A country under socialism is a bastion of mediocrity

“Social Security, which involves the younger generation paying some of the retirement benefits of the older generation, is a perfectly legal Ponzi scheme.”

This video was up during the election, taken down by the powers that be, and then returned to YouTube last week. Merry Christmas.

When my husband and I moved recently, one of the first things I did was sign up for phone service; immediately after securing said phone service, I took our newly-assigned phone number and put it into the FTC Do Not Call Registry.

Since our phone number went live on December 1st, we’ve received 3 calls from Honeywell Home Security. The first time, I explained that my husband and I live in an apartment, and cannot install a security system without the landlord’s permission. They should talk to him.

The second time, my husband explained we were not interested. In the background, I kept repeating “tell them to take our name off the list,” but he forgot.

Tonight, they called again. I recognized the number on our caller ID, and before the telemarketer could spit out “Hi, I’m X with Honeywell Home Security. How are–” I interrupted.

“I’m sorry, but I’m going to request you take us off your call list. If you continue to call, it will be in violation of federal law and I will make a referral to the Attorney General’s office.”

“Look,” she said, the friendliness gone from her voice, “it takes 31 days from the time you register…”

I hung up. I didn’t have time to argue. However, if this happens to you, know this much–if you ask a telemarketer to stop calling you, they HAVE to stop calling you or they are in violation of federal law. From the FTC’s website:

“If I don’t want to put my number on the National Do Not Call Registry, can I still stop telemarketers from calling?”

Yes. Even if you do not register with the National Do Not Call Registry, you can still prohibit individual telemarketers from calling by asking them to put you on their company’s do not call list.

So, Honeywell Home Security, if you are reading this, you’d better not call again. Do you hear me?

Also, I registered on the National Do Not Call Registry on November 21st, so in less than a week, that excuse will no longer fly. Better make a note of that too, right alongside my name where it’s also noted “Is a bitch and knows the law.”

Hello world!

Did you forget the existence of this mediocre blog? The tagline is, after all, we update when we get around to it, so if you were expecting something a bit more regular, shame on you!

Actually, the reason for extended radio silence without the sporadic updates you know and love is that The Husband and I moved to a new residence! And, let me tell you, MOVING SUCKS. No matter how much money you save up, it’s never enough, and the experience leaves you broke, indebted to everyone you know and love, and on the verge of suicide.

Or at least, that’s always been my experience.

Good news, though! Apparently, through some miraculous turn of events, I’m going to get all my moving expenses back and then some, to the tune of 18 MILLION DOLLARS! How, you ask with the skepticism I expect to hear in your voice? Easy! Apparently, a Colonel Uday of Iraq was murdered and left all of his money in a Hong Kong bank with no next of kin to claim it! All I have to do is help a nice Asian business man retrieve the money, and he’ll cut me in for 70%.

At first, I thought it was one of those Nigerian scams, but it clearly can’t be, because it’s all involving ASIAN people!

MR. Song Li le
Hang Seng Bank Ltd.
Sai Wan Ho Branch,
83, Des Voeux Road,
Hong Kong.
(songlile64@gmail.com)

Good Day,

Let me start by introducing myself. I am Mr. SONG LILE, Director of
Operations of the Hang Seng Bank Ltd. I have an obscured business
suggestion for you. Before the U.S. and Iraqi war, our client Colonel
Sadiq Uday, who was with the Iraqi forces and also businessman, made a
numbered fixed deposit for 18 calendar months, with a value of Twenty Four
Millions Five Hundred Thousand United State Dollars($19,500,000.00usd)
only in my branch. Upon maturity several notices was sent to him, even
during the war which began in 2003. Again after the war another
notification was sent and still no response came from him. We later found
out that the Colonel along with his wife and only daughter had been killed
during the war in a bomb blast that hit their home.
You can read more about the bombings on visiting these sites below:

1.http://www.ccmep.org/usbombingwatch/2003.htm#3/19/03
2.http://civilians.info/iraq/deaths_data.php

After further investigation it was also discovered that Colonel Sadiq
Uday, did not declare any next of kin in his official papers including the
paper work of his bank deposit. And he also confided in me the last time
he was at my office that no one except me knew of his deposit in my bank.
So, Twenty Four Millions Five Hundred Thousand United State Dollars
is still lying in my bank and no one will ever come forward to claim it.

What bothers me most is that according to the laws of my country at the
expiration 5 years the funds will revert to the ownership of the Hong Kong
Government if nobody applies to claim the funds. Against this backdrop, my
suggestion to you is that I will like you as a foreigner to stand as the
next of kin to Colonel Sadiq Uday, so that you will be able to receive his
funds.

MODALITIES:

I want you to know that I have had everything planned out so that we shall
come out successful. I have an attorney that will prepare the necessary
document that will back you up as the next of kin to Colonel Sadiq Uday,
all that is required from you at this stage is for you to provide me with
your Full Names and Address so that the attorney can commence his job.
After you have been made the next of kin, the attorney will also fill in
for claims on your behalf and secure the necessary approval and of probate
in your favor for the move of the funds to an account that will be
provided by you. There is no risk involved at all in this matter, as we
are going to adopt a legalized method and the attorney will prepare all
the necessary documents. Please endeavor to observe utmost discretion in
all matters concerning this issue. Once the funds have been transferred to
your nominated bank
account we shall then share in the ratio of 70% for me, 30% for you.

Should you be interested please send me your,

1, Full names,
2, private phone number,
3, current residential address,

And I will prefer you reach me on my private email address below:
(songlile64@gmail.com) and finally after that I shall provide you with
more details of this operation.

Your earliest response to this letter will be appreciated.

Kind Regards,
Mr. Song Lile

My reply:

Please reply to my information below with all of the information regarding this transaction!

Weysan Dun*
11 Centre Place
Newark, New Jersey 07102
(973) 792-3000

* this would be the name, address, and phone number of the acting director of my local branch of the FBI, FWIW

unpublished [verb] (origin: Boing Boing) 1. To delete, destroy, or otherwise remove the work of an individual from existence as if the work in question had never been there in the first place, as long as you created it, it was something you did personally, and it can be viewed elsewhere. Example: Andrea Yates unpublished her children; you can still see photos of them in albums and home movies. 2. To take away an individual’s ability to view a work. Example: FOX unpublished episodes of The Simpsons from my TIVO after a week through DRM.

A (not so) final word on BoingBoing jumping the shark into hypocrisy and The Communist’s Consumerist creates new “commenting rules” so ridiculous and censorial that I gave up reading it. Continue reading →

So, if you’re a fan of Teh Intertubes, you know all about the non-smackdown that happened between Violet Blue and BoingBoing and just how boring and frustrating it’s been the past few days. When will someone at BoingBoing say something that doesn’t sound like Scott McClellan wrote it? When will the BB fan boys stop acting like Violet Blue is the devil? When will readers notice that BoingBoing and Big Brother share initials and memory hole policies?

For those of you who aren’t Intertubes fans or have been in a cave recently, the non-story of the year goes like this:

Violet Blue is a sex blogger and sometimes writer/radio show host who probably has more money than God that comes from simply talking about sex. Boing Boing is an anti-censorship, liberal vehicle for Cory Doctorow’s latest work copyleft/copyfight blog that pretty much makes money from talking about how much copyright, big government, and invasion of privacy suck. Sometimes, the libertarians on this blog are all over BoingBoing; sometimes, we’re just over it.

The connection between the two comes from the fact that Blue once wrote a few posts for BoingBoing, and used to be a favorite on BoingBoing insomuch as she was linked to with frequency. Over the course of a few years, Blue wrote for or was mentioned in BoingBoing somewhere on the order of 70 times, give or take a few, according to an LA Times blogger who bothered to go to the WayBack Machine and count.

Why the Wayback Machine? Well, that’s the rub. You see, according to BoingBoing, they “unpublished”, which is a NewSpeak way of saying “deleted”, not just articles by Ms. Blue, but every mention of her in existence on their site, effectively scrubbing her from their archives and sending her down the memory hole.

Trust us, Winston Smith was doubleplusbusy that day.

Naturally, for such an anti-censorship site as BoingBoing, this seems rather odd, especially since there was no transparency in the action to unpublish Ms. Blue: one day she existed in the BB universe, the next she did not. Even Ms. Blue was unaware of her deletion until this past week, when the news slowly began to trickle out that she was gone from BB. People began to ask questions, and alternatively flame the hell out of BoingBoing, and BB began a hard and fast policy of denial: any comment that mentioned Violet Blue was systematically deleted from their site. The InterTubes grew restless. Metafilter got involved, then ValleyWag picked up the story, which then hit its sibling site Gawker, and all hell broke loose.

Sometime yesterday, BoingBoing responded to the controversy with a non-post about the issue by Moderator-cum-Douchebag Teresa Nielson-Hayden, who did her best White House Press Secretary working interview and forced out the editors’ response to the controversy, which was pretty much “This is a personal blog, we’ll damn well do what we feel like and have no responsibility to tell the readers what happened or why. More over, this is personal, so leave us alone.”

Also, she cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.

Now, that by itself wouldn’t be so bad, if the comments that followed weren’t routinely attacked for asking questions that seemed pretty self-evident after reading the post, such as how can a blog about transparency and accountability be neither transparent nor account for its actions? How can they continue to post about Mr. Doctorow’s novel fighting Big Brother (entitled “Little Brother”) when they had gone totally BB themselves and unpublished a writer? Between Nielson-Hayden and the readers, things in the comments quickly spiraled out of hand and two camps formed: fan boys who believe BB can do nothing wrong, reading for two minutes of hate with Violet Blue as a symbol of all that’s wrong with the InterTubes, and conspiracy theorists and general uber-left communists who now want BB staff to post home addresses, SSNs, and all other personal data to be the most transparent InterTubes blog of all times or else fail miserably under the weight of evil corporate oppression.

After that there were only three or four new posts to BoingBoing’s site, ending around 3PM. Then, for six hours, BoingBoing was dark, save for the glowing light of the comments thread growing exponentially. Meanwhile, ever the willing victim in all of this, Ms. Blue was giving interviews to any blogger who would listen. She even created a spreadsheet detailing every post involving her that was deleted from BB. When it comes to being sympathetic, Ms. Blue seemed to be aiming for a new residency over at Fail Blog.

Lost somewhere in the maelstrom was the question that the first few hundred posts reasonably asked: what transgression did Violet Blue commit that was so horrible and unspeakable, she had to be erased from the annals of BoingBoing, at the expense of BoingBoing’s own integrity?

For anything even close to an answer, only the LA Times and SF Gate came close to getting answers, and theirs had the ring of X-Files paranoia to them.

1: Cory Doctorow is a big copyleft protector, fighter of the “evil” of copyright. Violet Blue legally changed her name two years ago to Violet Blue and soon after sued a porn star for using Violet Blue as a name. Said porn star is a single mom (Oh noes! Leftists always bleed extra hard for the single mommies!) quit the business to sell her own work herself (Leftists also get massive hard-ons for independent production and small business) and (here’s the actually important part) had been using the name since 1999, long before Ms. Blue was a sex blogger. Moreover, it is believed that Violet Blue knew of the porn star’s existence before legally changing her name, and allegedly, before even using the moniker at all. Blue (the sex blogger) even had Blue (the porn star mommy) on her radio show once. The fact that Blue (PSM) couldn’t afford a decent attorney and was trounced in court by Blue (SB) would have really pressed Doctorow’s buttons wrong and ended with Blue being throughly denounced on BoingBoing. However, Blue being a former contributor, it might have looked bad to other editors or the almighty sponsors if Blue was still on the site as a contributor and yet trashed later on, so it was best to delete her and go on their separate ways.

2. Federated Media supports BoingBoing through ad revenue almost exclusively. Like many other publications, BoingBoing could, theoretically, be held hostage to the demands of Federated Media, and if they decided association with Ms. Blue was becoming a liability, they could demand she be wiped from the site.

3. Blue was “riding the coattails” of her BoingBoing posts, according to some readers and bloggers familiar with the two. She allegedly referred to herself as the fifth BoingBoing editor, which may have bruised an ego or two, and eventually might have had a falling out over taking more credit than her due and trying to raise her importance level to back her new projects.

4. Editor Xeni Jardin and Ms. Blue were allegedly involved at some point, and the affair turned sour. A hurt Jardin may have then convinced the other three editors that deletion of Ms. Blue was the best way to go. This rumor is fueled by a LA Times blog post which suggests that after a conversation with both Jardin and Blue, the blogger was satisfied that it truly was a personal matter handled poorly and not worth the bru-ha-ha it generated. Of course, that blogger’s lips are sealed.

5. Combine theories three and four. Or, as ValleyWag puts it:

For Blue, we’ve come to believe, the friendship always had a mercenary angle — Jardin could get her linked as well as laid. The association with Boing Boing boosted Blue’s career. How painful it must have been for Jardin to realize she was being used by a groupie who wanted to join her band. And people in pain exercise supremely bad judgment, which is what Jardin did when she “unpublished” posts about Blue from Boing Boing.

None of the rumors implicate either Mark or David as the root of the problem, which makes sense, as Mark just seems like such a nice guy, you can’t imagine him getting into a fight with anyone (did you see him on the Colbert Report?) and David isn’t nearly as active as the other three. Mark and David are like the Ringo and George to Doctorow and Jardin’s Lennon and McCartney, respectively. While you can see the latter getting into public feuds with people, the former just are so freakin’ nice and quiet, you’d have to murder their ickle robot puppies for them to get upset with you, and even then you could probably settle the matter over a cup of tea or something.

So, no matter what theory you subscribe to, the one thing all the theories have in common is that BoingBoing has compromised their principles for some unnameable reason, which makes the compromising of said principles all the more suspect. For a group of editors who decry the Bush Administration (and who doesn’t anymore, really?) they sure have learned a few lessons from the last 8 years under Bush Jr’s reign, such as how to talk without actually saying anything.

War is Peace.
Secrecy is Transparency.
Long live BoingBoing.

I always knew that FOX news was a bunch of racist, elitist, neo-con bastards, but to go this far is fucked up. From MoveOn.org:

FOX’s smears against Obama are out of control–have you heard about them? I just signed a petition telling FOX that their use of racism and prejudice is not okay. Would be great if you signed too.

First, a paid FOX commentator accidentally confused “Obama” with “Osama” and then joked on the air about killing Obama. Next, a FOX anchor said a playful fist pound by Barack and Michelle Obama could be a “terrorist fist jab.” (Seriously!) And then, FOX called Michelle Obama “Obama’s baby mama”–slang used to describe the unmarried mother of a man’s child.

Nearly 100,000 folks have signed a petition that will be delivered to FOX. Can you sign too? The more names, the bigger the impact. Here’s the link:

http://pol.moveon.org/stopthesmears/?r_by=13009-8324528-tTuJeNx&rc=paste

As many of you know, we here at BoMb have been supporting Mike Gravel’s candidacy since he was a Democrat. Ideologically, he lines up with everything we stand for:

Continue reading →

From BBC News:

Apparently, a creative-minded car salesman in Missouri had an idea on how to stop flagging car sales due to increased gas prices: buy a car, get a gun for free!

Continue reading →