upon reflection

I start sentences with "dude" on a much more regular basis than I think I've ever really grasped before.

Nooooooot really sure what to do with this realization.

Except go to sleep.

I love having a Saturday every other day.

forty-nine it is

Thanks for the clutch milestone, Dad.

Hope the rest of your day is as crucial as mine already has been.

and then I woke up

I always have dreams I'm a superhero. Takes me the whole first two-thirds of the dream to get any good at flying/phasing through walls/going hulk and then right when I start doing cool things like diving through floors and flying my giant muscle-tacular self intangibly through walls,

I wake up.

I tried to phase through more handrails than I could count, today.

not mine

I just got this letter to the President firsthand in an email to me from the son of the author.

Er, hmm. So I suppose that's secondhand. Oh well. Close 'nough.

In any case, I think it's just the right balance of intelligence and biting witty metaphors to get real famous, and I'm happy to get it on its way by publishing it somewhere it can be rapidly indexed by Google.

Let's do this thing.

The following is what I received:

Mr. President:

I am aggrieved, and I petition you for redress.

There has been much public rumination this week over your decision to sign the "Economic Stimulus" bill into law. I too have given this considerable thought, and I have come to a stark realization that I have not yet heard as part of this public discussion. I believe you now need to appreciate a simple fact, if you have not already done so.

By signing this bill, you have become the greatest single slave trader in human history.

This is not a metaphor. This is not hyperbole. This is simple fact. Let me explain, briefly.

What is slave labor? This is simple. Slave labor is any labor performed, the benefit of which is taken from the laborer against his will with no benefit returned to the laborer.

What is money? Money is not a commodity. It has no intrinsic value. We cannot eat it. We cannot feed it to our children. Money is really a legally recognized token of labor performed. Understanding this true nature of money is critical to understanding the workings of micro-economic activity. The key to understanding the true nature of money is that the word "performed" is in the past tense. All money is representative of some labor performed in the past by someone, somewhere.

Can we enslave ourselves? Yes, certainly. We do it all the time. For example, any time we borrow money, with an agreement to pay it back in the future, what we are really agreeing to do is to work in the future and hand over the value of that labor to the creditor. You pay for my passage from Europe to the New World, and I agree to a term of indentured servitude. You pay for a house in which I will live, and I agree that for the next thirty years I will hand over to you a portion of the value of my labor. This sort of voluntary slavery takes place whenever one exchanges the value of labor ALREADY performed (money) for the value of labor YET TO BE performed.

When is government action tantamount to slave trading? Those in government can effect slave labor in two basic ways. The first is simple: take from me through taxation the value of my labor with no benefit returned to me. This is not to say that all taxation is slavery. Any action taken by government that benefits all will also, by mathematical definition, benefit the individual taxpayer as well. (Let's agree to defer for the moment a discussion of the limited, enumerated powers given to our own Federal government, and save that for another day.) However, when the action of government is to take money from me and give it to someone else in exchange for doing exactly nothing for me, I am made a slave to the recipient of that money, for my money (see above) is a token of my labor. The second way that government can enslave us is for government to borrow money. Even when the government uses that money for the benefit of all, by borrowing the money the government is forcing us into future indentured servitude in order to pay it back. Just as I can enslave myself by borrowing money on a promise of repayment, the government enslaves us whenever it does so.

What does all of this have to do with the Economic Stimulus bill? This bill is a "double whammy", enslaving me by the first method described above and enslaving both me and my children by the second method. (Yes, they are all well on the way to joining the ranks of the "payers" and not the "payees"). Among the myriad provisions of the bill that will not provide benefit to me are any and all "one time" tax rebates that I will not enjoy. A "one time" tax rebate check is not a tax cut at all—it is a check. Only a permanent drop in tax RATES is a tax cut, and I stand to receive neither from this bill. The "double whammy" is that all of the money for this bill will be borrowed by the Federal Government. Thus, every dime of repayment will come from my future labor, the future labor of my children, and the labor of all who will pay taxes in the future.

Thus, in signing this bill into law, you have signed many of your fellow citizens into greater and greater future servitude. The sheer magnitude of the action at $787,000,000,000 (not counting interest or that fact that some labor transferring provisions in the bill will live on) does indeed make you, in conjunction with a majority of the U.S. Congress, the greatest single slave trader in the history of human kind.

Some legacy.

Yours truly (more and more with each passing day),

Keith Matthews

victory

I just solved the 5x5x5.

For the first time since I got it in November.

Epic win.

assuming toward has one syllable

I have to wake up in four and a half hours and I have a nosebleed right now,

but today was a beautiful day.

and not just because I won a free double bypass in a bet.

delicious.

and to a lesser extent, nutritious.

being there

I look forward to each day more than usual, these days.

Even though I just eat ramen, cereal, and ham sandwiches.

We love Him who first loved us.

What an understatement.

(also, Charlie, I promise to start putting the links back in soon, I just have been too tired to google around for them the last few posts. they'll be back.)

truffles and powerade

I spent this Valentine's Day eating chocolates my grandmother gave me, drinking Powerade with my shirt off, watching Heroes.

For the entire day. It was glorious.

I didn't leave my room for more than half an hour or ever wear a shirt.

It could've been better, sure, but I'll take what I can get where I can get it.

The 13th wasn't bad either. Got a B on a test, and we all know that ain't me, but I also went to the circus with A∆X. which was a blast.

And today, I just watched more Heroes and ate Frosted Flakes: Gold edition and am hopefully about to watch some sweet movies.

Just waiting on a text.

nightmare

I need to externalize this.

I just had what might easily be the most disturbing, terrifying, and vivid nightmares of my life thus far. I honestly can probably attribute this in part to eating wings from Taco Mac with Death sauce all up on them right before I went to sleep.

But still. I haven't been this shook up in a while.

So here's how it went, roughly:

Kittle, England, in some sort of hipster bar/museum with a giant basement. Somehow the news knows it's coming.

"You're acting like you're Ken Lee and like I like hanging out with you."

Ha ha. Very funny, you. Way to take this seriously. I always loved that about you. How you could keep a smile in any situation.

"Just keep saying that. I'm the one that's going to keep you alive. You wan't to be very, very, VERY much downstairs. If people knew we had this space..."

I'm going to go grab you some food from upstairs. When I know it's coming soon. We all knew it was coming. Because I care about you. Because I don't want to believe this is really happening.

FOOM!

Watched the air in the street catch fire, and people out side being literally blown away. "Blown away" doesn't even begin to describe it. People being tossed around like packing peanuts might react to the sudden appearance of a supersonic jet. You might have seen some video of the blast effects of nuclear weapons, and I have too, but I've never even imagined anything so powerful... so devastating.

The ground just drops away as the top levels of the building start spinning off into the sky as the blast wave caught it. I watch you fall away from me for what might be the last time as the upstairs tumbles up, up, and away through the churning air. You might be safe, still down there in the basement. Down there where I kept you safe. Down there alone.

Down there where I left you at the worst moment.

I watch a man crushed into halves as our crumbling semblance of Helios' chariot comes splintering back to Earth, and all his wife can do is hold on to what's left of him for dear life and say "We're still here! We're still together!"

And she's right. They are still together, at this terrifying end.

But we aren't.

fo' reals

Lord, thank you for this beautiful conundrum I find myself in.

More than ever before.

(also, for Wikipedia)

a momentary latching

I never really noticed until just now the sheer number of buttons, switches, toggles, and knobs there are in my room, laying out before me as I gaze from my standard, couch-prone standby position.

Seriously. Hundreds. Maybe thousands.

I mean, I love to optimize my environment as much as any decent propeller head, but I live in a fifteen-by-ten-foot dorm room, for crying out loud.

I love my toys, I guess.

(and my obscure links, as well)

times ∞

"My motto: the blacker, the better."

"For metal or for coffee?"

"Both."

PLing for the win.

news fail

Per my New York Times "important stuff" email:

"Senate Democrats on Monday advanced the $827 economic
stimulus bill, clearing a major procedural hurdle by a razor
thin margin with the help of just three Republicans."

Eight-hundred and twenty-seven bucks, eh? That ought to divvy up nicely. Like butter scraped over too much bread, maybe.

I really shouldn't think typos are as funny as I do.

moderification

Sometimes, I think I'm going to make it. Other times, I don't.

The interesting thing is, nothing changes. Just me.

I just think things through more thoroughly than is perhaps appropriate, on occasion.

In other news, Revolver was awesome. Netflix is awesome. Real-life zombies are awesome. Living is pretty freakin' awesome.

Now if only I ever got my homework done both correctly and on time.

I just have more important things to be doing. That's all.

Also, I know I'm a nerd when I not only have more than 50% of my post characters going towards HTML instead of actual post, but I also notice that I've done this. For the win.

Also, another extraneous link showing the glory that is Google.

to did

I'd really like to learn to play the saxophone and the cello.

Also, today was the first time I can ever remember confronting someone on purpose about something they did that I thought was out of line.

I'm not entirely sure why this hasn't happened before. I think it has something to do with my generally laid-back nature.

Weird day.

griddle envy

Today, I was rambling on in the grocery store about how I was just buying a griddle pan because I wanted to have the ability to makes pancakes at will, and this woman off to my left just sortof chuckled to herself. Considering my vocal projection and general belligerence, I assumed this was because she heard my babblings.

It made me smile.