shaft0rz

http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=objectivism_animal_rights


How do the animal "rights" advocates try to justify their position? As someone who has debated them for years on college campuses and in the media, I know firsthand that the whole movement is based on a single—invalid—syllogism, namely: men feel pain and have rights; animals feel pain; therefore, animals have rights. This argument is entirely specious, because man's rights do not depend on his ability to feel pain; they depend on his ability to think.


Utter drivel. Why does the author feel that it's an innate human right to torture other animals for his own will? (sidenote: I am against factory farming. I'm not going to say that humans were never meant to eat meat, so don't jump down my throat on this. I'm just saying there's a big difference between using an animal for sustenance and the torture and horrors that animals are put through on factory farms)

Ayn Rand style objectivism is nothing more than intellectual elitism. I bet she was a frigid bitch in real life.

A View To A Kill is hi-god-damn-larious.

An elderly Roger Moore, Cristopher Walken and Grace Kelly. How can you go wrong?


James Bond is the perfect antidote to evening ennui set on by a combination of too much stress, not enough wine, and sleeping loved ones.


Has anyone seen that Subaru Tribeca commercial? Where the other SUVs disintegrate, and blow away like dust in the wind (thanks kansas)? It's so depressing, on a couple of different levels. One can start feeling anthropomorphically bad for the SUVs themeselves - like somebody passed over for another, the more existance of the "superior" SUV makes them completely obsolete. The message, is that you are defined by those around you.

On another level, the message it sends about our society is a bit depressing. You must have a B9 Tribeca. Bought an SUV yesterday? Too bad, it's all B9 now. The real depressing part is, it will work on some people. There's somebody trading up their perfectly good SUV for a B9, or similar, right now.

We don't need more things. But more things always wins over fewer things.

I'm in a weird mood.

Why Vigilante justice doesn't work:

We stop by stop and shop for lunch a lot of days, and on the way we walk through the parking lot. There's a guy with a Ford Explorer that parks it diagonally every day. It bothers me to no end -- what makes that guy special enough that he can park sideways, when everyone else parks normally? So it bothered me and bothered me, and finally I took action -- I started folding in his rear-view mirrors. I don't know what I thought, but it was pissing me off that he did it every day. I did it maybe 4 or 5 times. Well today was different. The owner of the SUV was a stop and shop employee that had someone watch his car. When I was inside, he confronted me. Belligerantly. Like, I thought we'd have to throw down right there in the organic food section.

Then he drove by my workplace, which got me nervous, not for my car, but my fellow employees. So I had to go back down there and apologize again to defuse the situation. I told him it was totally me, and it was my problem that I got annoyed, I shouldn't have done it, yada yada. Which I don't necessarily agree with, but I needed to do it for my coworkers. So he calmed down a little. Just enough that I didn't feel like I was in immediate danger. But I will be glad when we move to the new office and don't stop by that stop and shop anymore...

Farewell parking lot vigilantism.

We just got back from seeing Rainer Maria. They're one of our favorite bands to see, because they have so much awesome energy. The guitar player is a rocking-out pro -- one of those people that looks like he's having the most fun he's ever had while playing. It might just be the fact that they're named after a poet, but I found myself thinking about poetry a lot during the show.

(stupid bitchfork, err i mean pitchfork analogy coming)

Emily Dickinson called poetry a "distilled thought", or something along those lines. I think Rainer Maria is pretty much "distilled rock". They're very basic in a lot of ways, and very deliberate, but not in a bad boring way. There's a lot of genuiness (i had to look that one up to see if it was actually a word) and honesty behind everything. Nothing's there that doesn't need to be, but there's a lot of depth that isn't immediately apparent.

Anyway, in the end it was just a rock show, and a damn good one. Way to go Rainer Maria.

Oh, and Rachel has fallen head over heels in love with the guitar player, Kyle Fischer. She almost stole the shirt he left hanging on their tour van after the show.

http://www.knowmore.org/



Also, I will begin updating http://ubercore.org/Gallery/ now that I'm not as lazy as I used to be. Sort of?

How much do your LJ friends love you? by ladybugadria
username
age
choose one	voodoopoopoolustloveblahjesusokbangsexwhyouch
loves you lots	l_scorpion_l
thinks of you as their best friend	dragonflymeaway
pretends to like you	alittletooabs
wants to move your relationship to the next level	gargoylemt
wants you in bed	stalicia
Loves your quirkiness	entropyfiend
desperately loves to read your journal	teffymae
Loves you more than you know	teffymae
thinks you are stange	alittletooabs
Quiz created with MemeGen!

Hey stacey, rachel's out of town this weekend *wink wink*

I love the IRS. Seriously. I did my taxes over the weekend, and turbotax informed me I have a large refund coming. Even bigger once I deduct my student loan interest payments. I guess I was only working enough of the year to be in a lower tax bracket. Sweet.

The question then becomes what to do with the money. The rational person would save it. The cool person would spend it on round-trip airfare to Monaco. Samir would take half of it to his friend Asadulah in securities. Maybe I'll have some kind of internet poll on how to spend my tax refund.

This weekend Rachel organized a screening of the movie "End of Suburbia", about oil depletion and suburbia's effect on oil usage and this country. It was pretty cool, lots of people showed up, including 3 professors from URI. The movie was interesting, but it was a little too cynical. Yeah, oil production is peaking. Yes, supply will start to drop rapidly. But that doesn't mean the fabric of society will be torn apart. People will have to start living closer to urban centers. Suburban sprawl will start to recede. Americans will have to pay as much for gas as the rest of the world. Alternative sustainable energies (hydrogen doesn't count) will pick up steam. It'll put a big hurt on the world, but I don't see the doomsday vision they presented in the film.

The only real question mark in my mind is how many wars will be fought over the oil scraps, and how much coal will be burned in the meantime.

Anyway, that was a boring post. Almost as boring as the Oscars. OH SNAP

"Through the Wire" just came on launch.com. It is categorized as "Rap, Christian Rap". WTF? Yes, the song "Jesus Walks" is about faith, and Jesus. But it's one song about a subject. I don't think Kanye should be called a Christian Rapper for that. Same with with Pedro the Lion. I see it all over the place, that Pedro gets classified as Christian. Having faith and religion be a subject of a song doesn't make a song a religious one. Struggling with a religious faith is something we all deal with -- whether it's choosing not to be religious or whatever. To me, "Christian Music" is music that's like "Praise Jesus Lord our savior!" It's music used for a religious purpose -- to rally the faithful.

Anyway, that's my rant. Oops, it should really be categorized as a "Christian Rant" because I said the word Jesus.

This post is proof of how spastic my mind is when I'm at work. Launch.com played a trans-am song. I went to look up which album it came from on allmusic. I saw the cover art for Futureworld, and I think the retro-future thing is awesome. That reminded me of an artist who was at the thing last year, downtown near condomn world. It was that thing where 2 apples high played, and there was the car alarm skit, and Gas Girl. Anyone remember what that was called? I'd like to try to track down this artist that did nerd/retro-future/math art there.

In other news -- I'm pissed that the bright eyes tour later this month is like, totally sold out. Suck.

I was driving back from Guitar Center today, and I heard something that disturbed me greatly on the radio. It was the new Motley Crue song. "If I Died Tommorow" or something like that. It was HORRIBLE. Cheesey nu-metal SUPER HEAVY BRAH guitar parts, and cheesey lyrics like "you are my everything" and "i miss your voice and the silence is so empty". What the F? From "Girls Girls Girls" to "you make me so happy"?? Oh how the mighty have fallen...
My new year's eve was awesome. The Flaming Lips/Wilco show (www.t-mobilepictures.com/Shaft0rz) was awesome. And getting to NYC was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. I took the train from Milford CT in. Everybody on it was drinking. Heavily. The conductor guy kept coming on the intercom saying "You can't have that in the station... drink em if you've got em" and "we're 10 minutes out of grand central station... drink up".
The flaming lips had topless dancers grinding with guys in animal suits through their whole set. They completely filled madison square garden with balloons. This was fun, yet led to a few annoying situations. There were two guys behind us that thought they were SO funny grabbing the ballons (away from other people, btw), and hitting them yelling "High School Volleyball baby!". The flaming lips are such an interesting band. The show was so hedonistic, yet pure and innocent. The strippers weren't there to be seedy and sexually arousing -- it was more like "Strippers are supposed to be fun, so we're having strippers! It's fun!". It's like teenagers that find a pack of cigarettes and pretend to smoke it. It's really just an expression of what our culture says is "fun" and "cool" without the addiction/dirtiness of a lifetime smoker. I don't know if that made any sense... I'm too dumb to have things make sense...
Wilco was good. They played mostly from their new album (almost no Being There), along with smorgasboard of covers. It was an epic 3 hour set, including "Livin After Midnight" by Judas Priest. Oh, and the flaming lips played War Pigs (geis, you would've been so pissed). So overall it was awesome, with 2 minor caveats:
1. $7.25 for a beer
2. Wilco, while awesome, can't really live up to the psychadelic splendor that is the Flaming Lips live show.

That is all. Keep it real.

Guess who has an advance copy of Beck's new album: Me.
Guess how awesome it is: very.

It's like a perfect blend of odelay and mutations. very cool. no time to outline how horrible my holiday was, that'll come later.

hope everyone had a good holiday.

So this weekend was cool in a few ways:
1) I didn't have to work. First time since thanksgiving I didn't have to work.
2) I partied with Irish people. My coworker had a BIG xmas party, with 4 irish guys/gals and 1 australian in attendance. Let me tell you something -- the Irish can DRINK. It's not just a stereotype. They woke up at 10am, started drinking at 11am, drank all day, went to 2 strip clubs, came back, and still outdrank me and everyone I saw that night. Amazing. They were also quite good at getting other people to drink as well. At one point I was having shots poured in my mouth over the bar (kahlua and baileys tastes AWESOME). I talked to jake + geis that night, however the details of the conversation escape me.
3) We watched 4 episodes of alias. Awesome.
4) We also watched Dark Days, which is awesome and I highly recommend it. It's about the homeless living abandoned NYC subway tunnels. It was the first film this guy had ever made -- he'd never even touched a camera before. He spent all his money, and even ended up homeless himself for awhile, to make the movie. He used the homeless people themeselves as the camera crew. Also, DJ Shadow did the music, which is excellent in its own right.
5) I made an awesome tofu/egg-noodle dish for dinner last night.

That is all.

http://fallujahinpictures.com/

I think these pictures should be more public.

This entry serves no purpose other than to distract me from work. Yes, it's sunday. This friday we have a big make-or-break the company kind of deadline, so we're all pulling extra hours. I'm up around 55 or so, before today.

In lieu of a central defining theme for my entry, I will ramble.

Alias rules -- I got rachel hooked (thanks netflix). We're on the last two cd's of season three. Lauren is a bitch. Quentin Tarentino's cameo was excellent. Netflix has been pretty good so far, movies get there and back in 2 days. Sometimes though it takes a week or more, randomly. That doesn't make me very happy.

I attended this thing at URI last night. It was a concert/info thing, where a bunch of socially involved groups on campus had info tables up, while the many hip-hop groups at URI performed. For some reason, URI has a ton of awesome rappers. Like, I was really really impressed with all of them. Plus the sound guys were using a 12" powerbook, which is amazing.

I'm going to begin surfing soon... as soon as the weather's better.

Enough distraction. Work!

So I tried to volunteer some time/effort to Dean's organization Democracy for America. This is the response I got, in its entirety:

Dear Peter
Thank you for your email. While the 2004 election is over, we still have a lot of work ahead of us in order to continue to rebuild and reenergize the Democratic Party. We must elect leaders that give every single individual an equal opportunity and ensure that no one is left behind

She didn't even finish her sentence! It's one thing if they want to blow me off (which is stupid, but whatever), but they should at least finish their sentence, and RESPOND to me.
So I sent back:

Hi Shaunee,
Just wanted to send back a quick response: unless there was an email
error or mistake or something, your response left something of a bad
taste in my mouth. It frankly doesn't make me very enthusiastic about
Democracy for America, if this is the only response people interested
in helping get.

To which I receive:

sorry....


What the fuck? I guess the Democratic party needs no help, they're doing just fine. They probably meant to let Bush win.

It pisses me off that I go out of my way to try to help out and this is the response I get. Blah.

So does 80's night still exist? If so, I'm coming to Pittsburgh. I will go to 80's night, and request Bizarre Love Triangle all night until they play it.

You Are a Liberal for Life

You've got a bleeding heart - and you're proud of it. For you, liberal means being compassionate, pro-government, and anti-business. You believe in equality for every person, and you consider yourself universally empathetic. Helping others is not just political for you ... it's very personal too.

YEAH! TEXAS! ARIZONA! ILLINOIS! BRRRRRAGWJRHJAY@GYGYG#$UYGOYGAFWHBJHB!
Howard Dean's the man.

I saw The Motorcycle Diaries, over the weekend. The place was pretty cool. It's a combo cafe/theatre, with live bands before all the movies. And instead of movie seats, it has couches and big puffy chairs. The movie was pretty excellent, I liked it a lot. It had much more humor than I was expecting, partly because the characters and acting were so charasmatic. The cinematography was awesome. Also, to its credit, it didn't come off as heavy-handed marxist dogma. The aim of the movie was more centered on the character himself, and how his experiences affected his life.

Which brings me to my minor criticism. The movie was a nice sugary thing. Marxist-lite. Che Guevara turned into a pretty ruthless leader. Well, he was pretty paradoxical in his actions and quotes. But he was responsible for personally excuting something like 1500 prisoners and enemies of the state in Cuba.

“Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy."

The movie didn't really, IMO, hint at this violent, ruthless side of his personality. I suppose he did throw a rock at a truck at one point. I just think the movie made him a little TOO charming; you didn't really see the hints of the other side of his personality. I guess maybe that was on purpose; by showing what the poverty and inequality he found did to such a charming, charasmatic guy, drives the point home in some ways.

I think I just talked myself out of my objection about the movie. Oh well. Either way, I'd recommend it. Especially at a theater with couches.

I cut my hair. Well, to be specific, rachel cut it. With my beard trimmer.
http://www.t-mobilepictures.com/Shaft0rz/
It's awesome. I roll out of bed in the morning and i'm good to go. And I no longer have to pay supercuts $12 for what should be called a subparcut. The only downside is a cold head. That Massive hat that was given to me 2 years ago now fits quite nicely though, so it's like it was meant to be.

How does Socialized Hair Cutting sound for New America?

Just Kidding.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/11/04/iraq.weapons.ap/index.html

So apparently the soldiers just watched as it happened. Anyone need any more proof the military is over-extended?

In other news, my office is very Drafty today. I'm glad I brough a sweater