Posted on Digg, re: Un-American: Have you listened to the right-wing media?

I never really call the conservatives, except when I'm being ironic. They are right-wing. *I* am conservative.

I believe in the Constitution, which mandates separation of Church and State. I believe that the government doesn't have the right to suspend the document.

I believe that corporations are creatures of the government, granted existence through our grace and exist for the betterment of the country collectively, and when they go off the rails, should be disbanded for breach of the contract by which they are tolerated.

I believe that corporations do not have superpowers that government do not have, and that government cannot use them to bypass laws on surveillance, for example.

I believe that for the most part, we pay the bills as we go. That means no tax cuts if the bills aren't paid. That means no borrowing to pretend there are no bills. A little deficit spending during bad times is utterly necessary, as capitalism is not perfect. But deficit spending during good times to pretend and pander that taxes don't need to be paid? No.

I believe that the Secret Service, the CIA, and all the little hunter-killer secret squads the right love so much should be brought back under government control.

I believe in a public good that overrides immediate private gain. I have a lot of good company in that belief.

I believe that destroying other countries for economic gain is a losing proposition that costs us skyscrapers in the short run and pariah hood and bankruptcy in the long run.

I believe that what a person does to his brain chemistry is his business, and that the consequences of that experimentation belong to him as well. I do not believe that the armed forces and police exist to force us to be the perfect humans that some want us to be - and that those "some" are some of the worst liars and hypocrites in that regard.

I believe that those who want to go to war against other countries for no damned reason but power/money should be forced to spend their own damned lives and their children's as well, or forfeit the right to vote for such invasions. You want the oil, go shoot them yourselves, or shut up.

That a start. That's conservative. The right are just... radicals. Disconnected, spoiled and false-to-fact.

Twitter is an original idea? Um, no.

Twitter users: you've rediscovered the AOL chatroom experience, circa 1993. Congrats. Yeah, it was and is fun.

But it ain't original.

Is Twitter the Vengeance of the Popular Kids' Lunch Table?

Seriously. The tech world has long been dominated by loner geeks: those who wouldn't be dating the cheerleader from the Popular Table in the school lunchroom.

I'm listening to Leo LaPorte's TWIT podcast, just downloaded fresh this morning. And Twitter, as they mention, has consumed the tech world. And Twitter is nothing but a popularity contest, and rewards and enriches the Kool Kids, with little regard to their actual abilities in tech. I could name names - Keeevvvvinn... Alexxxx....

TWIT has become a millionaires' club, full of 1) Young 2) Attractive people from wealthy/upper middle class backgrounds who behold endless vistas of opportunity before them. This is well and good, as such always are on top. But Twitter is supercharging the Kool Kids, while the tech duds who have always made this wonderful new world are becoming hangers-on, fans, recipients of restraining orders metaphorically who aren't invited to the tech table.

And yes, they were once the only occupants of that table. But like all other human endeavors, the business is being overwhelmed by celebrity and beauty and priviledge. Such is life.

Noticing here that the Apple stock didn't get trounced after the iPhone 3.0 announcement. Perhaps Apple's puzzling decision to stop announcing new products on a predictable semi-annual schedule and instead pop them out randomly with almost no notice to anyone has screwed up the stock-shorting geniuses' timing. About damned time.

The Wall Street Journal says that Netflix stock is overvalued, despite the fact they are taking over the video market and have future revenues of Apple-like levels stretching out before them.

Someone has decided it is time to short the stock and suck the profits out of its marrow. The Real Stock Market is about to fleece current shareholders of yet another excellent company. Get a cat food casserole recipe book, kids, your Uncle Wall Street's about to steal your future again.

Apple is about to release iPhone 3.0 in an hour. Gentleman, start shorting the stocks! Whee!

Cramer actual admits talking Apple stock prices up and then immediately selling short and talking the price down again. He said it was easy to do an very profitable as well.

I said some time back that Apple announcements always caused a major shortselling spree. I keep taking a bath on this, while the stockbrokers make bank.

Stewart is right. There are two stock markets, one for the 401K suckers, and the real one that only big boys play in.

Now it is possible, with lithium titanate or lithium iron phosphate batteries, to charge a car's battery pack in minutes. However, people are pointing out that it would take a 180 KW pipe to charge the car. Not available. Fail, say they.

Think a little. What you need is a sidewalk or garage capacitor/battery array that charges slowly and constantly off a 120 or 240 volt pipe from the grid or your solar array. When you want to charge the car, plug 'er into the sidewalk/garage battery/capacitor, and then blow all that power into the car in ten minutes.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper died today.

Comedy Central should form a news team, hell, a news network, around its Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert core group. Comedians of the "left" seem to be much more informed then the "middle" wing of the various mainstream news media.

Stewart understands that he needs the news networks to actually provide him some news to work with. But that seems less probable as the few outfits left coalesce into a few rightwing corporate news organizations.

The liberals need to move. We need more newsrooms, with clearsighted reporters and a lack of "balance".

What? - no one has noticed that Rush Limbaugh is running for president?