So, let me make a little sense here from what I just said above.  Rather than admitting that Michael Jackson was a man, and a human being with god and bad and trials and tribulations just like the rest of it, the are trying to point to the doctor and say that he did it, so that Michael’s “image” can seem untarnished by this, it was the doctor that caused his death not his addiction to drugs.

I say come one people, look at the facts, the real facts, not what the news pundits are trying to spoon feed you.  My bet is that Michael was in a lot of pain, between all the surgeries he had, and the extremely physical performances he put on, all that stuff takes a toll on your body and I bet he used the pain killers to help with that.  The problem thought, is that like with a lot of people, famous or not, they get to depending on them too much and whammo, they are addicted.

Michael Jackson was a man of huge and extreme talent, the likes of which we probably never see again, at least not any time soon, but he was still a man nonetheless, and a great loss when he died.

I still don’t know what the hell I did that made him so mad, I was trucking on Interstate 81, three lanes, left lane for fast runners, middle lane for normal I guess because the right lane was for slow moving vehicles.  I wasn’t going fast or slow, so I was in the middle.  This jerk decides to come up behind me fast, right on my ass, and then hit the left lane.  Keep in mind that the left and right lanes are clear, I’m in the middle.  He hits the left lane, comes up about halfway past me and then comes on over into my lane.  At first I thought it was just a mistake, it happens, nobody’s perfect, right?  Wrong, he proceeds to move all the way over to the right lane to hit the exit ramp.  Now, he could have just hit the right lane in the first place, but no, he had to get beside me on the left and run my ass off the road.  I got out of his way so he didn’t succeed, but  it wasn’t any damn fun.

And that’s one thing I have noticed about the big rig truck drivers, a profession that used to be honorable that is now rife with wage cutting mexican job stealing wheel monkeys that have to care for the craft.  I have noticed that since they are driving the big vehicles on the road, they pretty much don’t give a shit about the rest of us.  They have some kind of king of the road ooh boy look how much I can compensate with this big thing complex and all the little four wheelers be damned.  There are some good drivers out there sure, but unfortunately they are in the vast minority anymore.  All this just gets me circled right back around to my point that people are self centered jerks.  Here’s a tip, try not to be one, maybe life will be better for all of us.

“First of all, Criss, can I call you Chris? If you’re going to take a pseudonym, why don’t you not spell it like a jackass? I mean, I understand if you’re one of those people whose parents thought they were being original and decided to spell your name with all kinds of crazy extra vowels, misplaced consonants and the letter Y. But you, you CHOSE this name and that’s the route you went? Interesting.

Anyway, I don’t know if any of you have ever seen the show “Mindfreak” on A&E – but it’s terrible. It’s got “acting” and a production quality on par with porn and is generally pretty uninspiring. In addition to dressing like a model from the Hot Topic catalog CA’s deep self love and constant chest pounding/finger kissing/pointing at the sky routine wears thin pretty quickly.”

Check out the rest of it here …

I know, I know, you are reading this and thinking that I had a double helping of my fanatic-o’s this morning, but that isn’t true.  This is a real situation and problem that we are all facing (or soon will be facing) right here and right now.  I am talking about the war that is waging between the banks and the Federal Reserve, a war over something as simple sounding as “swipe fees”.

You see, swipe fees are what retailers pay the banks when you and I swipe our debit card as we buy something.  To the tune of about $0.44 cents per swipe or purchase on average.  This is where it gets interesting, the Federal Reserve has gotten all puffed up and self righteous saying that they need to cut those swipe fees by more than 70%, to about $0.12 cents per swipe.  Take that few cents difference and multiply it over a few bazillion times a day that people make purchases and you can see why the banks are pretty peeved over it.

Naturally, the banks reaction is to cut out those rewards programs they have been enticing people with.  Not to mention jacking ATM fees up high and faster than gas prices at the pump.  In some places, people are seeing $4 and $5 ATM fees for non-customers!  Yowza!  Another tactic that the banks are proposing, is capping the limit of what you can purchase with your debit card, like making it so that you can’t purchase more than say $50 worth of stuff at a time.  This means you’ll have to get more swipes in to ultimately make that purchase, even if you run it as a credit card.  On top of all that, if you make a late payment, even a customer in good standing that previously never missed one, they have it worked out so they can hike your APR to as much as 30%!  Nice customer loyalty program there, isn’t it?

Sneaky, huh?

Right now, most of this stuff is not in effect yet, but it’s being tested in certain locations and plans are being made while bank lobbyists and Federal Reserve Weenies argue over it.  Either way this falls, stay informed and keep an eye out for tricks so you don’t get hammered by one side or the other.  Take a look at this article and get some more details too, it’s an eye opener.

That’s really funny to me since I have yet to hear anything out of his pie hole of a mouth that isn’t a lie.  From his fake documentaries funded by George Soros that spread misconceptions and half-truths just to stir the political pot and provide fodder for the biased as hell media outlets, to his phony speeches and rigged awards.  The guy is a useless factory of misinformation and now it seems, a hypocrite as well.  I guess we see why he and our so called President are on the same side, they both lie, cheat and steal better than most of the crooks in prison.  They haven’t been caught after all.

I know, I know, you are all thinking that I shouldn’t hide my feelings and I should tell you how I really feel about him!  LOL

I am not saying that Hussein Obama was right or wrong in vetoing extensions for more negotiation time, only time will tell on that one, but in all the rush, fuss, mess and turmoil, what got missed or shoved through without enough forethought?  The figure has come in at something like $38 billion dollars[1] they cut from the budget, to expand to $500 billion over the next few years.  Does anyone outside of those few politicians, who were no doubt serving their own self interest, actually know what all those cuts mean?  There is absolutely no way that our so called president could have gotten a handle on what all was in there that fast, no way in hell.

Top that off with Nancy Pelosi, Grand Witch of the Democrats claiming that despite legislation that cuts FCC rules and powers, they will continue to operate in the same way regardless[2].  Tell me, how does that work?  Can some people just ignore the law and just do what they want despite it being illegal, just because they are a politician?  I know, dumb question.  This is ridiculous, and is just another example of how broken and corrupt our government is.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my country and it’s still the best that I have seen compared to most anything else out there, but it is blatantly obvious that it’s not about we the people anymore.  Today’s government is about the pockets of the politicians, and how they can get them lined even more than before.

I don’t mind if you ask me, give me a choice, but not every damn program out there needs to put one or more items into my system tray to load there every time the computer starts and slow down my startup time, eating away at memory and CPU power.  Normally this is under the guise of “speeding up the application”.  Well, I say that if you need all of those pre-loaders to make your application function acceptably, maybe you should go back to Fortran 101 and learn to write good code in the first place!

What’s worse, are the damn services that get installed and started that we don’t even know about.  Why does a simple media player need a web server?  Why does my GPS management app want or need to check out my hard drive at night?  Have all developers taken refuge at the throne of Bill Gates and Lenovo or something?

“We have a right to look at the user’s private information because they bought our crap.”  or “We don’t need to worry about writing tight, efficient bug free code, we’ll just tell the customer to by a new computer and get more kick backs from Intel.”

Not to mention the shift away from ownership to leasing.  Now when you “buy” software, you really are only “buying” a license that allows you to use it for a period of time.  Screw that noise, man.  If I am interested in a certain product and see that kind of license, ffft it’s gone and I am looking at something else.

This is just one reason why Open Source software is so damn good and popular.  Microsoft and the other behemoths of the commercial software industry want to come out and tell everyone that free software isn’t really free, it costs you more than the expensive slop that they sell.  The thing is, they don’t get it.  We don’t mean free as in dollars, we mean free as in spirit and ethics.  You get some open source code and you may spend a few bucks to implement it or get some support, or you may not, either way it is completely open.  All of the source code is there so you can make damn sure no one is spying on you or stealing information from you.  You can make a change to the app if you feel like it so that it fits better to your needs, instead of only getting “good enough”.  It’s free like the wind and water cascading down the mountain, and brothers and sisters, that’s a great place to be.

So, naturally Glenn Beck apologized, and appeared to be every bit sincere and remorseful that he made a comparison that upset folk.  I mean, the guy expresses his opinion (which, last time I check, we were free to do in this country), people complain about it because basically they are going to complain about anything that isn’t glowing praise about their agenda they are pushing, and Beck basically comes back to say he was sorry, he didn’t mean to offend anyone.  Seems like a pretty normal exchange, I think we have all had something similar happen.  You say something and someone gets pissed, and you put your hands up like “Hey, didn’t mean anything man, sorry about what I said about your sister, my bad”.  After that you have another couple beers and all is good.

Not so with these guys, they came back from Beck’s apology and have said that “Anything short” of ending “Mr. Beck’s tenure at Fox News” by Rupert Murdoch “reflects an unwillingness to take seriously the harm Mr. Beck causes to many in our community and beyond”.

Wow.

No, really.  Wow.

These guys need some Prozac in a bad way.  Nice turning of the other cheek there.  Way to get along with your fellow man and all that.  The guy apologizes for not really doing anything wrong from what I can tell, and you want to pull an Imus on him.  Get a life and get a grip on reality you moonbat.  The folks ultimately behind all of this the “Jewish Funds for Justice” league need to re-evaluate the word justice.  You can read the whole article here if you like, it’s just as ludicrous.

That’s right. Let’s give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and plan — that equals 6 1/2 hours).

Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children.

Now how many do they teach in day…maybe 30? So that’s $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day. However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.

LET’S SEE…. That’s $585 X 180= $105,300 peryear. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).

What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master’s degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6 1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.

Wait a minute — there’s something wrong here! There sure is!

The average teacher’s salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/30 students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student–a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!)

But what gets me the most riled up is the fact that I get stopped at all.  I stand there and wait in line, the cashier is the one that is supposed to do whatever voodoo that they do to clear them out of the system.  Naturally we all know that most of the cashiers/baggers at Wal-Mart couldn’t care less if they tried so it ends up sucking to be me.  Guilt until proven innocent, that’s me, and probably everyone else that shops at Mal-Wart.  Blech …