Author: Shelley Powers

Categories
Diversity Just Shelley

Associations

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Mike Golby found another “friend”, Stone Reynolds, who seems to be unhappy at Mike’s treatment of another weblogger, Mike Sanders.

However, in an amazing display of twisted brotherhood, Mike Golby states:

There’s something decidedly odd about this guy. His half-formed views appall me but I find, dare I say it, a sense of humor, in his writing. And a sense of humor, they say, is everything (of course, it could be a mask hiding naked hatred but, like my friend Christopher Locke, I am a professional and can handle any situation should it turn ugly).

So, I’ll be stopping by at a hell of a note from time to time – if only to swap gratuitous insults and find out what’s going down in the world of racism, sexism, anything lewd and smutty, the good ol’ boys, the loony right, etc. Look at it this way. If St0ne Freeman is a friend of WonderChicken’s, how can he not be a friend of mine?

To which Stone replies:

I promptly posted a comment there expressing my thanks and overall flabbergasmic response to his review.
…

Sounds good to me…and PageCount: Into The Lake of Fire joins my linklist

All of this would be interesting, except for the fact that I got dragged into this indirectly.

It seems that Stone doesn’t have too high an opinion of me for my “mistreatment” of Mike Sanders, either. But he continues his lack of high opinion elsewhere with little tidbits like the following:

And, speaking of MT and self-respecting ‘bloggers, burningbird, for all her l33t skillz, needed help from stavros to get MT installed. I’m not sure what that says about MT, or the flamingfowl…but if Dave had any difficulty with the installation, he hasn’t yet mentioned it.

Seeing all this, Mike Golby writes:

And, from there on in (while doffing his cap this way and that to various and vicious warbloggers of note), St0ne proceeds to rip into Shelley (for whom he nurses a dark and secret passion), Jeneane, Dave Winer, and me.

To which Freeman responds with:

There’s something decidedly odd about this guy”, Golby notices. I can’t argue with that, but I vigorously dispute the “dark and secret passion” he alleges I nurse for Shelley Powers.

I have a sense of humor. I really do. And I appreciate that both Stone and Mike got a chuckle out of this interchange. However, I found my association with the phrase and the entire exchange to be demeaning.

A simple phrase — funny or interesting for one person, embarrassing or painful to another. Thoughtless associations. Stupid word tricks.

Guilty as charged.

I wrote a posting last week that talked about Mike and Chris Locke and how much I admire and envy their writing skills. In this posting I used an association, a phrase, that looking back now I realize I shouldn’t have used. I pulled and re-posted this several times since, but pulled it permanently today.

Categories
Just Shelley

Moving…

If you’ve read this weblog for any length of time than you know I’m rather partial to San Francisco.

Unfortunately, it looks like I’ll be having to move. San Francisco is now known as the most expensive city in the US. It’s also a place where every technical contracting position has 200+ applicants. These two facts aren’t necessarily mutually compatible.

What a bitch.

I could be more eloquent, but “what a bitch” sums up the situation quite nicely.

Categories
Weblogging

Two more webloggers come over to the MT side

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Shannon recently switched from a Blogger weblog to Movable Type, and did a nice, neat job of it, too.

And then I was tripping through the Plutonians and found that Phil Ringalda has moved to Movable Type. That one floored me. If you’ve worked with Blogger, than you know Phil — he’s helped most of us resolve problems we’ve had with Blogger. To see him come over to the MT side was a shock.

Why damme, that MT is bustin’ out all over!

Categories
Copyright

What are you willing to give up?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Internet Radio is at risk due to CARP — the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel. There’s also a new bill being put forward before Congress that would make copying watermarks and holograms illegal.

Dallas News is issuing “cease and desist” orders against online sites for deep linking.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation — the main watchdog against copyright abuses is working overtime just to keep up with all the attacks against free speech.

Personally, I splurged and bought myself a CD, which I can’t afford, and then proceeded to find that I can’t play it on my computer because it’s one of the new copy-protected CDs.

Motion Picture Industry. Disney. The recording industry. AOL Time-Warner. Newspapers. Magazines. Cable. Sony. Television. Pieces of the creature we know as The Media Monster Machine.

And to fight this we’ve had a day of silence on Internet Radio, letter writing campaigns to congress, and discussions of a march on Washington.

I’m curious — what would you be willing to give up to fight for a more balanced viewpoint in regards to copyright law implementation? What would you be willing to give up to send a message to The Media Monster Machine?

Would you be willing to give up movies? Including Spider Man? Star Wars? Would you be willing to give up Radio, traditional or Internet-based? How about TV, would you give up sports and movies and Six Feet Under or Buffy or Sex in the City? Would you be willing to not buy that new CD, DVD, or VHS? Would you cancel your newspaper and magazine subscriptions?

What would you be willing to give up?

When you consider that people actively fighting any of the copyright legislative abuses add up to less than 5% of the total population of the country, marches and letter writing won’t have much of an impact on a congress whose main interest is in being re-elected to office.

However, when you consider that this same 5% of the population is made up of people representing a major purchasing power, particularly when it comes to cable, electronics, music, movies, and other items dependent on a larger than normal discretionary income matched by a larger than normal interest in entertainment and gadgets — then you begin to see the shadows of a hammer strong enough to beat against the box the media industry is trying to create.

The question is, though — what are you willing to give up?

Categories
Healthcare

War on health coverage

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

There’s been discussion throughout weblogging about whether people would vote for Bush again or not. Many of the postings I’ve read said that the webloggers would primarily because of his policies regarding Israel, and his “handling of terrorism”.

To vote for Bush solely because of terrorism ignores so many other issues that are critical to this country. Issues that also cost lives, daily.

For instance, there’s the issue of health coverage in this country. My friend Chris recently posted some statistics about American life at his weblog. Among these was one that I felt was particularly relevant to my own situation — the fact that 40,000,000 people in this country don’t have health insurance.

If you want something to back up this statistic, then will a press release from the US Census Bureau do? According to the press release, we’re actually improving our lot in life, as the number of people without health insurance coverage in our country dropped to “only” 38.7 million in 2000. However, this number has changed drastically due to the current recession and higher unemployment. Other publications now put the number at 44 million.

This is only about 15% or so of the populace, but considering that the US is the richest country in the world, wouldn’t you all agree that any amount over 0% is a cause for shame?

Instead of dealing with the health care crises effectively, George W Bush tries to put through a health plan based on tax credits, an approach that’s been proven ineffective in the past. In addition, Bush also wants to put through an “intermediate” pharmacy discount plan that could, at most, reduce prescription drug costs by only about 10-25%. With prescription costs exceeding thousands of dollars a month for some illnesses, saving a few hundred dollars is not going to make a difference.

I have a close friend in Oregon who works for the Job Corps, teaching carpentry to displaced kids. He doesn’t make the bucks a master carpenter would make in the public sector, but he loves his work. He’s past retirement age, though, and needs to think about quitting. He isn’t able to because of health care coverage.

My close friend’s wife has severe emphysema that requires drugs costing thousands of dollars a month to keep her alive. If he quits, he loses his personal health care coverage, and Medicare doesn’t provide coverage of most of the costs of the drugs. If he quits, he’ll quickly go through all of his savings in order to buy the drugs his wife needs to stay alive.

This is a real person. He goes by the name of “Red”. He has a wonderful smile, a great sense of humor, an enormously huge heart, and he used to be my father-in-law. And if he retires, which he’ll have to someday, he’ll be financially destitute within one year.

I suppose, though, he could get “lucky” and his wife will die before he’s forced to retire. By the way, she goes by the name of “Bert”. She’s firey and tempermental, with an incredible laugh. She loves her kids and her grand-kids and she loves to travel. With adequate medication, and some restrictions, she can still travel.

She and Red had always planned to travel when he retired.

Without health insurance coverage, people in this country are making decisions daily that result in early or immediate death. They’re literally gambling with their lives because of the cost of medical care.

How many people are dying because of inadequate health coverage and care? I couldn’t find a statistic on this, but as a conservative guess, if only 1 percent of those uninsured in this country die because of lack of easily accessible medical care in a year, thats over 400,000 people a year. And that’s over 1000 people a day.

To be blunt, you’re more likely to die in this country because of inadequate medical coverage and care than you are from being killed by a terrorist. Regardless of your religion, race, sex, or any particular orientation.

You might want to consider this the next time you say you want to vote for Bush primarily because of his handling of terrorism.