Anonymous Comments Begone

In the comment section of most blogs, I notice a lot of 'Anonymous' signatures. Why? It seems to me anyone who believes in freedom of speech and the press, if they're going to comment on a blog, why don't they signature with their own blog name or, at least, think up anything besides 'Anonymous' so the blogger doesn't have to comment back like talking to a wall?

Well...Here's how I deduce the various types of commentators:

Type 1. Loaded with paranoia. This guy/gal feels like his/her comment might bring either the target blogger to the front door; the FBI or CIA; the Wrath of God or anything else that frightens him/her even more the he/she already is about the world in general.

Type 2. The no-self-esteemist. This commentator, even if he has a really good comment, thinks so little of his own opinion that they hide behind the word 'Anonymous'.

Type 3. The Grand Illusionist (or know-it-all). This bird is usually twenty-five, a college drop-out, has never traveled further than his city limits, has never read more than twenty pages of any book, forms his opinions from hob-nobbing with his buddies at the local tavern and, once set, his opinion couldn't be changed with a stick of dynamite. His comments usually make about as much sense as the war in Iraq.

Type 4. The Secret Profanist. This bird is probably a religious fanatic (or athiest), loaded with guilt and by spouting all the profanity he can in his comment, gets rid of his inner frustrations with his life in general...which isn't that much to start with.

Type 5. The literally handicapped. Another high-school (sometimes Junior high school) drop-out who constructs sentences that are ubnreadable and has no idea of the content of the blog he or she is commenting on.

Type 6. The office employee. A loafer who doesn't want to get fired for blogging or commenting on his employers time.

Type 7. The lonely guy/gal...Just wandering aimlessly around the blogdom hoping to find a friend.

Type 8. The new age linguist. This bird usually has a blog with a name like Radhot or Big Cool and takes great pride in creating sentences in his own language, like: 'Me G-friend ez tripped n as a turfic bod.' Murdering English is his favorite preoccupation (and sometimes his only occupation).

And then there is probably the worst 'Anonymous' which is the Spamer. They play the oldest sales game around which is playing the odds: Get a hundred people to look and you will find one who will buy, no matter what the product. Tabloids, used junk car salesman and land investment scams have abided by this philosophy for decades, if not history.

Thank God and Greyhounds we have the delete key.

The Big Easy and Katrina

Sunday, 6 am: Hurricane Katrina, forecast to be as bad or maybe worse than Camile in 1965, lies around three hundred miles south of Mobile Bay this morning. She's steadily built up into a catagory V hurricane, the strongest level on the meteorological scale. Packing winds above one-hundred-fifty miles an hour, she's still moving west-northwest and by this evening the Gulf Coast shoreline from northeast texas to the Florida panhandle will begin experiencing first of what may be the worst hurricane ever. The waters of the Gulf have heated up more than usual due to this summer's long hot spell and to say they've steamed up Katrina's wrath just might be an understatement. What's unusually worrisome (and frightening) is her path, as now projected, is on course for a direct hit on New Orleans-- the 'Big Easy' city which is built on land below sea level. What makes this particularly horrific is up to a hundred thousand people there have neither the ways or means to evacuate. So far, predictions are that 40,000 folks (or more) could be killed by the ferocity of Katrina which, if prognostications come true, will put the Big Easy under water except for the tallest of structures which could be blown apart by the catagory V winds.

The army core of engineers has been working on flood control in New Orleans since 1965. The city has a large canal system, a pumping system which can lower flooding at one inch per hour (which will be incapacitated quickly if the direct hit happens). They've also completed ten of eleven new brides supposedly engineered to stay in place no matter what happens.

I've always said that mother nature is a capricious bitch and she might just prove me right although, for the sake of those stranded in her patch, I certainly hope not.

I have no idea what will happen here (outside of Evergreen, Al.) but, as it looks now, we'll just experience a little flooding, a few storms and (actually, worst of all) power outages. I'll probably be pondering out on the porch in the morning watching the rain fall and glad that my house is not in a flood plain.

Good luck, Big Easy!

Can't Beat Mother Nature

This morning the boys in Hurricane central were busier than usual with the computermodels as Mother Nature began playing her usual game of chess by ignoring the computer model and moving Hurricane Katrina further westward into the Gulf of Mexico.

Meteorology, like medical science, is still an inexact science and Mother Nature pokes fun at both, sometimes with not-so-funny results. Man, with all his smartivity, just doesn't hold a candle to Mother Nature's various ploys at confusing, prempting and disrupting scientific ways and means. Even the computer, with all its speedy analytical capabilities, still can't beat Mother Nature's capricious ways.

Just another thing to ponder over this early morning.

Oil Price Nonsense

BP capital management chairman, Boone Pickens, appeared on MSNBC's 'Hardball' with Chris Matthews this evening. Boone lives in Texas (where else) and blamed the rising price of gas on not enough refinerys to keep up with demand. He said worldwide demand is eighty-five million barrels a day and is expected to hit eight-seven million in the fourth quarter of this year. He also stated the middle east has plenty of oil (well, duh) and "the Saudi's need the money." He also said barrel prices will probably never be below fifty dollars again and will probably hit seventy dollars in the fourth quarter. Asked by Matthews about how all the commuters in the states are going to afford driving to work, Boone non-chalantly answered, "I don't know.."

If all this is true, then why aren't the oil companies spending some of their enormous profits on building more refining plants? I think we all know the answer to that question.

Columbus, Havidad and real History

When Columbua discovered the Bahamas and established the first military fort in Hispanola (now Haiti in the Dominican Republic) he thought he'd discovered a chain of islands off the coast of China. The Arawak natives on Hispanola numbered anywhere from less than a million to nearly eight million (depending on the historian you read) but, by 1508--a mere thirteen years later-- the Arawak nation no longer existed. He'd managed to wipe out the whole population by shipping hundreds of Arawaks back to the Puritanical Europeans for slaves, slaughtering thousands more, and working the rest to death as farm labor. Ironically he named his fort 'Havidad', the Spanish word for Christmas. Some present.

Pondering the Media

Quote: 'Disney, AOL Time Warner, Viacom, News Corporation, Bertelsmann, General Electric, Sony, AT&T-Liberty Media, and Vivendi Universal. These giants own all the worlds major film studios, TV networks and music companies plus a large fraction of the most important cable channels, cable systems, magazines, major market TV stations, and book publishers. The largest, the recently merged AOL Time-Warner, has intergrated the leading Internet portal into the traditional media system. Another fifteen firms round out the system, meaning that two dozen firms control nearly the entirety of media experienced by most U.S. citizens.' End Quote.
This quote is from the book, Manufacturing Consent, The Political Economy of the Mass Media', by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky.

I don't know about you but this raises a multitude of troubling questions to me. All media is fueled by advertising dollars...glaringly apparent then is there is bias in the media and it is neither liberal or conservative; it is corporate. Like a computer virus, it has wormed its way throughout the political, economic and educational systems of our nation, subtly knawing away at our country's foundation. And now--with Internet Globalization a reality-- at the rest of the world nations, no matter what their form of government. Whatever happened to our own monopoly laws?

Foreboding thoughts for this early in the morning...think I'll go inside and eat an apple.