I’ve stayed on hold with Adobe (yet another computer service that hooks me up with Ahmed Adlajblbja;lkj;lakj;lkaj who tells me to just “restart the computer”) for 2 hrs! Nothing is getting rid of this extremely expensive software. I finally resign myself to a trip to the Apple store.

Last Friday:
Approaching the giant cube that is the Apple store. “Hi I need my computer fixed.”
Emo guy brushes away his meticulously disheveled hair to raise his eyebrow at me. “Have you made an appointment?”
Me: “I wasn’t aware we had to.”
Emo boy sways back and forth. “Well we’re all booked. You’ll have to make an appointment. You can use that computer.”

I ignore the chance to mention that for such “simple” computers that’s quite the back-up and make the appt.

Yesterday:
Arrive at 10:40 am. I am led to what is called the “Genius Bar” where I am told that I am late for my appointment and that it was given away. I notice that all their shirts say “Not all heroes wear capes.” If I wait a half hour they are “sure” they can squeeze me in.

Okay let me make some observations here people. One Genius bar this is not. More than once I heard these “Geniuses” say sorry but they “just don’t understand how to install windows on a Mac.” FURTHERMORE, a hero is not someone who wakes up and goes to work 5 days a week to fix computers! A hero is someone who makes sacrifices, perhaps like the men of our military who die every day for for the ideal of freedom. They most definitely are NOT Mac using, hybrid car driving, vegetarians who work the Genius Bar! Also fyi, these self righteousness pricks had NO time to see me. They were booked solid till 5pm and just let me sit there for an hour!

In short: Mac’s suck and actually most heroes do wear capes.

As read in the report:

A chapter on “Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter” notes that Twitter members sent out messages, known as “Tweets,” reporting the July Los Angeles earthquake faster than news outlets and activists at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used it to provide information on police movements.

“Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,” the report said.

Okay-so is that the new terrorist watch list? Political enthusiasts? Boy, I’m in trouble. How many of you fit the above criteria? Think about it.

What does this mean? It means that Border Patrol & Customs authority is a lot bigger than we thought! Over two thirds of the American population to be exact. This unit of DHS has the right to stop, search and seize for any reason at all. And while these powers have been enabled for a while, only after the DHS took head of the organization have abuses started to occur. (Big shocker right?) Check out a few of the stories below:

Witness the before:

William Weaver, who worked in the U.S. Army signals intelligence for eight years in Berlin and Augsberg, Germany, concurred with her assessment of how seriously USSID 18 was regarded.

“The way USSID 18 was treated by us was that it came down from God and was sacrosanct,” said Weaver, who is now an assistant professor of political science at the University of Texas, El Paso. “We were told at training and many times after that, that if you violated USSID 18 you could spend the rest of your life in prison. The mindset was that you do not intercept U.S. citizens. And the minute you recognized that you intercepted, you immediately reported up the chain of command.”

To the after:

Kinne said that in the nearly two years she was monitoring conversations, her group received calls in numerous languages, including Farsi, Pashtu, Dari, Tagalog, Japanese, Chinese and Russian. Between 10-20 percent of the calls she monitored involved English-speakers, which included Americans, Canadians and British citizens. Nearly 99 percent of the calls she monitored were non-military related. Comparatively few of the calls she processed were in Arabic.

I hope you would tell me to eff off cause there is “no such thing as a free lunch.” Unfortunately, the FCC is trying to pull this exact gimmick by proposing nationwide free Wi-Fi. The catch? According to ABC:

But the plan comes with a peculiar hitch: in order to win the spectrum and use other portions of it for paid services, the network operator must filter or block all “pornographic” text or images, and all text or images (of any sort) that might be “harmful” to a 5-year-old.

In case you were wondering the proposed bill would also allow the FCC to censor any “offending” political websites. Since when did the US embrace China’s trend of censorship?

I hope this time that Americans tell the government to stuff it, they’d rather pay for their content than submit to brainwashing a-la 1984 style.

They have since been charged with suspicion of embezzlement, elder abuse and disposing of a body without a permit.

Wtf?

So what’s the next best step? Purchasing $25 million on ray guns to literally boil US citizens from inside out. The Army calls it an Active Denial System (ADS) instead of simply “microwave on the outside.” According to a recently released report by Dr. Jürgen Altmann:

“As a consequence, the ADS provides the technical possibility to produce burns of second and third degree. Because the beam of diameter 2 m and above is wider than human size, such burns would occur over considerable parts of the body, up to 50% of its surface. Second- and third-degree burns covering more than 20% of the body surface are potentially life-threatening – due to toxic tissue-decay products and increased sensitivity to infection – and require intensive care in a specialized unit. Without a technical device that reliably prevents re-triggering on the same target subject, the ADS has a potential to produce permanent injury or death. “

I ask you, does spending $25 million dollars in order to control it’s own citizens with experimental weapons sound like a democratic government? Cause it sure sounds like a terror regime to me.

Regardless if you woke up today planning on e-mailing your local rep about it; you may be blocked. The House is now blocking e-mails on the bailout after it’s website almost crashing last night. Hm…website or democracy? As my work colleague said, “that’s effed up.”