For an agency to be this clumsy they must not be meeting much resistance.

FEMA was busted red-handed in the act of creating fake news about themselves. Here’s the story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsxE_2sTGJs

Fake news is generated all the time. Companies pay to have news stories fabricated. This is significant because:

When your media channels are owned by those in control and the content is totally deceptive, your democracy is essentially over. That’s not to say that American society will disintegrate. It’ll just turn into another kind of government. History shows that this evolution is inevitable.

Hmm, let’s see… Which type of government are things starting to look like?:

I vote for this one:

Totalitarian state: This is a country with only one political party. People are forced to do what the government tells them and may also be prevented from leaving the country.

There must several ways for transition from democracy to happen. One way must be to silently take over all major media channels to passively subdue the majority of the people.

Things are fairly far down the crapper at this point. If many more people were to recognize this publicly things might improve a little. To help, go here: http://www.prwatch.org/nofakenews

A great way to store vim plugins, for example, is to have a project called project called plugin and check it out into your~/.vim directory. You could make .vim a project, but I like the flexibility and control of having smaller pieces when I get set up on a new host.

The latest plugin I’m enjoying, by the way, is NerdTree . I’m working on a video demonstrating it, as a tool for Rails development. This is part of a larger project which will go public in about two weeks. The goal of that project: To optimize the process of learning something well.

If this guy knows this, then it must be true:

Warning: This could be a bit of a ramble.

Something flew by in #caboose today that brought up the question again of why you blog. Of course the reason is because we’re all obsessed with ourselves. If we value each other based on how little we think about ourselves—wait, then that’s really thinking of ourselves, isn’t it?

Anyway, the better issue is “how you blog.” For me, blogging is an exercise in pealing back my skin—no, not in a CSI, turbo over-produced, techno-exploratory frame sequence, sort of way—but just being inside out. I think I like blogs that are written this way the best. I think I want politicians to write blogs this way too.

The problem is that if politicians blogged this way, it might just get everyone to do it and that could get really democratic. This flows into an idea about thinking for yourself. At first, it sounds like something you conquered long ago and don’t need to think about anymore. That’s you, in the trap of ‘just going with the flow.’ Think for yourself. It’s hard work but you should do it.

Think about now if I next said only one of the following two things:

Something about how we all need to open up, and peace, and love; while burning incense.

or

Something about how our democracy is clearly over because those in power are almost totally complacent. And by “those” I mean the entire majority of people in America. Our only hope is to snap out of it and all think about what’s going on here: You’re taking over the world. And by “you’re” I mean me.

See how they have different rings to them? Which one do you like better?

This just in from a good friend of mine, Trish Gray, about someone very close to me:

Jackson Alexander Orsini was born at 4:18am PDT Wed, October 10th. He weighed in at 7 pounds, 11 ounces.

Mom, baby and siblings are all doing fine. Rob, on the other hand, is exhausted. :-)

Congratulations to the Orsini family!

Trish

We managed to snap a shot of the little bugger, right before he snaked our wallets and fled down the hallway in a wheelchair. Here’s Jackson, back when he was 4 minutes old:

I’m also pleased to announce the Tuple Shop, Inc. employee of the month! This month’s award goes to none other then Jackson Alexander Orsini, Tuple Shop HR Director. Good work on the new-hire Jackson!