Thursday 29 January 2015

Two Minutes Closer To Midnight and other Poorly Contextualized Framings

If I have to read one more headline about deflated footballs I an going to scream... The bait and switch misdirection monkeys owe me at least ten to fifteen minutes of my life back as I figure that's about how long it took me to quickly ignore the couple of dozen hundred headlines and expert opinions about just how hard it is to deflate a football... WHAT THE FUCK?!!!

I'd say I feel better having ranted that, but it would be a lie, so I won't.

While I'm discussing lost time, it's my understanding that a clock just skipped a minute, bringing us 2 minutes closer to midnight. Not that I live or die by the words of Nobel piece-prize laureates (bad autocorrect left on purpose), given their recent track record on giving the prize to unconvicted war criminals... Maybe it's all based on the word of an ex-president too, for all I know...

I did catch a great article on the world bank / IMF over at Corbett report which I encourage everyone to read. Let's face it, poverty and hunger in Africa would have been wiped out decades ago if that's what these vampires truly wanted and that statement should be it's own proof... At least it has been for me. Which is what leads me to wonder why are they charged with keeping a list like this in the first place? Should I believe the list to be accurate -OR- should I be running out to do business with only companies on this list? I'd say it's best to go with the moniker of 'takes one to know one' or 'pot calling the kettle black' given what I already know and hate in regards to SNC Lavalin... But I so hate actually agreeing with the world bank that I'm torn on this one.

It's all in who frames the picture. For example this person is blaming technology for dissolving national borders, yet governments started the process with free-trade agreements and tax incentives. Consider just how much easier it is for your job to permanently move to another country. Heck, most times the other country even pays them to move there. Now maybe you get to visit that country for three months while you train people (who are to be paid a fraction of your salary) how to be you, and maybe you're valuable enough that you simply show up for work one morning and the place is for rent, but either way, they know it's harder to move a person than an entire business permanently to a different country... Besides, the linked article seems to think a passport (which I don't even own) defines ones nationality... Wrong. The tax office that threatens you with jail, bankruptcy, and or public flogging if you don't pay them defines your nationality, because if it were all about passports, I'd have a whole lot more in my pocket than this ball of lint.

if In case you needed another example, young people are a lost generation who cannot fix gadgets... If you are like I am (prone to opening and trying to fix gadgets) you understand that most gadgets are designed to rip themselves apart thanks to strategically placed glue and flimsy ribbon cables, or even poorly soldered chips or other appendages. The original iPod nano is a great example, if one of those died under warranty Apple simply gave you a new one because they knew it would cost more to fix than it was worth. Well, this practice is not limited to Apple and iPods, it now applies to many consumer electronics devices and gadgets. Even some $2000+ laptops fall into this category in so much as there might be an 'SSD' or 'M.2' hard disk or '8gb RAM' or even a 'GTX970 video card' which is not actually a separate component at all, but is soldered to the main board... Some laptops even go so far as to solder the keyboard to the back of the motherboard... All the convenience of a laptop, with the disposability of a tablet... They simply haven't figured out how to make the screen a directly attached component yet because it's not very easy to type on the back of the screen... They'll eventually figure that one out though...

-d©

Monday 19 January 2015

Minion Flavored, Me Too Stew

Well, the resulting stupid appears not to have finished resulting... Never have I been less Charlie and more not Charlie than I am after reading this. I mean, not to steal the phrase from last week's Smoking Mirrors, but talk about poking a bear with a pointy stick... And all at the same time, let's not start talking about Trilaterals, Bilderbergs, and bankers, who most likely financed, trained, and provided safe passage through intercontinental borders... It's not as though the culprits were not known, so how does one or more person leave the front lines of Syrian terror wars to go on a killing spree in Paris? If you didn't ask that question, but rather pointed out the growing risk of homegrown terror attacks, then you might be Charlie, unified in solidarity shouting 'freedom of the press' which must be some acronym for bullshit...

I haven't yet done the math to figure out how one phrase equals the other, but then there are the math laws used by bankers where one divided by zero equals minus one (house), contrary to normal math, so maybe my normal person math won't crack that code. Speaking of codes, maybe it's that seven year itch thing, but, didn't they publish that cartoon a broken mirrors age ago? Hmmmm... It's not as though they've not been trying to sell a war against Arabs to people genuinely disinterested in warring against Arabs for decades, so it's really the same sales pitch filled with even more desperation, unless I've spoken too soon. Benny even went so far as warning France beforehand, so where is the press which yearns to be uncensored now?

[crickets]

Obviously my assumptions and conclusions must be the result of exposure to environmental toxins or mind altering drugs to land so far from the reported truth. The press is minion and I'm just a dude who reads whatever I can find, bathroom walls, cereal boxes, blogs, and what not. How could anything but sheer madness explain my constant refusal to join the minions in their pot of me too stew?

Of course, the madness could be in how I persist at pounding a bloody and broken fist against the walls of society's perceived reality, knowing full-well the chaos that would ensue, should I ever successfully fracture the illusion enough to break the levee. Because, once that ripple effect begins, it pounds on every surface previously thought to be solid and grinds it into sand.


In other news, I suppose it's best that Target refused to hire me all those times I applied given that now I'd simply be unemployed at the same time as everyone else who was hired there. I do feel badly for the people who are working there, but then the only shopping experience I had felt like the store was staffed with kindergarten students who learned to speak by reading text messages phonetically. It was also obvious at that time, why I had not been considered Target employee material.

-dirt©

Wednesday 7 January 2015

I'm Not He Though He Might Be Me

I admit I've not been keeping up on all the 'news' lately, which is not to say I am unaware of a third Asian passenger jet performing odd aerial maneuvers into the bottom of the ocean because somehow these things find me... I simply don't have links... Not that i can't find things to talk about, or come up with linkage to the things which piss me off, I always can, but the time constraints on doing so are rather off-putting...

Today, I thought it might be fun to list the many fucked gripes which I'm sure afflict many of us in this first-world idiocy of daily survival...

Plastic bags. There are now stores which charge us per bag we need to put our groceries into thanks to some assholeish green tax, yet, years ago, some assholeish save-the-trees group of douchbags managed to get paper bags abolished and boxes, which all of these products arrived in are recycled... There is no logic which makes oil based non degradable, barely recyclable, inferior solutions better by charging a nickel each while trees grow via the magic of nature...

It is presently illegal to be on a bus without valid proof of payment, i.e. a valid transfer... Transfers used to be optional, non-mag stripped smaller papers, making them easier to recycle and less waste overall... Where are the save-the-planet pricks now? Also notable, the OPUS (aka Orange) machines on buses are more frequently broken than the former optional transfer making machines so payment is often not actually available... And third on this topic, these electronic passes cost us, need to be replaced on an expiration date, and were already hacked in other areas before their introduction here... Tell me how this solved counterfeiting if I only need a cell phone, software, and a bit of ambition rather than a printing press and magnetic strip writer?

I gripe about the transit system as I get on a bus which is either ten minutes late, or eleven minutes early according to the recently modified schedule which seems to force me to leave fifteen minutes earlier to minimize my standing in the Arctic tundra... So now I leave the house two hours before work, to get to a place that is a fifteen minute drive... As such time becomes more precious and leads back to the aforementioned fuck links...

The mind-numbingly illogical decisions of bureaucrats who seem to have attended the same school of bad decision making and the fine arts of embezzlement academy all work in some hive mind grouping. I laugh at the requirement of presenting a birth certificate to prove I exist any time I deal with some government entity that didn't exist ten minutes ago, yet now, I somehow need to deal with... Maybe it's the irony that whichever entity this is should be proving their right to exist to me, or maybe they really are pod people who can't prove they were born because, well, birth implies a mother at the very least.

They always want the original document mailed to them... But if you really must, appear in person, just drop by our only inconveniently located office on any Tuesday whose date is divisible by three *unless the full moon is within 36 hours+/-* between 9 and 9:15 where an unpleasant troll will make and authorize photocopies for you then carefully file them in a special filing-cabinet / paper-shredder... You will be contacted in 6 to 8 weeks to be asked why you haven't yet sent in the paperwork and promptly threatened with prison or waterboarding depending on the mood of whomever drew the short straw and had to call you... Imagine all the trouble you could have spared yourself had you simply lost the $800 notarized original in the mail... If they work for 'us' we need to fire them, yet they are the only ones with job security these days due to an extreme lack of thoroughly incompetent and malevolently evil pod-people in today's world.

I presently have to reapply to beg for a pardon for failing a breathalyzer almost 9 years ago (a crime as bad as murder, and worse than stealing the retirement funds of a hundred thousand people because I needed a bigger yacht), because, last last year I applied before the mandatory 5 years had passed. I know that the laws of mathematics have changed and that these days there is no '2', and that the laws have now changed and everything I paid for before has now expired granting me the privilege of paying the new and improved fees I can not afford due to a criminal record denying me better paid jobs.

I am not Charlie because I am dirt©. My solidarity is exemplified in not standing in large groups chanting 'I am conform' like everyone else. Sure I am in support of everyone's right not to be gunned down for expressing their ideas, I mean, I'm here doing precisely that... Whether they are correct or not remains to be seen but we should all have the right to express ideas and opinions, and hold a vigil by doing exactly that not chanting some catch-phrase supposedly supporting freedom of the press while not realizing we didn't have it last week and being Charlie doesn't give it to us next week... I am not the press, and my freedom to say whatever I chose to say came by claiming it for myself and owning it wherever I go... Maybe Charlie is me, but I'm no Charlie: bound by sponsors and readership numbers...

It all weighs down, and keeps down as intended. Concrete shoes for the spirit and fire to burn off the fuel needed to resist. And more and more bizarre hostilities from the day to day folks who don't actually know why this anger exists nor who to launch it at, yet I'm crazy if I feel resonance from this discord. Somewhere along the lines of time all of it will reek of sabotage, but it won't be my universe destroyed once people smell the roof on fire as my universe includes the endless possibilities including the ones where I am wrong. I am a best case/worst case daydreamer of possibilities and measurer of probabilities, nothing more, nothing less.

-dirtykid©