I don’t know about where you live, but here in my neck of the woods, there’s been rain, rain, and rain. And the forecast calls for a rainy day today, followed by showers over the weekend. Maybe it’ll stop on Monday. Maybe. One thigns for sure, all this rain has the grass nice and green. Guess I’d better get the mower on the tractor this weekend (hopefully there’ll be a gap between showers). I also need to fill in the massive number of holes and trenches in the lawn that have appeared courtesy of the dogs. Looks like they have a strip-mining operation going on, and I have no idea how to get them to stop, short of only allowing them to go outside if accompanied by a chaperone (which would pretty much have to be me, and I’m too lazy to do that).

I also need to play with the new car code reader that was finally delivered yesterday. I already have a code reader, but this new one has a color display and besides reading/clearing codes, will show live data from the engine sensors (it will even graph it!) and will store like 8 hours or something so you can hook it up, go for a ride, and then look at what happened. Plus you can read the freeze-frame data so you can read what was going on at the time a fault code was thrown. Did I really need this? Oh, probably not. But it was only $43 with free shipping (which is about half an hour’s worth – or less – of labor at a garage), and I’ve always wanted to see the engine coolant temp and rpm and percent fuel trim….

Oh, it’s gonna be great.

So have you heard about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty that’s in the works? It’s an agreement that’s being worked out in secrecy between the US, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam and all the “advisers” (aka, corporate reps and industry lobbyists) involved in the negotiations have been sworn to secrecy, so they only thing us regular folks (who will suffer the consequences of this treaty) know about it comes from leaks and rumors. But what’s been leaked and rumored doesn’t sound so good.

For instance, , you know how you’ve heard about other countries that have access to affordable medicine? Yeah, this should get rid of that.


“[The TPP will] transform countries’ laws on patents and medical test data, and include attacks on government medicine formularies. [It] would strengthen, lengthen and broaden pharmaceutical monopolies on cancer, heart disease and HIV/AIDS drugs, among others, in the Asia-Pacific region.”

Last November WikiLeaks released a chapter of the proposed agreement that deals with patents, copyrights, trademarks, industrial design and intellectual property.


“If instituted, the TPP’s IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs.”

You can read the full leaked chapter here.

Last Sunday, at a joint presser with the Malaysian PM, Preznit Obama derided critics of the TPP as uninformed conspiracy nuts, citing critics’ “…lack of knowledge of what is going on in the negotiations.”

Yeah, because you’re keeping it a fucking secret until the corporations are done writing it and pay off the governments involved to ratify the goddamn thing.

But what’s the use of worrying about it? Hopefully our corporate overlords will be benevolent.

Oh, and a note to Home Depot, Lowes, Tiger Direct, NewEgg, et al….

If you call every other fucking Friday “Black Friday,” the term “Black Friday” really loses any significance it might once have had. Unless you’re giving shit away, it’s just plain Friday.