goofballs

As this (early) political season and Christmas season heats up, remember that millions of Americans, wifes, children, fathers, mothers are separated from their loved ones held as political prisoners in America's war on Black Men and The Poor. Remember as our wars become more and more existential, our freedoms suffer as a result: the war on hunger, drugs, terror, ephemera, et cetera, et cetera. I saw Ethan Nadelmann give this speech , repeated several times on public access cable in Cleveland, Ohio over the Thanksgiving break. Nadelmann heads the Drug Policy Alliance, one of many organizations dedicated to decriminalizing victim-less crime and bringing awareness to alternatives to imprisonment of drug users and dealers. To be sure, Nadelmann forcefully points out that when someone harms someone else, whether or not as a result of drug or alcohol use, then that person must be held accountable. But in the drug war, he points out, usually no-one is helped and those harmed most are peop...

I know its a little early, but apparently department stores were open since 4am yesterday until midnight last night, so fuck it.

Looks like Dennis the Menace managed to Ron-paul the Kos post-debate poll: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/15/22252/245 And now for something slightly substantive. I'm sitting between gates 29 and 30 of terminal 1 of KSFO, San Francisco International Airport. The airport in general and this terminal in particular seem to have been designed by someone with a real love of flying: directly in front of me is the Bravo-Hotel taxiway, followed by 1L/19R and 1R/19L, and a view of approaches, plus the end of 10R/28L, approaches from the southeast. In the distance, the San Mateo Bridge, any frequent fliers favorite approach landmark coming out of 4000 feet. A Quantas B74 just taxied by on followed by a CO B73 and an AA B76. That I can't, whenever I want to, take the train in from the city into the BART station located just South of United International in terminal 3, walk through security and spend an afternoon watching planes is probably the most annoying feature of our new secur...

Wait, I'm confused.. a Republican.. with nice things to say about.. a.. liberal.. Democrat.. does not compute.. head.. exploding..

Here is my response to a recent article and interview with Newt Gingrich over at Salon.com : How about "no." How about "no" to sky-god worshipping white-male imperialists who want to turn the clock back to 1830 and the empire back to 1948. How about "no" to people who feel neither guilt nor shame at the systematic, institutionalized racism applied to our continent's first settlers and African slaves, and their decendants? How about "no" to old, white men who spend so much time and energy trying to figure out how to control a woman's uterus (especially now that the hysterectomy has gone out of fashion). Why? Is it out of jealousy? No. How about a "no" to those dirty, nasty men who will not let two people who are in love have the same rights as any other couple in love because they had the misfortune of being born with the same sex organs. These same dirty nasty men who seek illicit and unsafe trysts in public restrooms or prey o...

Shotgun Re-org A shotgun re-org is my own term for what happens when a business runs out of operating funds and immediately shuts down operations, or worse, posts a message like this: Feedster is Changing... We'll be back up soon with exciting news! I am citing this particular (and very recent) example by name because they failed to notify my company, their paying client, of their feed shutdown. As a result, my pager would go off twice every six hours: first, when my cronjob would complain that no new feeds were coming in and second, when our offshore "noc" would ditto the page (I swear, I think they just exist to infuriate me). Last night, as I was going to bed, I had the amusing thought that "wouldn't it be funny if they had gone tits up?" This morning, that intuition was confirmed when my co-worker IMed me to tell me that they had, indeed, gone tits up. I literally LOLed, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I worked for a marketing firm in 1997 that had ...

Wow, is our government really this stupid? http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/7/112926/221 Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists. The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area. Watch out, Rainbow Coop ! Big brother is watching what you eat! Stupid, stupid, stupid..