February 27, 2008 archive

Knowledge is Perception, Perception is Reality…a novel posted in chapters

Hello all,

 I am posting this story here for some feedback and to provide a nice diversion from depressing reality. I hit some writer’s block and am thinking feedback from people may help get the plot developed further. The stuff I have written already is pretty good I think but feel free to constructively criticize as the story develops. I will be posting parts every few days. Oh, this is a vampire, witch, philosophical rant, pagan filled fantasy novel hehe.

So here we go…

“Knowledge is Perception, Perception is Reality”

Layers, patterns, perceptions; they are different for every being on this planet. To the fly, his reality consists of finding bits of food in a huge world; the spider’s reality is pretty confined to his web, feeling for minute twitches that could signal the end of the fly’s reality. As one moves up the food chain the perceptions of the world and one’s place in it changes as well. Cats roam for miles at night hunting, unless it’s the spoiled housecat who is content to be waited on tooth and claw. Then you get to humans. I think we are the only animals that can purposely narrow or enlarge our realities based on what we wish to know. There are some who know everything that is going on in every corner of the world thanks to the Internet. There are others who couldn’t tell you what the person next-door looks like.  Then there are the few who see what no one else sees, the fey in the corner, the vampire hiding in the shadows, the soulless wretch who is drinking himself into oblivion to try to fill the hole where his soul should have been.

Chapter One:

I guess the standard form for introductions is what we are always forced to endure at a job orientation gathering or the first time we go to a club. What’s your name? Where are you from? What brings you to such and such place etc.?  I would have a hard time answering those questions anymore, no one would believe me. However, this story is confusing enough without at least clarifying who I am and why I am telling you all this. I guess I

should tackle the easy one first.  I am writing all this down because I am one of the few beings on this earth that knows the Truth. Yes. The Truth; about God, life, why we are here all those questions that always provide you and your friends hours of sober, inebriated or stoned conversation. As for who and what I am, that’s a bit more complicated.

I am a witch. Allow me to define that term, as there are many people who claim to be a witch or whatever and really are not. I can tap into other energies, without the need for herbs, ceremonies or deities to give me a boost. It is a natural thing for me to do. I have otherworld guardians but I do not rely on them to help me focus and use the energy I can tap into. Those who call upon whatever deity suits their imagination are simply people who are trying to connect to other realms, or bolster their own ego, but they are not witches. They are merely mortals who instead of using 10 % of their brain are using 12 %. I hold them in low regards simply because they hold themselves in too high esteem.  I grant that they some of them can accomplish some things but if they actually tapped the energy the way I do, their brains would collapse. It has to do with what I am but I am getting ahead of myself.  

The way I see a vampire or other non human is like double vision, in essence I see their real form and the form they go around in the same space. It’s like trying to watch 3d movies without the glasses, instead of the images melding correctly they are fuzzy and you see the different colors individually. To me a vampire has golden eyes superimposed on top of the normal colored eyes and I can see the fangs showing on top of the lips even when they are retracted, a werewolf appears as if a person and a wolf are trying to occupy the same space. As a child this trait made for some interesting times until I learned not to point and tell someone they were stepping on the doggy’s tail.  I have adapted to it and learned to pay more attention to one image or the other over time. The ability to see things others can’t is one of the things I have learned to hide over the years.  My father told me that I did not want to draw attention to myself as my family has enemies. He never specified who or what they were. When I chose to ignore his advice I found that humans haven’t traveled so far on the path of understanding and acceptance as we like to think. I still have scars from some of those adventures. Having to lead this double life has made me fairly comfortable with vampires, werewolves and changelings as I understand why the act the way they do and how to deal with them.  Most of my close friends are werewolves, changelings or other sorts as we understand each other much more then a regular human would. Not to say there are not bad vampires and selfish werewolves but on a whole they are more understanding of differences in people. I just hope telling this story changes a few perceptions on how people should view the Truths of life, each other and religions. I discovered that after I knew what the Truth was, all those arguments and opinions on who was right or wrong didn’t matter anymore.  

And the Fascism Rolls On

http://www.infowars.net/articl…

http://consumerist.com/360064/…

http://canadianpress.google.co…

This one you can’t even see until the retarded ad goes away.  Get used to it as this type of thing is the future.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2…

http://www.dailytech.com/Tempe…

http://www.nwotruth.com/60-min…

Strange, no pregnant mothers or parapalegics got tazered today.

Rumor also has it that Hillary will quit within a week.  That leaves John “nukemall” or Bildeburg’s newest favorite son Barry “I’ll just bankrupt ya’ll” Obama.

Not much of an essay but I have to go to classes.  Financial stuff on how to possibly avoid Mom and Dad going into a nursing home or only being able to afford dog food for dinner.  They are far too old to fathom the true Satanicness of the world we live in today. They can only realte to when they were active, working and living in a far better world, but that was twenty years ago.  

30 Minutes to Kill

Nope this isn’t some cleverly worded title about the latest situation in Iraq, just another update from the farm:

I am pretending I have 30 spare minutes but in reality I do not.  Reality can wait.  It is still snowing…hasn’t stopped in 36 hours. The weatherman just said there is a total of 12 1/2 inches.  The tractor got a real good workout yesterday but it really isn’t meant to be a snow plow.  I’ll be getting a larger truck soon and putting a plow on it.

I found 3 possible spots for the new house, they all have southern exposure and are pretty high up on the property.  I found out that this property is the watershed for two small brooks, one leading West and one leading South.  Another cat has shown up in the barn and the bravest of the barn cats is now upstairs in the house munching out and hanging out with Dancer.

To Laugh or to Cry

This is a both hilarious and sad illustration of why we are losing the “war on terror”:

Whitey Bulger has found himself at the center of another “mandatory kill,” though this one was ordered by a photo agency seeking to delete an image from their archives. The alert was prompted by the F.B.I.’s admission that they misidentified a German couple vacationing in Sicily as the reputed Boston crime boss and his girlfriend, Catherine Greig.

Despite no apparent problems with the law, the couple somehow evaded the F.B.I.’s global manhunt for months. Indeed, they delivered themselves to the authorities after seeing themselves on Aktenzeichen XY … ungelöst, a German show about fugitives that preceded “America’s Most Wanted.”

After seeing one of their best leads dissolve, the F.B.I. remained determined. “We’re going to continue our worldwide media outreach to arrest Mr. Bulger and his companion,” Gail Marcinkiewicz, a spokeswoman, told The Boston Globe. An alleged audio clip of Mr. Bulger speaking on the phone to “Tammy,” who dialed the wrong number, and others was released in January.

Emphasis added.

For those of you who don’t know, James “Whitey” Bulger is the Boston crime boss who served as the basis for Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Departed”.

What can you say?  The F.B.I. misidentified a random German man as one of its ten most wanted criminals, and then couldn’t find this innocent German man who wasn’t trying to hide from them for six months, and only eventually found him because he turned himself in.

At this point, I’m thinking we’re going to find the Lindberg baby before Osama bin Laden.

Four at Four

  1. The Exxon Valdez oil spill has finally reached the Supreme Court. Bloomberg News reports The Damage award amount is questioned. “U.S. Supreme Court justices questioned the $2.5 billion punitive damage award assessed against Exxon Mobil Corp. for the 1989 Valdez oil spill, the largest in American history.” Not unsurprisingly, but still disappointingly Chief Justice John Roberts said “I don’t see what more a corporation can do,” indicating Exxon’s “prohibition on alcohol use by on-duty vessel officers.” Of course, I doubt it occurred to Roberts that Exxon could have used double-hulled oil tankers, for example.

    Exxon is arguing, according to Reuters, that “it should not be punished for the mistakes of the ship’s captain. But the lawyer for about 33,000 commercial fishermen and others harmed by the nation’s worst tanker spill replied that Exxon Mobil for three years had overlooked reports that Captain Joseph Hazelwood had a drinking problem. Attorney Walter Dellinger said the record award was necessary to punish the huge Texas-based oil company, which earlier this month reported the highest-ever quarterly profit for a U.S. company of $11.7 billion.” Obviously, at $11.7 billion a quarter, Exxon is about to go out of business.

    The Los Angeles Times reports the Exxon Valdez oil spill lingers in Alaska.

    When the Exxon Valdez spilled its oil in March 1989, the world saw images of blackened seabirds and otters and seals, of bloated whale carcasses and once-pristine beaches covered with crude. Hardly anything was said about the herring.

    No one at the time understood the fish’s central place in the ecosystem, nor did anyone know the herring’s demise would lead to years of hardship for the people here…

    The herring disappeared four years after the spill — long after intense public scrutiny had faded and the story line had devolved into squabbling between lawyers.

    Exxon claimed the region recovered quickly. Government scientists, however, said oil remained and was still working its way through the ecosystem in a process that would last decades. At the back of a local tavern, hand-scrawled graffiti expresses a common sentiment here: “Oil spills are forever.”

    In December, nearly 19 years after the spill, scientists published the most definitive study of its kind linking Exxon oil with the collapse of the herring population. Oil killed adult herring, but more significantly, it damaged eggs and larvae.

    Surviving fish developed lesions in their livers. Larvae hatched prematurely and never grew to their full 8 or 9 inches. They showed depressed immune systems, which made them susceptible to disease.

    The population, which used to be scooped up by the millions of tons, never recovered and, from indications, may never return.

    $2.5 billion in punitive damages is too small of a fine against this eco-terrorist company and environmental mass-murderer.

ACLU & EFF Intervene in Wikileaks Case

Here comes the cavalry:

San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Northern California (ACLU-Northern California) Tuesday filed a motion to intervene in a lawsuit where a federal judge ordered the disabling of one of the domain names associated with “Wikileaks,” a website designed to give whistleblowers a forum for posting materials of public concern.

For those who may be unfamiliar with this case: the Swiss bank Julius Baer sued the whistleblower site Wikileaks and its Internet host Dynadot to remove documents related to the bank’s alleged money laundering activities in the Cayman Islands.

In a highly unusual ruling, the District Court, per a secret agreement between Dynadot and Julius Baer, granted the bank’s motion for a permanent injunction to both disable the Wikileak’s domain name and prevent its transfer to another registrar. The Court also ordered Dynadot to divulge all of Wikileak’s private client information and ruled it illegal for anyone (apparently anywhere in the world) to link to the documents at issue.  

Indeed, what makes this case even more unusual is that Wikileaks was informed of the bank’s motion by email only hours before the hearing, and when a Wikileaks attorney showed up informally to find out what was going on, she was ordered to leave the courtroom.

For more on this case, see Valtin’s excellent essay (also check out the comments) as well as this summary over at Wired.

The court’s injunction has far reaching implications for free speech on the Internet, because if allowed to stand, it means that anyone who doesn’t like what you post on the Internet can simply sue your host to shut you down.

It’s the Stupid, Stupid

US President George W. Bush denied Tuesday that the US economy was in recession or would go into one despite a spate of downcast reports and gloomy indicators.

“We’re not in a recession, I don’t think we will go in a recession. We’re in a slowdown, and there’s a difference,” Bush said in an interview with American Urban Radio Networks. “No question there is softening now.”

snip

“I am confident in our economy,” he said.

Shaky loan portfolios continue to darken the landscape for the nation’s banks, as federal regulators prepare for the possibility of an uptick in failures of financial institutions, according to recent government reports.

snip

All of this is happening as the FDIC, established during the Great Depression to provide a backstop to depositors during a rash of bank failures, solicits banks’ input on ways to accomplish as orderly a wind-down as possible in the event of a major bank’s demise. The FDIC sent a notice out to banks requesting their ideas last month.

“The notion that a bank is too big to fail shouldn’t be out there,” says Jim Marino, of the FDIC’s Division of Resolutions and Receiverships.

               PhotobucketPhotobucketPhotobucketPhotobucket

So is Iraq a sovereign country?

We all remember the fanfare of the Bush administration declaring Iraq a sovereign country. Our war criminal king George stuck his thumbs into his arm pits and crowed.

“After decades of brutal rule by a terror regime, the Iraqi people have their country back,” Mr. Bush said in Istanbul at a gathering of NATO leaders, who agreed Monday to help rebuild Iraq’s security forces.

Source

And who can forget the touching love note from Condi to Bush announcing that L. Paul Bremer had finished rewriting Iraqi laws and handed over the keys to Saddam’s palaces to the interim Iraqi government.

Photobucket

My question is what does Iraqi sovereignty mean? I have to ask because Iraqi airspace and territory have been repeatedly violated by Turkey, with the United States supplying the Turkish military with intelligence to conduct “incursions” into Iraq.  

Pony (Elephant) Party

According to Yahoo!News, a 4th grade girl in Montana has won the National Geographic contest to invent a new mnemonic for remembering the planets, now that Ceres and Eris are being recognized as dwarf planets (along with the demoted Pluto).

No longer will “Mary Visits Every Monday Just Staying Until Noon Period”, and never again will “My Very Educated Mother Just Send Us Nine Pizzas”.  Or….

(i totally cut and pasted this list from the wikipedia page, which has many, many more…all obsolete!!)

# Man Very Early Made Jars Stand Up Nearly Perpendicular

# Many Velvet Elephants Munching Juicy Satsumas Under Nodding Palms

# Many Verses Ease Memory Jogging Simply Using Nine Planets

# Many Very Early Men Just Sat Under New Planets

# Many Very Early Men Just Stayed Up Nights Planning (or Planting)

# Many Vikings Enjoyed Making Jelly; Some Used Norse Plums

# Many Visitors Eat Mulberry Jam Spread Upon New Potatoes

# Many Voracious Earthlings May Jump Soon Upon New Planets

# Mark’s Violet Eyes Make Jane Sit Up Nights Pining

# Men Very Early Made Journeys Seeking Unknown New Planets

# Men Very Easily Make Jugs Serve Useful Nocturnal Purposes

# Most of the Voters Earn Money Just by Showing Up Next to the Poll

How Sen. Clinton Loses Debates

During last night’s debate, Sen. Clinton once again tried to make an electoral issue out of Louis Farrakhan’s endorsement of Barack Obama, and the honor given Farrakhan by Obama’s church for his community activism in black communities.

First, let me say that the honor given Farrakhan is meaningless; it was for his activist works alone, which are deserving of recognition and get as little as they do because of all the many odious things Farrakhan says.  And of course, Barack Obama had nothing to do with the decision to give the honor.  So, in my opinion, not an actual issue.

But I want to talk instead about how Sen. Clinton blows her chances, rather than whether the opportunity is deserving.

Congressional races round 2: Illinois

Here’s part five of the second round of congressional races.  Earlier parts are here

Illinois has 19 representatives, 10 Democrats and 9 Republicans.  The filing deadline was way back in November, and the primary a couple weeks ago, so this is it

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

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