Help me, I live in a rogue state (revisited)

The following is an essay I wrote 14 years ago during George W. Bush’s tenure as POTUS as he was prepping the country to go to war in Iraq to find non-existent WMD’s. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the pendulum swings in American politics and, in particular, what might happen after Donald Trump is… Continue reading Help me, I live in a rogue state (revisited)

What we can learn from Canada and Vash the Stampede

This is how you make your country great: #BienvenueAuCanada pic.twitter.com/rUhrIXiFcR — Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) January 28, 2017 For that matter, replace “country” with any word that represents a community. Because the way you make any kind of community better is with love, not hate. Fighting hate with hate only creates more hate. The way you… Continue reading What we can learn from Canada and Vash the Stampede

Tomorrow is Solstice — during which we won’t be using electricity (at least as much as possible) — and then we’re driving up to Washington. Before I go offline for the next couple days, I wanted to take a minute to acknowledge a historic event that happened today in Utah.

A Federal Supreme Court Judge ruled that a Utah ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional — that it violated the basic human rights granted in the Constitution of the United States.

This is effing huge. Not just because Utah is a big fat red state but because it’s establishing the fact…well…we won. Everybody is — as they should be — fucking equal. And should be treated with equal respect and given equal rights. Sure, it takes a quorum of assholes to write up a law stating that (marriage == man + woman) for that to get overruled in a Federal court but it doesn’t matter. Right now, there are people who are in love and have been waiting for this for years, lining up to finally — finally — have that recognized. In Utah.

I may not be a native Utahn. And I hate much of the politics of this state. But dammit if this doesn’t make me proud to live here.

From HuffPo: Utah Gay Marriage Ban Struck Down As Unconstitutional
From Q Salt Lake: Breaking: Utah’s Amendment 3 unconstitutional

Private Internet Access, because the Internet is dirty

I was going to title this post “Private Internet Access: It’s like a condom for the internet” but the resulting image was a bit too graphic even for me. I must be getting old. A few months ago, I started using BTGuard. It’s a proxy server that can be used for BitTorrent to route your… Continue reading Private Internet Access, because the Internet is dirty