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Bite me!

SWEET NEO CON
(M. Jagger/K. Richards)

You call yourself a Christian
I think that you’re a hypocrite
You say you are a patriot
I think that you’re a crock of shit

And listen now, the gasoline
I drink it every day
But it’s getting very pricey
And who is going to pay

How come you’re so wrong
My sweet neo con…. Yeah

It’s liberty for all
‘Cause democracy’s our style
Unless you are against us
Then it’s prison without trial

But one thing that is certain
Life is good at Haliburton
If you’re really so astute
You should invest at Brown & Root…. Yeah

How come you’re so wrong
My sweet neo con
If you turn out right
I’ll eat my hat tonight

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah….

It’s getting very scary
Yes, I’m frightened out of my wits
There’s bombers in my bedroom
Yeah and it’s giving me the shits

We must have lots more bases
To protect us from our foes
Who needs these foolish friendships
We’re going it alone

How come you’re so wrong
My sweet neo con
Where’s the money gone
In the Pentagon

Just wanted to say congratulations to Shawn and Rachel on their marriage today.  We couldn’t make the wedding, but we’ll definitely catch you on the flip side!  Here’s to a long, healthy, happy marriage!

Um, I just wanted to point out some things to the Radicati group. First, Google just released an RSS Reader. RSS is mainly used to aggregate BLOG information. Microsoft announced widespread support for RSS in Vista. AOL bought Weblogs Inc. which is a conglomeration of web logs. They sold for between $20 and $35 MILLION dollars. Oh and Dave Winer sold weblogs.com to VeriSign. Weblogs.com is a service that does pretty much nothing other than allowing search engines to know when blogs are updated. It’s a ping tool for updates… TO BLOGS.

This is what the article above stated:

According to VeriSign’s Graves, the company decided to acquire Weblogs.com assets when it became clear that the service needed significant infrastructure investment to cope with the millions of daily blog pings.

They needed to cope with the millions of daily blog pings. Seems like blogging is big business now, and it’s still growing. Seems to fly in the face of what our favorite analyst group predicted for blogging this year huh? Sorry, sometimes I just have to point out things that are obvious to everyone in the world other than certain analysts… 🙂

Technorati tags: blogging,

Figured that it was only a matter of time, but Google has released Google Reader, an RSS feed reader. I’m sure they will integrate it with everything else they own, so that might be cool. I imported my OPML feed and tried it out, and while cool enough, it certainly won’t be supplanting my FeedDemon/NewsGator combo any time soon. Nice to see them embracing it however.

Technorati tages: rss, rss aggregator, google

Bill Buckner says Hi!

That is all.  🙂

Shit, I didn’t know it, but there are two competing oridinances proposed for limiting smoking in Chicago. One is a total ban, and the other is almost exactly what I would do as outlined in my previous blog entry. Read it and tell me it isn’t a good compromise.

Also, it looks as if there is a lot of evidence that smoking bans hurt businesses overall. Even in California.

More info at www.freechicago.org.

Technorati Tags: smoking, anti-smoking, smoking ban

Unless you live around Chicago you’re probably not familiar with what’s currently going on here. Well, some people are lobbying to make Chicago smoke-free. What this means is they want to outlaw smoking in ALL restaurants and ALL bars.

I’m not a cigarette smoker, and while I do smoke an occasional cigar, this legislation really doesn’t affect me. In fact, I hate inhaling smoke while I’m eating. Even when I DID smoke cigarettes, I never did it with a meal, it just ruined the meal for me. So, I tend to gravitate to smoke-free restaurants anyway.

This whole movement still pisses me off.

Why? Because it comes down to simple freedom. It’s just another step in a long line of freedoms government is taking away. It makes it all that much easier for them to take away something else later.

Here’s what I don’t understand. Why can’t we have smoking restaurants and bars AND non-smoking restaurants and bars? Require that they mark what they are clearly on the outside of the establishment. Then, you can let the market decide. If people REALLY don’t want to go to a smoking establishment, then they don’t have to go. Wow, freedom of CHOICE. What a fucking concept.

I imagine if a smoking establishment sees their clientele drop significantly, then they might make a switch to non-smoking. VOLUNTARILY. No government sticking their damn noses in and requiring adults to conform to another freedom-grab.

My wife even brought up a point that maybe we could require the smoking establishments to get a Smoking license, much like a liquour license. There could be some standards in regards to what type of ventilation they have, and money from those licenses could go to non-smoking programs like TV advertising and things like the American Cancer Society.

Sounds like a good compromise. This would allow me, as a free adult, the CHOICE of which restaurants I wanted to go to. I wouldn’t be forced to go to a smoking establishment, and the smoker likewise would not be forced to a non-smoking restaurant.

But instead we have the whiney bitch-ass non-smokers pushing to take away freedom. Make no mistake, they aren’t simply taking away smoking, they are taking away FREEDOM.

Now one of their arguments is that second-hand smoke really hurts people. They even trot out this waitress girl who got throat cancer despite not being a smoker herself. The doctors say it’s “probably” because of second-hand smoke. It’s not definitive, and I don’t doubt that it’s the case. The message is that second-hand smoke is bad.

No shit? Really? We’ve known that for a really long time, longer than she was a waitress. So, she knowingly worked in that environment, KNOWING that it could harm her health. Freedom of choice once again. She chose to work there despite knowing what could happen. If you boil it down, it’s no different from a contractor in Iraq, or from a construction worker working in heavy machinery, or auto body men in their paint booths. Every once of those people knew that there were risks involved, and yet they do the job anyway.

Am I glad this girl got cancer? Hell no. That being said, it turns my stomach to see her on TV going “If other cities can be smoke-free, why not Chicago?”

Because of freedom.

These people would say they support freedom, but when it comes down to it, they only support the freedoms THEY want. God forbid we try to outlaw their Hummer, they might fight that to the death.

People only want freedom on their terms, and I fucking hate that. We’re not really free, and what freedoms we do have dwindle every single day. Do you really want to support that?

Technorati Tags: smoking, anti-smoking, smoking ban