Boston

Geez, I never realized how many people want to hang with me when I leave for the weekend.

I have received several calls only to let them down with "Sorry, I'm in Boston for the weekend".

This will be short and sweet, so this is for anyone who reads this and needs to know:

Sorry, I'm in Boston for the weekend.

I am not sorry I am carousing and drinking a lot though. :)

Who is Sibel Edmonds?

Well, to answer that you have to read this article:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0504/S00251.htm

Is it the only source of information?

No.

But read it and look for yourself.

Is it a conspiracy theory? (I hate that phrase).

Or is it just a conspiracy hypothesis?

I am thinking it is the first. But that's just me.

It amazes me that there are so many things that aren't being said or allowed to be said based on "national security" concerns. Am I not part of this nation? Aren't we all part of this nation?

So why aren't the people being told what is really happening?

They already tell us when there is a terrorist "threat" so they might as well tell us all of it.

Ah well, I am a bit rambly today, just asking some questions is all.

The art of saying the obvious

I have this way of stating the obvious that, because it is SO obvious it is funny.

It is one of my charming qualities. :)

I am talking with my friend MGB and she got pretty gone last night and woke up drunk.

My suggestion: You should drink some water or something.

I AM Captain Obvious!

Let me explain a little bit about the humorous part of it.

Imagine you are in line at the grocery store and the cashier is ringing up your items. You have: 2 bags of hotdog rolls, a bag of hamburger rolls, hotdogs, hamburg, chicken breasts, chips, soda, condiments etc etc. The cashier says to you, "Having a barbecue huh?" The funny part is them being such a dumbass without realizing they are a dumbass. It is obvious I am having a BBQ.

I, on the other hand, am completely aware of what I am saying. Barring drunkenness of course. :)

Imagine you are in line at the grocery store and the cashier is ringing up your items. Your friend is expecting you to chip in half for the BBQ stuff. He hands me $20 and says, "You all set"? I say, "What's this for?" using a completely deadpan face, as if the money in your hand was some foreign substance or something. Your friend looks at you for a moment as if you had completely lost it or they had done something wrong. Then my smirk comes out and they realize after a beat or two that you are full of shit. They say, "fuck off" or something along those lines. :)

I am known in my circle of friends as a smart ass. I wear it as a badge of honor, a little round red butt on my sleeve.

Anyway, I am so much better in person or even online chat when it comes to humor. Often times this blog sounds so bland or "intelligent" and my humor doesn't come through.

Ah well, I will try to work on it. :)

Energy

I seem to have spent a great deal of my healing energy in the past week or so and it is finally catching up to me.

Granted, I have a great deal of energy to give but if I do not take breaks from giving it I will get drained. When I get drained I get real grumpy and my wit turns from humorous to biting and can even get into outright mean.

So my goal in the next day or two is to do stuff just for me and give nothing out (except in an emergency). I gave pretty much the rest of what I had today with family only because it was a rare occasion that my step-brother and his wife came to visit Maine.

As of now I am in mega-selfish mode. :)

Note that this is different then being an egoist.

I do things for myself all the time but much of it is investing time and energy into my friends and family for reciprocated love and companionship.

But now I am going for selfish.

I am going to be a taker much more than giver. So when I go out tomorrow night I am going to suck the energy out of my friends. Sounds vampiric but I guess it goes with goth night after all. ;) Or maybe a bad horror movie involving over-dramatic wannabe stars with fake looking rubber monsters or something. :)

Mostly it is about replenishing without harming. And by keeping a large enough group of friends I am able to take a bit more from each of them to replenish myself without taking too much from anyone in particular.

I am not going to go into specifics but I will have a different sense about me the next few days before I be myself again.

It's hard to be a healer sometimes, especially when you are not used to taking energy or expend it without resting often enough.

Craving

So I have this need to find some pastels or some chalks and make these images that are filling my head.

It is nie impossible for me to describe them. They are very colorful, very vibrant and are quite impressionistic.

They are more about feelings or ideas then concrete things, like a dog or televangelist.

I was partially inspired by mickey_murder and his website: http://www.inviolate.com/max/index.htm

His stuff is awesome!

Anyway, I am hoping to get some stuff in the next few days before my art muse goes away!

*ties his muse down, gags her until he is ready to do his stuff*

[Sick freaks, stuff means art!]

Food Pentagram

I have decided that the new USDA symbol should be the Food Pentagram.

USDA Revamps Food Pyramid to Unveil New Symbol

It only makes sense. We already had an Egyptian theme (pyramids) and Druidic theme (circles) so instead of going with the clown theme (balloons) we should go with Satanic theme (pentagram).

Mainly because this government is so evil it goes without saying. :)

Disclaimer: I KNOW that pentagrams are stereotypically Satanic and are mainly used in many pagan religions and magickal societies. Just go with the joke ok?!? :)

The Blind

I am getting kind of tired of all the people putting blinders on all around me without even trying to understand the world and universe around them.

A lot of it has to do with the decline of education funding in this country and the boobification (see earlier post) by watching too much TV.

Too many people are wasting their brain power by trying to numb themselves from their worthless jobs or even worse joblessness.

Who is really to blame? Well, that is hard to say really.

Is it the indoctrination that people haven't broken yet or is their intention to not try to break it?

Am I totally free from it? No. I still watch sports and the occasional TV show. But at least I am trying to make an effort.

How much effort have you put in to figure out what is really happening around you?

Here are some information sources to look into other than the spoon-fed TV versions:

http://www.truthout.org/
http://mediamatters.org/
http://www.commondreams.org/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.democraticunderground.com/
http://www.rawstory.com/

Feed your mind.

EDIT: Stupid blogger acted up and showed me the correct version earlier when I posted.

*bird to the blogspot*

Sorbet or Sorebutt?

So I went on my first biking excursion of the year today. And had great fun. :)

AZ and I took a riding tour of Portland from the Eastern Prom to the West End and down Commercial and up the Eastern Prom again.

And one thing I must say...my butt is sore!

It has been a while since I biked last and my seat is not used to my seat. :)

My legs are pretty strong and I have good endurance, but that first hill almost killed me til I figured out my gear situation. :) Plus I took it too fast at the beginning and by the top of it was quite winded.

I also forgot my water bottle so I was trying to bring in air traveling on the Western Prom with dry mouth. Ugh.

Needless to say I got my second wind on the way down to Commerical street, some windy, hilly roads. (Not airy wind, but turny wind). Stupid English.

Anyway, did I mention my butt is sore? Maybe I will ask for a butt massage when I go out dancing tonight. :)

*mmm butt massage*

Alternate Reality

You ever get the feeling that you are residing in the wrong alternate reality?

Things are not the way you remembered them or your life is not what it should be or could be?

I am out of sorts today and I am feeling all the missed opportunities. It is a bit of a bad reminiscence. Looking back at infinite possibilities based on the choices you did or did not make.

At what point, and how far back could you change something to completely change the track of your life?

How about a year? Two years? 5? 10? 25? 50?

Was there one thing that you truly regret doing/not doing? What can you imagine would have happened if you did it correctly at least in hindsight?

Anyway, I believe there are alternate me's (or is it mes?) in the infinite multiverses that have done the right thing and probably never think about all the bad things or poor choices they could have made. They are living it up while I am stuck in this one.

Fuck you alternate me!!

I know, it could be worse. There are definitely great things about my life. There are a bunch of shitty things too and I am not where I should be.

I guess the goal at this point is: can I fix my life and put it on track again with some effort or have I pigeon-holed myself so much that I cannot do what I wanted or should have done a long time ago.

I guess that is my grapple for the day/week/month/year/lifetime.

I wonder if I could switch realities and displace my alternate me in some "better" reality.

*digs through his QED and GR books*

Foamy

I am sure some of you are very familiar with Foamy the Squirrel but I thought I would link up the sites for this flash comic. It is definitely sick and twisted, so obviously I am gonna like it. :)

The original site is the first link and a site with all the past toons is the second. Enjoy!

http://www.illwillpress.com/
http://www.freewebs.com/foamy_squirrely_wrath/

Stubborn bastard

No, not me.

This guy at work.

Ok, so requirements change until a code freeze. We got an official change from marketing that they are going to be releasing a product that is designated as NC rather than NBC.

For the past few months, all the code that we have was in NBC terms. Basically all variable and constant names as well as function and executable names have NBC in it.

No big deal really if everyone does a replace of NBC with NC.

Except one guy doesn't want to do it.

Since this product has not been released to any customers except internal ones, it would be so much easier to deal with the current inconsistency now than to change it sometime in the future. It will not be that hard to change the database to reflect these changes since all the beta versions of the database will have to be destroyed anyways.

God I hate lazy people sometimes. Especially the ones at work! It took me all of 10 minutes to change over from NBC to NC. And now this fucktard has to make all my code look like crap because the values I am reading in to do the algorithm will be NC in my code and NBC from his.

How hard is it to fucking do a replace?

Now I have to go through my whole code to make sure I didn't change an NBC to NC when I am getting external values.

Have I told you how much I hate these people? (quote from Mike Malloy)

State of Me

So I thought I would update a bit about what is going on in my life.

Nothing amazingly special but some new and hopefully semi-interesting things.

If not, fuck off! Its my life, I'll cry if I want to. Oh wait, that's a song. And it doesn't go like that.....Whatever!

Ok, so I am almost done my 3rd week of not smoking. Go me!

My first night without smoking I only smoked one cigarette, and it took me 2 hours heh.

The next night I went out and tried my hand at drinking without smoking. Not so bad. Had a puff while hanging outside but that was it.

Nothing since then. Woot.

As a result of my stopping smoking, my eating habits kinda changed.

I eat 3 square as usually, nothing more than normal portions (which haven't been much since I changed my diet last year). But now I seem to be craving a snack sometime around 2 or 3 in the afternoon. I decided to add an apple in that time slot (eating the whole thing including seeds for my B17 :) ).

I have been eating more veggies and fresh fruits. Guess my body wanted to replenish everything I lost while smoking. Or at least overcompensate. :)

Anyway, have been reading a lot into Henry George and his ideas and I think I am gonna stick with it. I want to flesh out more about it and hopefully be able to express the ideas better than I currently am. I had 2 people I talked to today about it. One was amazed and would look more into it (got it right away), and the other it took quite a while for them to figure it out past their normal reservations (which I was surprised by actually).

I've been spending a bit too much money going out this past week. So I am gonna cut back on the drinking. Or even cut back on going out. But I guess people like me to go out, so they will have to buy me more drinks to keep me out. ;)

And I am making a spaghetti sauce recipe that I got from an Italian ex of mine with big chunks of pepperoni and some minced garlic. Should be quite tasty though it will probably last me a week heh. I did add some ground beef to the recipe to see how that turned out. I am gonna slow cook it tonight and then refrigirate it. And reheat it when I am ready to have some. The spice of the pepperoni will seep into the sauce over the night and will get spicier and spicier as it sits. *drool*

So that's what has been happening.

You are more than welcome to ask me about how things are and any other questions. If not, then screw you! Of course I am open to that too if I like you enough. ;)

ttfn

Land Tax

So I have been continuing to read Henry George's Progress and Poverty and did some math.

If you take his idea and ONLY tax land and not anything else (i.e. income, sales, cigarettes, gas, excise, use, death, inheritance, etc.) then the average tax per acre of land (not including water resources) in the Unites States would be $1012.83 per year.

I get that figure from the total expenditures of the US government (2004) of $2,193 billion (this is the complete expenditure including any deficit spending that we happen to be doing and is not solely what is the accumulated tax revenue of the US, i.e. this is a balanced budget value) and divide it by the total land area of the US (not including any water area such as lakes and rivers and stuff, though it could be included and reduce the tax per acre) which is 3,537,422 square miles or 2,263,950,080 acres (1 sq mi = 640 acres).

So basically for every acre of land, one would pay about $1000 per year per acre.

If you owned 5 acres of land, you would pay $5000 per year as tax to the government.

How much do you pay now per year? Let's see, usually we pay 37% of income, so let's see, if I make say, $30,000 I would be paying the government in income taxes (alone) about $11,000.

I just saved myself $6000, woot go me!

What if I made $500,000 and lived in the same 5 acre land, I would save myself $180,000...woot go me!

Ok, so that seems unrealistic and it sorta is.

If you owned an 80 acre farm (average size) then you would be paying $80,000 per year, ouch!

So the real deal is this. Urban areas are worth more than rural areas. Make sense?

Say I have an acre of farmland in Kansas, is that worth the same as an acre in downtown Manhattan? Umm, no.

So why do the Manhattanites get to only pay $1000 per acre which is a HUGE bargain while those in Kansas have to pay $1000 per acre for farmland which would never make that much income from said acre.

So I did another calculation.

The amount of rural area in the US is 37x that of the urban areas. Say there was a bi-modal system of dividing taxes. One rate for rural, one rate for urban.

Kinda makes more sense than making some swamp in Louisiana worth the same as an acre in Hollywood.

Ok, so if, for example, a rural acre's share was 1/37 that of an urban acre. Yes, I know an extreme example. Then per acre, a farm would have a tax of $27.20 per acre per year. So an average 80 acre farm would pay $2,200 per year. Go me!

Unfortunately, an average acre in the urban area would be $37,717. Ouch.

But still, think about that. A 5 acre homestead in downtown NYC would be taxed $188,586 about the same as is paid now in taxes. Interesting.

So my real point is this. The debt of the US, barring of course reducing our extravagant spending, could be paid for with JUST land taxes that to me seem reasonable. It would completely change the tax system (for the better I must say) and most people would not be spending 40% of their income on income taxes, let alone sales tax etc.

So to round out my simple example, if we raised the per acre rural tax to say $200 then a typical farm would spend $16,187 in taxes per year and the average tax per acre in urban areas is reduced to $31,282. Making the urban family 5 acre homestead $156,410, about $30,000 less than is currently spent on income taxes.

Needless to say, each city/town, county and state would have to evaluate the worth of the land (and NOT the property or use on the land) for themselves and not use my crude calculations.

All I am saying is that it can work, it will free up land that is currently not being used in many urban areas due to speculative land grabbing, and people would be able to retain all of their income and not pay taxes on anything except the land they wanted to live on. If they choose not to then they just pay rent to the landowner (as is currently now) and still have plenty left over from no taxes.

Simple tax system, makes more sense, and frees up money for companies and individuals alike to expand on capital, production and wages.

Go us!

Hostility

So, as some of you know, I have been somewhat hostile and very contrarian recently.

I am not exactly sure what that is from. I imagine a lot has to do with what I am reading.

I have been reading very controversial subjects and authors whose political and social ideas are contrary to most social norms and "common sense".

Basically it has created in me a disdain for the ordinary and trite (or tripe as DH8 likes :) ) conversation and ideas that I have been involved in recently. Now I am not talking about my blog conversations so far but the ones in "normal" life, like at work or overheard at the grocery store or whatever.

I am just tired of all the people being so ignorant and allowing those who "lead" to do the things that they are doing with no repercussions.

Some would say that karma will get them back, or they will pay in hell for eternity if they did evil.

I say: Not fucking good enough!

They should pay now. They should rot in prison for the rest of their miserable lives. Perhaps use the "interrogation" methods that they are fond of. Perhaps a few months of solitary confinement in the cold while naked standing up with Slayer playing at 300dB?

Then maybe they would tell us about what others are doing in their little evil cabal (or it could be big who knows).

It just sickens me that their is no accountability.

And the sad thing is, most of this is non-partisan. It has nothing to do with political party, it all has to do with power and money. The "politics" is just for show for the sheeple.

Anyway, the hostility is from a lot of that and hopefully people understand that I can be a right bastard sometimes. :)

Cheers to those who do. :)

B17

No, not the bomber.

I have been doing some research into some cancer treatments and the like. Mainly because I got a little neurotic after I quit smoking and wanted to clear out anything that may cause cancer in the future. Plus I want to eat more healthy.

Anyway, I found some compelling information that I would like to share about a Vitamin called B17. It is found in many different foods, but is in such low concentrations in many of them that it has little to no benefit or are in parts of the foods we have available, but don't eat, like apple seeds, and peach or plum kernels (inside the pit).

The interesting thing about this vitamin is that it attacks cancerous cells, or trophoblasts.

Basically there are two toxins in the B17 that are harmlessly folded between two glucose. In the conditions found only in a cancerous cell, the glucose is unfolded and the two toxins are combined together and kill the cell very efficiently. In normal cells, they are rarely unfolded and, if they are unfolded, there are chemistries found only in normal cells that will transform the toxins into helpful sugars.

Needless to say, you probably have never heard of B17.

You can find out more about B17 and the reasons why you never hear about it at these sites:

http://www.vitaminb17.org/
http://www.curezone.com/foods/laetrile.asp

Also, if you google you can find some too.

Anyway, thought I would share it and hope to keep you all informed. :)

And as a side note, I have found some research that says that smoking doesn't cause cancer, so my whole reason for doing the research perhaps was unfounded. Go fig. :)

Poor nutrition and radioactivity are the main causes of it.

But that's for another post.

Single Tax

So I have been reading up on some ideas for changing how things work in this country (and everywhere for that matter).

My brother, psuche, and I disagree to some degree on the "how" and the "what" in a lot of instances and I believe I have found the reconciliation.

It is a single tax that was created by a man named Henry George. You can find some more information about him and the work that I am reading "Progress & Poverty" at these sites:

http://www.taxreform.com.au/HG/main.htm
http://www.henrygeorgeschool.org/whowashg.htm

So far it seems like the right direction and reconciles the legal private property of industry vs the illegal taking of private property of the people and the community.

I will let you know more when I know more. Just thought I would bring it to the world's attention.

Well, my wee little world's attention. :P

My finger

My finger
Originally uploaded by baron_.

Eww, this is my cut finger.

It was hard to get a clean picture so this the best I got before I covered it back up again.

It is a bit pruney cause I just opened to the air for the first time since the incident.

Me

Self portrait
Originally uploaded by baron_.

Thought I would put a picture of me up. I was playing with the camera when I was taking pictures of my bloody finger (see next post).

Kinda fuzzy and artistic like, so not all bad.

You get 10 points if you tell me what my shirt says. :)

Ow sharp!

Ok, so I was making dinner last night and thought I would eat some healthy stuff.

So I have a NY sirloin broiling in the oven and I chop off the tops of my fresh bunch of beets that I bought the other day.

So my beet top salad is about ready and I begin to slice up my beets.

Granted, I worry about staining everything with it's purple juicy goodness but I am careful and I get no permanent purple stains anywhere. Yay!

The problem is...I nearly cut the end of my finger off!

(I will post a picture of it later :) )

Anyway, I am in the middle of my kitchen, I have beets slices and tops everywhere on the cutting board and I have a continuously bleeding finger adding to the pretty purple of the board. The steak is about ready to be turned over so it is sizzling up a storm and I need to take care of this little issue.

Now, I have a high pain threshold so I was more methodical then panicked. It wasn't in shock either, just a need to take care of the bleeding and hopefully not having to go to the hospital for stitches.

Did I mention I hate seeking medical care?

Anyway, I slide the chunk of finger (which was pretty close to the nail) back onto the rest of the finger and secure it tightly with a Band-aid.

I noticed that with the bit out of alignment it would bleed very profusely and would have soaked through the Band-Aid immediately. So I carefully put it back to where it used to be and get it all secure and stuff.

Then I go back into the kitchen, turn over my steak, finish cutting the beets (much more carefully then before) and cook them up. I stained my Band-Aid with beet juice and blood, made for pretty colors but thankfully the juice didn't sting.

Was a tasty meal I must say.

Then I went out dancing after I knew the blood had stopped, but I banged it a few times. And damn that hurt.

Lesson learned, don't play with sharp objects! Or learn how to slice beets better. :)