The Mask is Off!

Well kiddies...the mask is off the at the Obama campaign.  Their new logo "FORWARD" has been debuted and evidently the dumbasses who are managing the national campaign can't spend 5 minutes on their fave source website (that would be wikidpedia, for all you non liberals out there) to research their newest logo and see if there are any historical references to this word that might have a deleterious effect on their work!  I'd love to know who signed off on this....it has to be the stupidest campaign logo ever.  I've copied it here so that when it goes down the memory hole (I predict it won't last the week) there will be proof that it existed for the world to see.

Even the most cursory examination of Wikipedia would reveal that the word FORWARD as a title for anything is heavily associated with communism and socialism.  All I can say is what are they thinking?  Is it diabolically clever or the dumbest move of all time?

I guess we'll find out.

Stay tuned!

Update:  As of today the references to the word "forward" as used by socialist and communist publications has been suspended (scrubbed) from Wikipedia, and as I surmised, FORWARD as a campaign slogan for Obama has been flushed down the internet memory hole.  It didn't take them long, did it?

How is it that a guy who headed what was touted as the "smartest campaign in history" could hire people who make such noobie mistakes?   Neil Boortz is having a field day with it and so is Rush.

Making fun of FORWARD in the Hot Air Greenroom.  

Pass the popcorn.

We're all Cash Cows now....

Well, the do-gooders have managed to ruin something else. My Second Life is infested with them, and all the other grifters, cons and peeps who have figured out that you can get *real* money out of it.

Every time I turn around these days, inworld, somebody has their grubby little paw out for money. Tip this, donate to that. It is hoped that I will slip 50 lindens to some person who does nothing more than greet me when I rez into a sim. I'm sorry....what?

Everybody has a pet cause and they *all* expect everyone they come in contact with to donate to it. I'm suspicious of all but a very few SL charities because you don't have a way to fact check the people collecting the money. They will promise you that every cent goes to whatever charity they are collecting for at the moment, but they are telling you this while their AV is wearing a 2000L (about $10 usd) couture gown and another 5000L worth of designer jewels. It just makes you wonder where the money really goes.

I went to a "charity" concert inworld today and was subjected to some woman lecturing me in a flat, midwestern accent, who obviously was speaking with no idea where she was going with it, didn't really know where she was, didn't know what instrument the act before her played, and then put up a graphic slide show of pathetic Japanese tsunami victims while she told us all why we should give 'til it hurts. Evidently she doesn't care that she's the umpteenth do-gooder to ask me for money for the cause du jour. I'm charitied out, ya'll.

Then there are the sim owners who harangue every patron in their sim to tip the venue....everybody wants a piece of that Linden Lab money pie, and average users are coming more and more to be seen as nothing more than a source of revenue. I'm sorry, if you want to own a money pit, don't expect me to pay for your dream. I have my own dreams and they are more realistic.

I've also noticed a disheartening trend in the music venues, i.e., musos who only come into SL to play for large fees and tips. They do not really belong to the SL community, they have crappy AVs because to them an AV is a means to an end, and they're only there to collect whatever money their music will bring in on any given day. I'm very disappointed in what seems to me as the sort of attitude that their fans in SL are no more than cash cows and not to be interacted with outside of a gig.

When I started 4 years ago this wasn't the case. The musicians were a part of the community and the oldest ones still are. I do see some musos who support the other musicians and turn up at gigs other than their own but they are much fewer in number than the ones who just show up to play. The old school musos in SL were there to share their music and it wasn't about the money....it was about the music. Its not that way so much anymore.

Now we are all cash cows.

Pretty Pictures...just because I can.

When Did Adults....

When did adults stop being adults?

Right now, in Austin, the powers that be want to set up "sobriety check points," whereby the police stake out a certain place, bottlenecking traffic so that they can ostensibly catch drunks. On the surface, this seems like a reasonable thing to do. But, is it really?

In most, if not all states, the law says that the people responsible for drunks who drive is the establishment where they got drunk and the people who actually served them the drinks. This approach takes responsibility for their condition out of the hands of the drunk and makes whomever enabled him to get drunk, his keepers. WTF?

When did we stop holding *adults* responsible for what they do?

Don't give me that tired tripe about alcoholism being a "disease." It's not. It's a lifestyle choice. If you must drink, and you know you drink to excess, stay home. It's very simple. You can get as drunk as you want to, still, in your own home. Most people who get drunk on a regular basis know they do it. I mean, come on...if, by the time you are 30 years old if you wake up with a headache every morning, wondering how you got home, you're probably an alkie.

Taking responsibility for their actions out of the hands of the person who is actually *doing* the behavior isn't a boon to the drunk, nor is it a boon to society to hold his enablers responsible for his behavior. Checkpoints and prosecuting bartenders, who by the way, are subject to the orders of the person who pays them (the owner/manager) and are just trying to earn a living is not the way to keep people from driving drunk. Stricter sentencing guidelines will. Not being able to buy your way out of a DWI with an obscenely expensive lawyer who has a couple of judges in his pocket, or plead it down to a slap on the wrist, will make the act of driving drunk alot less attractive to the drunks who do it.

Infantilizing the citizens is a slippery slope to the government plantation. Allowing law enforcement style pat downs in airports and random "alcohol" checkpoints violate our constitutional right, endowed by our *Creator,* not the federal or state government, to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. This is the first baby step to the police being able to randomly search your house for drugs or contraband guns (or heck, anything they want just so they can look around) because it's against the law to have such things.

I, for one, am sick of it. Put personal responsibility back where it belongs. On the *adults* that do it. I am NOT my brother's keeper unless my brother is gonna listen to me when I say stop, which isn't bloody likely to happen in this lifetime.

The Upside of Obama

I have come to the conclusion lately that the Obama presidency has indeed had an upside. The race card is worthless now and even sleazy black politicians can now be prosecuted for the thieves they are. Crying "RAAAAACCCCCIIIIISSSSM" is not a get out of jail free pass any more and pols like Charlie Rangel, Maxine Waters, Eleanor Holmes Norton and many others are now being exposed for the grifters they are.

Halleleujah. All I can say is....it's about time. These people have been stealing their constituents blind for decades and now they'll finally get what they so richly deserve. Ousted from their cushy senate seats and maybe...even a little jail time.

So much for a post-racial presidency. Yawn.

Oh HELL Yeah!

I love Charlie Daniels. Been a fan for years and I can actually recite the lyrics to "Devil Went Down to Georgia..."

Well, it seems that Mr. Daniels has written an open letter to Barak Obama. Its written in Charlie's usual simple style and comes right to the point. I encourage any and everybody to read it.

I love it. You GO Charlie!

EUREKA!!!

A "moderate" muslim finally speaks....

In an essay today on the website Asarq Alawsat, Mr. Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid weighs in on the question of the proposed mosque, 2 blocks or so from the site of the former World Trade Center in New York city. He wags a rhetorical finger at Barak Obama for supporting such an idea (another unforced error for Dear Leader, ala "acting stupidly" He sure does a lot of that, for a trained lawyer). He goes on to say that this mosque is what most of the people against it are saying, which is "sure, on the question of religious freedom, they have the freedom to build this mosque, but is it really what they (the group wanting it built) say it is?" And further, it's not something the muslim world (street) cares all that much about anyway.

I agree.

I see it as a thumb in the eyes of New Yorkers by a cabal of people who, by virtue of the fact that they all want to see America fall, are the uneasy allies in this political and emotional farce. Sure, America is founded upon religious freedoms, but as Mr. Al-Rashid points out, the site is a commercial district in Manhattan that has no ready congregation because there isn't much residential property around there. I have been there and it's true. This is right in the heart of the financial district and although there are a bunch of hotels, the streets of that area are deserted on weekends.

This isn't about tolerance. It's not about religious freedom, and it's damn sure not about mending fences. Its about putting a finger in America's eye and reminding us all that the radical brand of Islam is bent on conquering the infidel, by any means necessary.

Be sure to read the whole post.

I've Learned a New Skill!

I've wanted to learn Photoshop for years and for some reason, it never stuck. I figured out why recently...I never really had a burning reason to learn it because I wasn't interested in manipulating pictures.

Until now.

Behold the fruits of my new skill...

I still haven't learned Photoshop, but I'm learning the same (more or less) skills in a freeware program called GIMP. I have wanted to do modeling in Second Life and the better your pictures are, the more likely you are to be chosen to at least compete for the job, and I got tired of asking my friends who know how to retouch pictures to do it for me, so it motivated me to finally buckle down and learn it myself.

Not bad for a newbie.