The poorest of the poor have food stamps. Why worry about them!?

According to Mitt Romney, they have a security net. Why worry about them!?

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A Brazilian Reasons To Get Spotify Premium!

How many is a Brazilian???

I’ve always had my reservations about storing my documents in the cloud, especially music. I always felt as though music  in the cloud A) took up too much space to be effective for large collections like mine, and B) I couldn’t convince myself to spend hours uploading multiple gigabytes of mp3′s… Seemed like a waste of time since I listen to music on either my MacBook Air or my iPhone.

My concern about storing documents in the cloud is basically the security and reliability (is it secure, and will I have access to a wifi source when I need it?). I don’t create and use a lot of documents in my personal life though, and those I do create or reuse are easily stored on my laptop so I can avoid those issues pretty easily.

Back to the music though… Thanks to a suggestion from @LDNcalling on Twitter in the recent past though I’ve been experimenting with the free version of Spotify and decided to get the Premium account over the weekend. Now, without having the need for saving large quantities of mp3′s in the cloud I can listen to their entire database of 15 million songs for $10 a month from my iPhone, MacBook Air, work computer etc.

With the premium account you get “more” but the two things that meant the most to me were higher bitrates on songs (320 vs. 160 on the free accounts), and no advertisements! I’m now contemplating deleting a lot of those rarely played mp3′s from my MacBook Air and just listening to those tunes on Spotify when I want to hear them, thereby saving me precious memory! It will also load any songs on the hard drive to integrate everything into one interface.

Listening to music that’s new to me is one of my favorite things in life, and there are entire collections of albums to hear! For example, as a big Gary Numan fan I have a bunch of his albums, but nowhere near ALL of them. With Spotify I can listen to ALL of those older, harder to find albums or those I just didn’t want to fork over the money for at the time because there was something else I wanted more. New music? Just pick some genres or do searches for musicians/bands that you want to hear. Their database is large, but you may not find every single thing you want to try out. Still, I think it would have to be rare, or very new.

On the downside, I do NOT want to connect my account to Facebook, which you are strongly encouraged to do during the sign up process. I don’t care to broadcast every song I listen to for one thing, and I prefer to keep all my social networks separated. It’s just me.

I’m pretty psyched over Spotify premium. I consider it something of a customizable, Internet based radio. And I hate listening to the radio! Around here it’s all classic rock, pop, country, pop-country, and talk radio… Give me something more unique, thank you very much!

I have 9 “invitations” for a free month or something like that, so if you’re interested in checking out Spotify premium let me know. Contact me through Twitter and DM me your email address, and I’ll send an invitation to you. Or leave a comment on this blog post.

If your listening habits are anything like mine, I don’t see any way you will regret the decision to make Spotify your primary source for tunes.

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I Quit Using FourSquare…

I just don’t understand the point…

I enjoy using all the different social media channels, if for no other reason than to know what it is and what it’s about. I’ve been using FourSquare for a few months on a pretty regular basis and accumulated 11 Mayorships and a bunch of badges. And I’m left feeling empty about it.

After providing a lot of data to FS I’m just not sure what it’s done for ME. Facebook and Twitter help me A) stay in touch with family and friends, or B) make new friends and have conversations with them. It’s awesome! Especially Twitter. I’ve nearly stopped using Facebook all together because I like using Twitter so much more.

The down side of Twitter is all the damn marketers and “social media guru’s” who post countless articles like, “9 Ways Twitter Will Make Your Business More Profitable.” I hate them, and as I learned how to use Twitter I unfollowed all those ass holes. I have to include that for me Twitter wasn’t as user friendly as Facebook up front, but as I learned the ins and outs I quickly grew to like it more.

Anyway, that’s why I gave FourSquare a few months of usage. I wanted to make sure there wasn’t something I was missing, and my opinion at this time is that, indeed, there was nothing I was missing. It’s pointless.

Suggestion: Perhaps the folks behind FourSquare could do something more with the businesses where people check in! For example, 10 checkins at Starbucks earns you a free coffee… 12 checkins at the local pub earns a free pint! WTF? It should be easy to get people to actually use it, but I’m left thinking it’s just stupid and so I uninstalled it from my iPhone and won’t be using it any more.

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I Love Killing Joke

If you like conspiracy theories, then this will delight you!

Joe Rogan, of MMA circles, posted a link to this article a couple of days ago on Twitter. It’s a brief statement and a pre-written letter that you can send your Congress people about new FDA regulations that are designed to ensure quality but could actually be used to limit the nutrients in our food. The excerpt below is from the letter penned by the Alliance For Natural Health that they want people to send their Congress people.

The guidance may also have far-reaching consequences. For example, if Sen. Durbin’s dangerous Dietary Supplement Labeling Act goes forward, with the list of “safe” supplements and doses which FDA and IOM would draw up under the bill — such as vitamin D in amounts greater than 4000 IU — it would mean that more therapeutic doses or supplement preparations could never meet the new NDI hurdle. This could have a profoundly negative impact on this nation’s health.

I’m intrigued by this because I read something about a year ago which I thought at the time was a pretty extreme viewpoint. It’s about the “Codex Alimentarius,”which;

“was created in 1963 by FAO and WHO to develop food standards, guidelines and related texts such as codes of practice under the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Programme.”

Jaz Coleman, lead singer for post-punk band, Killing Joke, says in an interview with The Quietus concerning their song “The Great Cull” from their 2010 album, “Absolute Dissent,”

Under the new food code all the vitamins and nutrients are being taken out of our food that goes on supermarket shelves. We’re creating a sick population. It’s Malthusian.

Malthusianism is, by definition, population growth outpacing the capacity to feed the population. That’s a very simplified description of it, and Coleman takes it to another level with his explanation. Essentially, if nutrients are scientifically/artificially reduced in our food so humans become sick more easily, we would have to pay doctors for stronger (normal) amounts of those nutrients to make us healthy again. Doctors would get that “medicine” from pharmaceutical companies. The end of this line of reasoning is that the pharma companies would basically be in control of the health of the world’s populations except perhaps in the most remote locations (where people would probably be healthy!). Population growth control through manipulating the health of the people…

Again, I thought this was a pretty extreme concept when I first heard about it, but with the link I got from Twitter (and this one too) I’m starting to think it may not be so extreme or far-fetched after all… I mean, the population of the planet is six billion now, and we know we can’t simply continue to expand without severe problems arising, so this is one of many lines of population growth control. Another is obviously war.

To continue, Coleman goes on to explain what Killing Joke does in the fight against this form of population/mind control,

…if you keep putting the human condition through a series of shocks you have a malleable population. That’s what’s happening to us, and that’s why the music of Killing Joke is so significant in rewiring. It’s homeopathic. To be immune to the sickness, we have to take homeopathic doses of the sickness and that’s what we do at Killing Joke concerts.

I need to continue reading about all this, but I love Killing Joke. You should read the whole article with Jaz Coleman in The Quietus. Oh, and go buy “Absolute Dissent.” It’s a great album!

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Taxing the Rich is “Class Warfare?” WTF!?

Taxing the rich is class warfare? WTF? What the hell is it called when armies of lawyers are hired by the rich to exploit every loophole in the tax codes? Seems like class warfare to me too, just in a different direction. In effect, the working class is getting a big, nut-splitting, economic wedgie because they’re the only ones paying taxes…

Steal from the rich to give to the poor? You can’t be serious!

Steal from the poor to give to the rich? Sure, I’ll have seconds!

I wish the Democrats would grow a set of balls and confront the bullshit slinging Tea Baggers and rabid, corporate-ball-sucking GOP. Think back Republicans. We had eight years of Dubya who gave you everything you’re trying to get out of Obama right now. And it was on a silver fucking platter. Where did it get us? In this big hole Obama’s still trying to dig us out of! Remember?

Tax them all, I say! Let’s start with the richest and work our way down to the politicians! Putting money in the pockets of the business owners  and rich in a bad economy will NOT get them to hire people as the Republicrats keep claiming. It will go straight into their pockets. If there is no demand for products because working people don’t have money (or jobs), there’s no need to hire people to supply (make) more stuff!

Am I being simple-minded about it? Yes, I’m trying to be. Give the consumers a break so they can go BUY stuff, and make the richest of the rich pay their share in taxes and you might see some progress in the economy. At least that’s how it seems to me. But I’m simple-minded after all…

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Fuck Death Row

This business of executing criminals has got me thinking lately because of the scheduled execution of Troy Davis in Georgia, and also because of the GOP primary race and the focus it has put on Rick Perry, who has a rather controversial past where executions are concerned. I’m not going to say Davis is innocent, because I don’t know the details of the case well enough to say that. I’m also not going to say Rick Perry did something wrong in the 2004 case I linked to. I just don’t know enough details about it.

But with “execution” a buzzword in the news right now I’ve done some looking around for information, specifically the execution of innocent people, if it has happened and been documented, how many times it has happened, and whatever else I could find. I’ve never believed that executions today prevent violent crimes tomorrow, though I’ve never known for certain. Perhaps we’ll never really be able to say that it does or does not prevent future crimes.

As a citizen, I think that if an innocent man can be executed by the government we’d all better be worried. And after reading about the people who were executed in multiple states and were later believed to be innocent, it feels wrong to me to allow the government to continue the practice.

Personally, I don’t think we should execute anyone, especially if we’re supposed to be some sort of “beacon of righteousness, freedom and liberty,” and shit. Execution is murder. It’s the act of killing someone, even though we justify it as government sanctioned “punishment.” It’s uncivilized. We should stop doing it. We should be above it…

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Snoop Dogg

I drove from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Mtn. View, Missouri this weekend to visit my family. The Will Rogers Turnpike goes from just outside of Tulsa to the state line, then becomes I-44 to Joplin & Springfield. As I drove down the turnpike I saw a large billboard that I just didn’t have time to get a picture of, unfortunately.

The juxtaposition of elements was outstanding. The large billboard had a picture of Snoop Dogg and the information where he was playing in October in gigantic, gothiky letters. He was playing in one of the many Oklahoma casinos, but I forget which one. The billboard was situated in a large field next to the highway, and under the billboard was a heard of cattle munching lazily on the grass.

It just didn’t fit into the landscape into which it had been placed…

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I’d Like To Introduce…

I’d like to introduce Avery Lynn Phillips, my new granddaughter. She was born August 6, and weighed 9 pounds even. She’s beautiful.

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Empty Bulletin Boards

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Cat With Basil & Flowers

Tuxedo strangely loves the 100+ heat of Oklahoma summer. I can’t figure it out at all… She sprawls on the concrete and just soaks it up.

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