UnOrthodox Observer

Finally they woke up at the nation and posted an article about that misleading ad.

My original article about this subject. Read it and understand the issue. Then, call your representative. This is a very important issue for all of us to just ignore.

Also a good comment posted by Gray62 at the nation.

… What ads do you want to run next? Pro-Life? Anti-Immigration? Privatise Social Security? If you really need the money that desperately, at least run a link to Savetheinternet.org directly above or below that add! Running a story named “Don’t Click on This Ad” once simply isn’t good enough. Check Eden’s comment, he almost got fooled by that telco spin. Im sure there are many more readers, not familiar with the issue, who will fall for that trick and spread that propaganda.

This has been long due.. Finally after seeing the poll numbers drop and having left with no choice, he has decided to come forward and to make clear where he stands. This is something that many of us have known already, but it was obvious that he is playing the political game until now in order to impress the conservative base. Well, finally there comes a moment, when there is no other alternative and there is no turning back. The president and his speech writers rose up to the ocassion and challenge and delivered a phenomenal speech. I appluad the president for this..

America needs to conduct this debate on immigration in a reasoned and respectful tone. Feelings run deep on this issue, and as we work it out, all of us need to keep some things in mind. We cannot build a unified country by inciting people to anger, or playing on anyone’s fears, or exploiting the issue of immigration for political gain. We must always remember that real lives will be affected by our debates and decisions, and that every human being has dignity and value no matter what their citizenship papers say.

No matter what their citizenship papers say, the basis of compassionate conservatism is to show compassion. Unfortunately the extreme right of the party tends to forget this. Well, I shouoldn’t say this, because they never had compassion to begin with. You cannot preach compassion to the extreme right. Underneath that hypocrisy, they prefer an all white racist society.

The president finished the speech in style..

Our new immigrants are just what they’ve always been — people willing to risk everything for the dream of freedom. And America remains what she has always been: the great hope on the horizon, an open door to the future, a blessed and promised land. We honor the heritage of all who come here, no matter where they come from, because we trust in our country’s genius for making us all Americans — one nation under God.

The genius of America! - That is the reason America is the super power of the world and the number one country in the face of the planet.

“The genius of America has always been attracting geniuses from all over the world!”

Not only geniuses but also the hard-working, the strong, the willful, and the mighty bunch who shape our nation and keep it number one.

Read more on this subject at The Nation

Finally there is an editoral article on The Nation regarding immigration reform bill

This has been long due. Many independent and progressive as well as, the few reasonable conservative voices need to speak out. The fourth estate need to do its job and fullfil its responsibility for the vulnerable common man. Simple politics cannot resolve the underlying problem, which affects all of us in one way or another.
Read more on the Immigration by Unorthodox Observer

Immigrants and Us by the editors at The Nation

Interesting article on The Nation!

Read the full article here : Article by Max Blumenthal

There are lot of interesting facts even though some of them are opinions, this shows how many people, who happened to be on the far right and who hate, races other than their own white group, like to associate themselves with the Republician party. If this trend continues, couple of decades from now, the middle fiscal conservatives eventually will tend to depart and move towards the democratic party. Is this what the senior leaders of that party want, is something that remains to be seen in the months and years to come.

Thats right, Don’t be deceived.

At&T, Verizon and Comcast are trying to act like your big uncle and want to show that they care. They are telling you to support and sign a petition and encourage you to stop congress intervention and even have a web site promoting this idea. This is pure deception. They present this to you as if they are on the consumer’s side and trying to stop congress or other govermental agency’s intervention. But the reality is that they are pumping millions of dollars in washington lobbying and want the congress not to ban certain illegal activities that they plan to engage on.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has introduced legislation that would ban Internet service providers from setting up special so-called “fast-lane” premium priced services or from blocking, degrading, altering, modifying, or changing the Internet traffic they handle.

The big, bad telephone and broadband providers does not like this bill. They want this stopped. So they created seperate website and act as if they are on the consumer’s side. These companies are actually deceiving the common man. What’s scary is that its very hard for the common man to see their hidden agenda.

They claim they are offering virtual pipes directly to consumers over their broadband connections that would allow content companies (any internet company / site like google, yahoo, microsoft etc), to make sure users at home have a good experience accessing their content. Bullshit.

One verizon executive said, “The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers..”

More Bull..

No one is riding. ALL comsumers already pay for the service.
You guys are not providing free broadband internet to all the homes, Are you?
Now you want to charge both sides?
What’s next? Charge Google and Microsoft now. Then start charging webhosting companies and eventually all website owners?? As a website owner, you have to pay these greedy bunch, so that your site sends data out. Plus as a consumer, pay again, to see the content on your browser?

The Greed and Malicious intent of the companies like Verizon and At&T need to be exposed.
Here is some reality.

They want a piece of the pie. They want the money Google and Microsoft and Yahoo is making. They not only want to charge extra to those who don’t want to have their Internet traffic caught in the slow lane, but if their efforts don’t succeed they want to settle with these companies for x dollars. How about inventing something and providing some good services to the consumer and making those dollars in a honest and dignified way??

They want to be able to create seperate lanes for data traffic and start charging seperate prices. Perhaps eventually block things that they dont like. In other words monopolize everything. Or they may use that fast lane for products they create and own. Imagine a search engine provided by verizon or comcast returning faster results (containing products they promote) and their webpages loading fast. As opposed to Google or yahoo, where you find true indexed search results of all the pages from across the web.

Above all imagine, as a small website owner, or a blog writer, your site being put on a “slow lane”, by these telephone companies as opposed to big corporate sites. How in the world a small startup can pay premium prices and grow?? If this were the case, Google would have never exploded into such a big giant. Neither Microsoft, nor Yahoo, Vonage, Skype and hundreds of others.

These big bad guys say the competition will keep them on track and prevent abuses. Heehee. Where is the competition? Folks its just Verizon, At&T(now acquiring Bell South), Comcast and few others. Where one is predominant, the others are not in the picture. Where is the competition??

Luckily for the common man, big comapnies like Google, Microsoft and ebay are on our side along with few members of the congress who want to stop the planned atrocity by these telephone giants.

Be aware of the commercials and websites that these telephone and broadband providers are promoting these days. You as a consumer must be on side with innovation and innovators like Google and microsoft (even though they themselves may be “that” big bad corporation on other issues), in order for the internet to stay neutral.

Lets hope the Net remains neutral and not end up to be controlled by the hands of telephone giants. For all aspiring young entrepreneurs and visionaries, this is a crucial thing to succeed.

I am updating this post with a link to The Nation’s article..

Well everyone pretty much knows about that. But how many of you has known this fact 5 years ago. I have been following the Finn’s career since 2000 and took a close look at him on 2001 season and found lot of interesting facts since then.

Before he entered the limelight and before others have discovered him, if you just take that one season for example, and analyze, you will see what I am talking about. He has shown great talent just with his sauber-petronas back then and may other teams who had the opportunity to sign him missed out and they probably are regretting now.

Back in the 2001 season, whenever he does not retire with hydraulics or steering or some type of mechanical failure, he has performed extremely well. I choose to use the word “extremely” because, you have to consider the fact that he was driving a sauber in 2001 and the reliability, performance and compititiveness of that car is not even comparable to the then Mclaren and Ferrari or the williams.
He has consistently finished in the rankings and several times in the top 5. This is a remarkable feat given the conditions of that sauber team and the car. He was 4th in canada and 4th in Austria, 8th in Spain and few 7th finishes in various grand prix races that season.

I think there must have been a friendship link (due to ethnic & national background), with Mika that season, who was winning quite a few races and posing almost a threat to Michael. And partly due to that link and influence, after Mika retired, he paved way to get Kimi inside the Mclaren and they were smart to see the potential and grab him. Another factor is Mclaren boss has always had a soft corner for finns. He thinks the cold and analytic attitude and approach to racing has more chances of winning the championship than more emotional ones. He even mentioned last year, along with several other bosses, that he prefer Kimi over Alanso, when posed with that “Kimi or Alanso” question last year by Speed channel reporters.

But unfortunately it looks like Kimi wont stay for long enough with the Mclaren team and it is possible he might end up with Michael in a Ferrari. Even though Mclaren says that he is welcome to stay, bringing in Alanso and not providing him with a reliable car for many races leaves no option for the Finn, but to decide against staying.

Word on the street is, someone at Mercedes is not too happy with Kimi and wanted to bring in Alanso from the begining and is looking to pair him with Montoya, because Mercedes has big plans for the spanish and South-American markets. Not to mention the growing affluent latino population in the United States. Well, this need to be analysed in depth on another article!

He has the potential to be the next Michael, but only time will tell how far he can utilize his talents and how far his luck will carry him and place him on a winning and reliable car.

Run - screamed some cops. Run Lola Run! Don’t stop run for your life! Lets all, not only panic, but push the panic button so hard, that it scares the shit out of everyone.

A small Cessna two-seater came around 3 miles from the white house because of some clueless pilot (Occasionally you get lost when you drive don’t you?) and there you go. The federal government and the authorities need to make sure that we need to learn form this and if we do we will be more secure and strong, rather than ending up in a clusterfuck situation by over-reacting to it.

The problem lies in the intellect of the people working for the government. With the exception of some specific positions in the intelligence agencies and NASA, most government workers have low IQ and are sometimes plain stupid and dumb. Think about the ratio of bright guys out of Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, UCal Berkley, Carnige Mellon, UPenn.. etc going on with their own business or working in the private sector versus landing on an government job. (This is just a sample, not the mention the thousands of others from several universities/colleges or some geniuses from the garages)

Who is the brain surgeon that came up with the color codes for the homeland security department? We need to have a system in place that is sending more meaningful and informative messages to the public, so that the public will be able to secure themselves and stay calm, rather than simply creating scare among the public for the benefit of politics.(Both Democrats and Republicans). This is probably the most ridiculed thing that came out of washington. How do you get the respect from the people then? Always, almost always, intelligence gets respected. Respect has to be earned. Simple and plain. The government need to attract more bright talent and retain them. Its a challenge even for top companies in the corporate world. The government needs to recognize this first. Then it needs to work on its image. We need to feel proud to be a worker there. They need to raise the bar and ensure that happens. Only then, with some bright talent, you can start talking about reforms and security and witness well-executed plans that actually benefit the general public. The taxpayers! The actual employer of those workers!

With top talent we can not only build the technology that can deter those occasional lost pilots to a safe zone, but also implement the top-notch management principles, which would provide effective risk management and efficient implementation of theories!

Until then, Run Lola Run! And enjoy the techno music!

Where are we going with these seat belts on all the school buses? Where do we draw the limit? Is it just me or someone else also thinks this is a little bit too much.

Kids need to be taught discipline for their own good. In those days when you grow up your parents taught you, not to cross the road suddenly. Stop, look to your left, then right, and make sure there are no zooming cars, before you make a move. They kept stammering this in your brain until you get it. These days, I see near several traffic lights, a special attendant in her bright orange or yellow outfit stopping the traffic and allowing teenagers (I mean they are practically adults in every respect, so they claim when they have drug themselves or sleep around or for many other things), to cross the road. Talk about Assistance!

Now, its not just that all these are enough, now some probably drugged or drunk driver got behind the wheel of a school bus and here you go, everyone is screaming on top of their lungs, we got to have seat belts on the school bus. Come on, what about monitoring and making sure no one is driving a school bus while intoxicated?

Some may claim that we already have a system in place, but trust me that system is dysfunctional. Do you know how many of these school bus drivers get their friends sample for the urine test? We simply turn a blind eye and act as if nothing has happened. What about ethics? Teach some responsibility for those drivers and dismiss all the suspected ones, instead of all this bullshit.

What may follow is, spending hours and hours of time debating and re-writing and proposing a bill, and get it passed in congress and pass it into a law, with photo-ops for the president (whoever it is), and awarding the contract to some company that has strings to someone in Washington to install seat belts in all the buses. This does not just stop there. What would it take to make sure the kids are actually wearing those seat belts? Then someone will come with the wonderful idea of appointing an aid for every school bus to make sure that the kids are wearing them, and this need to be ensured after every stop, before the bus can move, leaving the ignition on and consuming the valuable gasoline, of not only the bus but also of all the other vehicles patiently waiting behind.

Well, all this may sound like someone’s frustration being poured in a blog, but believe me, it simply is not the case. The reality remains this way and some can foresee this. What about some simple discipline? Just take some responsibility as a parent and teach. The government and teachers cannot do everything for your kid.

Until then, lets all drive carefully.