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.

Politik
Topic: Rant

Notice to potential readers:
I'm gonna rant on some politics now. I know politics pisses people off. But this is my site, and if you really can't read a bit of some other viewpoint without knee-jerk reaction, I would recommend you not read further. By reading further, you are acknowledging that what follows may be offensive to you in some way and that you continue purely of your own free will, and acknowledge that I forced none of this material upon you, and that if offeneded, you were free to leave this site at anytime and have no legal recourse for what is my opinion (unless otherwise noted) which is legally protected under the First Ammendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. You also acknowledge that you were duly warned before any of the actual document was presented by the title and topic of this article as well as this notice.

Being so warned, you may go else-where if you wish or continue on.

Replication of First Amendment for clarification:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
— The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

<ARTICLE>

I know I've read a lot of conservative material, as well as socialist, Marxist, fascist, Communist, and various bits of Fundamentalist material. When one needs to make arguments, it helps to know the other side, perhaps even better than the other side knows itself.

I think Jesse Ventura was a Good Thing for Minnesota. He showed that the Minnesota Republicans were money grubbing heels (see Norm Coleman) and DFLers had lost their spirit. It's Good because it woke up the party (albeit with the help of mighty-mighty Wellstone). Best quote from Ventura:
"I believe patriotism comes from the heart. Patriotism is voluntary. It is a feeling of loyalty and allegiance that is the result of knowledge and belief. A patriot shows their patriotism through their actions, by their choice [such as voting, attending community meetings and speaking out when needed]. No law will make a citizen a patriot."

Second, I think Norm Coleman is an fucking disgrace to this state. He is nothing more than a carpet bagger following whatever political party will give him the most backing. He is a stooge of the House of Fools. He is uncouth (see some of his comments relating to Wellstone during his early days in the Senate) and offensive (see his comments during the early part of his Senatorial campaign). The reasons he was elected stem from Kahn's over-inflammatory speech at the Wellstone Memorial Service (which turned it into a political rally). Trust me, Walter Mondale would have been a superior Senator by far. I consider it a great dishonor that he in some way represents me in the US Senate.

Walter Mondale is one of the best politicians and people this state has ever produced. The man has a soul (I hate that comment about young people who aren't liberal are soulless and older people who aren't conservative are stupid) and is extremely intelligent. Had we elected him to the Senate in 2002, instead of engaging in that orgy of mass-stupidity that gave us Pawlenty and Coleman, this state would be far better-off, and we would not have sold our soul.

I realized this only after his death, but, Paul Wellstone was one of the greatest things to ever happen to this state. The man had passion and intellect, things that very often don't occur in the same person. He proved that Minnesota still had compassion and soul in a time when other states were losing these things to interest groups. The amount of good things he did for Minnesota is staggering. The best would be opposing the Iraq War resolution, a thoroughly wise decision, as time has shown us that there are no WMD's and no other real valid justification for the war and the thousand dead US soldiers. I fully believed Wellstone would have trounced Coleman that November. Fuck you Rick Kahn, you can just piss off for trampling on the memory of Wellstone at the memorial service. One of the best quotes from Wellstone:
"I don't represent the big oil companies, I don't represent the big pharmaceutical companies, I don't represent the Enrons of this world. But you know what, they already have great representation in Washington. It's the rest of the people that need it. I represent the people of Minnesota."

Willy Jeff. Do I even need to point out how good life was for all of us during Willy Jeff's two terms of President? This good life was not from Reaganomics as some foolishly believe. And who cares who he was fiddling around with? Never affected his abilities as the President. There were other, more important things we could have focused on. It was during this time that the intelligence community first started saying that some seriously bad-shit was coming. But no, we all had to focus on the Great Republican Axe-Grind (from the Nixon resignation and the first Nixon defeat in 1960). Good one, fuckers. We may have been able to save thousands and thousands if we weren't engaging in that folly. Here is another thing, Willy Jeff is razor-sharp intelligent (you don't become a Rhodes Scholar for nothing, it cannot be bought like other things, such as diplomas from certain East-Coast Universities), not an idiot bumbler some would have you believe. Oh yeah, he was bringing peace to parts of the world that the House of Fools has since brought either nothing or strife. Too many good quotes from Willy.

Jimmy Carter, while a poor player as President (too much micromanagement), had grand ideals. I wonder what would have happened if Jimmy hadn't micromanaged his Presidency. Maybe peace in the Israelis-Palestinian conflict. Who knows? All things aside, I can't think of a better example of someone working for human rights. All I have to say on that front is Habitat For Humanity. Oh yeah, and a fucking Nobel Peace Prize!

Here's the rub of it. During my before-time and until I came to some logical conclusions based on the deceits of the House of Fools, I was ardently libertarian. I was so far into that ideology that I wanted a land with the only laws to be of the effect of "Thou shall not steal" and "Thou shall not kill". I wanted all government gone, every last shred of it. I was mildly indifferent to Bush, mainly despising him because he was a bigger tight-wad reinvention of "The Man".

Then things began to change (no, not on September 11th, after that). I had used scathing logic to come to my libertarian viewpoints. But there is a problem in straight logic: bad assumptions under good logic lead to bad conclusions. I went to college, and there, I saw the world with no blinders. I saw the poverty of most students (we may work two jobs, but they are rarely more than $10 and hour and it all goes to pay loans and to pay for books). I began to wonder, if our politicians claim to value higher education, why is it such a massive pain in the ass to go to school? Why did I need to sign boatloads of documents and more or less agree to indenture myself to the state for several years after graduation? Why have I had increasing tuition costs (around 15% every year since I started going)? Why do books cost me between $400 and $800 for a year? Why did I know people who had to leave because they could no longer afford school, possibly signing off on a better future? Why did so many lack anything but the barest of reactive health-care? Why were so many people hurtling along on the proverbial ride of life with no seat belts, no airbags, and no crash protection?

So I went back to my assumptions and began to question them. I spoke with good friends and my family. I read reams of political materials. Then I changed the assumptions. My first change was to realize that any form of conservatism is more or less a resignation of any kind of progress. The very definition of the word implies this, and the more I read, the more it was enforced that this ideology sought to only allow progress as it benefited the ideology. So I looked to other ideologies that espoused progressivism. I know pure Marxism, Communism, and fascism are more or less overall failures. Democratic socialism works, best examples being the Scandinavian countries, Canada and the Swiss. However, this ideal would die in this country due to lasting misconceptions from McCarthy.

So I looked at the Democratic party. It was mostly bloated and as worthless as the Republican party. Then Wellstone died. And to be honest, I had know relatively little of his career. So to be fair, I read some of his past speeches, and read the bits of his agenda. And I realized something. This guy was pushing for a lot of Good Things. I also began reflecting on my childhood, and I began to realize that Willy Jeff was the reason behind what was generally a very good eight years, and he had cause many Good Things.

So then, with many Republicans (and a good bit of Democrats) pushing war and reduction of freedoms, I looked critically at our leaders and saw that many of them were generally stupid (college degrees aside) and afraid of a world outside their comfortable models.

In light of all these things, I decided to throw my chips in with the Democratic party. By firm logical reasoning, they are more or less the ones that will bring us closer to peace and progress.

And peace, not obsessive and intrusive policies regarding movement of people within and without the country, will bring us eventually to safety. Pushing war and border control only provides the illusion of safety. I know I will be unsafe for a long time, most likely for my entire life. But I refuse to sacrifice pushes for peace and progress of humanity as a whole for an illusion.

Peace will be hard to come by for a number of reasons: classism, racism, religious extremism (this applies to all religions), and a general fear of the unknown.

Those are hard things to surmount, things that have been bludgeoned into people for thousands of years. But they do need to be overcome if humanity is to ever get beyond where it is now. We are not much different now than we were before the beginnings of society, we just have a lot of whizz-bang technology to play with. But that whizz-bang technology is the answer to a lot of those reasons.

However, the tech will, if it is truly allowed to, upset the entire layout of our world. Any alternative energy form that is not fossil-fuel based will more or less destroy all structures based on their use. If fusion ever becomes viable, we can more or less shutdown all current energy production schemes. Why? It produces huge amounts of energy on a fuel that can be easily extracted from the single most abundant resource on this planet. It would be crippling to those business based around the conventional energy methodologies, but, sometimes things must truly pass. Medicinal tech has the power to free us from sickness and disease if it were fully allowed to do so. This would be an end to one of humanities oldest grievances.

So what am I getting at? I think we need to get to the point where we have a global society capable of freely sharing ideas and technology. This does not mean an atheistic society, but a society tolerant of all other views. The best example I can think of, and I know this will be called geeky, is the society presented by Star Trek. They still have wars, but humanity is more or less driven to seek understanding and peace with the rest of the known universe. I believe that this thing Gene Roddenberry left us was the best example of how good we can become. In my opinion, that egalitarian and free society is by far the most beautiful concept of our world ever imagined, and something we should all push very hard for. If we could all make it to that level, where things were that truly egalitarian, we would know no more limits on humanity. We would be free from the trappings of this world. Whom among us knows where we could go and what we could do? My imagination fails me at this out of a profound sense of awe. I cannot get past that image of peace and prosperity. This thing is my point. This place of peace, somewhere in our future. But to get there, we need to make steps now, no matter how small. And my logic tells me where those first steps need to be made, and I hope a lot of you come to the ballot box to make those steps with me.

The words
Topic: Rant && Daily Info

With precision you feed me
My witness Im 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 Im choking
On the smoke that fills my home
The wrecking ball is rushing
Witness your blushing
The pipeline is gushing
While here we lie in tombs
Testify, Rage Against The Machine

<rant>
I've had it with corporations and governments and their fear of innovative thought. "I think, therefore, I am" - Descartes. Descartes would be more or less stoned today, especially by the current bunch of fools playing tiddly-winks in DC. Same with Locke, Hobbes, and Voltaire.

I will have original thought, and I shall do with it as I please.

As a side note, to all the people that for some reason have an irrational hatred of the French (I'm talking to those yo-yo's out there calling things "Freedom Fries"), our modern concepts of democracy, freedom and patriotism are mostly inventions of the French form the 18th century. And the word patriotism in no fucking way implies this damn country. In fact here are some definitions for it from several dictionaries:

pa?tri?ot?ism n.
Love of and devotion to one's country.
Source: The American Heritage? Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright ? 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

patriotism
\Pa"tri*ot*ism\, n. [Cf. F. patriotisme.] Love of country; devotion to the welfare of one's country; the virtues and actions of a patriot; the passion which inspires one to serve one's country. --Berkley.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, ? 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

patriotism
n : love of country and willingness to sacrifice for it [syn: nationalism]
Source: WordNet ? 2.0, ? 2003 Princeton University

So stop misusing the word. And stop calling them "Freedom Fries".
</rant>

Anyway, having my ass kicked by homework. But this really isn't news. I just needed a diversion from the grindstone.

Later-o.

The Critic
Topic: Daily Info

WAHOOO! "The Critic" is back on TV!!!!! As Jay would say, "Hatchi Matchi!"

And this is all I have to say, that is, I am saying that this will be the last thing I say when I finish saying this last thing which I have to say to make this the last thing that I say with finality.
/Mojo-Jojo