Political Facebooking

Many people use the Internet in many different ways. This Social Networking Internet has become incredibly popular in recent years and the majority of that which I am involved in is the Facebook side of the Social Web.

More often than not I'm not using this platform in a highly political fashion. Commenting on political groups and sending personal messages to people inflaming political hatred against me or others.

Quickly I am seeing this is all just a road with no end. I only end up "blocking" people as they only lie and deceive even when confronted in a respectful and fact-based manner. This leaves me thinking that it's all pointless to be civil and be fact-based in the first place.

It's possible that much of the dishonesty and vile rhetoric is more tied to the nature of the "no consequences" Web, but I don't think so. I think the art of political debate itself is dead, murdered by the Tea Party and Fox News. Without facts and without any interest in civil discourse on both sides of a debate, the debate is by its very nature non-productive exchanges of name calling and ad hominem attacks of other natures.

How often do people question your faith, or lack thereof? Think on this for a minute. Now realize that on this Easter Weekend I have had some vile Facebooker question my faith. And for what reason? Because I called him out on spouting bigotry.

People want me to be meek, to be "Christian" in my words. I think not. I see all this vile fringe underground of politics coming to surface and I will fight the racist code speak, the outright bigotry, the partisan lies and the anti-American rhetoric. If they want to use their KKK tactics of ganging up on me and hiding behind the sheets of their fake accounts and fake names then so be it.

I shall be the stone that weathers the storm, and if I must die or be made a straw man or made an enemy of civility in the process then so be it.

I see not the strength to stand fast on the Left-wing. I see a lot of good people backing down or letting a pack of comedians lead the way when they are not the best people to bring forth the important issues.

The big part about Facebook that is highly deceptive is that many believe either that people are full of it and being insane or hyperbolic anytime they say anything online, or they believe that Facebooking is the answer to getting their voice out. In all honesty I am no different in the real world than I am online with only minor exceptions.

Some guy is currently trying to pick a fight with me, and I'm not joshing around when I'm trying to set up a time and place to just have the brawl. I don't care. Not anymore.

As the war criminal George W. Bush once said:

"Bring it on!"

YouTube Changes Its Face On Us

This new streamlined YouTube is improved in the sense that we can see a billion & one videos lined up, but somehow it feels like they just made the whole site a video version of Twitter.

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I think it's all a big grand master plan to get everybody on Facebook in the whole universe. We will make you Facebook even if you don't own a computer, all devices must have Facebook Apps to be worthy of creation!

Jack Kerouac, The Diamond Sutra, and Blogging

Not only would Jack Kerouac have had a weblog, but he would have been blogging on Open Salon.

I feel that his writing techniques and contributions to Modern Literature are mirrored in the so-called “blogosphere” of today. I also feel that Open Salon is the only blogging-platform that is the home of artists of all stripes and the bastion of free expression in the mania of the web.

I would never go so far as to say that this little weblog here, that you currently reading, is anything close to what Jack Kerouac might contribute artistically to the community.

I only to seek to draw out that I am influenced, in part, by the same elements that influenced him to drive away from the cautious roads of standard-literature-procedure and drive boldly forth into the deeper forms of thought and real-life observation.

The Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text teaching avoidance to the extremes of mental attachment, has long held deep meaning to me and I am returning to it again after many years to seek it’s truth once more. Every verse of The Diamond Sutra begins "Thus I have heard."

Thus shall you think of this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

Jack Kerouac defined his “method” of writing in way that also effects my own blogging efforts greatly in terms of raw influence:

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside your own house
Be in love with your life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
The unspeakable visions of the individual
No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in your morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge
Write for the world to read and see your exact pictures of it
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
You're a Genius all the time
Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

This is the driving force of today’s cognitive-blog interlay system.

I am the Writer-Director of the Earthly Enterprises!

I struggle the stretch of the flow that never ceases, even as I command it to do so.

Pure crazy, pure declarations, pure honesty.

Not fear nor shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge.

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There is only so much I take away from Kerouac, as I have made more clear in bold.

And to any thinking whatever I am doing is wise … This is not the case.

I believe “edgy” is the term that keeps getting ascribed to the end result of this practice.

That and getting banned from websites.

So I invite everyone who already was live-journal blogging to keep doing your thing because this noise over here is usually taken as throwing firecrackers at people.

Fair warning to the curious.

Tracking The Stimulus Money

The most obvious choice for a tax-payer who is interested in learning more about the stimulus money and how it is being spent is Recovery.Gov.

There is also the addition of the website Recovery.Org to the mix.

But the most open-sourced transparency and best place, in my opinion, to address this issue while using the internet as a source would be at the George Mason Unversity's Mercatus Center who recently released the website StimulusWatch.Org.

If you desire to take a more direct approach to tracking the funds you should visit ShovelWatch.Org.

 

 

eTrade and the Recession

I have been intentionally over-paying those little everyday expenses like tipping and things like not using the local ‘insider’ coupon clip.

It’s been awhile for me personally since I bought a product online, but supporting eTrade is another way is try to do your little part to shoot some life into the economy while your online.

I plan to buy the next gift for someone special via online.

Net-Trade is complex for the ordinary consumer to understand but there are multiple ways to support domain hosts, web loggers, local businesses and local markets.

Change starts at home.

Making your home more energy efficient in every way possible is a sound investment. Energy costs are not likely to drop in any foreseeable future.

This is just one of many steps I suggest you take to affect real change in your local environment and community.

The federal government can only do so much. Each bailout and stimulus they devise will ultimately fail if the Consumer Markets do not participate.

We need to take the time to educate ourselves enough as citizens to better understand our role at this stage in our national economy.

We all can make some difference.

We all can effect some amount change within our respective spheres.

Pizzaman versus EricG

I have managed to make a profound impact upon a man with the screen name Pizzaman and before I ever got a chance to project my blather in this posting from Alan Colmes’ Liberaland, he was already name-dropping me. I don’t mind, a name-drop is a name drop and if someone reads my homepage I’m happy, but I would rather people at least comment directly on my blog if they are so invested in me specifically to use me as a reoccurring example. The way I see it if you have something to say to a man you say it to his face or in case of the internet you send him a notification of your comments. I send emails to all the conservative radio jocks and spinsters that I negatively comment on via blog. I also send emails to those that I might praise in one of my blogs. I would call such things being a ‘real person.’ Standing up for what you have to say rather than shouting out items and then fleeing the scene before any person involved in your comments might defend themselves.

I don’t believe in passing solely my opinion in this blog. If someone reads it and decides for themselves a conclusion other than my own, then so be it. I think this “Pizzaman” is so biased that his commentary that the commentary is useless in regards to liberals and ultimately to all politics. These fundamentalist ideologies are destructive. And most importantly they are anti-society.

Decide for yourself:

Kregg Reply:

Alan quotes: Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the white firefighters “understandably attract this court’s sympathy. But they had no vested right to promotion. Nor have other persons received promotions in preference to them.”

K: No one was asking for a ‘vested right to promotion’ but simply a fair chance at one. To throw out the test results because the ‘right’ races didn’t score well denied those who DID score well the opportunity to advance.

Pizzaman Reply:
June 29th, 2009 at 3:43 pm

Further to Kregg’s comments against Ginsberg:

Since when is required that an applicant for a job have a “vested” right to that job in order to have a valid discrimination claim? If a black and a white are competing for a job, NEITHER has a “VESTED” right to the job, but EACH has a valid discrimination claim IF the job is denied on grounds of race. What’s so hard abouit THAT? Why does it it take a genius to figure this out. Why can the conservative majority of the Supreme Court see this, but Ginsberg and her liberal colleagues not? Hmmmmm? Answer: Blinding, pathetic white guilt. EricG — care to respond? Did YOU ever violate God’s law against racial discrimination? I didn’t. And if not, why hold us BOTH accountable?

pizzaman



Do I violate God’ Law about … racial discrimination?

I know no such specific part of God’s Law. It’s against hate, not specifically ethnic hate but all hate.

Like right now I hate you. I hate you because you keep bringing me up in the course of making your points and I have never done such a thing to another internet user in all my life.

Maybe I should start. Using people on the internet as examples of racism and bigotry and hate for liberals. Why not?

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We all violate the law against hate. We are human after all. But we must fight this within ourselves.

Just as a person who feels ’superior’ to others due to race should fight this urge within themselves to view themselves as superior.

Kind of like … the way how you view yourself as superior to liberals. Is that racism? Think about it. It’s not racism but do you think of liberals as your equal? Intellectually or as a person at least?

I doubt it. That’s why I have no respect for you as a man, your opinions aside.

You’re just one more vile dog out there causing harm to nation with partisanship taken to new heights.

Waste of time all true patriots. Seriously.

Grow up and be an American.

NEWSFLASH LIBERALAND!

Pizzaman is God!!!!

He knows all the transgressions under God’s Eyes because he is God and knows all the secrets of the universe and where exactly he is accountable for everything he ever did.

“And if not, why hold us BOTH accountable?”

We are all accountable. You are accountable before God for how much you hate your fellow Americans called ‘liberals’ and in the same I am held accountable for my hate against Americans called ‘conservatives.’

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Next time you want to pick a internet fight with someone you might want to pick someone who is timid and will back off. You’ll be much happier ramming your nonsense and BS down their throat than you ever will dealing with me.

This is the web. You’re going to be more a coward than you would be to my face and I’m going to be more edgy here than I would be in person.

But in the end it’s best we don’t met. I don’t enjoy people who can’t be civil and respectful. I don’t think much of people like yourself, or rather people who present themselves as you have.

It’s a bunch of hollow ‘look me and my hatred and superior intellect’ while when you look around you don’t find people like myself who are outspoken, surely, but not involved with declaring myself ‘above’ others.

I’m right and you’re wrong. About ____. That’s true.

But I’m no better than you and vice versa.

This is America. Try to act like it. The burden falls to you as well as I. If you won’t do anything but be a partisan against liberals then you are a piece of carp American, same for me and cons.

It’s not a game. So don’t screw around.

　

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That exactly right, Alan. She not NOT being nominated to vote with the conservative majority. She SUPPOSED to be nominated for her intellectual ability to bring the CONSTITUTION — with the 14th Amendment, a color-blind, non-racist document, halelluliah! — to bear on hard legal issues. But IN FACT, Obama has nominated her precisely because of her penchant for giving preference to black or brown skin tone. Yes, appoint her . . . because she has the intellectual and legal qualifications, and under law, the President has that raw power. But be aware, and beware, of what Obama has appointed: Raw judicial power. And to hell with the Constitution. See Ricci v. New Haven. Funny, true conservatives who act in good faith usually lose out on the raw power decisions. And you EricG, are thinking, “Yeah, yeah.”

Pizzaman

(Somehow he knows my mind before I‘ve read enough about Ricci v. New Haven to feel informed enough to comment. Very strange.)

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Um Cara Reply:
June 29th, 2009 at 1:24 pm

I think he has nominated her because she is an anti civil libertarian, nothing to do w/ ‘preference to black or brown skin tone’.



Pizzaman Reply:
June 29th, 2009 at 1:42 pm

You’re naive.

BlissfulConservative Reply:
June 29th, 2009 at 1:46 pm

I’ll agree with your first sentence UM, but I think a lot of her decisions would be based on skin color/socioeconomics.

Course that is my opinion.

Pizzaman Reply:
June 29th, 2009 at 2:25 pm

blissfulconservative:

Stand up! “That is my opinion,” my deeply creviced arse. Sotomayor has made a career out of skin color and national origin. I’m an American who “happens to be” hispanic, and I’m fed up with the condescension. “La Raza” = “the race.” This is a collective admission of special need. Well, I don’t need — and I emphatically REJECT — any benefits conferred because of liberal white guilt. “This isn’t about you,” you Anglo, EricG–style liberals. And it’s not about you either, brown skinned hispanics or blacks. It’s about what WE are as a people, and about our founding, our BINDING documents. Get that? “BINDING,” in more sense than one. WE, as one, are BOUND by this document. Want to reject it? Fine, then go fight the civil war all over again.

pizzaman

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(I‘m ‘Anglo-style’ now. I feel judged based on the color of my skin!)

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OK. As of 4:37 p.m., on 6/29/09, the uncontested fact is that a firefighter (aka “fireman”) was denied a promotion simply because he outscored all minority competitors: black, hispanic, Asian, Venusian, Venetian, Malthusian, and Carpathian. The 14th Amendment says: “No State shall . . . . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws [on ground of race].” Why does the conservative majority have to engage in a death struggle to uphold this premise, which follows so naturally from the eralier premise that :We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”? Is it that we no longer believe in “self-evident” truths? Or a Creator? God help us if that’s the case. What saved Jews under Hitler? Raw American power? Or adherence to the idea that, under God’s Natural Law, we are equal? EricG: Would you contend that we are ignorant regarding God’s wish concerning Jews in concentration camps? Or the tortured in Darfur? Has false pride so fogged your internal compass that drops of condensation obscure your needle? Think straight. God gave you a mind. I don’t mean to pick on EricG or be mean to him, but he has set himself up as the enemy of natural reason, which flows from God. If not from God,then from EricG and the like-minded who deny all constants, except those like “don’t racially discriminate” or “don’t screw the planet.” But even in asserting these constants, EricG (aka modern liberal man) acknowledges a source of authority and truth greater than himself. Who might this be?

pizzaman

EricG Reply:
June 29th, 2009 at 5:16 pm

I see my name in there a lot.

You care to label yourself while your labeling me?

Are you a conservative? Are you a Christian?

How about an American?

Are you now, or have you ever associated with a communist?
“don’t mean to pick on EricG or be mean to him, but he has set himself up as the enemy of natural reason, which flows from God”

Well, your ‘good Christian’ self did just that and you will need to face up for what you’ve done.

The fact remains that we have freedom of religion in this country so whatever insane fundamentalism you are fitting yourself up for … you can’t touch me.

So chew on that for awhile. I have my views on God and Christ and you have yours and in the end you can’t tell me what to think or cause me any harm or stop me from spreading the TRUTH OF JESUS CHRIST in the face of your vicious lies designed to keep people in chains of misery and hate.

“EricG: Would you contend that we are ignorant regarding God’s wish concerning Jews in concentration camps?”

We didn’t go to war over the Jews in WWII.

I don’t see your point, at all. If we could know for certain exactly what “God’s wish” was at any given moment our lives would be infinitely easier.

If you want to accept all the words of the KJB as truth and solid then that’s your failing and not mine. You go right ahead worshiping Constantine and his apprentice.

“Think straight. God gave you a mind”

That’s not the problem. The problem is hate-monger and disgraces to humanity like yourself choose to promote idiocy and bigotry when others seek to fill the world with Christ’s love.

Glad to know you’re fighting me on this one.

Good to know I have people in my court.

“If not from God, then from EricG and the like-minded who deny all constant”

You are angering me by putting words in my mouth that I never said. Would you try not to lie so much about me? Please? It’s a simple request.

I never ‘denied all constants,’ show me where I did this.

Death is a constant. We all die. Time, gravity, etc.

I am trying not to degrade into name-calling and bitter comments but I’m not seeing a lot of Christian in anything you are saying. In fact I don’t even see any of God’s love in this very human posting of very biased views against me personally and liberals in general.

“acknowledges a source of authority and truth greater than himself. Who might this be?”

It’s God. It’s not my business to tell everyone else all the things of the world and everything I understand to be true. Supposedly we are supposed to learn things on our own without hand holding all the way through.

You all those who would attack someone for sharing a perspective on God other than fundamentalism are the ones who are ENEMIES OF REASON. The destroyers of Christ’s love in the streets and the followers of the hate-preachers who spread intolerance of gays and promote an end to religious freedom in the US.

Admit it. You hate this nation.

If it were another country you would never have to hear anything but the secularism of the state or the approved religion which sits just fine with you.

When you have to hear anything but your perfectly ARCANE and equally INSANE orthodoxy then you have to call some a ‘enemy of reason’ and ‘pick on them’ because it threatens everything you do to have people … question the idiocy of religion.

And yet pull away the greatest lessons. Thus making all the hate and BS you all drown yourselves in become nothing but a hollow shell which serves no purpose except to draw blood and feed Satan.

I will resist the swearing, and simply say:

Next time you want to pick on me come to my blog and say it to my face you coward.

Pizzaman = fascist pig

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Pizzaman = fascist pig

What Eric, no race card to follow.

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He is picking me out of the crowd and I can’t figure out why…

I retract that statement. I was pissed when typing that.

Are you going to retract some BS you posted?

Didn’t think so.

Typical conservative partisan-house unamerican bull from you guys … all day long.

Goliath Reply:
June 29th, 2009 at 5:48 pm

EricG

Take your meds please.. you’re really losing grasp on reality

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Whatever, you’re one more partisan loser who never once shown any respect to this nation or the liberals of the world.

You deserve all the anger and then some.

And all you conservatives are the ones losing your grip on reality.

I seem to remember debating if the recession even happened and if Bush was ever president or somethig like that the other day on here.

If anyone in America is living in a bubble of lies and falsehoods it would be the conservatives of America.

I shouldn’t care, that’s what my friends say.

they say you guys are fools who will never learn to be anything but fools.

I think more of you. But you don’t make it easy with the way you all treat me.

makes me think maybe I was wrong. Maybe you are all communist scum who deserve a bullet like some of my friends think…

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wooo Eric, its not good to get that upset. Nothing personal here, but maybe you should stop listing to your friends talking about bullets.

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They don’t believe in Christ or any of this side of my ‘bipartisan attempts’ so I can see where they are coming from, I guess.

But it’s insane. I’m the worst. I’ll be the first to say it. But I also see nothing to start with on the conservative side. No place I go send someone to hear a non-BS conservative perspective in politics.

People don’t believe something until they see it. If all you allow yourself to see is race and politics and religion you are missing the bigger picture.

But it’s all my opinion in the end. So I can state myself minus the name-calling and partisanship but who on the right will join me?

It’s a two-way street. When the other guy throws punches it’s hard to get anything done, it’s really that simple.

(There it is. Bickering about politics and my usual cry for sanity.)

Iran Explodes with Unrest

Huffington Post has the latest updates on the Iranian situation.

I would draw your attention to the final video on the post: "12:17 AM ET -- Awe-inspiring courage."