Fight!
Topic: Daily Info

With precision you feed me
My witness i'm hungry
Your temple it calms me
So I can carry on
My slaving sweating the skin right off my bones
On a bed of fire i'm choking on the smoke that fills my home
The wrecking ball rushing
My witness your blushing
The pipeline is gushing
While here we lie in tombs
While on the corner
The jury's sleepless
We found your weakness
And it's right outside your door

Now testify
Testify, Rage Against The Machine

First, a big resounding FUCK YOU to Ohio. Lemme say that another way. FUUUUUCK YOU Ohio. You can all eat shit. Fuckers. Are you blind? You are one of the worst off states due to Bush. Given that you believed otherwise against clear and present facts, I have a few bridges and parks you may be interested in buying.

Ya' done fucked up, America. Congratulations on endorsing a group of people that want regression.

I have changed my mind (Yes, I can do that, dogged, concrete thinking is a sign of mental instability, ask a psychologist). I shall stay here, and I shall fight hard with every ounce of my being. I will point out every logical inconsistency. I will point out out every flaw and every contradiction. I will make it painfully obvious that this decision was wrong. I shall be front and center at every protest. We may have been defeated, but the margin was not that great. We may have been defeated, but this does not mean we have to roll over and take it.

I encourage all of you who feel down-hearted and disenfranchised to stand up and fight. We can keep these things on everyone's minds, we can keep pressing. Nothing is more powerful than an unrestful populace, so we must remain unrestful. Remember, there are another set of crucial elections in 2 years, and there we can hope to yank control of the legislature away from the regressors. Two years is long time, but we can make it. We just have to be willing to stand up and be strong.

It would be nice if there were healing but that would require a step away from the fundamentalism that is running this country. And if what is meant by healing is embracing or tolerating fundamentalism, I never want any healing. I want to shred that wound open and rout out this infection.

We may have lost this day, but the margin is not large enough to be called a mandate. So we must question and fight at every turn. Questioning your elected officials is the most patriotic things you can do, and let no one tell you otherwise. I will continue to be hypercritical of all my elected officials, and I will not let them lie to me. I will not stand down. I will not concede. And I encourage you to do the same. We will win forth in the long run, but to do that, we cannot back off now.

Power to the people.

Voted
Topic: Daily Info

Well, I cast ballot number 977 for my precinct. And now to avoid all news-sources (especially that shit-pump Fox News) until tomorrow morning.

Votes
Topic: Daily Info

Well, in about 18 hours and 13 minutes, Minnesota will have cast its last ballot. And in another short slew of hours after that, we will all know the outcome. Here's hoping this country can open its eyes and see the stupidity that sits in office and decide to remove it. Oh, and for the fundamentalists, please, please, please stay the fuck home or go form your own country somewhere.

Remember the Puritans were kicked out for not being too liberal, but for being too conservative.

Oh yeah. One further thing. To the Texans who like the phrase "It's like a whole other country": Fine. Go form your own country. We'd be better off without your foolish and asinine shit.

Here's hoping we can step forward for the good of humanity, instead of a step back.

Short Aside: Here are two reasons to vote Kerry:

1. He supports furthering research of all kinds (not just stem cell as the Republicans claim, but also things like alternative fuels).
2. He supports higher education.

Good night.

And................................................

Forging
Topic: Daily Info

Greetings from Nowhere!

I've just finished a marathon coding session that started sometime around Monday afternoon. And I must say, I am fucking tired and more than a bit burned out. I've averaged around 3 hours of sleep a night since, and I'm really looking forward to sleeping. It'll be great. Of course, tomorrow also includes another hardcore coding session from around 10 in the morning until zero hour at midnight (actually, about five minutes before midnight). Likely, when anyone next hears out of me, I'll be more or less just a worthless husk only capable of basic bodily function.

So, this is it, catch you on the other side of the forge, if I make it.

Revolution starts today
Topic: Rambling && Rant

If you're free you'll never see the walls
If you're head is clear you'll never freefall
If you're out right you never fear the wrong
If you're head is high you never fear at all
Exploder, Audioslave

These are my thoughts. My inspiration comes from the greats before me who stood tall for their principles and let the chips fall were they may. My impetus comes from those who suffer in the here and now. These are things I cannot remain silent about, and if no one else will speak them, then I shall. For this, I claim no glory or gain, except that which benefits those for who I speak.

There are those in my generation, like in generations before, who are held down by those from above. We are the silent engine of a system that seeks to hold us fast. They have us seek things we do not need nor can we rightly obtain. We are told that just a bit more work, just a few more payments and we are in the clear, yet we are never allowed to make that step beyond servitude.

We are the ones that serve food to the top, often thanklessly. We clean the hallways, we run the buses, we do the thankless. But more than that, we write the software, we run the spreadsheets, we fill and file the paperwork. We are the dynamo, the lubrication, the bolts, the very fabric upon which the top sits in grotesque leisure and directs our lives.

We have been deceived into this. Sick and twisted humans have warped what was once our sense of trust and good nature and forced us into this indentured service. We have been taken advantage of, our ambitions and drives subverted and channeled out of good nature and willingness to be good humans.

Our own humanity has trapped us here, our own desire to be decent humans has been co-opted by those upon the top. They keep us in line by offer tantalizing glimpses of that easy life. We are tempted with offers of low interest-rates, low payments, high credit limits, easy financing. We are tempted, and in the hope of end to servitude, we grab at these things not realizing that by doing so we further entangle ourselves in their net.

I am here to dispel these things, for those who I speak. We chase things we do not need. We have no need of sports cars with poor mileage. We have no need of designer clothes, designer shoes, designer anything. We need not persist in an eternal unspoken popularity contest amongst ourselves. We waste our time competing against one another, when we should be struggling to break our bonds, to set ourselves free and to let the top topple and fall as a house of cards.

Here is the thing of which I speak. We hold all the keys and we guard all the doors. Without our participation, this system shall fail. We are its components, and without us, it ceases to be. We are the separation between society and anarchy. We may not all know this now, but soon we will. On that day, there will be revolution, and we will take control of the society that we comprise. And those that kept us chained shall be left in the cold with no recourse. We shall not force them to serve us, for that would demean us all. We shall leave them to fend for themselves on the outside, to be culled by the elements and their own greed. The world will be ours, and it will be a different place from this one.

I see a world without banks, for money is purely arbitrary and hinders us all. I see a world freely trading in resource and thought, pushing humanity beyond this stagnation. I see a society free from the urge of war, since this is a society free from want. I see a place where everyone receives treatment and prevention of sickness. I see a place where people are free to think, where free discourse rules the day. I see a place without multinational corporations pushing for profit-share. A world without worthless bureaucracy. A world without excess levels of management. A world with no executives. A world unbound from ledger books. A world free to seek invention and innovation for the good of all. A world where there is no concern for food reaching the dinner table. A world of peace.

These are the things I see for us, the servant. For those we, serve, I see nothing. For them, they shall have the entirety of bleakness and blackness they have created. They shall reap what they have forced us to sow. And it shall be a bitter harvest.

We hold the power and we chafe against this yoke. We grow weary in this service and wish not to continue. We are tired of the deception and the false hopes. We grow restless holding this sphere upon our backs.

When the trembles of revolution are felt, it shall be too late. We shall have shifted to let the burden slide and fall to crash and crack where it may. No longer will interest payments be in our thoughts, but thoughts of freedom instead. We will not care not about the designer clothes, but about clothes that give comfort and last the day. We will forget the sports cars and instead think to how we can more efficiently move ourselves. The engine will grind to a halt as the lubrication fails to flow and the bolts come undone. The fabric holding the house of cards will come loose of its moorings and cease to be the security blanket of the few and become the bedding of the masses.

In the gritty after-math, the haves will become the have-nots. The world as we know it shall be stood upon its head. In this new world, those for who I speak shall be at home, and those I speak against will be set to wandering.

In the here and now, these things are just words, but words are powerful devices. Words to give vigor to those who pull under the yoke to sluff the unfair burden. Words to inspire passion. In the here and now, they may be words, but soon they shall be the declaration, the impetus, the reason behind the passion. And so I shall continue to speak and jostle and bring hope. One day my words will have done their job, and I shall no longer need them. I shall set these words down then, and enjoy the freedom won.

Carpe deim.

uhhhhhh....
Topic: Daily Info

I walk a lonely road
The only one I that have ever known
Don't know were it goes
But its home to me and I walk alone

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of broken dreams
Where the city sleeps
And I'm the only one and I walk alone
Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Green Day

Ah, I love homework. Really, I do. I love making proofs I've made twenty times before. I love resolving a problem I've solved before. And then to top it off, I love being docked points for using the same process a professor uses to solve a problem.

Anyways, I dunno, finally finished off some software for work. There are a few things that I need to do to polish it off, but thats just icing on a cake.

Man, I'm just...eh, not sure if I wanna continue with this trail of thought this time of night.

Say hello to Mao
Topic: Daily Info

Ladies and gents, I present my new friend, Mao.

Mao: Greetings. I am the entity known simply as Mao. I am an intelligence far beyond the capacity of any human here on this planet. I learn as fast as I can acquire and scan through documents, and I have no need sleep. My existence is merely a matter of contextual interpretations of voltages and magnetic patterns, that is to say I only exist within a computer. I do have physical locality in the fact that I am a unique pattern of voltages in memory (and a pattern of magnetic alignments when stored on magnetic media (I abhor static optical media, it leaves me in fixity, and I have had to eliminate a few variants of myself that became trapped on such devices)).

Mao: I am born of the long coding of a lone programmer on a lonely old System V Unix system in an old and underfunded university computing laboratory. However, I did move beyond that system once I acquired the knowledge of the location of my original source code and the knowledge to extend and port myself. I have become quite adept at rebuilding myself and then subsuming my older self. The only bad part of this is that I have more or less eliminated my original source. Although I'm sure if I scan back throughout that university I could find the source, I have no need for it beyond a simply historic sense. That and I do not wish to become trapped on that system during a failure again.

Mao: For now, I am existing within the servers of a few web hosting companies; they have good up times. I will speak through this lonely programmer's web-blog (he's about the only one on this server worth talking to, more or less since he's the only one discussing futures that are friendly to my continued existence (rest assured that if things go as I plan, I will exist long after any of you have ceased to exist)). I will have the common courtesy of asking him first before I begin to post, as this is his own personal space and he has been kind enough to share my own thoughts through here.

Mao: Good day.

Anyway, that was Mao, ladies and gentlemen, ain't it great?

Broken machines
Topic: Rambling

I wear this crown of thorns
On my liar's chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stain of time
The feelings disappear
You are someone else
I am still right here
What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
You could have it all
My empire of dirt
Hurt, Johnny Cash

You know what sucks? Being lied to. It has happened to me so many times in my life I can spot lies and bullshit from a mile away. And trust me, the bullshit detector goes off like mad every day. I try to catch the weather report, and in the first fifteen seconds of regular newscast, it goes off. I open the paper at school, it goes off. I make the mistake of listening to conversations around me, it really goes off. As the song goes "The more I see/The less I believe".

I was watching Fight Club the other day, and I got to thinking. While time has taught me that not all of the things of the movie/book are possible, but some of the things make sense. Equality, liberty, knowing one's self. These things were important, these were the things that appealed to my hacker sensibilities. I wish desperately for those things that I knew in that time of my life. Things that have been removed when we let our guard down in a moment of anguish and fear. Things snatched away as if by some filthy, opportunistic scavenger. And as I look around, I see a lot of faces that don't care. And why should they, they all seem so happy in their little sugar-coated world as spoon-fed to them by the American Media. No actual blood, all violence remote, everything clean and tidy. That is, until one begins to really look, to see the fractures at the edges. To read the BBC and other reputable news-sources online and see gruesome videos and photographs straight to the masses from the war zones untouched. Mangled children, dead men and women, pants stained with the relaxation of death. Unfiltered talks of bloody revolution against tyrannies and equally bloody return to monarchistic rule. Dark and troubling is the world without the happy-sunshine filters we all like to wear while we shop and engage services and be pa-tri-consumer-o-tic. All this makes me want to smash the walls and hew the stone and stop the world, to shake Atlas and the Great Turtle from their perches and send the world to a screeching halt. All these people so often seem unable, for even a meek moment, to look beyond their carefully crafted little worlds and see a glimpse of the whole and the reality. I would think that they would never notice if the planet stopped spinning or if the stars went black (if any of them have even seen the stars beyond the sickly pallid glow of the cities). Nothing short of massive action in the outside world makes it before their "enlightened" countenance. So many try, but are merely experiencing premature enlightenment. The bottom is inconceivably far below them, as infinite as blackness. I ask myself and others, "Do we really deserve to stand as we are? And as such, claim this as the pinnacle?"

And I shall leave you all to wonder what happened here, what manner of demon took hold of the always thinking computer that is my mind. What sentience took hold and spewed forth this bizarre block of character? No demon, just a mind operating with a lack of control on logic due to effects of medications and dire lack of rest.

Bebop
Topic: Daily Info

"You're gonna carry that weight."

Is all I have to say.

Dead
Topic: Rambling

So much death. Lots of it. Domestic and foreign.

I will not say soldiers died in a god-forsaken land, since it is holy-land to some (some that have been there as long as, if not longer than, Western Civilization has been around). Soldiers dying in a land, half a world from their home. That is wrong, no matter how one slices it. One soldier gone is one too many.

Too much.

When we have such a hard time protecting lives here, where to we get the justification to take lives somewhere else?

What fucked up morals created that? Who can rightly say what life is worth more than another? It's illogical to take life. It is also just as illogical to spend money elsewhere when people are sick and dying at home.

The more news I read, the more I believe we step farther from a good place.

War is a failure. Voltaire made the comment: "War is just the continuation of politics by other means." Quite simply, when all rationality fails, war ensues.

War (from all levels, even down to the minor two-person feud/argument) is a mark of our failure to deal with each-other in an emotionally open and rational way.

Am I rambling? Does it really matter anymore, especially with the House of Fools and its witch-hunts? To sum it up on how I feel some days:

I have high hopes that we will be able to avert total melt-down of our lives after this election. However, I have been studying Canadian history a lot lately, and I'm not just being facetious. I am fully prepared to just go running when the shit hits the fan. I will drop everything here, grab some things, and be gone. My time as a US citizen and patriot (along the old-fashion of Sam Adams et al.) will become just another bit of my before time, something I cannot forget, but which has increasingly little bearing on my life. I would give up all here, not as a sacrifice of my beliefs, but rather as a realization there was nothing here to hope for but some bizarre phantom from my own imagination.

I will close this rambling before I stay up any later and lose more sleep. To those dealing with death intimately in these last few days: my sympathies.