[X] My Assistant

classymal.

Call of duty! (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I think I'm going to refer to Buns as Butyl from now on. Two primary reasons are:

1) Organic Chemistry
2) It's a combination of all three names that Buns has used.

EDIT: Oh, never mind, those are the same reasons :3

This post has been edited by radixius: Sep 8 2011, 05:16

Why does my phone hate my face?

Phones hate a lot of faces. D:

I hate maths.

I love math!

__________________

I have been to late all of my classes so far.

My Computer Security class is going to whomp this semester.

It got broken up fairly quick, but he ended up bruised and I didn't so I would say I won by points lol.
Well im on my iphone at my sisters house visiting so im not gonna get into it right meow but I'll start with NORAD, the state of the art multi-billion dollar federal agency that can simultaneously track all flights in national airspace from a privately owned small cessna to a public transport 747 and whatever is bigger than that, and tell within seconds when a flight is even slightly off course, which monitors with constant radio checks and position reports any and all aircraft, this agency which has been in operation since Its official inception in the 1960s, which to that date had tracked and prevented even small planes from going off course and providing assistance to lost pilots, failed on that day to track four flights which not only had been blacked out on communications for over two fucking hours, but had steered off course from the beginning, with one flight that even did a fucking u turn. And NORADs response? We're sorry, the government told us we cant say anything about 9/11.

I'd be game for discussing this.

I can only really speculate, not knowing the facts, but I'd think there is way too much bureaucracy on the ground for NORAD to have mattered. Even when they knew the flights were off their path, what could they do? They couldn't just up and send fighter jets up there to intercept. Then they'd have to deal with the shitstorm that would follow shooting commercial jets out of the sky and letting them crash to the ground. There was no retaking control of the flights, not with the pilots dead and apparently no air marshals on board.

Also, if you listen to some of the tapes from the morning, it's fairly evident that a lot of people working in air traffic control and so on are either borderline retarded or can't remember their coffee in the morning. They got a distress call from the first plane and didn't do shit besides talk to her and pass the info around to other agencies.

If NORAD had the information first that the flights had gone rogue, I doubt anyone important gave enough of a shit to listen before it was too late.

I just don't care anymore. I think it's time to move on it's been 10 years, it's over. Just like I think it's retarded we still celebrate Pearl Harbor.... Why? Most of the people who were even alive during that war are dead or they were children when it was going on. It doesn't matter anymore. It'd be like if we still celebrated the mass deaths that happened during battles at the civil war, or the American revolution. It's dumb people are dead no amount of celebrating it will bring them back. Lets all just move on.

I'm not sure "celebrating" is the right word, unless it's Pearl Harbor and you're Japanese...

The point, I guess, is that people want to honor and remember people who died tragically like that. It doesn't actually make sense, but nothing emotional ever makes sense anyway. This is how people deal with grief of loss, and the knowledge of their own mortality, so I just let them have it.

This post has been edited by FourThirteen: Sep 8 2011, 06:31

If NORAD had the information first that the flights had gone rogue, I doubt anyone important gave enough of a shit to listen before it was too late.

Like you, I don't have the facts either. Part of the reason why both you and I don't have the facts is because these questions were actually asked, but NORAD wasn't allowed to answer. My little rant about NORAD may have come off as me saying it was their fault, but I was actually alluding to the fact NORAD DID know what was going but nothing was done about it. They passed on the information to the right people and followed protocol, yet somewhere higher than them it was all dismissed.

You know whats dumb about the whole Pearl Harbor thing? When I lived in Hawaii I visited the memorial three times, and each and every single time the overwhelming majority of people paying their respects were Japanese. I went up to the names and said to my friend, in a low voice, "I feel sorry for those bastards, many died in their sleep and the rest were cut down by bombs and strafing runs." Next to me was a really old Japanese couple; the old man fell to his knees and started to cry. I looked confused at the wife and she told me in very broken English that her husband had been one of the pilots flying over Pearl Harbor. I didn't ask for clarification but given her dialect I could only assume he was a Japanese pilot during the war. Each time I visited the memorial it was a challenge to find any one white American, it was always the Japanese paying their respects, and yet I hear dumb shit today from ignorant Americans like 'the nukes were payback for Pearl Harbor' or one especially infuriating one that I heard recently 'the tsunami was gods way of paying Japan back for Pearl Harbor'. I hate Americans who only drag the honor of the fallen through the mud in order to chant a hypocritical and hateful rhetoric that is instilled out of pure ignorance to the matters of the world. Just like cappy said about the people who think waving an American flag once a year on September 11, or putting 'God Bless America' or 'Proud to be an American' stickers on their car makes them patriots. Instead of learning to understand and forgive we only spread hatred and violence. The middle-east did not attack us, it was a few radicals, not a whole nation, and yet we invade two countries and cause an insane amount of damage to their infrastructure, as well as kill off a large amount of their population. I can't speak for Afghanistan because I was never there, but I have seen large cities decimated to rubble and have walked the broken streets of Iraq, being seen as a destroyer of lives even though it wasn't me who flew overhead and pressed a button to release the bombs, I simply pull a trigger. And it wasn't the pilot's fault either, he was carrying out his mission. Through the successive chain of command we are able to at least legally be rid of the blame, 'we were just following orders', but in the deepest recesses of our minds, when memories come back that we wish we didn't have, we still had to see the destruction first hand and remember the eyes of those people as they looked at us with sheer horror. I am just one disgruntled soul and I will never be able to see the whole picture, but I do know that this country's overwhelming reliance on military strength makes US the real terrorists. This is not the way to true peace.

This place is almost uncomfortably deep sometimes, isn't it?

I get what you're saying, and support it fully. I despise the "us vs. them" mentality in absolutely any setting. It's narrow-minded and only generates more hate.

Relating to that, I'm thinking now that I'd like to write a zombie story/movie/whatever where the zombies aren't all alike. Imagine, being pinned down by a horde of flesh-eaters, when a few of them inexplicably help the survivors escape. Could be compelling, no?

The world isn't black and white, or even shades of gray. There's a whole fucking rainbow of colors out there, and no two people are the exact same hue. The sooner this paradigm takes hold, the sooner true peace can come.

Like you, I don't have the facts either. Part of the reason why both you and I don't have the facts is because these questions were actually asked, but NORAD wasn't allowed to answer. My little rant about NORAD may have come off as me saying it was their fault, but I was actually alluding to the fact NORAD DID know what was going but nothing was done about it. They passed on the information to the right people and followed protocol, yet somewhere higher than them it was all dismissed.

Right. It's not necessarily that it was dismissed at a higher level, though. The web of bureaucracy means if one person snoozes on the job, everyone fails. I don't think it was intentional; it was a little mistake a few people made that turned into a massive fuck-up.

This post has been edited by FourThirteen: Sep 8 2011, 06:38

This place is almost uncomfortably deep sometimes, isn't it?

I get what you're saying, and support it fully. I despise the "us vs. them" mentality in absolutely any setting. It's narrow-minded and only generates more hate.

Relating to that, I'm thinking now that I'd like to write a zombie story/movie/whatever where the zombies aren't all alike. Imagine, being pinned down by a horde of flesh-eaters, when a few of them inexplicably help the survivors escape. Could be compelling, no?

The world isn't black and white, or even shades of gray. There's a whole fucking rainbow of colors out there, and no two people are the exact same hue. The sooner this paradigm takes hold, the sooner true peace can come.
Right. It's not necessarily that it was dismissed at a higher level, though. The web of bureaucracy means if one person snoozes on the job, everyone fails. I don't think it was intentional; it was a little mistake a few people made that turned into a massive fuck-up.

A zombie fic where zombies have actual personalities? The only attempt at that which I've seen was in George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, his substandard (sadly (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/sad.gif)) attempt at creating a modern zombie movie. Remember how the zombies were led by the black dude? I think it was mentioned somewhere he had been a janitor. Well he had a personality of sorts, he was different enough to stand out and become the leader of the zombies, he even guided his entire flock towards the city of humans. Still, nothing crazy like you're suggesting has been done, it would be interesting.

I wish I could be more positive like you and believe that it was all just a long series of small fuck ups that turned into a national disaster, but I'm a lot less trusting of people in power and pretty cynical when it comes to government. I do completely agree though that the many layers of bureaucracy in anything, especially government, makes getting shit done almost impossible. Bureaucracy will be the death of us.

I think there was a scene in one movie where a zombie was a vegetarian and didn't eat the people. There's so many zombie movies though, not sure at all what it was.

A zombie fic where zombies have actual personalities? The only attempt at that which I've seen was in George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, his substandard (sadly (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/sad.gif)) attempt at creating a modern zombie movie. Remember how the zombies were led by the black dude? I think it was mentioned somewhere he had been a janitor. Well he had a personality of sorts, he was different enough to stand out and become the leader of the zombies, he even guided his entire flock towards the city of humans. Still, nothing crazy like you're suggesting has been done, it would be interesting.

I wish I could be more positive like you and believe that it was all just a long series of small fuck ups that turned into a national disaster, but I'm a lot less trusting of people in power and pretty cynical when it comes to government. I do completely agree though that the many layers of bureaucracy in anything, especially government, makes getting shit done almost impossible. Bureaucracy will be the death of us.

I remember seeing that movie. It was a cool dynamic, but still held the us vs. them mentality, which is the hallmark of zombie fiction anyway. That's why I'm eager to see the mold broken.

I understand what you're saying there about people in power. It's healthy to be skeptical of what our leaders tell us. Believe me, I don't have any faith in government at all. I know there are awful people there, but the stupid ones seem to far outnumber the ones who are actually evil, at least from what I see. There seems to be too much widespread ineptitude for anything truly diabolical to happen. It's different in foreign countries where one corrupt guy can more or less control his whole country through the military. In the US and other democratic regions, power is spread kind of thin. Even the President has red tape to get through before he can do much of anything.

I think there was a scene in one movie where a zombie was a vegetarian and didn't eat the people. There's so many zombie movies though, not sure at all what it was.

Sounds like a comedy. I can dig that, but I'd rather approach it seriously.

Attempting to split antidepressant pills with a knife is highly frustrating.

Would you say that it becomes... depressingly frustrating?

Pretty much. Which is quite paradoxical.

This post has been edited by Mika Kurogane: Sep 8 2011, 21:29

Obama sucks.

Waking up at 3PM sucks.

Obama sucks.

Oh, every politician sucks.

They make pill-cutters for that purpose you know. Ask at a drug store or something.

Obama sucks.

At public speaking? Not at all.

At running a government getting dems and repubs to quit having bitch-fits over everything the other party does? Yeah, kinda.

This post has been edited by FourThirteen: Sep 9 2011, 05:29

They make pill-cutters for that purpose you know. Ask at a drug store or something.

I guess asking wouldn't hurt. Thanks for the idea, FourThirteen.

Massive power outage in Southern California and other areas yesterday starting around 4 PM. I was in the middle of making a post and everything went off. At first I thought it was due to people overloading the grid from air conditioners due to the heatwave and I expected the power to come back on but it was out for a long time and it was really widespread and due to that one person in Arizona who fucked up something at the power plant there, as you might've heard on the news.

When night fell, it was pitch black and hot as hell. Thank goodness I had some flashlights and candles. I listened to the radio for information and after a while I was lying in bed with a flashlight and got so bored, I started making shadow puppets on the wall. Lolz. Low tech entertainment.

I woke up a little after 1 AM and I noticed a street light was on so I turned all my power strips back on and watched some TV. Fuck, what little food I had in the fridge is now ruined. Seriously, I don't know how people got along in the olden days with no electricity. I'll have to admit it was kind of relaxing not being online or having the TV on, but I'm glad everything's back up and running.

Fuck, what little food I had in the fridge is now ruined.

As long as you didn't leave the door open, it should be fine. You know, since the door keeps the cold inside.