The big news of this week is that I am endeavoring now to quit smoking. I am using Nicotine gum but it's only two mg. and apparently there are four mg. and seven mg. and even higher, so I'm screwing myself before I start. My brother paid for it Wednesday morning and I've almost entirely quit smoking. If you know my brother and his wife, "almost entirely" doesn't cut it. Anything less than zero cigarettes is chalked up in their mind as a failure. It was kind of the same way with grades in high school with my parents. In the second half of the eighth grade my grades had taken an alarming dip. This continued into the first semester of the nineth. There were definite signs of hope come parent teacher conference time in April and by June my grades were the best they had been since the first quarter of the eighth grade when I got four B's. And yet there was more complaining and roomanating about this report card than in a long time and parents were saying "What's wrong with [Marcus]?" And I was sent to Sydney J. Adler and put on Ritilan. That summer I'd gotten a B in a pre Algebra course. I had high hopes for the fall but once on Ritilan my grades again took a plumet. But parents stopped complaining.

Thom Hartman was taking a poll of which political candidate for President his callers preferred. By a narrow margin they favored Edwards, but with Dennis Kasinitch following very closely. Al Gore was mentioned as a first choice by some, if he'd run. Bill Richardson (?) that New Mexico guy got a number of votes and O Bama got a few. Hillary Clinton only got one. T H played some of the leading speeches of the major and minor candidates so we'd know what was important to them. In the news they've been talking about student loans and College Graduates movine back into their parents house. While some "boomeranging" is normal in my book it should only be a small bit of retro progress in an otherwise forward motion to emancipation. I have been self supporting since January of 1974 and only spent a very small time since then living with my parents. Some people move in and delay any decision to move out till they're thirty-five or something. Edwards and others want the government to pay all college educational expenses. As I recall any educational expense I had I paid myself. Dennis Kasinitch got as many straw votes as he did I believe because people see he is the one candidate who is really serious about getting out of this quagmire, which is the Iraq War. The other big obcession is health care for all. I've had it recommended that a young person just out of college who can't afford it spend seventy dollars a MONTH on a policy. During most of my life it was unlikely I'd spend seventy dollars a YEAR on seeing a doctor! It was not untill 1997 that I was turned into a doctor junky, and this is because high blood pressure was diagnosed on Halloween of 1997. I suppose you might have to see a doctor if you were walking along and slipped on a block of ice or something and broke a few bones. Actually one morning just before Christmas in 1998 I actually did slip on a sheet of ice just outside my apartment gate where the sun hadn't gotten to it yet. (I remember it being a cold day) I did sort of a pirowette and landed off in the grass but on my feet. This incident could have ended very differently.

I do have a bone to pick with Thom Hartman however. I presume I heard correctly. Didn't Thom Hartman say the other day that the free market system and Free Enterprize in general was a PRIVELEGE extended by government to its citizens? This is an outrage. The free market system, the freedom to buy and sell at market prices is an inherent right of every US citizen. It's one of those rights "retained" by the nineth and tenth amendments. And yet according to Thom, the free market system is an artificial system created by government and as such they can pass any laws they want, such as the forbidding of strike breakers. I've never gone for all this garbage about "Not crossing picket lines". I say cross them and give them the finger while doing so. Sometimes I wonder who Unions think they are. A business has the right to contract with anyone they wish. If a union breaks a contract and strikes, or there is no contract at all, then corporations are free to use the free market system to deal with it.

For our fourth Movement, I would like to discuss this whole plot line of the Soap Opera, "Passions". It seems it isn't all fiction after all. On this show a young woman is terrorized by a stalker spying on her through her computer and often through her cell phone. Often harrassing calls are made such as "I know what you just did" and "I'll get you" type of thing. It would seem that people have "hacked into" the computer opperating systems of cell phones. Now they can do things like spy on you and turn the phone off and on and do other things to your phone. I never totally understood the term "hack into". I don't even know how a person would go about "hacking into a system". You hear a lot about it. Leo Le Port speaks so glowingly of all the computer systems we have in electronic gadgets. The solution seems obvious. We have to dumb down our gadgets a little so they can't be hijacked and used by others. All you really need is something to remember phone numbers and perhaps a timer or something for your VCR. They just didn't have these sort of problems forty or fifty years ago. Those people would look on us and say "How stupid can those people get?" It would be like these cartoons where the machines take over the house. But now we have all these cell phones and the I phone is coming so we can have more of it, with people hacking into our phones and making life hell for us. It doesn't make sense to me. If you had "dumb" equipment things like copy protection would be meaningless because the machines would be too dumb to read it. Of course if we were smart we'd go back to all analog electronics. That's where we made our biggest mistake.