What if you could create a country
located next to your enemies
And use nationalism,
religion,
and plain old bribery
to get people to move there
And fund their military
so that in reality
it's your military
but better. You see,
this new state doesn't have your
Constitution, or any law at all
And you use that military
to attack your enemy,
forever
What then?

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There are only two ways to survive parenthood. One is to shut it out. The other is to welcome it in.

I like Barney's songs. I'm a huge Hello Kitty fan. I love Miyazaki's films, Monsters Incorporated, Shrek, ...

I enjoyed living in a child's world for the past eight years. I visited because of Kate. I had no choice. But she's leaving it now, and therefore I must bid it farewell.

Everything constantly changes. Jobs, pets, people, towns. Even the pace at which time passes.

It hurts to tell beautiful things goodbye but there is always something to say Hello to. Even health problems.

Only challenges keep us changing for the better.

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Being against gay marriage has nothing to do with gays or marriage.

It's about ordinary folks getting high on playing Tyrant.

Get some therapy, people.

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I recently configured FriendFeed, Twitter, and identi.ca to contain the same entries (more or less) without duplicating the same message in a single service.

• http://friendfeed.com/terrisca
• http://twitter.com/terrisca
• http://identi.ca/terrisca

FriendFeed and Twitter synchronization is easy thanks to FriendFeed's recent Twitter integration. However, adding a third application to the party results in a migraine. The application in my case is identi.ca, but it could just as easily be Facebook.

Master-master event replication is problematic, as it can result in infinite-reposting of a single message. The only solutions to this problem are either direct integration (as in the case of Twitter and FriendFeed) or breaking the loop. In my case, identi.ca's messages are not automatically posted to other services. This is unfortunate as this causes identi.ca to lose 'advertising' in FriendFeed. Yet, putting the same Tweet and dent in my FriendFeed stream leads to clutter.

My FriendFeed account receives messages from Twitter, last.fm, blogs, etc.. It also sends messages to Twitter (a cool new feature), with the option of having links point to FriendFeed, so that my friends can add comments there. I find FriendFeed's comment functionality to be superior to using replies in Twitter and identi.ca. FriendFeed does not receive messages from identi.ca because doing so would result in an endless loop which I indirectly discuss below.

I set up blip.fm to post to Twitter but not to FriendFeed. I can choose either service from blip.fm's Settings page but not both; otherwise, the same blip would appear multiple times in each service. I decided on Twitter because blip.fm turns my blip into a master FriendFeed item plus a comment, which results in two messages appearing in Twitter and identi.ca per blip.

Tweets are pushed to identi.ca by Twitterfeed, posting only the description and the link. Messages can be truncated (more on that later) which often results in broken URLs. If you tell Twitterfeed to omit links back to Twitter, readers will likely not be able to discern the context of your messages.

I can not use identi.ca's built-in Twitter posting capability because it causes an infinite loop. Consider the scenario where I post a message "foo" FriendFeed. "foo" appears in Twitter via FriendFeed. "foo" appears in identi.ca via Twitterfeed. identi.ca would then post "foo" back to Twitter. Twitterfeed would post the second "foo" from Twitter back to identi.ca which would then post it to Twitter, and so on.

I instead use ping.fm to post new messages to Twitter (and therefore FriendFeed) and identi.ca. Twitterfeed is limited to running every 30 minutes at 5 messages at a time, so using ping.fm results in immediate delivery to identi.ca. I also like ping.fm's ability to avoid shortening URLs by prefixing them with a *. Unfortunately, ping.fm doesn't use 3rd party shortening services like bit.ly.

I begin all messages entered into ping.fm with an underscore to indicate that the Tweet already exists in identi.ca. Twitterfeed consumes the output of my Yahoo! Pipes application that filters out all tweets that begin with the text "terrisCA: _". If I didn't do this, any message I entered into ping.fm would appear twice in identi.ca - first by ping.fm and then by Twitterfeed. Since messages posted to Twitter from FriendFeed etc. don't start with _, they are posted to identi.ca by Twitterfeed.

I wouldn't need to use ping.fm if I could instruct identi.ca to post 'dents to Twitter only when using the UI. identi.ca would then be able to avoid reposting messages from Twitterfeed back to Twitter. But even with such a feature, I would still need to use Twitterfeed (and thus the Yahoo! Pipes application) in order to send FriendFeed's messages to identi.ca (via Twitter).

Although I can not use identi.ca's posting UI, I think it's better than ping.fm's. Only identi.ca's "reply to" functionality points correctly back to the 'dent that you're replying to (of course, this wouldn't translate to Tweets). Plus, identi.ca can use bit.ly 's URL shortening service among others. identi.ca is very intelligent regarding the 140 character limit as it refuses to post messages that are too long, *after* URL shortening (a feature I've asked the ping.fm folks for, but they do not seem very receptive to requests). However, identi.ca is missing ping.fm's nice *-don't-shorten-URL feature. Currently, no service is perfect.

If I found Twitterfeed's latency acceptable, I could avoid using ping.fm and post messages using either FriendFeed or Twitter. I wouldn't need the Yahoo! Pipes application either, at least to filter out tweets that start with _. But there's another reason to use Yahoo! Pipes with Twitterfeed. Twitter's ATOM feed prefixes every message with my user name, e.g., "terrisca: ". This can result in the truncation of messages sent to identi.ca. The maximum message length for identi.ca is therefore 130 instead of 140. I would like to be able to replace "terrisca: " with an empty string but unfortunately, Yahoo! Pipes apparently doesn't have this functionality.

In fact, I wouldn't need to use Twitterfeed or Yahoo! Pipes if FriendFeed posted to identi.ca in addition to Twitter. Then I could post messages via FriendFeed. I doubt that will happen anytime soon. But FriendFeed's message posting UI is still clunky. It doesn't display the current character count and it doesn't shorten URLs.

Although my solution works technically, syncing between social media applications is inherently problematic. If you reply to @foo in, say, blip.fm, that reply will appear in @foo's inbox in both Twitter and identi.ca. If @foo on blip.fm isn't the same person as @foo on Twitter, Twitter's @foo will be rather confused. When venturing into social networking, it's wise to first choose a username that nobody else would think of, and use it everywhere.

Furthermore, Twitter and identi.ca frequently get the "in reply to" link wrong, making it impossible for readers to determine what you were actually replying to. It's a good idea to manually include a link to the original tweet or 'dent in your reply. Twitter and identi.ca should do this for us.

This adventure exploses the current half-baked nature of social networking technology. The word "network" applies to the human society and only loosely to the mishmash of various inadequate and incompatible protocols and systems. Laconica's federation concept seems to be a step in the right direction. Twitter, Myspace, and Facebook apparently prefer you and your content remain trapped in their unsocial systems.

To begin to remedy various issues with master-master event replication, at a minimum ATOM documents from social systems need to contain additional attributes per item:

1. Item URI (already exists in most ATOM documents as 'link')
2. Source system URI (useful for determining the context of @-user and #-tag references)
3. Author URI
4. If the item is a reply/comment, the following from the original item: Item URI, Source system URI, Author URI
5. Posted URIs: A list of URIs where the item has already been posted. This is needed to avoid infinite loops.

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Sometimes we refuse to do something easy that is truly in our best interest. And, because it's easy to do, we can't explain where the resistance comes from.

Perhaps the following conversation will help you understand what's going on in the consciousness.

"No!"

"Why not?"

"I don't no!"

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I have never been able to help others as well as I can with Buddhist teaching. If I can help someone, I help myself.

http://sfzc.org/ - San Francisco Zen Center.

Jana Drakka is a zen priest from Scotland who lives in San Francisco. Listen to her here:

http://janadrakka.com/content/view/16/37/

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One must learn
to cure oneself of
an addiction to success.

Compared to winning,
no-success will win you more friends
in the end.

No-success is the only way to learn
what you really are.

Nonaction is the key to
avoiding an addiction to no-success.

Success in nonaction can only be achieved
with no-thought.

There is no cure for no-thought
addiction. Good luck achieving it.

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You can not love one unless you learn to love no one.

Once learning to live without love, only then can you live with it.

No hope. No expectations. No desire.

Good-bye, Kate.

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Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.

Having chosen our course, without guile and with pure purpose, let us renew our trust in God, and go forward without fear and with manly hearts.


Abraham Lincoln

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http://is.gd/a6Me

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Much to the dismay of Bush and his cronies (Ken Lay, Enron, PG&E), California for a few years in the late 90s similarly allowed rate payers to choose their energy providers. After Bush was elected, Enron colluded to destroy both freedom of choice in California and its governor, Gray Davis. Now we have an Austrian bodybuilder as Governator and he just announced a financial state of emergency for California thanks to his Republican swine who refuse to make the rich pay their fair share of taxes.

Republicans are good at making money, but they're too stupid and greedy to avoid causing permanent damage.

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The US is one of 4 countries that so far has refused to sign the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

(with New Zealand, Canada, Australia)

Listen

http://kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=29630

Read

http://www.iwgia.org/sw248.asp

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No surrender.

Thank you Sarah Palin, John McCain, and the rich white men behind you.

Thank you for digging up the grave of Bill Ayers the Rebel.

Only you could have.

You sad lonely people. You always do the opposite of what you intend.

Your greed destroyed countless lives. But it did something else.

It sparked a revolution.

It awakened a consciousness in America that lay dormant since the last soldier escaped Vietnam in '75.

The reprioritization of love over materialism.

Zen isn't coming to the West. It's been here for at least 50 years.

And it's going to scare the shit out of you.

No surrender.

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I am starting to be unable to pay my bills. I'm still employed but everything seems to have gotten expensive enough to result in a noticeable pay cut.

I seriously doubt President Obama will lower my taxes. I don't think I qualify as middle class although with the cost of living in San Francisco California, I'm not exactly rich either.

Anyway. I'll have to cut back on things like donating to charities. Thanks America, you're great.

I'm glad that Obama is finally President. For the past month it was evident that he would be elected, but the question will always remain how long will he live given the number of skinheads in America. Let's take them bowling.

I've been on a large new project at work since last March. The fruits of that labor are starting to peek over the soil. Which only means that I will be busier than ever.

If I manage to keep my job, that is.

Kate continues to make our lives difficult. That's her job. I wish I was dead most of the time, although I don't believe in death. Things just get worse and worse, and then you start over. Life is somebody's sick joke.

I tread on. I love you.

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Hi Peter,

I clicked through a Google ad today to http://www.peterklivans.com/ The ad was on weatherchannel.com – quite a coup for you!

I live in Burlingame. I commute 4 days a week to SF mostly via Caltrain.

I could take BART twice a week but I choose to walk further and take Caltrain. Why is that?

1. BART interiors are disgusting. They look and sometimes smell like they were for dogs and horses. The seats have clearly been peed on many times. I have pictures.
2. Where is the bathroom on a BART train? That might help with the pee-on-seats problem. In fact, where's a bathroom in the stations? The downtown SF stations don't seem to have any. That's really nice!
3. We don't want to talk to each other, so why pretend that we might? The seats are too low. There is no privacy. The seating where two people face each other are either (1) torture for 4 or (2) an obvious waste of space for 2, which is usually the case.

I find it hard to believe that you actually ride BART, Peter, since your website doesn't mention even one of these points.

Have you ever taken a ride on Caltrain? The (older) cars provide privacy. The seats are high. They're not spotless but they're cleaner. There's a toilet in at least one car.

Caltrain feels good. It's respectful. BART doesn't treat me with any respect at all. So why should I reward it with my money?

I'd very much like to see BART spend less on sprawl and more on turning it into a humane mode of transportation. Like so many things in this world, I can count on that never happening.


Best of luck in life and your campaign,

Terris

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The Boomer generation, approaching retirement, is very afraid. They should be. But this was expected.

The Dow was bound to fall big around 2008 excluding all other factors. When a large percentage of the working population moves from securities to cash and bonds, securities suffer. The financial system crisis served as a shocking reminder that boomers won't live long enough to recover from a Wall Street meltdown.

Of course, younger sheep who shouldn't have been investing in Wall Street in the first place also contributed to the sell-off.

Securities don't just lose value. A piece of paper is worth the price that someone is willing to sell it for. Some investors are stupid with fear. Some have substantial debts and therefore need cash. Some are cautiously selling based on advice from their financial gurus. Some are shrewd and have made a killing selling short, as they did in 2000-2001 when Silicon Valley melted down.

Wall Street reflects the wealthy Western male collective consciousness. It therefore reflects the recent polls that show Obama will likely win. Even today, many racists own a large percentage of, well, basically everything. Although most rich white men hate Democrats, a subset of them believe that "black" people - using the One Drop Rule (even though we all have an African mother somewhere in our past) - are inferior and are therefore incapable, for example, of managing money. This is ironic considering how mostly rich white men pillaged and burned solid companies (like AIG; like GM; like Chrysler) to the ground. Many are (and have been) burning Wall Street in their disgust of the prospect of living in an African country. But we shall overcome.

My retirement is 30 years away, if ever. It's more likely I'll die before that happens. I therefore work for start-ups as much as possible. Unfortunately, I don't think any of the options and stock I hold will be worth much. The IPO market has been sledge-hammered for at least the next decade. Plus, getting rich with stock is a matter of media hype and little else. Nevetheless, I'm trying to make my 401k and Social Security irrelevant.

All of us GenXers and younger face an uncertain future with 401k-based retirement. At least some boomers are still buffered by pensions. Younger generations are subject to the slings of arrows of outrageous fortune.

Regardless, with the Dow at 8300 and P/E ratios falling back to pre-401k values, in my opinion, and Warren Buffett's apparently, it's an informed buyer's market. Sure, the markets may continue to fall, but people like me have to invest in something, and it's sure as hell not going to be US dollars with interest rates held down for the foreseeable future. This, of course, isn't a coincidence. The people who own Wall Street and influence US Treasury policy want workers to invest there. They'll do everything in their power to stymie the rebirth of dependable company-run pensions.

Therefore, I'm bullish for a few reasons:

1. Obama won't put the Black Panthers in charge of the Treasury
2. History shows that as long as people have babies, the economy grows, no matter how many stupid things the government does (unnecessary wars, unnecessary anti-hemp laws, allowing prayer in school, standing down jet fighters in order to let flying buses filled mostly with devil worshippers - I mean Californians - crash into skyscrapers)
3. The Obama Administration might actually deal with Afghanistan, bin Laden, and ignorant anti-science racists like the Palins
4. The bailout, although a cancer for Social Security and Medicare, will be good to Wall Street. So what choice do I have?

The question remains. When to buy? Timing markets exactly is impossible. The market's volatility is unprecedented. As for my experience, the biggest mistake I've made investing is selling good companies during hard times, and never buying them back.

In the long term, it's unlikely that you can beat a balanced portfolio that is shored up consistently, through good times and bad. But please do remember to cash in your chips years before you need to.

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You know who you are: the 400 mostly white mostly men who own mostly everything.

What the fuck are you thinking?

Here we are, trying to serve you your extra hot mochas, working every day to make you richer by researching physics, robotics, networking, and artifical intelligence. Teaching your ungrateful brats algebra.

What do you do in return? You run your ponzi schemes. You lie to us. You cheat us. You bathe in our tax dollars however you please.

You call us liars. You call us cheaters. You say we deserve it.

And worst of all, you tell us that you're the only ones who can save us from ourselves.

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I edited myself on Twitter a few times this week, only to find that those entries were among my most popular.

In one entry I asked, "Where's my bailout?", being a couple of paychecks myself away from foreclosure. I received several "me too" replies to that one. We all want something for nothing, and lobbyists are no exception. They shamelessly rode Congress hard last week for million-dollar scraps from the $800 billion carcass.

Alas, I deleted the entry because I used profanity with a tag (#bailout), a practice that I don't condone because tags are widely read. Profanity induces strain on the weak minded.

Secondly, I don't deserve a free house simply because I'm in the same precarious situation as most middle class Californian families. Housing here represents more than 50% of take home pay and we've reached the breaking point. As our pResident accidentally said after the bailout passed, Americans can once again borrow money to pay their bills.

There's something un-Christian (or at least immoral) about borrowing more to make mortgage and car payments. Or perhaps it's the immorality of those who've rigged the system in their favor.

There's always good with the bad. The bailout, thanks to Dennis Kucinich, taught me a few things about the world's banking system.

Question: How do you rob a bank? Answer: By owning one.

That's alarmingly easy to do. Lots of today's billionaires, many of whom are about to be given $800 billion of our taxes plus billions more in deductions, got rich by running their savings and loans into the ground. Neil Bush has some experience in that area. As does John McCain.

Suffering from 30 years of militarized Reaganomics, the modern world has endured white-collar corruption, incompetence, and crime at levels unimaginable by the victors of World War II.

The taxpayers are expected to pay for the party they weren't invited to - or else!

The credit pushers raked in obscene profits. The Fed apparently can't find the perpetrators. What a bunch of horse shit.

I unapologetically voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. Having endured eight years of the Clintons' version of Reaganomics (aka neoliberalism, ironically resembling neoconservatism), I decided that I would no longer support the DNC's unrepentant Republicanism.

I knew that Gore would be a better president than Bush - I'm not stupid. It was obvious that Gore would trounce the draft-dodging Bush moron handily. Or so I thought.

But along the way to November 2000, something extraordinary happened. Months before the election, Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch manufactured an opinion that swept across America like the plague: the President shouldn't be smarter than the voters. What matters more than a President's pedigree is whether Average Joe would enjoy getting shit-faced with the guy (or gal, in the case of Hillary's pathetic posing with shots of bourbon during the 2008 primaries).

This Republican fantasy was swallowed whole by both the electorate and the media. Saturday Night Live lampooned Al Gore’s impressive intellect. Bush benefitted for obvious reasons. Yet Bush would still have lost were it not for Fox News and five Supreme Court justices.

Eight years later, Rove’s trick is still working its magic. Obama's sharp wit is his elitist weakness. Palin’s down-home cluelessness is refreshingly honest. Up is down. War is peace.

After the credit fiasco, I've had enough of America's games with word-play, dumb-fuckery, and racism.

If Democrats and Republicans want to bail out Wall Street but can't exactly explain why, so be it.

If Republicans want a dumb-ass to be President, we already have one. How bad could President Palin be? Then again, I don't think Average Joe Six Pack NFL Sunday Republican is smiling these days.

If Democrats want a minority to be President, a week ago I would have chimed in whole-heartedly "Me Too!" Give me an Afro-American, a white woman, or an ex-bodybuilder with an accent and Democrat in-laws.

But after this pathetic bailout that both Obama and Biden supported, I’m inclined to recall those eight years of program-cutting, regulation-shredding Clinton rule.

Enough is enough. From now on, I will not fixate on the label. I will listen to the words. I will study the voting record.

I have, and I can not vote for the Obama/Biden ticket. I refuse to support anyone who participated in the largest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind, from the working man's pockets to those of the global yacht club.

The bailout and the "War on Terror" both serve the same cartels to the same end: the enslavement of the American underclasses. Not just the Africans this time around.

The cupboard will be bare when it’s time to fund Social Security, Medicare, and public education.

We non-billionaires have but two choices: to fight the Democrats with a third party, or to change them from the inside. The interior of the Democratic Party is corroded beyond repair. Funding an illegal occupation was proof enough.

There are a few voices in Washington DC that deserve our support. Sadly, Warren Buffett's isn't one of them. Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader are dead-on on all the issues.

Of course, I'll let you, dear reader, make your own decision. Also take a look here. Good luck.

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http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/09/would-better-data-analysis-red.html

Eric,

Given your logic that the 'contagion' might spread to Main Street, so we must act quickly for better or worse, why not just shoot and bury anyone who is suspected of having the disease?

That's what Congress is about to do.

But sometimes it's difficult to determine who is actually sick and who is well, especially when the illness affects the brain.

The gun is pointed not at the fat cats, but at us - the workers. The workers who will be laid off and will not have health insurance. The workers who will not have a pension, a balanced 401k portfolio, or a social security check that will buy a month's worth of dog food.

Or a roof over our heads.

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Dear Senator Boxer,

I hope you're not listening to the masses on the bailout.

Please don't give the speculators what they're asking for.

Sticking the taxpayers with a bill for real estate devaluation, which is the unavoidable result of speculation, is wrong for America.

Wall Street will survive. As for the rest of it, e.g., "Why will I never be able to retire?", it will have to wait until Obama is President.


Sincerely,

Terris

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The glass and steel towers shall return to the earth as ashes, rocks, and sand.

The sites will be cleansed of the countless lifetimes of toil that resulted in human slavery; in heartache; in jealousy; in disappointment; in oppression that crushed human skulls to dust;

In the destruction of rain forests and the whole of God's creation.

The sites will become places of worship; of gratitue; of reverence, humility, joy, cooperation,

And love.

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