20081105
Kit Bond's Carrier is OVER!
The election is over, now it is safe to say that even though Kit Bond (R-MO) still has two years left in his term IT WILL BE HIS LAST!Last week at a McCain-Palin rally, run by America's most clueless Hockey Mom in Cape Girardeau, MO, the crowd was fired up when he warned them about his view of Obama's judicial philosophy.
"Just this past week, we saw what Barack Obama said about judges," Bond said. "He said, 'I'm tired of these judges who want to follow what the Founding Fathers said and the Constitution. I want judges who have a heart, have an empathy for the teenage mom, the minority, the gay, the disabled. We want them to show empathy. We want them to show compassion.'"
--source CBS News
To which various disabilities advacates were not at all impressed.
Certainly, Lt. Governor Peter Kinder (R-MO) should distance himself from such individuals, especially people like Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK) who whould rather do nothing about her youngest child's Down Syndrome or any other child with ANY disabiltiy except group them in a PROVEN FAILED government program, the Individuals with Disabilties Education Act,and kill important research projects at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.
Needless to say, the doctors at UNC were not impressed with "Doctor Palin".
I guess this is probably why she didn't say a whole lot last night after John McCain's concession speech. If Kit Bond was wise, it would probably be in his best interest to do likewise.
Labels: disabilities, honeybees, missouri, stupidity
posted by Bushido Hacks 11/05/2008 11:01:00 AM (0) comments top
20081027
The coming tsunami of Change
With just nine days to go until the election, the forces of status quo are in panic mode. They are trying to find some way to enact martial law so that the election on November 4th does not happen.A couple of months ago, it was the crisis in the former Soviet repbublic of Georgia. The past couple of month, it has been the crashing economy. (Burn baby burn!) And this afternoon, the provoking of Syria.
It appears that whatever is going on in Washington right now seems to be about as logical as using a baseball bat to smack a hornet's nest in an attempt to not go to work it seems.
What I am waiting for at this point is for Miss Alaska to do something really stupid and support an organization that she probably should not support. Apparently, someone went to Plaza Frontenac recently and splurged $150,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus on a wardrobe and a spa treatment. (I went down to Plaza Frontenac to check out the Neiman Marcus. They wanted $100 for a tie! Expensive!) For someone who claims to be a hockey mom rooting for the Walmart crowd, Sarah Palin definitely did NOT shop at Walmart for her attire.
Reguarless of what this poser is doing, the fact is there are alot of scared white people out there right now. I am not one of them. And it is of no shame that BushidoHacks.com endorses Barack Obama as the next president of the United States. However, I would like to remind the many minority supporters that Barack Obama is not Jesus Christ reincarnated. While he does have a great and positive influence, this "he's a cadidate for 'our' (black) people" is slightly off the mark and not to metion adds to the hostility that many white people have against him as president.
When you run for president, you don't run for one particular race or party. Barack Obama sees that. But if both Black voter and White voters, and Democractic supporters and Republican supporters see him in polar opposite points of view, that also doesn't help.
Remember, vice president is just a heart beat away from being president. So if you don't like McCain or Obama, you have to keep in mind that you are actually voting for Palin or Biden.
Palin want to continue funding the failing IDEA program which is very partial and does not work but she wants Congress to stop funding an effective research project that has helped identify many autism spectrum disorders using fruit flies. If this was a program to help resolve Colony Collapse Disorder and it had democratic support, she would probably support killing that project too.
As a person with disabilities, Palin does not have the best interset of the disabled at heart. If anything, her support is emotionally and politically driven. She is basically tossing her own newborn son with Downs Syndrome under the Straight Talk Express bus.
Palin seems to think that there is a one-size-fits-all approch to people with disabilites when the truth is that people with High Functioning Autism (HFA) and people with Downs Sydrome are NOT at all alike. While these are disabilites, many people with HFA (espeically people with a form of HFA called Aspergers' Syndrome) can function and support themselves in life, where as many people with Downs Syndrome need constant care and monitoring. By putting the constrains of a program like Down Syndrome on people with HFA, the HFA individuals feel constrained as they have to prove to employeers that their disability shouldn't really have too much of an effect on their work aside from probably needing an extension on some deadlines.
But programs like the ones Palin supports assume that the person with HFA should work as a Walmart greeter. As a person who has spent six years at a private university to aquire a computer science degree, I sure as hell am not working at Walmart, not even as a manager!
So why is there all this hate agains Barack Obama? Recently, a guy name Sirkowski (kind of NSFW) pointed out that racial hatred continues to be pumped into this campaign. (Protip: Puting a Barack Obama sticker on a Curious George doll and calling it "Barack Obama" DOES make you a racist.)
It is my personal belief that racists, much like the current adminstration, are in panic mode. Right now, I see them as the people who go out onto a beach just before a massive tsunami is about to strike. The momentum of the Obama campaign has become so large that the breakers can not stop it at this point. And on November 4th, the massive wave will crash into the shore, changing the lives of the people living near the coast. Some will fight in vain to stop the wave and in their defense may try to drown themselves. Others will be on the high ground, watching in horror the people who will kill themselves because of the fear.
But on November 5, 2008, the world will be a much different place, and the countdown to January 20, 2009 will begin. The fight to stop a lame duck president and his corporate constituants from unravalling a 232 year old instition that during the past eight years has been abused and taken advantage of by the people who lulled us into believing that what they were doing was right.
Now comes the age of democracy restored.
Labels: disabilities, government, honeybees, politics, science
posted by Bushido Hacks 10/27/2008 12:19:00 AM (0) comments top
20080913
Rockbox is better than your iPod - Click!
After a near foolish attempt to replace my iRiver 120 MP3 player with a SanDisk Sansa, I finally got around to getting Rockbox to work.My experience has been positive especially after fearing a repeat of previous experiences. My only regret is that the iRiver 120 has a black and white screen. Imagine what it would be like if it was in color.
I should be able to listen to music how I want it this time, by playlist order (which the iRiver's original software could not read .m3u or .pls files) or in some form of portable relational database.
FM radio still works, although I wonder if there is some way to pick up other bands. I should double check my understanding of electronics.
I have not explored all the features yet, but I am amazed that I can finally play games and WRITE text files on the device. I hope I can read PDFs on it now.
Another feature that Rockbox has that the origninal iRiver (or several other MP3 players) is support for people with disablities, specifically those with impaired vision.
My only grievances about Rockbox so far are how the Installation instructions were written. I wanted to install the manual instructions for rockbox, but when the Linux instructions started talking about using a .exe file (which Linux does not run .exe files) and mentioned some tools for modifying the .hex file (the iRiver firmware patch) that were not on my system, I had to conceed to using the Automatic instructions.
It would also be a little awesome if there was like a mini-Linux console to write shell scripts and fiddle with sed, awk, and vim. The Handhelds.org had something like this. I blame the emphasis on Debian packages for why Handhelds.org wasn't very successful.
Outside of all that, Rockbox rules!
Labels: disabilities, hack, handhelds, lifeisgood, linux, music, radio, software, tech
posted by Bushido Hacks 9/13/2008 05:20:00 PM (0) comments top
