Atomictumor

Ever since reading Thomas Cahill’s book, How The Irish Saved Civilization, I’ve been interested in ancient Irish civilization, especially the Christian influence there. It is fascinating to me because the culture developed so richly and off in the hinterlands of the decayed Roman Empire. Eventually Christian Rome brought the Celtic church in line with itself, but not before Irish Christians sent missionaries through out the British Isles and much of Northern Europe.

A man digging peat in an Irish bog uncovered a psalter sometime this month. Evidently he was out using his bulldozer and saw the little brown manuscript unearth. He had the sense to cover it back up with moist dirt and take it to the authorities. The bbc reports on it here.

It is ironic that a book written near the end of one empire should resurface at the seeming end of another.

A guy in Philadelphia was recently arrested for taking a picture of police action outside his house with a cellphone.

Despite there being any actual, real laws against this action.

Think this stuff happens in the big cities?  You should check in with Joe Powell, who had a lot of info about the police action in Morristown during a recent demonstration there, resulting in the apparently unwarrented tasering of a retired man with a flag.

All my life, I’ve heard people crying ‘1984!’ for various things like that, and I didn’t pay much attention.  When the Patriot Act was ramrodded through, and the .gov was talking about mailmen and meter readers snooping around your house getting info just in case you’re a turrist, I was disconcerted.

We now have news that border agents are legally able to fire up your laptop and snoop around on it.  We also have news of the DOJ ammending legislation originally intended to allow wiretapping on cellphones (bit of an oxymoron, huh?) to impose upon network traffic, by sending all traffic to the govenment to inspect for VoIP packets.

Sounds scary to me.  If I were much of a tin-foil hat person, I’d start wondering if this is how a regime would become oppressive.  I mean, if I were doing it, I’d start by making sure I stay in office.  This can be done by requiring states to upgrade voting to electronic machines.  We’d contract with a biased company and make sure that voting machines use proprietary software that is not up to public inspection.  Thats already happened, as we see in this coming local election.
After that we’d suppress objection.  Obviously, communications will have to be monitored, and candid photos of police in action would be taboo.  Get people used to being monitored, and make it a part of their lives, so that when revelations sneak through, like, say, massive unwarrented government phone tapping, it won’t make much of a splash.

After that… well, just wait and see!

A woman in my class came in distressed the other day.  She claimed that her car had been stolen from her apartment’s parking lot.
Yesterday she came into class and said that she’d received a call from the cops.  Turns out it had been reposessed, not stolen.
Here’s where it gets scammy.  The dealership in question (Smoky Mountain Car Supercenter) had received her car payment only one day late when they sent out their repo guy.  When my classmate called them to ask why they towed the car, the salesman said that he’d mispelled her name on the contract and she hadn’t noticed, so they had voided it.  Hmm.
Luckily, she’d written down the VIN for the car before it got towed.  Upon looking it up, she found out that the car had four owners in this year alone.  It looks like they get their downpayment, maybe a second payment, void the contract and repo the car and start the whole process over again.
Our readers are too smart to fall for something like this, but I know you all know some suckers.  Spread the word and make sure no one gets shafted again.

OK, we all know that Food City has run Bi-Lo out of town, and is taking over their store in Manhattan Place in much the same way that insects will inject their eggs into the living bodies of other insects for them to grow in a nutritious environment. Now, I was wondering what Food City will be doing with three stores, so I figured my beloved east end would lose its store (along with damn near every other business open out here), but I learned differently after talking to a Food City spokesman (as he was putting meat out).

Turns out, Food City is closing both stores in favor of the Bi-Lo. Stay with me now. Food City has a smallish east end store, on the turnpike, and a biggish downtownish store on S. Illinois, and now the Bi-Lo. The Bi-Lo, evidently, has less square footage than the smaller east end store.

So why the hell are they doing it? Not only is the Bi-Lo smaller, its at a lousy location, with a parking lot designed by a drunk monkey that has lousy entrances and exits. The beer selection (currently as good as Krogers) will no doubt suffer with the space constraints, forcing me to either shop at Kroger, which I really don’t want to have to do, or drive way the hell out to Ingles, which I don’t want to have to do either. Grr.�

All of this local stuff has kept me away from talking about the crushing blows to consumerism that the big telco’s are getting ready to rain down on people like me, and some things have gone unTumored for a while.

I mentioned the anticipated merger of Bellsouth and AT&T a few months ago, and there hasn’t been much to say. They’ve been cutting through the red tape of an FCC that would just love to close the book on 20 years of regulating monopolies in the telecom industry (after all, if the government can be a monopoly, why can’t big business), and being pretty successful. First of all, last week Bellsouth and AT&T shareholders voted overwhelmingly to approve the merger (despite the ACLU, being a shareholder in Bellsouth, wanting feds to investigate those pesky reports that Bellsouth was giving the .gov phone records without subpoenas).

Our next bit of news comes from Will Street, where Bellsouth and AT&T both posted good looking second quarter profits. Woot.

Finally, the great state of Kentucky has approved the merger in the state, with the caveats of not raising local land line rates for 5 years, keeping a state headquarters, and probably some goats or whisky or something.

So, we’re pending FCC approval, a few more states, and we’ll have a super powerful AT&T-Bellsouth monster to deal with. Yep, that sounds fun. I’m glad AT&T is starting with us on its great path to resurrecting Ma Bell, that way we can complain the loudest about the high assed internet and phone prices, because once it becomes a duopoly between Comcast and AT&T things are going to get ugly.