Thoughts Randomly (aka: The American Fucktard)

Earlier, I posted the following text on a dailymail.com blog :

Why do all the righties think america is being destroyed?  I just don’t get it. You had no problem with the right lying to you over the previous 8 years, but you suddenly have a moral compass when the left lies to you?  come on, you’re not children, you’re adults, don’t you know that we’re the only ones who have to account for anything in this country?  right, left, center, wherever, if you’re not in a position of power then you are never going to have a voice, your rights will be trampled, and the justification will be the same from the voices at the top, they’ll just use different words.

we lost a lot of our rights and privileges under bush.  just like we did under clinton.  and bush before him, etc.  each administration comes in with its own agenda, but it’s never all that much different from the one before it.

glenn beck is a turd.  i’m sorry.  i do love fnc, but anyone with any sense of reality can’t take him at face value.  i doubt he even takes himself at face value.  he’s the fnc version of colbert, and you love him like the lefties love their guys.

the problem we have now is that neither of them are right, neither of them report news, and neither of them uses facts to push an agenda.  you’re not idiots, stop letting him treat you like you are.

if you want the government to stop taking advantage of us, then you need to get the *entire* government to do it.  from pelosi to boehner, grassley to kerry, and from your neighborhood letter carrier straight up to obama.  fnc is bloviating because it has an audience -  a complacent, complicit, lazy, and scared audience – which will follow it’s instructions like a bunch of mindless automatons.

speak for yourselves, stop letting tv do your thinking for you.

(btw, i am NOT a liberal, nor an obamalite, just someone who’s sick of being bullied)

Now, you’d think something civil and level-headed would go over well.  We’ll find out, and I’ll let you know soon!  I’m guessing that it’s going to devolve into some big argument about how I’ve been corrupted or that I’m a troll (which I am).  I think I was pretty fair and balanced in my comment, and i was almost not lying.  I am an Obamalite, so whatever, but I had to at least make some attempt to not come across as a lefty.  So sue me.  I do love FNC, though, but not for the reasons I implied.  I love it because the sheer absurdity is a welcome respite from all the seriousness of daily life.

Plus, I’d almost be willing to bet they have more actual news than CNN and MSNBC do combined, which is really sad.  But I’m not going to get into a rant about the current state of news… right now.

This is a true testament to the stinge-factor of financial services companies.  Those fucktards at authorize.net* put all their eggs in one basket and kept their entire infrastructure in a single datacenter. In which there was a fire.  And now they’re gone.

What the hell are they thinking?  They process countless millions of transactions and they can’t afford to put their machines into more than one datacenter? I’m going to go out on a limb here and make the assumption that their backups were also hosted in the same DC and that they have in-house engineers who sleep in cots in the DC’s conference room. I’d blame this on their engineers, but it’s really their C-level technology person’s fault for having the same amount of forethought about his company’s wellbeing as my dog has about where on my yard he’s going to poop.

I have clients, mostly small companies, who have more complex infrastructures than that.  They make hundreds of times less than these clowns per year and still manage to have two copies of everything in more than a single location because spending a few hundred bucks now saves, well, their entire livelihood.  I just don’t understand how a company of its size is even going to try and justify this to their soon-to-be-rapidly-shrinking customer base.

The real problem is this: my holiday weekend, along with many others in my business, is now going to be a holy hell.  Instead of pulling together in a crisis and answering the phones, authorize.net has decided to allow their employees to stay home on the long weekend and not worry about the elephant in the room.  They’re not even taking calls!  Can you believe this?  And now my clients and customers are calling and blaming ME for their customers’ transactions not going through.  Until about an hour ago, I didn’t even have an answer why, I had to find out from the article I linked above.  That’s just wrong.

Anyway, I just wanted to take a minute and vent.  Now I have to go back to answering phone calls and emails, because I am a responsible professional with more than two active brain cells.

Fuck you, authorize.net. I’m taking my business, and that of my customers, out of your inept hands.  You should be ashamed and embarrassed, I hope you go broke and I get to not put anything in your cup when you’re begging for change on Skid Row.

* If you don’t know who these jagoffs are, they are responsible for processing credit card transactions for many thousands of online businesses.  They have been around since the 90’s and are recommended by many small-business bankers because of their middle-of-the-road pricing and generally fair merchant support.

So, I’ve been watching these “elections” in Iran.  What a farce this is!  If the people really wanted change there, they’d elect someone other than Ahmadinejad to office.  Not that it really matters because the Ayatollah is still the head honcho and has the power to change the color of the sky.  We here in the US like to refer to our President as a figurehead controlled by anyone other than We The People.

Does anyone really care who the president of Iran is, really?  From what I can tell, the only discernible difference between the guy who won and the guy who didn’t win is their name.  Oh, and one denies the holocaust while the other doesn’t – however they do both agree that Israel should be wiped off the map.  There’s change you can believe in.  I know a Muslim who refers to himself, Christians, and Jews as all being the “children of Abraham“.  Where is THAT guy when you need someone to run for president of that train wreck of a nation?

The citizens are just pissed because they don’t think their votes counted.  As noble a cause as that may be (the integrity of the vote secures the integrity of the government, just look at us from 2000-2008…), however their votes still don’t make a difference.  It’s not as if they were going to magically cast votes and all of a sudden you’d see women’s hair flowing freely from the seat of an outdoor McCafé veranda.

I’m not a political pundit or journalist, obviously. Maybe I’m missing some of the more subtle intricacies of this situation (I’m actually absolutely sure that I am) but the point still comes back to the title of this article… “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos“.  Like the Simpsons before them, the people weren’t voting for the lesser of two evils, they were simply voting for a different evil than they had before.  I saw some comment out there written by a fucktard who likened these current events to what happened here in America in 1776, and I couldn’t find that to be more preposterous.

Iran is a shining example of a country that has jumped the shark.  At one time, that entire region of the world used to be the center of human ingenuity and innovation. The very first shimmers of civilization and the modern human condition were glimpsed upon from the shores of the Aegean, to the Fertile Crescent, to and beyond to the easternmost shores of the Indian Ocean. For centuries, Europe was ruled by theocratic monarchs who kept their people down and stymied innovation and growth.  Now the same can be said for the middle eastern countries who denounce modernity for ancient fables. I’m not a religious person, but even if I was I can assure you I would not let my belief in the spiritual cloud my view of the actual.

Iranians need to move into the 20th century.  Then the 21st. And they need to do it on their terms and at their own pace.

One piece of advice.  Stop using that piece of shit called twitter.  If you have something to say of any value, it’s going to take up more than 140 characters. Speak out, speak loudly, and speak at length.  We need to hear your voices – ALL of them – clearly and without any chance for misunderstanding. If you have to use the internet, post a blog – a real one – and tell your story using as many words, pictures, videos, and languages as possible.  I’ll even host it for you!

Do the right thing.  End of transmission.