Black Bert, an Austin Texas Magician is launching a new site, and I wanted to help him get the word out. I have seen him perform magic for large audiences from the stage and up close from across a small table.
The guy is great at what he does.
If anyone in Austin is looking to hire a local magician or even just see a video of one in action then please check out Black Bert’s site.
From Rueters: (source)
““I don’t think we gained anything from Durbin,” said Robert Donovan, U.S. assistant treasurer for McDonald’s, at the ATM, Debit and Prepaid Forum.”
There are a lot more details in the article, which I urge you to read from its proper source.
So, the banks are legally not allowed to set their own prices on debit card transactions. Instead, two businesses – possibly more – have been counting on Durbin (D) to boost their own profit margins at another business’s expenses. Our leaders in Washington agreed, presumably stating it was for everyone’s good.
Is it? The businesses want the service at the price they named regardless of what it costs the bank to process. Out of curiosity, which of you is able to set their own price at McDonald’s or Wal-Mart?
Worse – is it really in our own interest to cheer our leaders for demonizing and injuring some giant businesses for the benefit of other giant businesses? You know the guy is just going to stand on his record of being “anti-corporate” after pulling this slimy con game.
And what of the banks?
I’m sure that will work great right now, but what happens in six months? No one thinks this can end well. The problem is that no one is thinking beyond their own hate and fashionable anti-corporate sentiment. The banks aren’t saints, but I’m having a harder time finding any moral party in this event.
I used to get jumped outside of class for making good grades. The other kids couldn’t be blamed. They weren’t as lucky enough to be as smart as me, and couldn’t be expected to put in the extra effort that even I did, above and beyond putting the math answer in the little yellow box.
I left school dreading the last bell of the day so that other people would not need to reach up or speak out. The teachers got in on the act when I turned 10. It couldn’t be helped then, either. They were having feminine problems. Please contact McKinley Elementary in Wyandotte, Michigan if you have any more questions about these events.
It kept happening, for the record, well into my twenties. No one could help committing violence. They could not help the knives or the broken bones or the beatings or whatever else they inflicted on me. They were just not as lucky as me.
So, I have been watching the Occupy movement with dread. I do not want the people working for their share to live in fear due to the unaccountable “unlucky” just outside their doors. Too many people in the Occupy movement seem to stand for the following line of thought: If I can not have the money then no one can. Too many others seem to feel that we are are all entitled, and I fear for that more.
Entitlement does not stop with money. It never has. It never does. It never will.
Entitlement will always extend to a second mindset. The society that is born entitled to money will spread that entitlement to other aspects of life. Feeling a lack of self-esteem? Earn respect in a gang. Feeling lonely? A six pack bought with scrounged dollars is all the consent the entitled man needs. This isn’t theory or any repeated talking point, but a way of life I consider myself lucky to have survived. I hope never to live in that kind of filth again.
“But that’s not happening!” could rightfully be the words any critical thinker should rightfully be thinking right now. Except, that Human Events has been keeping tabs on the various rapes – especially the willfully unreported ones - occurring on various Occupy sites (source). Please bear in mind that Human Events is horribly partisan. Try not to read the comments, either. The contempt for other humans there is on par with the juvenile trash to be found on Yahoo News or the Daily Kos.
Back to the point. No one deserves to be attacked like that. Every individual, even the cradle-to-grave entitled, makes his or her own choices. This puts the responsibility of the rapists to answer for their actions. However, if the Occupiers insist on collective rights then I must insist on viewing them as a collective. These attacks are only the start of their entitlement collective. They are also to be expected under the entitlement mentality, as is the protection of the rapist at the cost of his victims.
The third mindset is what you see in the European riots. The entitled will destroy a thing simply because they can not have it. When, and I do mean when, America reaches this state, I will hold the Occupiers and every human being who willfully supported them responsible.
Count me out of this collective. Do whatever it takes to revise that 99% figure. Most assuredly, the committees and masses of underemployed college students can handle this one math problem:
Please solve this problem then send word to whatever necessary committees will revise the 99% slogan to something more accurate.
The Occupy movement is neither entitled nor allowed to count my presence among the people they claim to speak for.
I’m posting this from a Wii video game system. Why not? Granted, the WYSIWYG editor refuses to work. I’m cool with that. I know my way around (x)html enough to not break my site.
At an early point in my professional life, there was a near-parable floating around the Internet. According to this tale, there was a programmer at a job interview. This programmer told his potential employer, “I dream in code.” Those four words were said to have set him apart from his competition and won him the job.
I have been pushing myself to remember things. These things were lost to the day-to-day life of being a grown-up. They were lost to my regrets of having not acted in favor of what I believed was a more patient, long-term commitment to myself. So I have been trying to remember.
I remember one year, the thing I wanted more than anything else for Christmas a copy of Borland’s C+ Compiler. I lost many Friday nights to a beat up, cigarette-stained computer and learned to chip away pieces of code, one function at a time. Read the rest of this entry »
I re-started some notes. I’m surprised he isn’t dead after everything they did to him.
I had a nightmare around two years ago. In this dream, I beaten and arrested over something trivial. Nothing this depraved has ever actually happened to me. Situations close enough to it have occurred. The police did not join in the festivities, but they did nothing to stop them.
Two years ago, that nightmare inspired my first vision of this Apocalypse. That bad dream would not only inspire a lot of notes for a story that never took off but would be a crucial element of this adventurer’s journey. The only problem was that it was an aimless journey. I knew what I wanted to say but had no reason to say it through this character or the world built around him.
The time between that first attempt and now has been wonderful in that I have made a lot of great friends. I have been finding strengths I thought were lost to the worst of times. Read the rest of this entry »
1982. My dad was showing me around his record collection when he yanked out Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefeart. Being that I was very young, I ran away screaming in pure horror. There’s not much else to tell, here, except that my father usually handled that album with care from then on. Only, from time to time, he liked to see if I would still jump.
Its presence in his record collection – and please remember these were the days of big vinyl disks – kept my hands and curiosity at bay. That album cover is burned into my mind like a smoldering scar.
Those who know me can understand why it’s much less frightening to see Fred Kreuger in a nearly perfect mirror image of the same album cover. ”Freddy’s Greatest Hits” recently came to my attention by way of a blog devoted to the foolhardy days of vinyl. Here are the covers, side by side. Read the rest of this entry »
Today there was a new visitor in Radiator Springs.
A New Visitor in Radiator Springs
So, I’m trying out to different cloud players right now. They promise to work on any web browser.
That is, except for “lite” browsers on mobile devices, gaming consoles, or anything else that lacks the inherent capacity to store a respectable mp3 collection. These browsers can play YouTube videos. They can play the flash/mp3 players found on many podcast sites. There has to be some way to play mp3s off the cloud services.
