Psychedelic Sofa

Eight years ago the unthinkable happened. The government that was responsible for protecting the citizens of this country failed and a small group of middle eastern men, mostly Saudi Arabian in origin, overtook the crew of several planes and flew two of them into each of the towers of the World Trade Center. That day over 3000 lives ended and thousands more ruined forever, including the first responders and anyone else who inhaled the debris.

Along with those lives, America lost something else. America lost its courage and delicate cohesion. America, in general, fell victim to fear. And it is no surprise given that for the following months all of the major media channels played the video of the attacks as a permanent moving wallpaper behind the talking heads.

This fear caused people to do things against their best interest and allowed them to be easily distracted. Days after the attacks voices of such people where broadcast on CNN, saying things like "I think we can give up certain freedoms for security."

Benjamin Franklin wept.

Months after the attacks, the government that failed to protect us hastily pushed an agenda that we are still feeling the effects from. An additional 4000 plus brave Americans died from this agenda and are still dying there today despite a new presidential administration.

The attacks destroyed any sense of decency and commonality between any two people or groups who hold differing political opinions. Over the past eight years these divisions have worsened to the point that anyone who holds a centrist opinion is immediately alienated and marginalized. Rational ideas are quickly washed away with zealous support of misinformation.

My challenge to Americans, on the anniversary of this horrific act, is to cast aside the fear and hatred and try to live our lives the way we did prior to the attacks, albeit with any wisdom that can be gleaned from the experience. Regardless of your political stance, if this fundamental challenge cannot be met, then the attackers have indeed achieved their ultimate goal.

Am I the only one who finds the book deal that "Joe the Plumber", a.k.a. Sam "the fraud" Wurzelbacher, has made short sided given that most folks who buy in the plumber myth are illiterate?

Of course that won't stop the GOP from buying pallets of the pulp and handing them out at rallies.

It has been nearly a week since the election that brought America her first non-white president. It was a long time coming and it was historic. That night celebration was definitely in order.

But too quickly the honeymoon is over and barely more than two months before Obama actually takes office a lot of work needs to be done. If he does not start ramping up for his presidency now, he will start already behind. In some respects he will be anyway. Barack Obama will walk into the executive office of a country gutted by eight years of Friedman economic rot from the inside. Many of our once strong civic core infrastructures are wholly reliant on private industry to function. The wolves have already raided the henhouse, but the farmhouse too. We have an illegal war that has bled and broken our military and treasury to the tune of over $550 Billion. The last straw was the funneling of over $800 Billion dollars that our treasury really did not have to give to banks and industry that has been basically raping the middle class a reward for dismal failure to the public they were suppose to serve.

Obama is indeed starting in the hole. And he will be tested. Not just by foreign interests that would do us harm, but by an economy laid waste by unbridled capitalism. Taxing the rich may set things right, but it may just backfire and bring nothing but criticism. The powers that really control the nation, if not the world, would love nothing more than for the first president of African decent to fail miserably. How can we civilly reclaim from the uber-wealthy that once belonged to the public? With our nation producing nothing other than weapons, where does our industry go to grow? Does it finally consume itself? And what happens next?

I hope to hell that we can overcome this period in history without befalling the fate of other nations that have reached the heights of power the United States has. We have had hard times before, but some of the challenges that face us today simply did not exist in the past. It took lots of money and public support to get Obama elected. We will need to both support him and keep his feet to the fire for him to fulfill the promise of hope described during his campaign.

We will also need to marginalize those who have fully deserved it during the past eight years as we have been marginalized. The often obnoxious, yet entertaining, Keith Olbermann handled his Worst Persons piece best last Wednesday. Each familiar neo-conservative face, a "leader" and two water carriers, were rendered irrelevant. Indeed, who really gave a fuck what they had to say after being so wrong about everything -- everything except how to swindle unimaginable funds from the public trust.

If you know anyone who lives in a rural area, where they do not have the ability to get broadband Internet, be sure to warn them not to fall victim to Hughesnet satellite Internet service. IF their only other alternative is dial up, tell them to stick with it!



First of all if you want to want online movies from sites like YouTube, forget it. And don't even begin to think about sharing files.

You want to pull down the latest Ubuntu? Nope.

How about Open Office? Negative.

It will fail almost consistently around 80%. Well, I say "fail", but what really happens is that their equipment sends a termination packet so your download manager thinks it is done. If you try to download it again, you will trip their (cough) Fair Access Policy . Once you hit this threshold, you are penalized with a download speed of 2Kbps for 24 hours. I think you are only able to hack into WOPR to play Global Thermonuclear War at that speed.



To add insult to injury, to get the service you have to pay $500 for equipment and installation. The rate for the package I subscribed to was $80 a month. I was supposed to get 1.6 Mbps/250 Kbps...I never got it.

Here are the results of the internal speed test I got with Hughesnet:

• Date Download/Upload
  (Ike takes my power away for 11 days)
  09/13/2008 14:54:56 144/53
  09/11/2008 00:46:44 943/161
  09/11/2008 00:12:10 782/87
  09/10/2008 23:33:21 44/86
  09/10/2008 23:14:49 52/38
  09/10/2008 23:11:03 94/28
  09/10/2008 23:00:15 95/79
  09/10/2008 22:58:50 92/57
  09/10/2008 22:54:22 48/0.0
  09/10/2008 02:15:10 1224/148
  09/05/2008 21:28:39 1348/189
  08/29/2008 23:15:01 437/55
  08/29/2008 23:12:01 371/49
  08/26/2008 22:03:09 507/74
  08/26/2008 18:04:13 801/54
  08/26/2008 11:09:07 1346/191
  08/25/2008 23:31:17 545/63
  08/25/2008 23:10:11 666/26
  08/25/2008 22:10:57 1170/165
  08/21/2008 22:16:07 520/134
  08/21/2008 22:09:58 482/144

Mind you these are speeds just to get from my home through the satellite to the Hughnet network some 2000 miles away. Speeds to the sites outside their network were as low as 20Kbps due to oversubscribing.

Have a problem with your service? Get ready to go through a canned checklist of things to do to your computer (some of which can fuck it up) before their worthless techsupport staffed with Indians who have undergone American customs training even get close to helping you.



For someone like me who knows a few things about networking and computers, you will find this experience insulting to your intelligence. The technician with their watered down Indian accent with immediately apologize for your problem and set about trying their best to do absolutely nothing about it. And you'd better not mention Linux or their heads will explode!

To terminate this nightmarish service before the 24 months is up, you get the sheer joy of paying $300. WOOT! After fighting with two more Indians about why I didn't want to pay for service I couldn't use, explaining that they did not fulfill their end of the contract due to oversubscribing so I wasn't paying a fee, being put on death hold, and being hung up on once, I was still stuck with the termination fee and $500 worth of satellite equipment.

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