This place is messed up

There are people who tell me I’m a naive optimist. The Peace Corps Effect© has helped solidify that opinion, I know. I’m not deluded enough to think I’m going to change much, but perhaps I’m still immature enough to think that change could happen.

In any case, the following two news stories came through my feed aggregator today.

Mac Hammond […] says his private jet is for sale. […] Living Word Church has fallen $40,000 to $70,000 short of its weekly budget in recent months.
“It’s not yours, it’s God’s, and you’re not going to get it — and that’s something I’ll go to prison over,” (Rev. Kenneth Copeland) said at a meeting of prosperity ministers he sponsored in January.

In Tanzania alone, malaria kills roughly 100,000 people a year. (Bush said) “The suffering caused by malaria is needless and every death caused by malaria is unacceptable. […] It is unacceptable to people in the United States, who believe every human life has value, and that the power to save lives comes with the moral obligation to use it.”
Tanzania is one of 15 countries that benefit through the distribution of live-saving medicines, insecticide spraying and bed nets […] which cost about $10 (each).

(All emphasis mine)

I’m pro-Jesus and anti-Bush… something’s screwed up when the “wrong” people are on the “right” side of my fence.

Go ahead. Call me naive. I’m good with that for as long as I can hold onto it.

Ladders and Snakes…have nothing to do with this post

[But AC/DC is always awesome.]

Via Digg:

Tomato Raid
Point the first: BWAHAHAHAHA. HA. Etc.
Point the second: growing lamps = probable cause? WTF, mate.

That is all.

Practiced at the art of deception

An infinite number of conundrums continue their approach, the good and the bad coming in together.

On the good hand is the fact that unimportant mountains made of insignificant molehills have begun to lose size. Problems that never truly were make their return towards slightly more managable proportions. The bastard child of hindsight and retrospect laughs in your face.

And on the bad hand is the hurt, the pain, the bleeding that no one sees. I don’t want to hear your daggers, to know your words. I don’t want to fall into the nothingness of existence that shoves itself forward to guard against your intrusion. I don’t want to be called names and given labels, to hear the ones I love doing the same to others I love. If I can’t talk then they use needles to bleed the words out, but what they can’t see is that the words aren’t there to begin with. Their lights are too bright to see through the darkness and their words are too sharp to love.

I want to buy an island to avoid the world, to live life without interacting with it. I want to run forever while never moving again. I want to tell you everything and not utter a sound.

But what I want is rarely what I am told I need.

Existence != right to procreation: Discuss.

[The following paragraphs were incredibly cathartic at this moment. Likewise, feel free to pay absolutely no attention.]

Essentially, fekking idjits should be barred from loosing their mentally defective DNA upon this planet. The end.

By the way, if you haven’t read here long - or haven’t noticed the few dozen related facebook status updates over time - or need a reminder: I have a huge problem with idiots. Of the ones I’ve been priviledged enough to encounter this week: I have a problem with the outsourced ones who ineptly man “customer service” lines. With the skeezy ones who blatantly lie to generate sales. With the apathetic ones who refuse to learn basic driving skills. With the myriad ones on campus, both sitting in classrooms and standing at whiteboards. And most certainly with the ignorant ones who can’t even make a decent cup of coffee… and then charge you $4 it.

Oh my good holy mother of pearl. I am by no means among the smartest, and have more blonde moments than many - but I generally tender a healthy sense of At-Least-I-Am-Not-An-Idiot self-righteousness. Honestly, people: how difficult is it to at least make some effort towards coherency, logic, and general cognitive ability?

I am so proud.

Those of you that pray… it has been, and will be, appreciated.

Spin the Wheel

…reason number Q why, should I ever become a parent, my child will never see the inside of a K-12 factory:

Chuck Narcho, a […] substitute teacher in Los Angeles, said younger children should not be burdened with all the gory details of American history.

“If you are going to teach, you need to keep it positive,” he said. “They can learn about the truths when they grow up.”

Via AP: Teachers ditch “traditional” Thanksgiving lesson; face criticism.

Ye gods.
Presenting the good little proletariats with a slightly more realistic view of our Founding Fathers != recounting a battlefield amputation.

Boo II: Electric Boogaloo

So this Halloween was actually pretty damn cool… except for the part where I remember why it is I don’t do the party-thing on weeknights anymore. It really started Monday night, because RHPS was teh awesomeness incarnate. I completely didn’t expect much from the student showing — but I was more than happily proved wrong. Rock.

For those of you not abused by a Certain Person’s album updates on Facebook (stop tagging me, yo!), costume of the day was Death from the Sandman comics…also known as oh-crap, didn’t-get-a-costume-together-in-time, pull-a-stereotype-from-the-closet. It was fun, anyhow, regardless of the fact that apparently nobody in Auburn has read Gaiman. Silly people.

Dumbfuck complaint department: why the heck is it so hard to pronounce Samhain correctly? Why no, actually, there wasn’t anyone named Sam, and his last name was not Hane.

Final link of the season: headinjurytheater - Halloween goodies. 13 Mystery Monsters: how many can you name?

Boo.

You thought you’d get away this year, with no Hallowe’en-y post-o’-goodness from Sara? Sorry.

So requisite wallpaper of the season: found here. Runner up: BRB?
Edit to add: As much as I hate to admit it, I actually find the newly-covered Nightmare tracks growing on me - so I suppose they merit a mention as well.

And random student-related rant story thing…
In case you haven’t caught on, apart from my individual students, I also have a group class once a week: this is actually in the building of a certain area church, and in return certain church-y conventions are occasionally imposed. Fair enough, and as a rule students and teachers alike are free to abide as they please.

During the intermission between class hours, there’s a combination food-and-announcement type thing, where classes mingle and talk and all that jazz. This week, there were handouts and a special presentation on…
TEH EVALS OF HALLOWEEN.
…along with requisite misinformed propoganda. I kid you not, the phrase “High Holiday of Satan” actually is printed, in black and white. What the crap, people.

So anyhow. Needless to say I had fun with all my individual lessons yesterday and today — and you know, how else are you going to learn the vital cultural details if your American Friend doesn’t tell you? Light on = ZOMG CANDAY RUSH. Light off = GO AWAY CRAZY PERSONS. Simple, yet important.

One final seasonal word: anyone in the Auburn area want to go to Rocky Horror with me Monday night? Seriously. You all are a bunch of lame freaks. Minus the freak bit.

Guilty by association / Methodical eradication

I really need to invest in a good pitchfork and a roll of duct-tape. I don’t want to be left behind in the dust while everyone runs off to either hunt or hide.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday that Congress should require Internet service providers to preserve customer records, asserting that prosecutors need them to fight child pornography. […] The law enforcement officials have indicated to [ISP companies] they must retain customer records, possibly for two years.
“We respect civil liberties but we have to harmonize this so we can get more information.”
[Associated Press]

We do… but we don’t. I understand completely. Does anyone here still think this will be limited to cases involving child pornography? Just checking.

As of this posting, the official press release has yet to make it to the DOJ’s site: it has, however, hit the newswires. [DOJ Press Release] The release itself is careful to avoid the deliniations laid out in Gonzales’ defense to the Senate: no mention of the phrase “customer records” or implied enforcement of the retention thereof.

Justice Department officials have said that any proposal would not call for the content of communications to be preserved and would keep the information in the companies’ hands. The data could be obtained by the government through a subpoena or other lawful process.
[Associated Press]

As near as I can gather, the “content of communications” would refer to image and site caches, etc. The only thing, then, actually being preserved, would be URLs and transfer/activity data. So, if you’re not doing anything wrong, what are you afraid of?

I’m afraid of the Person in charge of defining that wrongdoing… and the fact that “other lawful processes” can very well include probable cause. Reason to believe a crime is being committed. That’s all it will take.

Stalkerbook, rehashed

Ok, here we go: I freely admit, I spend more than a passing few minutes per day on Facebook. I joined the network for South the week it opened; since multi-networking was allowed I have both USA and Auburn, along with an international network thrown in. So yeah, I’m probably biased, or at the very least well along the road to happy-go-lucky indoctrination. I don’t care. It’s useful, it can be damned convenient locally, it’s an intriguing social-experiment-in-progress, and yes - it’s kind of fun too.

…but anyhow. I logged in this morning around 7:20 (no hardcore sign of addiction, incidently: I was early to an 8am class and had nothing better to do), and discovered: Stalkerbook 1.0, brand shiny new.

Or at least, that’s what everyone seems to be calling it (well, that, along with more colourful variations thereupon - you get the idea). I eavesdropped (shamelessly) upon not one, not three, but four conversations in hallways today — all related to “ohmigod, did you see what happened? It’s totally stalker now. I’m never getting on again!” Apparently, Facebook and the game this past weekend constitute the entirety of this campus’s conversational material.

So for those of you not ‘facebooked’, or otherwise out of the loop: read. Essentially, the Powers That Be have started implementing the inevitable, and they’re calling it all “News Feeds”. If your ex goes from being “in a relationship” to “single”, you now find out immediately — no more checking her profile whilst clinging vainly to hope five times a day. The next time your classmate updates something, you get more than a “Yo Mama has Updated In the Last Hour” message — it actually says, [gasp]: “Yo Mama has Updated her Class Schedule in the Last Hour”.

According to the voices I hear and the words I read today, the majority of folks seem to think this is a BAD BAD THING. Because first of all, it “enables stalking”. Um, so sorry. This information is already there, just slightly buried. If you don’t want your girlfriend to notice you posted 5 times to her best friend’s wall last night — methinks you have a slightly bigger problem. Second, albeit bringing up a distant rear: people are upset that feed details coming from “friends I’m not really friends with” will eclipse the more-important feeds. So, um, explain to me why you have those friends-but-not-really padding out your pseudo-myspace-buddy list in the first place? Ok, we know, it just looks so bloody cool to have xxx many friends. News: Prince William you ain’t.

Essentially, after the API was released, and all the controls for (much of) this data was released in the first place — it was only a matter of time before something like this was jury-rigged. This way, stalkers enquiring minds like myself are happy, and The Powers That Be control the “feeds”, and not some freelancing third party.

And dudes. You’re worried about stalking? You signed up for a social networking website. You willingly input information. If this is still a problem: try logging the hell off.

Of Bandwagons and Bandwidth

Of my relatively small collection of quasi-regular blogchecks, not a soul has yet to mention this particular hot-topic-du-jour: and I’m curious. So have at it, folks, be it by email, comment, or personal beratements (which may or may not involve trout and wet noodles). Net Neutrality. Go.

CNET Full Coverage
Snopes.com Article

[TX Rep. Joe, GOP] Barton … pressured his fellow GOP members to vote against Markey’s amendment…Net neutrality is “still not clearly defined,” Barton said. “It’s kind of like pornography: You know it when you see it.”

…And that, my friends, is what bothers the hell out of dear ol’ Sara. Sure, our intrinsic libertarian-esque leanings would generally tend towards the whole “ohh, keep the gummint’s hand’s OFF: Legislation of any type = TEH DEBAL!” — but this is a horse of a different color. Aside from the fact that his statement as a whole pisses me off in the first place (but that’s an entirely seperate ramble…); without base legislation to start with, who’s to make that call of “knowing it when we see it” — on either extremist side of the line? As nice as they’ve played thus far, I really don’t want to leave the call in the hands of the almighty Telcos for all eternity: nor do I want to leave it in Mr. Barton’s hands, either.

Granted, I have to agree with the Good Rep on one point: cases are being overstated, and dangers exaggerated.

Barton argued that Net neutrality proponents were overstating their case and exaggerating the dangers of a more laissez-faire approach. “I don’t think all the Draconian things they (predict) will happen if we don’t adopt their amendment,” he said.
…
“I’m concerned about e-mails being blocked from advocacy groups, of all sides,” said Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat who supported the amendment. “I’m concerned about start-ups that may be shut down.”

Amendment proponents who are going all-out for Neutrality are using all sorts of layman scare tactics to add to their supporters: the honest affects this will have on the average user, at least within a limited time frame, are nothing like the “OMGZ TEH INTARWEB WILL BECOME CENSORED!!!11eleven” effect that is being touted.

Nevertheless: the fact remains that what concerns me most — what scares the everliving shite out of me most — is the fact that The Powers That Be seem completely oblivious to the inevitable repurcussions of allowing the “nice” telcos to lay out their own, individual, guidelines. As a small-town chick, forced to jump through a singular hoop for my beloved broadband, I don’t really hold much stock in the (actual, overheard) argument of “well, if you think it’s that bad, then just boycott the big telcos” (gee thanks; try a traceroute someday, moran).

And so we wait. We watch. And we wonder what the future holds.