Good news!

1200 people have signed up for curbside recycling in Rock Island.

Unfortunately no curbside recycling of glass.

I’m trying to imagine why we can recycle glass through
the recycling center but not at the curb.

I’m currently waiting for an email explanation.

As we enslave the world for cheap goods it is important to note some third world nightmare keeps our American dream propped up. Each purchase we make, depending upon whether it is made with virtual slave labor or not determines the state of the world that we live in. Much of the evil we find along the way is rooted in our daily lives.

Please think about how your spending effects the world.

Your Foot Print Calculator

“Music washes from the soul the dust of everysay life.”

–  Berthold Auerbach –

I’m just getting finished reading Fritjof Capra’s “Hidden Connections”

It seems that we here in the US have been a bit sheltered from the global storm going on over genetically modified foods. Most people in the world are vehemently against the “genetic colonialism” that the bio-tech companies agenda truly is.

The central dogma of biology that bio-tech industries are trumpeting, that genes decide behavior is crumbling. Recent findings are pointing in the direction of the “epigenetic network” as having more to do with gene expression than perhaps the genes themselves do. In other words, taken out of context the genetic code is meaningless.

More Later

In the meantime, check out Systems Thinking

I spent a year and a half barefoot. It was 1989 till sometime in late 91. After that I went to prison and was forced to wear shoes for five years.

I was working on a van. It was a 1966 Ford with a three on the tree straight 6. Not a large van a small one. It was mignight blue. I called her Stella. It was really late and my mechanic buddies bailed on me around midnight thinking that drinking was the thing to do instead. They said I’d never get the thing done bfore dawn which is was I’d set in my mind I had to do.

I did eventually around four thirty am get the engine back in and running. I went in the house and got a few last things before leaving town and while I was running down the driveway to leave my sandal broke and I left town barefoot.

I kept thinking about getting some shoes but money was tight and I’d been arguing with my friends about whether you needed money or not… so… I guess I was out to prove that you didn’t. And rather than accept a hand out pair of shoes I decided that humans were given feet for a reason. Sure they were designed in the trees but really I thought, they’re perfectly able to get around just about anywhere just fine. Besides, in keeping with my philosophy of not needing money, being barefoot kept me out of all but the coolest restaurants and businesses in town.

You can’t “fight” rigidity with more rigidity. The only answer to rigidity is fluidity.

D. VanThournout

Check out this Video of Keith Olberman Ripping George W. Bush down to the ground! 

deprogrammer.com/video

I just amazed myself by instead of breaking down and buying a new keyboard for my computer I just opened the one I was using up and cleaned it out a little…. well I did have to take the little silicon cups that were really worn and trade them with f key’s little silicon cups… And the numeric pad to the right which I never use anyway.

I’d first been thinking that I was sure to run across a freebie keyboard if I waited long enough… Then a friend of mine said he had an extra. I took it home today and plugged it in. The “t” worked, as well as the “u” and the “j” and the zero…. just had to pound the hell out of the space bar to get a space.

So…. I was thinking about breaking down and going to the store (i hate) and spending a small fortune (in my opinion) in order to not have the frustration of going back through the code for the missing t’s, u’s, j’s, zero’s, etc. I estimated that over half the coding errors were due entirely to this faulty handful of keys. No small thing this.

So, I opened the original keyboard and cleaned the plastic sheet with  the circuity side of things is on and then kind of haphazardly traded a few of what I thought might be worn silicon cups with a few of the f keys cups. I put it all back together and while the zero and the u worked great, the t was still malfunctioning. I realized that this meant that far more important was the replacing of the worn silicon cups than the cleaning of the “board” with alcohol. I realized this meant opening the damn thing up again….

I know this shouldn’t matter at all but I thought since I hadn’t yet opened up the keyboard my friend had given me it wasn’t such a chore because I wasn’t doing it twice! And perhaps getting the space key to work would be easier than getting the t, j, u, zero, etc. to work….

So this time I was much more thourough in my going through the worn keys. By this time I was really thinking about this and realized I could see which ones were worn and likely to give trouble. So I looked to see which keys they were and it was all very logical. Delete, Space, cursor keys, the letters; “a”, “s”, “t”, “j”, the zero, the enter key… You get the idea. So I pretty much took all the little silicon cups that had gotten the most use and traded them with things like f4, f5, f6, etc. and then when those ran out I started taking them from the numeric pad.

I won’t go to much into the actual process of taking the thing apart.

I got to thinking about how this might be done out there in the world In the first place. It wasn’t easy getting all the little silicon cups to line up in the thing right once I was to the point of putting it all back together. It took a little time. I started iimagining what the workers that put these things together might have to go through during their days. Like; “Damn! there goes another screw down that extra hole that serves no other purpose than to make me look slow to my boss.” I imagined someone younger asking someone older what that little hole is for…. and them coming back with something like; “It’s so you lose your screws and then they can say you have a screw loose! Ha ha ha ha all the while slapping you on the back and then saying now stop asking me silly questions to which I know not the answers!

I always imagine people working in Asia as working in terrible conditions and not thinking about them as people who probably joke about the boss and how stupid he looks just like we do here.

Well it was fabulously successful this saving of the $30.00 on a new keyboard I didn’t really need. I saved who knows how many ergs of energy not driving and slowed the flow of plastic to the landfill significantly (at least in the  microcosmic scheme of things) . More on that later.