Friday, August 29, 2008

Bad Apples?


More fun with photoshop.

I laugh everytime I hear the righties spew their fearful: "But is he ready to lead?" Obama-attack tactic, because clearly their candidate is "No Longer Ready To Lead." (if he ever was at all)

We don't need yet another blundering mouthpiece of corporate interests, rubber-stamping our country into financial ruin.

Monday, August 25, 2008

The Grotto of Lost Souls

I just ran across an excellent video clip made by Dizzy Banjo of my exhibit in the "NPIRL Garden of Delights" (NPIRL is a collective of artists and fans experimenting and exploring things that are "Not Possible In Real Life")

The event is over and the exhibit only exists in storage now, so it's very nice to have some visible recording of it still around. =)   Take a peek at:

Monday, August 18, 2008

Taxes?

My mind wandered seriously far afield while perusing some of the Obama / McCain ads.

So, I went a-googling around a bit with some random questions and got rough answers:

The national debt is roughly three times the national budget. (Imagine having a credit card with 3x your annual income racked up on it!)

Fortunately, only 10% of our tax dollars go to making the minimum interest payments. (It'd be 20% to 30% of our income if we owed 3x what we made yearly!)

10% of our yearly tax dollars.

That's more than the annual budget for Education, Transporation & Vet Benefits combined.

That's around of the budget for the Military... for half a year.

And that 10% doesn't help reduce the debt... or help pay for those "must have now" expenses of years past.

Think of it this way:
* You *NEED* a spiffy new $1200 large LCD television, so you use your credit card.
* Every month you make the minimum payment of $10. ($120 each year).
* Ten years later, the TV breaks down, you need another.
* Your check your credit card statement. It says: You still owe us $1200.
* You lament in vain: But I've already paid you $1200 for the TV!
* You take your credit card to the store and... buy a new $1200 television anyway,
* 10 years later you've paid enough in interest to buy two new TVs.
... and you haven't even started paying for the ones you bought yet.

Now... see, the government wanted this spiffy new war back in 2002. Had to have it. Of course, they probably haven't even started paying off the loans for the previous war... or the war before that.

The only way for the government to rack up more debt (and still manage to pay for everything else) is to devalue the U.S. dollar. Weaker dollar means higher prices, demand for higher pay and.. of course, more tax dollars. With enough inflation, the government could keep the ratio of tax used for interest payments around 10%.

Which works fine until dollars bills become cheaper than toilet paper.

Which reminds me... San Francisco is considering christening their largest sewage works the "George W. Bush Sewage Plant". Hmm.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Wanna bet?

I can't help but assume that the recent tragic shooting of democratic super delegate Bill Gwatney was perpetrated by another unstable loner who spent too much time listening to the blatherings of O'Reilly, Hannity, Savage, and Limbaugh.

Why else would he pick the person he did to lash out at?

I'm not getting the "jealous ex-lover" vibe off this situation.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

The "R" Word

There's a stink over the word "retard" in the new Ben Stiller movie "Tropic Thunder".

Some angry people want the word "retard" banned, and they want the movie boycotted for using it 17 times in a way that could be viewed as derogatory towards developmentally challenged people.

If I thought that banning certain words would bring about the end of xenophobic bigotry, I'd get on board. However I think the effort is doomed to backfire. Instead of bringing people together, the protests further divide people, ruining any chance for mutual respect to ever develop. It creates conflict that drive people into their 'us' and 'them' trenches, where they will stubbornly stay with their peers, heads down and shooting blindly at "those damned outsiders".

Protesting certain words, in reality, makes them more effective tools to offend others. And when looking to give offense, people are going to grab the most effective tools at their disposal.

Besides, if using specific forbidden word results in career suicide and social exile, people will simply gravitate to other words and use them to mean the exact same dismissively hateful thing.

What needs to be banned is the attitude that "together, we can disrespect and dehumanize people that aren't like us".

And we can't do that by taking a black sharpie to the dictionary.