Ever wish you had like a hundred thousand dollars to open a stock portfolio, but realize, “Well, not this month, I gotta figure out how to both pay the rent AND buy drugs!”?

Well, guess what: Now you can buy drugs AND play the Market. Always in the search of new online time wasters, I have stumbled across Investopedia’s free stockmarket game. The game gives you 100,000 dollars of fake money, and then sets you to investing in their stock market (which is, of course tied to the real stock market). You can compete against others for the top ranking, and demonstrate your Warren Buffet-like skills in picking when to buy and when to sell to make yourself very rich. Or you can ignore all of that and just mess around, trying different investment strategies: Suppose you want to build a green portfolio to see if it would really work in a capitalist country (it probably won’t). You can do it here without actually investing a dime. Suppose you wanted to invest heavily in the military industrial complex, because you know you’ll make money but can’t stand the idea of actually helping them wipe out Iraq. You can do it on this sim.

The one reason I recommend this game to you all is not because I have turned capitalist, but for no other reason than you aren’t really investing, but it does teach you a lot about the system. Since it updates with the real market, you can see that you have to understand the system a LOT better than simply saying “capitalism is bad, socialism is good.” There are a number of reasons why capitalism is bad, and you can tease these reasons out by looking at this game. If you are a total idiot when it comes to market capitalism (as most socialists are, because they rely too heavily on normative Marxism and do not even participate in the real world), this will help you learn what you are critiquing.

And did I say best of all, it is totally FREE?! Well, there is it.

Click on this link to begin building your fake portfolio today

Who knows, who cares what it means? All I know is that the people who made the decisions to have 3200 plus Americans murdered in the sands of Mesopotamia will never be tried for their complicity with “tourists”.

Do you feel cryptified? Join the club and read the story for yourself: Click this link, from Yahoo News.

Take it easy Mr. Libby. You’ll get pardoned anyway.

Who Loves Ya, Baby?
The Reverend

Friends, I just would like to point out two things:

1) If you are getting this post via an aggregator and don’t otherwise visit the site (probably because there’s really nothing new there, and hasn’t been for some time,) there is something new worth checking out. I have listed a number of internet radio sites on my sidebar directly to the right of this post. Some of them are political, most are news, talk and good music. You can just click the link and it opens in your windows media player, and you can listen to it all damned day if you like (including Air America, NPR, and that whack KPFA from Berkeley! If you have never been to the North Bay but want to find out what sort of whackjobs live out there, just listen to KPFA for a little bit, and you will get a small sampling. But you still have to go for the full experience. This is like getting a whiff of something that you can’t quite put your finger on. The real deal is rather more surreal.)

On that note, Radio Havana now plays English Language broadcasts at 10pm local (Mountain Time) that’s Midnight on the East Coast, 9pm on the West Coast. You can click their button, displayed prominently by the animated icon, and listen to all the best news you won’t hear in the United States. If you ever wanted to take a trip back to the cold war, this is how you do it. The broadcast is not too professional sounding: in fact it sounds like a propaganda bureau in a communist country. But it is great to listen to and supplement the normal garbage you get from this country. It presents “the other side”, if you will, the stuff we’re too scared to say. RHC also breaks the hour in two places with Cuban music, and political commercials informing the world that the Cuban 5 will return. I love it, and would listen to it every night, if I could get the computer time to do so. The English broadcast lasts 2 hours, and then abruptly switches back to Spanish language at midnight, sometimes mid sentence.

2) Which brings me to my second point: If you can’t get the computer time, or don’t have one (you probably wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t), get yourself a cheap shortwave radio. I got one for 10 bucks online, tuned it to 6000 kHz, and listened to a crackly, ghostlike broadcast straight out of Havana tonight, in my son’s nursery. At the midnight cut off, I switched through some channels and got a relatively clear broadcast of Radio Australia! Yes, that’s right, radio from half way around the world, literally, over the air. While the static is sometimes very difficult to deal with, nonetheless, you can listen to broadcasts without wasting your time on a computer. I have begun writing my times and freqs down (as shortwave hobbyists do), and when I get a significant number of them I’ll post them.

For now, know that Radio Havana is on from 10 PM Mountain on channel 6.00, and Radio Australia is on channel 9.70 at midnight. The weather has a lot to do with reception, and things throwing off huge amounts of EM waves (like your computer, for instance, or your microwave) will destroy any hope you have of getting any reception on a SW radio, so use it where there is the fewest plugs, EM generators, and other things like this, and maybe try an external antenna for clearer sound (apparently, getting the antenna out of the house will do wonders, especially in steel frame houses. It’s like listening to AM radio and driving under a bridge: it doesn’t work, but you all know what I am talking about, and if not, try it.)

Enjoy internet radio at Supernova Earth, and Dan, I’ll look for an AlJazerra link online for you too.

Who Loves Ya, Baby?

Sincerely,
The Reverend

There is bit of an urban legend concerning becoming an ordained minister by filling out a form and sending it in.

Well, I am here to report that it is not an urban legend. As of this morning, February 6, I have become an ordained minister with the power to marry people, baptize kids (or adults) and absolve sins. You heard it: I am not a reverend of the Universal Life Church. And I did it for free.

The Universal Life Church apparently has ordained millions of folks since 1959. It’s theology is relatively simple, something we can all pretty much get down with: “Do only that which is right.”

While they charge money for a lot of bells and whistles, they will ordain you for free. You have to visit their site and agree to “do what is right”, (but they say that you are free to determine this for yourself). It is so post-modern it is silly. But nonetheless, they will then ordain you a minister, and you can get to starting your own church, marry people, do legit baptisms, and absolve every last one of the sins of every person you know. You can conceivably walk down the street absolving sins. There are articles online to let you know how to do all this officiating.

The website is here. Feel free to join, and get to the God’s, god’s, or gods’ work here on Earth.

Serenely,
Reverend William “Doc” Stodden

I had intended to vow to not do another show until Pinochet died. Well, he’s dead. I don’t have much more of a eulogy for him than to say this: The nicest thing anyone could say about this fellow is that he was a devoted father and he lived a long life. But now, he’s worm food. Good riddance.

W Doc

In honor of end of the semester committments I will not be doing a show this weekend. However, there are two stories I wanted to break while they are still hot, both dealing with Latin America.

Chavez Wins re-election by a wide margin
Chavez has won in Venezuela. While the terms of his re-election are kind of shakey (and due to a constitutional question that he had interpretted to allow him the opportunity to run for re-election, which, while observing that a President can’t serve several three terms successively, dates his office from half way through his term which actually began in 2000, claiming that he was removed by the coup, and therefore the rule doesn’t apply to him) he nonetheless won 62 percent of the vote. It is short of his goal of 70 percent of the vote. His opponents were saying in recent weeks that anything less than 70 percent would be counted as a victory for anti-chavista forces, but, to be honest, this is not true. They were able to get 30 percent or so to go vote for the opposition, but… the vast majority still voted for Chavez. The result was never actually in doubt, and Chavez rejoins the leftists in Latin America (Morales, Castro, Ortega, and Correa [and Nancy Pelosi]) with this victory.

In perhaps unrelated news, Augusto Pinochet suffered a major heart attack, further buttressing his lawyer’s arguments that he is too ill to be put on trial for the thousands of murdered, dissappeared and tortured during his 17 year dictatorship in Chile. It is difficult to say anything nice about this man: the nicest thing I can say about him is that he REALLY abused his power. His end will be soon, and with any luck, he’ll meet the people who’s blood stain his hands there waiting for him in the afterlife. If he doesn’t answer for his crimes today, you can bet he will someday. For his sake, I hope that day is soon, so that balance can be restored to his soul and his debt repaid.

W Doc

For those of you who don’t know what the ASVAB is, it sands for Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. It is the primary method that career monitors in the military use to determine where a uniformed individual will work within the military system. It is more or less a standardized test, similar to ACT or SAT, but it asks technical questions that determine one’s competency for mechanical, electrical, language, and other skills. I scored higher on mine than most, and so I was presented with a range of options which are not available to all enlistees. Because of my scores, I was able to basically pick my job, and my first duty station and was enlisted at the grade of E-2 rather than E-1. Sad to say most enlistees don’t get any deal like this, and most are lied to about that fact.

Here’s a happy story of the effect that a couple kids can have on the official, government-sanctioned process of turning the youth into cannon fodder. Apparently, the school (probably secretly) in this story decided to collude with the military, and perhaps had put some prestige on the line. When some kids found out about it, and said no way, they were actually able to make a difference. I don’t vouch for the veracity of this story, but even if it never did actually happen, (and instead is the creation of a zealous counter recruiter) so what. It gives us yet another tactic that we can use in undermining the recruitment efforts of our government.

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/horton.php?articleid=10055
November 24, 2006
Teens Frustrate Military Recruiter’s ASVAB Scam
by Scott Horton

With MySpace.com bulletins and a handful of homemade flyers, two teens have struck a blow against the American Warfare State, Lindale, Georgia Division.

On a Friday afternoon the 17th of November, 17-year-old high school seniors Robert Day and Samuel Parker decided to act after Day overheard some teachers at Pepperell High School saying that first thing Monday morning the school’s juniors would be made to take the ASVAB military aptitude test. Often administered under the guise of a career aptitude test, the ASVAB’s purpose is to better equip the State to prey on young people tricked or pressured into taking the test. According to Debbie Hopper of Mothers Against the Draft, it is often given under the pretext of being a “career placement” test. (In some cases it has in fact been used that way, no doubt in an attempt to legitimize what many Americans regard as not legitimate: the use of government schools as military recruiting grounds.) The school board answered a concerned email from Parker’s mother with a suggestion that the test is not mandatory but “customary.” Sane Americans might ask, “Where, in Prussia?” Read the rest of this entry »

Ladies and Gentlemen, get your passports because we’re going to Canada! That’s right, for the first time in recent memory (maybe forever) you are now required to present a passport to reenter the country from Canada! What will these wacky fascists in the Department of Homeland Security think of next?! This law only applies to American nationals, who are, of course most likely to be turists (Bushism for Islamicists in general), and not foreign nationals, who represent the single most dangerous threat the law is supposed to be protecting our glorious christian white republic from. If these individuals truely hate our freedoms, we don’t have to worry, cause soon we won’t have any left.

So get your passport and lets cross the longest undefended boarder today! Supernova Earth will be with you the entire way with analysis of what this law means as well as tips that you too can use to gum up the facist system in airports.

Who loves ya, Baby?! Download Supernova 19 today!

Check it out. it’s a down and dirty election post mortem. Naturally, I didn’t cover all the topics I would have liked, but I can talk about politics for days, and you all would likely get bored. So, you can listen to me talk for 30 minutes and feel that you have an election recap that you can count on, light on the punditry and heavy on the truth.

Here’s the Link for Supernova 18- Election deCap