n a t b s

That favicon up there may look like a yin-yang but it’s not.  It is in fact the sacred chao, the holy symbol of the Discordian religion.  Here’s the full sized image:

It doesn’t come across so well in the favicon does it?  Maybe I can get a better one.  Anyway, that apple with the K is the apple of discord, thrown by the goddess Eris (aka Discordia) into a party of gods to which she was not invited…no one like chaotic guests.  The K stands for kallisti which means “to the prettiest” or “to the fairest” and arguing over who’s apple it was sparked tensions among the gods that ultimately lead to the Trojan war.  The pentagon is a sacred symbol of Discorianism because it is a five sided figure…it’s a long story.

Anyway, “Andrew why do you have a discoridan symbol on your blog, are you a discordian?”  Good question Andrew, I suppose I am somewhat of one yes.  “But why worship a religion based on chaos?” I wouldn’t say I worship it, but to sum up a complex thing in as few words as possible lets just say this:

Chaos created everything in the universe.  It created the sun, the earth, human life, and it created order.  So you tell me, who or what is god?

Following Wright’s unapologetic press conference today, Obama had his own, and he strongly denounced Wright’s words. From Salon:

“I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the spectacle that we saw yesterday,” Obama told reporters about Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “The person that I saw yesterday was not the person that I had come to know over 20 years.” While he said he gave Wright “the benefit of the doubt” because “soundbites [of his sermons] created a caricature of him,” in Wright’s sneering Monday press club performance “he caricatured himself.”

“I gave him the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia, explaining that he has done enormous good in the church,” he said. “But when he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS; when he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st century; when he equates the U.S. wartime efforts with terrorism – then there are no exuses. They offend me. They rightly offend all Americans. And they should be denounced, and that’s what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally here today.”

“It is antithetical to my campaign. It is antithetical to what I’m about. It is not what I think America stands for,” he said.

Can we finally put this matter to rest? I like that Barack tried to avoid doing this as best he could, but after Wright’s unapologetic appearances this weekend and today, I don’t think he had a choice. This controversy just keeps cropping up, and hopefully, after today’s strong clear words denouncing these ridiculous statements (except for the US terrorizing people, that one I agree with, but I also completely understand why Obama must denounce it) it will finally go away. Obama said the remarks offend him, he said they’re antithetical to his campaign and himself, and he even said Wright was no longer the person he had known for the past 20 years. So please, America, stop talking about it. And please, Jeremiah Wright, shut up for the next 7 months. Thanks.

What was with that debate last night? I thought CNN was bad, but wow ABC takes the cake for most terrible news network (Fox isn’t a news network). Or at least worst debate moderation ever. Right off the bat they asked Obama about the bitter remark. After beating that one into the ground for ten minutes, they brought up Rev. Wright. Aren’t we past that one already? But ABC had a new take on it: “do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”[nyt] What, the fuck, is that? That’s not really an answerable question. How does George Stephanopoilous even pretend he’s a journalist? Other “important” issues ABC raised:

• Why doesn’t Obama wear a flag pin?
• Is he friends with William Ayers of the Weather Underground?
• Why they want to raise taxes when clearly that hurts everything

They were really adamant that raising the capital gains tax is clearly bad for the country. I didn’t think the news was supposed to take that kind of partisan position. And what do a bunch of out of work factory workers in PA care about the capital gains tax anyway?

In the second half there were more policy questions, but I found they were often given in an antagonistic tone. Overall I’d say it was 60/40 worthless-gossip questions to real policy questions. Terrible ratio, more than half that debate was worthless and stupid. The candidates should stick to holding their own rallies and q&a sessions. Or what if prominent Democrats moderated the Democratic debate? They would probably be less dickish to their colleagues. I’d like to close this with something Obama said in the debate:

What the American people want are not distractions. They want to figure out, how are we actually going to deliver on health care; how are we going to deliver better jobs for people; how are we going to improve their incomes; how are we going to send them to college?[nyt]

The National Priorities Project recently released their annual report on how American tax dollars were spent over the past year. Are you ready for this? 42.2% of every tax dollar went to military spending. Specifically, 28.7 cents went to current military operations, 10 cents went to interest on military debt, and 3.5 cents went to veterans benefits. By the way, 4.4 cents went to education, and 2.6 cents went to the environment and science. So yeah, military spending is almost half of all spending, and we spend almost ten times as much on our military as we do on education. I can’t imagine why we have so many problems in this country.

I find these figures to be not very surprising, but completely appalling. Our priorities are completely bass ackwards. I mean, if we had some sort of real enemy that required spending more on our military than all other countries combined, I guess I’d learn to accept it. Maybe this kind of spending made sense during the cold war, but in the “war against terror,” aka the war against disgruntled people with box-cutters, I just don’t see the need. To protect ourselves from terrorism we don’t need stealth bombers and fancy nukes, we need intelligence (in both senses of the word). I see it as a law enforcement battle, not a military one. I also see it as a pr battle; when people really fucking hate you it might be a good idea to try and figure out why, and then try to make them like you.

Anyway, isn’t it great to know where your taxes are going? And it’s almost tax time again, yay! Maybe we should all only pay 57.8% of what we owe as a form of protest. The scary thing is that it’s going to be so hard to get that number down because there are so many entrenched military-industrial-complex interests that will scream bloody murder if we try to cut military spending. Maybe our only hope is to stop increasing the military budget (lord knows we’ve increased it plenty in the past 8 years) and thus the amount we spend will go down, relatively speaking, as inflation increases.

On closing, can we just reflect on the fact that our country is putting a huge percent of it’s productivity and effort towards killing people? How did we get to this point? What kind of horrible aberration is this? Why is there money being deducted from our paychecks to kill innocent people halfway around the world? Doesn’t that just make you sick? I know I don’t want my efforts, my labor, perverted like that. You can check out the whole pdf here.

Hi everybody, last week my old host lunarpages decided I was using too many server resources and shut me down.  So normally this wouldn’t be so bad but in this process they moved my stuff to another server but my databases didn’t make it.  They insist they’re working on it and I’ll have my data soon.  Weather they lost it, or are just taking damn long to get it to me, they’ve displayed horrible customer service.  I haven’t even heard from them since wednesday.  They obviously don’t take keeping someone from their data seriously.  No only was this blog on there but another one with years of posts.  That’s irreplaceable.

So it remains to be seen whether I’ll get my data back.  For the time being my permalinks don’t work obviously, but hopefully in a few days they’ll be back.  This blog is now running on Media Temple.  I hope they’re better.  All I know is that I’ve been burned by LunarPages and will never use them again or recommend them to anybody.  Can you imagine if I was running a commercial website on there?  And they kept me from my stuff for a week?  That is so unacceptable.  They’re terrible.  Don’t use them.  The first customer service rep I called told me my account wasn’t even suspended, which was completely untrue.

So anyway, I’m back, and hopefully we’ll get those old posts and quotes and other things back soon

Andrew