(the) Insanity Shop

Over 50. Overweight. Really Pissed Off.

October 4, 2006

Testing A New Blog Client

by wisefool @ 2:11 am. Filed under Tools

Working my way back into doing this, after such a long silence. Funny, how computer meltdowns, hurricane aftermaths (even over a year after the event itself), and general family madness can rob you of the energy to sit down and write. I’ve missed it.

I’ve been struggling with my eyes for a couple of months now, ever since I made the mistake of trying out America’s Best for a new contact lens and eyeglasses prescription. Funny thing is, my current ’scrip is just fine - I only needed to have it renewed. Of course, nothing is ever simple, and to date I’ve spent weeks going back and forth to this place while they ignore my complaints that I can’t see clearly with their “new and improved” numbers. All of this without even mentioning the two pairs of glasses I ordered that still are unwearable.

The upshot of all of this is, of course, that it’s a real pain to sit and look at a screen for any length of time. So… Resuming regular posts might take a bit longer. In the meantime, I’ve been researching blogging clients again. Before the great PC failure of ‘06, I’d been using Qumana to do the local work on my posts. It’s a nice editor, but I found myself having to go into Wordpress’ online interface too often to tweak the html tags that Qumana decided to use. After not very long, it all became more trouble than it was worth.

This post is being written in my new find: BlogDesk. It’s free, it’s very easy to understand, and it installed and communicated with Wordpress without any fuss. Of course, the big test will be to use it for a while and to see if it can handle the relatively simple things I need a client to do - straight entries, links and tags, image uploads and positioning, a tiny bit of text formatting, and blockquotes. I’ll report on my findings as the weeks go on.

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August 1, 2006

Almost A Year Later, Now

by wisefool @ 7:49 pm. Filed under Politics, Video, New Orleans

Bush and the NeoCons are intent on doing everything they can to deepen and expand the madness that’s going on in the Middle East.  I have thoughts about that and I have a bunch of interesting references to point to on the subject.  It’s a critically important subject, but I can’t write about that right now.
 
Sen. Specter is doing everything he can to push a vote on the surveillance bill that will, in essence, legitimize everything the Bush gang are doing to destroy any semblance of privacy we might have left.  It’s another critically important subject, but I can’t write about that right now, either.
 
As of today, we have a new named tropical system in the Atlantic, and TS Chris is following a path that’s unnervingly similar to Katrina’s a year ago.  Like so many others down here in New Orleans, my stomach is in a knot.  The rage is flowing, and the fear, and now our seasonal game begins: Daily checks with the Weather Channel when there’s nothing in the Caribbean or Gulf, and hourly checks when there is.  This is how we live down here.  After what Katrina did - from which we haven’t even begun to recover, despite what you might have heard to the contrary - tensions are beyond belief.
 
Logan Babin III, a realtor down in Houma, LA (to the south and west of New Orleans) created two videos about what happened down here.  I’ll embed the YouTube items here, but you can also download the very nice (and much larger) .wmv files from his site.  They’re both set to very well chosen music: “My City Of Ruins”, by Bruce Springsteen (.wmv link), and “My Own Two Hands”, by Jack Johnson (.wmv link).
 
 
 
 
New Orleans is still mostly… gone.  We can live with what nature did, you know.  What we didn’t deserve was Bush - and America’s general disinterest.
 
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July 28, 2006

I Did NOT Do This!

by wisefool @ 7:10 pm. Filed under Technology, Video

As a follow-up to yesterday’s grumbling about my computer, also known as “that which is about to be tossed from the second floor window”, I offer this little bit of comic relief.
 
No, I did not do anything like this. Wanted to, several times (and still do), but didn’t.
 

July 27, 2006

Silence Is Golden?

by wisefool @ 11:32 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

(Entirely personal rant begins)
 
I hate breaking promises to myself.
 
When I started this site, I made what I thought to be a reasonable deal with Self (of whom I’ve written before): We’d not be stupid and assume that we could post multiple times daily, or even once a day. A hard minimum of every other day or every three days seemed more likely to be accomplished.  After all, this is a one man operation, and life has a million little ways of saying “sorry, Bubba, not right now…”.  Self, of course, laughed at me and left the conversation with a shrug and a grumbled “yeah, right - tell me another one”.  And like the supposedly “realistic” soul that I am, I sighed at his lack of faith and set about creating my own little soapbox on the ‘net.
 
Man, I hate it when he’s right. Today I went to check to see if any comments were awaiting moderation, and to my great chagrin I realized that nearly a week had passed since my last posting.
 
Funny how the most mundane things can strip away your best intentions.  Take one migraine headache that lasts nearly three days (most likely induced by a single half glass of white wine - you can tell I’ve never been a candidate to become much of a drinker), add in an evening of house guests, a couple of annoying car problems, the ongoing struggles to get the insurance company to help pay for Katrina repairs, various cat dramas, random family silliness…
 
…and then this: Okay, if anyone is actually reading this and is one of you really irritatingly savvy tech types, maybe you can drop me a line and tell me what might be happening with this stupid infernal device.  First, it was powering up the computer, only to have the fans spin and not a whole lot else.  No POST, nuthin’.  After a second or third try, the BIOS would do its little POST and booting would proceed as expected. After a couple of days of that, the “second or third try” would turn into the “tenth or fifteenth try”.  Still, eventually the POST would occur and then XP would boot right up.
 
I set to researching the issue on the web, and what seemed to be the most likely scenario appeared to be that the power supply was getting hinky and the problem would most probably go away with a replacement. Fine, dandy.  Being way too cheap (which fits nicely with being way too broke), I decided to temporarily overcome my longstanding resistance to forcing my hands into the interior of computer cases and do the deed myself. Carried myself to the local CompUSA, armed with obsessive research, and picked out a nice Antec power supply.  While I was at it, RAM was on sale, so I stretched Mr. Mastercard a little further and got a whole bunch of that, figuring that once my booting problem was resolved - which if would certainly be, once the power supply was replaced - that I’d give the evil bastard a treat and arm it with a crapload of more memory.
 
Self was nearly killing himself, laughing at me.
 
I’m deeply grateful that the Missus resisted any impulse to videotape what happened next. I don’t want any permanent records. Things went fine, at least as opening the pretty Lian-Li case was concerned. After that… well, things went south very quickly.  I have big hands - long fingers completely unsuited to sticking tiny little friggin’ connectors into nearly inaccessable slots. What was supposed to be a half hour job slowly evolved into a couple of hours, and as my general frustration grew, Self stopped laughing and started taking over. He no longer considered any of this to be amusing, not in the least. Thank goodness that the streets outside were generally empty, because what issued from my mouth over the course of a long afternoon would’ve melted ears and could have easily precipitated frantic 911 calls.  Self was very unhappy.
 
Still, we eventually got the sucker all rewired and screwed down, and after a few minutes to let me gently ease Self back into his cage, I screwed the monitor back in, plugged in the keyboard and mouse, and pushed the power button.  Three tries later, the POST finally began. By today, it’s once again taking five or ten tries to make the machine wake up. Self, thankfully, decided to not reenter the fray, and just grumbled “your problem, dufus, not mine,” and went back to whatever he was doing.
 
So, now I’m faced with having to possibly replace this monster.  My motherboard is long out of production, and I’m getting the general impression that the best economy will be to just start fresh with a new machine - except for the drives and cards I can swipe from this fella.  Some of my software won’t survive a new installation of XP, since the companies that sold certain programs employed activation schemes to protect their intellectual properties - and are now out of business. No company = no activation = dead software.  Lovely.
 
Okay, so that’s one of my rare (I promise) detours into entirely personal whining and grumbling here. Between bouts of tech depression, I’ve been feverishly collecting more tales of religious insanity, governmental indecencies and general stupidity.  Stay tuned.
 
Note to Self: I promise, we’ll never try this again.
 
Self: “Yeah… right.“
 
(Rant ends)

July 21, 2006

Fascism, USA

by wisefool @ 6:37 am. Filed under Politics

 It’s one of those things I probably shouldn’t be doing.
 
I wake up in the wee hours of the morning, always the time of day (night?) when I’m most susceptable to those kind of “gray” feelings, and I wander back to the infernal device to check my email and take a look at what Sage has for me. This, from Grouchy’s Liberaltopia, sets me to reading, following links, bookmarking like a mad fiend, and trying to figure out just how to organize all of this into something resembling an intelligent posting.
 
My dad was of the stripe of political beast I think of as an “Eisenhower Republican”: A veteran of the second World War, he lost the younger brother he cherished in the air war over Germany. I’m not sure he ever got over the loss, but his taciturn Scandinavian nature prevented him from ever really discussing it at any length. Dad was an immigrant’s son, and like so many other first generation citizens, the very idea of “America” took on nearly religious significance for him - the closest thing, in fact, that I think he ever had to a religion. Dad would shrug and show little or no interest over questions of “church” or “God”, but his eyes glazed with transcendence when the words United States of America crossed his lips. Some of my earliest memories are of (quite literally) sitting on his knee while he waxed poetic about the wonders of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Founders. He taught me to worship those things and those people, not some imaginary “super friend” in the sky. He told me once, and I’ll never forget it: “America is brave enough to really be free.“
 
I’ll never be glad he’s gone, but I’m glad he’s not here for this. It would kill me to have to argue with him over what’s happening now.
 
Okay, let’s be honest here: Dad was also a strict “party line voter”. Yep, he’d surely have voted for this creep and his gang of monsters, and he’d probably have been more than a little upset when I pointed out what they’re up to here and abroad. Still, he wasn’t blind, and I like to think that he’d have agreed that a lot of what these guys are doing is pretty disturbing. Dad was fond of quoting Eisenhower’s warning about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex“:
 
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.
 
I like to believe that Dad would’ve looked at what is happening to his beloved America, and that he would’ve been afraid.
 
My wanderings from Grouchy’s Liberaltopia led me to this disturbing analysis from the Project For The OLD American Century, outlining the connections between the Bush White House, the NeoCons, and what constitutes - literally - a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to create a new world order, with the United States dominating every corner of the world with its military and economic might. The philosophical basis for NeoCon thinking is drawn from the teachings of Leo Strauss:
 
The hallmark of Strauss’ approach to philosophy was his belief in a totalitarian system, who rejected all universal principles of natural law, but saw their mission as absolute rulers, who lied and deceived a foolish “populist” mass, and used both religion and politics as a means of creating trust and compliance. For Strauss and all of his protégés (Strauss personally had 100 Ph.D. students), the greatest object of hatred was the United States itself, which they viewed as nothing better than a weak, pathetic replay of “liberal democratic” Weimar Germany.
 
I’m generally one to laugh at conspiracy theories.  But when you have a President in office who has openly and angrily denounced the Constitution as “a goddamned piece of paper“, and you come to realize that he and his handlers and advisors have populated the government with followers of a philosophy which denounces democracy itself, you have to admit that, sometimes, “just because you’re paranoid, it don’t mean they aren’t out to get you”.
 
POAC also has an even more disturbing examination of fourteen characteristics of fascist states, based on an article by Laurence Britt.  I don’t want to recycle POAC’s commentary here, but it won’t hurt to offer the list itself. POAC’s page is thick with examples and links for further reading.
 
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights.
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause.
4. Supremacy of the Military.
5. Rampant Sexism.
6. Controlled Mass Media.
7. Obsession with National Security.
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined.
9. Corporate Power is Protected.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption.
14. Fraudulent Elections.
 
Did you know that one section of the Patriot Act establishes a secret national police force, with the power to arrest anyone, for any reason, without warrant or notification?  Did you know that US law requires that publishers apply for a government permit before publishing the works of authors from certain countries? Did you know that insiders in the GOP have admitted that their party is preparing for the possibility of a Democratic takeover of the House and/or Senate in 2006 by planning to accuse the Democrats of election fraud?
 
I think about my dad, and the “religion” he raised me to believe in, and those early morning “gray feelings” come crashing down.  I’ll be glad when it’s daylight.
 
POAC is well worth reading and supporting. Editor TJ Templeton is currently in the middle of trying to raise funds to keep his operation going. You might want to send him a few bucks, and hold off on that new iPod for a while.
 
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July 17, 2006

CCR’s Torture Report - I’m Bustin’ With Pride

by wisefool @ 5:53 pm. Filed under Politics

There are things I just can’t find the right words for, you know?  I feel a rant coming on, but right now, I’m a little too sick to my stomach to express myself clearly - at least at any length.
 
I just found the time to sit down and read the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Report On Torture And Cruel, Inhuman, And Degrading Treatments Of Prisoners At Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It’s fifty-eight pages of grim misery, I warn you, and if you are in the least bit willing to pay attention to what kind of things we’re up to in the world, you should pry the scales off of your eyes and read it. Here’s a link to the .pdf file.
 
Okay, maybe a “mini-rant”, just a few words: I can’t remember where I originally read it, but there’s a wonderful essay entitled One Less Act of Violence, written by the Buddhist teacher Cheri Huber, which you can find here. The specific topic of the essay is meat, and the ethics of meat eating, but that’s not my point here. We may or may not agree about the consumption of animal flesh. Huber’s message, and it’s a lesson for life if there ever was one, is that we can’t really live moral and decent lives if we deal with things by simply refusing to look at them. It’s a lesson I’ve heard repeated endlessly, and have watched ignored endlessly: We deal with the problem of homelessness in our rich and pampered country by refusing to look at the homeless. We deal with the realities of the death penalty by making it look quiet and painless (even though it’s neither), and by hiding it away from public view. We focus on our cars and our friggin’ iPods while the criminal who stole the Presidency engages in acts of depravity here and abroad. We simply refuse to look at things, and we walk around feeling just fine.
 
I’m not as nice as Cheri Huber. I’m nowhere near as nice as Martin Luther King, or Gandhi, or any of that lot. Right now, these days, I’m rather in love with my rage, and I’ve no intention of letting go of it anytime soon. I know it, I know the dangers, and I’m just fine with it. I’ve looked at it, and I’ll take responsibility for it.
 
So, in the spirit of doing what little I can to force attention, I’m going to mail copies of this file to every single Republican I know, all of my so-called “representatives” in government, and to every news creep I can find an address for. And at the top of every single email, I’m going to ask the same question:
 
“Why are you all right with this?”
 
I know, it’s not much. It’s probably stupid and impotent. But I’m doing it anyway. End of rant.
 
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July 16, 2006

Fight Secret Surveillance - Now

by wisefool @ 6:05 am. Filed under Politics

We knew all along, of course, that Arlen Specter (R-PA) wouldn’t really try to do anything about the Administration’s domestic spying program, despite his blustering pretense that he was going to force Bush and his gang to be accountable to the people. After all, he’s one of them. This is, in the end, hiring the thieves to be the security guards.
 
So, the good Senator has introduced a draft bill which would force any current and future legal challenges to the Administration’s violations of our privacy out of the public courts and into the secretive FISA court - where only the government is allowed to present evidence, and the proceedings and results are kept away from public scrutiny.  Once again, the GOP is working to rubber stamp Bush’s assaults on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The end result of this “reform” legislation will be to legalize and encourage secret intrusions into the lives of anyone - and everyone - the government decides they want to investigate.  One of the cases that would immediately be impacted is the suit by the EFF against AT&T for its complicity in the NSA’s phone sweeps. I’ve written about that case here before.
 
If you care in the least bit about any of this, I’d suggest you start harrassing your Senators.  People keep acting relieved that 2008 is only a couple more years away.  That’s insane: It’s two more years for them to destroy our country.  Think of the damage they can do in two - no, more than two - years.  EFF has good information and a direct action link, including a .pdf file of the draft bill itself.
 
Actually, we need to go further than just harassing our so-called “representatives”. Yes, we need to still do it, but it’s important to remember that they’re mostly ignoring us anyway.  I suggest we start calling the media - print and television - and start asking them why they’re not doing their jobs. There were reasons why the Founders insisted on a press that was beyond government control. They saw the press as a bastion against dictatorship. While these well paid bastards at CBS/NBC/ABC, etc, etc, are desperately doing anything that can to avoid having His Highness get angry with them, they’re leaving it to a bunch of halfassed bloggers and the like to do the job that they’re supposed to be doing. I say, let’s start calling them and asking them to get some collective backbone and get on the ball.
 
What a concept, right?
 
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July 13, 2006

Kinky Speaks!

by wisefool @ 2:03 pm. Filed under Politics, God. Damn., Religion

Sometimes, Kinky Friedman is the most profound thinker in America:
 

“The only thing wrong with Southern Baptists is that they don’t hold ‘em under long enough.”

 
Via AnimaMundi.
 

July 11, 2006

Dreadlocks = Visit From Sheriff’s Deputies

by wisefool @ 1:13 am. Filed under Politics, Video, New Orleans

Oh, damn it to hell…
 
All right, a little geography lesson for those of you who aren’t from Louisiana: First off, we’re a little different than every other state in that we don’t have “counties”.  We have “parishes”, a convention held over via a state constitution based on the Napoleanic Code. The city of New Orleans occupies Orleans Parish, for example. North of the city, on the other side of Lake Ponchartrain, we have St. Tammany Parish, including the cities of Covington and Mandeville.
 
St. Tammany is one of the prime destinations for the “white flight” that’s been exiting New Orleans for decades.  Up north of the lake, amid the pine forests, the population has been swelling for a long time and it’s pretty much all white, in stark contrast to the city, which is about sixty-five percent black. It’s a pleasant enough area, I suppose, but it’s insanely boring - not a lick of the rich and varied culture of the city south of the lake.
 
Since Katrina hit, thousands of relatively poor folks from New Orleans, most of whom were left homeless by the flooding, have been forced into temporary housing arrangements - often courtesy of FEMA trailers - in the areas surrounding the city, including St. Tammany.  These storm victims have many a story to tell about the hostility (up to an including physical violence) they’ve encountered. Of course, no one’s going to be honest enough to admit that they just don’t want black people from New Orleans “spoiling” their little redneck enclaves. Hell, no - they’re not racist (believe me, they’ll get fighting mad if you suggest such a thing). No, what they’re worrying about is not the skin color of their unfortunate guests, it’s the persistent fantasy that New Orleans has solved a lot of its urban crime problems by “dumping” its local “trash” on their safe little communities.
 
But no, they’re not racist.
 
Imagine it was you: You’re from New Orleans, you’re black, and you still can’t return home - because your home is, well, gone.  Pretty much what you have is what you were able to carry with you when you were forced at gunpoint (our lovely National Guard at work) to board the busses which were going to take you to points undisclosed.  Now, nearly a year after the storm, you’re stuck in a trailer in a maze of other trailers, you’re hearing the taunts and curses from the God-filled Baptists around you, you’re wondering when (if ever) you’ll be able to return home…
 
…and you hear this:  The Sheriff of St. Tammany Parish, interviewed by a New Orleans television station, angrily complaining about the “New Orleans trash and thugs” that have infested his community, and promising that “anyone wearing dreadlocks or ‘Chee Wee’ hairstyles” is going to get harassed by his deputies. The video is chilling.
 
Tell you a story from our own evacuation experience: During the first two weeks after the storm, we were stuck in Mississippi.  Sitting in a crappy little Chinese buffet place one night, a guy with the world’s most stereotypical redneck accent and mannerisms sat at the table behind us and started pontificating about how well Bush was handling the crisis, and how all the “blacks from New Orleans” were just whining and taking shots at “our” President.  He then went on to say that he and his wife had “prayed about it” and that God had told them to be Good Samaritans.  So, he announced, his voice quaking with Christian love, he and his wife had decided they would need to open their home to a family in need - so long as, of course, the family in question were “good Christians”.  He didn’t bother to add that the refugees would need to be of a particular skin color.  He didn’t need to.
 
I was exhausted, physically and mentally, from the entire disaster, and was inches from becoming aggressive with the little shit.  Being wiser than me, my wife did me the favor of very diplomatically dragging me outside before I did or said anything we might come to regret. Later that same evening, our evangelical hosts were rambling on about how their God had “sent Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sinfullness”.  When we’d see video footage of the ten thousand starving souls trapped at the Convention Center in the city, held there by National Guard rifles, all our hosts could see were “lazy [racist term omitted] who didn’t have enough sense to evacuate”.
 
I believe you can tell a tree by the fruit it bears.  The Christians’ god produces rancid, poisonous fruit.
 
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July 9, 2006

The UK: Blair’s War On Civil Liberties

by wisefool @ 3:39 pm. Filed under Politics

I get into regular arguments with friends who are on “our side of the fence” politically and socially, mainly over their constant moaning about how America is “losing it” and how we might all have to move to Canada or the UK or somewhere else. If you don’t know this already, I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you, but:
 
There is nowhere else.
 
The UK has never had formally written protections for civil liberties, at least none as explicit and thorough as our Bill of Rights (for all the good they’re doing us right now).  The British Official Secrets Act allows those in power to pretty much shut down public discussion of anything that might be uncomfortable for the government. Under Tony Blair, there’s been a steady and mostly unnoticed assault on basic civil liberties for nearly a decade.  As with the US, a lot of it is being hidden under the guise of “fighting terrorism”. And, just as it happens here, this slow erosion is barely being noticed by the people.
 
Bottom line? If you harbor illusions that you’ll find safety from government intrusion and oppression, anywhere, think again. It’s happening in Australia, it’s happening in the UK, it’s happening in Europe… and sorry, folks, but don’t expect the Canadians to offer much hope.
 
Solution? Until the people are willing to stop gazing in the mirror, concerning themselves only with what is directly impacting them at this precise moment, and start acting up and demanding change… we’re screwed.
 
From the The Independent, a catalog and analysis of Blair’s assaults on his own people. And from Londonist, a downright scary first person account of being assaulted by the police for the “crime” of saying out loud that the metal detectors in a tube station look pretty useless (this second link is via Boing Boing).
 
A word in your ear: Every dictatorship uses the excuse of a “state of emergency” or a “national crisis” to justify the oppression of its own people. Ironic, isn’t it, that one of the people arrested in England recently was hauled in for quoting Orwell?
 
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July 7, 2006

Krugman: The Treason Card

by wisefool @ 7:23 pm. Filed under Politics

In today’s New York Times’ Op-Ed page, Paul Krugman nails the intent and dangers of the Bush administration so eloquently that I can’t think of much to constructively add. Everybody and his brother in the blogging community (I refuse to use the -sphere word) is quoting the thing in its entirety, but I don’t see why you can’t go and read it on Klugman’s own site, right here. A few select quotes are in order, though:
 
Over the last few months a series of revelations have confirmed what should have been obvious a long time ago: the Bush administration and the movement it leads have been engaged in an authoritarian project, an effort to remove all the checks and balances that have heretofore constrained the executive branch.
 
…and…
 
…I think that most Americans still believe in the principle that the president isn’t a king, that he isn’t entitled to operate without checks and balances. And President Bush is especially unworthy of our trust, because on every front — from his refusal to protect chemical plants to his officials’ exposure of Valerie Plame, from his toleration of war profiteering to his decision to place the C.I.A. in the hands of an incompetent crony — he has consistently played politics with national security.
 
…and…
 
Does anyone remember the editorial that The Wall Street Journal published on Sept. 19, 2001? “So much for Florida,” the editorial began, celebrating the way the terrorist attack had pushed aside concerns over the legitimacy of the Supreme Court decision that installed Mr. Bush in the White House.
 
…and, finally…
 
Things have changed since then: Mr. Bush’s ability to wrap his power grab in the flag has diminished now that most Americans no longer consider him either competent or honest. But the administration and its supporters still believe that they can win political battles by impugning the patriotism of those who won’t go along.
 
For the sake of our country, let’s hope that they’re wrong. 
 
Yep. He nailed it.

I Almost Got Mad About This…

by wisefool @ 1:46 am. Filed under New Orleans
 
… and then I finished reading it. Thanks from New Orleans, Timmay. Link.
 

Kitty’s Back

by wisefool @ 12:25 am. Filed under Church of Bruce, Video, Music

So, here I am, collecting links - more depressing and/or infuriating stories about how we’re being royally screwed by the powers that be. And it just hits me that I can’t do it tonight. I just needed something to make me smile.  A few random searches on YouTube, and I come across something that made my heart race a couple of Christmases ago, when it first appeared.
 
This is one of the best pieces of televised rock and roll I’ve seen in years, and it’s not surprising that the Conan O’Brien folks let it run uncut. Link.
 
 
 

July 5, 2006

The Internet - A Series Of Tubes

by wisefool @ 10:49 pm. Filed under Politics, Technology

It's a series of tubes. Really.
All right, this is going to be very difficult, so you’ll have to pay close attention.  It’s important.
 
The internet is a series of tubes. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s a series of tubes, and when those tubes get full, your mail can’t get through.
 
Now, at this point, I need to step slowly away from the keyboard and allow myself time to become hysterical, so as to avoid spraying soda all over my nice shiny LCD monitor, which I’m now assuming is also a whole bunch of really tiny tubes, fixed so they glow pretty colors when the magic electrodials from the CPM infiltrate them. Now I understand why my computer crashes sometimes: Its LCD tubes are getting too full of the electroidals.
 
With me so far? No? I’m not surprised.
 
So, the venerable (83 year old) Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) explained everything to us when he voted against an ammendment to the telecommunications bill now moving through the Senate.  The ammendment in question would’ve inserted some very basic protections for net neutrality into the bill, thus preventing abuse by the big telcos, who want to be allowed to charge different prices for bandwidth, depending on who the customer is.  In English, they want the right to decide for themselves to charge, say, Google more per unit of bandwidth than they might charge someone else. Of course, Google is already paying through the nose for bandwidth. What the telcos figure, though, is if someone really wants their internet access to work reliably, they should expect to be gouged even more deeply for it.
 
In very simple English, it means that they want the right to selectively screw people and organizations out of access to global communications - for whatever reason they choose. And there endeth the freedom of expression that the internet has offered to us all.
 
So, back to the tubes:  The good Senator explained that the reason emails - which he refers to as “internets” - arrive slowly sometimes is that they’re having to “stand in line” while video downloads are going on. The videos are filling up the tubes . I am not making this up. He figured, therefore, that insisting on net neutrality would really be an unfairness to the average Joe, whose important family communications are being disrupted by these selfish video download services. Really, I’m not making this up. He said those selfish hoggers should maybe “make their own internets”. So there.
 
Okay, for a wildly funny (and equally upsetting) piece of reading, first check out the text of Stevens’ explanation from Wired .  Then, once you’ve had the chance to catch your breath, get yourself all bent out of shape again by reading Ryan Singel’s satirical ”forensic investigation” of why Sen. Stevens’ emails actually took several days to reach him. Don’t blame me if you hurt yourself laughing.
 
The folks at Boing Boing have been all over this as well, and Cory Doctorow pointed to the lovely satirical image above. Link.
 
Now, in all seriousness, what we have to ask ourselves is this: Does Stevens really believe the insanity that came out of his mouth, or was he just at a loss to justify voting against something that would’ve protected the people from the abuses of big business?  I suspect the latter, personally, and I think the main reason for this tirade was to distract the curious from hearing the sound of thousands of dollars dropping into his bank account, courtesy of his friends in the telecommunications industry. The internet has done something that’s never really been done before, on such a scale: It’s equalized the playing field, giving every little creature out there who can scrape together the price of some cheap web hosting the ability to speak to the world.  And the fu… (no, I promised my wife I wouldn’t use that word) … the darned money folks just can’t stand it.
   

July 2, 2006

The Joys Of Motherhood, From Megan Morrone

by wisefool @ 10:03 pm. Filed under Thought
 
Once upon a time, I wouldn’t miss an episode of the wonderful TechTV flagship program, The Screen Savers. No, I’m not going to provide a link, because when Paul Allen sold the little cable network, their programming became game-oriented, “cool youth” obsessed - and pointless and boring.
 
Megan Morrone was a producer and on-air personality in the days when The Screen Savers was both great entertainment and an excellent source of information for all of us “semigeeks” ™ out there. She left the program to become a fulltime mom. Reading her infrequently updated blog, I’m always reminded of how much fun she and Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton and the others were.
 
This is Megan’s list of “things you never thought you’d have to say” (before you became a parent).
 

The Party Of Fear

by wisefool @ 8:15 pm. Filed under Politics
 
Thanks to DJ Allyn from Grouchy’s Liberaltopia for posting this.  He’s exactly right, of course: The main hold that the Republican Party has on this country is their amazingly effective use of fear - fear of what we (the ‘bad people’) would do, should we be allowed into power again.
 
For years, I’ve been telling like-minded friends something that they got mad at me for saying: The GOP deserves to have won. Starting back in the Reagan years, their planners realized that the culture wars would be won through careful control and manipulation of the language itself. Memos were circulated, insisting that Republican speakers hammer the same points, using the same language. For decades, now, they’ve controlled the terms of what’s laughingly called “the dialog”, and we’ve paid a very high price for it.
 
And.. it’s our fault for letting them do it.
 
DJ Allyn has a nice list of “fears” that the GOP invokes about us. I won’t copy it here. Go and read it for yourself, and see if you don’t agree. Link.
 

The Question of “Incompetence”

by wisefool @ 7:29 pm. Filed under Politics

 
I’m so glad someone said this.  One of the things that’s been worrying me for a long time is how liberals/progressives/wingnuts-like-me tend to rely so heavily on the label of “incompetent” in their critiques of President Bushit. This is a serious mistake, and it’s going to cost us this year and again in 2008. There’s a fine analysis here, from the Rockridge Institute.
 
Bush isn’t incompetent. Okay, let me rephrase: It’s true, he isn’t the brightest bulb in the pack, and he’s got a long history of running operations into the ground. But his incompetence isn’t the problem in America today. Bush is the figurehead of the right in this country, and he’s advancing their agenda and doing it well.
 
That is the problem. If you want to go after the right, go after the policies and philosophies of the right, for Pete’s sake. Taking a shot at our presidential slime is like arguing with a statue. If we ever want to prevail, we’re going to have to start taking shots at the sculptor, not his work.
 

Hersh On Bush And Iran

by wisefool @ 7:11 pm. Filed under Politics

 
Seymore Hersh has an excellent article on the struggle between Bush and the military over his obvious intentions with regard to Iran. It’s well worth reading the whole piece.
 
It should go without saying at this point, but it still bears repeating: Bush needs war. What stands out most profoundly, for me, in the Hersh article is how the terms laid out by the administration for even beginning to negotiate with Iran call for that nation to surrender before “negotiations” can even begin. This isn’t a call for compromise. It’s a shell game to provide deniability when the bombing begins.
 
“We tried,” they’ll moan, “to negotiate with them.”
 
The formula is this: In times of war, the president has greater power. Therefore, you keep the nation in a continual state of war. The NY Times knows this now, more certainly than ever before, and you can bet every single person or organization in this country who’s ever considered criticizing this pack of jackals knows it too.
 
“War is Peace,” said Orwell.  So did Fearless Leader.
 

June 30, 2006

More Shatner

by wisefool @ 6:52 pm. Filed under Video

 
…and the video from the last item, of course, got me to looking for more Shatner stuff on YouTube. Which led me to this parody of one of my favorite movies, Se7en, with Shatner playing pretty much all of the roles.
 
If I got a box with that in it…
 
 
 

Shatner: I. Am. Canadian.

by wisefool @ 6:34 pm. Filed under Video

 
I needed this, after several days of dealing with a thousand little system dings, all precipitated by installing the newest version of Java’s Runtime Environment. I’m not blaming Java - somewhere along the line, I probably screwed something up, and had to pay the price.
 
Big price, by the way.  Four uninstalls and reinstalls of Firefox, before anything would work correctly.  Literally a dozen hours, spread across three days, of trying to repair and restore my encyclopedic bookmarks.  Endless uninstalls and reinstalls of Sage, which is a superb news aggregator (feed reader) that works within Firefox. General panic and great gnashing of teeth.
 
So, when a friend aimed me toward this, I was greatly relieved.  You know, back when Star Trek was actually on the air (yes, I’m that old), I could’ve sworn that Shatner would just have to have been the world’s biggest, most full of himself, so and so. It was his legendary appearance on Saturday Night Live that opened my eyes. He’s funny, self-deprecating in the nicest of ways, and seems a real gentleman.
 
Oh, and he’s Canadian, too.
 

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