Veritasti Blog Design

Welcome to Veritasti!

BertandCarey@gmail.com (Bert Johnson) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:00:00 +0000

What is Veritasti? It's Design. It's portraits. It's high impact resumes. It's a retirement tribute. Keep coming by as VeriTasti introduces a section for freebies like icons and Vista themes; a section to teach a couple of our photoshop tricks; and ways that you can change the way you keep memories and celebrate the ones you love!
Who is Veritasti? It's one man who learned graphic design to make gifts for the ones he loves. It's a man who was challenged to make an unforgettable resume. I found that others wanted me to do the same for them and their loved ones.

They started asking questions like "Can I get a picture that can be my desktop wallpaper and frame it?" "Can you do a project for my digital picture frame?" I loved spending time making very personally dedicated work for my family, I'd love to do the same for yours! Browse my Gallery at Violet's Kitchen, and drop me an eMail at bertandcarey@gmail.com

And yes, keep coming back to check for new icons, tutorials, and visual styles to make your computer exude the same style you expect in all aspects of your life!

Let's all get on the same web page...

BertandCarey@gmail.com (Bert Johnson) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 22:17:00 +0000

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
Mark Twain

We need to be on the same web page, but we also need to be sure we're readin' and writin' the same language once we get there. Sure, there's a ton of stuff we can do to the blog knowing absolutely nothing about things with letters like HTML or CSS. But then again, that means we're changing stuff and have no idea what we're actually changing. It seems daunting, all those acronyms and crazy letters, but it's not that bad and it will help to take a look at those languages that will be used both by us and Google to write our blogsite.

These days, there's about as many languages for web design as there are web design companies. Most languages have quirky little acronyms - it's an unfortunate side effect of the fact that they are typically invented by people that can quote episode titles of Quantum Leap and own twenty-sided dice. Now, I'm not going to give a long lesson on HTML/XML/XHTML/CSS/javascript/JAVA/AJAX/php/mySQL... the list goes on and on. Suffice (and redundant) to say, there's a ton of programming languages out there, most based on something called C++, or the BASIC that was used back in the 80s. Really, it's like the romance languages, if you know French or Spanish, Italian's not too hard to learn - some work, but it's not like jumping to Sanskrit. They all get invited to the family picnic, they're all closely related. If you really want to learn this stuff, start out over at W3Schools - it's the official school website for the W3 which is the official organization for web language standards that web designers should comply with. But for our purposes, here's a brief overview of what this stuff is:

Your blog is going to be stored on Google's computers; think of them as your cyber-waiter, they're even called servers. You ask for a blog entry, they bring it to you. You ask them to bring your profile, they bring it to you. You ask them to bring you a margarita, well, get a bartender. You are sitting at your computer (or your employer's), which they call a client. Since you are reading this, you probably are running Firefox or Safari or some other internet browser software, perhaps you go old school with NovaTerm on your Commodore 64. Whatever. Now, let's say that the Server is a magazine company that uses some form of microfiche to save on mail costs - they send the articles and ads to your mailbox (your computer, the Client), and your browser actually takes all the microfiche and turns it into a readable magazine and displays it on your screen. That little program you use to cruise the web is a cyber-babelfish. You will learn that most browsers translate the same, except for the most popular one - yeah, the browser whose name I don't mention. Uh, here's a hint though:

So let's continue to use our magazine metaphor today - a website is a magazine, k? A blog or web page is like an article or page of a magazine, and as we go about designing the magazine, we need to set up where things go, how things look, and it'd probably help to have everyone agree on how to write our little editorial and design comments when doing that.

HTML stands for "HyperText Markup Language". "HyperText" was a phrase that was originated by people that watch Star Trek or need some Xanex, don't be afraid of it, it just means that it's "words on the internet". All a 'mark up language' means is it's the comments that you would 'mark up' a document with - the editor's marks and designer's marks on where things need to go. For magazines, it'd be what page an article goes on and how the ads are framed around it, where we put that weird little fragrance insert, the 100 CDs for a penny ad, and the plethora of subscription cards that fall out whenever we pick up a copy. For our kitchen metaphor - it's the directions on the ingredient card - how everything should be put together. HTML breaks all web pages into two parts, the head and the body. The head has all the inside information, like the title of the page, a description, where to find the 'translation dictionaries' for your browser to translate the page, all the CSS style notes (below), and other stuff that you need to manage the page. The body of the HTML is just that, the body of our article. It does things like set up information into neat tables and divisions, as well as determine what should be printed as the article's paragraphs and what should be emphasized or used as the title. Once we've done that, then we'll apply our CSS to place those things where they make sense... speaking of...

If HTML is the nerdy engineer who does the structure of our site, CSS is his smokin' hot wife that makes the place look good. CSS is "Cascading Style Sheets". This actually makes sense when you look at it, and unlike HTML, sounds kinda sexy. It should, it's the fashionistas and designer department of our little magazine company. They are sheets of instructions on how the style of your page should look - that's pretty frikkin' simple. Uh, oh, but that 'cascading', that's not just some silk sheets cascading behind the models for the cover shot, is it? Nope, but don't worry, it just means that the rules you write 'cascade', that is if you set a rule on something, everything 'inside' it, be it a page, a section, an article, or a type of article, everything 'downstream' is going to go ahead and be the same way. Okay, to go back to the magazine idea - if I say for example the magazine should use a Verdana font for it's lettering, than every article, add, index, and well, everything will use Verdana unless I tell it otherwise - it cascades down from on high. The actual rule is written like this: "#magazine {font-style:verdana;}" - there's more to it, but that's the jist of it. So unless we say something different down the line, everything in the magazine is going to be written with the Verdana font. If I say something like "#articles {color: blue;}", well then all articles are going to be printed in blue ink, regardless of whether the articles are recipes, travel guides, whatever; and they're all still in Verdana, because it 'cascaded down' onto the smaller detail... and we can go from there and say for example something like... "#articles .opinions {font-size: smaller;}" and "#articles .coverstory {font-size: larger; color: black;}", so on and so forth... all opinions would be Verdana, blue, and smaller, all cover stories would be Verdana, blue, and larger - oh, but then we said ignore the cascade and make them black... so there you go. Check out Lynda.com or W3Schools for in depth tutorials, because it can get really confusing... oh, and if your wondering, this article is written in the Verdana font.

We'll get to Javascript later - it's kind of our 'action and interaction' language, and there's several others - but the last one I want to mention is going to be one of the first things we mention in this next part: XML. XML is simply the way we write HTML and all the other languages. It is our rules of style in writing all this - what do we capitalize, how we use tabs and spaces, and it governs the way that we use our outline format. 'It's simply the grammar for our languages. Don't worry, there's no words to learn in XML, only the structure, which is pretty self evident if you have any sense of manners or logic.

So... HTML determines the layout of our magazine, CSS the style, color, etc., and XML the way that we should write HTML and CSS so other people can understand it, get it? Other languages are used in our magazine on the 'server side' - they do things like deliver the feedback, make some personalization, or what have you - you could say they manage the subscriber list, print the address labels, and take complaints. Others specialize in making videos and games, so on and so on. For now, we're going to concentrate on HTML and CSS, and we'll explain some of their commands and what we're looking at when we open up our actual design in our next post...

Introduction to a Blog Design Construction Zone

BertandCarey@gmail.com (Bert Johnson) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:58:00 +0000

So, we're going to do a multi-blogger experience. We're going to design a new blogspot, or Blogger template from scratch. While we do that at the actual blogsite, we'll be discussing the modifications and all the little tricks and hacks over here, at Veritasti. Over at samsherpa.blogspot.com I'm revamping my "Road to Pleroma" blog. For almost three years, I wrote about spirituality and such. It's time to upgrade, and we're starting from scratch.
We went and created a new blog, and took the "Black Minima" template. We're going to be destroying that in about oh, a day and change, but let's see what we look like after a good two minutes of getting a new blog and writing a quick post over there. Looks like that. Pretty lame.
We're going to look at the template's html, css, and all of that, but before we start putting together ingredients and getting out sauce pans, let's figure out what we're cooking (this will be a rather repetitive metaphor, get used to it). In time we're going to be setting up multiple blogs, there will be an artist gallery sort of blog (at violetlucille.blogspot.com), a site for creative writing (at sherpastories.blogspot.com), and the blog we'll be creating from scratch here at Veritasti, a spiritual blog with two aspects: a set of articles that is a pretty standard blog code wise, and a second registered blog that will be a table of contents, notes on the blog itself, design notes, maybe some horoscope type deal, random quotes, etc. We'll get to the second one in awhile, samsherpa.blogspot.com is going to be the article blog.
So what do we want to put into this bad boy? We want the main post section, obviously. We want a neat little table of contents that may be a little more in depth than what Blogger gives us, a set of links, maybe one blog catalog or blogroll type of widget. We'll want to set up analytics to see who's reading us, and some SEO (search engine optimization) content to make it easier to find. We're going to want to make it possible for comments to be organized easily, for individual posts to be bookmarked or compiled, and set up the possibility of a couple close friends to post to it as well. And of course, we're going to want to make it gosh darn spiffy looking.
While we don't want to look like a no-frills blogsite, we're actually going to keep the basic layout: We'll have a title banner to grab people's attention, although it will have some stuff intergrated into it, maybe a search bar, maybe a little animation to catch the eye. We'll have the main section right where it's at, so the articles load up quick and don't jitter all around when other stuff loads; it's also where things like search engines typically put their important information, the meat, and so most people will look to that left hand side immediately for what they want. I always hate the websites where I have to figure out where the main content is. The side bar will pretty much be where it is, although as it goes down the screen, we'll want to make it split and divide and come together again.
By the end, we'll have neat little tricks like a fading "Blogger" bar, a nifty little logo for our address bar, and lots of subtle bells and whistles; but ultimately, this site is all about the articles. Later on, we'll get into those, how and why we'll put 'pull quotes', divider lines, and pictures in the middle of them. So that's what we want, a very stylish forum for publishing spiritual and philosophical articles.
Tomorrow, we'll look at the layout, put some placeholders in effect, and go over what our art is going to look like...

Who Would Jesus Elect?

BertandCarey@gmail.com (Bert Johnson) — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 13:43:00 +0000

In the magical land of "perfect democracy", we Americans would ignore Senator Obama's race, Governor Palin's sex, Senator McCain's age, and Senator Biden's tragedies. As Paul wrote in Galatians and elsewhere, we wouldn't care about the particulars of their personalities. When casting our votes as to who we should hire for the two upcoming vacancies in the White House, we would look at the programs they intend to implement and the capabilities of the candidates to carry them out. Now, of those two things, I don't think it is difficult to arrive at a second agreement: that I would rather have someone working for me who does a decent job that I want them to do, than someone working for me who is very efficient and exceeds expectations in doing things that I find contrary to my well being. For specifics, I would rather have someone fight a decent fight for my views on a particular topic than someone in office who fights a tremendously good fight against my views on a particular topic.

So I think it goes without saying then, that in choosing our next Executive Branch, for the President selects his cabinet and surrounding positions, we should look by and large at which team promises what is best to me, or, if I am unselfish, to the greater good of the country. Let's for this argument, throw out my personal opinions on the abortion issue, the validity and prospects of success in various conflicts, and other such matters, and look at by and large, what the country as a whole cares about and how the two competing platforms intend to address them. Going over to Gallup, which seems to be fairly well quoted by both Sean Hannity and Keith Olbermann (the Scylla and Charybdis of unbiased journalism), so we can go ahead and say that it's straight forward. Gallup says the economy worries us more than the situation in Iraq, energy topics, and healthcare (the next three) combined, and that 71% of us are none to please about the economy. So, where do the parties stand?
The Republicans, with their supply side economics believe that by cutting taxes, most importantly for business and the wealthy, it enables the private sector to have more spending capital, therefore able to expand business and hire more lower class, thus creating wealth for all. The Democrats, with their ideals of Keynesian economics believe the opposite is true: any tax cuts (if any) made need be made for the lower classes, who are more likely to return the money into the common stream and thus buffing up the economy by the greatest percentage and where it is needed most. This is where one of our most interesting ironies come to bear. The Republican party, who's "trickle down economics" contend that the rich have the ability to pull up the poor, and if given the choice will do so rather than become richer, is also the socially conservative party which is sometimes associated with the "Religious Right". Our friends over at Gallup also report that 65% of self-identified highly religious white voters favor the Republicans, while only 26% favor the Democrats. The irony of course, is that it is not a far cry to assume that religion is Christianity, which contends that Jesus of Nazareth not only is the greatest moralist of all time, but in fact his words are the moral law of God, he being the Heavenly Father's son and indeed, aspect of the Father on earth. So Jesus, who encouraged his followers to give their excess (or their entirety) to the poor, and not to the wealthy in an expectation of trickle down effect would seemingly be a good role model for the "Religious Right" in this example. His apostles also, it should be noted, in Acts chapter 4: "..was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common.... there was no needy person among them, for those who owned property or houses would sell them, bring the proceeds of the sale, and put them at the feet of the apostles, and they were distributed to each according to need." Interesting.
The Republicans will always have a following. They are the party of possibility. A supply-side free market sells itself as taking the leash off of American ingenuity; the Democrats on the other hand promote equality and social safety nets. When it comes to personal ambition, the Republicans paint a picture of the hard working mailboy or three job single mom making it to CEO of a company or President of the United States, if they only work hard enough. The Democrats unleash the ugly truth: But for the one that wins the lottery, what of the 7.2 million that bought a ticket worth nothing? Underneath the acme of the great nation is a lot of dirt that is trod upon to get there. Social Equality has a negative ring to it, bringing up socialism (which is hated just for it's cousin, communism, and the American Media Campaign against him); bringing up things like Equality, which also infers things like racism and sexism. Icky! Can't we just look at pictures of John Wayne and daydream about being rich? It's what the Republicans count on.
They sell the idea that each American is a capitalist acorn, ready to to grow into a strong Oak of Success, it's branches providing cool shade to all the young acorns to grow up underneath its tutelage. Ah, lovely, can you hear the stream of trickle down economics in the background? So refreshing!
Oh don't gloat yet, Dems. The Democrats, which are marginally socialist in their economic policies, sometimes miss a major point: to distribute wealth fairly and evenly, the wealth must first be generated! Yes, the prescription drug companies and the oil companies milk the public. But to brand them as evil and unnecessary is going to far; someone has to do the cancer research and develop new technologies. I've worked for our government, trust me, you don't want them doing the job. Capitalism provides the incentive to the individual or the corporation to succeed. In every example of socialism and communism that have had any discernible footprint on the world stage, they were not in and of themselves socialist or communist, but rather a face of such government forms headed by a small bureaucracy that most definitely rewarded achievement with something more than the pride of doing the union well. Nonetheless, the idea of a moral capitalism relies on a completely just and moral society in the same totality as does communism. The Democratic emphasis on government regulation to enforce this may be a sad reflection on our societies' need for such parenting, but it is a definite need.
The biggest problem with the absurdity that is the Palin-McCain ticket is that the emotional regurgitation of their lies contains somethings of nutritional value. The absurdity of being the "conservative" ones and the "new exciting ones", a juxtaposition of impossibility on both parts is laughable. Palin, an earmark hawk who loves to pretend she's on McCain's economic trimming team, supported not only the Bridge To Nowhere until it became politically detrimental, but also the Road to Nowhere: a $375 million dollar project for a fifty mile road to connect two towns with a total of 3,600 residents. That's a little over $100,000 in federal funds per resident. If she could do that all the way out there in the largest state of the union and right next to Russia (the geographical annotations, which again, are laughable), imagine what she'll do for the Land of the Midnight Sun. The list of their hypocrisies is endless. But in the hypocrisy is also the hypocrisy of our two party system. They both claim a love of life and the senselessness of death, but the Right claims that life is forfeit in certain aspects (in the form of the death penalty) and the Left claims that in a case of doubt, life may be forfeit (late term abortions) leaving the Catholic Church without a candidate it can endorse since the Kennedys. They both have differing opinions on what are rights and freedoms. The ownership of a gun is subject to control from the left, the ownership of certain opinions is subject to criminal scrutiny from the right. The Republican party is not void of good ideas, nor is the Democratic party a golden platform of impeccable moralism and progress. Unfortunately, in today's sound bite world, truths are reversed and the society loses.
Who would Jesus vote for? I'm not sure he would have voted for a politician in a Kingdom of Earth. But I daresay, his policies seem rather blue state.

McCain's Misplaced Patriotism

BertandCarey@gmail.com (Bert Johnson) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:35:00 +0000

“A patriot sets himself apart in his own country under his own flag, sneers at other nations and keeps an army of uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people’s countries and keep them from grabbing slices of his. In the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for ‘the universal brotherhood of man’ - with his mouth.” Mark Twain

Is there anything more decisive in the moment of birth - more than the accumulated genetics from your family, more than physical or mental defect - than the physical location? Hair color, height, perhaps even a predisposition to alcohol and other drug abuse. These all come from our parents. But the physical location of those parents is a much greater influence. It determines whether a girl will grow up under black robes in the desert sun, whether a boy will grow up in a drought ridden sub-Saharan country. It decides whether a girl will grow up in the San Francisco bay area, surrounded by liberal ideologies and a vegan diet from her parents, whether a boy will grow up in Montana with a more conservative ideology, a good eye for hunting, and a serious belief in Jesus as his personal savior. These children are not forced into those stereotypes of course, but the social atmosphere of their upbringing heavily influences their learning opportunities and patterns. Through no choice of our own, fate decides whether we are born to democracy or dictatorship, to wealth or woe.

Last night's speech by John McCain, unofficially known as the "Palin for President" speech inside the circles known as my brain, was an unfortunate reflection of how tenuous that truth is. John McCain, all while talking about himself and Governor Palin, claimed that only one thing mattered: that ever fickle fate that put us where we are. It superseded all other concerns; it binds more than any other factor. Race, sex (but not sexual preference!), and political opinion all fall to the wayside under the stars and stripes. One wonders, if he had been born to Panamanian parents rather than Americans stationed there, would he - with his instinctive love for our country - now be an illegal immigrant? Of course that is a ridiculous question; regardless of his upbringing, his "God Given Character" would have had him legally come to the states, or perhaps his loyalty would have been to the country of Panama, which no doubt would be a world power by now if he had been born to serve it.

As an American, born in a military hospital and veteran of the first gulf war, I am not advocating an anarchist's state. Being born here, having traveled abroad and seen other countries, I understand the privileges fate (or a big Charlton Heston looking guy in robes) has bequeathed me. I understand the necessity to use that gift, to protect it, to nurture it in those around me. I understand that our imperfect union is founded on traditions of greatness.

I also understand that the merit of a society is not the quality of its government form, but the quality of its constituents. That a flag or a physical boundary should not encourage pride, but the education of the masses that reside under and within those artifices may encourage a desire to serve. Some say a country’s purpose, at its lowest form, is nothing more than Hobbes’ Leviathan, a suspicious agreement meant to protect us from each other and those other groups that have reached similar agreements (the core of our Cold War). A slightly more dignified, but ultimately selfish way to promote this is as a collaboration that provides protective measures and pools resources: things like a common military and roads. The ultimate incarnation is that of a group of people, brought together both by happenstance of birth (natural citizens) or desire (immigrants) who join hands and hearts to educate one another, to do as many what cannot be done individually. It is to create a utopia that battles disease and promotes growth. It is a “heaven on earth”, a society of peaceful coexistence.

The keys to this kingdom are those of wisdom. The wisdom of Jesus, of the Buddha, of Lao-Tzu all echo the wisdoms of rejection of nationalism. It is the wisdom that our most downtrodden neighbor is ourselves. It is the wisdom that we judge the worth of a society by its weakest links. It is the wisdom that those outside of our agreements are so because of happenstance, not because of any intrinsic value or lack thereof. The wisdom that the agreement is simply an agreement, and by its very nature does not outweigh the importance of a single human being. The day the agreement is greater than those who have entered into it is the day it has become a fascist state.

Ideologies do not outweigh the people that operate within them. It is a matter of physical location that we operate within the government that we do. A few miles of latitude or longitude, a scant boat ride to Cuba. If our parents had come from an area just a little north or south, our entire life is changed. The United States of America is indeed a wonderful country of diversity and great history. I am proud of those that have gone before me. But to blindly claim “patriotism” as a virtue into and of itself is something only the worst of history have claimed.

Seriously?!

BertandCarey@gmail.com (Bert Johnson) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 19:29:00 +0000

Bristol Palin is five months pregnant and planning on marrying the father? Does it get any richer? Look, here's the thing: My "wifey" and I are not legally married. Her daughter, two year old Violet, is not biologically related to me whatsoever. We are a great loving family without any real care for legal pronouncements on whether we are a great loving family. At the same time: WE ARE NOT CLAIMING A MORAL HIGH GROUND!
The problem here is NOT whether or not Bristol and her boyfriend are doin' the nasty. The problem is NOT that the name "Bristol" dooms her to being a NASCAR wife. The PROBLEM is that the daughter of a Vice Presidential candidate running on a "moral parent" platform is acting in direct opposition to the candidate's stated belief. The PROBLEM is that Bristol Palin, who is somewhere in the realm of seventeen (there's no birthdate to be found on her), was more than likely getting busy before the age of consent, while a student in high school (or after she was pulled from school and "homeschooled" late in her high school career) all while her mother, who is attempting to be in line to be in charge of the military as commander in chief, cannot maintain her own code of behavior in her own home. If she can't enforce her own standards in her own house, can we trust her to enforce the UCMJ as the head executive? What? Oh, here's the link to an Eagle Forum question where she states she is an abstinence-only woman.
The Washinton Post predicts the conservative christians (lower case mine) will give the Palin family a pass on this. Perhaps it's because, living so far away in Alaska, they aren't close enough to qualify under the American Evangelical Sixth Commandment: "You shall pass judgement on thy neighbor." Sarah Palin is a pentecostal. What's a pentecostal? It's a Christian that believes they have the gifts of the pentecost. What are the gifts of the pentecost? Those are things like speaking in tongues, possession by the holy spirit, the laying on of hands. Yeah, there is a possibility that our next Vice President believes she can be healed by her pastor laying on hands while she "speaks in tongues". She believes that Satan is actively working to destroy America - or at least her pastor does. Yet even with a God given necessity of promoting abstinence only, she can't get her closest family to follow what she portrays as incredible truth.
Which do you think is worse, that the people running around talking about the sanctity of marriage portraying the other side as "free for all, do what you want, orgy havin' and then baby killing wild people" are themselves getting "knocked up" out of wedlock (so much for abstinence only sex ed, eh?); or perhaps it's the fact that the Palin camp accepted the mantel of Religious Right Figurehead knowing this; or finally, the possibility that John McCain is such a complete moron that he chose the "ultimate" Mom knowing she couldn't control her family and not realizing it's obscenely hypocritical? This isn't Dick Cheney painfully wincing when his party turns its back on his daughter's choices (yes, there is one area where I'll stand up for Cheney again and again); this is a woman who embodies a moral rectitude that obviously can't be found in her own living room.

Oh, I almost forgot my second question: does it get any richer? Oh yes it does. On a personal level, I don't care about Bristol's business. I'm definitely going to give you a link to people who are: RIGHT ABOUT HERE. By the way, don't try to follow the "smoking gun" to a no-showing seven month Sarah Palin, they've taken those photos off the website - wait, if it's a dirty left-wing rumor, why is it that the website showing Palin's svelte seven months not preggy look suddenly missing? Of course, there is oddity in the press, but ultimately, if the daughter is truly "five months pregnant", she didn't have a child four months ago. IF. Let's stay tuned to see if her (cough, cough, second) child is born just a bit premature. Or sit in awe and wonder that Sarah Palin was flying home from Texas as she's having contractions - the airline not even noticing that she was pregnant as she's in labor does seem odd. The doctor is a family friend. The hospital has no birth record. Small town secrets are pretty ugly splashed across a national level review.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: I don't care about their family. I could care less about all their children and what they do in Alaska. Don't care. But don't play some "Oh all the good Christians rally around the wonderful uber-mom" if the uber-mom in question is just a normal American mom, a little too obsessed with her newfound careers to pay enough attention to what the kids are doing. To preach "abstinence only" sex education and the perils of Left-Coasters like Pelosi corrupting our schools when you can't hover in the idealistic bubble you've created as your image is beyond hypocricy, it's an insult to those you claim to serve. It happens Bristol, women get pregnant, welcome to today. But don't lecture us about being dirty pigs on the left if you're eating from the same sty.
Don't worry too much conservatives and Palinatics! David Pepper, her pastor, says that Satan has powers on the internet to corrupt. Sit tight, believe. All this is just Satan trying to confuse you. A supernatural demon is easier to accept than a hypocritical politician.

McCain's big bet on Stupid America

BertandCarey@gmail.com (Bert Johnson) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 13:34:00 +0000

The morning after Barak Obama shed his nice guy image and let the Chicago politician out, John McCain suddenly pulled off the greatest flip flop of the campaign to date. He didn't change his stance on much this time, only his long-time facade/tradition of building friendships (the inner McCain desperately wanted to get good ol' Joey Lieberman on the ticket, I'm sure of that) and standing by them. No, he changed the entire positioning of the candidates. The morning after Barak essentially said "Bring It! Bring your swift boating friends to attack the Muslim Who Hates America, you hot headed, senile, old f@*&!", John turned into the Democrats. He didn't utter as much as a peep about being senile, or about not knowing anything about his houses. He hardly responded at all to the challenge.
Instead, he introduced perhaps the most unqualified Veep nomination in the history of the free world. There have been kitchen appliances more qualified for vice president than Sarah Palin. She's a caricature straight out of SNL, a little Christian Soccer (er, hockey?) Mom, with the voice of a South Park character and just good looking enough to arouse comments inside every man (and some women's) thoughts. She is a Stepford wife, a PTA girl who took on the government, a Disney film, or perhaps a brunette spin-off of Legally Blonde. When she got behind the microphone, she called the office of the Vice Presidency the highest office in the land. She praised Geraldine Ferraro. She praised Hillary Clinton. Um. The Republicans are praising Hillary Clinton? Isn't that like a vegan extolling the pleasures of a French Dip? Less than a month ago, on CNBC, she stated she didn't know what the Vice President does? This is the most blatant insult to the feminist movement, to the Clinton supporters, and to whatever historical spins the media is currently putting on this race. She's a steadfast hunting carnivore supreme who opposes things like rape exceptions to abortion bans. Sounds like a great choice to go after the liberal Hillarite women.
It was brilliant. It was the smartest political move that John McCain has ever made. For every Hillary Clinton supporter that Hillary has "Nadered" out of the Democratic column, there's also now five good little Christian women in the suburbs who will put down their cookie sheet and turn off the 700 club and go vote for Sarah Palan. She's not a replacement of Hillary, she's a strange, anti-Hillary. She's a homemaker that somehow ended up as a governer of an unimposing state. She's got a gaggle of kids (one with down syndrome!) and a rough and rugged fisherman husband with one of those phantom goatees. She's got more minivans than McCain's got houses. She was a beauty queen of a podunk town, but not Miss Alaska. She played basketball in her little high school, but not scholarship good. She has a Bachelor's in journalism from the University of Idaho - a degree that's about two ticks above a G.E.D., which she used to propel herself into a small market news station job. She is not a super-over achiever like Hillary. She's what a First Lady should be to many people, and ergo, even if she's never been a First Lady, she's the First Lady the conservative house wife wants to see as Vice President. She the consumate dream of the bored stay at home wife, a little success without too much pressure. She's an Oxygen Exclusive Premiere. And for people that don't read politics, for women that want to "break a glass ceiling" without being tied to evil liberals like Nancy "Left Coast" Pelosi or Hillary "Pantsuit" Clinton, two communists if there ever were any in our government, she's perfect.
John McCain is counting on the American tradition of putting as much thought into a presidential vote as into where we stop for dinner afterwards. That Americans only read headlines and listen to soundbites. That the least common denominator wins. And even more so, whatever bad press comes from Joe Biden roughing up a woman in the debates... uh, wait, that's not even a problem with his target audience. That's in addition to the best thing ever. If you were tooling around the cable stations on Friday, Barak's Big Challenge was relegated to footnotes as the pundits furiously scrapped around to find out who Sarah Palin was. The "Barak Bump", which the McCain camp estimated to be up to fifteen points (and with hurricane coverage vying for time with the Republican Convention, a fifteen that may have been unrecoverable), was negated. John played a trump, he took the big chance. He cashed in all his Risk cards and went for it. The Maverick dodged Barak's Challenge, and in Obama-like fashion, changed the subject. Just as Barak was about to war over the middle, McCain dropped the fight and swooped on the Republican Base, the Religious Right, and amazingly enough, Suburban Church Ladies. He Baraked Barak.
There's only one downside: what if (I'll skip the prerequisite prayer to God) John McCain becomes incapacitated? Well, he'll be incapacitated, and it's not his problem anymore, is it?

Welcome to Veritasti!!

BertandCarey@gmail.com (Bert Johnson) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:00:00 +0000

Welcome to Veritasti! I've been writing a blog for a long time now, couple years. Over those two years, I've had about 1200 visitors. Of the 1200, about 800 got to it googling "Krishna Temple Berkeley" or "Drunken CoEds Berkeley". I am not a krishna or a drunken co-ed, heck, I don't even live in Berkeley anymore! So I decided it was time to start fresh. I wanted to address politics, sum up my views of philosophy, and let go. Let go of the control, and make it a blog "of the people". Encourage others to drop off an article and a blog link. To go out to UC Berkeley, to UT, to get up and comers to join me in a new voice of philosophy and politics. A few months ago I decided I wanted a website named Veritasti (Veritas+Tasty!), about the same time, my boss said he wanted a website for his job. So we started working on his. After awhile of sorting through the costs and what we needed for his site, we thought, hey, why not a newsletter instead of a website? And what is a newsletter, but a blog? And so a gazillion dollars of software later, we ended up here on blogger. Well, now it's my turn. I wanted a philosophy and politics website that encouraged others to post their articles as well, along side links to their blogs, and even a section for artwork, email functions, etcetera. I started looking to see what Blogger could do, and dang, it is part of Google, the biggest master of the e-universe ever! So here it is, the blog/web version of "Behind the Story" - this is the blog, and week by week we'll take the Blogger template "Simple II" and turn it into an incredible blogsite!!

This, by the way, is what the blog looked like at the start of the journey!
So the point isn't the web design. It's the politics and philosophy. If you've got a voice, intelligent insight, why not join me? Send me an e-mail with a link to an article, or the article itself and we'll post it (assuming there's no mad rush). Got an idea for sharing our ideas? Come on down! From the left or right, whether you think the future is looking up or down, share your views, support your point, and let's chat!