A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

So the national average price of gas has come down to $2.89, it’s price from exactly one year ago.

But you know, Big Oil wouldn’t ever let that happen.

I’m hearing an awful lot out there about the donations accepted on The Messiah’s website not doing basic matching checks on names and card numbers and just cashing the donations.

A couple commenters mention they filled out fake information for a minimum donation and having had it accepted. These aren’t just fake names, they’re names and addresses that don’t match the credit cards being used to pay for them.

Just try that at amazon.com, paypal, or buy.com. It’s the easiest thing in the world to verify. If it’s not being done it’s intentional. That’s just it. There’s no ambiguity. IF true, it’s willful and criminal.

And if true, this is an utterly outrageous violation of our system of government. I don’t expect an honest investigation any time soon; certainly not in time for the election.

Add to this the fake ACORN registrations (even an internal investigation suggested they were in violation of several federal laws) and I’m frightened.

Look, if the Obamessiah gets into the white house then it needs to be legitimate. Not because he bought the election with hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal campaign donations. Not because he was voted in by an army of registrants that don’t exist or are long deceased.

Personally, he disgusts me utterly. He’s vague and duplicitous, having no qualities other than personality cult charisma that qualify him for the office. I disagree with his policy proposals so completely that I have to keep checking myself. In fact he reminds me of a carnival psychic; someone who says little, suggests much, and leaves you free to superimpose whatever you want to hear over the top of their words so that you walk away thinking they’re a genius.

When push comes to shove, I do not believe that Obama is acting in good faith. I believe he’s trying only to get elected and is tailoring his speeches and positions to appeal to whomever he’s addressing at the time.

If he’s elected fairly, he’ll be the president; he’ll be my president.

Because that’s how the system works…

or ought to.

BTW: The acorn fraud isn’t something that can be reasonably disputed with ACORN employees and volunteers coming forward admitting it.

Then there’s the Illegal Campaign Donations

Here’s where I initially found out about the Illegal Campaign Donations issue. They just posted a follow up article.

The man’s a genius. I had attempted to live blog it, but the signal to noise ratio is just too great.

I’ve got to find the text of his testimony. It should be available, no?

Orson Scott Card.

…Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It’s as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn’t there a story here? Doesn’t journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren’t you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

…

Nothing political here. Just 9 minutes of great laughs at the expense of the average human dumbass.

(H/T of course to DougM over at SondraK’s place)

Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof

Still, the number of climate change skeptics is growing rapidly. Because a funny thing is happening to global temperatures — they’re going down, not up.

But the eeaarrrtthhh…..

You know you need to step away from the monitor when your feed reader has 237 feeds and you’re all caught up.

Getting really bored with the iPhone.

The good part about that is that I’ve got all the other phones I’ve had in the last few years in a box (well… in several boxes strewn about the apartment.)

I’m thinking about going back to a symbian phone, maybe the Nokia N95.

I was makin’ my lunch and was reminded of one of my favorite tunes of all time.

Having a bunch of time to myself causes the thought engines to start up again.

My life is, not to put too fine a point on it, a disorganized mess.  That’s ok, it’s largely to be expected given my complete laxity this calendar year.  But my dissatisfaction with it has gotten me back up towards a critical mass that I usually associate with being dramatically overcaffeinated (pssh, as though such a state could exist *twitch*.)

Last night I spent about a half hour (doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but…) with a pad of post-its and a blotter pad (big 17″ wide desk pad.)  I was just brainstorming a bunch of life organization things “apartment clean” “baking” ” get laundry” “learn russian” etc.  and as always, once I got going, I ran out of space pretty quick.

But one thing I kept coming back to is this idea that pervades organizational systems all over, and that’s a calendar/tickler file to keep track of scheduled tasks, events, and deadlines so you don’t have to.

I thought I’d give it another shot so I started looking around the internet for calendaring software I could live with.  So far I’ve got Sunbird, the mozilla one as the “least bad.”  I tried “Lightning” the add-on to Thunderbird (I use the Mozilla “Eudora” codebase for email, which is actually Thunderbird with some tweaks) and it doesn’t really work so well.  Sunbird is passable, but it’s exceptionally mediocre.

Having everything online is cute (for solutions like Google Calendar), but I don’t want to have to connect to the internet every time I want to get an update a mobile device.  I could see using it as a backup, but not a primary point of reference.

Outlook is right out, primarily because of it’s unreasonably heavy weight process footprint and perfectly opaque persistance format.

I keep coming to this horrible notion that I’m going to have to write something.

Ok, I’m finally crawling out of the fairly predictable week long mental/emotional slump and it’s while it seems to have corresponded loosely with the weather change, I assure you it was orthogonal, falling instead squarely into the realm of The Topic That Shall Not Be Blogged.

A funny thing happens to me in the fall as the temperatures drop.  I start sleeping like the dead.  When THAT happens I start having/remembering dreams again.  But that takes a couple weeks to get used to so instead of waking up refreshed and invigorated, I wake up exhausted.  It’ll normalize in a week or two, but it’s pretty wonky to my state of mind.
So yeah, this weekend’s been pretty bizarre with dreams of being a PoW in China singing Allentown with my squad as we were working fields while the Chinese soldiers were raping and killing the land owners.

Also, this weekend was my niece Emily’s first birthday party, which was a blast.

If I could figure out WTF the problem was with getting pictures posted in to WordPress I’d show you some, but it seems to thwart me at every turn.

Let’s see what else.
OH!  Facebook!

I’ve been scoffing at these social networking sites since friendster.  Sure, I always join them.  But I sign up for everything (That’s why I have the “madwilliamflint” email account, so I can fill it up with crap to ignore :p)

What usually happens with these things (in my circles at least) is that they’re just a bit too flash in the pan.  I’ve been on Friendster, Orkut, Linked-In, MySpace, SixDegrees, Ryze, FaceBook and a couple others that I get “we miss you” automated emails from every six months or so.

About a month ago I was pinged on FaceBook by my friend Jenn, whom I haven’t seen in FAR too long and is one of those people that I’m a better person for knowing.

So I went in and filled in a couple more details and I realized that my sisters were on as well… and a fairly creepy number of extended family members (a topic for another time.)  There were a couple one-off connections (friends of my sisters) I reconnected with.

Then last week I heard from a buddy of mine from high school.  For those of you who are counting, that was 22 years ago.  We caught up a bit then I saw a bunch more of ‘us’ and started drawing lines back there.

It really cracked open the vault of that decade in my head.  I went back and forth a couple rounds with my Junior year roommate as well.  It’s funny how the memory of people seems to demand that they be frozen in time. I suppose it’s not so abnormal.  Apparently “everybody is married with children” which also is to be expected.  It does seem a bit alarming though and it’s tough not to contrast myself against that, with fairly predictable results.

I’m not sure I’ve got much else at the moment.  I’m really just trying to keep my fingers warm as my land lady hasn’t turned on the heat yet *twitch*.

Now that I’m down to 1 new reader (and the one mysterious Norwalk reader) I’ve closed on my goal.

Jay Tea over at Wizbang has a great post on McCain & Obama.

I think it’s worth a full repost:

The Value Of Experience

By Jay Tea on 2008 Presidential Race

As I poked around the blogosphere this morning, seeing what various and sundry pundits had to say about last night’s debate, One particular opiner of the sinister political bent (who shall remain nameless) brought up McCain’s appearance — in particular, the left side of his face.

Also, based on McCain’s face, he’s trying out for the lead in the next Mask movie.

I was irritated by that, but I had to admit — it kept grabbing my attention, too. And it was quite distracting.

But then I started thinking about it.

McCain’s face bears the marks of a very unpleasant brush with skin cancer. In 2000 doctors discovered a tumor on his face that turned out to be Stage IIA melanoma, where IV is the most severe. They performed serious surgery to excise it and do all they could to make sure it wouldn’t come back. Had McCain paid attention to the warning signs sooner, he could have been spared the scarring he bears today.

In 2002, he had another bout of melanoma. This was a tiny spot on his nose, and was removed with a minimum of fuss.

It was caught so quickly because McCain now pays a hell of a lot more attention to such things.

That struck me as part of a pattern.

In 1989, John McCain — along with four other senators — were accused of violating ethical rules while helping out savings and loan scumbag Charles Keating, intervening with regulators to keep them from noticing Keating had essentially robbed his customers blind and run his bank into the ground. Three (all Democrats) were found to have broken Congressional rules; McCain and John Glenn (also Democrat) were found to have not violated any rules, but exercised poor judgment in the matter.

After his return from five years of captivity in Viet Nam, John McCain let himself go wild in his personal life. He repeatedly cheated on his wife, and eventually the two divorced.

He’d also been a hellraiser before his capture. The stories of his carousing are nearly the stuff of legend in Navy history.

Even before he got there, though, he had shown himself to be at best an indifferent student. He graduated near the bottom of his class at Annapolis.

Sounds pretty damning, doesn’t it? Yeah, until you look at what Paul Harvey likes to call “the rest of the story.”

After his return from Viet Nam, McCain cracked down on himself in regards to his career. He battled back from crippling injuries and returned to active duty, eventually rising to command a training squadron. And not just any training squadron — one that had a dismal record and turning it around, winning its first commendation.

After his divorce, McCain realized what he’d thrown away. He mended his relatinship with his ex-wife, not reconciling but staying cordial. He remarried and worked like hell on keeping that marriage together.

After dodging a bullet with the Keating Five, McCain found himself seeing just how corrosive the influence of money on politics can be. He made himself into a crusader on the issue, with all the annoying fervor of the ex-smoker or ex-drinker, going after elements of the problem as earmarks and campaign finance.

And after he had his face sliced open and was left permanently marred as a direct result of his negligence, he paid a hell of a lot more attention to his skin’s health. When he had another bout of skin cancer, he spotted the symptoms almost as soon as they appeared, and it was excised with a minimum of fuss.

As I said, this is a pattern. A pattern of John McCain making mistakes.

And learning from them.

It’s a cliche’ to talk about McCain being a “straight talker,” but that’s because it’s largely true. He’s never been bashful about admitting his mistakes, of owning them and owning up to them. Hell, most of the people who obsess over his personal failings find themselves using McCain himself as their best source — especially about his first marriage.

McCain, like most people, is far from perfect. But unlike most people, he readily admits his shortcomings and his failures — and works like hell to learn from them.

On the other hand, we have his opponent. Barack Obama, the man who it seems never makes mistakes.

No, when Obama appears to make a mistake, it’s not his error. You were mistaken when you thought he’d done that. Or you have your facts wrong. Or it happened long ago, and is just a distraction.

For example, his association with unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. Ayers was just some guy in the neighborhood, someone whose kids went to the same school as the Obama children.

Then he was some guy who was on the same board as Obama, and they saw each other a few times at meetings.

Then he was the guy who was on two boards with Obama.

Then he was the guy who put Obama in charge of one of those boards.

But that’s all irrelevant, because Ayers’ crimes happened when Obama was eight years old.

Just like it’s irrelevant that Ayers has never shown the slightest regret for his crimes. Indeed, he’s boastful of them — after he was freed because of prosecutorial misconduct, he declared “guilty as hell, free as a bird — America is a great country.” And he says that he and his former buddy terrorists (who were still active into the 1980’s), maybe they didn’t blow up enough things.

Things such as a dance for enlisted Army personnel. Things such as the home of a judge and his family.

Or, for example, the Iraq war.

Obama touts as the great example of his judgment that he came out against the war from the outset. Well, congratulations, Senator.

But since then, he’s been consistently wrong. When General Petraeus presented his “surge” strategy to the Senate, Obama predicted that it would fail, miserably, and voted against confirming Petraeus and tacitly endorsing the new strategy.

Well, the “surge” seems to have worked, quite thoroughly, but Obama won’t admit that he might have been mistaken in his assessment.

Obama talks about sounding a “warning” about the impending collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Well, good for him. But when several senators — including John McCain and my own Senator John Sununu — put together a letter of their own and tried to put together a bill to rein in the insane practices going on at those two institutions, Obama said “include me out.”

But instead of saying yeah, he maybe should have done something more than just write a letter, he wants full credit for doing that and nothing more.

Think about the people you know. Nobody’s perfect; we all screw up on occasion. How do the people you know handle that, and which do you respect and trust more?

One type admits it, owns up, tries to fix it, and watches extra-carefully to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Another type refuses to acknowledge error. They see that as an admission of weakness, and instead fight like hell to deny that they ever made that mistake. They will argue and rationalize and defend what they did so that they don’t have to admit that they were human, that they messed up.

And they are the ones who are far more likely to keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

I know which of the two i prefer to deal with, which I put more trust and faith in. And it ain’t the guy who never makes mistakes.

We have a clear example of these two types, in John McCain and Barack Obama. And I know which of the two I’d rather put my faith in.

Listen for these in the media. They’re going to parrot this vapid foolishness exactly, as ordered:

OBAMA CAMPAIGN ISSUES TALKING POINTS TO MEDIA AHEAD OF DEBATE
Wed Oct 15 2008 11:13:03 ET

The Obama campaign issued a set of debate ‘talking points’ to media on Wednesday morning, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.

Press Secretary Sean Smith issued the directive in an email from Pennsylvania, 12 hours before the debate.

The memo oddly mirrors much of the main press analysis and theme of the current campaign:

——– Original Message ——–
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 09:37:27 -0500
From: Sean Smith [s***mith@barackobama.com]
To: Sean Smith [s***mith@barackobama.com]

* This is John McCain’s last chance to turn this race around and somehow convince the American people that his erratic response to this economic crisis doesn’t disqualify him from being President.

* Just this weekend the weekend, John McCain vowed to “whip Obama’s you-know-what” at the debate, and he’s indicated that he’ll be bringing up Bill Ayers to try to distract voters.

* So we know that Senator McCain will come ready to attack Barack Obama and bring his dishonorable campaign tactics to the debate stage.

Obama continues to lead on the economic crisis with a rescue plan for Main Street.

* Over the course of the campaign, Barack Obama has laid out a set of policies that will grow our middle class and strengthen our economy.

* But he knows we face an immediate economic emergency that requires urgent action - on top of the plans he’s already laid out - to help workers and families and communities struggling right now.

* That’s why Barack Obama is introducing a comprehensive four-part Rescue Plan for the Middle Class - to immediately to stabilize our financial system, provide relief to families and communities, and help struggling homeowners.

* This is a plan that can and should be implemented immediately.

* Obama has shown steady leadership during this crisis and offered concrete solutions to move the country forward - and his Rescue Plan for the Middle Class builds on the plans to strengthen the economy and rebuild the middle class that he’s laid out over the course of this campaign.

* Already in this campaign, he’s unveiled plans to give 95 percent of workers and their families a tax cut, eliminate income taxes for seniors making under $50,000, bring down the cost of health care for families and businesses; and create millions of new jobs by investing in the renewable energy sources.

* John McCain has been erratic and unsteady since this crisis began - staggering from position to position and trying to change the subject away from the economy by launching false character attacks.

END

Developing…

(current Drudge Report headline)

Tom was in the fertilized egg business. He had several hundred young layers (hens), called ‘pullets,’and ten roosters to fertilize the eggs. He kept records, and any rooster not performing went into the soup pot and was replaced.

This took a lot of time, so he bought some tiny bells and attached them to his roosters. Each bell had a different tone, so he could tell from a distance, which rooster was performing.

Now, he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report by just listening to the bells. John’s favorite rooster, old Butch, was a very fine specimen, but this morning he noticed old Butch’s bell hadn’t rung at all! When he went to investigate, he saw the other roosters were busy chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing, but the pullets, hearing the roosters coming,could run for cover.

To John’s amazement, old Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn’t ring. He’d sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one. John was so proud of old Butch, he entered him in the Renfrew County Fair and he became an overnight sensation among the judges.

The result was the judges not only awarded old Butch the No Bell Piece Prize but they also awarded him the Pulletsurprise as well. Clearly old Butch was a politician in the making. Who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren’t paying attention. Vote carefully this year, the bells are not always audible.

(Just posted to the Republican meetup group by Nasir.)

I just found out that, although all the language semantics seem to be there, Think Or Swim doesn’t actually support user created program trading strategies.

You can get close. There’s a little programming language and it has an “addOrder” function. But all that does is place an indicator on the chart saying “buy here” (well, it’s a bit more interesting a tag than that, but you get the point.)

I’m getting very far along with a couple automated trading algorithms and it’s pretty frustrating to find out I can’t actually switch them on.

Plus, while they do plan on putting that feature in, it’s months away.

So I’m left with a quandry.

Should I switch platforms? ToS does EVERYTHING really very well. It’s the Grand Unified Trading platform with tremendous depth and breadth. But if I can’t use it to create “the black box” then I may have to let it go.

Either way, it’s time to start evaluating other platforms.

ugh.

“We have been raised to fear the yes in ourselves.”
- Audre Lorde

(via Whiskey River)

Next up? Satan’s snowball factory.

All, ALL voter registrations submitted by ACORN need to be removed from the rolls. Every one.