Every Man a King, but No One Wears a Crown

It appears that we are losing the most significant populist candidate since Huey Long. John Edwards is expected to announce that he is dropping out of the race this afternoon while helping build houses for Habitat for Humanity.

As you know, I have been supporting Barak Obama, but I regret to see Edwards leave this race. His populist support for issues affecting those members of our society typically ignored added valuable contrast to the Republican platform. His steadfast insistence that we can not allow corporations to continue to take advantage of the less fortunate is a stance that needed to be heard.

Early reports indicate that he is not going to throw his support and delegates towards either Obama or Clinton. With that being said, I would love to see Obama offer Edwards the position of Attorney General. Edwards could turn the office of the Attorney General into a powerful advocate of the people, fighting against the parasitic influences of corporate greed.

Thank you John Edwards.

Not Florida AGAIN!!!

In honor of the Democratic Primary in the State of Florida, you are going to be honored with a bonus comic.

You Have A Choice

I have followed politics for almost my entire life. Over the course of my thirty years, some elections have left more of an impact than others. In 1988, I was in fifth grade and I remember very clearly standing in front of my class passionately appealing to my fellow students to try and convince their parents to vote for George Bush. (Don’t ask. For the life of me I can’t remember why I was so misinformed.) I remember the debates in 1992. Particularly the charts of Ross Perot and his description of the “Giant Sucking Sound” he believed would be the negative effect of NAFTA to jobs in America. (I supported Bill Clinton in that election, but Perot was essentially correct in his analysis of the negative impact of NAFTA when it comes to American manufacturing jobs.) The election of 2000 affected me in ways that I still don’t fully comprehend. In short, 2000 was the year that my innocence and optimism of the electoral process died. Anna still loves to tell the story about how I was so upset by the decision of the Supreme Court in Gore v Bush that I called Chief Justice Rehnquist’s office to express my displeasure despite it being after midnight. (And of course ignoring the fact that I am a nobody and now probably have a file with the FBI.) 2004 was the year I became a cynic and fell into the trap of believing that what works is right. That being pragmatic is more important than being an idealist.

The past thirty years have taught me to be cynical, pragmatic, overly concerned with just winning and generally a byproduct of everything that is wrong with our political system. So here I find myself in the year 2008 and another election is at hand. In my entire life, I have never been given a candidate that speaks truly of hope. That passionately asks us to set aside our partisan differences for the greater good. A candidate that inspires us to be greater than the sum of our parts. A candidate that simply asks us to believe. Today we have been given that candidate in Barak Obama.

But it is hard to shake off the shackles of the past thirty years. Despite the fact that here is a candidate that spoke of peace when the rest of the nation was beating the drums of war. A candidate that spent his early years as an activist trying to show the people their strength while others played the lobbyist trying to manipulate the halls of power.

I say no more. I refuse to allow the system to corrupt me any longer. Today I am going to stand up and say that what is right will work and no longer be deluded into thinking that what will work is right. My support for Obama is more than just an endorsement of the man, but a rejection of the way politics have been played my entire life. I am ready for a change. The nation is ready for a change and together we can make it happen.

I know from looking at the statistics to my blog that I have readers from Kansas, Connecticut, New York, Alabama, Oklahoma, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, California, Minnesota, Tennessee, Illinois and Massachusetts, all which vote a week from today in Super Duper Tuesday. I am personally asking each of you to vote for hope. Over the last seven years we have been manipulated by fear and dishonesty. It is past time to reject these things. On Tuesday you will have a choice.

Sen. Ted Kennedy is far more eloquent than I, so I am going to post his speech of why he is supporting Barak Obama. I am sure that many of you have seen the thirty second clips that they aired in the media, but they do not do justice to his stirring oratory. Please take a few minutes and listen to the entirety of his speech. It recalls a time when politics did not automatically make one pessimistic, as the past thirty years have done to me. Together we can shape our future into something we can be proud when we look back thirty year hence.

Wouldn't Put Anything Past Them.

Still Without A Name Comic 2

Yeah, yeah. I know this is actually being posted on Thursday, but I am old and can't wait until midnight and tomorrow is going to be a busy day at work, so you are getting it a couple of hours early.

Wow. Another No Talent Hacks Wades In.

Inspired by Shamus Young and the DMing of the Rings, I have decided to start my very own webcomic, despite the fact that I have far less talent or skill. My initial plan is to try and post a new comic most Mondays and Fridays. I initially started creating these because I thought it might give you a chuckle, but I had so much fun creating it, I don't really care if you find it funny or not. Well without further ado.

Oh yeah, if you are having trouble reading it, you can click on the comic to get a larger size.

I'll Be Back!

Do you remember that little 1984 art house film by James Cameron that made the Governator famous? The touching story about a man and woman whose love must overcome the obstacle of an unstoppable cyborg assassin who has been sent back from the year 2029 by a race of artificially intelligent computer-controlled machines bent on the extermination of mankind.

Yes, I am talking about The Terminator. Well apparently the film never seemed to have made it into Israel. If you recall the whole extermination of the human race nonsense started when humans created a “Global Digital Defense Network” and gave it command over all computerized military hardware and systems. The theory behind Skynet’s creation was to remove the possibility of human error and slowness of reaction time to guarantee fast, efficient response to enemy attack. As you can imagine, this had “unimaginable” consequences when the computer become sentient and decides that all humans are the enemy.

Now jump back into “reality” and you find this little article about how the Israeli’s plan to create a new, robotic defense system, armed with enough artificial intelligence that it "could take over completely" from flesh-and-blood operators. "It will be designed for... autonomous operations,' Brig. Gen. Daniel Milo, commander of Israel's air defense forces, tells Defense News' Barbara Opall-Rome. And in the event of a "doomsday" strike, Opall-Rome notes, the system could handle "attacks that exceed physiological limits of human command."

It is events like these that remind of the quote by Ray Bradbury about why he writes science fiction.

“People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.”

Chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and unless you work for a governmental agency, the odds are that you have to work. Hell, my employer gives me the fucking Oaks Day off, but not the day set aside to honor the most important figure in American history that represents non-violence and equality.

Since I really didn't feel like spending the day helping a bunch of rich white men make another group of rich men more rich, I took the day off without pay. So here I sit in my living room with my beautiful bride and darling daughter trying to figure out how best to honor this wonderful man. Lexington has the annual Unity Breakfast and Downtown March, but both of these tend to strike me as not much more than a self-congratulatory celebration for the old guard civil rights activists. There is nothing wrong with this, in fact, they deserve their moment in the sun, but it isn't why I took off of work.

So I turn on the TV trying to find something that honors the day. Flipping through the channels reveals that the closest program in the spirit of the day is the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Yes, the Banks try to teach Will a lesson or Will tries to teach the Banks a lesson, but again, not really what I am looking for.

No, this man that was extremely unpopular when he was alive (people forget this), spoke as passionately and often about poverty and militarism as he did about civil rights (remember he was assassinated standing up for striking workers) deserves more. It seems that our nation has turned him into nothing more than a plastic action figure with a microchip in it that says "I have a dream!"

I wish the quote from Dr. King that best represented the day was "The time is always right to do the right thing;" but in actuality it probably is "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

Holy MegaPixels Batman!!

That camera is not a prop from Carrot Top's comedy act but an actual camera produced by Seitz. For only $43,000.00 you too can own this amazing piece of hardware that will make you the envy of photographers everywhere. The 6 x 17 format camera takes pictures at an amazing resolution of 160 megapixels.

Obviously this camera is marketed towards individuals needing to take incredibly hi-res pictures or anyone trying to take a picture of my entire family. Or maybe a picture of Tammy's butt (That one is for you Fish).

Since Kodak introduced the 1.3 megapixel DSC-100 in 1991 for a mere $13,000.00, I think we can expect to see 160 megapixel cameras in our cellphones in about 2012.

Time to Dig a Moat

One of the major news stories this morning was the agreement that MySpace and 49 Attorney Generals have reached to protect minors from online predators. One of the major concerns by watchdog groups and lovers of children everywhere (the good kind of love, not the NAMBLA kind of love) was the lack of parental control over their children’s ability to have a MySpace page. The ingenious solution that the collective brainpower of Rupert Murdoch’s multi-billion dollar empire and our country’s Attorney Generals have developed is the creation of a database where parents can submit their children’s email address, wherein they will be prohibited from creating a MySpace page. I hear the trumpets of heaven welcoming this momentous initiative.

Because, you know, like, it is going to be such a drag and like totally unfair, to, you know, have to spend a whole two minutes, to like, create a whole new email address at like either Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail or AIM or BlueBottle.

Parents, I have a piece of advice for you. You are NEVER going to be smarter than your kids when it comes to dealing with the internet. It just isn’t going to happen. I consider myself pretty tech-savvy but I have come to grips with the fact that my kids are going to be laughing at me for whatever the future equivalent is for programming the clock on the VCR.

You have two choices. One, you can be a Luddite and ban any form of internet connectivity in your home. Or two, you can just trust your kids. If you go with the first choice, be prepared to have raised a kid that is several steps behind their peers when they enter the real world and most likely will end of like the preacher’s daughter when she goes to college. Lying on the floor of a frat house passed out drunk in hopefully only her own puke.

In my oh so humble opinion, the job of parents is not to protect children from the bumps and bruises of life, but to prepare them for dealing with whatever the world throws. Face it, you and I are never going to be able to foresee all of the challenges they are going to deal with. Our best hope is to build a foundation of love, respect, justice and integrity upon which they can survey the world and shape it in their image.

Oh yeah, and Sophie, if you ever read this, it doesn’t apply to you.

We are an Honorable Band of Thieves

92214563780560366130661709445338835634

In a very small (and pathetic) way I have committed an act of civil disobedience in the spirit of Henry David Thoreau by posting the above number. Not only have I broken the law, but I have made a criminal out of you as well, since this webpage now resides in your computer's cache.

You may be suspecting that my brain has overheated from wearing a tinfoil helmet but it is not me that has lost grip with reality but the Recording Industry Association of America or RIAA. The above number is not merely the solution to the equation

x=2(46107281890280183065330854722668 + 1)

but is in fact the numerical representation of the AACS processing key that allows you to decrypt HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs. That string of numbers is illegal to publish, possess, utter or propagate according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

You could be thinking to yourself, oh well, I just won't use that number as the PIN to my ATM, but what if I told you that prime numbers, those crazy little numbers that Euclid talked about in 300 B.C. and groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation award money for finding, can also be illegal.

493108359702850190027577767239076495728490777215020863208075
018409792627885097658864557802013660073286795447341128317353
678312015575359819785450548115719393458773300380099326195058
764525023820408110189885042615176579941704250889037029119015
870030479432826073821469541570330227987557681895601624030064
111516900872879838194258271674564774816684347928464580929131
531860070010043353189363193439129486044503709919800477094629
215581807111691530318762884778783541575932891093295447350881
882465495060005019006274705305381164278294267474853496525745
368151170655028190555265622135314631042100866286797114446706
366921982586158111251555650481342076867323407655054859108269
562666930662367997021048123965625180068183236539593483956753
575575324619023481064700987753027956186892925380693305204238
149969945456945774138335689906005870832181270486113368202651
590516635187402901819769393767785292872210955041292579257381
866058450150552502749947718831293104576980909153046133594190
302588132059322774443852550466779024518697062627788891979580
423065750615669834695617797879659201644051939960716981112615
195610276283233982579142332172696144374438105648552934887634
921030988702878745323313253212267863328370279250997499694887
759369159176445880327183847402359330203748885067557065879194
611341932307814854436454375113207098606390746417564121635042
388002967808558670370387509410769821183765499205204368255854
642288502429963322685369124648550007559166402472924071645072
531967449995294484347419021077296068205581309236268379879519
661997982855258871610961365617807456615924886608898164568541
721362920846656279131478466791550965154310113538586208196875
836883595577893914545393568199609880854047659073589728989834
250471289184162658789682185380879562790399786294493976054675
348212567501215170827371076462707124675321024836781594000875
05452543537

is a prime number and it is also illegal. The above prime number is DeCSS executable number that can be used to break CSS encryption on CDs.

Ok, ok, I get it, all of these huge numbers and strange acronyms are going over your head but this isn't the only evidence that the recording industry has lost its mind.

Do you remember the case of Jammie Thomas? That is the woman that lost her court case and had to pay the RIAA an obscene amount of money. There are a couple of interesting points that came out of that case. First the RIAA never proved that anyone actually downloaded any of the songs that she put on the internet. They won that case based upon the fact that someone MIGHT have downloaded some of the songs which MIGHT have resulted in a loss of revenue for them. That is right, they never actually proved that they were financially harmed, just that they might have been.

The second point coming out of this case, and in my opinion is the most crazy, is this was the first time the RIAA put forth the argument that the act of ripping a mp3 is illegal. Yes, you read that right. The RIAA now contends that taking your CDs, cassette tapes and vinyls and putting them on your computer or iPod is illegal. Don't believe me, read this exchange between a reporter and the RIAA when he was trying to get them to clarify their position.

A couple of weeks ago, Dennis Schrock wrote in the Freeman Courier about how he recently got an iPod and has over the last several weeks been placing all his CDs onto it. I doubt that he was aware that he was publicly announcing that he was a criminal. If you are reading this Mr. Schrock, Jamie Thomas was fined $9250.00 per song, but I am pretty sure that the RIAA would be willing to accept cash, check or major credit card.

Now show of hands, how many of you are criminals because you listen to music either on your computer or iPod?

I will end with this thought. Since corporations are considered individuals in the eyes of the law, do you think we can get the RIAA committed mentally incompetent and have it locked up?