20030814 – sex and military pay cuts

I got really pissed when I read that Troops in Iraq face pay cut / Pentagon says tough duty bonuses are budget-buster. And we’re talking $75 per person, per month increase in Danger Pay.

Holy FUCK!

Our troops over there have it probably a lot worse than I did. I recall one thing very clearly: that we were severely underpaid.

Think about it, you’re getting shot at, and you are living in absolutely the worst possible conditions, which make any prison here look like Club Med. In prison, people at least get three meals a day, a place to sleep, a place to shit, and not shot at (usually, unless you’re in some commercialized prison/neo-plantation). I slept on a pile of duffel bags in the back of a 2.5 ton truck, when I got to actually sleep. Food was the dreaded MRE most of the time, punctuated by something they called “food” the cooks tried to entertain us with. Never mind the misery. Never mind the risk. While the friends of the _resident profit enormously on the war, our troops, and their families don’t even get a $75/month increase in Danger Pay. This is the same administration that called the War Protesters (the first people who said “Support Our Troops: bring them home!!!“) unpatriotic and treasonous.

YOU tell me who is treasonous!
YOU tell me who gives a damn for our troops!
YOU tell me who is looking out for this once great nation!!!

Oh, and if you’re looking for the sex in this entry, it was just a way for me to SEX UP the appeal of this journal.

jack_

20030814 – these are your kids

You send him out here to visit with $40 in his pocket. Forty dollars for a sixteen-year old!!! This is friggin’ San Francisco, not some outpost in the middle of the Outback.

I called you and asked “why did you send him out here with so little?” and you said “he doesn’t deserve it.”

Well, I don’t think you deserve to receive almost $600 a month in child support if you can’t see why that money belongs to the kids, not you. You use it to go to concerts and whatever, but what I don’t hear is you putting anything of your own into them unless you absolutely have to. You are punishing him because he has my name and because he reminds you of me.

Do the math:

$600 – monthly child support
divide by two since we have two children
$300
he visits for two weeks this month
$150

$150!!!

That’s all you needed to send with him. And it’s not like he doesn’t need new clothes, some shoes, and underclothes. HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO YOUR OWN SON????

It’s because you are punishing him. You don’t care about how he feels or how he does in life. You’re too busy with your own life to bother being a parent.

I begged, I grovelled, I pleaded last year for you to let me have them stay with me. I had lined up good schools, good mentors, and set aside time and money to make this happen. And you said “NO.”

His grades plummeted. His attitude went to hell. And all you could do was keep him in that isolated jail you call “home.”

I see spider bites on his body because his mattress is old and worn. I hear stories by eye-witnesses about how you don’t really care about much more than yourself.

THESE ARE YOUR KIDS!!!!

History will not treat you well. There’s no way these smart kids won’t realize what an awful person you have been. Yes, you’re their Mother, and yes, they’ll always love you. But in the end, they’ll see you for exactly what you are:
white trash

You might be able to keep him down for now. You might be able to keep him around you by sabotaging his life. But not forever. You can’t keep a good man down.

Wake up!!!!

20030812

I was at a protest against the secret police chief Tom Ridge with my daughter Brittany (I wanted to make sure she knows the range of options Constitutionally guaranteed to her (up to now anyway) as well as getting to know a side of her Father she might not get to see in action. Plus, I want my kids to not be afraid to get involved. After we left the rally, I teased her and said “ you know, now your photo is probably in some glossy black and white file at the FBI headquarters, with a caption on the back of each one.”

She said to me as we were leaving “it was just annoying to be around all these loud rowdy people.” And I said “that’s the point. We’re TRYING to get on their nerves to get them to listen to us. If we have to close down the city, so be it. Human lives are at stake here. The very principles by which we live, are at stake here. If you want a time where your dad will say “get rowdy!” NOW is the time!!!”

I think she got it. Hell, she may rebel and one day join the Young Republicans. But I know whatever she does, she’ll be able to give sound reasoning to back up her actions. I love that little lady!!! I love my son, who arrives this week.

They both are just starting to have significant others. THAT’s interesting! Let me tell you, parents must be constantly laughing to themselves as all the other expecting parents around them think it’s going to be one big cakewalk. Man, watching your kids grow up is like the biggest f*cking dose of karma. I mean, you can’t avoid looking at them as your own DNA in full 3D living color. There they are, some fractal of you and another person, animated and talking to you. And instead of falling over in dumbstruck awe, you answer back at them, trying to keep the charade going, that you aren’t just totally blown away by this meeting with the Future. You know, when they talk about “if I could go back and talk to myself when I was xx years old, blah blah blah . . .”? That’s what parenting is. Except more like in real time. Like right here, right now, 2003 (or whenever).

20030811 – wireless revisited

Thanks Mark, for your feedback on Wireless. Mark is a friend of mine I’ve known from back in the days of working at the University of Wisconsin – Madison’s Division of Information Technology Help Desk.

SparkyMark arrived on the scene with an extreme knowledge of the Mac OS. I remember him taking any Mac and tweaking it so it would run twice as fast and using less reources. Anyway, Mark’s got some good points on Wireless.

I guess the main reason I like opening my bandwidth, or at least some of my bandwidth, to a free wireless network, is to encourage the furthering of Open Community.

We used to talk in Madison about each block getting a T-1 or DSL connection and then splitting that up within that block so each house would have constantly-on Internet connectivity. This was what we called “Neighborhood Networking” (before Windows started using it in their interface). We’ve seen this happen in places like Ramona Street in San Francisco where the now-defunct cyborganic.com had their stronghold of hip-witted techno-pagan/pixel-visionaries during the 90’s.

The main attraction of setting up something like a cooperative network is it returns the control of the network back to the community, while at the same time encouraging peoples’ face-to-face interaction. This would then become a block-by-block Town Hall meeting. I guess I am still attracted to this sort of grass-roots networking.

I received my amateur radio license when I was 14. “KA2SGD” was my first call-sign. Those nights of staying up with the smell of heated capacitors and vacuum tubes (I grew up in the middle of the solid-state boom of the 70’s and 80’s but an entry-level transmitter and receiver (transceiver) was a little more than my newspaper-carrying fourteen-year-old self could afford) listening for weak signals in the static, or gabbing all night with my other friends, who had also earned their ham licenses. It was great having the ability to talk whenever reception conditions allowed, to virtually anyone who happened to be on that frequency.

The only down-side to this was the fact that you had to have a license to get on the air. And you had to have the equipment to get on the air, or at least access to it. And part of the equipment requirement is having space to have an antenna, which can sometimes be lengths of wire that span several hundred meters. I still love ham radio. Haven’t been on the air in a while. But my license is still current: “NZ0C”

However, now we’ve got this new-fangled thing on our hands called the Internet. And for a while, it seemed like everyone was going to eventually have free access to the Internet, where they could keep up with whatever they felt like. For instance, someone interested in getting more of an inside or in-depth scoop on the WMD fiasco currently playing out in the world today, would be hard-put to find anything on television or radio or even in print newspapers talking about the issue in all its gory detail (for instance, that the _resident mislead this nation into a war for weapons he knew damned well didn’t exist . . . at least not the way he made it sound). But more and more controlling interests are closing in on the last bits and pieces of the Internet that are not currently controlled by corporate interests.

One worrisome trend has been the erosion of our Rights here in the USA. The Patriot Act managed to make it a helluva lot easier for the government to monitor people, not just terrorists, but people who happen to express their dissent or are in disagreement with the power base. Just for the record, I worried about this sort of thing even during the Clinton Era. But I had no idea how bad things could get until Smirk and his Cabal of Cheap Labor Conservative (Neo-Feudal Plantationists) took control of this country.

Boycott the RIAAOf late, it seems the corporate greed-mongers get anything they want. At least the ones who contributed to the campaigns of the right people. The RIAA managed to issue a subpoena in a drive against an alleged illegal Internet file sharer. They essentially succeeded in getting the Internet Service Provider of one file sharer to hand over the doucments telling the identity of one alleged file sharer.

While this may seem OK at first, who’s next? Well, now the RIAA has issued numerous subpeonas to affect the same results for thousands of file sharers. Got MP3s on your hard drive? Be careful, be VERY careful.

However, imagine a world where information flows freely. A marketplace of ideas with a truly level-playing field. This is a world a lot of detractors of the Internet do not want you to imagine. They instead want you to have to pay them or their middlemen to get spoon fed the information they think is OK for you to consume.

When is the last time you were referred to as a citizen? Seems we’re almost always just thought of as consumers now.

So imagine a Folk_Internet. An Illegal Internet. A Truly ALTER-Net (I know this name is already taken). This IS coming into existence as we speak. People are linking up their wireless devices and they are creating their own bandwidth. And yes, at some point, they do have to connect into the Internet to talk to the rest of us.

The same could be said of packet radio when we used to “wormhole” back to the Internet from our radios. It has beens omething we’ve been able to do for years. And now the technology is becoming readily and inexpensively available.

No, the speeds simply don’t compare to wired Ethernet connections. But this is happening and it’s happening right now. And anything I can do to help it along, is an honor and a necessary step in our evolution toward a more open and honest society.

Irf you know of good WiFi sites, please send them my way. I am hoping to compile these and report back on what the best way to proceed, at least at the moment, in getting the Free-Net running well for the benefit of the PEOPLE.

20030811 – Sometimes

Sometimes,
I can look in your eyes and I see right through your soul.
Sometimes,
the only thing I can see in your eyes is me

Starting to really get down to the wire as far as energy levels go. I really really have spread myself a bit thin. But at this point, most of the people I’m helping out on their various projects are on their own two feet and helping themselves.

One thing I sort of detest about web journals is you can’t just say whatever is exactly on your mind. Reminds me of Nostradamus who wrote in quatrains which were four-line prose embedded with his ideas, but under layers of imagery and double-meaning. One never knows who is reading.

But that’s good.

20030808 – eat like an Egyptian

So I’m just about to head out of work (yes, I’m still here, see earlier post), head to my place, get my scooter, go pick up Giovanna, and then ride out to the avenues to what seems to be the only Egyptian restaurant in the area. Being that Giovanna is an Aegyptophile, and I have a hankerin’ for some Middle Eastern food, we’re going to head over there and see what’s cookin’. I’ll keep you posted.

Starting to enter into the wireless realm. As much as I’m happy to see wires go away, it still worries me how non-secure the wireless networks seem to be. ALthough, on the other hand, what a great way to share bandwidth!!! I’m very seriously contemplating setting up my wireless router to have an open-use community Wireless Access Point (WAP) right near Haight-Ashbury. I’ll have to roam around the block and see what’s available on the network. If nothing, then I’ll probably set it up this weekend or next. Hopefully there are some groups around that I can link up with for any questions about security and all that jazz.

Friday, August 02, 2002

I believe, I believe what the old man said
Though I know that there’s no lord above
I believe in me, I believe in you
And you know I believe in love
I believe in truth though I lie a lot
I feel the pain from the push and shove
No matter what you put me through
I’ll still believe in love
 — Phil Oakey

20020401

I wrote this haiku on Saturday, March 30th under a cherry tree in Golden Gate Park, near the Tea Gardens:

limerick dosage
bliss chip-static overture
cherry blossom love