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McSweeney's remembers Vonnegut

Q: Well, in your pamphlet, then, you spend a good deal of time talking with the dead. What do you think we can learn from those who have bailed-out before us?

VONNEGUT: Well, there were—or maybe there are—a number of dead people out there. (Laughs.) It's a very crowded place. There is a Beethoven and a Shakespeare and a Hitler and an entire family out there. But, fortunately, you don't have to go to heaven to talk to some of them. A lot of them have left us amazing things on paper, and so their lives persist here anyway. Wonderful words. Beautiful music. Stunning things that resonate. I am, as we talk, quoting Shakespeare. I'm writing about the death of eloquence. Eloquence was so ordinary back then, in the time of Shakespeare. [part 1] - [part 2] - [part 3]

Myspace becomes Ourspace, can I say I told you so now?

They own you they own you they own you.

Just in case that was unclear.

When MySpace was sold to Fox, it was over.

When Youtube was sold to Google, it was over.

When Delicious was sold to Yahoo, it was over.

It will happen over and over again until you noobish fools learn:

Don't let any CORPORATION host your personal data online.

Just don't. Cause they'll scan it for advertising value. They'll turn it into the police as evidence against you. They'll limit the things you can and can't do with your data... several times, changing the original service until it becomes a perverted disgusting mockery of itself.

It will happen over and over again.

Example: Everyone who has their email on gmail right now is owned. Pure and simple. No ifs ands or buts.

When you write to your friends: OWNED

When they reply: OWNED

By sending emails to your friends you expose your personal network to google. You tell them who you are, even though you don't realize it.

You allow them to own you.

You give them your data and allow them to make you their slave.

You let it happen.

They just set up the honeypot. and that's all they are. Honeypots for online data. Once you get in, you're stuck and they just keep gathering more and more data on you.... until they find the right piece, then they flip over all the previous pieces and they've got your ass in a sling.

Learn to handle yourself online.

Don't allow any CORPORATION to own your data.

It's up to you.

No one else will ever respect the rights of your data like you do.

Photobucket now joins the list of several companies understandably displeased with such developments at MySpace, as they all stand to lose traffic and mindshare as a result. A post on the Photobucket blog points out MySpace's action and asks its 40+ million users to e-mail MySpace to tell them what they think. "We believe that by limiting your ability to personalize your pages with content from any source, MySpace is contradicting the very belief of personal and social media," writes Photobucket. "MySpace became successful because of the creativity of you, its users, and because it offered a forum for self-expression. By severely restricting this freedom, MySpace is showing that it considers you as a commodity which it can treat as it sees fit."

MySpace's pattern of blocking video and music widgets from competing sites over the last few months has worried Internet users that MySpace was moving toward a closed-content system. The move to block Photobucket videos comes about two months after MySpace's decision to block embedded widgets from Imeem, a music and video sharing site, and a month previous to that, video sharing site Revver. [link]

E. Howard Hunt's Confession: LBJ ordered JFK Assassination

E. Howard scribbled the initials "LBJ," standing for Kennedy's ambitious vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Under "LBJ," connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that's never been solved. Next his father connected to Meyer's name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer's name was the name David Morales, yet another CIA man and a well-known, particularly vicious black-op specialist. And then his father connected to Morales' name, with a line, the framed words "French Gunman Grassy Knoll."

So there it was, according to E. Howard Hunt. LBJ had Kennedy killed. It had long been speculated upon. But now E. Howard was saying that's the way it was. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't the only shooter in Dallas. There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the Corsican Mafia assassin Lucien Sarti, who has figured prominently in other assassination theories. [link]

Read the entire rolling stone article

Kurt Vonnegut, dead at 84

I feel cliche and lame even trying to eulogize vonnegut and all his excellent novels have meant to me. He was a great writer, a great thinker and he spoke the truth, even when it was difficult to tell it.

He was a great man who added much to this world.

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Cat's Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in New York. He was 84 and had homes in New York and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

His death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.

Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and '70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.

Like Mark Twain, Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well? [link]

There is no decency. There is no justice. There is no righteousness. There is only war.

This is lower than low. This is beyond anything before imaginable. To meet the madman's artificial goals for his unattainable peace we must stretch the Army ever further.

Could you imagine being over there in that shit, fighting for bullshit, and being told that you get 3 more months in the Death Lottery because King George II back home needs to extend the conflict a little longer so he can make the handoff to Queen Hillary.

April 11 (Bloomberg) -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates said U.S. Army units would be deployed to Iraq for 15 months instead of 12 months, effective immediately.

The change applies to Army units already in Iraq and those that will go there, Gates said at a news conference today at the Pentagon. Without extending tours of duty, the Army can't maintain 20 brigades in Iraq as President George W. Bush ordered last January and still give troops a year at home between deployments, he said.

``Our forces are stretched, there's no question about that,'' Gates said, while rejecting suggestions that the Army is broken as a result of the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. [link]

Even though I usually don't agree with Rahm, he nails it here:

"Yesterday, extending tours of duty was 'unacceptable' to the president," Representative Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat, said in a statement. "Today, it is Pentagon policy. American troops and taxpayers are paying the price for a war with no end in sight." [link]

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