Slow

I'm on my third build of this video now, trying to get the filtering just perfect. It really sucks having my main machine tied up. I'm at the point in the year where every single minute that I'm not working is a minute of sleep that I'm going to have to lose, so I really can't afford to have it tied up for so long.

The fact is that if I don't get this work done, I can't pay for IAM and various other things I care about. So if it means long hours and no sleep, so be it. It's not like there are any other options anyway.


While waiting this morning I read some copies of TIME magazine from a couple months ago. What a depressing load of shit that was. A pile of lies about the war that only an utterly uninformed and short-sighted fool would believe, and not only that, stories that when compared against current news stories don't even line up. I really have no idea how the average news reader doesn't call their bluff a la The Emperor Has No Clothes. Why doesn't it happen? Is the average person a fucking moron? Do they simply not care?

I'm sorry if it sounds insulting, but more and more I believe that as long as you keep giving people their soma, you can murder in their name indefinitely, and rape them to pay the bill. It's a very sad comment on the illusionary freedom of modern Western “democratic” capitalism.

The West is still a slave-based economy, and it will be as long as it retains capitalism. It's a simple fact. I challenge any economist to deny that fact. It's the core fact that is required for a capitalist system to succeed, as it is an inherently predatory/parasitic pyramid scheme which can only function by enslaving and abusing the majority of its people.

Anyway, then in the TIME magazines there were a bunch of articles about how white-collar workers are becoming unemployed in high numbers and not finding replacement work. Boo-fucking-hoo. That's like telling me that soldiers are out of work because there's no more people to kill. Here's a hint: it's because your job was bullshit, and never should have existed in the first place.

The fact is, work is work. Skilled and/or educated work is still work. What I do for example may require more skills, but I certainly can't say that what I do is any more difficult or noble or back-breaking than a manual laborer working the same hours. Work is work. Human is human. An hour is an hour.

Question: Why do people doing “my job” deserve $300 an hour?
Answer: They don't.

As I've said before, every piece of wealth, every dollar on this planet is created by physically processing the world's natural resources. Food, water, land, trees, minerals, oil, and so on. But somehow we've gotten to a place where the people who actually make that happen make very little in terms of power, money, and quality of life, whereas the people who force them to do it — the people higher up on the pyramid — become rich by circumstance.

Don't put up with it.

Wealth is in a good meal and a warm bed and good friends laughing around a fire. You don't have to play their game. You really don't. Land is cheap. A home is cheap. The planet and the sun will do the rest if your heart is pure and you have faith in your path.

Alice in Wonderland

“But I don't want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can't help that,” said the Cat. “We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.”

“How do you know I'm mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn't have come here.”

Guide me, guilds.

In my cleaning and reorganizing I found the box from an old product of mine. Sort of anyway; at this point the product had already been made obsolete by the explosion of fax modems (we built the product in the 80's; here it's being sold in 1993). Anyway, this is what it looked like after we'd sold it to a group laundering Columbian drug money (yet another reason I am a no-go person in the US):

I was also reading an old interview* with Walter Wriston, the former CEO of Citicorp (Citibank) who retired in 1984. Anyway, he is asked,

What's the future of one-stop shopping for all your banking, insurance, and investment needs?

The real issue is who is going to run these financial supermarkets. Will it be something called a bank? Or will it be General Electric, Merrill Lynch, or Fannie Mae? All I can tell you is the banking business used to have about 70 percent of the financial assets of the world. Now we have about 30 percent. Do you know any industry that went from 70 down to 30 percent of market share and survived?

It's still an unancerwed question if America's heavily regulated banks can compete against huge corporations with massive cash flows. All I'm saying is that the share of financial assets administered by banks is shrinking every day, while the share administrated by the General Electrics of the world is growing.

Banks are regulated. Tightly regulated. International megacorps are not only totally unregulated, but they have more money and power than most smaller nations, and have more than enough power (as we've seen) to dictate the actions of even the biggest countries in the world.

Remember, when I say revolution now I'm talking about killing the corporation. It's an abomination and should not exist. We need to go back to small businesses, craftspeople, and guilds. Hmmm… Maybe we should start a body modification guild.


* WIRED 4.10 US, October 1996

Shannon's bookshelves…

I am very much out of room!!!





















Morning of Dec 21, 2002


BME News Feed
Dec 22: NY: Over-40 Rebels With a Caus…
Dec 20: MI: Man pleads guilty in kitchen…
Dec 20: ME: Bra wires and body piercing…
Dec 19: NJ: Apprenticeship legally requi…
Dec 19: CA: Tattoo parlor finds loophole…
Dec 19: FL: Scratcher gets scratched
Dec 18: VA: Hopewell may legalize tatto…
Dec 18: WI: Brookfield considers reversin…
Dec 18: CA: Fontana sets tattoo regulati…
Dec 18: PQ: Hate worn on the skin

Just a couple quick news stories to mention:

  • Is the real purpose of the domestic war on terror (ie. Homeland Security, etc.) actually ethnic cleansing?
  • Do you have your buzz word decoder ring? Remember the new rule of justice is “do unto others so they can't do unto you”.
  • Another story on the brilliant new Bush plan (“an Internet strategy to secure cyberspace”) to force ISPs to give the government live feeds of all their network traffic (in a useful form) for their “early-warning center”. Another stupid idea that won't stop terrorism, but will erode civil rights even more (and chase tech companies out of the US).
  • Enemies galore! If the US keeps pushing its unilateral stance, it will find itself with no friends, and only enemies. World population: 6 billion. US population: 275 million. That is, there are 22 times as many people in the world as there are Americans. So the US must learn to get along and play nice or it will be destroyed*. The numbers are irrefutable.
  • Latest State Dept meeting: “Future of Iraq, Oil and Energy Working Group“. Here's a hint: stop buying oil from Saddam Hussein (50% of the oil Iraq produces goes to America [info], 8% of America's total consumption), and stop trying to take it by force. America can only play this pyramid game for so long. America must learn to stand on its own two feet again, proud and independent without having to steal from other nations to survive.
  • 100,000 troops on their way to the Gulf with forces amassing by January's end. If this thing goes urban, they'll need a lot of body bags as well. The people of Iraq are now armed to the teeth, and attacking a well defended population in hostile, unfamiliar, and punishing terrain and in their homes generally results in an unacceptable high casualty rate for the invading force.

* Or if you're to believe folks like Pat Buchanan, America will be destroyed pretty much no matter what, again, “by the numbers” it's inevitable, short of massive cultural change. Military aggression hastens the problem, but massive cultural change (ie. focus on family, increased birthrate, energy and food independence, etc.) is needed for America — and most Western countries — to survive as the nations they are now.



I think I'm going to go make myself a sandwich and then finish putting together this workspace. My must-do task for the day is mastering another DVD for the video site that launches on January 1st. Mostly it's heavy-duty adult stuff a la bme/HARD, but there are also things like the ModCon DVD, BBQ footage, and there are both suspension and tongue splitting DVDs in the works that are more “general interest”.