Category: depressing

Yahoo: “SCREW YOU, ED.”

This Yahoo! Account Has Been Deactivated

Please remember that the Yahoo! Terms of Service provides that Yahoo! may terminate your Yahoo! account in certain situations, including (a) where a violation of the TOS or other incorporated agreements or guidelines has occured, (b) in response to a request by you (self-initiated account deletions), or (c) extended periods of inactivity. For full information, please review the entire Terms of Service.

What the hell.

This is the second time Yahoo randomly screwed me.

Anybody who used to communicate with me over my ‘e_heil’ yahoo messenger address, don’t bother anymore.

You can reach me on AIM as MetaEdward and Jabber as ‘ed at-sign edheil dot com’.

Dammit.

I’m not even going to try creating a new yahoo account this time.

Been fun chatting with ya, yahoo friends. :(

Calvin to Welcome President Bush

Calvin to Welcome President Bush

Alma mater, you’re dead to me.

(OK, to be honest, I ran across the phrase “You’re dead to me” in a webcomic today, thought it was funny, and was looking for a place to work it into conversation or writing. The Bush thing is not really such a surprise or a big deal. Just gonna suck having the town crawling with secret service goons and roadblocks and what not that day.)

As the World Continues To Lurch Violently To The Right

A former Hitler Youth and leader of the Inquisition is elected Pope.

Huh.

UPDATE: before somebody points it out in comments, I know that membership in the Hitler Youth was compulsory at the time. As I understand it, worshipping the Emperor was also compulsory in ancient Rome.

UPDATE 2: really detailed article on Ratzinger here. Interesting stuff.

Perhaps later: some writing on why I even care about who’s Pope, not being Catholic and all, and why I’m disappointed it’s Ratzinger.

The Long Emergency

There was a recent article in Rolling Stone (via pk at Puddingbowl) about imminent consequences of passing Peak Oil — that is, the point where the oil we can get from the world’s reserves starts diminishing, until eventually it’s all gone. The author has a blog too.

This has been the “preying on my mind and threatening to depress the hell out of me” thing of the moment.

I dunno. We lived through the Cold Wr without reducing the world to radioactive slag. We managed to fix our software to the point that the Y2K problem passed us by with barely a blip. Maybe we’ll get through this all OK too, if it happens. And maybe the changes that do happen won’t all be bad ones.

Wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if America wasn’t Super-Global-Corporate-Military-King-Of-The-Walmart-Universe anymore, if we had to be just another nation in the world, getting by as best we could.

It’s just that if civilization as we know it does collapse over the next few years, well… that is so far from being something I could conceivably do a damn thing about, worrying about it isn’t gonna do much except make me miserable right now (as opposed to when civilization as we know it collapses).

Right?

UPDATE: One of the few days I go the whole day without checking BoingBoing, and it turns out they have a lengthy and several-times-updated article on Peak Oil, which contains a lot of different points of view on Peak Oil, its date, and its possible consequences.

A Wave of Hatred

“I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you… I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good… Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want pluralism.”

— Randall Terry, prominent anti-abortion activist, with whom the Republican Party ended up staunchly allied over the Terry Schiavo case.

Want some more?

“The greatest crisis we face is not child killing, it’s not the sodomites, it’s not land tax, it’s not the intrusion of the federal government into our lives, our families, as they crush our liberties. The greatest crisis we face tonight is a crisis of leadership. We are facing a crisis of righteous, courageous, physically oriented, male leadership. Male leadership!

“God established patriarchy when he established the world. God established a patriarchal world. If we’re going to have true reformation in America, it is because men once again, if I may use a worn out expression, have righteous testosterone flowing through their veins. They are not afraid of the contempt of their contemporaries. They are not here to get along. They are not even here to take issue. They are here to take over!”

From Orcinus via Puddingbowl blogmarks.

With that first quote, I expected it to continue, “strike me down with your weapon, and your journey to the Dark Side will be complete.”