I’m trying something new! I’m hoping this will put a fire under my Work From Home Friday video productions.

If this is not on a t-shirt, someone needs to make it into a t-shirt RIGHT AWAY!

If this IS a t-shirt, someone needs to send me a link so I can buy it RIGHT AWAY!

A new humor meme making the rounds is “First World Problems” in which the hilariously trivial problems faced by we, the rich and spoiled, are presented as real problems. It’s funny because there are billions of people in the world who have real problems and we; the few, the fat, and the lazy; are forced to admit how stupid are the things we whine about.

This blog post is a great example (I laughed until I had tears in my eyes.): Life is So Hard

But why did I laugh unto tears? Because I have personal experience with more than half of those “problems” or because these problems are so painfully trivial in light of the suffering of humanity? Or because both are true at the same time?

Question of the day: Is it good to see these and laugh because A) I can say I’ve done that, or B) it makes me realize that I’m so completely callused to the real problems in the world? A makes me laugh. B makes me want to cry (but not from laughing).

It’s that time of year again. The weather is hot. School is out. And the young and stupid are aimlessly roaming our streets.

I am more than a little concerned (if not fully horrified) that I have increasingly heard words generally associated with grumpy old farts coming from my own mouth (and even from my wife).

“Pull up yer pants! No one wants to see yer drawers!”
“When are ya gonna get a haircut, ya hippie?!”
“What’s with all that metal hanging off yer face? Did you crash into a fence?!”
“Stay off my lawn!!”

Ok, I’ve never actually said that last one. But still…

I’ve worked with the youth in our church for eight years now.  (Holy cow! Eight years?!) We loved and guided dozens and dozens of kids through the trials of youth. We call them our “chi’ren” (a bit of a nod to Shirley Q Liquor and her 19 chi’ren). A few of our chi’ren are now married with kids, thus we even have grand chi’ren! So I feel that I am well qualified to talk about this segment of our population: The Young and Stupid.

I read a quote once:

“To be old and wise, you must first have been young and stupid.”

It might be a stretch for me to presume that I have achieved “old and wise”, but let there be no doubt, I did get here via the long and painful road of “young and stupid.” Still, I don’t think this statement is universally true. Here are a couple more quotes that I feel are good rebuttals to the above:

“A wise man learns from him mistakes. A wiser man learns from the mistakes of others.”
“I don’t have to get hit by a truck to know it hurts.”

And thus, there is always hope for the young. There are ample opportunities for them to gain wisdom without experience, to be both young and wise. In fact, a couple of my chi’ren are shining examples of this. However, they are in the minority.

So, if you are old and wise, be patient. When you hear the music thumping from a car behind you. When you see clothes that used to be reserved for strippers and prostitutes now worn openly at the mall. When you are confronted with the Young and Stupid, remember! You were once young and stupid too.

Oh, and if you are young and stupid: Pull up yer dern pants and stop poking holes in yer face! You’ll thank me when your old.

If your like me (God help you.) you’ve got accounts on dozens of websites. Your bank, credit cards, eBay, PayPal, Facebook, Twitter, your blog, and any number of forums or hobby sites. Each one has a login and password. How in the world do we keep track of it all?

For most folks, the solution is simple. Simply stupid, that is. They use horribly insecure passwords. A colleague just sent me a link to the Top 20 Most Common Passwords which in turn links to the Top 500 Worst Passwords (Parental Advisory!! Some people have potty-passwords!) Way too many people use names, common words, or easy to guess combinations, like “121212” or “qwerty.” These people are easy marks for hackers. Don’t be an easy mark!!

The advise I’m about to give you is not unique. I claim no mystical knowledge. You can find it on any number of web sites, but I do think it’s worth sharing.

First off, I strongly recommend that you create what I like to call a spam email account. Use hotmail, yahoo, etc. to create a free email account that you’ll only use for signing up on websites. That way, you’ll have a place to get the inevitable confirmation email, but you won’t be risking your personal email address to spammers.

Now, for passwords:

1 – Don’t use words or names.
2 – Don’t use common non-words. (ex. “qwerty” or “asdf” [Keyboard patterns] or “NCC1701” [Registration number of the Enterprise on Star Trek. Don’t laugh, it’s #139 on the 500 worst passwords list!])
3 – Don’t use common personal information like birth or anniversary dates or phone numbers.
4 – Don’t use only numbers.

“Well, good grief,” you might be saying. “What am I going to use?!” In a word, acronyms! Do you have a favorite song, movie quote, or Bible verse? Here’s an example:

Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are.

Now as an acronym password, that becomes “ttlshiwwya”.

5 – Add special characters and use both upper and lower case letters.

For our example above, we could use “*” instead of “star” in our acronym. We could also use “R” instead of “are.” We could replace the lower case “l” with a number “1”. And we could capitalize the first word of each phrase. Now we’ve got “Tt1*HiwwyR”. That’s a pretty good password… except that I just published it on the internet, so now it’s junk. Don’t use it!

Now for one more rule that I have not heard anywhere else, so I am claiming as my own.

6 – Come up with a system that incorporates something unique about the website in question.

Remember I said we’ve got dozens of sites for which we own passwords. It does no good to have a rock solid password that you use everywhere. What happens if, say, Facebook gets hacked and someone steals your rock solid password? The hacker is not going to make any money off of hacked Facebook accounts. Where he butters his bread is taking those passwords and trying them out on eBay, PayPal and major financial websites. If you’re Facebook password is the same as your bank, you’re in big trouble. Likewise, you may want to create multiple spam email accounts or login names that are related to the website. This will decrease the chances of someone cross hacking your accounts.

Come up with an easy to remember keyword for each site.

Bank website -> Money
eBay -> Junk
Stamp collectors forum -> Lick
Online T-shirt store -> Threads

You could even use the name of the site (not as secure, but easier to remember). Now, obviously, you’re not going to use these keywords as your password, but you can use them as part of your password.

Let’s say we take “Tt1*” from the example above. We’ll call that our password root. Now we need a password for our bank, “1st Secure Bank of Awesomeness” whose website is “www.1stsecurebank.com”. Take the last three letters of the website: “ank” (Not “com”… duh.) and inject that into your password root. We could just tack it on the end (“Tt1*ank”), but that might be too easy. How about we interweave the two. So “Tt1*” and “ank” become “Tatn1k*”. Now, you need a password for your stamp collecting forum, “WeLoveStamps.com”. Using the same method, we get “Tmtp1s*”. Get it? Now you’ve got a unique password for every website you visit that is nigh impossible to guess.

But what’s this?! You’re bank wants you to answer some simple questions to help identify you in case you forget your password! What’s your mother’s maiden name. What was the name of your childhood pet. Where did you go to school. These are easy questions! No problem, right? WRONG!

Remember a while back when Sarah Palin’s email was hacked. Guess how the hacker got in. “What school did you go to?” Umm. “Wasilla High School?” Bingo! I promise your bank won’t reject you for inventing a fake answer to these questions. In fact, I would recommend that you give the answer to a different question.

Q) Where did you go to school?
A) 1992
Q) What year did you graduate?
A) Amarillo High School
Q) What was the name of your childhood pet?
A) Sarah Parker
Q) What is the name of your closest childhood friend?
A) Freckles the Fish

The trick here is to remember what answer goes with what. If you don’t think you can pull that off, you might be better off just making something up. Be sure it’s something you’ll remember.

Q) Where did you go to school?
A) Gotham High School
Q) What year did you graduate?
A) 1939
Q) What was the name of your childhood pet?
A) Batty
Q) What is the name of your closest childhood friend?
A) Alfred

Did you catch that? Batman? Eh? Nudge nudge? Pretty smart, eh?

Now, I fully expect you to spend the next two hours going to every website you’ve ever been to and changing your passwords and your security questions. You’ve got work to do, buddy! You’d better get crackin’!!

My dad told me a great story last year, about the time the first bailout bill was being debated.

I grew up on a horse farm. We had all kinds of animals on the place. The most numerous were ducks. Ducks are the best insect suppression you can buy. But, ducks are easy targets for predators, particularly coyotes. We had a large pin, with six foot fences around it in which the ducks would spend the night, safe from predators.

Dad noticed we had lost some ducks. He assumed that coyotes had found a way into and out of the pin. He checked all around for holes in or under the fence, made some repairs, adjusted the gate to close tighter, etc. But the duck population continued to suffer.

There was a large dog house in the pen to afford the ducks shelter and shade. Dad was in the pin, puzzling over how the coyotes were getting in and back out, when he heard something under the dog house. There was a litter of baby skunks. Momma skunk had found her way in and dug a den under the dog house where she and her young had a ready supply of taste ducks at their disposal. While Dad had been shoring up the borders against external attacks, he had unwittingly locked in the real threat, the internal threat. He had locked the skunks in the pin, giving the real predators the keys to the kingdom.

The lesson here is one that should be applied to politics, now more than ever. In November, America, swayed by emotional teleprompted speeches and catchy slogans, locked the skunks in the pin. Now, those skunks are making babies as fast as they can, inviting in more and more skunks.

Here’s a quick run-down of the current skunks. There will be more, rest assured.

Bill Richardson – Commerce Secretary. Caught in pay-to-play scandal. Appointment withdrawn.

Tom Daschle – Health & Human Services Secretary. Tax cheat. Appointment withdrawn.

Nancy Killefer – Chief Performance Officer (responsible for White House spending). Tax cheat. Appointment withdrawn.

Timothy Geithner – Treasury Secretary. Tax cheat… who now runs the IRS. Nice.

Hillary Clinton – Secretary of State. Hillary was confirmed despite concerns over Bill making money from international donors and foreign governments.

Hilda Solis – Secretary of Labor. Known lobbyist American Rights at Work, a strong-arm labor lobby. Can you say conflict of interest?

William Lynn – Defense Secretary. Known lobbyist for a defense contractor. (See conflict of interest above.)

Janet Napolitano – Secretary of Homeland Security. Napolitano made the news after the anti-tax Tea Party demonstrations by warning the FBI and CIA to look out for dangerous individuals who are pro-gun, anti-big-government, pro-life, religious, etc. Basically, anyone who calls themself a conservative. She also blamed Canada for the 9/11 attacks by falsely claiming that the terrorist came into the US through the northern border. One word: CLUELESS!

Kathleen Sebelius – Health & Human Services Secretary. As governor of Kansas, Sebelius threw a victory party in the governor’s mansion for illegal abortionist George Tiller, the most notorious late-term abortionist in the US. Her state attorney general appointment, another militant pro-abortionist, was forced to resign after a sex and abuse of power scandal. She also pushed through huge tax increases in Kansas.

Steven Chu – Energy Secretary. Chu is a top-notch global warming nut-job, making stupid sky-is-falling statements exactly like I exposed in my last post. His solution? Carbon taxes. Great. Funny thing is, he seems to happily admit he has no idea what he’s doing. In a conference call to reporters, he said his answer reflected “more of my naiveté than anything else.”

Rosa Brooks – Adviser to the Undersecretary of Defense. Brooks, a George Soros lackey, called Bush “our torturer in chief” and a “psychotic who need(s) treatment.” She compared Bush’s War on Terror to Adolf Hitler’s use of political propaganda. She considers al-Qaida “little more than an obscure group of extremist thugs” and that “on 9/11, they got lucky.” She credits US policy for turning al-Qaida into what it is today.

Harry Knox – Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Knox is a militant homosexual activist who called Pope Benedict XVI and Catholic bishops “foot soldiers of a discredited army of oppression.” When appointed, Knox said the LGBT community “will support the president in living up to his promise that government has no place in funding bigotry against any group of people.” Unless, of course, that community is Christian. That’s totally different.

Rev. Otis Moss Jr. – Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Moss is the father of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s replacement at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Moss Jr. once noted that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas “is like seeing your brother set your house on fire with laughter while your parents and brothers and sisters are in the house,” just because Thomas is a black conservative.

Harold Koh – State Department Legal Advisor. Koh believes that US courts should refer to foreign law in interpreting our Constitution. That is, other countries must have better ideas than us about how to run our country.

Dawn Johnsen – Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Johnson, in a supreme court brief, compared pregnancy to involuntary servitude. Thus, abortion is equivalent to freeing slaves.

Eric Holder – Attorney General. Where to start?! Holder is a anti-gun nut, pro-terrorist nut, anti-military nut, anti-border control nut… need I go on? In his few days in office, he has moved forward to close Gitmo, with no plan on what to do with the terrorist housed there. He has denounced US “torture” policies on foreign soil. And he insists he’s going to push through a Clintonesque gun ban even when Dems in Congress warn him not to try it.

And the list goes on and on and on. The skunks are everywhere.

I caught a very interesting bit of trivia on the radio this morning and I couldn’t wait to share it.

I knew that the word “silhouette” was French because it’s retardedly spelled (stupid French). But I didn’t know it’s origin was economic.

A silhouette is an image portrayed in shadow, a void that implies an object rather than the object itself being portrayed. In the late 18th century, if you couldn’t afford an expensive portrait, you could settle for a silhouette portrait in which your profile is traced from your shadow.

Here’s where it gets interesting. (I promise.) The word “silhouette” comes from Etienne de Silhouette who was the French finance minister the late 1750’s. Back then France was at war with England and they were running out of money. So Silhouette came up with an idea that sounded great on paper (or in speeches).

There were a few really rich people in France and a whole bunch of poor people. So, rather than try and tax a bunch of poor people, Silhouette decided to only tax the rich, and he taxed the snot out of them. He taxed them to the point that the wealth of the few was nearly spent. They were forced to melt down their golden trinkets and silverware in order to pay the taxes.

With much of the wealth spent, no one could afford painted portraits, so they resorted to cheap shadow paintings. It became a running joke that Silhouette had turned France’s wealth into a shadow of what it had been before. And the shadow paintings became known as silhouettes.

I wonder what item will be called an obama after he taxes the wealth of America into oblivion.

…

In case you were wondering (or even if you never have) I found a great resource to help you understand exactly how taxes are paid in the U.S.

The National Taxpayers Union breaks down the percentage of taxes paid by the taxpayer’s percentile of AGI. (That’s adjusted gross income, the number calculated by your 1040 tax form.)

In 2006, the top 1% of earners (that’s the 3 million richest people in the U.S., with an average income around $400,000) paid almost 40% of all the taxes that the government received, while the bottom 50% (150 million people with an average income less than $32,000) paid less than 3% of the tax receipts. And this is with all the Bush tax cuts in place! And Obama still wants to raise taxes on the rich. Apparently he thinks that they need to pay even more. 50%? 60%? Maybe he should do like Silhouette did and make the richest 1% pay all 100% of the taxes.

How exactly does he expect to make poor people richer by making rich people poorer? It didn’t work in France and it won’t work here either.

I caught a teaser on GMA this morning about yet another twenty-something teacher getting married to his teen aged student. Robin Roberts posed, “What has caused this alarming trend?”

I didn’t see their story (I did find it on their website), but I had an answer for Robin on the spot. (Imagine that! I have an opinion on the matter. That never happens.</sarcasm>)

I have a favorite quote from Ronald Reagan that I’ve mentioned before. “What one generation tolerates, the next generation embraces.” The Gipper was talking about communism, but the statement holds true for almost anything.

Let’s look at the previous generation in this case. In the 60’s and 70’s, the sexual revolution taught that sex is good and love is free. That generation chided their parents for “repressing” our “natural” sexuality. They believed that children should be taught about sex as early as possible and taught that it’s a beautiful thing that should be expressed and experienced freely. (See novels like “Brave New World” were “sex games” are part of elementary education and abortions are as common as flu shots.)

When the youth of the 60’s and 70’s came of age in the 80’s and 90’s, they became the teachers and policy makers. They brought their ideals with them and taught them to the youth of the 80’s and 90’s. My generation was indoctrinated. We were taught that sex is good so enjoy it. “Embrace your sexuality.” “We can’t stop you from having sex, so we’re going to teach you to have sex safely.” (What a crock!)

Now, the youth of the 80’s and 90’s are the teachers and policy makers of today. The 27-year-old teacher who was raised in this post-hippy, free-love culture is preprogrammed to think that sex is natural and good and should not be hindered. It’s a very short leap from that preprogramming to “Sex is good and natural so I should not hinder my 16-year-old, hormone-crazed student’s sexual awakening. Nor should I hinder my own sexual growth. So sex between me (the adult teacher) and my student is good and natural.”

We have raised a generation (my generation) of people with no moral emergency brakes. A 16-year-old doesn’t have moral emergency brakes yet. Kids are going to be infatuated with a teacher. That’s natural. But, said teacher should be smart enough, and have enough of a moral compass to stay miles away from such a situation. As long as the teacher keeps things professional and is mindful of not giving any shred of credibility to the crush, the crush will fade and the kid will learn to identify a crush for what it is.

But this current crop of twenty-somethings never learned the moral background they need to be the grown up and do the grown up thing. This “alarming trend” should be no surprise. We are reaping what our teachers sowed. God help us when the coming generating takes the reins.

Interestingly, according to the article, this most recent case takes place in Texas. The 27-year-old, male teacher was arrested despite the fact that the girl’s parents signed a consent form allowing them to file for a marriage license. The teacher faces up to 20 years in prison for having sex with a student. See, we don’t put up with that kind of hanky-panky in Texas. We know that, “That boy ain’t right!”

This week’s white board quip contains some simple wisdom about human nature, or perhaps more specifically, man nature.

Tell a man there are 300 trillion stars in the universe and he’ll believe you. Tell him a seat has wet paint on it and he’ll have to touch it to be sure.

Ain’t it the truth?

I can’t explain how it is that I have never looked up “FNORD” before. It showed up on the whiteboard in our office break room a few weeks ago and I kept telling myself to go look it up (seeing as how I’m endlessly curious about odd words and their origins). But I always forgot about it by the time I got back to my desk.

Then today, I saw it in the sidebar of Ghosty’s blog. So I looked it up right away. Turns out it’s been around for ages! How could it be that I never noticed it before? The only explanation that makes sense is that I was brainwashed by the Illuminati!! They conditioned me to subconsciously ignore the word!!

So why can I see it now? Isn’t it obvious? I’ve attained enlightenment and overcome the Illuminati’s brainwashing.

(If you don’t know what FNORD is all about, then you’ve probably not reached my level of mental superiority. Keep trying… or just google it. *wink*)