Scariest thing so far today!

This video is disturbing on so many levels. First, it's disturbiong because it shows that this giant python can open a door. second, it shows that the "owners" of this creature are so incredibly stupid as th think that a 15 foot long snake, or any reptile for that matter,  is an appropriate thing to keep as a pet. Reptiles think one thought - one - period. "Is that small enough to eat?" If their pea sized vbrain processes the answer as "yes!then youd better watch the kids, dogs and cats and spouse. Wild animals are inappropriate as pets. period!  


                                                            http://vimeo.com/9841493



This is clearly a big snake being kept in a family dwelling. NO. NO. NO!

Lies, Lies. and More Lies!

Once more we have lying liars telling lies regarding the current President and Administration. The most recent  smear campaign uses the code word “Obamaphone” to describe partially subsidized (a whopping   $9.25 off  the  monthly bill)  cell phones or landlines  for  qualified persons who apply. There have been  accusations, some accurate, regarding multiple phones per household (prohibited) and some of the phones being listed on Craigslist for sale, also obviously wrong.  To qualify for Lifeline (the real name of the program) assistance, the individual’s household income must be 135% below the national average. The household may also only use the Lifeline Assistance Program for either one wired connection or one wireless plan. A recent  attack by Arkansas Rep. Tim Griffin was claimed in his words to be an attempt at  “reforming” the program. His proposed legislation — the “Stop Taxpayer-Funded Cell Phones Act of 2011″ — actually would have eliminated the cell phone subsidy. Fact Check climbed all over Rep Griffin for implying as others are doing yet, that this program was a tax, and an Obama administration giveaway. Is anyone interested in the facts?

The first government provided cell phone came about in 2008 under the Bush administration. The very idea of government subsidized phones for low income people originated during the Reagan administration and brought about the Telecommunications Act of 1996.  Owing to the fact that people generally need phones to apply for jobs and enroll their children in school, and elderly citizens need to be able to call their families and emergency services, the government decided in the '80s (under Ronald Reagan, no less) to institute the Lifeline Assistance program. In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act into law, which offered either cell phones or landline services to low-income Americans. Telecommunication service providers are required to pay certain amounts to the federal USF(Universal Services Fund). These amounts are based on their profits and end-user revenues. These telecommunication service providers include wireless telephone companies, wire line telephone companies and specific Voice Over internet Protocol (VoIP) providers.

 Telecommunication service providers may directly charge their customers on their telephone bills for their required USF fees. Bills may have a line titled, “Universal Service”. This is the small charge that benefits Lifeline and provides low income families and individuals free government paid cell phones so they too have access to new job ventures, family connectivity and a way to contact authorities in case of emergencies. However, the FCC does not require these “Universal Service” charges to be passed on to the customer. Each company has to make a decision that will best fit their corporation.

In other words, the cost of these services were incepted as a cost to the providers, but because they were allowed to, most of them have passed a small share on to you, rather than reduce their already huge profits. Remember, they are not publically regulated utilities (especially wireless ones) and they are free to use and abuse you as they see fit, which they will, and do!  The average universal service fee passed on to consumers is between $2.50 and $3.00 monthly. Your wireless provider passes this cost on to you because they can, to maximize profits, not because they need to do it to remain solvent. It is not a tax, as many on the right imply. More importantly, it is not an Obama administration initiative.  If you're upset that Obama is giving "freeloaders" gratis cell phones paid for with your tax money, don't be.

In the first place, Obama had nothing to do with the Lifeline program: the "Obama phone" narrative is a myth that both liberals and conservatives have fallen for since 2009. Secondly, Lifeline isn't paid for with tax revenues. Rather, Lifeline is funded with a pool of money, called the Universal Service Fund, which is paid for with revenue donations from telecommunications providers, as described above. Remember, they don’t have to charge you anything, they just do!

Finally, there have been, as described earlier, charges of abuse of the system. A recent audit placed the amount of abuse at around  9 % annually, which is measurably less than the percentage of Medicare fraudulent charges perpetrated by Fl Governor Rick Scott’s health care corporation!

In January, the FCC completed an audit of 12 states’ service records and found that 7 percent of subscribers (269,000 of 3.6 million) used more than one subsidized line, costing Lifeline $35 million a year. A second audit released this month found 135,000 duplicate subscriptions in three more states, costing another $15 million. The FCC said it disconnected those phone lines, generating $50 million in savings.

 The audits are part of the FCC’s overhaul. The changes, enacted in February, include:

 ■The creation of a database to prevent one person from having more than one subsidized phone line.

 ■The creation of a database (by the end of 2013) to ensure subscribers are eligible for Lifeline.

 ■The end of the Link Up program, which gave phone companies $30 for each new subsidized connection. Link Up was originally intended to cover the cost of installing a new phone line. But it gave prepaid wireless carriers a “perverse” incentive to sign up ineligible subscribers. (Not all cell phone companies took the Link Up subsidy.)

The FCC claims the overhaul will save up to $2 billion in three years, reducing growth in the fund and “keeping money in the pockets of American consumers.” The commission fails to state whether the savings could reduce the universal service fee. The Lifeline program will use some of the savings — up to $25 million — on a pilot program to help low-income persons gain access to broadband Internet service.

The commission plans to assess its changes after six months and one year. The GAO followed up on its own assessment of Lifeline in 2012, finding that the FCC is making progress in addressing Lifeline’s vulnerabilities.

Why did I tell you all this?  I point this out because the program as incepted is a must have for many Americans, regardless of which inarticulate wretch you see in a You-tube video and because these recent integrity initiatives and reforms are the responsibility of President Obama’s administration.  The mythical Obamaphone program should be called the Reagan-Clinton-Bush-aphone! So instead of getting angry at the man for something he didn’t do, laud him for trying to fix the loopholes!

The sky is falling; the sky is falling!

I understand that what I am about to write  will upset many of my liberal friends, but I cannot read all that has been written recently on the subject and remain mute. The persons screaming about the Government  tracking cell phone conversations (they're not, just who calls who, when, which the police can get at any time anyway) are many of those who scream the loudest about “why does the Govt. take so long to track down and apprehend terrorists and/or criminals?”. The cell phone dump in Boston was a prime example of using that data to apprehend murderers. If you are so paranoid that you feel  threatened if the Government knows who you called ,  and when, then I am truly sorry for you.

 These persons weave a web of "what if” around the issue of personal data which is 10 years too late in the first place, and based on the absurdly hypothetical in the second. I was concerned more when the Government monitored what I read ,  until I realized that in factual matters for me, it was irrelevant.  The inevitability of computer network interconnectivity was obvious 20 years ago.  Reality is that if Snowden at the NSA had remained silent, we would all be going about our business with no thought to who we called or why it matters.

  If you seriously  believe that the elected government and those whom it controls (the NSA, etc) are worse enemies than Al Qaeda and such domestic terror threats as we know exist, then you are a fool; and a Tea Partier at heart  A more proper concern would be the issue of who uses the data and what for.  Oversight committees exist for that purpose.  If your life, like mine, is an open book,  then  let them collect away.  If they ever attempt to use any of such data for actual suppression  of civil rights of law abiding citizens, then let’s have a revolution.

   Otherwise those screaming  “4^th amendment” are as bad as the “2^nd Amendmenters “  they ridicule over the handgun issue.  The reality is that I know many liberals (myself  among them) who believe that the gun lobby is egregiously in error in their reading of the 2^nd amendment.  Likewise many of us believe the wording in the context of 1789 meant to apply it to “A well regulated militia.”  Some are unwilling, however,  to apply the same logic to the current brouhaha over phone communications. The USSC ruling on phones (Katz) relates to recording conversations (wiretaps) only.  In addition to the Katz standard, a search occurs when law enforcement  “trespasses on the searched person's property”, which, since cell conversations are broadcast  by a middleman (the carrier) makes the records the property of the carrier, not the individual. Seizure doesn’t even apply, since no cell carrier went to federal court to try to avoid releasing said info in the first place, and the standard for bad seizure relates to the unwillingness of the person whose property is being “seized.”   

And finally, a person like Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden deserves no sympathy or thanks for what they have done for a very simple reason. They are dishonorable men, both of them, because they released their respective information  while still in the employee of organizations they had made commitments to. Manning has no defense for what he did, since he is covered under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Transmission of  any classified material he inappropriately copied /kept/ released which in any manner aided entities with which the US is in conflict would constitute  a capital offense in time of declared war by Constitutional definition. In Snowden’s case, he had options. He could have resigned and then given such information as he had, i.e. “The government tracks cell phone data” to the media ,  as Daniel Ellsberg did re: the Pentagon Papers.  Doing it while a NSA employee is simply dishonorable , not to mention stupid. It would be interesting to know if the fact alone was even classified; since all the hoo-ha is not related to alleged improper use of the data, simply it’s transference to the government.

When the second submarine to which I was assigned transited the end of the Cowal peninsula and entered The Minch, the water between the Hebrides and the Scottish mainland , we were, over a period of several years, met by Soviet intelligence gathering vessels. They were there because another traitor had released crypto information to the Soviets, which they used to decode Atlantic  Fleet Submarine operating orders. The man in question, John Walker,  is lucky to be in federal prison and alive.  Whatever motivated these two, and I’m not convinced it wasn’t simply  the desire to be seen as “moral watchdogs,”  the gist of what they did is the same.  The vast majority of us have the same reasons to be concerned about who knows who we called and when, as we do to fear a meteorite strike in our front yards.

Speech Therapy

Many, including me, have written regarding the plethora of  linguistic misusages which English teachers have bemoaned for a century. Many of these stem from words that sound similar but are spelled differently. These are correctly known as  homonyms,   prime examples of which are “their”, “there” and “they’re.”  Another, especially abused,  is “mute” in place of “moot,” as in “The point is mute.”  Aaaarrgh!

          There is another abuse, much more widespread, in fact heard at least once in most TV  newscasts,  press conferences, etc. This is the incorrect usage of   “I” and “myself” when  a simple “me “ will suffice.  It is heard from well educated persons who apparently think they are speaking more correct or “proper” English in their usage.

          An example would be “Mom will come and pick up you and I.”   No,  she won’t! She’ll pick up you and she’ll pick up me; she won’t pick up “I.”  Unfortunately, far too many would say,  “ Suzie and me will go for a walk” (or the true illiterati will say it even worse, “Me and Suzie, etc…”  In truth, of course,  Suzie will go for a walk and I will as well, not “me.”          

          Another twist on this is the usage as in “They gave the money to he and I” No, wrong in both pronouns. It was given to him and to me (or “us”, vice “we”)

          A subtler twist is those who seem to feel that “Myself” is somehow more formal than “me,” which, of course, it isn’t. There are cases when its usage is mandated, such as “I took it myself.” Nothing else works in that structure but “I took it” is sufficient.  Myself has always sounded a bit like multiple personalities. There’s me, and then there’s myself, begging to be freed.

          Of course, it’d be easier to know proper usage if we heard it consistently, but we’re bombarded daily with song lyrics and talking heads who misuse the language professionally. “Billy Mack is a detective down in Texas, he knows exactly ‘what the facts is’" Really? And just what is they?  

Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

One must wonder sometimes, if the infallible, constant, eternal and unchanging God of  Christianity changed his mind between the Old and New Testaments! The O.T.  God is one angry and even vengeful dude:  “Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.” And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses, and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men. A small number when compared to the Egyptian infants already massacred by God in order for things to have proceeded even this far, but it helps to make the case for “antitheism.” By this I mean the view that we ought to be glad that none of the religious myths has any truth to it, or in it. The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.  Of course the N.T. God has changed his tack and, apparently his mind, if Jesus was correct.  The problem he seems to correct God along the way, Hmmmmm.

Really?

      Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps a bit uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of worldly  power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim and forecast an Apocalypse and a “day of judgment.” It apparently bothers no one that Jesus himself predicted it would occur while some of his peers were still  alive. When this obviously failed to happen, “scholars” fudged the data and have continued doing so as recently as last year. This has been a constant scam since the first witch doctors and shamans learned to predict eclipses and to use their half-baked celestial knowledge to terrify the ignorant. It stretches from the epistles of  Paul, who clearly thought (and apparently, hoped) that time was running out for humanity, through the LSD like fantasies of the book of Revelation, which were at least memorably written by the alleged Saint John the Divine on the Greek island of Patmos, to the best-selling pulp-fiction Left Behind series, which, although supposedly  “authored” by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, was apparently generated via the old Bob Newhart-esque shtick of letting two orangutans loose on a word processor. “To be or not to be, that is the gazortenplat!”

A Tea Party Top Ten

                  Top ten ways to tell a Conservative from a Tea Partier

10.   Conservatives blame the horrible climatic disasters in the midwest on President  Obama; Tea Partiers blame it on the “Gummint’s Secret Weather Machine”

9.     Conservatives genuinely appreciate the US Military and are patriots in their own way; Tea Partiers fear the military will some day be used to make them stop stockpiling illegal weapons, forcibly marrying twelve year olds, urging Cabinet members be “shot in the vagina” [yes, really], and blocking Michelle Bachmann’s “husband” from coming out.  

8.     Conservatives think Sarah Palin was an “unfortunate” choice in 2008; Tea partiers think she should be vetted for sainthood.

7.     Conservatives wish Michelle Bachmann would shut the hell up, Tea Partiers think she’s a hot savant.

6.     Conservatives consider Ted Nugent a reasonable spokesperson for the gun lobby;  Tea Partiers think he’s a pussy.

5.     Conservatives think Bristol Palin is a talentless, teen mom, stardom seeker; Tea Partiers think she’s relevant, hot, and probably a genius.     

4.     Conservatives think Benghazi provided  a good opportunity to attack the President on foreign policy and discredit Hilary Clinton; Tea Partiers believe ity provided a failed opportunity to vaporize North Africa in a cloud of nuclear dust.

3.     Conservatives believe there might be some truth to the whole global warning thing; Tea Partiers know it’s part of President Obama’s secret plan to do…., ah hell, whatever they want to blame on him this week.

2.     Conservatives think the Diary of Anne Frank is overtly sexual in nature and should be removed from High School reading lists, Tea partiers home school and think the Bible (King James Version only, please) is all the text book any “right thinking Amurcan”  ever needs.

1.     Conservatives think Trayvon Martin was  a depraved delinquent,  legally shot  by a true American hero;  Tea Partiers think George Zimmermen saved America from  a Liberal Zombie Apocalypse Clone plan to kill all white persons.