August 22, 2004

The more I see and hear, the more I wonder how anyone can support the man(?) currently in office. This is a pandering fearmonger who lies to the American public with every breath, and every action of his seems to be calculated to do the most damage to America and its ideals, philosophies, and way of life.

A couple of recent actions demonstrate the lengths this administration and its cronies will go to stay in power, and demonstrate the moral and ethical failings of our current (P)resident.

• They are intimidating minority voters in Florida. Police have been going through minority communities supposedly investigating "voter fraud", but they are focusing their effort predominantly in areas with large elderly populations. The police (armed and in plain clothes) are going door-to-door in a threatening manner in an obvious attempt to stifle voter participation. (NY Times: Voting While Black, By BOB HERBERT, Published: August 20, 2004)
• The entire "Swift Boat Veterans" brouhaha. Here a bunch of lying ethics whores are selling their honor for political (or monetary) expedience. A group of veterans who never served with or beside John Kerry are making outrageous statements about actions and events they have no first-hand knowledge of. They cooked up a batch of lies about Kerry that are so odious that the people who actually were there have been coming forward of their own free will to dispute them. As of this writing, the latest is William Rood of the Chicago Tribune, who said in a recent editorial the tales told by Kerry's detractors are simply untrue. Rood commanded one of the boats under Kerry's command during the incident resulting in Kerry winning the Silver Star for valor. It now turns out that Ken Cordier, one of the group of liars, is a Bush campaign volunteer. He has since resigned from the campaign under the scrutiny, but the facts speak for themselves.

This (P)resident is a spoiled frat boy who never earned an honest dollar in his life. Everything of value he ever had was handed to him, which he promptly flushed down the toilet due to incompetent management. From Harken Energy to the Texas Rangers to the United States Government, he has spent other peoples money like a drunken sailor on payday the day before going on an extended duty tour. I literally wonder out loud how anybody can support him without using doublethink on an Orwellian scale. The support he gets from people he has thrown out of work into un- or under-employment puzzles me to no end.

This was to be my first full 2-day weekend off of work since, I want to say the middle of June. Honestly I can't remember. I make videogames for a living, and work's a bear. I say "was to be" because not one hour ago my boss called my cell to ask me to come in tomorrow to fix something, even though I told him that my part of the actual fix would take me maybe about 10 minutes, maybe 30 for testing. Of course, it will take several hours to get to the point where I can make my part of the fix. So much for a weekend. Still, I've done 12+ hour days 7 days per week for about a month now (don't tell the California government we don't make overtime, shhh). Woulda been nice to have had that weekend, though. Maybe next time.

Anyway, I decided to go to Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue this morning because it gets me out of my apartment. I went to Amoeba Records and bought a used Muddy Waters album which I later discovered was, I am not making this up, caked with dirt. While lesser, or more intelligent men might have summoned the internet to research how to clean vinyl, I strode forward boldly, and just used water and a paper towel. Haven't tried playing it yet, as it's still got some dirt residue on it.

I also picked up Outfoxed, the documentary/counter-propaganda on the FOX News Channel. I picked it up mainly for three reasons. One: saw the trailer for it floating around the internet, and it earned the Raised Eyebrow of Interest. Two: it was cheap. As in $10.95 cheap. That was cheap enough. Three: I noticed it was published by The Disinformation Company. Back in the late 90's, I loved disinfo's links pages to the truly wacked out corners of society that were trying to use the internet to spread their message, and their mind-warpingly bizarre webcast show (starring Richard Metzger) for the ill-fated internet "television station," the Pseudo Online Network. Disinfo has published a few good books (and some right terrible ones), but nostalgia was the tipping-point here.

I consume so much media these days. I may even be spending more money on media than on food. That's so strange to me, unnatural even.

So I decided to walk to work yesterday, which one would think was a good idea, exercise supposedly being so healthy and all. In actual fact, walking to work turned out to be a horrible idea, because on my way I passed a dead cat half-wrapped in a sheet of wax paper, decomposing in the sweltering heat of the midday sun. Naturally, I'd never seen anything like that before, and was torn between my sick desire to peek at the poor, rotting thing, and my equally strong urge to vomit and turn back the way I came.

Today, as my bus went by the same spot I noticed that the cat was gone, although the wax paper remained as some sort of eerie reminder. Clearly, it didn't get up and leave, so I was left wondering whose job exactly it was to remove dead cats from city streets. If I chose the wrong major in university, or even worse, flunked out completely, would I end up being the person whose job it was to take care of that sort of thing? It's not like I don't have previous experience, I can remember this one time at summer camp when a counsellor-in-training and I found a dead mouse in one of the toilets in the guys' washroom, and with him being a responsible, seasoned professional, and me being ten years old, he naturally delegated the task to me of ensuring the mouse's removal, armed with nothing more than an empty yogurt container and a stick.

I'd better stop the trip down memory lane there, as I don't want to make anybody sick or wake up tomorrow morning to find myself downvoted into oblivion. Although I'm not entirely sure it's not too late. So what exactly is the point of this? Is there even a point? And am I always going to write a daylog after I encounter a dead person or animal?

Well I guess I'm trying in my own roundabout and uniquely disgusting way, to reinforce the point that it's never too early for me to start figuring out what I want to do in life and how I can set goals to achieve that. Even if I've got a pretty useless major. If I leave serious decisions to the last minute I could end up like a wax paper wrapped cat on the side of the road. And who the hell takes the time to wrap their dead cat fairly securely in wax paper but doesn't have the decency to bury the poor thing, or at least stash it somewhere slightly more secluded than a fairly busy public sidewalk?

nasreddin and atriumjake PUNK ROCK the NODE off

Today I find myself in a coffee shop on the East Side of Milwaukee. I hate coffee shops. However, this one is called Node. ‘Nuff said.

This is our mission statement and communiqué rolled into one, or something: For the next twenty-four hours, my friend Greg, and I will be having a node off, posting as many nodes as we can in a 24 hour span, as a protest against E2 sloth and lack of creativity that has become rampant within the two of us. We intend to both add as much positive content to the database as we can, while also reinvigorating our E2 careers.

We’ve had this idea for a while, dating back to our collective boredom in our high school Latin class, and our dreams of going to the library for the class period to write and post as many nodes as we could. After a few weeks worth of constant E2 related talk this eventually adapted to something more ambitious and daring, "Hey, why not just spend a whole day doing nothing but noding our collective asses off?"

Today I find myself in a coffee shop because it has free internet access and it is called Node. How crazy is that? Node. And that's what we're here to do. Node.

The rules are simple:

• Node as much as possible
• Node with as much quality as possible

At the end of the designated 24 hour period a winner will be decided thusly. Arrange all nodes in an order of reputation, from highest rep to lowest rep. Whoever has the most nodes in the top half of the list is declared the winner. Simple as that.

We make prior apologies for the copious amount of nodes we intent to create today. If by posting a new write-up we knock yours down in the New Write-ups Nodelet we are eternally sorry. Our noding for numbers is not what you may expect.

So this is our pseudo-Milwaukee nodermeet. Two guys doing what they love to do, something they somehow forgot all about it for a while. Here we go.

Today was a day to remember. I met with Bernard von NotHaus, the developer of the Liberty Dollar. On his annual national tour which concludes with his annual inspection of the warehouse that stores the silver backing LD silver certificates, he told me it was very important to him that he stop in Santa Barbara to meet me.

We talked for about three hours. I had some questions for him, and he told me of some of the goings-on at NORFED. Joined by an acquaintance of his, our discussion also took some turns into other areas, including some kind of independence plan (or something) for Hawaii, and prototypes of hydrogen-powered cars.

Before he left, he presented me with a specimen of a LD$500 gold certificate. I was especially thankful for the gift when I saw that its serial number was 000000. I told him that he is a hero in my book, which he brushed off (as real-life heroes tend to do).

Tomorrow will be a day to remember even more, because I'll be in Paso Robles where I'll see Bernard again, as his tour intersects with the current campaign swing of Michael Badnarik, Libertarian candidate for President. I met Mr. Badnarik in March of this year, at the convention of the California LP. The meeting of the two is significant because Michael has named Bernard the Treasury Secretary of his shadow Cabinet.

On Tuesday, I'll probably just get back to my normal funk of realizing that liberty has little chance of returning to this country anytime soon.