I don’t like to say it, I don’t even like to think it, because I think Obama is a good candidate, but if he wins the presidency, I give him less than two years before he’s assassinated. Why? Because there are still a great number of racist and ignorant people in this country. Like people who think Barack’s last name is Osama, as one dumb-ass girl told me last night, or people that think he’s muslim.Let me clear things up for the morons: he’s half black (his mother is white), he’s christian, and I don’t even think his middle name is Hussien but his last name definitely isn’t Osama, it’s OBAMA you morons! If you don’t know who to vote for, if you don’t even know all the candidate’s names, please don’t fucking vote - you’re too dumb to risk participation.Anyway back to my point on Obama being assassinated. How am I so sure? Because I work with one such ignorant racist. Unless I have extremely underestimated the American people, if Obama wins the Democratic nomination, John McCain will win the election easily. There are even democrats who will vote for Hilary, but not Obama due to race. Which shows you how dumb these mother-fuckers are in the first place. I’ll use my co-worker as an example. He loathes Bush, hates republicans, he wants Hilary Clinton to win. However he will vote for McCain if Obama wins the democratic nomination. In other words, just because Obama is half-black (way too black for a president, I guess) he would sooner vote for McCain even though he doesn’t agree with anything out of McCain’s mouth, just because McCain is white. How does that make any sense? Why would you vote for someone with completely opposite views, just because their white? Well, it makes a lot of sense to a racist.When it comes down to a national election, I don’t think Obama will win due to racism. Plain and simple. If by some grace he does take the white house, it won’t be long before some whack job snipes him from the back of his Chevy pickup. I think the morons of this land may just barely be willing to give up sexism - but God dammit - racism is as American as apple pie!

One thing I absolutely love about Apple’s OS X is how all the iLife applications seamlessly trade information with one another. Add all your friends to your Address Book and when you want to write an email, you can launch mail, start typing their name and the rest will be auto-filled. I simply find this fantastic. However, it’s always annoyed me how this synchronization of information can’t span multiple computers as well. Well, it can, if you don’t mind paying $100/year for Apple’s .mac service, which is already considered by many to be obsolete. With .mac you can do things like, synchronize mail and contacts and calendars across multiple computers. But why would I pay $100 a year to synchronize such information between my desktop Mac Mini and my PowerBook? It’s a waste of money. Clearly, the .mac service would come in handy if you were synchronizing between home and work computers, but what if your work computer is a notebook which you bring home every day? Also what if your desktop machine were the center of your home office? This is my case. I have a mac mini, which I use for everything while I’m home and a PowerBook that I take with me to school and work. When I add or remove contacts, events, to-do’s, bookmarks, from one computer I’d like to have the changes made on the other. Let’s say I’m out in the school library writing a paper, I get a phone call, some things come up and a few more items are added to me to-do list for the week, I add a couple bookmarks, I write a few e-mail drafts. I add them to iCal/Mail on my PowerBook, and ideally when I come home and set the PowerBook aside to charge, I’d like to synchronize and have all those changes made onto my Mini, where I usually do all my e-mailing and organizing. I’m not going to pay $100 to do this, it seems so obvious, it’s .mac synchronization without the internet. Both of these computers share the same network, why can they not also share such information like contacts, events, and tasks directly? I don’t see any reason why I should pay to synchronize information between computers on the same network. If I knew anything about computer programming, I’d do it myself, but I only have an average grasp over HTML and even that I haven’t used in years. If there are any programmers or Mac aficionados reading this post who know how to accomplish what I seek to achieve, please, please tell me!

Over at the Raw Story, they’ve reported that apparently according to Mike Huckabee Homosexuality is a choice. I found the story on digg, where not surprisingly there were a few morons actually defending Huckabee, concurring with the belief that any behavior is ultimately a choice. This is simply laughable. If you really believe “any type of behavior is a choice,” that means you also think the mentally ill choose to be insane. The behavioral tics symptomatic of tourettes are choices. Huckabee must have had, at one point, homosexual desires which he suppressed because he chose to be straight. It’s the only way to rationalize such a stupid argument. I was born straight, always attracted to women, never had any desire to have sex with men, I did not choose to be like this, it’s just how I am. To say that homosexuality is a choice means everyone has the ability to walk that path including Huckabee and you and I. It means that everyone has homosexual desires, but chooses to ignore them. Therefore anyone who stands behind this argument must have had some experience of suppressing their sexuality. I cannot comprehend the concept of homosexuality as a choice because for myself, heterosexuality was not a choice.Plus, I seriously doubt anyone would choose to be gay given the shit they have to put up with from social conservatives.  

Quick rant about .mac, and a couple things that piss me off about it. Why the fuck should make require you to have a .mac account in order to sync your computers? Sure, I can see how this would be useful if the two computers were far apart and on different networks - like one at home the other at work - but I really don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to sync my Mac Mini and PowerBook address books if they are on the same computer network. Makes no sense, why the hell should I pay $99 a year or however much it costs now, just to sync simple things like address books and bookmarks from safari?

I would like to talk about nonviolence today. I’ve been thinking about it recently, and I’m swaying on the line between nonviolence and violence. It all goes back to Gandhi, of course, and his method of nonviolence. Gandhi’s goal was to make the English realize their own cruelty, which would make them leave on their own. However, lucky for Gandhi, he was doing this in the early part of the 20th century and dealing with the people of the UK, who are, on the whole, a bit more intelligent and compassionate than Americans.

Today in America, I hardly see the fruits of nonviolence. Is it because the government and grown more calloused and resistant to these acts, or is it because there are not enough people participating? It’s hard to say, after seeing and hearing one scandal after another out of the Bush administration every day, I’d say it’s the government that simply doesn’t care about what the people say anymore. Certainly the Bush administration doesn’t care, by the way they see things, it’s their way or the highway, and public opinion doesn’t matter. The public, and right now it is obvious, is far more in favor of social spending and domestic issues than it is of meddling in foreign adventures and wars. But this goes against the desires of the elite ruling class, thus the public is marginalized and ignored. When we, the public, are ignored to such an extent nonviolence is a much duller blade. Compare the protests and acts of nonviolence today with those of the 60’s, and you might be inclined to agree that today there are simply not enough people committed to the cause of direct democracy. The United States is not a democracy and anyone who thinks otherwise is sorely mistaken. There is and always has been a complete divorce from the general population and the ruling class.

The most recent examples of nonviolence I can think of are the Buddhist Monks of Burma and Tibet. In Burma, thousands of monks recently took to the streets in a show of solidarity against the military government. Days later all dissenting media was shut down, and monks were hunted. While I greatly admire the adherence to the philosophy of nonviolence by the Dalai Lama and native Tibetans, it has not helped to get the Chinese army out of their homeland. China wants Tibet for its natural resources, and these new empire-states like the US and China simply do not care who or how many must die along the way. While the dedication to a philosophy of nonviolence is admirable, it has not earned the people of Tibet or Burma freedom.

Should we resort to violence? If we did, it would be a very bloody civil war. Although the armed forces are busy abroad, the police state has grown so massive that it has become an army of itself whose number-one objective is always to keep people from stirring anything up. One need only to look at the last bloody battle between the public and the police state: the Seattle WTO protests. I don’t recall anyone being killed, but there were certainly many injuries. Now imagine how much worse the same protest would be today, with police forces stronger with more equipment purchased with Homeland Security funds. It would be the public against the police-state, possibly the military, and then the state itself.

Nonviolence is the obvious moral choice, but I often question whether it is enough to affect massive social change. With propaganda so thorough, and a police state so large and intrusive, will violent revolution eventually take over the public of the United States?

From the AP, via TIME: Mike Huckabee once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public, opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure and said homosexuality could “pose a dangerous public health risk.” Wow, just another reason for me to loathe Huckabee and the republican party in general. The democrats aren’t much better, but at least they aren’t filled with a bunch of ignorant, homophobic, fear-mongering jingoes.”It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population.“ It seems that Huckabee is completely oblivious to the fact that AIDS is a sexually-transmitted disease, and therefore there is no need for quarantine. I don’t even have anything clever to say. This is simply beyond me, nothing politicians say or do ever makes any sense to me. Mike Huckabee is a moron, so are the rest of them. 

I just finished up filling out an online application for the Peace Corps. I got rejected right away because I don’t have a college degree. Never mind my intense desire to help other people, and further the cause of world peace; never mind my strong work-ethic and stick-to-it-tiveness; never mind the fact that I’d be willing to do anything I can to the best of my abilities. No, I don’t have a college degree. Sure, I can wait until I finish up at Bunker Hill, but even then opportunities for Community College graduates in the Peace Corps are still negligible.  Peace Corps: I’m sorry I wasn’t a dedicated student in high school, but I’m smart, I promise. I’m sorry that even if my grades were better in high school, I would’ve gone to BHCC anyway because my family is stuck in the missing class. Won’t you please reconsider?

So a guy calls in to a radio show to let Rudy Giuliani know just exactly how much of a low-life scum-bag he really is. Rudy proceeds to make fun of the man and suggests he needs psychiatric help. The caller is a parkinsonian who who has lost his food stamps and Medicaid.

Sure Giuliani is a scum bag, but these actions are not unique to him. It is the philosophy of conservatism, of me not you, of haves and have-nots. How bad will it get? Our society is structured as such that being hungry is not a prerequisite for obtaining food, one must have the money to obtain food, and one must work to obtain that money, most likely as a wage-slave. Likewise, in the capitalist way of things, being ill is often not reason enough to receive treatment, one must be able to pay for that treatment. And this is how it works, with no sense of equality or humanity. If you happen to have a lot of money, you’ll also have a lot of food while your brother starves in the gutter. We have more food than we can eat in this country, just see how much food your supermarket throws out at the end of the day, yet people starve anyway. The man in the video does not work because he cannot work. No money, no medicine. Welcome to the new America. Survival of the richest.

How can we possible call such a society civilized?