Nevertheless, here is one more to consider. Recently, the Duchess of York went with a reporter to investigate orphanages in Turkey. The situation they found was appalling, beyond anything we can even imagine accepting in the United States. Kids tied, boxed, ignored. Adults who never get to leave and thus spend their lives tied to the furniture. Infants tearing off their own ears to escape the pain caused by neglectful practices. There’s a documentary about the trip coming out on Thursday, but more importantly Fergie is trying to raise money to help build better institutions in Turkey and elsewhere. No one would willingly choose to warehouse children in this manner, but a lack of funding enforces a standard of apathy.

If you can help, please do, whether it is through making donations or simply continuing to spread the world. No matter what country we claim as home, all the children of this world have to grow up together. The least we can do is work to give them a chance at a real life.

Thanks to Robin over at Vabolium.com for being the first to bring my attention to this issue.

Dear Sirs,

I watched the Presidential candidate debate tonight, as did far too many of my fellow Americans.  Each one of us wasted an hour and a half of our lives (an hour and a half, may I note, that we could have been cutting our arms with razor blades or smoking crack, either of which would have been more rewarding).  As the people who pay your salaries, people whom you are both fond of saying “deserve” everything under the sun, I want to make it clear that we deserve more.

You were asked some fairly pointed questions, which you proceeded to dance around in favour of saying “lemme tell you what the other guy did”.  You looked right into the eyes of the people asking those questions, and proceeded to demonstrate your best two-step.  When you did pause to wink and toss off anything like a response, you used rhetoric, often word for word, that you had used before.  You might both have been taking lessons from Governor Palin in how to twist a series of words into an incomprehensible structure that avoids even marginally touching on the topic at hand.

Senator McCain, for the first half of the night, I really could not follow your sentence structure, no matter how hard I tried.  I know you are fond of idolizing Reagan, but this is taking things a bit too far.  Senator Obama, I really expect more from you.  “He did it first!” is not an adult response to any question.  I need both of you to understand one thing: if I am beating my head into my desk halfway through your debate, you need to rethink your strategy.  I read politics as a hobby.  This was about as interesting as getting lobotomized with a knitting needle (which means that in the beginning the pain was interesting, but then I blacked out).

Next time I see either of you, I expect you to do what I do every day as a mother: make decisive statements, explain your reasoning, and don’t say it’s all the other kid’s fault (even if it is).   Yeah, I know you have 300 million kids.  But you know what?  You wanted that position.  Grow up and show us you deserve it.

Abandon All Hope

Long ago, I told my son, when I was growing up, Geeks were forced to desperately cling to the lowest rung of the social strata.  “Really?” my son asked, horror showing plainly on his face.   Yes my love, I told him, it was a very hard time to be a Geek.  And I reminded him of several nightmarish episodes from my youth.  I then proceeded to explain to him how we took over.  How, with the advent of the Internet and computer games, suddenly we were the ones holding the keys to the kingdom.  You see, I continued, no one but the Geeks had ever bothered to learn how to write computer programs or play with hardware.  And so they found themselves coming to Us.

After that, I went on, it wasn’t long before it was “cool” to be a Geek.  And then the ex-jocks and cheerleaders and prom queens and kings and all their minions traded in their jerseys for some plaid, button-up shirts and Chucks and started talking about sci-fi and roleplaying games and comic books and physics.  And some of them even started reading H.P. Lovecraft.

My little son’s faced glowed as he gazed adoringly upon the mother who had fought so hard to bring the world to what it is today (or at least, I like to remember it that way).  But then his little brow crinkled, and he asked in a worried voice,” But Mommy, how do we tell the Real Geeks from the Fake Geeks, now?”

Simple, I replied.  Real Geeks would never use Internet Explorer.

And that, my dear readers, is what I have come to you to say today.  Please, please, for the love of all that is holy, do not use Internet Explorer.  It’s not cool.  The Real Geeks laugh at you behind your back for using it, when they are not cursing you for making their day jobs as programmers ten thousand times more difficult.

If browsers were cars, IE would be a moped.  If browsers were wine, IE would be Night Train.  If browsers were hot dates, IE has herpes.  If browsers were…well, you get the idea.

So there’s the tip of the day from one who knows.  If you want to be one of the “in-crowd”, ditch that lousy-ass browser.  You’ll be glad you did, and so will we.

1) How come it’s crazy when Middle Eastern religions say women have to cover up, but it’s OK when we do it here? It’s because it’s different bits, isn’t it?
2) How come Western culture is so sexually promiscuous, and yet a nipple is still headlining news?
3) How come anyone still cares about Britney Spears? [Note: you must follow above pattern of searches to understand this question]
4)Why does a search for men in burkhas turn up mostly naked women?

Perhaps they are not deep questions, but I sort of think they are.

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Now read that again, carefully: charged with

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Just who is significant? Photo by highkey11, creative commons license

Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn’t won any of the significant states — outside of Illinois? That raises some serious questions about Sen. Obama.

This is a campaign which has stated its determination to fight for Michigan and Florida being included in the DNC because “every vote should count”, but all those votes in all the 21 states aside from Illinois which Obama won…are insignificant? Perhaps what Senator Clinton’s campaign is trying to say is that they care about the voters in Michigan and Florida because those states are significant. I guess I can see it from her perspective.

But then there’s how she claims she really cares about the middle class, the “everyman”, if you will. And yet, she rents out her donor lists cheap to a megacorporation whose CEO has helped her out in the past. It’s just weird, and I can’t quite get my head around it. Somehow her populist message isn’t sounding very populist. Perhaps corporate friends are more significant than mere citizens.

So, we’re on to talking about Texas and Ohio, two states which are significant and in which by all accounts Senator Clinton must win big if she is to continue to be significant herself. She is counting on the support of the Hispanic community (commonly ignored as insignificant, but not in election season), particularly as she seems to be losing ground with the (also normally insignificant) black and women demographics. Somehow, though, despite the recent change in staffing for her campaign and her declarations that she’s not done, yet, I don’t feel like Hillary is getting it. This whole grass-roots support concept that Obama has so successfully built his campaign upon is not trouncing her because their stated intentions are so very far apart. It’s because Obama makes each one of us feel significant.

Presenting The Case

As I have stated previously, democracy is not a bad concept for a governing system, but it simply doesn’t work if the people stop having input into the system. The concepts sort of cancel each other out like that. So the real problem in this country, the problem underneath all the other problems, is that the people no longer have any real input. We can vote, but the election system is now so vulnerable that it cannot be trusted to supply a valid result. Even if it could, we live in a nation where the vote of the people can, and has been in the past, overridden by “more powerful” people in a system designed to keep those “in the know” able to direct our elections “for our best interests”. Even apart from that, we only have elections every couple of years, and that leaves a lot of time in between for our representatives to spin their more dubious actions in a better light. And even worse, most of their dubious actions happen behind closed doors, out of sight of the people, and are rarely reported.

If we are going to take back control of our country from the corporate interests currently running it, we need transparency. We need video and audio recordings of every single committee and conference meeting in which our government officials take part. We need to either outlaw federal lobbyists, or we need a set time and place where they can present their cases to our representatives (read: us), which must also be open and documented. Every person in the United States is not going to care about every issue, but each person must be able to follow all actions related to any issue they choose to investigate. All these recordings should be available to anyone seeking them.

All pending legislation must be made available online for all Americans to read, at least two days prior to it being voted into law. This legislation should be hyper-linked to any previous legislation which it references. All representatives must have a means for their constituents to send commentary on the legislation readily available, and staff whose job is to read the comments and convey them to the representative.

We must divest corporations of their illegitimate legal status as “people”, and begin holding them accountable to the actual people. Our media organizations must begin actually investigating the events happening in both our nation and others and reporting accurately and without bias. Our school systems must teach each child the actual structure of government, and must attempt to teach history and current events as accurately and broadly as possible. We the people must have the right to question everything, and must remember to do so.

If we can implement these few things, we can have our country back. Granted, it will be a long and arduous path getting there. We will have to fight like hell to make these things happen. But that, after all, is what a revolution is all about.

Presenting The Case

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