Whoa

10 Easy Steps to Fascism in America.

Kinda scary. There certainly are stepping blocks in place for a horrible Über-State. Not that it will necessarily wind up in that place. Terrifying to think about, though. What I'm not looking forward too is when the prominent activists, journalists and whatnot all disappear.

Luckily, the checks and balances are not all destroyed. There are still steps to be taken and actions against the general rotten state of affairs.

Constant Vigilance, after all, is the price of democracy. Not a sacrifice of liberties. Not a random and volatile war for capital gain.

Uh, to arms? Not literally, of course, but it'd be pretty excellent if The People started standing up for Themselves, myself included.

In an unrelated note, sometimes I'm filled with pride for some of my students and disgust for some of the others. I have one girl, for instance, who printed out a bunch of signs with the Homo-Rainbow (phrase stolen from Ween) and the declaration "These are the colors of America. I support bi and gay people." She and her friends are wearing them around school today.

That's awesome. I'm all for standing for people. And student activism!

Of course, I walked into the bathroom earlier and someone had taped it up in the urinal. That is disgusting. Intolerance, as cool as it seems, is not cool at all. It's stupid, narrow-minded bullshit. I'm preaching to the choir here, probably, but it is most definitely a putrid practice. And a couple of kids were joking about how they were going to dispose of the signs. What the best way would be.

"I'm going to rip this up and stomp on it."
"I'm going to take it home and set it on fire."

Equally as gross.

Whoa

I'm terrified.

And aroused?

Violence

It has been a gross couple of days.

Lou Dobbs has said some smart things about the Virginia Tech Massacre. You can find them here. I'll summarize here though if you don't want to read that article.

The VTech killings are an absolute travesty. Even though there have been 250 school shootings in the past 80 years, the biggest killers in colleges are alcohol and suicide. Binge Drinking, say officials, also leads to the majority of the Rape cases reported on campuses. And then there's the violence that is not sensational, the individual murders, beat-downs and robberies.

Then we get incidents where the very next day 157 are killed in explosions in Baghdad. It doesn't get nearly the coverage the VTech killings did. It's half a world a way. But it's a more solvable situation than what happened in Blacksburg. That kid was an anomaly. A tragic anomaly. These blasts in Baghdad are part of a statement of terror and a direct reaction to the political turmoil that has been caused largely by the US-led "intervention." These people by and large just want the United States out.

And on the same day, we are treated to ridiculous shit like this where Secret Service Agents aren't competent enough to use their own firearms. The NRA and gun lobbyists are worried that the Virgina Tech Bloodbath is going to be "bogarted" for the anti-gun cause. They should be more worried about this story. Both stories, of course, argue similar points, but the Gun Accident where trained Secret Service Agents wind up injuring each other unintentionally speaks stronger than the kid who goes batshit and takes out 32 of his peers. There is no stopping the latter from committing some act of violence but there is plenty we can do about the accidents.

Anyway. It's been a gross couple of days.

Battle of the Browsers

I recently switched back to Safari because Firefox was sapping my computer and making her crash more than was needed. Safari's not perfect, but it's better.

Stuff like this, however, makes me want to switch back.

Curses!

Also, I'm sure this was my most engaging post as of yet.

EDIT: That link is clearly the wrong one. I'm going to leave it, though, because it amuses me.

Terrible

Here's something bound to enrage or at least dissapoint y'all.

Fox news has hijacked Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s death for ridiculing the left. Ugly, ugly stuff.

Man, it's a shame Vonnegut was a humanist who believed in the power of the general people and not the power of a few, cracked and greedy political leaders.

Web 2.0

I wasn't named Time's Person of the Year for nothing.

So here I am, joining Technorati as well as Digg and Twitter in one day. This is what happens, folks, when school is cancelled.

Anyway, the major reason for this post (third today!) is that I need to post this link.

Enjoy

As predicted

I joined Twitter. You can check out my posts (as I know you're all chomping at the bit to) here.

I think because food plays an important part of my life AND I've just posted my first post about drinking coffee, I'm going to try to work in eating on every post.

Also, I was thinking - and I need your opinions on this, dear readers (a simple comment will suffice) - should I try and take up all 140 characters with every post?

Krister, out

Twitterlee-Dee

All right, if you have not heard of it there exists these days an interesting micro-blog site called Twitter. You have 140 characters to post about whatever. Usually it winds up being posts about what that person happens to be doing. If you were consistent about it, at the end of your life you might have an interesting, stacatto autobiography.

But what is perhaps more fascinating is Twittervision. On Twittervision you get a globe and the latest Twitter posts pop up from the geographic locations they were made. It's incredible. The majority of the posts are from the United States, with Europe and it's myriad languages, Mexico and Spanish and the rest of the world following behind. I've only seen one post from Japan and one post from the South Pacific apart from that. I was alerted to the existence of Twittervision by an article that suggested "a savvy journalist might watch Twittervision to look for interviews on current crises."

If I had my way, I'd have a projector running Twittervision against a wall in my house 24/7.

Anyway, I expect this blog will be updated momentarily with news of my joining Twitter and a link to my feed.

I had no idea...

Huh! 86 years of misleading people!
Vomitoria were no place for vomiting, it would seem.
Take THAT 7th grade Latin teacher. Sorta. She barely taught us Latin.

Anyway, interesting to note!

clipped from dictionary.reference.com Main Entry: vomitorium Part of Speech: n Definition: 1754, "passage or opening in an ancient amphitheater, leading to or from the seats," from L. (Macrobius, Sat., VI.iv); see vomit. Erroneous meaning "place where ancient Romans (allegedly) deliberately vomited during feasts" is attested from 1923. Etymology: Latin vomitorius, alluding to the path's discharging of the spectators Usage: plural vomitoria

Haha, what?

This is pretty great. It's a livejournal post!

Oh man, it's great, though.

So is dinner. But you know what isn't? Grading. And unfortunately I'm about to trade the former for the latter.

LAME.

Also Even llamas do it