SemiConscious Dot Org

One year ago today.

Do you remember where you were when you first heard the chilling news reports?

Who can forget these terrifying images? I still see them in my nightmares every single night.

In the twelve long months that have followed, many have become complacent, lulled into a false sense of security, forgetting their duty to remain ever vigilant, ever suspicious, ever mindful of the Imminent Threat of Instantaneous Death posed by the Mooninite terrorists.

In the bloody aftermath, many in fact chose to blame the real victims: the policemen, politicians, and newscasters who scared the living shit out of people for absolutely no reason and were made fun of as a result. Some even laughed when the terrorist masterminds chose to pretend their murderous plot was all just a “big joke,” and later applauded when liberal activist judges predictably let them off the hook instead of sending them straight to Gitmo with all the other deadlock-wearing America haters.

Last night, in his final State of the Union speech, President Bush said…

Um…

I, uh…

Aw, the hell with it.

Why bother, at this late date? What’s the point? I just don’t have the energy for it. Besides, you already know what I think of the man, and if you read this blog regularly, you probably feel the same way about him.

He is George W. Bush. Lying is as natural to him as breathing. That’s all you really need to know, but if you truly hunger to hear what Dubya said and how pointless and wrong it was, check out the Rude Pundit. As usual, the Rude One sums up the STFU SOTU more succinctly and savagely than any of us mere mortals could ever hope to.

Here, look at some nice pictures instead. I took these on Sunday, when I went for a walk in the snow around Portland’s Back Bay.

There, I feel better already.

Many centuries ago, our ancestors first arrived on these shores, filled with hope that here, at last, was a place where they could practice their religion without discrimination. In the long years that followed, they endured prejudice, reprisals, threats, intimidation, even the occasional pogrom. Through it all, they clung tenaciously to their faith, buoyed by the belief that someday, their Faith would attain the level of respect and academic legitimacy that it so richly deserved.

At least, that day is here!

While the five academics drew laughs while discussing topics like meatballs, pirates and “saucy baptisms,” they spent most of the time discussing how the faith illuminates their own debates over the secular versus the profane, the fake versus the real, and the roles of communities and parody in religion.

Conference organizers received “hateful” e-mail and voice messages from Christians offended by Monday’s panel, said Northwestern University religious-studies professor Sarah Taylor. Whether other religious leaders agree the Flying Spaghetti Monster deserved such a forum is unclear: The panel drew an audience of only a hundred.

One panel member defended the discussion. “Most people don’t think we’re serious. They just keep saying, ‘You’re having a lot of fun,’” said University of Florida graduate student Samuel Snyder. “Yes, we’re having a blast. But … this is quite serious, too.”

Reaction to public disclosure of the spaghetti deity’s existence has ranged from hysterical laughter to staid criticism. “It is a serious offense to mock God,” wrote one Kansas state school-board member.

As if you needed any further proof that Pastafarianism has arrived as a true and proper Faith, we offer the following incontrovertible evidence. We feel this photo speaks for itself.

Well, my parents will no doubt be pleased to know that the tens of thousands of dollars they borrowed so I could go to college and get a Political Science degree weren’t totally wasted:

It turns out I might stand a flying chance of passing the citizenship test!

Here are 15 questions among 100 currently used in a US citizenship test. To pass, one needs to answer 7 or 8 of 10 questions correctly. See how many of these you know. You can check your answer by clicking for the next page.

My fancy-schmancy college edumacation enabled me to answer 12 of the 15 questions in the quiz correctly. No, I won’t tell you which 12.

You know who I’d really like to see take this test?

Yeah, these pigfuckers, and all their buddies. In the happy world I envision, every one of those “Minuteman” douchebags would be forced to take the citizenship test as a condition of retaining their citizenship.

Without any prep time.

At gunpoint.

Failure resulting in immediate deportation. At gunpoint.

Hey, a boy can dream, can’t he?

Now there’s an appetizing post title, eh?

Ok, so you may have noticed that I’ve been awfully hard on Windows Turd Sandwich Vista. Maybe you thought it was a little disingenuous of me to continually slam an operating system I had never actually owned or used, based solely on secondhand information I read online.

Well, now it’s firsthand, folks. My new employer issued me a laptop, and it came preloaded with Vista. I asked if it would be acceptable for me to upgrade to XP, but was told that, since we’ll be increasingly be asked to administer client computers that run Vista, we might as well learn to use it ourselves. I’ve now been using the laptop extensively for a week, long enough to offer some preliminary thoughts.

First off, Vista is every bit the bloated monster you’ve been warned about. My laptop is brand new and seriously souped up, with a 1.8 GB dual core processsor and three gigabytes of RAM…and it’s still slower than my four year old home computer, which has an old 2.1 Gig Pentium 4 and 512MB of RAM, and can boot in either XP or Ubuntu. Yup, that’s right: despite having almost twice the processing speed and six times the memory, it still takes longer to boot up, log in, and open and run programs. Hell, it’s comparable in speed to my Ubuntu laptop, which is almost ten years old, runs on a Pentium 3, and has only 128MB of RAM.

Vista’s not just bloated in the performance sense, either. The operating system and drivers take up 20 gigs of space on the hard drive, and that’s not even including the extra full gig occupied by the amazingly buggy and crash-prone Office 2007. XP, which upon its release drew complaints from users for its space-hogging, uses up about a quarter the drive space of Vista. Ubuntu? Less than a fifth.

“Alright, that’s some serious bloat,” you’re no doubt saying right about now. “But if it’s better, the tradeoff is worth it.” Alas, no: Improvements fall overwhelmingly in the Window Dressing category. Sure, the Aero desktop is kind of cool looking, but are translucent windows and neat widgets in the corner of the screen really worth all the resource gluttony? And yes, you can turn off Aero and save your processor, but if you’re not using it, then why did you bother forking out all the money for Vista in the first place?

I honestly thought that being forced use Vista would cause me to gain some grudging respect for it. I figured that firsthand experience would lead me to discover neat new features that would counteract all the negative press I’ve read about it. Thus far, it ain’t happening, kids. None of the supposed benefits have bowled me over, and the drawbacks are even more aggravating than I had figured they’d be. Add in the staggering price (anywhere from $150 for an upgrade to the cheapest version to $400 for a full install of the high-end variety) and it’s just not worth it.

Conclusion: Microsoft will sell seventy zillion copies.

Couldn’t have said it better myself:

What should US cable news be doing, other than leading the hour with live updates from Britney Spears’ custody hearing? Put another way, what does US cable news do better that it should be doing instead? The answer, my answer, is nothing. It’s perfectly tuned by the lords of the manor to service the land of genetically modified bread and circuses. What has it ever demonstrated to justify a higher expectation?

But the failed expectations are not the media’s alone. Most responsibility rests with the broken subjects of America’s broken media. Does Clinton versus Obama really merit more attention and sober analysis than Spears versus Federline? I don’t see why it should. One pair speak of “change,” and the other of mood swings, but it’s the same, leveled spectacle.

Read the whole thing.

Kids, let’s take a journey, way back through the misty veils of time, to the year 2003. It was a strange and unusual era: our President was a stupid, morally bankrupt thug; the Democrats were a bunch of spineless appeasers who rubber-stamped his every evil whim; we were involved in ugly, brutal wars on the other side of the planet for absolutely no reason whatsoever; and the White Stripes and Radiohead released the year’s best albums.

Ok, so maybe things really weren’t very different back then.

In 2003, the world of football was dominated by the New England Patriots, a hard-nosed bunch that won a series of close, ugly, low-scoring games punctuated by ball control offense and molar-rattling defense. Here at last, one might assume they’ve detected a historical difference: for this year’s edition of the same team is powered by a record-setting scoring machine which throws the ball constantly. Some in the national sporting press have even gone so far as to hang the dreaded “finesse team” label on them because of that.

Well, they can all shut the hell up now, because what happened in yesterday’s AFC championship game against the San Diego Chargers was nothing less than a reversion to Pats Of The Stone Age. Faced with a big, physical team that was supposedly going to push them all over the field, they grounded the aerial assault, lined up in a three tight end formation, and ran the ball right down their fucking throats.

During that final, spirit-crushing nine minute drive to run out the clock, I kept hoping that the camera would pan over to Philip Rivers on the sideline. I wanted to see if he was preoccupied with jawing at the fans while his team had its heart ripped out and its season ended. Alas, it was not to be, as the camera never alighted on his face again, and we’ll sadly never know. Bye bye, douchebag.

As if the Patriots kicking the obnoxious Chargers to the curb wasn’t satisfying enough, the New York Giants beat the Green Bay Packers for the NFC title, a fantastic event which simultaneously

a) Removes the only NFC team that made me even slightly nervous
b) Ensures that I won’t have to listen to the national media fellate Brett Favre for two straight weeks
c) Means that another Boston team will win a title at the expense of another New York team
d) Fulfills my wish for the Patriots to beat a Manning in the postseason this year.

Everything’s coming up Milhouse!

For years now, our great Nation, preoccupied with such fripperies as war, terrorism, erosion of civil liberties, and economic collapse, has sadly turned a blind eye to one of the worst injustices ever perpetrated in the history of the world. This egregious oppression goes on right under our noses, day after day, and no one does a thing about it. The cry of this maligned and persecuted group has often been ruthlessly drowned out, yet they shall never be silenced! If you listen very closely, you can hear their voices pleading for justice:

“Why, O Why, Will No One Let Us Sell Our Organs to the Highest Bidder?”

But fear not! Martyrs for the sainted cause of organ-selling have a champion in libertarian reporter John Stossel!

(Above: Freddie Mercury, minus the gayness and talent)

This tireless Apostle of Free Markets, last seen heroicially defending the rights of price gougers to exploit humanitarian tragedies for monetary gain, has turned his fearsome rhetorical guns on those Jacobin nogoodniks who imperiously lord over the last vestige of medicine not subject to the grandmotherly kindness of the Profit Motive.

Or, to put it another way, those who don’t think that you should be able to sell or buy a kidney are a bunch of fucking Commies:

Why isn’t someone with two healthy organs allowed to put one on the market? Because in 1984, U.S. Rep. Al Gore sponsored a law making the sale of organs punishable by five years in jail. Congress couldn’t contain its enthusiasm; the bill passed 396 to 6.

So giving someone a kidney is a good deed, but selling the same kidney is a felony.

When I confronted Dr. Brian Pereira of the National Kidney Foundation about that, he said, “The current system functions extremely well.” I asked him how the system could be working “extremely well” when 17 people die every day because they can’t get kidneys. He said that the “desperate (situation) doesn’t justify an unwise policy decision.”

The Kidney Foundation fears that poor people would be “exploited.” But what gives the foundation the right to decide for poor people? The poor are as capable as others of deciding what trade-offs to make in life. No one forces them to give up an organ. To say the poor are too desperate to resist a dangerous temptation is patronizing.

But gatekeepers like Dr. Pereira say there should be “no barter, no sale of organs. That’s where we have to step in.” When I asked him who that “we” is that has the right to “step in,” he replied, “The government (and) the professional societies.”

That conceit—that the government and “professional societies” must decide for all of us, and the underlying hostility toward commerce—kills people.

Truer words were never spoken! Why should a bunch of “doctors” have the right to decide, on the purely arbitrary basis of “medical need,” who should have first crack at those sweet, sweet kidneys? And if a rich guy wants to buy his way to the top of the transplant list, who are these bureaucrats to say he can’t? And the little girl who was ahead of him because of her greater “need?” Well, maybe she should have taken greater personal responsibility and not been born poor! Bad choice on her part, but why should the rich have to unduly suffer for it?

And why stop at kidneys, anyway? You only need one eye to see, one lung to breathe, and one ball to procreate, right? You could walk perfectly well with a missing toe or two. And once a guy played Major League Baseball with only one arm. Your kid was run over by a truck? Sure, that’s a bummer, but don’t compound the emotional loss with a monetary one – sell off his undamaged organs to pay the hospital bills! (And maybe a nice new car or vacation getaway. Hey, you’ve suffered enough.)

No doubt, there are many Bleeding Heart Bedwetters who will envision all sort of “slippery slope” scenarios that could stem from the selling of human organs for profit. However, such people are Communists who hate America and Free Enterprise, and should all just move to China.

Oh, Jesus H. Pencil-Necked Christ.

Hey, he lasted longer than I ever thought he would. I thought that trade would be the death of the franchise, that he would do to the Patriots what he did to the Vikings and the – ok, he didn’t really destroy the Raiders. They were a rotting corpse long before he got there. He merely hastened the decomposition…for which I am profoundly grateful, truth be told. Fuck the Raiders right in the ear.

But he made it through an entire season without reverting to Randy Being Randy, and that season just happened to be the greatest season any wide receiver has ever had in the history of the NFL. That’s a pretty good return on the investment of a fourth round draft pick.

Unfortunately the old demons have returned with a vengeance. And even assuming he isn’t guilty of the charges (which, given his history, is at best iffy), his contract is up, and he’ll probably require the richest contract any receiver has ever signed in order to stay. Considering the rapidly aging linebacker corps who will shortly need to be replaced and the Pro Bowl cornerback who will need to be paid, tying all that cash up in a troubled receiver isn’t the best idea.

So Randy, enjoy your last two games in a Patriot uniform. Get us another ring, and look back fondly on your short time playing for The Team Of The Decade. Next year, the Titans or Jaguars or Buccaneers will be paying you a lot of money.

Holy Jesus, I knew Windows Turd Sandwich Vista was bad, but even I never expected this. With Microsoft preparing to discontinue sales of XP on June 30th of this year in order to force victims customers to shell out the cash for Vista, people are panicking. InfoWorld has even started a petition begging the Redmond Politburo to reconsider its decision to mothball XP.

Gee, you think that maybe, just maybe, after wrestling for seven years with an operating system that took two service packs and innumerable updates and security patches to finally become relatively safe and stable, they don’t want to start the whole excruciating process all over again with a new, significantly more expensive OS that delivers no new features of any importance? Can’t imagine why.

Sadly, not even yours truly may be completely free of the Borg Collective’s clutches. My new employer uses a snazzy, server-based system that allows employees to connect remotely and have total access to not only our email and files, but to our desktops, profiles, and even software installed on our work desktops – even if said software is not installed on our home computers.

Problem is, the client application for this system, which must be installed on my home computer for this to work, is only available for Windows. There is not, as yet, a Linux version.

Save me, Wine! If you can’t work your magical voodoo, I may have no choice but to reinstall Windows…and nobody deserves that.