Just Passing Through

Maybe it's just me, but my favorite fast food joints are starting to fail me. Last night it was Sonic. The second visit to two different stores in a week's time, and both times I got the same nasty aftertaste, the same heartburn. Each time I ordered completely different stuff. Don't tell my Uncle Virgil (who owns a bunch of Sonic stores), but I'm not stopping at Sonic anymore.

This comes at a time when my situation dictates I use fast food restaurants more than usual. The time factor is obvious, but I have an extra kicker: I can't eat any later than 7PM. If I'm out somewhere and miss my usual 5PM feeding, I have to grab what's available before 7PM or do without. With my metabolism and appetite, that's a miserable thought.

On top of that is the economic consideration. When you get paid low wages, your time is worth less. If you can do a certain thing yourself within an hour, and it costs more than an hour's pay to buy it done for you, it's best to do it yourself. If your time is worth more, then you can afford to pay for things you couldn't otherwise. It's cheaper to let someone serve you a meal, eat it, and be on your way in a half-hour when you get paid more than $10/hr.

I'll have to be more careful where I eat in the future when I'm on the run. Besides, I really very much prefer home-cooked food, even if I have to make it myself.

Now I have to read the entire ZoomText manual and get enough of it memorized to teach it to folks with less than perfect vision. This company is handing me clients already. These posts may be getting a lot shorter unless I learn something useful in my case work to reveal to my readers about computers, Win-ware and assisting the vision impaired (AKA "blind" and "can't see well").

Addenda: I had a pretty busy day with my first client. In my favor, he's been a good friend of mine for at least a year, and I've already been helping him with his computer and driving him around. I had to export the email from his previous machine. Outlook created a full 1GB backup just from his Inbox. Then I moved it over to his new machine. The reason they gave him a new one was his old Dell 2Ghz box was too wimpy to run ZoomText. At any rate, I also had to fix his printer, because it was not working properly.

Back when I was serving as a Military Policeman in Europe, my Provost Marshal told me he felt I thrived on being busy, running all over the place and getting stuff done. I'm praying that's something built into my character, not just a skill which I might have lost.

I'm not sure I know how to act. First, I got up late for me at 0530 hours. Then I made breakfast for my darling wife and I, something I do most days. I ran her to work, then my son and his wife to the train, then I went to "work" -- I drove a blind friend around on errands and appointments. Then I got some nice computer stuff donations and dropped them off at the house just in time to go fetch my wife back from her job. And so on....

I'm not used to this. Yes, I'm laughing as I write this, and those who know me will join in that laughter. Tomorrow I face something equivalent to an interview for a job. Thus, the end of an era, because I sense they'll hire me. For the past 15 years I've been technically unemployed. While I did spend a bit of time working as a substitute teacher, that was clearly not the place where I belonged, and I seldom worked a full week at any one time.

Actually, the only thing I'm sweating is keeping up my work out schedule, and finding another vehicle I can afford. This job prospect covers a whole region bigger than the State of Oklahoma. But especially I don't want to lose that daily run and thrice-weekly upper body workout. Arthritis is far worse when the joints get too stiff from disuse. God alone knows how this is all going to turn out. Pray with me.

You can't have it your way, except at Burger King. That's because BK's whole business model depends on doing that. Most businesses don't have to actually compete. People have gotten so used to being told what they want. I swear, sometimes I believe the branch of human behavioral science called "Marketing" has completely taken over the Western world, making the Borg look helpless by comparison. So we have entertainment and software businesses who actually own you, and you aren't actually the customer. You are the product, delivered to someone who pays a lot more than your piddling purchase price.

That's because the real business behind entertainment and software is marketing. The "product" they pretend to sell is, in reality, merely the means of delivery. It works for so long as people don't realize it. For example, how many people out there actually understand the Internet? Aside from charging a fee to get you through the gateway (we call them "ISPs"), there's just no way to make a lot of profit off the net with marketing. Whatever new trick you do to grab the eyeballs serves merely to condition folks to ignore you the next time. Never mind the gimmicks for blocking ads -- which is shamefully easy from a technology point of view -- the real arms race is the adaptability of the human mind.

The other edge of the sword is the inadaptibility of the Internet. That is, the Internet is a particular beast with DNA which, if altered in the least, becomes completely another thing. It no longer fits in its native environment, and it dies quickly. Every attempt to change the Net to make it more amenable to marketing dies because marketing's DNA won't mix. They can't interbreed. Yet they can't ignore it.

In elementary economics, we learn a key to profit in sales is limited access. If you can't limit access to a product or service, you can't charge for it. Unless you manage to lie to people on a grand scale and they don't know it's available for free. With entertainment, the problem is you cannot possibly limit access once the product is released in any form amenable to the Net. The nature of things electronic is they are inherently reproducible, or they can't be sold over the Net. When something becomes bits and bytes, it is clone-able without limit. All the technological measures in the world cannot possibly be anything other than ephemeral. What one expert can encode, another can decode. Any measure of success will immediately make it useless on the Net. It's the paradox of the Net that you must have it to profit, because that's where the consumers are, but you can't keep the product or service locked up.

People who truly belong to the Merchant Culture will never understand. Their minds are locked into a place which is permanently crippled from ever seeing beyond their little world. Sure, they own the whole thing, but they can't really control people, unless the people like what the control offers in exchange. Plenty of folks will grow up and decide they are tired of it. If there ever comes a substantial shift in the Net culture, where the clueless users suddenly begin to actually understand the Net, it's all over for the Merchant folks.

While it may seem the current crop of 20-something-and-under really do have a clue, that's a misconception. They have mere use; they don't actually understand it. I wonder what it would take to bridge that gap.

Give someone a bucket of meal and they can eat for quite some time. Slip a mealworm in that bucket, and they'll be shocked to find a bucket of worms before too long. It's repulsive when you find them. So it is when you find a bucket of information which seems to tell the truth, but buried in this bucket is a lie or two. All that other stuff sounds pretty good, and you keep reading. Like a scoop of meal from the bucket, you may not know when you swallowed a worm. So you may not know when you have swallowed that one important lie for which that organization was founded to promote. When you do discover it, the whole thing becomes repulsive.

As a disabled veteran, I am frequently led to numerous veterans organizations with their own websites. Recently I was steered to a couple which offered buckets of meal, but worms were hidden inside. VA Watchdog comes on like an advocacy site out to protect veterans from bad government behavior and other maltreatment. There are plenty of links and articles to stuff which pretty much plays up that purpose. Yet buried in one article was an editorial scolding people for daring to doubt the NRA when it promotes H.R. 2640. This bill has been excoriated as the "Veterans' Disarmament Act." According to the gun owners crowd, hidden in this proposed law is an provision which allows for confiscation of firearms from veterans who suffer from PTSD. The author of this editorial uses precious little facts, relying mostly on his scolding tone that anyone would dare to doubt the NRA.

The problem with this is the NRA most certainly does support gun control. That may not have been true in times past, but the organization has sold out to the police state. They have often defended gun laws in clear violation of the 2nd Amendment. If we're going to remove it, let's do it right: all at once, brave and honest. Otherwise, this stealthy piecemeal stuff needs to stop. Either it's legal or it's not. The amendment as written is pretty blunt about needing guns to keep government from stepping out of line. So Gun Owners of America (GOA) was born to counter the pro-government NRA. When the GOA experts review the proposed legislation, I'll trust their ability to dissect the legal mud better than someone who supports the NRA. Thus, VA Watchdog is set to watch the veterans on behalf of the police state.

Then there's Veterans for Common Sense. When I got to the page which trumpets how they are funded by the Ford Foundation, that was all I needed to know. Directly contrary to the intent and purpose of Henry Ford, this foundation funds all manner of New World Order initiatives designed to destroy this nation in order to bring on world government. As a philosophical libertarian (note the small "L"), I find there is pretty much no government as good as no government. Given the impossibility of that, "That government is best which governs least." The best any government can hope to do is stay out of the way. I don't trust any human institution which sets out to direct my affairs, because it cannot possibly do so in my best interests. Fallen humans don't operate that way (see Romans 13). I trust even less any human who seeks government office; anyone with a desire to control others is morally unfit to do so.

The only government which can even pretend to care about you is one which has to deal with you up close and personal on a daily basis. More layers and barriers mean an assurance you will be viewed as a hindrance to those with the magisterial duties. The US federal government is already sinfully large and evil. A bigger government over North America, or Trans-Atlantica, and certainly a world government would be relentlessly evil. The Ford Foundation carefully funds evil only, so the so-called Veterans for Common Sense are in favor of enslaving all mankind, or they wouldn't be funded by Ford.

I didn't sacrifice my flesh and become disabled to protect the police state which America has become. I did it because I love Jesus and His people, and because of Him, I care about people in general. There is nothing virtuous about calling for folks to fall in line and support an evil government just because the popular will requires they pay me for the rest of life to compensate for the loss of physical abilities. I have no doubt that government already has plans to end such payments at some future date because of some other supposed higher priority. I fully expect martial law, greater oppression, blood in the streets, and a host of other hideous things to consider. My highest duty to God Almighty includes calling these folks on the carpet, as it were, and calling them the liars they are.