//Delete this later

Can Ugly be a Roman numeral? That’s what the U stands for.

I’m a pretty reserved dude for the most part. In the last 12 years, I’ve cried roughly 5-6 times that I really remember, and believe me, this last decade wasn’t too good to me. When my wife left me, that was one. When my grandmother died, that was 2. When my family’s golden retriever died, that was 3. I got into an argument with an ex once (or twice, can’t recall), that was 4. And when I watched the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and saw the destruction and pain it caused, I cried like crazy. It actually hit me as hard, or harder, than anything else that had happened to me, and I’d never even been there. I’ve always been really interested in the history and culture of the area, and always wanted to go but never could get the funds up for a real road trip there.

That said, 4.5 years later, with New Orleans’s football team playing in the Super Bowl, and, at last check, ahead in the fourth quarter, I have hit my limit.

I like sports. I like sportsmanship, and I understand the importance of rules to keep the game clean and entertaining. After all, that’s all it is. Entertainment. To keep it entertaining, we have rules that we follow that make sense. Like, for example, we fine players who decide to take cheap shots at the other team’s quarterback after the play is dead. Those are called late hits, and generally speaking, that’s playing extremely cheap. The fact that the NFL practically rewards a team like the Saints for basically crafting their game plan around late hits is pretty disgusting and disrespectful to every team that follows the rules and tries to play a clean, sportsmanlike game for their fans. I say that they “reward” a team for playing dirty because the punishment is primarily monetary. They get fined something like 15k-30k or so. Which is basically walking-around money for a player making 4 million a season. If your coach is basically telling the players to lay into the other team’s quarterback with cheap shots, one has to wonder if the organization isn’t secretly paying off those fines and keeping that off the books anyway.

In hockey, they take a guy out of the game for playing dirty and he sits for awhile. When you only have 5 skaters on the ice and you lose one, it puts your team at a disadvantage of 4 against 5. I think that’s a pretty fair way to do it. In basketball, the other team gets a couple free shots. If you do the same dirty crap twice, the refs boot you out of the game. That’s very fair. Puts your team at a disadvantage because they’re down a player (though with roster sizes in football about 5 times what they are in basketball, it’s easier to just throw a few players to the sharks and let them sit). In baseball…well, you just don’t get that many opportunities. But in a game like football where you have loads of opportunities to literally put someone on a stretcher and/or end their career, the NFL punishes dirty play with…a little monetary fine. What does that do for the fans of the team that lost because the other team played dirty? NOTHING.

Oh, so New Orleans deserved a shot at winning a Super Bowl because they have never won one before? What about Arizona? Minnesota? Both teams haven’t won one either. Both teams have potentially Hall of Fame quarterbacks that are both fairly old that the Saints felt was fair game to take shots at their knees, lay into them after the play, and generally play like complete jackasses because the only punishment would be a little monetary slap on the hand. The fines they get would be pretty substantial deterrents to a player making 100k a year…but no one makes that little in the NFL anymore.

I hate to take all that away from New Orleans, but after watching 4 years of them electing scumbags to political office that pumped all the reconstruction money into building up wealthy neighborhoods for their own investment purposes…and I could forgive them all that, as politics makes fools of us all…but to ignore how dirty their NFL team plays is just pathetic. They don’t need a Super Bowl any more than Arizona or Minnesota needed one. It’s not going to get any more funding for reconstruction of the ninth ward or any of the other areas that still look like war zones. If anything, politicians are going to say “hey, they won a Super Bowl!” and continue to look past them, figuring that the morale boost would let pols off the hook for another year or so.

It wasn’t long ago that the Saints were pretty much my second favorite football team. I felt like they deserved a shot just like my Vikings did, and thought if the Vikes couldn’t make it, I’d hope the Saints could, right?

If I had heard the Vikings defensive coordinator get on a local radio show and detail his game plan as “laying into the other team’s quarterback with late hits, and try to take the guy out of the game”, I’d be calling for his head as a fan. That shit is just uncalled for in any sport that tries to pass itself off as “professional”. That’s “professional” wrestling type shit. But apparently, that shit is good enough for Louisiana!

So, we started off the week watching the Saints play the dirtiest game they could possibly muster against the Vikings. Literally, Gregg Williams admitted that his game plan was to have his guys ignore penalties and try to injure a 40 year old future Hall of Famer. I’d say that’s going to come back to haunt them in the future. Instead of playing a clean game against an evenly matched team and showing some semblance of sportsmanship, Gregg Williams and Sean Payton decided it was better to crap all over the notion of sportsmanship. So what if New Orleans had a disaster and hadn’t been to a Super Bowl…cheap shots and home refs won that game for them. A lot of those Vikings turnovers, which most admit lost the game for them, came as a result of cheap shots, and on one of them, even the league admitted that the refs screwed up the call. If I were Brad Childress, I’d be scheming for that game against the Saints next year right now. And if I won that game, I would tell my team to ignore any Saints player looking for a handshake, because they don’t deserve shit.

Then we got introduced to one of the biggest head scratchers I’ve ever seen in the tech world. I now know why Apple decided not to release it at CES a couple weeks ago…because it really isn’t anything different (and probably more expensive) than most of the tablets demoed off there. It literally is the offspring of an April Fool’s joke I thought was hilarious last year, and an SNL joke about electronic women’s “hygienic items”. If these iPads came with substantially more memory and a fully multitouch MacOSX interface, I think they would be worthy tablets. But all they did was take an iPhone and make it bigger, then change the UI around slightly. I’ll reserve judgment on the processor, but it sounds like a wimp. And this thing is supposed to add multimedia playback to a typical Kindle type book reader…but it’s really only an iPhone with a bigger screen. I think…I’ll pass on that. The ideas I’ve seen so far for the iPad just sound like they’re trying to make an expensive device do something that a 100 dollar device could do just as well.

Then there was the State of the Union speech, and the even better conference with the Republican Party on the political front. The State of the Union speech was really the sort of speech that I think a lot of people wanted the President to make last October…but it still should be effective, if nothing else, as a campaign advertisement. After all, you can’t go home to your district and say you’re trying to pass tax cuts and be bipartisan, then sit on your hands when the President tells everyone that he’s cut taxes for 95% of the working families out there. But that wasn’t all…that conference with the Republicans proved, once and for all, that the right wing talking point that “Obama uses teleprompters” is a load of shit. And possibly, comes from subconscious stereotypes. The people pushing that talking point have all made blatantly racist comments in the past and have gotten in trouble for it. Glenn Beck lost a whole lot of Fox advertisers, Rush Limbaugh lost his “dream job” as a sports color man. Even Frank Luntz, the guy who’s job it is to craft right wing talking points, run them by focus groups, then push them out to right wing media types and various pols, admitted that Obama mopped the floor with the Republicans. Obama didn’t have a teleprompter, he didn’t have any knowledge what questions were going to come across the bow. He just nailed them all right to the wall. He came across as the mature, stable one in the room calling out a classroom of children who have cried wolf one too many times, and now they can’t do anything other than cry wolf.

Lastly, it’s time again to hunt for a new place to live. I found out from crunching the numbers that I’m roughly 300 bucks short of making mortgage payments + average monthly budget if I were to buy this house. Not coincidentally, that 300 bucks is roughly 80% of what I’m paying for getting a new vehicle. So, that woman in that SUV who didn’t know how to park properly who totaled my old car probably cost me my home as well. Let that be a lesson to everyone driving large vehicles…you can’t use your rear view mirror for parking. You have to use the side mirrors. You are lifted so far off the ground that you can’t see what’s behind you, especially if you’re backing up on a hill. Anyway, I found a place, I think, that should work. It’s a little small, but it’ll be fine. It’s really just a one bedroom with a really nice office type space, but it’s listed as a two bedroom for some odd reason. But the location is excellent, right by the MAX, and the view is tremendous.

And tomorrow, we do the Shiba meetup. So, looks like things are on the upswing. Plus it’s my little sisters’ birthdays.

I heard that line again. If there is one phrase from this last decade that needs to die, it’s “We fight them there, so we don’t have to fight them here!”

How, pray tell, do you stand up and cheer at the Olympics for a nation of people who hide and cower behind their troops and hired mercenary army…a nation of people so unwilling to fight to defend their own homes, that they would rather send their children to kill people in someone else’s homes?

This last decade was a nearly unbearable shame. A complete humiliation. As if having our economy turn into a joke wasn’t bad enough, we had a President, our “avatar”, our “representative to the World”…couldn’t string together complete sentences. Threw out quotations in public like the town drunk. I want the smartest, most charismatic person I can find to represent me to the rest of the world, not the biggest idiot I could find. But what’s worse of all, the American people turned into the biggest bunch of pussies I have ever seen in my entire life because we were attacked.

I was raised with all the standard propaganda. I was led to believe that we were a nation of “rugged individualists” who would “fight for our freedom at any cost”. And yet, here we were, saying something as cowardly as “We fight them there, so we don’t have to fight them here!”. Except, of course, the people doing all the fighting…weren’t them. Those people were hiding HERE. Not fighting. Not defending our freedom. Not giving a chickenshit terrorist who hides in caves, among innocent civilians, and in holes who has brainwashed kids do his killing for him…not giving that guy the keys to our freedoms, just giving up what we fought for, just becoming a locked down, less free society. Not let this scumbag play our country for fools.

The humiliation of all of this is too much to bear. The only options people like me have is to give up, or go sign up and be cannon fodder. I’d rather our country be REALLY strong, not let these scumbags drain our country dry AND not hide…but to tell the middle east to fuck off, take our troops out, tell them that there’s no way in HELL we will sell our massive water supply to them unless they turn over these criminals and pledge to do the same to anyone who’d attack us from then on out, shore up our defenses here at home, and make it a massive, singular mission to reject fossil fuels entirely and replace them with our own resources. Run our economy on our own terms.

But that’s not all. The humiliation leaks over to the job market. It’s awfully hard to prove how good the American worker is when corporations get paid to take their jobs away and stick them in other countries. There’s no way that the American worker, especially in the high tech arena where there are plenty of good paying jobs, can compete with people who are getting government run health care out of the gate AND can live comfortably on 10 bucks an hour because their government represses the value of their currency. The saddest thing of all is that two generations were completely brainwashed into thinking that they were being noble by accepting, and even defending, being screwed over and robbed by people with so much wealth already that they can’t even really spend it all in a lifetime. Literally, they’re taking your hard-earned money out of your children’s college fund and using it to wipe their backsides. They don’t need it! But these people being robbed, for whatever reason, think it’s okay and that “the rights of rich people have to be protected too!”. Yes, their rights have to be protected. But they have no right to steal from you…they used some of that extra cash on hand to buy up politicians so that they could legitimately steal from you. Then they go offshore some jobs and you have no options but to take your Computer Science degree and work fast food with no health care and hope you can figure out how to get through the month.

People need to start breaking through those walls and get comfortable with the notion that to save this country, we might have to take what we need to survive out of the pockets of those who have far, far more than they need to get by. The bottom line is that it’s for their best interest. They’re drunk on cash. They’re obsessed to the point that they’re nearsighted…what good is their money if the society collapses, if the economy collapses? It would be worth nothing more than paper. Maybe it would be better to solidify the economy, the job market, and in turn, the society…and protect what you’ve got left, then to let it all turn into toilet paper. You’d think.

Okay, so my old, exceptionally expensive laptop’s graphic cards blew up. Don’t work. Then my desktop died. Thankfully, in a pinch of spend craziness, I bought a sub-400 dollar netbook last year (MSi Wind, great netbook by the way)…and I used that to get myself a job. Had two offers on the table, one was East Coast, the other was here…with where I worked before…well, I took the latter despite lower pay because I just couldn’t bring myself to leave Oregon. I’ve been here for so freaking long, and it represents a rock of stability that I just can’t let go of.

Anyway, I’ve been working again…but I just didn’t have the blog linked on my laptop, and I had kinda sorta forgotten the password, so I had to do some data recovery on my old system to get all my info back. Took awhile, but here I am for my audience of possibly 1 or 2 readers.

Hated leaving it on that old blog, too. It was kinda personal and not a way I wanted to leave things on.

Well, back to political geekery. Seems we won’t have much of a public option with the Health Care bill. I’ll be fine with it, though, if we have a real, serious, jobs bill and I don’t have to keep working these 3 month contracts that skirt around having to get me employer based health insurance. Hell, if the exchange would let me come in and say “I feel that I shouldn’t have to pay more than 250 a month for insurance and that rate shouldn’t increase beyond the average cost of living increase”, and they can get me something, I’ll be satisfied. I think 250 a month is a very fair amount to have to pay, considering how I already pay into Medicare and other programs. If I had my druthers, it’d be Medicare for all and we’d leave it at that, and if you didn’t like the baseline that Medicare provided, you could hook up your own supplemental or opt for private insurance. If they had gone with that from the beginning, the current bill wouldn’t stink so bad and most likely it still would have passed…if older people were thinking that by killing “Medicare”, it would kill their lifeline, they’d put the fear into Republicans like you’ve never seen.

One can dream. Of a world where we think that protecting people from getting sick or hurt and dying is just as much a right provided by our government as protecting people from blown up by terrorists. When you put it that way, yeah, it sounds fairly reasonable regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum (I guess…unless you peddle health insurance…in that case, you better REALLY hope the jobs program hits it out of the park). Can’t quite figure out why no one says it like that, though.

As for techie stuff…well, I’ve been getting into more WPF development lately. It’s kind of weird, but Intel is finally sorta shifting into Agile, sort of step by step. I guess it’s probably because so many people who have been getting hired by Intel are pitching it to them on many different levels, and it must have struck a chord with enough people. I recall pitching it to my boss last April, and having it thrown back at me…but now my team is jumping into it as well. It’s kind of funny that both of the contractors in the team have multiple years of experience in that paradigm, and the guys in charge basically are just learning it for the first time. They’ll probably be in charge of the scrum, though, and most likely make us contractors suffer through the learning process because running the scrum makes managers feel like they’re “managing”. Well, been there, done that…so I better pick up my scrum certs and pmp cert quickly. At some point, I’d kind of like to be the guy running the scrum, rather than the exasperated contractor who can’t believe the ineptitude of the newbies who are trying to learn as they go.

Allow me to provide a perspective for you from the perspective of someone who came dangerously close to the point of no return. This will most likely offend your sensibilities, so be warned.

Yes, it’s about society. More importantly, it’s about your society, and your social mores, and whether or not you participated in this, you shouldn’t have to ask yourself “why?”, ever. It should be completely obvious to anyone.

Here’s a scenario that should register with you. Take 10 people, and out of those ten, let’s make one of them very different from the rest. No fault of theirs, he/she might have a different skin color, be of a different religion, not be as close to the ideal of beauty that the other nine hold…maybe they’re overweight. Maybe they have a different sexual preference than the norm. Now, lets say that those other 9 people taunt, tease, disrespect, and otherwise violate that one person’s humanity unmercifully. Let’s say this happens over the course of a year or two. Let’s say that these people are all stuck together for an unforeseeable amount of time. And let’s say, after years of this, after every attempt by that one person to find a way out of it…changing their appearance, their religion, losing weight…whatever…it doesn’t stop. The other 9 still hold that one person in that same category. Some of those 9 might actually enjoy taunting and hurting that person. They may feel pleasure afterward, because it makes them feel better about their own various situations.

Then, “out of the blue”, that person finds a weapon and kills a couple of them. The rest express shock! Outrage! Confusion! Why would this happen? “We’re all good people!”

Is it obvious yet why it happened? If it isn’t, you’re not very bright. Human beings require only a couple very basic, simple concepts from other human beings in order for society to function properly: basic, genuine dignity and respect. You don’t have to look up to every other person, but just accept their reality, their existence, and at least think about how they feel, if only a little. Feel for their position, try to understand them. That’s all it takes to prevent this.

It’s all humanity has to do. If all of humanity achieved it, and began treating each other with that dignity and respect, humanity would reach enlightenment. Wars, violence, crime, all of these things would fade away.

It’ll never happen. Why? Because from that original example, some of those 9 people actually felt pleasure in hurting that person. Do you think the classmates of the Columbine murderers ever learned that lesson? All of them? Did all of them go on to treat every other human being in their lives with that level of understanding and respect? I doubt it.

There’s your answer about what happened at Fort Hood. I know what the answer is, because I know where the point of no return is. It’s when the human mind cannot find a way out of a horrifically painful situation. Much like the concept of torture will cause a person to say anything to make it stop, if a human being cannot find a way out of something, that human will resort to something as drastic as murder because while all humans know that crime is wrong, we have it beaten into our heads from an early age (well, unless you’re truly psychotic), when there’s nothing else a human can do, the innate animalistic survival instinct will disregard those mores and do what it perceives it has to do to survive.

I learned where that point was when I was 13 years old. I had thick glasses, was perceived as a nerd (despite the fact that I liked sports). Moved around a lot, wasn’t from a wealthy family, didn’t have a lot of connections. Every day I woke up, there were onethings that went through my head: I didn’t want to go to school…not because of the work, but because of the ridicule. Behind that, was a quiet voice that kept growing louder over time…until I moved and it ended. I wanted to hurt anyone who would try to hurt me. Anything. I was just this 13 year old kid who didn’t know what the hell was going on with my body, and at the same time, I was being ridiculed in front of people I respected, people I wanted to be like. There are always a handful of kids like me at every school, in every social situation. The one that isn’t in the loop, and because they want to be, the loop shuns them. To be humiliated, hurt, abused, disrespected in front of people that you want to be like drives most of these people to adopt fear as the cornerstone of their beliefs. They are “afraid” of God. They are “afraid” of foreigners. Most times, they turn out to be conservatives because they are “afraid” of not being able to “get theirs”.

The rest develop hatred and anger to be the cornerstone of their beliefs. Hatred, unlike fear, can burn away much faster…if that person feels they have a way out. But when that person runs out of options, that hatred is far more dangerous. I got out. I moved away and started over every few years. That kept me from going down that path, and that anger burned off and was replaced by caring about other people. That reforged me as a raging liberal. But in junior high, I was the one who fought back. I threatened to hurt other kids, burn their houses down. You name it. I read comic books to try and escape, to try and act out my rage alone and try to control it. I was always teetering on the point of no return…but then things happened, I got another chance far away with a new set of complete strangers, and I tried something different. I tried to be the class clown, to emulate those who didn’t get hurt. I played sports. I did the things I felt I needed to do to not be at the bottom of the pile. It worked, I became well-adjusted.

But when Columbine happened back when I was in college, I knew exactly why it happened when they described the two kids responsible. I didn’t need video games to do what they did…in fact, I figured they used those video games to act out their rage, to try and manage it like I did. But if I had stayed at that same school, I might have turned out like those kids, too. And when I heard their classmates asking “Why?” afterward, it made my skin crawl. They knew damn well why it happened.

Human beings crave only two things from other human beings, and that’s all they need to survive and exist within society. Genuine, simple dignity and basic respect. You need to let them know they always have a way out to the light to stand with everyone else on a level field.

I don’t make it hidden that I’m a big fan of Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor under President Clinton. However, I’ve got to say this. I don’t think the amount of the stimulus, at this point, is the problem with how the stimulus has been utilized so far. I think it’s really the number of federal employees going over various project submissions that has been the problem…there aren’t enough of them.

This is one case where having some more bureaucrats would be a good thing. There’s a big heap of money, a lot of people on unemployment insurance, and that money should be putting those people to work so the government can get some real return on their investment, instead of giving them enough to just “hang on” and thus, not really drive the economy at all.

We need more people looking at each proposal, making sure that the proposal is in line with what the spirit of the stimulus’s purpose is (it’s not to help some state buy a bunch of windmills made in China, it’s meant for people here to buy windmills made by other Americans, thus putting more people back to work all around AND helping us get off our dependence on foreign energy). It’s not meant to make a private company rich off the public’s taxpayer dollars like a lot of these “private/public partnerships” (which are really only approved for political reasons…some politician doesn’t want to be seen as a “big government” type, so he/she makes some corporation that ends up charging the public again to use what the public paid for fat off taxpayer dollars).

Less than half of that stimulus package has even been spent because so many projects have been backed up under review. The administration can’t hire some of these people without getting them approved by a Congress that is deadlocked on an issue they should all be agreeing with and moving on from…Health Care…that they’re only fighting over for purely political reasons. (Don’t buy into that philosophical differences crap the Republicans have offered up…why would it have taken so long for them to get their own proposal written? Why haven’t they been working on this over the last 8 years? Why wouldn’t they realize that it’s politically expedient to protect the health of their citizens in the face of a health care system that has been raising it’s premiums…and their CEO’s paychecks…and blocking out competition in most states? It’s because the Republicans are ashamed that they needed the corporate campaign donations from the insurance companies so much. After all, the majority of the people in this country are really basically Democrats, not Republicans…Republicans just talk louder and puff themselves up more.)

No, we need to get more people in there to review these projects and get them moved on faster, get people back to work and off unemployment. When we burn through those dollars and the job situation isn’t turning around, THEN it’s time to start talking about putting some money back in that pot and keeping it running. Turning the economy around should be viewed as an ongoing thing. That’s how FDR did it…0% unemployment, but he used a World War as a catalyst to get that going. We’ve got a harder job ahead of us, because we don’t have that political instrument to use to tease the less forward-thinking of us forward.

So the Cato Institute guys are rattling the Social Security cage again in order to gin up their Libertarian base like they do every year. As if a total repudiation of their philosophy worldwide wasn’t enough for them.

Here’s why Social Security isn’t a Ponzi scam, and why neo-conservatives should really read up on Ponzi scams because apparently they don’t understand the accepted outcome of a Ponzi scam (and what makes it a scam): Ponzi scams generate less revenue than they take in. The concept here is that a guy or organization gets a lot of people to pay into a pot, and when those people go back to get their investment back, they get back less than they paid in.

Barring a mass die-off or disengagement from society of Americans aged 18-65, Social Security will always generate at the very least a 2% growth in that investment, and during economic booms, will generate more than that. Granted, it’s a very, very conservative, low risk investment, but that’s kind of how it’s supposed to be. It’s money that is expected to be there when you turn 65, and barring a complete deconstruction of the US government, that money will be there. Your employer can do horrible things like raid your pension plan, your investment broker could go belly up, your mutual fund could tank in a down economy, but that social security check will be there. Why? Very easy…there are more people aged 18-65 than there are 65 and older, and even if you’re under 65 and pulling Social Security, you’re still in a minority. Considering that it’s a government agency, the government isn’t supposed to raid those funds (though that didn’t stop Reagan from dipping into that cookie jar). The money that goes in is essentially invested and paid out to the previous generation, and so on…meaning that at the absolute worst, the same amount of money comes out as goes in (and even then that’s saying there’d have to be some sort of serious economic or otherwise calamity).

So, lets repeat…Ponzi scam: More money goes in than comes out. Social Security: Equal or more money goes out than goes in. They may seem superficially similar, but what you measure is the results, and the results are completely different.

This is a common trick with a lot of things the Cato Institute does. They love to try and back up their libertarian philosophy by making their points in a particular manner, but frequently leave out excruciatingly important details. It’s a trick where they go from A to C, and they hope that their listeners just didn’t notice that they skipped step B.

Iceland can’t support McDonalds anymore. Why is that? Because a few Libertarians over there, enamored with Milton Friedman, went berserk and privatized all the banks (and everything else they could privatize)…and after having a momentary economic boom not unlike the one in the US, they deflated and fell completely apart. They crashed so hard, that the people there turned on the Conservative/Libertarian party completely and elected the Democratic Socialist Party to come in and try to clean up the mess. So the bottom line is, the few Libertarians still holding onto that goofball philosophy of theirs because they personally identify with it are looking for anything they can find that they can use to keep deluding themselves that “deregulation and privatization is a great way to run an economy”. Of course, they’re suckers. They are not unlike people who hand thieves the keys to their front door and car, and “hope” that those thieves will use “free choice” to choose not to rob them.

Generally, the Republican Party (and a couple of gutless Democrats) shelved the Mathew Shepard/James Byrd act for 12 years because, according to them, it would be an “unwarranted expansion of federal power” and an “unconstitutional thought-crimes law”. The reason is that it gives the Federal government the power to intercede in certain cases where the motive may have been bigotry if the Federal government feels that the local justice system is not handling the case fast or fairly enough.

The reason why its needed is really pretty simple. Local Judges and police officers around the country have long allowed their own innate bigotry and local customs to cloud their interpretation and equal enforcement of the law. Usually its a political issue…the local Sheriff or Judge wants to be re-elected and is concerned that his/her opposition would attempt to paint that Sheriff or Judge as “out of touch with the local community”.

That’s why that bill needs to exist. There wouldn’t be any need for it if local law and judicial employees did their jobs according to the law once in awhile. The alternative is putting bureaucrats in charge to oversee local law enforcement and judges to ensure they’re following the letter of the law fairly, and if they’re not, those higher on the chain would recommend that they be reprimanded or terminated/recalled. I’d think that your local Judge or Sheriff would be more in favor of just dumping the situation on the Feds and getting out of it, rather than lose their jobs.

“So, you kids think you should have something to hope for? THINK AGAIN, PUNKS!”

“Your leader isn’t going to do anything he pledged to do! Yeah, that’s right. Did you hear? Did you hear he didn’t say public option more than 2 times in his big health care speech? That means he’s not going to fight for it! Yeah, that’s right. You should just give up now. That’s what you get for not organizing and making Hillary Clinton the POTUS like we wanted you to. We want OUR OWN to be president, not some snotty little tweener/Gen X punk like Obama.”

“So what if the boat hasn’t even cleared the dock on this new administration? We’re jumping ship. Yeah, that’s right. We’re OUTTA HERE! You better bet that Obama loves the banks more than you! He’s sold out completely, just like we all did in the 80′s when we realized love and peace didn’t let us afford nice cars and pimp houses in nice neighborhoods. But we kept it real, man, we always smoked pot out in our BMW SUVs and in our perfectly manicured backyards, bought it from our buddy Gerrold from the health club after a furious game of squash.”

“You think he’s going to fight for you? THINK AGAIN! We know how things work. After all, we’re the epitome of selling our souls out. That’s just how things work now. We fought against the Vietnam War by smoking pot and drinking cheap wine in the park. Wearing flowers and dirty clothes. Pretending to be stereotypical Native Americans. Pretending how to play folk guitar. Yeah, we were keeping it real, and that’s why we could justify buying that SUV years later, complaining about capital gains taxes, and voting for Ronald Reagan. We set the rules, you silly little kids, and don’t you forget it.”

“Yeah, that’s right, college kids. You stay home, you shut up, and you better regret you did all that work for “that man” who wasn’t picked by us. We wanted to hold him up like an icon, like Jesse Jackson, so we could say “see? We have African-American heroes here on the left that ran for President! That justifies our WASPiness!” You get your heads back into the dirt and you think about what you did, because we didn’t approve of you turning some of us over and getting some of us to support your token leader. We wanted one of our types to promise us stuff and not deliver, just like we loved about Bill Clinton. But he sure could play a wicked sax!”

“You silly little kids with your “hope” and your “change”. We’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen. It offends us. We got rid of our “hope” in the 1970′s when Nixon lied to us, even though we knew he was a phony. We lost our “hope” in the late 1970′s when Jimmy Carter was the Pres because of the recession that occurred around his time, even though those of us who were sensible knew it wasn’t his fault (paying back that Vietnam War debt had to be steep). We sold out and voted for Reagan. And frankly, at this point in our lives, change offends us. We don’t want that. We understand our parents now. We want to make this thing work for us as long as it can so that we can die comfortably. Whatever happens to you, well, ehhh, you can just cope.”

“So you stupid kids stay the hell home and don’t you DARE turn out and try to recreate that movement that you did last year. Don’t you DARE create a movement to push Obama to spend more money to try and right the ship. We’ve got ours. It’s not our problem if you don’t. What, you didn’t make a fortune off the dot coms? OOOH, so sorry. Well, these things happen. You stay the hell home and deal with it and stop risking what we’ve got. We want to live our golden days comfortably. We deserve it. After all, WE protested VIETNAM. That gives us the RIGHT.”

With all the recent outages, it’s hard not to be at least a little suspicious.

After all, every social networking technology wants to be tight with Twitter. They want their updates pumped out over everything because everyone is clamoring to be that central hub of the social network on the Internet. They know full well that there is potentially Google-class money in being that hub. The truth is that Facebook is “close”, but they remind me a lot of how Yahoo was right before Google hit the ground…and Myspace…well, it reminds me a lot of AOL, Lycos, or Infoseek. Kludgy, but serves a specific purpose well (music vs. people lookup). Twitter is a very simple, non-cluttered-up technology that does a particular thing really well, and is easy to integrate with…so everyone will want to be the guy who lets you pump your updates over Twitter as well as display them on your own page.

The problem is, with all these “friends” wanting to flood Twitter, which is already fairly well flooded with various people’s meal updates, whether they tripped on a curb or not, or possibly a bit about the weather, it makes you wonder if the total income is enough to support the increases needed in infrastructure. Perhaps they need to find a way to be more decentralized, to offload more of the work to sites that integrate with Twitter…but on the other hand, that may skew their greatest potential economic strength, which is their ability to search through their messages and find people with similar interests.

Chances are, they’ll end up having to hook up with a wealthy sugar daddy. If they want to commit suicide, they’ll let that company be an Apple or a Microsoft closed shop. If they want to continue to roll, they’ll want to hook up with an outside partnership group that acts silently…but then again, there’s not a lot of value there if you do it like that. They definitely don’t want to make the same mistake as Myspace and let themselves be bought up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Google might be a good choice, or Facebook (though that would render it a closed shop too, most likely). It’s possible, too, that being bought by one of these well-known (and in many cases, notorious) companies to the typical Twitter user, a competing technology might be right there to suck up all the people who ditch it because they don’t trust that new ownership (as it was with Myspace).

Maybe they’ll be able to keep this thing up privately. Optimally, that would be the best for their success…and people will just have to deal with the occasional outage.