Never been one to let the carrier drop

Sometimes I get discouraged – I see so many broken things, so many cases of people oppressing other people for profit or “because God told me to”, and I just want to give up and curl up in a little ball and hide.

But, this story reminds me that things are actually getting better. In 1974, race officials tried to bodily remove a runner from the Boston marathon.. because she was a woman. In 1967, you couldn’t marry someone who wasn’t of the same race you were. And in 1920, you couldn’t vote unless you were male.

I look forward to the day when our children, or grandchildren, look back at capitolism the way we look back at slavery – when people are mostly puzzled by our refusal to let gays marry – when people have designed a government that can’t turn on it’s citizens and lock them up for “moral offenses” like recreational drug use – things that don’t hurt anyone else, and in many cases don’t even hurt the offender.

——————

A thought, by the way, for all of you resisting nationalized health care – a nationalized phone system brought you the transistor. Right now it’s very much not in the economic interests of the powers that be to cure diseases – they can make far more money treating them. But – if you measure in terms of wealth of humanity as a whole, instead of wealth of particular stockholders, clearly every infectious disease known to man should be eradicated. Human health care needs many Xerox parcs, many bell labs – groups of brilliant people who are encouraged to create the best things they can, with the wealth of the race as their primary interest rather than the wealth of a individual company.

So, me and Kayti went to see the Indigo Girls last night. It was at the House Of Blues in Anaheim, and it was neat seeing that many IG fans togeather in one place – it was like a little pocket of sanity in the middle of the repressive right-wing world that is O.C.

Sadly we had to leave before the end, but they did play many favorites including ‘Get out the map’, ‘Shame on you’, ‘The wood song’, ‘Power of two’, ‘KiD fears’, ‘Land of Canaan’,’Hammer and a nail’

Next week: Jimmy Buffet

As you’ll recall, earlier I posted a definition of caughterfy for Google. Now I’m going to help with related keywords, since it’s clearly a irregular verb: That poor cat is suffering from caughterfication, I caughterfied Allie, She caughterfies the cat, He is caugherfying his cat right now, Allie was caughterfied yesterday, Allie will be caughterfied tomorrow.

Coming up next: pronunciation guide. Then I’ll publish a book of 100 cat words. 😉

So, I continue to telnet into nonmundane.com 23 every day or so – I’ve posted a few messages – I *think* I’m the only one who has. I suppose I should also go check out nonmundane.org, to be fair 😉 But it just doesn’t have that old-skool bbs feel to it. I gather I’m the only one who’s entranced by same, though 😉

so lately on facebook I’ve been a bit over the top about espousing my particular flavor of utopia. I don’t have any idea why, but lately I’ve just been really irritable. Part of it probably has to do with changing my sleep schedule, but I don’t really think that that is all of it. I actually think that a lot of what I wrote was pretty good stuff (though the people who had entries I was commenting on generally disagreed – some of them even seemed unhappy that I was wasting their time) although I did several times in one of the argument commit the communication sin of assuming I knew what the other person’s side was.  (I’m going to try to stomp down hard on that tendancy, because it definately decreases the chances of successful communication, and I hate it when other people do it to me, and it’s just generally bad.)

According to this article, the house is going to vote on a bill from CA rep Sanchez which will allow people to be placed in prison for up to two years for writing blog entries that “harass” public figures by criticizing them in a “severe, repeated, and hostile” manner.*

Look, basically, you have power over our lives, we write about the bad things you do in our blogs – which you don’t have to read – and you send us to prison? I’m sorry, but that’s just awful. Also kind of puts a dent in the 1st amendment. Sadly, I don’t live in Orange County any more, so I can’t write Sanchez and tell her how nuts I think she is. Well, I can, but she wouldn’t pay any attention because I don’t get to vote her out. Pity. But I can write my reps and tell them I disapprove, and I will.

I don’t like hate speech.. I pretty much hate Encyclopedia Dramatica, for example.. but I believe everyone should be free to post whatever they want on the interwebz. You don’t like it? Don’t visit the page. Censorship is bad, mmkay?

*** Update ***

Actually, apparently it applies to everyone – it’s a reaction to this – and a attempt to prevent cyberbullying. I don’t think laws are the right solution, I think educating people about the wonders of not browsing to a site where people are flaming them, educating people about how horrible/assish other people can be, and encouraging depressed 13 year olds to spend time with real people instead of myspace ones is probably the right solution. Anyway, I still don’t like the bill, but it also doesn’t look like it’s going to pass, hence, I’m not going to worry about it.

Well, looks like I survived another year. I think the probability of that probably goes downhill a little bit each time from now on. 😉

I’m going to repost something someone commented on:

telnet nonmundane.com 23

😉

(And if you do it from Telemate running in DosBox, I’ll give you a cookie!)