Whenever I think, “I have no heart,” something always comes along to prove to me that I do.

My immediate thought is always to be skeptical of Internet Chain Letters and such, but with this one, I dug a little deeper and found that it’s totaly legitimate…

Why the one million friends challenge? I get asked the questions, Why 1 million friends? What will it achieve? on a regular basis. So I thought I would try to explain. James and I used to come onto myspace to listen to music and look at the videos just before he was diagnosed and added a few friends.

When James was diagnosed and we came to terms with the fact that his cancer and its treatment was going to take over our lives we needed a distraction and the “James and Daddy” page was born. I asked James if he thought we could get one hundred friends and then one thousand and the ten thousand. When we reached ten thousand friends I asked James to set the next target. James said ONE MILLION.

We will gain nothing financially from this page but have gained friendship from people around the world and we have shared our story with you all and in return shared your stories. This page has helped us as a family deal with the tough times and share the good times. Now as a father I feel I have to achieve this challenge as I made a vow to James the day after he was born that I would never let him down and I would only make him a promise if I could keep it.

So there you have it, the reason for the challenge and why I need you to help me get more friends. We have tried the celebrity route with minor success so all we can do is keep sending out the bulletins and searching out the profiles that have loads of friends and big hearts.

I mentioned a while back, I can’t have kids… Rather, not healthy ones, anyway… I have been using my vaginal dhea cream and I can say I found my peace with all of that a long time ago.
But then again, maybe that’s why stuff like this tears me up so bad… Like it did with Ambriel… Like it does with someone else even closer who went through a bout of it herself (I love you, baby girl, I miss you, and I’m proud of you).

There’s the futility factor, wishing I could do something to make it better, and I can’t…

And then, of course, I see their faces they’re smiling right through it most days.

That…

…is one of the few things that I glean hope from.

And I know damn well that despite everything else, those kids are toughter than I will ever be.

If you’ve got MySpace, be sure and add him as a friend.  Spread the word.  Make a donation.

http://www.myspace.com/bizwiz68

     Lest we forget as we enter the fray of our Brave New World:

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled
was convincing the world he didn’t exist.
     — Charles Baudelaire, “The Generous Gambler”

     Sometimes, you read something that slants reality ever-so-slightly. 

     It’s a well-laid-out Conspiracy which didn’t do a damn thing for me.  It’s a theme we’re all to familiar with, anyway:
     Liberals accuse Conservatives of “One World Government” while surreptitiously kicking the legs out from under their own argument with their own objectives.  Republicans then attempt to “fix” the situation, all the why claiming that it happened due to a lack of foresight, while kicking the legs out from under their own argument by passing the first proposal to come along.
     They all come together in the middle, and we get screwed in the process.  No big friggin’ news there.

     Actually, the blog did get me thinking.

     But it wasn’t the Conspiracy theory…

     Instead, it was this statement by Dwight Eisenhower that struck me:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

     “Knowlegeable citizenry,” schmitizenry… 

A long memory is the most subversive idea in America.
— George Wald

     For years, we’ve observed that peoples’ attentions spans are short, and their memories even shorter.  A perfect example of this is in the Obama campaign’s vicious attacks against Hillary Clinton, inciting mass hysteria over Sexism, and yet, when she dropped from the race, people forgot… and began blaming Republicans for said sexism, despite the confessions of so many prominent Democrats that it was them all along.

     The afforementioned blog was also haven to a quote suitable for a “Duh of the Day” award.  In reference to Obama making promises he has no intention of keeping, and in stark contrast to “knowlegeable citizenry,” someone replied:

No way he’ll bite the hand that feeds.

     I would counter with this, further showing that our memory has been disrupted for a good century and a half:

You can fool some of the people all of the time,
and all of the people some of the time,
but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
— Abraham Lincoln 

     “Honest Abe” fooled a Hell of a lot of people, promising during his campaign and subsequent inauguration that it wasn’t his job to outlaw slavery, nor would he, as it was the right of each and free man to draw their own conclusions.  It was those statements that got him elected, but what did he do afterwards?
     Yes… He bit that hand pretty hard.
     Regardless of The Emancipation Proclamation’s forward-thinking and status as a defining document in our Nation’s history, the very nature of its passage is still a matter of great debate and conjecture.  There are many people, both black and white, who consider that our History books are incorrect, claiming that the Proclamation was nothing more than a political ploy designed to disable the ability of the Confederacy to operate autonomously.
     To a very large degree, it worked.  However, it was also the reason for Lincoln’s untimely demise, thus proving his own theory to be correct… You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

     Back to the point, please show me a Politician who doesn’t bite the hand that feeds…

     Everyone knows that you can tell when Politicians are lying because their lips are moving.

     I almost said, “his lips,” but I didn’t want to come off as “sexist.”  *smirk*

     I died laughing when I read this…

     …however, it bears a disturbing similarity to the way some Customers have tried to get out of paying me the money that they rightfully owe me for services I’ve rendered.

     With that kind of asshattery, is it any wonder I get anti-social sometimes?

Tip: Drew at quoted4truth.com, by way of Doobla.

     Firefox still sucks.  I don’t care what everyone else in the world thinks, and I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but it’s the truth.  While they bitch about “standards” all the time, the fact is, 95% of what Firefox calls “a standard” isn’t even ratified yet.  When developers can’t tell a “Standard” from a “Request For Comment,” all sorts of malady ensues.
     It’s also disingenuous on the part of Web Developers to say, “It won’t render right in IE because IE sucks!” when the fact is, any Web Developer worth their salt would make an attempt to make a page render right in the predominant browser and its inferior counterpart.  Yet, for some reason, the call is to “blame Microsoft” every time a Developer makes a stupid mistake or doesn’t know what the Hell they’re doing…

     There’s also this ridiculous assertion that Firefox is inherently bullet-proof as far as being hackable.  The case is that IE is the predominant browser, so it makes sense to use it as the target for widespread attacks.  Firefox is an even more broken mess from a Security standpoint, and the veracity of its issues span across multiple platforms, despite claims otherwise.

     A nice little case in point of “shitty code” in Firefox is this attack vector I found two years ago and apparently still isn’t fixed…

     Get out your favorite PHP editor, and send an image in a stream… but in the header, use these two lines instead of something normal:

echo "Content-type: image/jpg";
echo "Content-length: 0";

     Now, with every other user-agent in the world, this won’t work for two very important reasons:

1. “image/jpg” is not a valid content-type.  “image/jpeg” is.
2. A connection-length of zero bytes tells the user-agent not to receive any data.

     Firefox, on the other hand, will go ahead and render the invalid content-type, zero-byte image at whatever size the Server streams to it, proving that it doesn’t care what’s actually being received from a possibly malicious host.

     Can you say, “Exploitable,” boys and girls?

     I knew you could…

     If only I’d read this before voting…

     (http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-mccain-will-win.html)

     I mean, damn, I got a stiffy just thinking about it…

     No, not her, you dolt… Coffee… Oh, man, some fine, smooth Kenyan or an Ethiopian Harrar…

     Oh, god, it’s been soooo long…

     So all of you on the west coast?

     VOTE FOR COFFEE!!!!!