Not His Real Name

Designated Experts

noreply@blogger.com (itsjustme) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 13:59:00 +0000

Being an expert on something requires a lot of time learning and experimenting in whatever subject that something happens to be. The considerable investment of time makes it impossible for most people to become experts on very many subjects. As a result, we rely on others that have made themselves (or simply declared themselves, in most cases) experts to provide the dumbed-down version on which we base our opinions about the things we don't fully understand. Basically, if a person can convince our uninformed minds that they know more than us by saying something we don't understand, we will just take their word for it.

As an example, let's say someone says they can speak a foreign language that you have never heard spoken. Since you don't know a single word in that language, they could be speaking complete nonsense or just showing they can count to ten...their limitations are not apparent to you. If you happen to travel to a country where people speak that language and use some of the words that you were taught by your designated expert, you might find out they don't know as much as you thought.

So, what if your designated experts disagree on something? Being ignorant of the subject, you are probably going to go with the most persuasive...or the one that doesn't smell like onions. Of course, being persuasive doesn't necessarily mean being correct. It could just mean they know your prejudices, phobias or tendencies.

Okay, another example for you...global warming. There are a lot of "experts" on that subject and they don't appear to all agree (I'm not sure how much of that is part of the smokescreen, I'm not an expert). Unless you have the time, inclination, money and knowledge to do exhaustive research yourself (which would take considerable amounts of each), you have to make your assessment on the subject based on the information the "experts" provide (which also may be based on flawed data). Once again, if the message is repeated enough, a large portion of the population will believe whatever that message is...meaning those that have found a way to profit from the message will spend the money necessary to prime the pump and quiet any opposing "expert".

Taking a slight side trip for a second, why have the major corporations suddenly jumped on the "green" bandwagon? Well, one reason General Electric has "gone green" is that it sells low wattage light bulbs. If they say that replacing your present light bulbs with low wattage bulbs will "save the planet", a lot of people will go out and buy them (they neglect to mention that those bulbs use mercury, which is pretty harmful to the environment). "You don't hate the planet, do you?" Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Kind of like, "You support the troops, don't you?"

It's pretty hilarious to me that these corporate "environmentalists" have convinced a lot of people that turning off their lights for an hour will "save the planet". The premise is that power companies won't have to produce as much electricity using power plants that pollute the environment. Guess what? Those power plants produce as much electricity as they can for the life of the plant, that's how they make money. If you don't buy the electricity, it is sold to someone else, but it is still produced...it's a business. You might personally save a few cents using lower wattage bulbs or increase the crime rate in your area by turning off the street lamps, but it's definitely not preventing any pollution.

Ethanol is another thing that will "save the planet"...unless you use a coal power plant to make it, huh? It's like putting paper in the recycling bin and then watching the janitor dump it in with the rest of the trash, isn't it? Not to mention, using a food crop to make fuel, which can't be a smart thing in my mind.

Solar panels are made with toxic substances that pollute the environment.

Biodiesel production can even cause problems.

Of course, since I'm not an expert, I have to rely on other people's information...so, the data could be flawed or manipulated and I would never know.

I don't want to leave you with the impression that I'm against recycling, alternative fuels, conservation of natural resources, organic farming, renewable energy, etc...I'm not. How could anyone be against them? You might as well be pro-cancer. That is the consensus that will be used in the next round of corporate "green" propaganda to steer the true environmental movement in the direction of higher profitability and greater control.

So, turn off your lights for an hour, put in some mercury filled light bulbs, pass laws that force others to conform to the corporate "green" world view and feel good about yourself...or choose your designated "experts" very carefully.

Ozymandius

noreply@blogger.com (itsjustme) — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 07:32:00 +0000

Last week Gerald R. Ford, former President of the United States, died. Ford was appointed Vice President by President Richard Nixon when Spiro Agnew resigned from the post because of legal troubles, he then became President when Nixon was forced to resign in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Ford immediately pardoned Nixon, thus preventing the trial and probable conviction of his predecessor.

Ford was never elected Vice President or President and wasn't successful in his election bid after a fairly uneventful partial term in office (with the notable exception of pardoning an obvious criminal)...he was far from what would be considered a "great" President, but, apparently he was better than the rest of us. Five days of memorial services, bands, twenty-one gun salutes, honor guards and being buried at a museum dedicated to him (of course, he also has a Presidential library, they all do now)...that's a lot of pomp and circumstance for a mediocre President. All of this is actually a "toned down" version of a Presidential burial since he was such a "regular guy"...believe it or not.

Like most politicians, Ford will have as many things named after him as is humanly possible...an airport, an aircraft carrier (it's in the works) and whatever else his friends and supporters can manage. Then, his body will rest in the modern equivalent of a pyramid, the grounds of his own museum (Ozymandius must build his monuments). You see, the "elites" believe this is what they deserve...since they are better than the average person. That's what these people have to believe, in my opinion, if this kind of grandiose burial is considered muted.

Without humility, people will govern as tyrants...that's the danger in politicians thinking the way they do. Eventually, they will be tracing their bloodlines to prove their divinity...and immunity to the laws they create for the rest of us.

When I'm being beaten to death by an orderly in a nursing home so that a weapons manufacturer can have a corpse to use for ballistics testing, I'll be remembering every state funeral that my tax dollars funded and wonder if a library dedicated to me would make my passing more pleasant. I doubt I would notice the difference.

Okay, less caffeine, more focusing on positive things for a while...Happy New Year!

A Cure for Toothaches

noreply@blogger.com (itsjustme) — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 03:23:00 +0000

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about raising the minimum wage again after about ten years of having it at its' present level. Simple lesson for those not following along in the textbook...if you raise the minimum wage, the retailers have to pay their employees more, so they raise their prices for goods and services. For those making the minimum wage, the buying power of their check is the same. Anyone making more than minimum wage doesn't get a raise, so the buying power of their check is reduced.

I know that it makes people feel like the government is doing some good, that's why politicians are pushing for it...to make you think they are making things better while not changing anything. Congress definitely doesn't want an angry mob storming the capitol when they realize what the government is really doing.

Okay, for the simple people that are about to write me a nasty note (both of them)...I'll dumb it down some more.

Let's say (for the sake of simplifying) that a combo meal at a fast food restaurant costs the same as what the minimum wage is...for this illustration, let's say seven dollars. Let's raise the wage of the person that makes the meal to eight dollars an hour. The fast food place isn't going to pay its' employees more money without bringing in enough money to make up for the added cost...so they either reduce the amount of food in the combo meal (which they would never do) or they raise the price to eight dollars for the meal. If they reduce the amount of food, you will have to buy more to get what used to be included in the meal...which means, either way you are spending more to get the same as you used to get for seven dollars.

For the person making the (now) eight dollars an hour, it still would take an hour of work to buy the meal...just like it was before the price went up. For anyone making above minimum wage, it would take more labor to earn the money for the meal than it used to...reducing their ability to buy things.

What I left out of the illustration is that the employer could also hire illegal aliens for less than minimum wage, outsource the labor overseas or build a robot that can do it. Those solutions would reduce the available jobs (for legal citizens in the case of hiring illegals) and drive wages lower, so, any solution they decide to use will make the situation worse for the average worker.

Raising the minimum wage to help people uses the same logic as punching someone in the stomach to get rid of a toothache. If you're having to think about that analogy, you might want to read this post ten or twelve times before making a comment.

Hero

noreply@blogger.com (itsjustme) — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 08:52:00 +0000

Does it bother anyone else that people play fast and loose with terms? It gets more extreme as time goes by...my guess is that the overstated terms lose their punch as they are used more frequently, so they have to get more outrageous to mean anything over time.

Take the word "hero", for example. Everyone is now a hero. It gets applied in all kinds of situations that are far from heroic. If you go hiking by yourself, don't take any communication device, get trapped by a large rock and have to amputate your own arm using a dull pocket knife in order to save yourself, you are not a hero...lucky to have survived, but not a hero. Any situation where you save your own ass does not qualify as heroic, especially if you got into that situation by being an idiot.

Taking a wrong turn in a war zone, being captured by the enemy and then being rescued a week or two later by someone else does not make you a hero. Call me silly, but not being able to read a map doesn't sound heroic at all. You might use the word "hero" to describe the rescuers, but definitely not the rescued in this case...in my opinion.

I realize those are old examples, this is about my thousandth time being irritated by it so I have a few stored up.

More recently, President Bush (W.), when making a speech praising the capture of some alleged terrorists, said, "this nation is at war with Islamic fascists."

I hate when people resort to the dictionary in an argument, but, in this case it's better to make sure everyone is on the same page. So, from dictionary.com, here's a definition of fascism:

"fas·cism

often Fascism
1. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
2. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.
2. Oppressive, dictatorial control."

That definition could apply to several governments that I can think of at the moment, but I don't think that the people Bush was referring to would qualify. Once again, this is part of the "repeat it until they believe it" brainwashing the US government favors in the mass media. It is also, in my opinion, an attempt by the US government to magically turn anyone they want to attack into Nazis and relive WWII in the press...they already have a script for that one, so adapting it would be easy enough.

I'm going to do another thing I hate...quote somebody. Here's a snippet from an essay titled "Politics and the English Language" written in 1946 by George Orwell which you can read here.

"The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning."

Mr. Orwell could have written that today...it's worth reading the whole essay.

We are fed a steady diet of meaningless crap that changes interpretations as it pleases the storyteller. Nebulous bad sounding labels are put on anyone that the government wants you to hate and nebulous good sounding labels for themselves. After you've seen the fourth or fifth interpretation/repetition of an event, the cycle is hard to deny.

Of course, television is proof that America loves being told the same story over and over again...hell, movies, books and games too. The audience doesn't want anything new, they want the hot wife married to the goofy husband, the sexual tension between two characters that lasts for five seasons until they get married in the series finale and the smart worker with a dumb boss. It's like television writing hasn't progressed since "I Love Lucy". They want commercials to reinforce every stereotype, men who can't figure out how to wash clothes, clean anything or take care of their kids. It's easier to just let the car steer itself by following the grooves cut in the road, I guess.

History does seem to repeat itself, but the loop is getting shorter...and simpler.

Friendly Robots

noreply@blogger.com (itsjustme) — Sat, 13 May 2006 09:49:00 +0000

I'm getting pretty sick of people falling for every slight-of-hand trick the U.S. government throws at us, so, I'm going to vent for a second...sorry.

As usual, the government throws up smokescreens to keep the populace occupied while they find new ways to screw them...in this case, it's illegal immigration. They don't really want to fix anything, they just want you to demand they do something about it so that they can offer a solution that gets them more of what they want...control and money. If the government starts to suggest doing something that makes sense to you, they've found a way to turn it against you.

One solution that has been suggested for the illegal alien problem, put the military on the border. Instead of giving the Border Patrol the funding they need to do the job, they would love you to beg them to use the military within our own borders...the general population would be next, of course. If you're not familiar with the "Hagelian Dialectic", we are getting a lot of good examples lately...soon, we'll all be experts.

The reason people (for the most part) are sneaking across the border in the first place is to earn what would be a sub-standard wage to any citizen of the U.S. The only people that benefit from that are the companies that pay below what most people could survive on. They'll tell you that no American wants to do the job. What they leave out of that sentence is "for the wages we pay". If the companies that hire illegal aliens were required to pay even the standard minimum wage (health insurance would be nice too) to their workers, they would quickly invent a machine that did the same work so that they wouldn't have to pay. It has abolutely nothing to do with Americans being unwilling to do the work, it's about money...the same reason a lot of the other jobs are being "outsourced" to other countries. It's pretty pathetic when McDonald's looks at outsourcing the minimum wage job of taking a drive-thru order.

Okay, quick fix for this smokescreen, force all companies to pay at least the standard minimum wage to all workers with optional health insurance and retirement plans. See how easy that is? I can't wait to see what kind of robots they come up with to avoid it...I hope they're friendly.

Now, stop falling for this! It was only brought up to get you worked up, just like gay marriage, prayer in school, displaying the Ten Commandments on government property, the "War on Drugs", the "War on terrorism", etc. They have a whole bag of tricks that get all the idiots to march in the street with hand-made signs...wrestling is getting way too predictable (sorry, a reference to a previous post if you haven't read it).

Okay, I had to get that out before I had to hit someone with their own sign. I have to stop talking to people, the stupidity might be contagious.

Approximation

noreply@blogger.com (itsjustme) — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 11:46:00 +0000

You can be fooled...no, seriously. To be fair, anyone can be fooled, tricked, misdirected, bamboozled or whatever term you would prefer. Face it, it's not really all that hard to do if someone is determined. Of course, I include myself in this unfortunate group. It has happened to me just as much as anyone else even though I make a concerted effort to not be taken in by constructs of those that wish to take advantage of my mental shortcomings.

We are vulnerable for a lot of reasons, some we can control and some we can't. Some of the things we can't control are the limitations of our senses. There are a lot of examples of how our senses can be fooled. My favorite demonstration involves spinning a disk with a black and white design on it fast enough that your brain decides the design has color in it (if you haven't tried it, it's as simple as it sounds). Our senses are limited because our brain is designed to compensate for the crappy data they provide...like the digital zoom built into a camera, it works, but can only do so much. Television and motion pictures take advantage of the limitations of our vision, so it's not all bad.

Approximation, that's how our senses and mental processes tend to work. In my opinion, that's why we have the need to categorize everything...it gives our brain an easy way to recall information, however flawed the generalizations may be.

In addition to the horrible information our brain receives, the brain's approximations are easily affected by mood, assumptions based on previous experience, sleep, magnetic fields, what we ingest and a whole host of other factors. That's why we build instruments to measure things more precisely. Nothing is perfect though, even the instruments of measurement we create are made using assumptions...sounds hopeless, doesn't it? About all we can do is constantly test our conclusions based on established "knowns" that were created using more assumptions.

In short, don't believe anyone or anything without verification. Test your conclusions constantly and be open to the possibility that your tests or "knowns" are flawed. Accept theories you create until your constant testing proves them wrong...and eventually, it will. Chaos can be a little scary, but, life is chaos...or the system is so large it appears to be. Don't let fear cause you to stop questioning and testing or someone will use that fear against you.

Well, that made the voices stop...cool.

The Group Grade

noreply@blogger.com (itsjustme) — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 10:19:00 +0000

When you were in school, if you had a similar experience as me, you were probably assigned group projects on occasion. The nature of my degree made group projects pretty common and sometimes the larger part of the overall grade. Of course, not everyone was interested in doing the work or even in learning the skills necessary. These people just wanted the degree, not the knowledge that the degree represents...they were content to let the others in the group carry them.

There are people that live their whole life getting by on the group grade...they're in all walks of life. What is disconcerting is that sometimes (probably more often than I want to believe) they are in critical positions. They aren't exposed until there is an event that they are supposedly qualified to handle where they fail miserably...often causing harm to others.

As an example, the mayor and city council of New orleans, the governor of Louisiana, the President of the United States and all of the associated agencies to those offices following hurricane Katrina. Everyone involved screwed up to the point that people died...I think they have had their exposing event.

You want to believe that people know what they're doing, but, think about the people you deal with every day...no job is completely populated by overqualified genius' and everyone has an agenda. On a side note, have you ever noticed how a CEO will call their company a "team" until the bonus checks get passed out?

As I stated in a previous post, the media (and slower witted people...don't worry, even if they read this they won't know we're talking about them) assumes that the qualities of a character that an actor has portrayed are the qualities of the actor. By the same token, having a job title doesn't mean you are qualified. Of course, these kinds of assumptions are what people that attempt to manipulate others count on. It could be something as innocent as a magic trick or something as deceptive as naming a law that restricts personal freedom and paves the way to a totalitarian regime "The Patriot Act".

Yeah, I've got issues. I just wish there weren't so many things that reinforce them.

Accents

noreply@blogger.com (itsjustme) — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 02:15:00 +0000

Why does anyone have an accent? Sounds like a stupid question, doesn't it? Sure, if you live in areas where you are isolated from the rest of the world, over time, your language will change along with how you pronounce words you have in common with other regions. The key word in that sentence is "isolated". If that assumption is true, then it makes sense that the less isolated a region is, the more alike (over time) it's language will be.

In the U.S., we've had radio for somewhere around eighty years, television around sixty years, audio recording for over a hundred years. Announcers (for the most part) have the same mid-western American sort of accent and everyone alive now (in the U.S.) has heard this style of speaking since they were children.

I'm sure I have an accent of some kind...I can't hear it, of course. However, I swear that there are loads of people that are cultivating barely intelligible accents as a way to maintain some sort of "identity". I've seen people that grew up in the same household where one has an accent and the other doesn't.

It's usually a news story that sets me off on this, sorry. The "man in the street" interviews and every witness to an event make me cringe when they speak. I've also seen it on shows like Jerry Springer (occupational hazard, unfortunately)...but those people are actors, let's be honest...or at least encouraged to emphasize their trashiness.

I guess you have to take the good with the bad though. American english is constantly changing. If people weren't so used to making up names for things, mis-pronouncing others and attempting to be cool by coming up with new slang phrases we wouldn't be as open to new ideas. We make up so many words a year that it spills over into other languages. As an example...what do they call a microchip in other languages? Try one of those online translators, see what you get. Most of the languages will come up with the same word...but I bet they've been cultivating their accents. I wonder what word other languages have for "bootylicious"....

Pumpkins Are Food

noreply@blogger.com (itsjustme) — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 11:51:00 +0000

Pumpkins are food...I know that, I like pumpkin pie. They of course are also considered a decoration during Halloween around here...and probably wherever you are as well. What I can't get past is how ridiculous the unwritten rules of conduct are that (apparently) people live by that the displaying of these pumpkins makes plain, at least to me.

Several stores I frequently drive by had piles of pumpkins outside on the sidewalk...not a small pile either. They had them on top of the sign with the store's name on it, on the sidewalk by the entrance, in the aisle inside the store, everywhere. The most ridiculous display (to me) was pumpkins adorning the logo for the store that sits about ten feet from the street with the parking lot between the pumpkins and the store itself. Why doesn't anyone ever take any of these pumpkins?

There were homeless people standing on the corner in front of the store with cardboard signs begging for money. Don't tell me these people are too honest to steal? I know, you're saying, "They just want alcohol". Alright, you could use pumpkins to make alcohol...hell, they make it out of a lot of other things, why not pumpkins?

The unwritten rules will allow a store to put just about anything on the sidewalk as long as they put a price on it. Then, nobody steals it...for some reason. As far as I knew, that was the rule. I have gone into a lot of convenience stores that have sodas stacked up on the sidewalk with the price stuck on the side and nobody I have ever seen has walked off with anything from those displays. That is just plain crazy, but, that is the unwritten rule. Whoever came up with that rule was brilliant, they saved a lot of money building enough storage space for their inventory. To flip that around, I can put anything by the curb in front of my house and it will be taken within an hour by somebody...I guess that is another unwritten rule. If it's by the curb of a residence, it's "fair game". Someone should print up some documentation.

Getting back to the pumpkins, they didn't have a price anywhere around them...so, what are they for? If they are selling them, their logic escapes me. They piled food all over the sidewalk a few hundred feet away from people that claim they are hungry...what am I missing? If I were one of those homeless guys, I'd be running down the street with my shopping cart full of pumpkins! Don't look at me like that, you would too if you knew the rules...they didn't have a price on them.

We erect a lot of mental barriers without realizing it. We need to stop that. I'm not saying people should steal pumpkins necessarily (unless you're homeless), I'm just asking why it hasn't happened. I think it's a total lack of imagination...and that can cause a lot of problems.

Everything Is Wrestling

noreply@blogger.com (itsjustme) — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 06:10:00 +0000

Okay, let's lay down some groundwork for the statement "Everything Is Wrestling", one of the pillars of the beliefs of "The Church of Dave".

First, everything is propaganda because everyone has an agenda...hell, I have one, I'm just not smart enough to know what it is. In the U.S. we are bombarded with bullshit. The people in this country are inundated with propaganda from every media outlet there is...and that's a lot of media. If you repeat something enough, the vast majority of the people will believe it. They don't go out of their way to find out anything, if they said it on TV, it is true to them. Never mind that "Reality TV" shows have script writers (they were complaining about their low wages and lack of recognition a few months ago if my memory serves me). It worked for George W. Bush, remember? "I'm a uniter not a divider" was the catch phrase in his first Presidential campaign...I thought it was hilarious until I started hearing people repeat it.

Second, people are either easily hypnotized or just plain stupid. I used to think that the adage "the intelligence of a room decreases as the number of people increases" was true. Now, I realize, the stupidity of the room increases in direct proportion to the comfort level of the idiots in it. If an idiot isn't comfortable in the environment, he/she keeps his/her mouth shut. However, if the idiot is in their comfort zone, you'll never be able to keep them from "setting you straight" about whatever they think you should think (yeah, I'm comfortable here). The media attempts (and usually succeeds) in getting the idiots to come out of the woodwork to stand on a street corner with signs they made themselves proving how ignorant and easily manipulated they really can be. At wrestling events, you see homemade looking signs that were put together by the wrestling organization and handed out to attendees which help to set the stage for whatever they have scripted for that day...politics are just as scripted. I'll admit, some of the signs were actually made by fans, but there are plenty that are handed out that suggest things that have been scripted that the audience couldn't have known about.

If politicians want to run interference or "solidify the base", all they have to do is start an argument about one of the "hot button" issues like abortion, prayer in school, gay marriage or separation of church and state (like having the Ten Commandments displayed in a government building). In wrestling, they get the crowd to support the "good guy" by having the "bad guy" give a long-winded speech where he insults the crowd while the "good guy" does the opposite, throwing in "cheap pops" (for example, mentioning the name of the city, or complimenting a local sports team).

In wrestling, the announcer is there to tell you what you should think...he's framing the events much like the myriad of news channels. The only difference between the good guy and the bad guy is that when a "bad guy" hits someone with a chair the announcer says he's evil, when a "good guy" hits someone with a chair he's "giving that guy a taste of his own medicine". Pretty much, if someone agrees with you on something, you consider them a "good guy" and forgive just about anything they do...I can't count how many Republicans will defend another Republican no matter what the guy did, the same goes for Democrats or any other kind of affiliation you can think of. Not to just pick on political parties, that is equally true of any group larger than one person. The BTK killer even still has a friend, he went on either Fox News or CNN or something and was talking about how they were both involved with Boy Scouts and how he wasn't going to judge him for what he did....he even chuckled about BTK's knot tieing abilities since one of his victims managed to get untied!

In wrestling, the "good guys" turn evil or the "bad guys" become "good guys" all the time...sometimes that involves a change of costume like not wearing a mask any more. Of course nothing about the wrestler really changes, just what the announcer says about them. Robert Bird, the Democratic Senator, is a former KKK member...why does anyone vote for him? Oh, that's right, he has changed, he doesn't wear the mask any more. Strom Thurmond ran for President of the United States on a segregationist platform in 1948 as a "Dixiecrat". He continued to be a U.S. Senator until 2003 when he died...I guess he "saw the light" as well...I don't know if he ever wore a mask though.

Okay, I've picked on politicians enough...how about celebrities?

Wrestlers cultivate an image, the "bad guys" portray themselves as something negative and the "good guys" something positive...some of the "bad guys" actually get attacked by fans occasionally, which gives you an idea of the comfort level of the idiots in that room. Celebrities also cultivate an image, and occasionally get accosted by a fan if they are portraying a "bad guy". The media, and the simple-minded, apply the attributes of the characters an actor portrays to the actor. If the actor portrays smart people, they are considered smart, which is why there have been several actors elected to public office. I know, enough with the politicians...but it's true.

I used to think that the majority of people had some kind of sense...they don't. So, from now on, just repeat your message over and over (slowly if you have to...and throw in a few "cheap pops"). No matter how stupid that message is, eventually, the whole world will believe it. I'm still working on my message, but, something like "Dave is the smartest man alive" might get me elected to something.

What is this blog?

noreply@blogger.com (itsjustme) — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 08:35:00 +0000

It has taken me a few months of having an empty blog to decide what I might put here...stupid ramblings seem to be common, so, I'll do that. I guess you can classify my ramblings as the teachings of "The Church of Dave"...of which I am the only member and I'm not trying to increase membership since it would end up watering down the message (as if there actually was a message).