Tr1v14l Pursu1ts

Iran promotes 'Islamic' haircuts - CNN.com

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 23:55:00 +0000

Islamic Supremacism's good side: the mullet must die!

Among the do's that are now don'ts? The '80's Prince-style pompadour preferred by many young Iranian men, the Steven Seagal-style ponytail and the "business in the front, party in the back" sentiment of the mullet -- also popular among the Persian populace.

It’s a bit late, but it’s nice to see someone is coming along on this. The mullet has been the scourge of the west and now it is firmly stopped in the east. Next, we get them to notice http://menwholooklikeoldlesbians.blogspot.com/ and stamp out that travesty of style. Sadly, I suspect the Christian Supremacists will get worked into a huff about this and insist on wearing mullets. Or, maybe that’s not so sad. Who can take anyone in a mullet seriously? Yes, all the “Christianity is the only true religion” people will look stupid! Oh the evil ideas I am envisioning now…

Head -> desk, head -> desk, head -> desk...

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 04:16:00 +0000

If I could express how tired I am right now, I would, but I am too tired to express it and still do it proper justice.

Between classes, home repairs and renovations, errands and the usual vagaries of life, I'm beat.

I can't wait till the weather stays stably in the warm and dry range so I can walk in the woods, take nature pictures again, and relax with music on my earphones and my thoughts on my mind. Also, I can't wait to find a filter for my laptop that stops glare from making using it outside on a nice day an exercise in futility.

Seriously, whose idea was it to make every new flat screen so shiny that a sports car enthusiast wants to copy that finish on their ride? Whoever that person was, they should be beaten with a crowbar.

Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:37:00 +0000

Disqus Borked Again

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:54:00 +0000

Over at SayAnything Rob Port switched to Disqus for his commenting system and for what reason I cannot fathom unless I go low rent and assume superficial blog number building as the primary reason and I like to think better of Rob than that, but...

Anyhow, yet again for the millionth time this year, Disqus is giving out 503 errors, not taking comments, and just sitting there doing nothing.

Let this be a lesson to you would-be professional bloggers. The move towards coalescent social networking and blogging is not necessarily where the future is at and if your comments don't work, then no one will stick around your site because they cannot take part and taking part is what they go there for when it comes to professional blogging. That interaction IS their social networking. Bringing in Facebook and MySpace and all that crap in an attempt to coopt those and get a piece of their impressions for a few more cents and doing it with an outfit like Disqus which clearly has not gotten their shit together is not a good way to keep your traffic.

Me, I'm not a pro here. I just have this place to sound off in my own way whenever it suits me.

World of Shit

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 02:16:00 +0000

Well...

I am taking a breather between jobs. I got so burned out I didn't notice the company I was working with burning down around my ears. Laid off, I compiled a small stockpile of money, hit unemployment (which I've paid far more into over the last few decades than I ever took out) which is slowing the cash burn, and am retooling with college courses and self-study as well as writing and spending time with my family.

The job market is horrific but nothing I haven't seen before in any of a dozen of careers so no big deal to me really. I can do lots of different things and am not sweating it.

My wife wants to start a new business and we might have that on in another couple months.

There was a great investment opportunity laid at our feet recently and we figure that should we land a couple million in business, we can live off the interest at 3-8% per year so that's our target. After that, we intend to keep building the investment pile to afford others on our payroll who'd be paid off the interest. One million per person, seems pretty easy. Might not, might just crash and burn, but I haven't got anything better to do.

See you later.

Been Busy

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:10:00 +0000

Just in case anyone wondered, I have had a lot going on.

Ted Kennedy Achieves Shovel Ready Status

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:37:00 +0000

In case you missed the news, which you can find all over Google and the televisions and radios, Ted Kennedy, the drunken court jester of those dubious American royals from the Tax You To Death State of Massachusetts, has shuffled off the mortal coil.

Already, Democrats are predictably trying to deify him, but the Teleprompter Messiah in the White House is already deity of the moment for the religion known as liberalism and though they are pantheistic idolaters, the ego of The One is an obstacle.

So Ted Kennedy will be Saint Ted until further notice.

Film Adaptation Of 'The Brothers Karamazov' Ends Where Most People Stop Reading Book | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:46:00 +0000

Film Adaptation Of 'The Brothers Karamazov' Ends Where Most People Stop Reading Book | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Shared via AddThis

Congresscare: How Good We Will NEVER Have It If Their “Reform” Goes Through

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:56:00 +0000

A Reprint of My Recent Post at the Say Anything Reader Blogs

Congress’ own healthcare benefits: Membership has its privileges

Too much, too fast, too expensive. Those are some of the objections lawmakers have voiced against the healthcare overhaul Democrats are attempting on Capitol Hill.

Yes, just SOME. Many more are also laid out and more to come.

But many Americans think Congress is out of touch. How, they wonder, can lawmakers empathize with the underinsured or those lacking insurance when they receive a benefits package—heavily subsidized by taxpayers—that most of us can only envy?

THINK congress is out of touch? We KNOW it.

Empathize? Since when do they care about a population they steal money from at will with glee and joy? I don’t think a congress that votes itself perpetual pay and pay increases at will is going to give a rat’s butt.

Among the advantages: a choice of 10 healthcare plans that provide access to a national network of doctors, as well as several HMOs that serve each member’s home state. By contrast, 85% of private companies offering health coverage provide their employees one type of plan—take it or leave it.

Lawmakers also get special treatment at Washington’s federal medical facilities and, for a few hundred dollars a month, access to their own pharmacy and doctors, nurses and medical technicians standing by in an office conveniently located between the House and Senate chambers.

In all, taxpayers spent about $15 billion last year to insure 8.5 million federal workers and their dependents, including postal service employees, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

If the average company tried to replicate this, not only would there be no profits, and not only abysmal debt, but the company would economically turn inside out and cease to exist. Only government which can use its police powers to expropriate our money at will and lay on debt that we and unborn generations are indentured to can do this.

Favorite Quote:

“For the average worker, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan would probably look quite attractive,” said Pete Sepp, a spokesman for the National Taxpayers Union, a pinch-penny advocacy group.

DO YA THINK?

Elitist scumbags who have theirs, and will tell us, “sorry, but we don’t think your mother’s cancer treatment would serve the public interest very well and we cannot approve of it.”

Remember, the libtard troll roaches who infest this blog (Say Anything’s Rob Port in a naive stab at egalitarianism or something tolerates a plethora of trolls who can make the place very annoying and depressing some days), every last one of them, are for exactly this inequity. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, don’t it?

ADDENDUM: If the congress which has all these perks were to try to vote business to give us the common folks just a tenth of them, our economy would collapse overnight and civil war would result. What do they do instead? Throw us into the hands of the arrogant population control is good and humans are evil crowd who would decide whose life is worth saving and whose is worth letting go. Out of touch is an understatement.

The Symbol of Our Generation... Under National Health Care

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:15:00 +0000

From here, noted then here.

Elegant, simple, truthful.

What constitutes proof of existence?

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 03:49:00 +0000

http://sayanythingblog.com/entry/national_review_birthers_are_an_embarrassment_to_the_right/#c499262

wilzyk:

Obamas own paternal Grandmother stated unequivocally that she was present at his birth in Mombasa Kenya in the summer of 1961. No other living human has claimed to be present at his birth.

This one point is continuously studiously ignored.

While the terms of the stand alone complex that caused this election to go this way generally lend themselves to total unknowns taking the fore due to having the least amount of likelihood to generate cognitive dissonance and disrupt the phenomenon, there’s something else.

Obama has precious little record of anything prior to 2007. There are the usual papers and paperwork, the usual legal records and filings, but they’re just paper. Artifacts that signify nothing. Does the pipe I own and smoke mean I was here? Does the chair under your butt have some special power proving you existed? No. They’re no more meaningful than the cars rusting in your nearby auto yard or the remnant calcium compounds where the bones of a caveman have finally gone. Something happened but it’s all a matter of your interpretation.

I have a birth certificate from the US Navy that the US Govt. itself will not accept as proof of my citizenship for a security clearance… but will take any given state’s from an era when $100 was enough to convince an overworked clerk to falsify any number of documents. What’s the likelihood of getting a false document from a major military hospital staffer who carries a rank? Strange that don’t you think?

He’s supposed to be a lawyer and their entire claim to fame is oratory before other people, their ability to spin a convincing tale that gets a jury to give them what they want which is to justify their billed hours. I live in a court town and you cannot throw a rock and not generate a lawsuit. I know no lawyer so incompetent at speaking without a prepared speech, and one prepared by someone else I might add, as Obama.

That doesn’t track.

He’s probably among the whitest black men ever to grace Washington, D.C. but he’s still black and in a nation obsessed with skin color he practically rode a Segway into office without a peep about it. African-Americans seemed to pay no attention whatsoever as if this was every day and nothing out of the ordinary. Whites and the rest paid no attention either.

What gives our lives meaning and says we were here is what is formed in others when we reflect off of each other by our presence, our actions, what we communicate and show.

There’s next to no sign that Obama existed before just a few years ago and while some people slouch through their lives leaving no ripple in them, utterly irrelevant to their own lives, so much so they could die and they wouldn’t even notice their own passing, he’s achieved a rare thing certainly. One so rare as it has never happened before. He’s managed to leave so little a mark on his own existence as to not exist and yet managed to get his hands on the executive control of the most powerful nation ever to exist as if he’s just the latest in a long line of clerks hitting aisle 7 at Safeway.

I’ve also noticed that other people don’t seem to think he exists either. Or that his existence if he has one has any significance. Haven’t you noticed the distinct lack of leadership from the White House? Almost as if he’s just some shmoe hired to play housekeeper and face on the TV and the policy is made elsewhere? The Democrats aren’t lining up behind him at all. They’re lining up behind a big blank space with Obama’s face, but not lining up behind him. There’s a difference between getting with someone and merely standing behind the concept of them, like a cardboard cutout.

If that doesn’t strike you as a bit odd, then maybe you’re just the sort the story was written for. We’ll see how well the editing takes, but this is not the way it went.

That which we would do

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:33:00 +0000

we do not do if it is what we said we should do but rather that which we would do which we do not say we would do.

That which we say we should do we say we would do but do not do what we say we should do but instead do what we would do.

If what we would do is not what we should do then...

Roundup of Minor Notices

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:42:00 +0000

Hillary Clinton on North Korea:

Clinton said that "what we've seen is this constant demand for attention." She added that "maybe it's the mother in me, the experience I've had with small childeren and teen-agers and people who are demanding attention: Don't give it to them."

Of course. Don’t give them attention and they’ll just go away. That worked sooooo well in Columbine didn’t it?

Iraqis Show Who's Boss

Fadhil told The Associated Press about two occasions in which Iraqi troops turned down U.S. requests to move around the capital until they had Iraqi escorts, and one instance to conduct a raid, which the Iraqis carried out themselves.

"They are now more passive than before," he said of U.S. troops. "I also feel that the Americans soldiers are frustrated because they used to have many patrols, but now they cannot. Now, the American soldiers are in prison-like bases as if they are under house-arrest."

According to the libtards, wasn’t Bush supposed to have conquered Iraq for oil and Halliburton contracts or some such and put us completely in charge of a puppet government? Some puppets, telling us what we can and can’t do in… oh yeah, their country which we handed right back to them in the aftermath of the removal of Saddam Hussein.

Curiously, BET co-founder makes a Republican pick...

A billionaire co-founder of the Black Entertainment Television network who is also a key Democratic donor has endorsed Republican Bob McDonnell for Virginia governor.

Sheila Johnson joined McDonnell at a Monday appearance in Richmond. She says she thinks the Republican can turn around the state's sluggish economy and prefers him over his Democratic opponent, R. Creigh Deeds.

A woman yet… Hmmmm…

Methinks that a black woman going with the Republicans will be met with a mixture of silence and laughable condemnation largely centering on absurd notions of authenticity.

April 1st Arrives Many Months Early

The meat a little more than half way through the article is in this single bit:

In an interview for an upcoming SCMagazine article, Jonathan Lamy, chief spokesperson for the RIAA comments, "DRM is dead, isn’t it?"

Wow. That truly equates to the RIAA officially declaring DRM dead.

NOT.

Keep your powder dry people. The *AA are not gone and we are not safe.

Kelly Hildebrandt Marries Kelly Hildebrandt

Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt, 20, and Kelly Carl Hildebrandt, 24

The amazing thing for me is that he’s walking loose and not doing time in prison for assaulting his parents for naming him Kelly. Maybe they were fans of “A Boy Named Sue”, but really… Kelly?

Spot the Lie Time

I’ll even help you:

Conservative Leaders Deplore Proposed Health-Care ~~Reform~~ Takeover

Easy as that.

You’re welcome.

World Continues to Call Lawful Honduran Removal of Unlawful President a Coup

Sensationalism up front:

Honduras' de facto leader came under increased pressure on Monday to hand power back to the ousted president with Europe halting economic aid and top Latin American officials warning of bloodshed if he does not back down.

Kernel of truth wrapped in deception bit of fact at the rear:

He had upset his political rivals by trying to lift presidential term limits and the army toppled him after the Supreme ordered his arrest.

Would it upset Obama’s political rivals if he tried to lift presidential term limits illegally? The correct answer is that it is beside the fact. The point is that the former president of Honduras tried to lift presidential term limits illegally, which would constitute a coup by the sitting president as he’d hold the office illegally instead of legally. Recognizing this, the Supreme Court of Honduras gave Zelaya the boot.

That Zelaya was himself attempting a coup and that forcing his return to power is to take part in that coup, seems to be studiously ignored by the media and the world.

Belated Notice of an Excellent Article

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:42:00 +0000

John Hawkins : 5 Character Flaws That Are Destroying America's Future - Townhall.com

READ THIS.

The Steps of Human Cognition With Respect to Emotion

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:25:00 +0000

These I have corralled into four steps, each of which impart their own separate yet interconnected experience.

Passionate Emotionality
This is the first step of human cognition where something sufficiently provocative to be noticed consciously and not absorbed unconsciously is dealt with. At this stage, emotionality provides the drive and thus I call it passionate in that it has an emotionally based force to it and not a simple rules matching, following, and deducing sort of motivation.

In this step, human experience is framed in and largely formed from jumps of assumption, leaps of faith, instinctive reactions, rapid escalations of feedback reaction, and the like.

This is the step known for women stomping out after a man says the wrong thing, men throwing a punch in a bar, children screaming that they never get their way, and so on.

Dispassionate Emotionality
This is the second step where the human mind tries to get an ordered logical grasp on what for it is still an emotionally based scene. The drive of emotion which is poorly understood and functions on its own without intellectual understanding more often than not now fades and the vacuum demands to be filled, and the mind fills it with tab A slot B reasoning, but applying it to emotion, trying to both use emotion to solve or understand a problem and at the same time refine the understanding of emotion itself.

This stage is the stage of cagey shrewd behavior in social situations, the part that thinks it over as to whether to take someone home from the singles bar, and the part that covers what to tell your boss during a review.

Passionate Intellectuality
Next up comes the return of emotional drive as in the last stage the emotion was given an overly large sense of itself by the overt focus from the start, the seeming aegis of logic and order in the second step, and commits itself to being the drive behind actual logical though. It's as if the emotion somehow thinks it can conquer that simple logic stuff and avoids its own emotional aspects of leaps of faith and intuition, or that the human begins to tire of fruitless leaps and instead in an emotional fit decides to try actual facts on the ground as it sees them.

This is the stage of long talks with oneself, the stage of trying to make a doghouse without planning, the stage of diving into your math homework.

Dispassionate Intellectuality
Finally the emotion burns out and a sort of resolve to not be resolved is reached and the brain's eternal attempt at finding reason and meaning has to play by itself without emotional drive or interest, and so goes on repeating times tables and thinking of how many screws will be required to affix a plaque to a wall.

This last step starts out with a push out the door goodbye from emotion and goes on with analytical thinking of various subjects step by step without much passing interest from emotion, more or less, until emotion suddenly feels a need to intervene, usually because something piqued its interest. In the meantime the brain doodles along 5+5=10/2=5*3=15+5=20...

This is also the part that creates works like Kant's while it is the preceding stage which keeps shoving this one along to get it done.

All this will be dressed up and refined as I go along but it is what I've noticed so far. As I've said elsewhere, there are multiply re-entrant lines of logic, and crossovers of logic between that of emotion and that of pure intellect and while they sometimes conspire without discrepancy they more often act as sneering contentious rivals. Nevertheless, they compliment each other and somehow human cognition functions despite emotion's rowdiness and intellect's seeming unconsciousness. One is all smell the flowers, the other doesn't see the cell structures for the flowers, and between them...

Double Digit Unemployment Is Here!

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:11:00 +0000

Unemployment tops 10% in 15 states, D.C. - USATODAY.com

WASHINGTON — Unemployment topped 10% in 15 states and the District of Columbia last month, according to federal data released Friday. The rate in Michigan surpassed 15%, the first time any state hit that mark since 1984.

Home to the nation's struggling automakers, Michigan has been clobbered by lost factory jobs. Its jobless rate of 15.2% in June was the highest in the country, but the record-high for the state was 16.9% in November 1982.

Still, the Labor Department said it's the first time in 25 years that any state has suffered an unemployment rate of at least 15%. In 1984, it was West Virginia.

The national unemployment rate is 9.5%, a 26-year high, and is expected to hit 10% by year-end. In May, the jobless rate topped 10% in 13 states and the District of Columbia.

I strongly suggest clicking that link to see the chart. It is not pretty. I bolded the most relevant line above.

Charles Krauthammer Reminds Us of the Moon and a Future We Abandoned

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:09:00 +0000

Charles Krauthammer : The Moon We Forgot - Townhall.com

After countless millennia of gazing and dreaming, we finally got off the ground at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Within 66 years, a nanosecond in human history, we'd landed on the moon. Then five more landings, 10 more moonwalkers, and, in the decades since, nothing.

To be more precise: almost 40 years spent in low Earth orbit studying, well, zero-G nausea and sundry cosmic mysteries. We've done it with the most beautiful, intricate, complicated -- and ultimately, hopelessly impractical -- machine ever built by man: the space shuttle. We turned this magnificent bird into a truck for hauling goods and people to a tinkertoy we call the International Space Station, itself created in a fit of post-Cold War internationalist absentmindedness as a place where people of differing nationality can sing "Kumbaya" while weightless.

Krauthammer’s usual style of massively understated and nearly emotionless devastation of his target of rebuke comes through again.

We turned away from the future we watched on Star Trek and turned inward to letting the political class run this nation and world into the ground by comparison. In the name of solving poverty we made it worse. In the name of solving racism we made it worse. In the name of saving the environment we made it worse. We are now in the USA under the boot heels of people whose idea of how to save the planet is not to get humanity off of it into space where we can make environments from scratch that we are compatible with but instead to cull the herd as it were and cut the numbers of humans down to whatever in their arrogance is viewed as “sustainable”.

Remember when you were told you’d one day cruise space on some sort of liner to the moon? To Mars?

We’re moving father and farther from your great grandkids ever doing that never mind you.

ADDENDUM:

Voice of America Reminds Us of Apollo 11
VOA News - US Remembers 40-Year Anniversary of Moon Landing

PC World Misses the Point and Engages in Leg Tingling over the Internet
Apollo's 40th Anniversary Shows True Wonder of the Internet

It's one of the few times I can truly say that what I'm watching online is absolutely incredible. It's the difference between fluff and real emotion. This is a weekend where watching the unfolding recreations and simulcast coverage is not to be missed. Even as I'm writing this right now on my modern desktop PC, which has far more computing power in its single AMD Athlon chip than was available to mission controllers for Apollo 11 back in 1969 on their complex mission computers, I'm listening in the background to the audio tracks of the mission being replayed in real time. Absolutely amazing.

By now he should be writing that article on the moon from his room at the Sea of Tranquility Hilton.

Apple Begs Microsoft to Stop Making Fun of Them (It’s Apple’s Shtick)

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:08:00 +0000

UPDATE: Apple Asks Microsoft To Stop Running Ad Campaign>MSFT

SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--Apple Inc. (AAPL) recently asked Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) to stop running television commercials that suggest its Macintosh computers are expensive, the latest indication that the rivalry between the companies is heating up.

I agree. They should flat out SAY IT, not suggest it. It’s true.

The interaction, which happened about two weeks ago, has emboldened Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft to continue its "Laptop Hunter" campaign, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner said on Wednesday at the software giant's partner conference.

Wow, it only took that to embolden them. They should have had an “interaction” years ago.

"We're just going to keep running them and running them and running them," Turner said at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference 2009.

Funniest line in the entire article. They should keep on running anything that makes Apple cry and whine like the elitist snobby self centered bastards they are.

The television spots feature shoppers looking for laptop computers and dismissing Macintosh models because they are too pricey. Apple complained because the Cupertino, Calif.-based company has lowered prices on some of its machines, Turner said.

Let us know when you lower the price of all machines, MacOS licenses, and attendant bundled software to the same range as the PC world. You won’t because you’re control freaks over at Apple and have never grasped that Microsoft’s win was IBM’s release of the platform into the wild, no matter what led to that.

News of the exchange comes amid growing rivalry between the two companies. Apple has been tweaking Microsoft for several months in a television and Internet campaign that portrays computers running its Windows operating system as out-of-date and its users as fuddy duddies.

Apple has smugly implied and let their user base do the direct claiming of the idea that Windows is too complex for the average person. The adoption rate of Windows Vista despite all the complaints, as well as Linux, clearly show the average person can handle more complexity than Apple believes.

If anything it is more evidence of Apple’s patronizing attitude towards others. I am not surprised however as they are the odds on favorite platform of elitist snob liberals everywhere who evidently don’t mind being dictated to and told what they can run on their machines from a central authority as long as they can believe otherwise no matter how false that belief is.

Apple declined to comment on the recent exchange.

Nothing to say people? Come on Apple. You used to know what open approachable platforms were. You fielded the Apple ][ platform, the single most open platform ever in the history of personal computing as far as hardware goes. Were Linux to have happened back then, Apple ][ might still be the way of things.

Steve Jobs is the single biggest reason for the decline of the Apple brand from a bright and wonderful and inviting brand to a brand known far and wide as the favorite of liberal leftists, elitist snobs, and the self-satisfied and smug. I’ve been saying it since the late eighties but the Mac crowd won the day and us hackers were told to get lost.

Well, we did and now we rule the PC world with a dominant Microsoft that gives us all the development info anyone could want, and a Linux world of disparate distros enough to satisfy anyone and guess who is the ruler of the business desktop and all that income from it?

It’s not Apple.

Addendum:

Microsoft: Apple wanted 'Laptop Hunters' ads pulled

Soon to come, some thoughts on self, other, one, etc.

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:59:00 +0000

I don't follow one school as might be clear by now. I believe that Jung, Freud and others all have made important points. For instance I believe logically that if you conceive that there is you, then there must be not you. If there is something that defines you, something else must not define you. There is you and then there is not you. There is self and there is other.

I also believe in archetypes, but no so simplistically as Jung did, rather I think that archetypes are implied through experience and reaction to experience in the multiply re-entrant logical paths of experience and cognition that we have, and that the archetypes are not only those inherent to our existence as two legged animals but also those we create in society and culture.

So I'll be writing about those as time goes by. I will not flatter myself as Kant would have put it, to think I am mounting a critique of pure existence, but I do hope to put down some ideas of value that cut to the central logical matters of existence and implication.

That by the way is another theme I note in the world: implication and assumption. I'll write of that as well.

European Parliament Elects Former Polish Prime Minister as President – Insert Polish Jokes Here

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:25:00 +0000

Milestone for Eastern Europe: European Parliament Elects Former Polish Prime Minister as President - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News – International

Predictably, he’s all politician and says this gem:

“The biggest crisis¹ that we must overcome² is the crisis³ of the lack of trust⁴ from our citizens⁵,” he said. “Our citizens often do not understand us⁶ -- we must do everything to change this⁷.”

Okay…

Right off the bat we start off with the instinctive appeal point of all politicians, the appeal to fear. Everything is a crisis, so act now!
“we” who? Who has to overcome? What are we overcoming? He has yet to state it yet, but he is setting us up for it…
Yes, we’re being told twice that this is a crisis, once through inference and once directly. We must be stupid or he must be a politician.
We the people not trusting you the politician is a crisis? To you politicians maybe.
At least he got the word right and he even used the collective ownership implication through the word “our”. The force is strong with this one.
And so we veer right off the road into the nether regions of stupid. We are being told through implication that the alleged crisis, this lack of trust in politicians by the citizenry, is a matter of us not understanding them. On the contrary, we don’t trust you because we understand you perfectly well.
“We” who? You politicians? Us citizens?

Truly the EU has chosen a solid politician for this largely ceremonial and mostly irrelevant position at the head of the largely ceremonial and mostly irrelevant European Union. Unfortunately, that might be all he is.

Well to you. He’s the spitting image of my grandfather. So this is just sad for me.

Head desk head desk head desk…

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:06:00 +0000

Editorial: Out of Africa | Editorials | Jerusalem Post

In the American ideal, leaders who cling to power through deceit and the silencing of dissent are on the wrong side of history, to paraphrase a line from President Barack Obama's inaugural address.

The way that Barack Obama, congressional Democrats and leftist blogroach astroturfers have been attempting to do?

Glad we’ve got another example of Obama’s naked hypocrisy and lying down pat there. Sadly, a newspaper from an entirely different continent had to point it out. The news here is still busy giving Obama literary blowjobs.

This was essentially the message Obama brought with him as he and his family spent a day over the weekend in Ghana.

Whoops, spoke too soon. How does that knob taste there?

The president is of Kenyan descent on his father's side; the First Lady is the great-great-granddaughter of a slave.

And I’m descended from Polish Jews who were forcibly converted to Christianity, American Indians who were forcibly ejected from their lands, and a lot of other people who were pushed out of one place or another themselves. Does this have anything to do with anything? No. What matters is what I the living do now.

Ghana was selected for the visit because it is one of the few stable democracies on the continent.

Botswana still gets all its American love from HBO but none from the prez.

Over the years, Jews also contributed to some of the key legal victories achieved by the civil rights movement. For instance, Jack Greenberg assisted Thurgood Marshall in the watershed US Supreme Court case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, and succeeded him as counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

When the black power movement achieved ascendancy in the 1960s-1970s, and violent Jew-hatred became a regular occurrence in urban America, what divided Jews and blacks became stronger than that which united them. The two communities were further driven apart because Jews mostly opposed racial preferences in employment (affirmative action) - even to compensate for institutionalized discrimination.

Ah, the obligatory Jewish angle. Why oh why do we need to make these references? I note that Orthodox and Conservatives don’t seem to have this obsession with finding a Jewish angle which makes me hopeful that this can go away some day but all humanity has a superficial “let’s find a local angle” tendency. However, that doesn’t make it right and the mark of conscience is to through action reflect a cognition of that.

Once discrimination in the institution became illegal there was no institutionalized discrimination, only subversive discrimination, and it is entirely proper and ethical that those who make an accusation prove guilt and not that the accused prove innocence. To give racial preferences as this article puts it is to presume guilt of all whites a priori.

Yeah, that’s moral, huh?

Why does that last part in the quote up there sound so guilty. As in, “we’re sorry and embarrassed that so many Jews were so selfish as to not embrace racial preferences”. Why can’t some get this through their heads? Those black people, they are your fellow humans. So if you’re going to hold yourself to moral standards, then why not them? If Jews can bust ass and earn a position WHY NOT BLACKS? Are they incapable?

Don’t answer that. Think for a minute about the message sent by treating blacks as if they could not possibly meet the same standards and instead giving them success they never earned. You would never wish that of fellow Jews so why the long face in that phrasing?

TO A welcome and remarkable extent, tensions between African Americans and Jews have receded in the 21st century. It seemed only natural that Obama should receive 78 percent of the Jewish vote, and that two of the president's closets aides would be Jewish.

If you’re going to vote based on race or religion or other quantity that was not related to earning the spot based on qualities bearing on that position, then would you not want the best example? I understand the JPost’s “happy to see a Jewish face” simplicity in the thinking but come on… Rahm Emmanuel? What the fuck… We couldn’t be maybe wishing for a Jew who had more ethics and morals than to work for this, the single most corrupt administration in American history which has managed to do what was once thought a terrible but near impossibility, that is run up a ONE TRILLION DOLLAR PLUS BUDGET DEFICIT? In only seven months, an extreme and extremely dubious record has been set. Guess who is now linked? Blacks and Jews. Good choice of people to have represent. Obama and Emmanuel.

The US civil rights movement and our Zionist enterprise, 6,000 miles away, share a passion for the Promised Land.

So now you’re conflating the chasing of a home of our own where Jews can defend and make safe themselves with a system that keeps blacks as pets on a political plantation.

Maybe you dimbulbs at the JPost editorial board should read something other than the press releases of the NAACP.

Editorial fail.

Postscript: I will herein reprint from Wikipedia’s entry on tzedakah, as most to least proper in Maimonides’ view.

Giving a person independence so that s/he will not have to depend on tzedakah. Maimonides enumerates four forms of this, from the greatest to the weakest:
1. Giving a poor person work.
2. Making a partnership with him or her (this is lower than work, as the recipient might feel he doesn't put enough into the partnership).
3. Giving an interest-free loan to a person in need.
4. Giving a grant to a person in need.
Giving tzedakah anonymously to an unknown recipient via a person (or public fund) which is trustworthy, wise, and can perform acts of tzedakah with your money in a most impeccable fashion.
Giving tzedakah anonymously to a known recipient.
Giving tzedakah publicly to an unknown recipient.
Giving tzedakah before being asked.
Giving adequately after being asked.
Giving willingly, but inadequately.
Giving "in sadness" - it is thought that Maimonides was referring to giving because of the sad feelings one might have in seeing people in need (as opposed to giving because it is a religious obligation).

Where in that do you read that running up the largest budget deficit in American history, driving the American unemployment numbers ever closer to those of the Great Depression, and taking the arrogant attitude that they have the right to do so because they won is a good idea?

HOW IN THE HELL CAN YOU CALL STEALING MONEY FROM ONE MAN’S PAYCHECK AND GIVING A FRACTION OF IT TO ANOTHER MAN TZEDAKAH???!!!

Bet your ass that Jews like Rahm Emmanuel think that’s fair. Who would you rather hold up as an excellent example of Jewry? Emmanuel or Maimonides?

The same question needs to be put to American blacks. Is Obama really the best you could get or did you settle? And by the way, how do you feel about this sell-out cretin being voted for so overwhelmingly by Jews?

I will herein requote what Conservative Black Woman did on her blog, stated by Digital Publius:

Then you have the Original Democrats, these are folks that know the origin of the Democratic party. They know that it was the Democrats who started the Klu Klux Klan, with the express purpose of terrorizing black voters and to keep them from voting for the party that freed them. The O.D.s are the ones that still remember it was the Democrats during the civil rights movement that turned on the fire hoses and loosed the dogs on the civil rights activists in the 50s and 60s. It was the Democrats that raised the Confederate battle flag over all the municipal buildings in the south.

The O.D.s know that the party simply changed tactics when they lost the civil rights struggle, instead of beating and lynching people, they began to implement programs that stemmed the tide of independent minority progress both socially and economically, while appearing to be the party of the black man. Since we began to vote en masse for the democrats can we as the black community honestly say we are better off?

With 70 percent of our children now being born out of wedlock and the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country? With our young men disproportionately represented in the nations jails and prisons and killing themselves in violent criminal activity in staggering numbers? This was not the case during my parents time nor was it the case when I was a kid in the 70’s when the liberal programs were just getting started, we are only now really seeing the bitter harvests that those programs are yielding.

Black Americans are NOT children, looking up to the messiah chosen for them by white people and we should want to have little to do with it. I did nonetheless vote specifically because of one thing: the alarm wakes us with a start and not by petting us on the head gently. I didn’t do that as a Jew or a white man or anything like that. I did that on my own as an individual. The JPost is ill-advised to try to tie Obama to Jews in the public mind. Wait another few years and that will become crystal clear.

Tyrannosaurus Debt

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:25:00 +0000

Courtesy of Rodney Graves @ Say Anything...

Technorati Sucks

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:18:00 +0000

h9zjb4qnxy

Well after researching this issue all over the Internet, and sending support tickets, all I get from Technorati is total silence and my opinion of them is that as an aggregator and traffic driver, their methodology and support absolutely blow.

The quote below is all I ever get and the support forums? There's not even a single link or button to make my own post there about this problem and every single post thread there is marked solved/closed/whatever and are dated months old.

I get the feeling that Technorati has no interest in doing what they do correctly. Given unequal application of their system, it gives the appearance of at the very least stupidity and laziness if not selective listing choices.

This is exactly why I never bothered with Technorati before.

We have identified a problem with the URL submitted for claiming:

http://suitepotato.blogspot.com

This may be for a number of reasons. Please review possible reasons below.

1.

Please check and make sure the URL you are trying to claim is the front page of your blog as a browser would link to it. If the URL submitted was different, please try updating the URL and submitting the claim again.
2.

If you\'ve verified the claim URL is correct and your blog is reachable by browser, it may be that the URL has been flagged by Technorati as matching a pattern for spam blogs, or the blog software being used is not recognized by Technorati\'s web crawler. In this case we ask you contact technorati support and supply the following info:
* Please include the following error code: 402
* URL you are claiming
* The name of your blog
* Your contact info
* What blog software you are using (if known, e.g. Wordpress, Drupal, Movable Type, etc.)
* A short description of your blog and the type of content you like to write about.
* Does your blog have a RSS feed? Please see if you can supply us with an example URL of your feed.

That text snippet at the top? Their vaunted scripts can't fucking detect it no matter how it is posted here, and if they do, they can't use it. I could write better code to search text in Applesoft Basic over twenty-five years ago. I could write better in Python within a week of starting to learn it. I could do better work with regex a week after using Linux the first time.

The word?

FAIL

Thanks for nothing Technorati.

Drool… Network Techie Heaven…

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:32:00 +0000

Now all I need is this, a good superhardened tough laptop, docking station, and I’m ready to go… and a lot of money.

Stupid Network Tricks: GMail via Tor

noreply@blogger.com (-suitepotato-) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 02:08:00 +0000

While the accessing of the GMail web interface via Tor in Firefox with Torbutton installed seems simple enough, you might prefer to use an email application with GMail, in which case it might seem a bit harder.

Here’s how.

Install Stunnel which you get here. Once you have, find in Start | All Programs | stunnel | Edit stunnel.conf which on selection opens Notepad with the stunnel.conf file ready.

Insert these lines:

[SMTP Gmail]
accept = 127.0.0.1:25
connect = smtp.gmail.com:465

[POP3 Gmail]
accept = 127.0.0.1:110
connect = pop.gmail.com:995

and then File | Save and you’re done there. DO NOT run Stunnel from the Start Menu or it is going out straight from your IP.

Instead, using SocksCap which you already downloaded and installed earlier, you start that and go to File | New… and here’s the values:

Profile Name: Stunnel by Tor (or whatever you prefer)

Command Line: "C:\Program Files\stunnel\stunnel.exe"

Working Directory: "C:\Program Files\stunnel\"

and click OK.

From within SocksCap you now run Stunnel AFTER starting Tor from the Vidalia Control Panel. I suggest letting it run a few minutes to build a few circuits before starting Stunnel.

Now simply aim your email application at Stunnel. Where you enter your POP3 server, user 127.0.0.1 and the same IP address for your SMTP server. Enter your GMail account user and pass information and save everything.

What this does is to cause your email application to send standard POP3 and SMTP traffic at Stunnel which receives it and relays it to GMail’s servers which only use SSL but many email applications don’t, and does it via SocksCap's redirection towards Tor.

This saves you from trying to get SSL functioning on the email application, which while it might work almost certainly won’t be SOCKS aware and thus will be unable to be directed at Tor. IF your email application IS SSL aware, then theoretically you could start it within SocksCap and cut out Stunnel. Of course, many aren’t and for those who don’t want to dick around with the SSL stuff and just insert the easiest values to use, then this method works.

Also, it helps familiarize yourself with using Stunnel to use SSL with non-SSL-aware applications AND do it with Tor.