When 9/11 happened, I immediately began to think of other ways they might attack us. Using a transcoastal flight full of fuel was certainly ingenious. I looked around and the answer was near immediate:

Gas tanker trucks. 9,000 gallons of fuel.

If you went to a major hub like the one south of Knoxville, and put a time delay charge on tankers set for maybe 18 hours later, those trucks would be all over the nation when they went off. Coordinate a few of these and you can imagine if all across America, giant fireballs erupted on city streets and interstate highways. Shutting down the airports for a day was a disaster, imagine what shutting down interstate traffic, or at least fuel delivery would do.

We have spent incalculable amounts of time and money trying to prevent another person from getting on a plane with a shoe bomb, yet, giant gas bombs criss-cross our country continually, without any safeguards other than truckers themselves.

Think about that next time you are on the road next to a tanker truck. Then imagine what the wake of such an attack would mean.

I wish I got paid well to protect America from terrorists…

Ack! What have they done with the head of the Jetson’s maid?!

And in other news, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has confessed to the Great Flood, killing OJ’s wife, planting the fake Dinosaur evidence to screw with the Kristians and he’s pretty sure he is the daddy of Danielynn.

Oh, and that whole Global Warming thing?

His bad.

In the continuing saga of the music industry not being able to construct a business model that capitalizes on the new technology and instead waging war on it, we are now about to lose online radio.

I have an online radio broadcast and it has been a rough road. The music industry does not want to treat online radio like on-air radio. A long time ago there was a truce between the industry and radio. A common sense understanding that radio promotes the music the industry sells and thus counteracts the fees the industry wanted to impose for them playing the music. They still pay fees however.

Now they are going to start dramatically escalating the fees to online radio only. This will essentially mean that there will be no more variety. All but the very biggest online radio companies, who are in cahoots with the music folks, will be able to take the huge financial hit. Your local college radio station will go offline. The really cool one in New York you listen too will go away. The local WDVX, which has a huge online following and is voted best Bluegrass station year after year, will only be available here in the hills of East Tennessee. Live 365 will be gone or start charging more fees. All that variety will cease and we’ll hear Fergie and Justin on constant rotation instead.

Despite the fact that online radio is tied into online sales directly and I can click the currently playing selection and buy it, thus making a direct link between sales/promotion and listening, they want to shut it down. They can’t fathom the great good it does for them. Amazon reports that the biggest CD sales are for the extremes of their catalog. The older, more obscure titles, when combined, out sell everything else by miles. Let the entire catalog of music be played and heard and bought and the industry will make far more money.

They just don’t see it our way and want to ram their top 3 artists down our throats further.

You can help stop it by signing this petition online. Do it now!

Way off topic perhaps, but I am POed at my car choices. Not too long ago, the Chrysler folks had created the Viper, the PT Cruiser and the Prowler. They made really unique cars and trucks, whether you liked them or not. You knew what they looked like and if you liked it, you really liked it.

I bought a Sebring JXi because I liked the style. When I heard they were bringing back one of my favorite old cars, the 300, known as the “Beautiful Brute” back in the day, I was excited. They rolled out the concept for the convertible and I drooled. And now I get an email about the new Sebring convertible and it is not butt ugly, its so boring I despise it. No style or character whatsoever!

What happened? The new styles for the trucks were a huge success. The new 300 and Magnum are doing well and their look is not to my liking, but very popular and cool. I don’t understand the dumbing down of this car…

Here is another repugnant conservative Kristian site trying to bring back the Moral Majority. It’s hard to know where to start with this stuff because it is so ignorant and pathetically stupid. Their list of Gay Bands to avoid and defend your kids from is laughable. I mean, in general, there are a lot of reasons to not listen to these bands, and some sort of gay connection is pretty far down the list. And any mental flyweight retarded enough to be under the influence of these clowns isn’t worth bothering with to begin with. Except that they probably minister to a lot of very young, gullible kids. Kids may be smart as whips, but they don’t know enough to understand that these people are ‘tards. So they become the victim of their abusive “teachings.”

But the real issue here is one that most all gay bashing Kristians have and that is the notion that one becomes gay or decides to be gay and that they can be fixed.

But then, these aren’t people who listen to science, so I don’t know why I am surprised they don’t get it. Chances are, we can create gay people at will by messing with a mother’s hormone levels during pregnancy.

Being someone who actually knows and has talked to many gay people, let me make this very clear. People are born gay. They certainly do not choose it. Nor are they victims of gay sexual abuse.

That is fact.

Notice anything odd about this portrait? This portrait of a singing group? They are not smiling. That’s the way it used to be. Then, for some ungodly reason, we all had to smile when someone pointed a camera at us. “Feign delight!”

I think Walt Disney and his “happiest place on Earth” may have had something to do with it. Maybe it was the hippies. I don’t know.

But I do know it needs to stop. I am sick to death of newscasters who feel a need to be happy and perky telling all the grisly details. I am sickened by everyone in TV commercials living in happy happy land where it’s all non-stop smiley fun world!

Look, chicken! Yeah!

Tooth polish! Whee!

And every damned show is now filled with perky, happy people. You can’t redecorate a house or bake a dinner on TV unless you are insanely gleeful while doing it.

Enough!

I have more than one feeling or emotion and the majority of my life is not happy funland. That’s just where I go to put quarters in machines to take my mind off my real life for a while with the kids.

If I pass you at work and don’t say, “Hi, how are you doing?” it does not mean A) I hate you or B) I am deeply depressed and need help. It means, I am normal.

All this fake smiling is creepy. Like some horror movie. Like those creepy ass clowns. Like John Wayne Gacy.

I fucking hate perky people! The people who inhabit TV commercials and talk shows and any of those DIY instruction type shows are the freaks who need help. They make me sick. I want to trip them and make them fall face first in a mud hole.

That would make me happy.

When will it start? Every single person who reads this has been attacked repeatedly. And if the attack were successful, our computer might be dead or our back accounts drained or our identities stolen. Sounds freakin serious to me.

I have a very good sys admin who keeps 99.9999+% of the spam and phishing scams from ever hitting my inbox. But some still comes through. And over 99% of the email traffic on the internet is spam. The work of compromised, infected computers. National Security? Hello.

My sys admin knows who they are. He blocks them and send the spam to the bit bucket. Why does he have to?

Wanna stop elderly folks and computer newbies from sending thousands of dollars to Nigeria? Stop with the free distribution of spam! It’s that easy.

We need to stop it all at the Internet backbone. If the engineers and computer scientists in charge of maintaining the Internet decide to implement it, they could stop 80-90+% of the spam immediately. Thus freeing up bandwidth for more porn commerce.

Every day it only gets worse as a new computer has a broadband connection to the Internet every half second and three days later 1 out of 100 of those is sending out 100,000 spam emails an hour. It will cripple the Internet. And no one is even thinking about it. No one but the sys admins fighting the war on their servers and the people like us fighting off one attack after another.

Not to mention the millions of dollars that is lost daily to the crap coming into our Tubes…

The news of the double murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom is shocking. But I want to know where this all began. We know where it ended and who is in custody, and who died. Young white kids from the West side died East Side of town.

What will be truly telling is where it all started. Why are they holding that back? I think the answer will be that it started somewhere “safe” like ”Turkey Creek” and they don’t want people to know that. If it had happened in the Old City or downtown, you can bet it would have been news from day one.

I really want it to have happened in West Knoxville. I want the world to give up this notion that parts of town are “safe” and parts are “unsafe.” Why doesn’t the media report the number of thefts and robberies and other crimes in the parking lots of Turkey Creek and West Town Mall, but seem to regularly report anything that happens downtown? If people knew the facts, it would change a lot. When Bill Haslam’s mother’s purse was snatched at the mall, they were unable keep it quiet. News this big can’t be kept quiet either.

We will see if there is a real reason the location is unknown, or if it is just their way of protecting some economic interest’s investments, or maybe some segment of Knox County’s notion of “safe.”

That is where we live. No, our politicians are not dictators, but the companies we work for are. They hold our lives in their hands and make decisions on a whim that can destroy us. And we have little recourse. In the state of Tennessee you can be fired for basicaly no reason.

I bring this up for one reason. It is a critique of the notion that if we give more money to the upper crust, it will mean that the rest of the population does better.

If we lived in a country of benevolent dictators this would be true. Unfortunately, as people get lots of wealth and power, they simply want more wealth and power and are less likely to share. They don’t spread it around, they hoard it.

How many companies or bosses have you worked for that pushed you to work more for less and tried to see how far they could go before they made you quit? They didn’t value your ability to make the company better by sharing the wealth you were making for them. They simply used you to make more for them and when you became too squeaky a wheel, they dumped you for someone they could pay less.

This is how most companies are run. The people who do the work that make the money are undervalued, while the people at the top keep getting bigger heads and thinking the only thing that matters to the company is their brilliant leadership which means they deserve more money. They can keep replacing workers. They can keep treating them poorly. They can keep taking more and giving less.

It’s a matter of the human psyche and how money and power corrupts the mind into false flattery. It leads to a nation of distinct and distant strata.

In an ideal world, it would mean that as the companies got bigger and more profitable, everyone would make more money and be better off. Instead, the top layer gets more and more and the bottom layers stay the same and slide back. And the bigger the company, the more extreme the concentration at the top, and the more large the chasm below.

The Republicans have been in control for a good 12 years. The stock market is soaring to new records. But, most of the people I know are making less money and are more worried about their future. Crime is rising, in particular, robbery and burglary, which is a sign of hard times. 12 years and this is where we are. How do you feel about your future?