goofballs

DevOps: the jig is up

2011-10-21T04:48:00.000-07:00

I will be the first to admit that systems administration is a protection racket: pay us, or something *bad* will happen to your network.

Of course, the fact that bad things do happen to servers and networks -- worse, if you host a site on the internet you invite all sorts of badness from bored teenagers to Chinese government-funded hacker farms -- keeps us systems administrators out of jail for extorting money (our salaries) from companies for protection.

As if that's not bad enough, us systems administrators are notorious for erecting barriers between developers and their masters, dumb management, and critical production systems that the systems administrators are tasked with maintaining. QA, regression testing, staging and peer review are just some of the tools in the "stymy development" tool box systems administrators use to slow down the development cycle from "pretty fast" to "reckless, stupid abandon".

Developers, who know in their hearts that they can do no wrong, and managers, whose lack of technical knowledge and thirst for capital knows no bounds, have teamed up to do an end-run around those pesky systems administrators. The key to their success in this noble goal lays in two buzzwords you are likely to hear being tossed around: "the cloud" and "devops".

"The cloud" is a magical place where you can, for a price, deploy as many crappy virtual Linux instances as you desire on demand without having to directly pay someone who knows what they are doing.

Are you fresh out of college with only a glancing familiarity of Linux? Can you point and click? Congratulations, you are qualified to become a "cloud" administrator. Let's deploy some LAMP servers!

Do you value high availability, scrutinize resource usage and have a mind towards stability and security? Go away, dinosaur, you must be a sysadmin.

"DevOps" is really just development, sans quality control, regression testing or change management. A sysadmin would not fare well in this environment, wanting to focus on operational concerns instead of pumping out redundant, useless and hastily written perl or PHP code 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. Those lazy sysadmins will try to limit their time in the office to something under 50 hours, and they will try to excuse their lack of ambition and team spirit on things like "being on call" or "having a life". First, "the cloud" means you never have to be on-call, because how could "the cloud" ever fail? How? Stop talking.. Second, it's your "life" or our founder's million dollar payout when Zynga buys us. Pick a side (hint: the one that doesn't involve getting some 28 year old fuck-head "CTO" rich from a Zynga stock trade means you're fired).

The cloud is a good way to quickly develop and deploy a new product, but should not be the be-all and end-all of internet or mobile app development; despite it's ease of use those without knowledge of operations best practices often make "rookie" errors in designing and deploying their applications. And while an agile development cycle can encourage innovation, doing so without the safety harness of testing and change management under the watchful gaze of experienced systems administrators invites disaster -- especially if your development cycle is dev straight to prod.

Shuttered

2011-07-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

Some of these posts are delightfully unhinged. Ah, drugs.

Working on other projects for a while, we will return to Goofballs in the future.

Editing a letter to Dad about what it is I do..

2011-05-12T00:58:00.000-07:00

The three laws of Arthur C. Clarke:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The third law applies best to how most people perceive what I do for a living. I will try to dispel magic in lieu of science, and I will try to do so semi-chronologically.

In the early 1980s I had been given a number of Apple computers which were either on loan from or purloined from the law offices of my father; some he bought, outright, seeing my interest in computers. Nevertheless my very first command-line interpreter (CLI) was the built-in Apple BASIC interpreter that all Apples came with, on 5.25” floppy disks.

A typical program might look something like this:

10 REM THIS IS A PROGRAM

20 PRINT CHR$(7)

30 GOTO 10

This program would endlessly beep until you cancelled it with a control-C (I had not yet learned about trapping system control variables, but I soon would). Between the ages of about 5 to around 9 years old, the Apple, it's BASIC and some of it's MC6501/6502/65C02¹ assembly language.

Around the time I turned 10 I got a brand new Mac Plus, which boasted an entire 1MB of RAM. My precious command-line suddenly disappeared and was replaced with a visual interface (GUI – graphical user interface). I hated it.

This new technology wasn't magical to me, it was annoying. An annoying obstacle. So I researched it, learned what I could about it.

I learned that the filesystem kept files organized as pure data files and files that could be run, and the files that could be run had a “fork” called the resource fork. I learned that Mac System OS had a utility to manipulate that called ResEdit². ResEdit opened up a whole new world in the Macintosh operating system to me, but that wasn't the end of my exploration.

Soon I discovered MACSBug³: a low-level debugger from Motorola, makers of the Macintosh CPU the 68k or MC68000 series of processors. The Mac Plus ran on an MC68000, the Mac SE also on the same 68k chip but with wider “motherboard bandwidth” (better access to the 1MB of RAM, or, 2MB), the Mac SE ran on the MC68010. The Mac LC ran on the MC68020, and unsurprisingly the LC-30 ran on the MC68030 (same as the Mac SE-30).

I think it was the Mac SE30 that we had which had this beast attached:

Pictured above is a Jasmine 20MB SCSI Hard Disk Drive. In 1988, this cost $700. Now, my network interface card probably has more on-board cache. A single gigabyte would run into the tens of thousands.

Exploring the Jasmine drive got me into quite a bit of trouble: for some reason, I thought it would be fun to put a “password” on the drive so I could keep my stuff private – not an unexpected impulse for a precocious 12 year old; but not good for a 40 lawyer with data on that drive. Worse, still, when I forgot the password.

And in that regard, my father was my first partner in hacking something of value: we engaged the makers of the equipment, they directed us to a piece of software called “SCSIEditor” which I continued to use for many years. The software allowed you to edit the boot blocks of a SCSI block device, erasing the password. This was my first experience with sector editing on a low-level block device, but it would not be my last.

1The Motorola chip in the Apple ][, ][e and ][c respectively.

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit

3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacsBug

Farrah Dawn White

2010-12-20T10:31:00.000-08:00

Farrah Dawn White

Rest in peace.

hard times

2010-09-12T02:08:00.000-07:00

displacement is a human disease

Case Study in Racial Taboos in America

2010-08-01T02:42:00.000-07:00

I wish I had written this myself, I can only quote it:

Dear anti-Mayer Mob. Please read the article:

http://www.playboy.com/articles/john-mayer-playboy-interview/index.html?page=2

----------------------------------------

Since I know many of you won't bother reading all of what he actually said before condemning him, I've tried to make it easier for you by pasting an excerpt from his Mein Kampf, er I mean his interview.

Please explain to me the overt, blatant, horrible racism in (the very clumsy and un-clever) things he is trying to say.

Maybe I'm just an old clueless dude, but to me, it is very clear that he is trying to make a social commentary/point out of his ill-advised use of the "N-word".

What is his point? That it is silly for someone to tell him he has a "hood pass" (Ed. note - I am presuming that means he has full acceptance in the black community, I'm too old to have any idea really what "hood pass" means).

Why does he think the word "hood pass" is silly?

Because, if he had a true "hood pass" he could also refer to it as an "N-word pass".

Since, only black folks can (and do) use the "N-word" to refer to themselves or others, and since he as a white man, can never do that (as history and most recently so many of you Salon posters have made clear), the very concept of a "hood pass" for a white man is a contradiction in terms.

Is that so confusing? How did some of you get through your school? Is our children learning, indeed.

Please note - it is clear form this interview that Mayer is no Lord Byron, but I just don't get the racism accusations being leveled at him. Clueless perhaps, but proudly, overtly racist? If anything he sounds apologetic for the fact that he is not as color blind as he would like to be.

---------------------------------------

MAYER: Someone asked me the other day, “What does it feel like now to have a hood pass?” And by the way, it’s sort of a contradiction in terms, because if you really had a hood pass, you could call it a nigger pass. Why are you pulling a punch and calling it a hood pass if you really have a hood pass? But I said, “I can’t really have a hood pass. I’ve never walked into a restaurant, asked for a table and been told, ‘We’re full.’"

PLAYBOY: It is true; a lot of rappers love you. You recorded with Common and Kanye West, played live with Jay-Z.

MAYER: What is being black? It’s making the most of your life, not taking a single moment for granted. Taking something that’s seen as a struggle and making it work for you, or you’ll die inside. Not to say that my struggle is like the collective struggle of black America. But maybe my struggle is similar to one black dude’s.

PLAYBOY: Do black women throw themselves at you?

MAYER: I don’t think I open myself to it. My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock. I’m going to start dating separately from my dick.

PLAYBOY: Let’s put some names out there. Let’s get specific.

MAYER: I always thought Holly Robinson Peete was gorgeous. Every white dude loved Hilary from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. And Kerry Washington. She’s superhot, and she’s also white-girl crazy. Kerry Washington would break your heart like a white girl. Just all of a sudden she’d be like, “Yeah, I sucked his dick. Whatever.” And you’d be like, “What? We weren’t talking about that.” That’s what “Heartbreak Warfare” is all about, when a girl uses jealousy as a tactic.

omg, what a racist!

This land is your land, this land is my land.

2010-07-09T21:11:00.000-07:00

Tom Tancredo ironically calls the English language "the glue that holds together this country." Excuse me?

The glue that holds this country together is law, specifically, the United States Constitution. Look it up, teabaggers. Where in the Constitution does it say that English is the national language?

Glenn Beck also has some interesting ideas regarding illegal immigrants: take their DNA. Perhaps instead of re-reading the 2nd Amendment over and over, you should focus on the 4th Amendment.

Glenn Beck, Tom Tancredo, Lou Dobbs, Ann Coulter and even I are illegal settlers. That our laws permit this is irrelevant; if Native Americans came to Europe to usurp the lands on which the English, Dutch, French, Portugese, Spanish and Italians called home, not only would this have been (rightly) labelled an egregious wrong, but a great long and bloody war would surely have resulted.

They didn't cross the border, the border crossed them.

Still standing.

2010-07-04T03:09:00.000-07:00

I'll chalk it up as a coincidence that I got laid off after taunting my nemesis to "get me fired".

What I did with my 5-figure severance is the subject of another post, possibly on another blog altogether. Some of it is NC-17.

I took a job promising working from home, and have since spent 4 of the last 5 weeks in an area north of Hollywood, working for another huge company (as a subcontractor), for a big pharmaceutical company who laid off most of their workers and is now regretting outsourcing their IT.

Folks.. you need to keep your IT in house. The outsourced contract people don't give a fuck about much more than meeting the goals set forth in the contract. In house IT people care, in part because they know if they fuck up bad enough then their checks will stop coming because there is no more company. Contractors just move on to the next victim.

The last company I worked for bought the cool company I thought I was getting hired at. The bought the cool company, drove it into the ground, and released their own product; this was, as predicted, a total fucking failure.

That sort of eclipses the "major, newsworthy outage" that I suffered through despite being one of a chorus of voices saying "don't do this, slow down". In large part the senior management created the circumstances under which the service utterly failed. Certainly, those in management would disagree. I will and can prove point by point that they are wrong, if I cared anymore. I don't, and I won't get specific because the matter is tied up in litigation.

I'm up at 5AM Sunday morning because that's the time I've been waking up.. and because I fell asleep on the couch listening to the Decemberists and was woken up by my roommate while "Star Witness" by Neko Case played. She didn't want me to turn it down or off. She wanted me to play her live album from "Austin City Limits".

"Wayfaring Stranger" sung by Neko Case is truly stunning. Check it out.

Riddle me this, Jack

2010-02-10T19:57:00.001-08:00

Okay, here's the thing. On the one hand, you have all these chuckleheads trying to talk about Miranda rights and terrorism, talking smack about the FBI(*) and wanting these suspects whisked away and taken to Jack fucking Bauer for some heavy BDSM(**).

The on the other hand, you have "The First 48". Are you trying to tell me that a bunch of Law and Order rethuglicans don't know that every day city po-lice be getting confessions out of dumb-fuck suspects who ARE ALREADY MIRANDIZED. Something like 90% conviction rate or better. Republicans are so full of shit.

(*) The FBI had the intel on 9/11, the data on some of the suspects and could have potentially stopped it. The CIA has a 60+ year record of failure after failure. Yet, 'thuglicans want to take suspects into CIA custody? Hells no!

(**) BDSM. Is anyone shocked that the right wing is fascinated by this?

I need an easy friend

2010-01-30T09:32:00.000-08:00

The best gift I am likely to have ever received in the history of forever was the recent re-released double-LP 20th anniversary edition of Nirvana "Bleach".

Like just about everyone I know, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was the first Nirvana song I had ever heard back in 1991. The record store was sold out of copies of "Nevermind", so I settled for the other record by the band that was available at the time, "Bleach".

By the time I brought it home and listened to it on repeat ten times I discovered that my sneaky little sister had managed to get a copy of "Nevermind" on cassette. We listened to that until the tape wore out, but I grew to realize that "Bleach" was ultimately the better of the two albums.

By 1992 me and everyone I knew were in full blown Nirvana craze.

It wasn't until much later in my life that I began to realize the profound impact the album made on my life. It led, first and foremost, to buying more Nirvana albums. That led to an appreciation of song-craft, the Vaselines, Meat Puppets, Tad, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Smashing Pumpkins, the Pixies and the Jesus Lizard in high school. Later still, it laid the groundwork for transitioning out of being an Industrial/Goth scenester where Neil Young, Built To Spill and Elliott Smith supplanted Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails and Front Line Assembly.

"About A Girl" was the first song I ever learned to play, on a Epiphone strat with a tremelo that I traded some kid in high school a quarter ounce of weed for. Cherry red, with tuning locks. I lent the guitar to my friend Shannon Fortune, where it and the van that contained it were impounded by the Cleveland Heights Police. Having an arrest warrant against me, I never attempted to claim it. Who knows where it is now, I hope CHPD made more than the $40 investment I had made on it.

Recorded for just over $600, "Bleach" remains one of the most raw, honest and rockingest albums of all time.

Listening to it again today brings back a flood of memories.

We miss you, Kurdt.

Conservapedia

2009-12-09T04:45:00.000-08:00

My responses in Red

Examples of Bias in Wikipedia
From Conservapedia
Jump to: navigation, search

The following is a growing list of examples of liberal bias, deceit, frivolous gossip, and blatant errors on Wikipedia.

1. Conservapedia posted the news about liberal corruption of global warming science (climategate) on its Main Page on the very first day: November 19th. But it took Wikipedia over two weeks to give priority to this bombshell, and even now its entry is remarkably biased against it.[1]

Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia does not automatically cowtow to the whims of conservapedia. As I have not read Wikipedia's take on the controversy, I cannot comment on the assertion of bias either way. If one chooses to use the word "remarkably", one would expect remarks to follow.

2. Isaac Newton translated parts of the Bible, and considered this effort to be the source of his scientific insights, yet Wikipedia's 10,000-word entry completely omits this.[2]

If Newton's religiosity were directly responsible for the conclusions he drew, I would be interested in seeing more evidence of this. It is no secret to any serious student of history that Newton held deep religious convictions. Conservapedia is omitting Newton's life long pursuit of alchemy. Why?

3. The "Pioneer anomaly" contradicts both the theory of relativity and Newtonian gravity, but the Wikipedia article describes it as a potential defect for only Newtonian gravity.[3]

Conservapedia does not grasp the meaning of the term "theory".

4. Wikipedia uses anti-religious examples for its entry on "argumentum ad populum" (Latin for claiming that something is true if it is popular). Conspicuously absent from Wikipedia's examples are atheistic arguments based on popular opinion, such as misleading people into thinking the theory of evolution must be true if others accept it.

While some may accept the fact of evolution because of peer pressure, evolution remains a fact (and a theory). On the other hand, the general acceptance of the idea of the tooth fairy among 6 year olds makes such a being no more real than Santa Claus or God.

5. Wikipedia's article on engineering[4] features a photo of ... an offshore wind turbine, which is an inefficient liberal boondoggle and certainly not a representative example of engineering. None even exist off the shores of the United States because they are not competitive.

Ironically, creationists insist on using fossil fuels from animals they believe to have existed 6,000 years ago, not millions. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider the folly of this argument.

6. Amid the libel controversy against Rush Limbaugh during his bid to purchase an NFL team, the St. Louis Rams, Newsbusters revealed the false quote's Web source appeared to be from Wikipedia.[5] The quote has been removed and replaced several times since 2005. And the Wikipedia entry did not provide a transcript link to Limbaugh's show with the citation, because the quote did not exist but was part of a bias strategy by Wikipedia to label Limbaugh a racist. While the talk host criticized the website that bills itself as an "online encyclopedia," Wikipedia editors were busy discussing their strategy for handling the controversy.[6] It was later revealed that the quotes were added by a highly controversial, bias user with the IP address of 69.64.213.146.[7]

If it is not apparent to you that Rush Limbaugh is, indeed, a racist then it is likely that you are also a racist. Examples of Mr Limbaugh's racism could fill volumes. I applaud any researcher charged with the unpleasant task of pouring through the writings and speeches of Limbaugh who is an odious and reprehensible human being.

7. Wikipedia has a large article detailing anti-abortion violence committed around the world,[8] but there is no article about pro-abortion violence, like that which resulted in the September 11, 2009, death of peaceful protester Jim Pouillon. There is no article for "Pro-choice violence"[9] and "Pro-abortion violence" bizarrely redirects to the "Pro-life movement" article section about "Term controversy."[10] Before being redirected, the "Pro-abortion violence" article was biased towards downplaying the reality of violence committed by supporters of abortion.[11] For example, while the "Anti-abortion violence" article matter-of-factly begins: "Anti-abortion violence is violence committed against individuals and organizations that provide abortion." ...the "Pro-abortion violence" article dismissingly began: "Pro-abortion violence (or pro-choice violence) is a term used in the pro-life movement to characterize acts of violence committed by abortion practitioners or abortion advocates against those who oppose abortion or against pregnant women. The former is regarded as factual while the latter is just "a term used in the pro-life movement."

The murder of Jim Pouillon was tragic and unnecessary. The violence in the abortion debate is, however, overwhelmingly directed toward health care providers and toward women. It is crass for conservapedia to attempt to portray the debate as a zero-sum, equal fight. Reproductive rights are civil rights, and to deny women those rights goes against the founding principals of this nation.

8. Wikipedia omits that there are serious contradictions within and objections to the Theory of Relativity, instead presenting it as scientific gospel. (Example of contradictions and objections needed.)[12]

This claim is primae facie false.

9. Wikipedia lists Factcheck.org as a "non-partisan" "'consumer advocate' for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics."[13] However, two attempted edits were deleted pointing out factcheck.org falsely claims that Barry Soetoro (aka Barack Obama) has produced his birth certificate: "FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate."[14] This claim contradicts the fact that the document they refer to is a copy of a Certificate Of Live Birth, produced in 2007, as opposed to a Birth Certificate. While later in the page, it states that detractors claim it is a "'certification of birth', not a 'certificate of birth'" (actually "Certificate Of Live Birth" and "Birth Certificate" respectively). Factcheck.org clouds the verbage by getting the actual terms wrong and presenting the two items as synonymous.[15]

I'm not sure where to begin with this one. I am not sure whose hat someone pulled the name "Barry Soetoro" out of, but I suspect it may be Orly Taitz's. Barack Hussein Obama is a native US citizen and he was born in Hawaii (which happens to be an actual US state much to the chagrin of the Dole family, I'm sure). He is our president. Get used to it, you lost.

10. Wikipedia's article about Bernhard Riemann, perhaps the greatest modern mathematician, contains little discussion of Riemann's faith and tries to downplay his fundamentalism as though it were merely a passing interest as a teenager.[16][17]

Who?

11. Wikipedia savages anyone who criticizes the theory of evolution, such as Dr. William Dembski, whom Wikipedia introduces with outlandish, unsupported quotations by liberal critics.[18] For example, Wikipedia describes David H. Wolpert as a "prominent mathematician" in order to insert a scathing, unjustified quotation by him about Dembski.[18] In fact, Wolpert does not even hold a math degree and his (non-math) doctorate was from the University of California at the weak Santa Barbara location.[19] Dembski's PhD is in math from the preeminent University of Chicago.

Anyone? Everyone? Savages? UCSB is somehow worse than Regent University?

12. Noting that Al Gore's 2009 statement that he won a 2007 British court case about An Inconvenient Truth ran contrary to the actual ruling and, especially, the judge's statement that the claimant won the case against the film is considered "original research" and "POV" on Wikipedia.[20]

Don't know about this case.

13. Wikipedia often treats conservative figures and sites with contempt, characteristic of the liberal double standard. Compare, for example, Wikipedia's smear of Conservapedia[21] with its straightforward description of Scholarpedia.[22]

I cannot find the words contempt or smear in the wikipedia article about conservapedia. The article suggests a bias that conservapedia does not seem to deny or shy away from. In the reality based world, I would consider that to be a factual report.

14. Wikipedia cites vulgar blogs and liberal rants as though they are encyclopedic authorities. For example, its entry about Conservapedia claims that "[s]everal articles on the site have reputations for bias and inaccuracy,"[23] but its citations for that falsehood consist of a vulgar blog, a liberal rant, and an article that takes a neutral position. None of Wikipedia's three "authorities" make any statement about the "reputation" of Conservapedia as Wikipedia claims.

If vulgarity invalidates authority, no one should believe the Bible, one of the most grotesque, pornographic pieces of literature ever committed to the printed page.

15. Wikipedia bias against movement conservatives is intense. Michele Bachmann won reelection in 2008 by 3% in a state that went heavily Democratic, but instead of crediting her conservative positions the biased Wikipedia entry states, "Despite fallout from controversial statements that she had made, Bachmann defeated her Democratic opponent Elwyn Tinklenberg in the 2008 election."[24]

"argumentum ad populum"; it is also evident that Bachmann is a dangerous ideologue whose understanding of the US Constitution, history and body of laws is tenuous at best. Many third graders probably have a better understanding of the Constitution than Bachmann. That she was elected is a black eye on the otherwise great state of Minnesota.

16. In its entry on the heavily Christian Gothic architecture,[25] Wikipedia credits Islam before Christianity, does not even mention Christianity until after more than 1500 words, and then does not mention Christianity again.

Someone call a whambulence, we have a butt-hurt emergency!

17. In his article entitled Wikipedia lies, slander continue, journalist Joseph Farah supports his observation that Wikipedia "is not only a provider of inaccuracy and bias. It is wholesale purveyor of lies and slander unlike any other the world has ever known."[26]

Well, that sounds fair and balanced to me.

18. Wikipedia's evolution article certainly does not have robust and relevant "Criticism and controversy" section its evolution article which is not surprising since liberals are rather enamored of the evolutionary position despite the evolutionary view having a total lack of evidence supporting it.

Keep that in mind next time you give your kids antibiotics. You see the stuff in red here? No, you don't, and you likely never will. That's my opinion. So I can make a blanket (and probably false) statement like "anyone who believes anything conservapedia says is a fucking idiot." This is not appropriate for a reference resource like an encyclopedia (online or otherwise). To make that blanket statement about liberals is equal in value to saying blacks are lazy or Jews are stingy - in that the statement has no value at all.

19. Wikipedia's article on atheism fails to mention that American atheists give significantly less to charity than American theists on a per capita basis even when church giving is not counted for theists.[27] In addition, Wikipedia's article on atheism fails to mention how key proponents of atheism have been deceptive. Wikipedia's article on atheism also fails to mention that Christianity and not atheism was foundational in regards to the development of modern science. Wikipedia's article attempts to associate atheism with scientific progress.[28] In addition, Wikipedia's article on atheism fails to mention that atheism is a causal factor for suicide.

Atheism causes suicide? Fuck you. I'm not going to bother with the rest of this bullshit statement.

20. The Wikipedia entry for homosexuality is adorned with the a rainbow graphic but fails to mention the following: the many diseases associated with homosexuality, the high promiscuity rates of the male homosexual community, the higher incidences of domestic violence among homosexual couples compared to heterosexual couples, and the substantially higher mental illness and drug usage rates of the homosexuality community. In addition, the Wikipedia article on homosexuality fails to mention that the American Psychiatric Association issued a fact sheet in May of 2000 stating that "..there are no replicated scientific studies supporting a specific biological etiology for homosexuality."[29]

..and here's where I stop. You dear reader are welcome to plumb the depths of conservapedia in all it's glory, "citations" and all. I cannot stomach any more.

Big, small and indifferent

2009-12-09T01:55:00.000-08:00

I wouldn't qualify working in "the bigs" as a total disaster.. professionally.

However one of the biggest disasters to happen to a large organization like the one I work for happened a bit ago, a news making, lawsuit generating, fuck all snafu.

So I've entered the world of job candidacy again, going on interviews, proving my worth, etc.

Going to interviews is a chore no matter how you slice it.

After what I've been through, it's damn well like pulling teeth.

Let me explain.

I can't go to a single interview without answering the uncomfortable question "so.. I see you work at XXXXXX.. I read about that on Gizmodo (or insert other tech blog here).. so, what was that all about?"

To add insult to injury, I'm expected to answer all kinds of hypothetical questions, solve problems, etc -- the usual interview stuff -- knowing that the interviewer knows about the complete breakdown of the service that I in part was charged with the care of.

It's humiliating.

So, in order to relieve some stress, I'm currently fixing this at my old job:

me@sql01 [1:27am]:6:~> sh foo.sh
env env.c foo.sh ports.txt post.sh program.c program.o resolv.conf sudoers w00t.so.1.0 FreeBSD local r00t zeroday
by Kingcope
November 2009
env.c: In function 'main':
env.c:5: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function 'malloc'
env.c:9: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function 'strcpy'
env.c:11: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function 'execl'
/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: environment corrupt; missing value for
/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: environment corrupt; missing value for
/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: environment corrupt; missing value for
/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: environment corrupt; missing value for
/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: environment corrupt; missing value for
ALEX-ALEX
# id
uid=1001(me) gid=1001(me) euid=0(root) groups=1001(me),16(dba)

Take this job and shove it

2009-11-01T18:05:00.000-08:00

From: PHB
Sent: Saturday, October 31, 2009 12:10 PM
To: PHB Staff
Cc: PHB
Subject: please acknowledge and respond

Team

This job requires you to be reachable (EVEN IF NOT ON CALL) 24 x7.

Naturally you take vacation and go away but you need to notify someone.

I have tried 2 employees and an manager today with no response.

This is a condition of employment. - we are running a SERVICE!!!

Please acknowledge and commit to informing your Teams.

Thanks

PHB

Datacenter Confidential: A Memoir?

2009-10-17T23:21:00.000-07:00

Once the lawsuits have settled, I think I am going to write a book about working the worst outage in recent Internet history. An outage that is a real game changer.

Microsoft. Danger. Sidekick. October 2009.

Stargate: Universe drinking game!

2009-10-02T23:39:00.001-07:00

* use of jargon
* slowmotion + mood music
* gate dial / wormhole opened
* jive talk / wise cracking wacky ethnic person and/or alien

and that's just the cold open!

* any member of the original SG1 team on-screen, double for Jack
* "the hammond"
* beaming anyone up (double if to the hammond)
* radar (radio guy)
* space sex

Sun vendor-class-identifier a limited list

2009-09-25T22:46:00.000-07:00

It pisses me off to no end that this shit is not search-able on sun.com:

SUNW.SPARC-Enterprise # Sun M5000, M6000, M8000, M9000, etc
SUNW.Ultra-80 # Sun Enterprise 420R, V420R(?)
SUNW.Sun-Fire-T5220 # early model T5220
SUNW.Sun-Fire-T5120 # early model T5120/T5220
SUNW.SPARC-Enterprise-T5220 # late model T5220
SUNW.Sun-Fire-T1000 # early model T1000
SUNW.SPARC-Enterprise-T1000 # late model T1000
SUNW.Sun-Fire-T200 # AC200, DC200, Netra T200
SUNW.Sun-Fire-V125 # Netra V125R

Datacenter Confidential: Apartment Networks

2009-08-09T11:38:00.000-07:00

As I type, I am acting out the most stereotypical (and stereotypically lazy) Unix/network admin behavior in my very own home:

My Macbook in the living room is on the Internet via my Airport (yes, I love Apple), I have a terminal open to my other Macbook (the one that my job bought for me for work), which is sitting on top of a machine racked up in a 4-post 19" rack in my bedroom, which in turn is connected to a HP Procurve switch and a 4u, 16-bay, 2 3ware raided FreeBSD machine whose only purpose for the time being is to jumpstart a 1u Rackable PC that is destined to become my new home firewall.

Let me repeat..

inet -> airport -> personal mac, work mac ( -> raid box )

And just to gild the lily, I'm running the copy of data from my laptop onto my server in screen.

I'm such a nerd.

An urgent plea to peers in my age group with children..

2009-06-06T00:31:00.000-07:00

Much hash has been made lately of the "death of so-called Conservatism". Anyone who believes such nonsense is as deluded as Karl Rove when he speaks of the "permanent Republican majority."

I blurted this short missive out in response to an article on Salon.com (whose track record for delusion is worthy of note):

College Republicans and the Millenial Generation

I have faith that a new generation of right-wingers [are] waiting in the wings.

After all, feel-good "Positive Self Image" schooling has profoundly damaged a generation of children, producing selfish, narcissistic little sociopaths whose lack of critical thinking skills combined with their inflated egos are primed to gravitate to the self-affirming message of modern "conservatism".

We live in a nation that tolerates the shallow platitudes of charlatans like "doctor" Phil McGraw, and suffers the theatrics of smug, self-serving Ayn Rand freaks and fringe idiologues like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

It is only a matter of time before this new generation of brats, unable to tolerate challenges to their delusional sense of self worth, cling to the hysterical "me first" rhetoric of the privileged yet "victimized" right.

This is cult initiation on a mass scale. An army of "true believers". It's going to be ugly, believe me.

Let us ponder for a moment the tendency of people everywhere to remember the hits and forget the misses.

This is of course a extremely curt version of the concept of Confirmation Bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Confirmation bias, tied with the insipid and now discredited theory of child development and education that a positive self-image leads to better performance in school leads to a toxic combination of self-serving delusion and an intolerance toward challenges to ones ego; to wit, ones personal perceptions of truth tied to feelings of self worth, and critical analysis of fact becomes a personal attack against which individuals naturally resist.

Strategies for neutralizing any aspect of primary education that would be traditionally considered merit-based are literally dumbed-down: honor rolls are eliminated, competitive sports, even basic educational requirements in the form of "social promotion".

And parents who naturally want to believe that their child is special, by becoming doting "stage parents", actually help inhibit their child's development.

Without getting into too many of the painful details, I feel I made it through this gauntlet of meaningless "good feelings" by being truly tortured as a child; and while I have many scars and crosses to bear, I feel that I am at least more prepared than the majority of happy coddled children that preceded and followed me during this dark period (which is hopefully coming to a close).

In other words, I am better suited to win at an emotional or existential knife fight than the kid who grew up with Dr. Phil-esque platitudes that did not ever match their achievement.

So, parents, please.. please please please.. do not buy into this positive-image, law-of-attraction hooey.

The only way we learn is by making mistakes. And someone who thinks that they are incapable of being "bad" or "wrong" is someone without guilt, shame or empathy.

Feliz nuevo año

2009-01-06T22:40:00.000-08:00

2008, good riddance.

I have been the deadly (and blog unproductive) combination of sick and busy at work.

But, I am still alive. Oh, oh. So alive.

Statement of Beliefs

2008-11-07T22:15:00.000-08:00

Letter sent to my Republican cousin:

I agree with two major points you make:

(1) The Republican Party, as we know it, is at a crossroads

(2) We need to get out of Iraq

I think the best way to have this discussion is to start with a statement of my values; on the surface, they may seem antithetical to a lot of things that you believe deeply. In reality, however, I think that there always exists common ground caused by our common human experience. So, with that, I hope not to offend.

I came to become an atheist early in life. I came to this conclusion, this momentous conclusion, as a reaction to discussing God with my grandmother, your grand-aunt, Mildred Neill.

I was unable to reconcile the assertation that God loves all children (but judges adults), and the contradiction that God could not accept or love bi-racial children.

I understand this is not a modern or mainstream interpretation of Christianity, but a product of my grandmother growing up in the Deep South during the 1920s or 1930s.

However, it piqued my curiosity about religion and it seeded doubt in me that I was never able to shake.

That said, I respect and admire the good that religious institutions are capable of, and I envy the comfort that faith gives a great many people.

I spent many an hour trying to convince my friends of faith that they were wrong, and as many hours listening to them trying to convince me that I was wrong. I learned that sometimes you just have to agree to disagree.

But, if anyone says I am immoral, I will take great offence. I believe in and try to practice honesty, charity, justice and fairness in my daily life. And I hope that if there were an afterlife, Grandma Neill would approve.

That said, that I don't believe in a life after this one makes my every decision and action all the more crucial. The stakes are for me higher, having only one shot to get it right.

Therefor, it is ironic that I place a high premium on adherence to what could be considered values that echo the Gospel of Matthew:

* each and everyone of us is lucky to be alive
* we owe a debt to one another
* every person has a responsibility to lift up their peers and neighbors
* peace is the highest goal humanity can aspire to
* forgiveness is a virtue
* humility is a virtue
* every day is a struggle against our worse nature

Religions, governments, societies, communities and families are all organizational units whose structure exists in order to keep our lesser, baser instincts in check. None are perfect organs for keeping perfect order, and from time to time the pendulum of greed and selfishness versus community and charity swings back and forth and dances around the center, but can never reach it.

Like you, I have an idealized version of what being a Democrat represents. I am often let down by the failings of the Democratic party.

Like you, my political identity is a result of lifelong indoctrination.

My father's mother, Mildred Neill, worked as a labor activist and married a strike-breaker. Her first husband gave his life to the Labor Movement; he was shot dead right in front of her.

My father's father, who I never did meet, was also a labor activist.

To me, the Labor Movement is every bit as important as the Civil Rights movements for African Americans, and Sufferage for women. And now, the rights of our homosexual citizens are as important to me.

I believe that all people should be protected by government and law, because that is the purpose of law and of government.

I believe that 9/11 was not an act of war but an act of hate, and a crime. I believe that each person accused in that crime deserves the same rights you or I enjoy in a court of law.

I believe that a government that keeps secrets from its citizens, that spies on its citizens and then arbitrarily removes the rights of its citizens is fatally flawed. I believe such a government is exactly the kind of government our founding father's faught and died against.

I believe that buying a Ford Explorer made in Mexico and placing a "I Support The Troops" magnet on it while sending money to Saudi Arabia at the gas pump is an act of treason. American's should have made that car, it should be a low or no-fossil fuel vehicle, and the best way to support the troops is to demand that they not be sent out on an illegal, pre-emptive war.

I also believe we should have mandatory service requirements for all Americans; maybe we won't be so eager to go to war when the children of privilege risk being drafted.

So, that's a start.

Look forward to hearing back from you!

It's over

2008-11-05T01:13:00.000-08:00

But it's not over.

We need to all get together and push the progressive agenda.

The real work starts tomorrow.

2008 General Election Guide

2008-11-03T18:37:00.000-08:00

President of the United States - BARACK H. OBAMA, DEMOCRAT
United States House of Representatives California Congressional District 8 - CINDY SHEEHAN
California Superior Court Seat 12 - Gerardo Sandoval
California State Senate District 3 - Mark Leno
California State Assembly District 13 - Tom Ammiano
San Francisco Board of Supervisors

District 1 - Eric Mar
District 3 - (1) David Chiu, (2) Denise McCarthy, (3) Tony Gantner
District 4 - Dave Ferguson
District 5 - Ross Mirkarimi
District 7 - Sean Erlsbernd
District 9 - David Campos (1), Eric Quezada (2), Mark Sanchez (3)
District 11 - Jahn Avalos (1), Randy Knox (2), Julio Ramos (3)

San Francisco Board of Education - Sandra Fewer, Norman Yee, Barbara Lopez, Kimberly Wicoff

San Francisco Community College Board - Milton Marks, Chris Jackson, Bruce Wolfe

Bay Area Rapid Transit Board of Directors

District 7 - Lynette Sweet
District 9 - Tom Radulovich

State of California Ballot Initiatives

Proposition 1A - YES
Proposition 2 - YES
Proposition 3 - NO
Proposition 4 - NO
Proposition 5 - YES
Proposition 6 - NO
Proposition 7 - NO
Proposition 8 - ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY NOT NO NO NO 1000 TIMES NO
Proposition 9 - NO
Proposition 10 - NO
Proposition 11 - NO
Proposition 12 - YES

San Francisco Ballot Initiatives

Proposition A - YES
Proposition B - YES
Proposition C - NO
Proposition D - YES
Proposition E - NO
Proposition F - NO
Proposition G - YES
Proposition H - YES
Proposition I - NO
Proposition J - YES
Proposition K - YES
Proposition L - NO
Proposition M - YES
Proposition N - YES
Proposition O - YES
Proposition P - NO
Proposition Q - YES
Proposition R - NO
Proposition S - NO
Proposition T - YES
Proposition U - YES
Proposition V - NO

Geez, SF, we were about to run out of fucking letters.

Incredible Press Conference

2008-11-02T21:39:00.001-08:00

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/11/2/84051/4140/170/649703

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rfea8iEGNw

"I have close family members and friends who are a member of the gay and lesbian community. Those folks include my daughter Lisa, as well as members of my personal staff.

"I want for them the same thing that we all want for our loved ones—for each of them to find a mate whom they love deeply and who loves them back; someone with whom they can grow old together and share life's experiences.

"And I want their relationships to be protected equally under the law. In the end, I couldn't look any of them in the face and tell them that their relationship—their very lives—were any less meaningful than the marriage I share with my wife Rana.

If the GOP hopes to survive into the future, they'll need more of this. That's certainly the case in California, but that will also be the case nationwide in the midterm. A party that has built its power by demonizing government should understand that advocating for government meddling in people's personal lives is a long-term political loser.

I have not been so touched by an admission of heartfelt, honest humanity from a party that has become known to be antithetical to my ideas of fairness and equality since family friend and stand-up guy Senator George Voinovich broke rank with his party to stand up against the nomination of John Bolton for United States Ambassador to the United Nations many years ago.

Recent history has vindicated Senator Voinovich, and Bolton's tenure was a disaster from the start to the finish.

The question of gay rights in this country is as important an issue as any other we can grapple with at this most important pivot point in American politics -- we can either damage our reputation forever more as being the world's moral leader (whether or not this was ever in fact true), or we can tick over the domino and create a wave of tolerance.

Dick Cheney was not brave enough to publicly defend his own daughter when his own party began to ramp up the most hateful rhetoric we've seen in American politics in decades; against gays, against civil rights, against the enduring concepts of the rights and privileges of citizenship and of merely being alive, against of the downtrodden, poor, ill, weakest and neediest of society.

To my own mind it is easy to forget the human face of my ideological opponents in the face of such craven politicians like Cheney.

But the courage and leadership Jerry Sander's showed today is truly something that gives me great comfort as we come to the end of a vicously fought election cycle.

And if he ever runs for Governor, I might yet vote for him.

--
http://revolt.com/

I don't want to start any blashpemous rumours

2008-10-31T04:32:00.001-07:00

I'm surprised no one has picked this up here, then again, the field is ripe with the fetid fruit sown of good ole fashioned American religious in(s)anity:

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2008/10/30/obama_hell/index.html

Columnist: If you vote for Obama, you're going to hell

Still can't choose between John McCain and Barack Obama? Well, good news -- WorldNetDaily's Janet Porter has just made your decision much easier. Porter's latest column warns that a vote for Obama is irreconcilable with the Christian faith, and that those who do choose to vote Democratic this year have a terrible punishment awaiting them.

"To all those who name the name of Christ who plan to willfully disobey Him by voting for Obama, take warning. Not only is our nation in grave danger, according to the Word of God, so are you," Porter wrote.

What kind of danger are so many of us in? The really bad kind:

Be forewarned: If you willfully disobey God on life and marriage because of race or false hope for the economy, you will usher in the kind of change that brought the Soviet Union to collapse.

As the saying goes, if you talk to God, you're religious. If he talks back, you're schizophrenic. This Porter person appears to just be a daft c*nt.

And one final thought: there is the famous story of a faithful man who finds himself stuck on his roof during a great flood. One boat comes along, and the boat offers to take him to safety. "No," says the man, "I have faith that the Lord will protect me." Another boat, and the same response, and another, and a helicopter.

Finally, the flood waters carry the man away to his death.

Upon entering the gates of Heaven, the man says to God, "O Lord, I feel blessed to be here. I have only one question, why did you not save me from the flood?"

God says, "save you? I sent three boats and a helicopter!"

If there was a God, clearly she's an Obama supporter.

Why Liberalism is still important

2008-10-24T03:04:00.001-07:00

From AP:

Islamic clerics in Malaysia rule to ban tomboys
By JULIA ZAPPEI Associated Press Writer

Oct 23rd, 2008 | KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- Malaysia's main body of Islamic clerics has issued an edict banning tomboys in the Muslim-majority country, ruling that girls who act like boys violate the tenets of Islam, an official said Friday.

The National Fatwa Council forbade the practice of girls behaving or dressing like boys during a meeting Thursday in northern Malaysia, said Harussani Idris Zakaria, the mufti of northern Perak state, who attended the gathering.

Harussani said an increasing number of Malaysian girls behave like tomboys, and that some of them engage in homosexuality. Homosexuality is not explicitly banned in Malaysia, but it is effectively illegal under a law that prohibits sex acts "against the order of nature."

Harussani said the council's ruling was not legally binding because it has not been passed into law, but that tomboys should be banned because their actions are immoral.

"It doesn't matter if it's a law or not. When it's wrong, it's wrong. It is a sin," Harussani told The Associated Press. "Tomboy (behavior) is forbidden in Islam."

Under the edict, girls are forbidden to sport short hair and dress, walk and act like boys, Harussani said. Boys should also not act like girls, he said.

"They must respect God. God created them as boys, they must behave like boys. God created them as girls, they must act like girls," he said.

Council chairman Abdul Shukor Husin said the ruling was prompted by recent cases of young women behaving like men and indulging in homosexuality, according to the national news agency Bernama. He did not elaborate.

Malaysian media have reported on recent incidents of school bullying among girls, which have been caught on film and circulated on the Internet. In one film, some girls are seen beating up another girl in a bathroom.

A well-known Malaysian Muslim actress caused an uproar last year when she shaved her head bald for a film. Harussani and other muftis urged Muslims not to watch the movie, arguing that the actress had violated Islam by making herself look like a man.

"Muallaf," or "the convert," is scheduled for release in Singapore next month, but no date has been set for its release in Malaysia.

Muslims make up some 60 percent of Malaysia's 27 million people, and are subject to Islamic laws and the council's edicts, even if the rulings have not been enshrined in national or Shariah law.

It was not immediately clear what kind of punishment awaited those who violate the tomboy edict, or "fatwa." Malays generally follow the council's "fatwas" out of deference, but violators rarely get into trouble unless the edict is incorporated into national or Shariah law.

There are two things that I feel it is important to point out here.

First of all, the conservative movement in America has been dead since (if not before) President Ronald Reagan's inauguration. Exactly when it died, and why, is up for debate.

By pointing this fact out I am making an honest and urgent plea to my friends who consider themselves conservatives to take an honest look at what passes for "the Right Wing" in America today, and to asses the true goals of the movement.

Second, rulings like this are the inevitable direction that an unchecked authoritarian/fascist form of government will take, regardless of the underlying pretense of ideology.

Again, if you take an honest and frankly non-partisan look at the direction American politics have taken ever since we realized the unfettered growth in power following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (itself a sad semi-colon in our ill-conceived transition from a social republic to an imperial actor), you can only conclude that (1) America, in spite of the wise advise of its founders, has undertaken a course of action in the last 120 years where it has become a de facto empire and (2) imperial policy has escalated to the point where unilateral intervention and Exceptionalism is considered mainstream.

All of these trends are an indicator of humanity's affinity toward order and conformity. Humans desire to shore up power and to self-identify as a member of a more powerful group. Most people will identify with being somewhere in the hump the the bell-curve of human society that values structure and order in their lives, work, government and society in general.

On the other hand our government in the US was designed specifically to throw up roadblocks in the way of those who would consolidate power against the best interests of the people in general, as had been the case in the Georgian period of British history.

That said, one has to wonder if it is any coincident that the most notorious empires were also the most oppressive at the height of their power: Victorian England, the Spanish Inquisition at the time of Isabella, Japan under Hirohito, Germany under Hitler and Rome, which would like the rest of this list eventually collapse and fail.

The freedoms we enjoy in modern democratic societies owes a great deal to a famous sexual deviant: Henry VIII.

Even after beheading one wife after the next, old Hank 8 could not have realized what he had started. Sure, everyone likes to cite Martin Luther the German founder of Protestantism for a variety of things: breaking from the Catholic hegemony, starting the Renaissance, starting the explosion of religious freedom that would ultimately draw a line to his namesake, Martin Luther King Jr.

Nonsense, I say.

It was the serial "monogamist" Henry VIII who truly set in motion the course of events that would culminate in "The Declaration of Independence." His defiance of the neo-Roman Empire, controlled by the theocracy of the Catholic church, shook European politics, trade and "group identity" to its core.

It is unlikely that without Henry's help the "Enlightenment" period would have happened a mere century later.

Without the Enlightenment fueled by French philosophers and revolutionaries America as we know her today simply would not exist.

Skipping forward 200 or so years we have a Republican party that proudly boasts that it "campaigns against the 1960s" and will for decades to come. But what the Republican party in it's current incarnation really campaigns against is Civil Rights, Labor Rights and "social democracy."

Conservatism has been long dead.

The sheer hypocrisy of a right-wing, so-called "conservative" movement who purports to value small and unobtrusive government while taking firm and obstructionist stances against the rights of women, gays and workers should be apparent to any critical thinker. The same right-wing that flies the false banner of "conservatism" does exactly the opposite of the definition of "conservative" in pursuing it's aggressive foreign policy aims.

Sadly the disease is not confined to the right-wing. America has, over time, quietly accepted it's extreme position in the world theater to the point where her next president, Senator Barack Obama, is often incorrectly labeled as a "liberal" or "socialist."

On the subjective scale of world politics Obama finds himself slightly right of center. Senator John McCain on the extreme authoritarian war mongering right of that scale and Governor Sarah Palin is off the charts -- inviting comparisons to authoritarians who were, as monstrous as they may have been, at least smarter than she.

If you are still with me I am sure you are wondering what a fatwah against being a "tom boy" has to do with either US, global politics or imperialism.

This decree is a power-grab -- one that has the effect of oppressing the free will of an individual. In California a serious effort is afoot to, in spite of judicial review of the state constitution, deny equal citizenship to homosexuals.

On a much larger and far more serious scale the United States has decided (or rather had, long ago) that it has the right to act unilaterally and aggressively; imposing it's will on others not because any sort of consensus was reached between the US and is allies, but because the US is peerless in it's military might: to wit, because we can.

We can deny gays the right to marry. We can invade Iraq. We should not be surprised when Iran (sanely) moves in a defensive manner. Regardless of the actual fact of whether or not they are pursuing a weapons program, the history between our two countries is such that it should be no surprise to anyone that Iran has a legitimate basis with which to fear and suspect the US -- yet ironically we are told in the US that we should fear Iran, and are told by our most vocal chest-thumping war cheerleaders how Iran is an enemy of freedom, a repressive regime and a terrorist threat.

In short-con games like three-card Monte this is called misdirection.

Second to Israel the citizens of Iran probably enjoy equal or better freedoms than Egyptians, and certainly more than Saudis. Yet all four have major flaws: Israel being a democracy only for her Jewish citizens, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and certainly Iran being theocratic states who oppress women (worthy of note: oppression of women is much more harsh in US ally Saudi Arabia).

Mind you, if Iraq or Saudi Arabian citizens were given true enfranchisement today, the results would likely be ugly. In contrast, Iranians enjoy a greater degree of democratic control of their government.

Imagine what could have been if we had not interfered in 1953 by installing the Shah against the will of the Iranian people and setting in motion a sequence of events what would eventually lead to the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

I want the US to be a beacon of freedom now like 17th and 18th Century France was, but I cannot in good faith say that we are that.

If we continue to choose to elect people like John McCain or Sarah Palin, we drift further away from the intention of the founders of this nation.

If we elect to ban one group of people the privilege of marriage, the civilized world will roundly mock us for being like the clerics of Malaysia who have banned "tom boys."

Liberalism is a rejection of these unneeded incursions on our personal freedoms and an endorsement of the potential of humanity to overcome it's baser Draconian instincts of endless conflict, control and order.

Oppressive societies may have produced Beethoven, Darwin, Sarte, Washington, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, Jr., Buddha, Jesus, Rosa Parks, Einstein and others, but to drift back towards authoritarianism or fascism disrespects their combined sacrifices.

Obama/Biden 2008

National Sociopath

2008-10-09T16:54:00.001-07:00

I see no one (well, hardly anyone) in the Obama camp calling for anywhere near the sort of violence to be visited on Bush, Cheney or McCain and Palin.

There is a certain small minority calling for an organized campaign to place Karl Rove, John Yoo, David Addington, Roberto Gonzalez, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and were they not under the protection of the Secret Service (SS anyone? no, too far?), Bush and Cheney under citizen's arrest for their war crimes.

I am among that minority.

..and if I were for the death penalty, which I certainly oppose, I would say that for some of them "hangin' is too good".

But I am a radical who believes in crazy things like if you are responsible for the unjust deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians you are a war criminal. That if you eavesdrop on millions of innocent people without a legal court order, you are a criminal. That if you peddle influence and deal in cronyism, you certainly have no place in a supposed democratic form of government but instead should oversee some banana republic.

At best, George W Bush is a two-bit, self-aggrandizing hack; a character much like Forest Whittaker's King Idi Amin, minus the actual fortitude to personally dispatch his enemies (Bush hides behind a military he himself "served" only by the loosest interpretation of the word). At worst, Bush has on his hands a body count that rivals the worst monsters of the 20th Century, all for the grave and criminal folly of his Daddy-complex driven campaign to leave his mark (stain) on history.

In that sense, Bush is more blood thirsty, more psychotic and more dangerous an animal than Amin was. As examples of human beings, I think both are fairly deplorable.

What I find alarming, getting back to McCain, is that we have (thankfully, according to www.fivethirtyeight.com, less than a 1 out of 10 chance) the ability within our sights to elect another maniac with a paternal inferiority complex whose campaign is, as Greenwald pointed out, increasingly characterized by inciting to riot as stump speech.

Does America have Daddy issues? Senator Obama's wasn't there for him, but it didn't turn him into a sociopath. Wherein lies the cause of this American National Sociopathy (forgive the pun, Godwin)? Because that is what American exceptionalism is in a nutshell: sociopathy on a national scale.

Barack Obama - Ready to Serve

2008-09-10T13:09:00.000-07:00

Forwarding from Writers for Obama, memo by Wade Hudson:

[NOTE: After receiving lots of very positive feedback to my "One-pager?" post last night and some suggested changes, I've rewritten it a bit and reformatted it. If you want a one-page Word doc that you can print and distribute in your campaign work, email me and I will send it to you. Feel free to remove my name if you wish. Also, I've posted it on my blog at http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/wadehudson/gG5LY7 if you want to comment there or refer people to that version.]

Barack Obama: Ready to Lead
by Wade Hudson wadehudson@progressiveresourcecatalog.org>

Given his temperament, track record, and life-long commitment to public service, the American people can trust that if elected President Barack Obama will run the Executive Office effectively, with the common good foremost in his mind. He will also use the “bully pulpit” of the Presidency to rally ordinary people to counter the power of the special interests and their lobbyists. He will continue to inspire us to care for each other and work together to improve ourselves and the larger community.
We know this because of how he has run his campaign.

This long, arduous effort has tested him severely and through it all, he has demonstrated that he can manage a large operation with great skill and grace.
He has responded to moments of pressure calmly and intelligently.
He brings people together and forges consensus.
He inspires and holds people accountable without being harsh.
He makes decisions thoughtfully, after taking time to listen to others and reflect on what they have to say.
His first decision after winning the nomination, selecting Joe Biden as his running mate, illustrates his judgment.
He knows how to lead, without being authoritarian.
He’s willing to compromise when it’s necessary to make progress, while consistently holding to his core principles.
He’s able to cooperate with others, including other countries, while maintaining an essential strength.
He recognizes the need to limit the arbitrary, top-down power of the President.
His campaign has been based on building the largest, grassroots organization in the history of U.S. elections, thereby empowering citizens.

John McCain, on the other hand, ran a chaotic campaign until he brought in a protégé of Karl Rove to tighten the ship.

Rove and his people know how to run nasty political campaigns, but as demonstrated by the George Bush Administration, they don’t know how to manage the federal government.
Moreover, McCain has shown that his explosive temper makes him ill suited to be President.
A fellow Republican, Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi, who has known him for more than three decades, said, “The thought of McCain being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.” (“GOP Senators Reassess Views About McCain: His Old Foes Still Wary Of His Pugnacious Style,” Paul Kane, Washington Post, February 4, 2008, A01.)
McCain has admitted that he often makes decisions rashly and suffers the consequences later.
His selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, made in only a few days at most without proper investigation or public discussion beforehand, demonstrates his tendency to make decisions secretly and unilaterally.
His early cheerleading for the occupation of Iraq, even before President Bush had talked about it publicly, reveals an inclination to rely excessively on unilateral military action.
Once in office, McCain would surely continue the Bush pattern of centralizing more power in the hands of the President, inevitably leading to more abuse and the violation of fundamental liberties and human rights.
McCain’s campaign is resorting to the same old, divisive, slash-and-burn tactics that the Republicans have used for years.

The choice is clear.

Unsurpringly, McCain didn't do very well at Linux World 2008

2008-08-24T11:58:00.000-07:00

I think the final tally was something like 5-to-1 Obama over McCain. Mind you, Linux World 2008 was in downtown San Francisco, which may be the "bluest" city in the world (eat your heart out, Eugene, Oregon!).

What is it? Open Voting Consortium has designed and created a secure, open sourced version of the electronic voting machine. These run Linux, but I do not see any reason why they couldn't also support Free or Net BSD, Open Solaris or some other platform (even MS Windows or OS X).

Instead of paying $4000 or more for a Diebold manufactured proprietary and closed-architecture voting machine, these machines run on commodity hardware with a price tag of roughly $400 or less.

And unlike their proprietary counterparts, the OVC machine provides a paper trail with a securely signed receipt.

More over, the ultimate value of this system is that peer review is possible for anyone who cares to download the code and read it themselves.

Unlike today, to borrow a phrase from a movie, where we have "TOO MANY SECRETS".

Liberal Media

2008-08-23T14:00:00.000-07:00

Pass it on:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/08/23/politics/animal/main4376842.shtml

Fournier Is At It Again

By Steve Benen

(Political Animal) FOURNIER IS AT IT AGAIN.... The latest piece from Ron Fournier, the AP's Washington bureau chief and the man responsible for directing the wire service's coverage of the presidential campaign, on Joe Biden joining the Democratic ticket, is drawing a fair amount of attention this morning. More importantly, McCain campaign staffers are pushing it fairly aggressively to other reporters, in large part because it mirrors the Republican line with minimal variation.

Who is Ron Fournier?

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Fournier

Ron Fournier is the acting Washington bureau chief for Associated Press (AP).^[1] He formerly served as the AP's chief political writer and subsequently as "online political editor".

In mid-2006, Fournier was a founding member and editor in chief of the online political and social networking community HOTSOUP.com.^[2]^[3] Fournier returned to the AP in March 2007 "in the newly created role of Online Political Editor". In a memo announcing his return, AP executive editor Kathleen Carroll stated that "his primary responsibilities will be developing new approaches to political and election coverage online, working with AP's news, multimedia and revenue groups."^[4]

Fournier is listed with the speakers agency, Leading Authorities, as costing $5,000 to $10,000 for east coast speaking engagements and double that for west coast engagements.^[5]

Not bad, but Fournier has his eyes on a bigger prize:

http://www.americablog.com/2008/07/ap.html

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/12149.html

Before Ron Fournier returned to The Associated Press in March 2007, the veteran political reporter had another professional suitor: John McCain’s presidential campaign.

In October 2006, the McCain team approached Fournier about joining the fledgling operation, according to a source with knowledge of the talks. In the months that followed, said a source, Fournier spoke about the job possibility with members of McCain’s inner circle, including political aides Mark Salter, John Weaver and Rick Davis.

Salter, who remains a top McCain adviser, said in an e-mail to Politico that Fournier was considered for “a senior advisory role” in communications.

Fournier turned the job down, and why wouldn't he if he can bill out at $10,000 an hour speaking in front of elite audiences on the East coast or $20,000 on the West, but with an Obama campaign that is showing signs of fatigue, Fournier may be back to considering taking a senior post in a McCain Administration. Which is why it comes as no surprise today that Fournier has penned this AP wire piece, now well above the fold on most online media (I saw it on Salon this morning):

http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/2008/08/23/D92O6OHG0_cvn_analysis/index.html

Analysis: Obama's pick highlights his weaknesses

By RON FOURNIER Associated Press Writer
Aug 23rd, 2008 | DENVER -- The candidate of change went with the status quo.

In picking Sen. Joe Biden to be his running mate, Barack Obama sought to shore up his weakness — inexperience in office and on foreign policy — rather than underscore his strength as a new-generation candidate defying political conventions.

"I searched for a leader who is ready to step in and be president," said Obama, a transformational political figure who nonetheless faces criticism about whether he has enough experience to be president.

He picked a 35-year veteran of the Senate — the ultimate insider — rather than a candidate from outside Washington, such as Govs. Tim Kaine of Virginia or Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas; or from outside his party, such as Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska; or from outside the mostly white male club of vice presidential candidates. Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't even make his short list.

Fournier's objectivity is highly suspect, to put it very midly. He has access to the highest levels of policy makers in the Bush White House: none other than Karl Rove himself, to whom in an exchange over coverage of the war on terror and Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch Fournier said "Keep up the fight." Fournier certainly is very very chummy with Republican movers and shakers, so chummy he even brought Senator McCain doughnuts. How nice?

Politics and Religion Redux - Its going to be a long road to November

2008-08-16T19:07:00.000-07:00

I am ambivalent about this commercial, but stripped of its religious underpinning, I agree with (and who wouldn't) the underlying argument.

In the 1990s, especially after the 1994 mid-terms and Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America", the hegemony of the right wing and the religious right became iron-firm (although it has its roots with Reagan, a draft-dodging Hollywood actor and sportscaster who beat last centuries most authentically religious president, Jimmy Carter, partially by appealing to "family values" conservatives).

The net effect of the past 31 years of religious rule in America has arguably been a disaster for many people. The effect of the cynicism of "new" Republican rule and their systematic and intentional bungling of services can been seen on a daily basis in San Francisco, a city that is understandably liberal. Reagan's dismantling of services for the poor, the addicted and the mentally ill has now become my problem, as a San Francisco resident and tax payer, and not society's at large. At the same time, instead of investing in harm reduction, his pill-addicted wife eschewed drugs with the catch-phrase "Just Say No" on national TV, a campaign roundly and rightly mocked by its intended target audience (again, me) in the 1980s. Many billions of dollars were spent ineffectively battling an un-winnable drug war as drug use, drug-related incarceration, crime and the AIDS epidemic skyrocketed.

The United States now imprisons a higher percentage of its population than any other industrialized nation, over 6 times as much as the European average. The complexion of inmates is overwhelmingly darker compared to the general population. These things are all related: incarceration, the AIDS crisis, the war on the poor, the war on drugs, the dismantling and privatization of government services. We the people are charged with the duty of due process, yet the job of handling our swelling prison population, rightly a function of government, is handed off to private corporate contractors. For profit.

Who started the political war of attrition between Republicans and Democrats in the 1990s is up for debate. There is no question that Bill Clinton, and the Democratic Leadership Council, practiced a form of hard-ball politics that was a formalized, methodical answer to Richard M. Nixon with his "enemies lists", win-at-all-costs tactics. Except the intervening years separating Watergate and 1992 were rife with lessons to be learned, the biggest: don't get caught.

Sexual dalliances have always been a part and parcel of politics, but it came to its apex, or nadir in recent decades, peaking with President Clinton's impeachment proceedings. Sex and betrayal resonates with every talking primate on this marble: every cheated-on wife, and every wandering eye possessing husband, wary of his wife's wrath. The same decade that brought us the literal dismemberment of Joey Buttafuoco, and the sex-rage killings of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman also brought us Monica Lewinsky and Ginnifer Flowers, and an alpha-male president whose predilections tended toward the sensual unlike the Current Occupant and his sociopath's glee for mass homicide and fascism.

In the name of Family Values, our just and righteous leaders like adulterer Newt Gingrich and homosexual Larry Craig, Bill Clinton must be made to answer for "hav[ing] sex with that woman."

Remember, these are the people so busy locking up blacks for smoking plants and plant derivatives White Society has told them they are not allowed to have that they have to sell off the burden of running prisons to private industry. Small-government, family values conservatism using your tax money to enrich for-profit enterprise whose job it is to incarcerate people suffering from a disease.

Returning to religion, the Gospel of Matthew is one of four canonical doctrines related to Jesus Christ in the Christian faith, and it is the one that most vociferously promotes the idea that followers in Christ have as their core and solemn duty in life to emulate Jesus in humility, charity, faith and good works. Matthew records Jesus' sermon on the mount, considered by most to be the core tenants of Christian faith just like Moses and the revelation of the Ten Commandments is central to Jewish dogma. In practice, however, the devil is in the details.

The religious right openly and loudly identifies themselves as Christian (with some strange bedfellows recently from the Zionist Jewish far-right), and largely Baptist. Fire and brimstone baptists. Shortly, "bible-thumpers." But all this self-identification with Christianity begins to unravel upon inspection. Instead of healing the sick and helping the poor, the Religious Right in America is more concerned with GGA - Guns, God and Ammo, and preventing reproductive rights or any advancement in rights for homosexuals (even though at least one of Jesus' disciples was himself gay, psst, it was Paul). Jail, not forgiveness for sinners, and bombs for the Commies and later the Terrorists. You could turn the other cheek, but only while reloading your assault weapon, while riding shotgun in a Hummer blasting through Falluja, spreading Motherfucking Freedumb Uhmerikan Style to the Hajis.

John Edwards cheated on his wife, who has cancer and probably not long to live. I do not know the details but assuming it was done in secret, without Elizabeth's knowledge or consent, that was a dastardly, selfish, cruel and, frankly, asshole thing to do. Perhaps it was John Edwards' way of moving on in the face of a terminally ill spouse, who knows. Rush Limbaugh blamed the victim, Elizabeth Edwards, by insinuating that she was a know it all ball buster, based on no evidence at all. Rush Limbaugh is the darling of the Religious Right. Knowing nothing at all about John and Elizabeth Edwards' private lives, he accused her of driving her husband away for the crime of being smarter than him.

As deplorable as it is, it bears repeating: Rush Limbaugh thinks it is the fault of Elizabeth Edwards for her husband's admitted infidelity.

Turn the other cheek. Charity. Faith. Uplift the poor and care for the sick.

It is remarkable that Rush Limbaugh is in possession of absolutely none of these qualities. He promotes family values and has himself been divorced multiple times over. He dares to uphold the sanctity of marriage and himself has broken the vow "till death do us part" multiple times, supposedly made in earnest and before an all seeing, all knowing and perfect God. The only sick that he seems to want to heal is his own dope-sickness by chasing the Oxycontin dragon.

John McCain's infidelity is a matter of public record and he, like Edwards, has admitted to it. Yet somehow when Democrats cheat on their spouses it is bigger news than when Republicans do, as if Democrats were some how more vulnerable to moral interpitude. But the party that values divorce court as much as it values homosexual trysts in public toilets, mass murder and the privatization of re-enslaving the Black poor in America as prisoners of a false and unending war on drugs has not a leg to stand on.

So, I call fair game. Let us all put are cards on the table, or, as someone famously said, lets let our chickens come back to roost. Is this a truly zero-sum game?

Well, I for one would prefer to be lead by someone who takes to heart the Gospel of Matthew, who loves the sinner and hates the sin. Maybe such a person will treat the ill instead of lock them up. Maybe such a person will sit at the table, across from our adversaries, to open up a dialog; thus to him offering the un-struck cheek.

Maybe America deserves a president who is not a murdering sociopath, or fully of envy, lust, greed, avarice. Nobody is perfect, certainly not Barack Obama, but I want to believe that he is not a criminal psychopath. I'm just afraid that America is incapable of electing someone who isn't.

The Obama Nation

2008-08-14T21:25:00.000-07:00

Folks,

As you know, Jerome R. Corsi of "Unfit to Serve: Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" infamy has penned another precious tome to fuel the pulpy conflagration that is this election cycle, namely, "The Obama Nation". This screed is poised to overtake, if it has not already, the #1 slot in the New York Times Nonfiction Bestsellers list, which is ironic as by most reasonable accounts the book is a work of fiction.

Never mind that many book stores have received bulk orders of the book, some by the palette. Surely not all of the book's readership is also fictional. Yet, Corsi has enjoyed a plethora of media coverage, bolstered by the "fact" of his latest opus' "status" as a top selling book. If this offends your sense of fairness, Nation, you are not alone.

The Corsi commentator conundrum requires containment. But what can be done? As you know, I would never, never, never recommend that we, as Obama supporters, take the tack of hitting below the belt of Senator McCain, a multi-millionaire senior in favor of privatizing Social Security and an admitted adulterer whose foreign policy aims and dim view of Constitutional protections are in every way as bad or worse than the Current Occupant. If Obama represents a promise of a new kind of politics, then we as supporters must also rise up to this high standard and come up with a creative solution to the Corsi problem that builds up, but doesn't tear down.

Let's return to alarming popularity and visibility of Corsi and his new book; as I said, not everyone who bought it has bought it by the palette -- some readers genuinely agree with Corsi, or are at least vulnerable to his book's message. Who are these people, and why are they vulnerable?

You, like me, probably have a family member, a relative or a friend (or acquaintance) who is either pledged their intention of voting for Senator McCain or has not made up their mind. You, like me, are worried that Corsi's arguments may hold sway: Obama is this, that and the other thing. He can't be trusted. He's inexperienced. He's too liberal. He's not liberal enough. He's too black. He's not black enough. He's a recipient of affirmative action. He's an elitist.

I put my thinking cap on and I thought to myself, "golly, there have got to be a few people who have already contributed the maximum amount to the campaign.. even still, there are people who can afford $15, $30 or $60 for a flashy, one day event to do something positive to help out the Obama campaign even if they haven't maxed out.. and gee, self, there has got to be a way that regular people, not pundits or commentators or mainstream media infotainment talking heads can help someone who is not already an Obama supporter get to know our nominee a little better."

That's when the light bulb went on: bingo!

I have family all over this country. I have a lot of Red State Dyed in the Wool Republican cousins and aunts and uncles in Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio. I have friends in the reddest enclaves of Orange County. I personally own a copy of "Dreams From My Father", and so do most members of my immediate family. I could buy copies of that book and send it to three, five or ten Republican relatives or friends, but that wouldn't offset Corsi's book.

What if I got ten people to do the same thing? That's potentially 100 copies of "Dreams From My Father".

What about 100? 1000? What if the idea got out there, on the Internet, and it spread like a smile, or like sunshine at daybreak? A hundred thousand copies of the book? A million?

On August 28, 2008, Senator Barack Obama will accept the Democratic National Convention nomination for President of the United States.

http://www.demconvention.com/events/

I saw we use that day to introduce our candidate to those who are on the fence, who are unsure, or even who swear they never will vote for him -- especially to them! -- and undo some of the damage that Jerome R. Corsi has done exercising his right to freedom of expression, his right to his opinion, and show him the real power of The Obama Nation.

On August 28, 2008, give an undecided or McCain supporter relative or friend the gift of Senator Obama's book "Dreams From My Father."

Are you with me?

--
http://revolt.com/

The Change You Deserve

2008-08-10T11:21:00.000-07:00

New Republican sloganfunny videosFunnyOrDie.com

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Of course, its not just Republicans. Harold Ford Jr, head of the Republicans in Democrats clothing "Democratic Leadership Council" famously said "the constitution doesn't poll well."

If that doesn't sum up the failure of the American body politic, and its constituency, surely the flat "Money Bomb" of the Accountability Now PAC is further evidence.

On the entire Internet, only 2300 people could be bothered to contribute money to be used to hold politicians feet to the fire for their failures on FISA, the Global War on Terror, torture and so on. On the anniversary of Richard M Nixon's resignation, and here, 34 years later, we collectively shrug.

Shameful.

Once again, and near Alexandria, our empire feeds it's coffers with foreign riches. Abroad, too many of us for too long have been tempted to shield ourselves under the banner SPQA - Senatus Populus Que Americanus.

Datacenter Confidential: Working in the Bigs

2008-07-21T21:15:00.000-07:00

Part of being a good, career-minded systems administrator is knowing when to hold 'em, and knowing when to fold 'em. Knowing when to walk away, and knowing when to run.

I quit my last gig in March. Part of the calculus of leaving a job which pays 6 figures in the Bay Area is having another one lined up; quickly. With rent at $2100/month, money disappears very fast if you don't jump from one job to another, and without the safety net I once had in previous jobs, I needed to cover my bases.

My last day at the former job was on that Friday, and the next Monday I started at the new job.

Initially, when talks began with my soon-to-be new employer, I was jumping from a faltering start-up with budget and management problems to a well-funded, well established start-up on the cusp of a possibly very lucrative public offering. But, during the vetting process, an industry giant came along and gobbled up the company which was courting me -- temporarily making me weigh the implications: working for a large organization, pro- and con.

I started the new job mere weeks before the closing of the buyout deal. I stepped off the precipice. I was committed. Now, I was playing in the big league.

And here's what I'm building out, now:

And..:

And..:

(That's my man G in the foreground)..

And of course we want to avoid doing this:

(That's famous internets villain "invalid media" in the foreground. Ph34r.)

I told you so

2008-07-19T14:15:00.001-07:00

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/07/19/law/index.html

Blanket criminal immunity will be granted before President Bush leaves office, not that it is needed because Democrats in Congress are too spineless to pursue investigations of lawbreakers in government and big business. Record numbers of Americans are imprisoned every day for non-violent offenses; but to enforce the laws of the land on government officials is politically verboten -- especially against the President; to paraphrase Richard M Nixon, "if the president does it, it's not illegal."

It may never be known why Senator Obama voted for the FISA bill forever closing the doors on any sort of accountability for lawbreaking by officials and business. My theory is that the DLC, party leadership and wheelers and dealers in the Democratic Party extorted the vote out of Obama by threatening less than enthusiastic support should their own duplicity come to light. Warrantless wiretapping, the fraudulent causus belli, and torture are all programs enabled and abetted by criminal complicity not only of Republicans but also Democrats, who have "controlled" Congress since 2006 (if by control you mean capitulate to every demand made by the White House).

While it is imperitive that Senator Obama be elected President over John McCain, truly a terrifying prospect, once in office it is our job as citizens to hold his feet to the fire and require a sea-change among the Democratic Party elites, and politics in general.

All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction; to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community, and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans, digested by common councils and modified by mutual interests.

We have come a long way since those words, spoken by our first president, warned us of falling into the very trap we are mired in. Or, to quote DLC chairman Harold Ford, "the Constitution doesn't poll well." A politician who can make this claim and still expect to have a career indicates a system rotten from the inside out, putrid and useless. Yet, no political capital is expended making this shocking admission, instead, it is de rigeure in American politics.

http://www.accountabilitynowpac.com/ -- pledge a donation today.

DiFi - Liar

2008-07-16T22:46:00.000-07:00

I know this is a little off topic, but I wanted to share the wisdom of our great Senator, Diane Feinstein, and my response.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Christopher
Date: Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 12:09 PM
Subject: Re: U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein responding to your message
To: senator@feinstein.senate.gov, Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right <SenatorObama-PleaseVoteAgainstFISA@groups.barackobama.com>

Honorable Senator Diane Feinstein and staff,

I am not an idiot, and I know this is a false dichotomy and a lie:

If the Senate did not pass this bill, Congress would have been faced with two options:
oExtending the temporary surveillance bill passed last August; or
oPassing no legislation, meaning that surveillance on specific terrorist groups would expire and our Nation would be laid bare.

Please allow me to congratulate you on the dubious distinction of having earned yourself an uphill battle for re-election when your current term ends, Senator Feinstein.

With all due respect, and I sincerely mean this, Senator, you are a liar. All I ask is for a government who will not lie to me, especially about something as crucial as my security.

I do not appreciate being lied to.

I plan on spending as much time, money and energy as I can muster to ensure your defeat by a candidate of my choosing who will not make the same mistake.

Respectfully,

Christopher
San Francisco, California

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 11:10 AM, <senator@feinstein.senate.gov> wrote:

Dear Mr. XXXX:

I very much appreciate your concerns on the recent legislation to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA). I would like to take this opportunity to explain to you my point of view. As you may know, the legislation passed the Senate on July 9, 2008 by a vote of 69 to 28 and was signed into law on July 10.

I have served on the Senate Intelligence Committee for seven and a half years and I take the responsibility extremely seriously. I believe the United States continues to face serious threats and there are many who seek to do harm to our country. The first responsibility I have is to prevent another catastrophic terrorist attack from happening. This requires getting ahead of the terrorists by identifying and preventing their attacks. We can only do this with good, actionable intelligence.

If the Senate did not pass this bill, Congress would have been faced with two options:

oExtending the temporary surveillance bill passed last August; or

oPassing no legislation, meaning that surveillance on specific terrorist groups would expire and our Nation would be laid bare.

Last year's stop-gap bill did not contain nearly the privacy protections that are in place in this FISA legislation. It was intended to be a temporary solution while Congress developed a more comprehensive approach to surveillance.

The communications industry has changed in the past thirty years since FISA was enacted in 1978. This has changed the way that communications are routed and how surveillance is conducted, and the original law technologically cannot function today. So, FISA needs to be modernized to fit the technological change from radio communications to wire and to provide additional privacy rights for U.S. persons.

I would like to take a moment to highlight five major improvements in this legislation, which I believe provide new privacy protections. This bill:

1.Includes provisions I authored that make clear that FISA is the exclusive authority for conducting surveillance inside the United States. This is crucial as it requires that all future Presidents must act strictly within the law. FISA will be the only legal authority for conducting surveillance on Americans for intelligence purposes, and only legislation that specifically provides wiretapping authority in the future would be an exception to FISA.

2.Requires the government to obtain a warrant before surveillance can begin. This applies to all U.S. persons - anywhere in the world. The Protect America Act allowed surveillance for up to six months before getting a warrant. This bill ends all warrantless surveillance directed at U.S. persons. In this sense it is precedent setting.

3.Bans reverse targeting, which was a concern under the Protect America Act. Reverse targeting would allow the government to collect the contents of telephone calls and e-mails of an American by conducting surveillance on the people with whom they communicate. This practice is prohibited in this bill.

4.Requires that the government implement procedures approved by the FISA Court for minimization. If an American's communication is incidentally caught up in electronic surveillance while the Government is targeting someone else, minimization protects that person's private information. This has been a hallmark of FISA for 30 years, but court approval of minimization procedures was not included in the Protect America Act. It is here.

5.Requires the Government to obtain a warrant to conduct surveillance on an American outside of the United States. This means that Americans' privacy rights are protected everywhere around the world. A court warrant has never before been required for surveillance outside the United States; this would be the strongest protection ever.

I understand your concern regarding Title II of this bill, which provides an immunity provision for telecommunications companies that are alleged to have provided assistance to the government. I agree that this is not the best approach to the current legal challenges facing these companies. In February, I offered an amendment that would have required court review of the legality of a company's actions. The court would have been required to find that the assistance was provided in good faith, and pursuant to an objectively reasonable belief that it was lawful, before immunity could be granted. Unfortunately, that amendment did not pass.

During consideration of this bill, I co-sponsored an amendment authored by Senator Bingaman (D-NM) that would halt any action on immunity until three months after Congress received a report from the relevant Inspectors General on the Administration's warrantless surveillance program. This amendment would have provided an independent review of the telecoms actions, and those of the Government, and would have provided Congress with additional information before immunity was granted. Unfortunately, the amendment failed on a vote of 42-56.

I have spent hours reviewing the telecom immunity issue and my conclusion is that the Government asked them to provide certain data in the wake of 9/11 and, at the highest levels, assured them that it was legal. In my view, if there is fault, it is the Government's and it is not immunized by this bill. They did not have to move outside the law but did. This program is now subject to FISA Court warrant.

In conclusion, this FISA legislation, while not perfect, brings intelligence activities back under U.S. law. It provides significant improvement in oversight and accountability of our intelligence collection programs while still empowering the intelligence community to keep our Nation safe. And, it provides the strongest privacy protections to U.S. persons in history. Additionally, the President - any President - cannot enact a program outside of this law in the future. While the immunity language was not what I would have preferred, I believe that passing a bill with the important improvements was a better choice than doing nothing or extending the Protect America Act.

I hope this helps you understand why I support this bill. Attached to this letter, you will find a copy of my statement on the Senate floor from July 9, 2008.

Statement of Senator Dianne Feinstein

FISA Amendments Act of 2008

June 25, 2008

Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Thank you very much, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I begin my remarks by thanking the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Rockefeller, and the vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Bond, the House Speaker, and the House leadership for their distinguished work on this piece of legislation. This has not been easy. It is certainly not without controversy. There are some major challenges to work through.

I want to begin by putting my remarks, at least, in context.

There is no more important requirement for national security than obtaining accurate, actionable intelligence. At the same time, there have to be strong safeguards in place to ensure that the Government does not infringe on Americans' constitutional rights.

Yet if Congress does not act and pass this bill, as it was passed overwhelmingly in the House, both of these goals, I believe, are in jeopardy. Here is why. If this bill does not pass, our Nation would likely be forced to either extend the Protect America Act or leave the Nation bare until a new bill can be written. Neither of these are good options.

As I will describe, the Protect America Act does not adequately protect Americans' constitutional rights. It was written to be a temporary measure for 6 months, and it expired on February 5.

What many people do not understand is that surveillance conducted under the Protect America Act will cease by the middle of August. It will be impossible to write a new bill, to get it past both Houses, to have it signed by the President in time to meet this deadline.

If that bill expires without this Congress passing new legislation, we will be unable to conduct electronic surveillance on a large number of foreign targets. In other words, our intelligence apparatus will be laid bare and the Nation will go into greater jeopardy. I truly believe that.

The FISA legislation of 1978 cannot accommodate this number of targets. It is simply inadequate for this new task due to changes in technology and the communications industry. That is precisely why FISA needs to be modernized.

So taking no action means we will be opening ourselves, in my view, to the possibility of major attack. This is unacceptable.

So as I see it, our choice is a clear one: We either pass this legislation or we extend the Protect America Act. For me, this legislation is much the better option.

This bill, in some respects, improves even on the base bill, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It provides clear protections for U.S. persons both at home and abroad. It ensures that the Government cannot conduct electronic surveillance on an American anywhere in the world without a warrant. No legislation has done that up to this point.

I think the improvements in this bill over the Protect America Act and the 1978 legislation are important to understand, and I wish to list a few.

First, prior court review. This bill ensures that there will be no more warrantless surveillance. Now, why do I say this? Under the Protect America Act--which is expiring, but we are still collecting surveillance under it for now--the intelligence community was authorized to conduct electronic surveillance for a period of 4 months before submitting an application for a warrant to the FISA Court. Surveillance could actually proceed for 6 months before there was a warrant.

Under this bill, the Government must submit an application and receive a warrant from the FISA Court before surveillance begins. No more warrantless surveillance. This is, in fact, a major point.

In emergency cases, there can be a short period of collection--up to 7 days--as the application is prepared. There has been a provision for emergency cases under FISA for some 30 years now. So that is prior court review for a U.S. person anywhere in the world if content is collected.

Meaningful court review. This bill strengthens court review. Under the Protect America Act, the Government submitted to the FISA Court its determination that procedures were in place to ensure that only people outside the United States would be targeted. The court could only reject an application for a warrant if it found that determination to be ``clearly erroneous.'' This bill returns to the traditional FISA standard, empowering the court to decide whether the Government's determination is ``reasonable.'' This is a higher standard of review, so the court review under this bill is meaningful.

Next, minimization. These first two improvements ensure that the Government will only be targeting people outside the country. That is good, but it is not enough. There is always the possibility of someone outside the country talking to a U.S. person inside the country. The bill addresses this with a process known as minimization.

In 1978, Congress said that the Government could do surveillance on U.S. persons under a court warrant, but required the Government to minimize the amount of information on those Americans who get included in the intelligence reporting. In practice, this actually means that the National Security Agency only includes information about a U.S. person that is strictly necessary to convey the intelligence. Most of the time, the person's name is not included in the report. That is the minimization process.

If an American's communication is incidentally caught up in electronic surveillance while the Government is targeting someone else, minimization protects that person's private information.

Now, the Protect America Act did not provide for court review over this minimization process at all. But this bill requires the court in advance to approve the Government's minimization procedures prior to commencing with any minimization program. That is good. That is the third improvement.

Fourth, reverse targeting. There is an explicit ban on reverse targeting. Now, what is reverse targeting? That is the concern that the National Security Agency could get around the warrant requirement. If the NSA wanted to get my communications but did not want to go to the FISA Court, they might try to figure out who I am talking with and collect the content of their calls to get to me. This bill says you cannot do that. You cannot reverse target. It is prohibited. This was a concern with the Protect America Act, and it is fixed in this bill.

Those are four reasons--good reasons. Here is a fifth: U.S. person privacy outside the United States. This bill does more than Congress has ever done before to protect Americans' privacy regardless of where they are, anywhere in the world. Under this bill, the executive branch will be required to obtain a warrant any time it seeks to direct surveillance at a U.S. person anywhere in the world. So any U.S. person anywhere in the world is protected by the requirement that a warrant must be received from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before electronic surveillance can begin.

Previously, FISA only covered people inside the United States. The Protect America Act did the same thing.

Now, also under this bill, there will be reviews of surveillance authorities by the Director of National Intelligence, the Attorney General, the heads of all relevant agencies, and the inspectors general of all relevant agencies on a regular basis, and the FISA Court and the Congress will receive the results of those reviews.

So there will be regular reporting from the professionals in the arena on how this bill is being followed through on--how electronic surveillance is being carried out worldwide. The Intelligence and Judiciary Committees will receive those reports. That, too, is important.

Also, under this bill, there will be a retrospective review of the President's Terrorist Surveillance Program. That is the program that has stirred the furor. The bill requires an unclassified report on the facts of the program, including its limits, the legal justifications, and the role played by the FISA Court and any private actors involved. This will provide needed accountability.

In summary, all intelligence collection under the Terrorist Surveillance Program will be brought under court review and court orders.

Everything I have described brings this administration back under the law. There is no more Terrorist Surveillance Program. There is only court-approved, Congressionally reviewed collection.

But what is to keep this administration or any other administration from going around the law again? The answer is one word, and it is called exclusivity.

It means that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the only, the exclusive, means for conducting electronic surveillance inside the United States for foreign intelligence purposes.

The exclusivity language in this bill is identical in substance to the amendment I offered in February, which received 57 votes in this Senate. It is section 102 of this bill.

This language reiterates what FISA said in 1978, and it goes further. Here is what this bill says:

Never again will a President be able to say that his authority--or her authority, one day, I hope--as Commander in Chief can be used to violate a law duly enacted by Congress.

Never again can an Executive say that a law passed to do one thing--such as use military force against our enemies--also overrides a ban on warrantless surveillance. The administration has said that the resolution to authorize the use of military force gave this President the right to go around FISA.

Never again can the Government go to private companies for their assistance in conducting surveillance that violates the law.

Now, this administration has a very broad view of Executive authority. Quite simply, it believes that when it comes to these matters, the President is above the law. I reject that notion in the strongest terms.

I think it is important to review the recent history with this administration to demonstrate why FISA exclusivity is so important.

At the very beginning of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, John Yoo, at the Office of Legal Counsel, wrote in a legal opinion that:

.... [u]nless Congress made a clear statement in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that it sought to restrict presidential authority to conduct warrantless searches in the national security area--which it has not--then the statute must be construed to avoid [such] a reading.

That was the argument. I believe it is wrong. Congress wrote FISA in 1978 precisely in the field of national security; there are other, separate laws that govern wiretapping in the criminal context. In fact, the Department of Justice has repudiated Yoo's notion.

But if the Department admitted that FISA did apply, it found another excuse not to take the Terrorist Surveillance Program to the FISA Court.

The Department of Justice developed a new, convoluted argument that Congress had authorized the President to go around FISA by passing the authorization to use military force against al-Qaida and the Taliban.

This is as flimsy as the last argument.

There is nothing in the AUMF that talks about electronic surveillance or FISA, and I know of not one Member who believed we were suspending FISA when we authorized the President to go to war.

But that is another argument we lay to rest with this bill. Here is how we do it. We say in the language in this bill that FISA is exclusive. Now, here is the major part: Only a specific statutory grant of authority in future legislation can provide authority to the Chief Executive to conduct surveillance without a FISA warrant.

So we go a step further in exclusivity. We cover what Yoo was trying to argue and what others might argue on behalf of a Chief Executive in the future, by closing the loophole and saying: You need specific statutory authority by the Congress of the United States to go outside the law and the Constitution.

The final argument the President has made is that even if FISA was intended to apply, and even if the AUMF didn't override FISA's procedures, he still had the authority as Commander in Chief to disregard the law.

Now, I have spoken on the floor before about how the President believes he is above the law and the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company v. Sawyer case. In that case, Justice Jackson described how the President's power is at the ``lowest ebb'' when he is acting in contravention to the will of the Congress.

This bill, again, makes it clear that the will of Congress is that there will be no electronic surveillance inside the United States without a warrant, and it makes clear that any electronic surveillance that is conducted outside of FISA or outside of another express statutory authorization for surveillance is a criminal act. It is criminalized. This is the strongest statement of exclusivity in history.

The reason I am describing all this is to build a case of legislative intent in case this is ever litigated, and I suspect it may well be.

So, finally, I wish to read into the Record the comments on exclusivity from a June 19, 2008, letter that Attorney General Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence McConnell wrote to the Congress. The letter recognizes that the exclusivity provision in this bill "goes beyond the exclusive means provision that was passed as part of FISA [in 1978]."

So they essentially admit we are taking exclusivity to a new high. Nevertheless, they acknowledge that the provision in this bill "would not restrict the authority of the government to conduct necessary surveillance for intelligence and law enforcement purposes in a way that would harm national security."

I said in February I could not support a bill without exclusivity. This is what keeps history from repeating itself and another President from going outside the law. I believe that with this language we will prevent it from ever happening again.

Now, a comment on title II of the bill, which is the telecom immunity section. This bill also creates a legal process that may--and, in fact, is likely to--result in immunity for telecommunications companies that are alleged to have provided assistance to the Government.

I have spent a great deal of time reviewing this matter. I have read the legal opinions written by the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. I have read the written requests to telecommunications companies. I have spoken to officials inside and outside the Government, including several meetings with the companies alleged to have participated in the program.

The companies were told after 9/11 that their assistance was needed to protect against further terrorist acts. This actually happened within weeks of 9/11. I think we can all understand and remember what the situation was in the 3 weeks following 9/11.

The companies were told the surveillance program was authorized and that it was legal, and they were prevented from doing their due diligence in reviewing the Government's request. In fact, very few people in these companies--these big telecoms--are actually cleared to receive this information and discuss it. So that creates a very limited universe of people who can do their due diligence within the confines of a given telecommunications company.

For the record, let me also address what I have heard some of my colleagues say. At the beginning of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, only four Senators were briefed. The Intelligence Committee was not, other than the Chairman and Vice Chairman.

I am one who believes it is right for the public and the private sector to support the Government at a time of need. When it is a matter of national security, it is all the more important.

I think the lion's share of the fault rests with the administration, not with the companies.

It was the administration who refused to go to the FISA Court to seek warrants. They could have gone to the FISA Court to seek these warrants on a program basis, and they have done so subsequently.

It was the administration who withheld this surveillance program from the vast majority of Members of Congress, and it was the administration who developed the legal theories to explain why it could, in fact, go around the law.

So I am pleased this bill includes independent reviews of the administration's actions to be conducted by the inspectors general of the relevant departments.

All of that said, when the legislation was before the Senate in February, I stated my belief that immunity should only be provided if the defendant companies acted legally, or if they acted in good faith with a reasonable belief that their actions were legal. That is what the law calls for.

I moved an amendment to require the court to review the written requests to companies to see whether they met the terms of the law. That law requires that a specific person send a certification in writing to a telecommunications company. That certification is required to state that no court order is required for the surveillance, that all statutory requirements have been met, and that the assistance is required by the Government.

Unfortunately, my amendment was not adopted, but I continue to believe it is the appropriate standard.

Now, the pending legislation does not assess whether the request made by the Government was, in fact, legal, nor whether the companies had a good-faith and objective belief that the requests were legal. What this bill does provide is a limited measure of court review. It is not as robust as my amendment would have provided, but it does provide an opportunity for the plaintiffs to be heard in court, and it provides an opportunity for the court to review these request documents.

I believe the court should not grant immunity without looking into the legality of the companies' actions. So if there is an amendment that does support this, I would intend to vote for it.

But I believe the Record should be clear in noting that if this bill does become law, in my view, it does not mean the Congress has passed judgment on whether any companies' actions were or were not legal. Rather, it should be interpreted as Congress recognizing the circumstances under which the companies were acting and the reality that we desperately need the voluntary assistance of the private sector to keep the Nation secure in the future.

I believe this bill balances security and privacy without sacrificing either. It is certainly better than the Protect America Act in that regard, and makes improvements over the 1978 FISA law.

As I said, if a new bill is not in place by mid-August, the Nation will be laid bare and unable to collect intelligence.

This bill provides for meaningful and repeated court review of surveillance done for intelligence purposes. It ends, once and for all, the practice of warrantless surveillance, and it protects Americans' constitutional rights both at home and abroad. It provides the Government with the flexibility it needs under the law to protect our Nation. It makes it crystal clear that this is the law of the land and that this law must be obeyed.

I yield the floor.

Sincerely yours, Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator
Further information about my position on issues of concern to California and the Nation are available at my website http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/. You can also receive electronic e-mail updates by subscribing to my e-mail list at http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ENewsletterSignup.Signup.

Good Job, Internets!

2008-07-03T15:30:00.001-07:00

As of right now, "Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right" is the #1 my.barackobama.com group!

We couldn't have done it without you, internets.

Yet, there is work to be done. From Jane@Firedoglake:

We have a small window in which we can push the Senate to take retroactive immunity provision out of FISA. While during 4th of July recess, senators will be in their home states, attending parades and hosting a variety of other public appearances. This is our chance to ask them the simple question: whether or not they will vote against retroactive immunity.

So far we've got around 40 events around the country where senators will be walking in Independence Day Parades, or where Firedoglake activists are going to visit local senate office.

Please sign up to attend an event and put pressure on your senators:
http://action.firedoglake.com/page/event/search_simple

We have until July 8 to put some serious pressure on every senator to have some sense and defend our constitution. It's an opportunity that we can't afford to miss.

Taking action is simple. Just make up a sign with a strong message like, "I like the WHOLE Bill of Rights -- Vote NO on FISA!", and head out to the parade route. I hope that you'll take advantage of this chance to put some heat on the Senate.

Thank you,

Jane Hamsher, Firedoglake

P.S. If there isn't event in your area or you're interested in leading your own, I've put a post up with some tips here:
http://firedoglake.com/2008/07/03/fisa-whip-it-good/

[ Edit - BHO responds, here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/rospars/gGxsZF. Looks like he needs some convincing. This weekend will be an action packed adventure in activism for this blogger! ]

[ Bird-dogging your senator:

]

Not even slightly safe for work

2008-06-24T20:28:00.003-07:00

I repost this stuff because I'm "edgy".

Datacenter Confidential - Sysadmins are insane

2008-06-20T23:46:00.001-07:00

23:34 <chris> wow, it is unbearably hot in my apartment. i couldnt sleep if i tried tonight
23:34 <lance> blah, try having to sleep in the day as your room slowly gets warmer and warmer :P
23:34 <chris> "simply sleep"
23:35 <lance> vodka helps :)
23:35 <chris> not for me.. i'm just drunk and awake ;)
23:35 <lance> haha
23:36 <lance> i'm a small guy so i quickly go into the "hmmm kinda tired, let me just rest here and close my eyes" phase
23:36 <chris> the downside of simply sleep is that sometimes it works too well
23:37 <chris> also, like just about everyone in the sysops team except the managers, i'm in the grip of one or more sleep disorders
23:37 <lance> heh
23:38 <chris> no joke, there are a variety of mental and physical maladies that people who excel in my line of work seem to have in common
23:40 <chris> for example, just to demonstrate how serious it is, the other day we're driving back to the office from lunch. me, eddie, tom and
dave. i mention that the bmw in front of us has its passenger door cracked open
23:40 <chris> eddie, sitting in front of me on the passenger side says he's been trying hard not to look at it
23:41 <chris> OCD. but i'm the same way
23:41 <chris> so tom, who is driving, tail the guy for an extra couple of miles just to fuck with me and eddie.
23:42 <chris> the point is, dave is probably the most well adjusted of the four of us in that car

Marriage = Love

2008-06-16T21:27:00.000-07:00

Today marked the first legal statewide gay marriages (brought to bear largely by the courageous act of grace by our controversial mayor in San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, whom I did not support in the election).

I have been proud of California, but never prouder than I feel reading the national headlines.

Don't fuck it up in November, California.

Why I'm voting Republican

2008-06-10T20:42:00.001-07:00

Bush's 3rd term, Carter's 2nd term

2008-06-09T23:01:00.000-07:00

Voters..

We have an exercise in comparisons here.

Barack Obama:

Born in 1961

Raised by a single mother

Father was Kenyan

Stepfather was Indonesian, and a Muslim

Admitted to using marijuana

Admitted to using cocaine

Married once to Michelle Robinson

Has two daughters

John McCain:

Born in 1936

Raised by parents John McCain Sr, US Navy Admiral and mother Roberta Wright-McCain

Father was US Navy Admiral

First wife was model Carol Shepp

Fought in Vietnam conflict, and was captured

Spent 5 years as a prisoner of war (POW)

Divorced first wife and married heiress Cindy Lou Hensley

Has two adoptive sons Douglas and Andrew and one daughter Sidney from his first wife Carol

From wikipedia:

Shepp met McCain again when he was stationed at the Naval Air Basic Training Command at Pensacola, Florida in 1964, and they began dating.^[7]^[3] On July 3, 1965, Shepp married McCain in Philadelphia.^[8] The following year, John McCain adopted her two children.^[5] The McCains then had a daughter named Sidney in September 1966.^[9]

John McCain was shot down and badly injured over North Vietnam on October 26, 1967, beginning what would be five and a half years as a prisoner of war.^[10] During his captivity she raised their children by herself; she sent frequent letters and packages to him, few of which the North Vietnamese let through.^[11] On Christmas Eve 1969, Carol McCain was driving in snowing, icy conditions. Approaching an intersection on an isolated country road, she skidded and collided with a telephone pole, was thrown from the car into the snow, and went into shock. Some time later she was found badly injured and taken to Bryn Mawr Hospital.^[6] She had two smashed legs, a broken pelvis, broken arm, and ruptured spleen. She spent six months in hospital, and over the course of the next two years had twenty-three operations^[6] as well as extensive physical therapy.^[12] She did not tell her husband about the accident in her letters to him, believing he already had enough to worry about.^[6] Businessman and POW advocate Ross Perot paid for her medical care.^[13]

The McCains were reunited after his release from captivity on on March 14, 1973.^[14] She was now four inches (ten centimeters) shorter, on crutches, and substantially heavier than when he had last seen her;^[13] he was also visibly hampered by his injuries and the mistreatment he had endured from the North Vietnamese.^[15] The McCains became frequent guests of honor at dinners hosted by Governor of California Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy Reagan,^[16] and the two couples became friendly.^[2] Carol McCain worked for Ronald Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign in Florida, as he sought the Republican Party nomination.^[2]

During John McCain's assignment as Executive Officer and Commanding Officer of the VA-174 squadron located at Naval Air Station Cecil Field outside Jacksonville, Florida^[17] the McCains' marriage began to falter;^[18] he had extramarital affairs.^[18]

John McCain's next assignment was to the Senate Liaison Office within the Navy's Office of Legislative Affairs.^[19] The McCains separated briefly, then rejoined.^[13] His job was aided by an active social life the couple conducted, entertaining Navy, government, and other people three to four nights a week at their Alexandria, Virginia home.^[20] By 1979, the McCains were still living together.^[13] In April 1979, John McCain met and began an extramarital relationship with Arizona special education teacher and Hensley & Co. heiress Cindy Lou Hensley.^[13]

Of course, the Obama campaign doesn't want to discuss Barack Obama's high-school drug use. Neither does the McCain campaign want to talk about John McCain's abandonment of his first wife and mother to his daughter, and his subsequent marriage to a wealthier, younger woman with whom he carried on an affair.

From http://clintonattacksobama.pbwiki.com/Incident+Tracker:

The Incidents

#1 Barack Obama May Have Been a Drug Dealer!

Who Billy Shaheen, the co-chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign in New Hampshire

Date December 12, 2007 in an interview with the Washington Post

Statement "The Republicans are not going to give up without a fight ... and one of the things they're certainly going to jump on is his drug use... It'll be, 'When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?' There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It's hard to overcome."

Context In his first book, Dreams From My Father, Obama admitted to using cocaine, among other drugs. Shaheen claims he was bringing up the drug use because the GOP will do the same, and that the democrats would do better to nominate someone whose past has already been vetted. His questions about Obama were really what the GOP would say, he claims.

Racialiciousness Moderate. I cannot recall any white candidate whose past drug use was used to imply that he was an actual drug dealer. Given the prevailing image of drug dealing as a "black thing," Shaheen went too far.

Wackness High. While it's true that candidates must show they are tough and can handle the general campaign, using hypothetical attacks as an excuse to attack your own party's candidate just seems weak.

Links
Washington Post Campaign Blog, The Trail, Dec. 12 2007
Hillary Clinton apologizes to Barack Obama for Drug Smear

Latest Status Senator Clinton apologized to Obama in person, and Shaheen stepped down as co-chair of the campaign on December 13. BUT, no sooner than an HOUR after the debate Clinton SUPPOSEDLY apologized BEFORE, Chief Clinton Strategist, MARK PENN, was peddling the same swill on MSNBC'S HARDBALL. So, just how SINCERE was said apology from Clinton to Obama?

I am more willing to forgive the missteps of a high school student whose actions are practically harmless than the missteps of a grown man, having himself suffered great physical torture at the hands of an enemy army then abandoning his physically injured wife, the mother of his children, for a younger richer bride (and allegedly carrying on an affair with an even younger lobbyist).

What is going on in the mind of a torture victim, a years-long prisoner, that makes it alright to leave your wife? Because she is crippled and fat? Maimed?

Is it a sense of entitlement?

What is going on in the mind of a young, athletic, popular and attractive high school student which makes him turn away from the allure of pot and cocaine and instead pursue a life of civil service?

Is it a sense of gratitude?

Who would you, dear voter, rather have as your president?

[Edit:

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Kucinich_presents_Bush_impeachment_articles_0609.html

Yes! ]

I am against capital punishment, but..

2008-06-06T21:52:00.000-07:00

After I read this:

http://www.salon.com/books/excerpt/2008/06/06/rove_katrina/print.html

The image of Rove, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush et al swinging from the gallows of the Hague filled me with a moments catharsis.

The cruel thought of drinking the hot tears of the twins and Laura as they watched involuntarily evacuated shit and piss drip off the shoe-less foot of their dead father and husband entered my mind.

That ended the reverie for me.

We are animals. Sick, twisted monkeys, all of us.

But a life in jail.. I think that would be fair.

I hope Khalid Sheik Mohammed is spared the death penalty. I really do. Unlike Bush, he is enough of a pragmatist to know that his death would be a great symbolic victory for the cause of Islamic extremism.

Bush may have been near death many times; driving drunk, snorting who knows what chemicals, screaming through the air at MACH 2. But Bush avoided fighting in the service of his country, and continued to shirk real responsibility all the way to the top, and does to this day.

The noose comes back out in the back of my mind. I must repress it.

Dear John Hagee

2008-05-13T10:26:00.000-07:00

May 13th, 2008 | WASHINGTON -- John Hagee, an influential televangelist who endorsed John McCain, is apologizing to Catholics for referring to the Roman Catholic Church as "the great whore" and calling it "the apostate church."

[Source - Associated Press]

Good start. Now apologize for blaming Katrina on homosexuality and 9/11 on secularism, you worthless son of a bitch scumbag. If there is a hell, you will definitely be in it in the afterlife, you utter cunt.

What does it say?..

2008-05-10T18:31:00.001-07:00

What does it say about America when the best drama on TV is science fiction?

We have given ourselves over to parable and burlesque in our entertainment. But it begs the question, "why do we need to entertain ourselves?"

I think the metaphor of "holding a mirror up to reality" is good. But I think that entertainment also serves the proverbial "soul" the same way religion does. So, no wonder religion fights as hard against other religions as it does against art, the non-movement movement.

Well, I take that back. Movements in art are motivating, just like religion. But religion leans toward more organized, authoritarian movements, and art has always been religion's free-form cousin.

Just as "a DJ saved my life", art saved the life of Michaelangelo, surely a homosexual living on the cusp of the darkest of ages in Italy, supported by a closeted Vatican and moneyed aristocrats and merchants.

Then, also, draw the parallels between the art and music movements in the 1960s and 1970s and the creation of one of America's lasting cultural institutions: Star Trek.

In many ways, Star Trek was the free-love movement vicariously offered to the "can't get laid" set on the small screen. Here was man and woman's potential.. really, human potential as a whole, represented as a Utopian future without war, disease, poverty or greed.

Well of course Star Trek got a lot more interesting when the cracks in the system were shown. Some of these innovations came with "The Next Generation", aptly named because it, in 1989, brought my generation into the Star Trek fold. Most came with a much-ignored but critically acclaimed off-shoot called "Deep Space Nine."

"Deep Space Nine" broke many of the unspoken rules of the too-perfect Star Trek universe: thou shalt not foment dissent between Federation allies, thou shalt not invoke religious wars, thou shalt not question the goodness of the Federation, thou shalt not make morally ambiguous decisions and mostly, thou shalt not pin humanity down as the underdog and suggest that they may not win.

All of the things that made "Deep Space Nine" interesting were by and large the result of the direction of junior television producer Ronald D. Moore. However, Moore's vision of the Roddenberry's universe led to a great deal of controversy and Moore's eventual departure from the show.

Years later my roommate at the time Larry and I were watching an episode of "Stargate: SG1" where during a commercial break the Sci-Fi Channel ran a minute long trailer for a mini-series based on the canonically cheesy late-1970s sci-fi TV series "Battlestar Gallactica" that would star Edward James Olmos (of "Miami Vice" fame) in the lead and, shockingly, cast the swaggering fighter pilot Starbuck as a woman!

"I hope that doesn't suck," I told Larry.

"It's going to suck, I'm sure of it" he responded.

Needless to say, the mini-series and resulting Sci-Fi Channel series has exceeded my expectations in every way. And it is all thanks to the vision of that junior producer of "Deep Space Nine" fame, Ronald D. Moore.

Edit: the reason I was prompted to post this was because of Nana Visitor's guest spot on this week's BSG. Nana Visitor played Major Kira on DS9.

Datacenter Confidential - Brawndo

2008-05-02T23:24:00.000-07:00

Does alcohol and IRC mix? You decide.

<chr1s> security through obscurity has been an unmitigated disaster for microsoft
<stim> less garbage out there tailered for you
<Adversary> linux himself said it, you shouldnt have to deal with the os. you shouldnt know its there.
<stim> linus is a tool
<chr1s> agreed
<stim> who was never in line with linux
<Adversary> heh
<stim> stallman is far more "linux" than linus can ever hope to be
<badlogic> windows 9 microsoft linux :)
<stim> for the argument consider linux being a collection of apps, not just the kernel
<Adversary> anyways... this all misses the point...
<stim> that you have a retarded troll
<stim> about licensing of other peoples software?
<Adversary> i say we trolled eachother
<stim> u trolled my nuts, with your mouth
<chr1s> i like how the linux community at large keeps declaring the death of zfs, and everyone else keeps ignoring them
<Adversary> we know where we stand and why
<Adversary> and your opinion is that of a facist hippy!
<stim> zfs is dead
<chr1s> tell that to my managers
<stim> whats their emails
<chr1s> actually, dont
<chr1s> and here's why
<stim> :P
<chr1s> zfs is easy to manage
<chr1s> like, ridicukously easy
<chr1s> and freebsd is building full support into the 8.0 kernel
<chr1s> prediction: in 6-9 months, the linux community will declare zfs as the next best thing
<chr1s> you heard it here first, bitches
<stim> shah
<stim> try zfs+
<chr1s> next time you google something to figure out what i'm talking about, try not to make it totally obvious
<stim> zfs+ isnt real
<chr1s> neither is RAID45
<stim> either is the cake
<chr1s> be the spoon
<Adversary> as a local filesystem will the server side ppl really like it that much?
<Adversary> or am i missing something?
<chr1s> zfs+nfs or zfs+iscsi
<chr1s> also, local only is a misnomer
<chr1s> zfs is agnostic about underlaying block devices
<chr1s> anyway, its legitimate enough that we have iscsi vlans designed into our back wires
<chr1s> mostly for oracle RAC
<chr1s> so, to say zfs is dead is at best premature
<chr1s> and at worst completely wrong and fucking retarded
<stim> what if one were to say it was gay
<chr1s> you'd be right
<chr1s> but gay as in fashion, art and music, not gay as in bad and weak
<Adversary> looks very interesting tho
<Adversary> have a good doc on it? the wiki is lacking
<chr1s> go to docs.sun.com and check their whitesheet out
<stim> trusting sun
<stim> fools!
<chr1s> sun.. the tech industry's scrappy hanger on
<chr1s> just like hillary!
<stim> bbl, cartoons
<chr1s> man, every time i see an IHOP commercial i think to myself "no wonder america has a diabetes epidemic"
<Adversary> heh. lifeforce holds up
<chatboss> wl
<Adversary> click and clack are in a movie
<Adversary> Car of the Future: Engineering for the Environment
<chr1s> saw it
<chr1s> you need to watch more pbs
<Adversary> i watch alot of pbs. having no cable tv and all
<chr1s> i tivoed it last week
<chr1s> it was interesting, but i wish it went into more detail
<chr1s> like, exactly how much fossil fuel is expended just growing corn for ethanol, and the intrenched system of corporate welfare that surrounds the corn industry in the US
<chr1s> and how hydrogen fuel cells also require an expenditure of energy to dope the hydrogen atoms with electrons
<chr1s> things they touch on but don't really dig deep into
<Adversary> these things are always like that
<chr1s> frontline is at least reliably detailed
<chr1s> they've been dumbing down nova for years
<chr1s> critical analysis is a lost art
<Adversary> brando
<chr1s> brawndo
<Adversary> brawndo
<chr1s> its got electrolytes, which your body craves

Patriotism and Message Discipline

2008-04-12T12:45:00.001-07:00

Two things.

About a week ago Senator Obama said a few things that seemed to denigrate the working, White-ethnic poor.

I watched the Republican campaign of Senator McCain and the Republican-light campaign of Senator Clinton react negatively to those comments, and in typical form the Obama response was swift and concise.

What I didn't expect was this piece: http://www.salon.com/opinion/walsh/election_2008/2008/04/11/pavoters/index.html

Joan Walsh is the editor-in-chief of the transparently pro-Clinton Salon.com online news magazine. In it, she goes on to say this about the recent Obama-working-poor "gaffe":

Barack Obama does have an affluent, educated, Ivy League sense of self-righteousness and entitlement that my Irish Catholic working-class side occasionally chafes at. So does Michelle Obama. So does Jeffrey Toobin. So do some of our Obama supporting readers. So sue me.

And I was prepared to try to explain the mounting irritation about Obama's remarks. But ... then I saw Obama's reply to his political critics. And it was awesome.

You can look up Senator Obama's comments on the news, its quoted in full in the link provided above. On to the next thing..

I received this from my dad today in email, everyone should read it and consider it carefully:

In 1961, a young African-American man, after hearing President John F. Kennedy's challenge to, 'Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,' gave up his student deferment, left college in Virginia and voluntarily joined the Marines.

In 1963, this man, having completed his two years of service in the Marines, volunteered again to become a Navy corpsman. (They provide medical assistance to the Marines as well as to Navy personnel.)

The man did so well in corpsman school that he was the valedictorian and became a cardiopulmonary technician. Not surprisingly, he was assigned to the Navy's premier medical facility, Bethesda Naval Hospital, as a member of the commander in chief's medical team, and helped care for President Lyndon B. Johnson after his 1966 surgery.

For his service on the team, which he left in 1967, the White House awarded him three letters of commendation.

What is even more remarkable is that this man entered the Marines and Navy not many years after the two branches began to become integrated.

While this young man was serving six years on active duty, Vice President Dick Cheney, who was born the same year as the Marine/ sailor, received five deferments, four for being an undergraduate and graduate student and one for being a prospective father.

Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both five years younger than the African-American youth, used their student deferments to stay in college until 1968. Both then avoided going on active duty through family connections.

Who is the real patriot? The young man who interrupted his studies to serve his country for six years or our three political leaders who beat the system? Are the patriots the people who actually sacrifice something or those who merely talk about their love of the country?

After leaving the service of his country, the young African-American finished his final year of college, entered the seminary, was ordained as a minister, and eventually became pastor of a large church in one of America's biggest cities.

This man is Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the retiring pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ.

They Attacked Us

2008-04-05T02:47:00.000-07:00

And lo, suddenly the world changed.

Within the entire glass menagerie of specious right-wing counter-arguments made whenever some boorish, wrong-headed, dubious, illegal or insane Bush/neocon policy is challenged by their opponents, "they attacked us" and its rhetorical cousins are the most annoying retort I commonly hear.

"What do you suggest? Therapy? Hugs for the terrorists?" the argument goes, "they attacked us, we have to fight back."

First of all, who are "they"? Well, if you are talking about 9/11, "they" were largely Saudi Arabian middle-class college students. "They" were goaded into the operation by the son of a Saudi construction magnate of Yemeni decent and an Egyptian doctor, who were in turn disciples (at least in spirit) of an Egyptian dissident named Sayyid Qutb.

In America, the "they attacked us" crowd likes to throw around terms like "jihad" and "fatwah" and "sha'ria" as if all of the sudden they are experts on the subject of radicalized Islam. But ask about the differences between Sunnis, Shi'ites, Wahhabism or Salafism and you will draw blank stares, or worse, inept and blundering explanations followed by a reiteration that "they" (whatever that means) attacked "us" (whatever that means). A scant few know who Sayyid Qutb was, and if they have heard the name, they cannot explain what his significance was.

In 2001 the name Osama bin Laden was not unknown to me. In 1998 I had as a roommate an ex-Marine who shared with me a book by Angelo Codevilla about the gaffes and missteps the US had taken between the end of WWII and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the intelligence and security challenges we would face in the 1990s and beyond. Around the same time, this interview was published: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/542192/posts

My interest was piqued, to say the least, and my view of our national interests was radically shifted as a result of being exposed to both Codevilla and bin Laden and later many others (Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Pat Buchanan, Madeleine Albright, etc).

Our duty is to incite the jihad against America, Israel and their allies. We are following this route. Because of circumstances surrounding us, as well as our inability to move outside Afghanistan to take care of matters closely, we were unable to do so.

But, with the grace of God, we have established with a large number of our brothers in the International Islamic Front to confront Jews and the crusaders. We believe that the affairs of many of those are moving in the right direction and have the ability to move widely. We pray to God to grant them victory and revenge on the Jews and Americans.

I cannot vouch for this translation from Osama bin Laden, nor can I say what exactly bin Laden may have meant by "jihad". In the United States, the arabic word "jihad" means a religious war, or to engage in warfare -- the word "muhajadeen" describes one who is engaged in "jihad."

In reality the word "jihad" can take on a number of meanings depending on context, and perhaps a closer translation from it to English would be "great esoteric struggle." In this sense, jihad is the same as a tribulation, like a monk struggling to remain pious. The esoteric struggle for piety in Islam is considered to be the greatest jihad an adherent can wage, al-jihad al-akbar. Jihad waged through violence is considered the lesser jihad, al-jihad al-asghard. It is the latter that we associate with the generic term in the West, and it is the latter which bin Laden strives to perpetuate.

A revolutionary or terrorist movement has much to gain from getting a real government to declare war upon it. This gives the movement considerable status, putting it in some sense in the same league with the government with which it is now recognized as at war. No sensible government wishes to give such quasi-legitimacy to a movement it is trying to stamp out.

As usual, American Conservative magazine is lucid with regard to this subject. Bin Laden's "lesser" jihad is a vulgar guerrilla tactic of an illegitimate resistance movement.

Bin Laden knows how to speak to and engage his audience, and to twist his lesser jihad in their minds into a noble cause by invoking common and deep-seated feelings of unrest, rage and humiliation among young Muslims and scapegoating the West. History has given bin Laden a tailor-made narrative of victimization that all Muslims can to some degree relate to: it was the Holy Crusades that crushed the glorious caliphate, Jerusalem was sacked and stolen, and ultimately given over to the Jews as the State of Israel. Centuries of colonial rule stifled Arab society, and even after colonial rule European and American interference kept Arabian and Muslim nations subservient. Whatever oil-producing countries couldn't be bought by greasing the palms of the corrupt rulers had their popular governments covertly subverted by the CIA.

Nevermind that many of these claims are exaggerated or entirely false, bin Laden's narrative of victimization resonates with the disaffected -- even if it is their native governments and not the West causing them grief.

While bin Laden may consider the form of Shi'ite Islam practiced in Iran to be heretical, the example of Iran's religious and political revolution in 1979 must have been to him a very powerful symbol of the potential inherent in his brand of radicalism. That bin Laden and al Zawahiri's rag-tag band of misfit extremists managed to rise to the notoriety they enjoy today is in many ways an acute symptom of the boiling cesspool of dissent that had been fomenting in the region since at least the end of World War I.

It is generally felt that the Iranian Revolution in 1979 resembled the Bolshevik revolution by design. This was of course great propaganda and political theatre against the West at a time when the Cold War was in full swing.

Informed by his experiences rebuffing the Soviets in Afghanistan, is it any wonder that when bin Laden turned his murderous intent on the United States he would use the same tactics of hit and run? Certainly it cannot be a coincidence that the United States is now engaged in a free-form guerrilla war in Iraq, designed to resemble both the Soviet's failed war with Afghanistan and the United States failed and demoralizing war with Vietnam -- bolstering the muhajadeen while at the same time wearing down the will of the Americans, fomenting the same sorts of internal turmoil that America endured in the 1960s and 1970s?

Yet the voices that raised the alarm in 2001 about the costs of engaging bin Laden, and worse, waltzing into the strategic tar-pit of the Middle-East were and are dismissed as fringe elements, even when we have bin Laden in his own words in 1998 saying that it is his goal to engage the United States in just the sort of war we are now fighting.

4000 soldiers and a trillion dollars and counting. The best hardware and presumably the best military minds that can be found, and the 6'4" son of a construction magnate with a set of bad kidneys is literally leading us around by our dicks.

They attacked us, and apparently hit us in the brain, because little we have done since then has made much sense.

I'm sure that each night before going to sleep Osama bin Laden thinks about it and smiles.

Drop out

2008-03-27T23:00:00.000-07:00

You know who I am talking to.

Drop out. Because this year, this election, more and younger people are finally getting excited and involved in politics, and if you steal this election away from them, they will not vote again for a long time, if ever.

Drop out.

You are behind. Its March. McCain's polling figures are looking more favorable day after day.

Drop out.

You are a conniving, slimy, reprehensible human being if you think you can broker the nomination, you dirty, partisan jerk.

Drop out.

Earth to Hillary Clinton, drop the fuck out of the race.

Mark the date

2008-03-19T00:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the day that Senator Barack Obama won the election:

The Warm Cozy Flag

2008-03-04T01:58:00.000-08:00

Much moronic ado has been made of Sheik Barack Hussein Mohamed bin Obama of the Secret Caliphate Order to Destroy America not sporting the secret gay-code jewelery adornment of the Guns-god-illicit-bathroom-sex loving right wing.

Salon.com paraphrases Senator Obama, I think, correctly: Obama said he had worn a pin after 9/11 but stopped once he began to notice, and here I paraphrase wildly but no doubt accurately, that most of the people still wearing lapel flags were assholes.

Damn skippy, they are.

As a liberal, I understand symbols. Symbols are like art, and art, like health care and education, is one of the many dastardly socialist programs I would like the downtrodden taxpayer to have the burden of paying for (and never-mind most of your tax dollars fund the military, payolas for agri-business, oil interests, and corporate welfare, not to mention paying all those phone bills for all that illegally seized wiretap data).

I get it.

If you want to wear a flag pin on your lapel, great. You're proud of America. Good for you. So am I, sometimes.

If you wear the pin and make a big deal about it, you're an attention queen.

And if you make a big deal about wearing it, and someone else *gasp* forgetting to wear it, you are a gas-bag attention queen asshole.

I don't recall there being a dress code for being an American. Is that in "The Constitution?"

Seems to me that if your idea of patriotism is waving around the flag and criticizing anyone who doesn't, you have perhaps missed a couple of civics lessons. You stopped listening after "I pledge allegiance to the flag.."I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

I do pledge allegiance to the United States of America, and I love my country.

If you don't believe me, well, I'm sorry to hear that, and you are wrong. But I'm not going to get dressed up in costume jewelry to prove it to you, and neither should Senator Obama be forced to.

Our Allies, Saudi Arabia, and their ilk

2008-02-12T22:29:00.000-08:00

This post is dedicated to the thin skinned, weak willed morons who are fundamentalist Islamics. You know, the ones who get their panties in a bunch over cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohamed?

Fact: Mohamed, if he ever existed in person was,

a pedophile

That is what you call someone who marries their 9-year old cousin.

insane

That is what you call someone who sees a horse with a man's head and hears voices.

a war mongerer

But who wasn't back them. Don't get me started on what a certain other tribe did to everyone in Canaan a few centuries back.

Muslims.. you worship Mohamed as bad as Christians worship Jesus. You claim not to, but you do, apparently some misogynistic maniac version of him. How else do you explain honor killings, labial mutilation and the burqa? What, are you afraid of girls?

The word of Allah? Is meaningless. Allah is a figment of your imagination.

Now, I can allow someone to embrace whatever irrational fantasy they want to, until and unless it starts to impinge on human rights.

Islam -- erase yourself.

You already worship an imaginary god. Start playing nice in the real world. Mohamed, if he existed, was a delusional child abuser.

Fuck Allah. Fuck Mohamed. Fuck Jesus, Moses and Abraham.

9/11 Truth? An inside job?

2008-01-30T00:47:00.001-08:00

These are my opinions, based on what I have seen, read, observed and extrapolated.

September 11, 2001 was a conspiracy, and an insidious one. Call it luck, or coincidence, or divine will, but, the conspiracy succeeded (at least, 75% success) in its aims.

Here are some of the common claims of "9/11 Truthers", and my personal thoughts about those claims:

Steel melts at a higher temperature than Jet-A fuel burns.

True. But drywall, paper, plastics, human beings, furniture, paint, and other materials present in those buildings burn at higher temperatures. Furthermore, the Jet-A fuel would have quickly burnt off, but it would have ignited other substances that burn at higher temperatures.

Furthermore, steel weakens when exposed to heat. Anyone who has even sharpened a knife, or shot slugs into a traffic sign, or even bent a spoon with a Bic lighter knows this.

Therefore, it was not necessary to actually melt the steel to weaken it, and even if that was not enough to bring down the buildings, there were certainly fires hot enough to melt portions of the load bearing columns (located near the outside of the structure, best exposed to oxygen to fuel the ongoing fires).

The buildings came down in manner of a controlled demolition.

False. Conspiracy theorists claim that the planes alone could not have brought towers 1 and 2 down, much less building 7, the crux of the argument. For buildings 1 and 2 to say that the planes themselves did not bring the buildings down is technically true, see above: ignition of other sources contributed to the softening of the steel super-structure, weakened by the impact of the jets.

The argument that someone or someone(s) were able to wire up miles of fuses and wires and tons of explosives in all three buildings without being noticed is much less likely than the evidence in front of us. A similar theory was put forward regarding the devastating destruction of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma, but several independent tests verified that the destruction caused by the truck bomb was not only plausible but likely.

No planes actually flew into the Trade Center towers 1 and 2.

False. I watched it on live TV. I have friends in New York who saw it. Millions of eye witnesses, tens of thousands of direct eye witnesses. This claim makes me truly angry.

The administration had advance knowledge of the attacks.

True. "Bin Laden Determined to Attack." The obstructionism of the Bush administration was a cover-up, for sure, in resisting the investigative efforts of the 9/11 Commission. However, this was not to hide some intentional complicity, but rather to cover-up and therefore avoid liability for their willful ignorance, to wit, unintentional complicity in the attacks.

It is improbable that 19 young hijackers, funded by Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan, could circumvent the world's best financed defense department, complete with Jet Fighter interceptors, RADAR, and untold military technology.

False. Believe it or not, not all of the $500 billion dollars we spend per year on defense goes toward a standing at-the-ready fighter jet strike force capable of tracking and intercepting hijacked planes at a moment's notice.

The Bill Moyers' PBS documentary about this goes into greater detail than I care to at this time, but I would note that the fighter jet interception force was, in 2001, still geared towards fighting the cold war. We were, as they say in the military, "blind on our 6". No one was watching civilian RADAR, and sorting out which planes were in fact hijacked and where they were was, tragically, not accomplished until after half of the jets had already reached their targets.

Also, as a final note, the laws of physics simply do not allow for jets, scrambled from various stations in the mid-Atlantic, to reach hijacked planes or target zones in the time alloted. It takes over 15 minutes to even get those jets into the air.

When you consider the apparent fact that the President himself didn't even know there was an attack under way until the second Jet hit the WTC, how can one assume that our defense apparatus would have had any chance at all to intercept and disable those planes.

I will allow some doubt as to whether Flight 93 was shot down or taken down by terrorist pilots, but having heard the flight deck recordings, I tend to believe the latter.

That is the only uncertain detail I am willing to entertain.

Finally. After almost 7 years there is no "smoking gun" indicting our government, nor Mossad, or anyone other than al-Qaeda in this attack. Surely, after all that has happened, given the amount of organization and manpower that would have been required by our government or some other actor to perpetrate this attack, some evidence would have surfaced that could cast real doubt on the reality of a more nefarious conspiracy than the one that was, in my opinion, executed by radical Islamic terrorists. Surely someone would have come forward. Same with Oklahoma City, same with TWA Flight 800.

I await the flaming and the bullying in comments, and I do not censor comments.

How Labor Activism is Viewed by Corporate America

2008-01-27T19:29:00.001-08:00

In the tradition of Aaron Sorkin, John Grisham, David Simon and Bill Moyers, Writer's Guild member Seth MacFarlane contributes this heartbreaking allegory about the stakes of the current guild negotiations:

State of the FISA

2008-01-26T15:08:00.000-08:00

On Monday, President Bush will give his (hopefully) final State of the Union address.

Because of procedural and behind the scenes bullying by the Republicans, the Senate is poised to schedule the SIC-marked up FISA bill Monday, where it will hopefully be filibustered. The SIC bill grants retroactive immunity to United States telecommunications companies who, without any authorization other than Dick Cheney asking them (and I'm sure not nicely) took it upon themselves to spy on American citizens -- without a warrant.

There are those who will claim, as the President surely will Monday night, that Democratic obstruction to extending FISA updates past February (which the SJC marked up bill does, by the way) will put American's in danger. The argument, according to right-wing operatives, is that if carte blanche amnesty is not fully granted without compromise then suddenly NSA collection will grind to a halt, allowing Terrorists to Slaughter Americans in America with impunity.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Having followed the issue on Greenwald on Salon, I stumbled upon this link: http://fisa.wikispot.org/Telecom_Immunity_Arguments

The information seems to be well enough annotated. I would recommend reading Greenwald to get the specifics on what this debate is really all about, who is behind telecom amnesty and why.

But on Monday, when Bush lies that Democrats are endangering our nation and our troops, do not believe him. Call your representative and tell them you are against telecom amnesty, FISA updates and the Patriot Act!

And tell Senators Obama and Clinton to put their money where their mouth is:

State of the Union

2008-01-25T19:56:00.000-08:00

End the tax cuts for the rich, and for corporations.

If they don't want to pay, then they don't get to profit off of our backs.

End the war now. Bring the troops home tomorrow. End support of Israel, Saudi Arabia, China. End the sale of weapons to everyone, to both sides of every conflict.

Tax churches. That's right, all of them. They are either religion or they are Business, they can't be both. Throw all of the bums in jail -- from Earnest Angeley to Pat Robertson, David Miscavidge to Tom Cruise to David Eicke. All of them, for fraud. No more free passes.

No telecom amnesty. Amnesty for anyone who makes less than $200,000 per year who evaded taxes for the last 20 years, no questions asked.

A Reproductive Rights amendment to the Constitution, barring any state from regulating a woman's uterus.

A real Equal Rights Amendment, barring the states from discriminating against gays, lesbians and transsexuals, their partner rights, or their rights as parents or adoptive guardians.

If you drive a car that has an MPG less than 30 on the highway after 2010, you will pay an additional 10% sales tax to fund green energy. If you drive a car that gets less than 100 MPG on the highway by 2015, the tax goes up.

That should get some fucking jobs back in Detroit, McCain.

If you cheat on organized labor by moving your factories to China, Malaysia, Mexico or India, then your products will be levied heavily when you try to "import" them. The Justice Department will aggressively pursue a war of attrition on unfair labor practices: you have been warned, Cargill, Con-Agra, Walmart, Safeway, and the rest of the bums.

Teachers will be paid like doctors. But their tenure can be revoked by committee if they do not live up to measurable standards. No school vouchers. Every child in every neighborhood has the absolute right to the best education possible. This is what "no child left behind" should mean.

Eviscerate the Defense Budget. Use that money to pay reparations to descendants of slaves. Use it to pay for education and health care. Stop funding wars. Stop funding oppression. Reparations now.

Maybe then, America will start to be back on track.

Friday night's alright

2008-01-12T05:50:00.000-08:00

I don't care who you ask, "Blade Runner" is still the best cyberpunk movie ever. Fuck the "Matrix".

Anyone who thinks differently is a moron.

The Swiftboating of Mike Huckabee

2008-01-09T02:11:00.000-08:00

And so it begins: http://opposehuckabee.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

And here: http://www.taxhikemike.org/

The GOP power base does not know what to do with a man whose personal religious beliefs actually gel with the Gospel of Jesus: help for the poor, the outcast, the sick, love thy neighbor, devotion to community.

A Republican? With a pro-labor, pro-child, anti-douchebag platform?

This is what you get for crawling into bed with the Religious right, you sanctimonious, cynical, hypocritical scumbags.

So go Huckabee! I hope you win the Republican primary. And I hope you bring down the house of cards Cheney built, and maybe save American from the prospect of war with Iran.

And, if Clinton wins the Democratic Primary, I hope you win.

Because I have a $70 longshot bet on that, haha.

100 Posts, and a Happy New Year!

2008-01-01T00:02:00.000-08:00

Hello 2008.

Time to eat my words..

Best of luck in the new year to you and yours!

And, for your enjoyment: this is the winning-est website in 2008.

Datacenter Confidential #13

2007-12-18T21:29:00.000-08:00

A blast from the past, circa 1994!

Well here's a special feature on new groupz that appear on the IRC, this
feature is covering the mysterious and often misunderstood SK, better known as
SaTaNzKiDz. So who are these guyz? Well let me show their membership list
cum info sheet :

                    SK.NFO -=- STARTS HERE -=- SK.NFO

                               [ Satanz Kidz ]

        Satanz Kidz is a group.  The actuality of being a child of satan is
  handled on a per-member basis.  We are not here to re-structure irc.  We
  are not here to put out k-spiffy 'zines for people to chuckle at.  We are
  here to look out for one and other, we are here to merely signify an
  alliance (excuse the pun) of irc kiddies that think in relatively the same
  distorted, sick, perverted manner.  There are only two requirement you
  must fulfill in being a Satanz Kidz member; being a generally k-rad guy
  (or girl), and having [Satanz Kidz] in your ircname in some form.
  Tattoo's, brandings, and other semi-permanent markings may earn brownie
  points in the Founding Fathers' eyes.


  [Founding Fatherz]:

       HappyMeal  -  *@*
    Mr. p|pe hed  -  jacklin@cyberspace.net
          Plexor  -  plexor@paranoia.com  - he's too texan to
                                            pick a new handle.
   Mental Retard  -  retard@argyle.sox.net

  [Memberz as of Oct 2, 1994]:

       draftb33r  -  drunk@and.living.in.the.uk
        whyteb0y  -  elastic@LAME.CAPZ.SITE.EDU
           _fool  -  fool@dfw.net  - his nick was funny enough
    klueless j0e  -  rebel@warez.warez.warez
           SH33P  -  oldsk0ol@iii.net  - note: sh33p is dead, but his
                                         old sk0ol memories live on in [SK]
        crackh0e  -  noise@en.com
          _kAHV_  -  cavalier@shadow.net

  [Wanna-Be lamerz]:

        Skipjack  -  plexar@netcom.com (note: he's still lame, he just
                                        changed his nick)

  Reguardless, see all you fewlz on irc.

                                                  ,        ,
                                                 /(        )`
                                                 \ \___   / |
                                                 /- _  `-/  '
                                                (/\/ \ \   /\
                                                / /   | `    \
                                                O O   ) /    |
                                                `-^--'`<     '
                                               (_.)  _  )   /
                                                `.___/`    /
                                                  `-----' /
                                     <----.     __ / __   \
             HappyMeal [SK]          <----|====O)))==) \) /====
                                     <----'    `--' `.__,' \
          "We have no purpose,                    |        |
         but we have eliteness,                    \       /
  and from eliteness purpose will arise."     ______( (_  / \______
                              -HM           ,'  ,-----'   |        \
                                            `--{__________)        \/
                                                [artist unknown]

                    SK.NFO -=- ENDS HERE -=- SK.NFO

Heh! More on this later..

Again, Thank God For Mental Illness..

2007-12-16T00:53:00.000-08:00

Wow..

Call to Action - Kucinich barred from Iowa debate

2007-12-12T22:47:00.001-08:00

The Des Moines Register has arbitrarily barred Democratic Congressman and Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (OH) from participating in their Democratic Presidential Debate.

Please register your displeasure, politely, with the Des Moines Register here:

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071212/NEWS09/71212029/0/NEWS09

Also, you can, and should, email or call them and register your displeasure. Public debate, regardless of being sponsored by corporate media, should be beholden to equal time rules -- barring Kucinich may not be illegal, but it is surely immoral and unfair.

Call the Des Moines Register at 1-800-247-5346 and protest their private decision to censor a public election. The Iowa Caucus has National Implications and the Des Moines Register is excluding Dennis Kucinich from the Debate based on local politics. If that infuriates you, step up and call the Des Moines Register at 1-800-247-5346.

Better yet, call their Editorial Board too:
Carol Hunter - 515-284-8502
Laura Hollingsworth - 515-284-8041

Those of you calling The Des Moines Register to prtest their censorship of Kucinich, should also email their editors at the following...

Carol Hunter - 515-284-8502
chunter@dmreg.com

Laura Hollingsworth - 515-284-8041
Lhollingsworth@dmreg.com

War is Over

2007-12-08T19:57:00.000-08:00

27 years ago you were taken from this world, John.

This was the first time I remember feeling sad about something, about someone I never knew. I was not even 6 years old. Your's is also the only Christmas message that seems to have anything at all to do with the philosophy of the Jesus Christ of the Bible:

War is over (if you want it).

Rest in Peace, Mr. Lennon. You may be dead, but you are not gone.

Religious Freedom

2007-12-08T11:53:00.000-08:00

[Note: this is in response to Joe Conason's Op-Ed regarding the religiosity of Republican Candidates for President over at Salon.com]

It is interesting that of the three supposed forerunners on the Democrat side of the 2008 race to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in order, the top to bottom, their pronouncements of faith are less and less disingenuous: Hillary Clinton, who no doubt is as religious as I am a Black-Asian Lesbian Amputee from Mars, to Barack Obama, who I am sure feels some affinity for a generic Church and form of worship, but whose real idols are secular progressive pursuits and their real-life embodiments in the Civil and Human Rights campaigns of the last century and Edwards, whose good works bely his Southern religious values of which I feel he genuinely and deeply believes (and, going through what his family is going through regarding Elizabeth Edwards, I'm sure that it is for him a source of strength and stability -- the only real purpose of spiritual belief in this supposedly rational age of Chemotherapy, MRIs and echo-cardiograms).

To accuse the left as a whole of not examining the role of religiosity in their own political backyard is an unfair, and untrue assumption. For me Senator Clinton's unseemly disingenuous embracing of religion, as well as any number of other genres, means that primary or not I cannot in good consciousness bring myself to vote for her. I fear that Obama may be tempted to fall into this trap, and as disdainful and unfair Clinton and others' criticisms of him are on the basis that he is young and inexperienced, that he would fall into the trap of trying to please everyone and in the end pleasing no one is a result of not knowing better -- being young and inexperienced affords him a certain degree of flexibility of thought, just enough to be flexible enough to fail. John Edwards will do himself, his family and the world a great service when, like Albert Gore Junior, he leaves politics and makes his mark on the world. Mark my words, in less than 20 years he will be invited to Sweden to receive an award from the King.

Dennis Kucinich holds what common Beltway conventional wisdom regards to be the looniest of views. But Kucinich neither runs away from them nor shoves them in your face. Unlike "serious" candidates, Kucinich really has no fear to state his views exactly as he holds them without parsing or affected speech (a common speech disorder of politicians is to make unclear what any sane or rational person would see as cut and dry). 'Anyone who would not grant the right to marry to gays,' to paraphrase Kucinich, 'does not believe in equality for all people.' Bra-vo, Dennis, bravo. That is exactly right, and that is a more righteous stance than any supposedly pious mouthpiece in the field, Democrat or Republican, has managed to articulate in any debate before or since. So, we must quickly change the subject on Kucinich to his belief in UFOs (which is like saying you believe in pasta -- both things exist, spaghetti and objects, which while in flight, that cannot be identified). Salon.com, to its great discredit, has engaged in this hypnotic lack of discourse by citing that example. Who cares? You know what, I saw that same UFO, and so did all of my friends, and hundreds of other people, if not thousands. But somehow it is crazier to say I saw something flying and glowing that I couldn't identify than to say that I believe in a cosmic Jewish zombie who is his own father?

Which person sounds like a lunatic? But because these ideas of religiosity are attached to authority of consensus does not alter their real face value. Going to war because God told you to do it is a bad idea, whether that God is Allah, Yaweh, Jesus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And if your God tells you that two adults in love cannot be married because their plumbing is the same, then you are against freedom for all people. Period. End of discussion. Maybe people resist considering Kucinich because to consider him valid, one has to consider his ideas valid, and to consider his ideas valid, one has to consider their own to be suspect, and worse, to make the difficult choices required to divorce oneself from the status quo. That is why Kucinich faces an uphill, but worthwhile battle. And if Jesus came back today, I'm sure he'd be Kucinich's running mate.

If Jesus ever actually existed anyway. But that's not for my Government to decide, and you would think that they made that pretty clear when they wrote the US Constitution. Sadly, that seems not to be the case.

For Immediate Release

2007-12-05T13:31:00.000-08:00

Fuck the DEA.

http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/states/newsrel/sanfran120307.html

Contact: Casey McEnry
Number: 415-436-7994

Everyone is encouraged to call Agent McEnry and communicate how you feel about the illegal capture of political prisoners by our lawless prohibition junta thugs and their mendacious supporters in the legislatures.

Thanks for ruining my New Years plans. LSD is harmless.

Also:

Rudy Giuliani, you are a liar. Your own kids hate you. Stop lying for once in your sorry political career.

Datacenter Confidential #12

2007-12-03T03:44:00.000-08:00

After taking an incredibly unscientific poll of friends and colleagues, I have discovered that the Linux users tend to lean toward Ron Paul and the FreeBSD users tend to lean toward Dennis Kucinich.

That said, I have a handful of 7.0-BETA2 and BETA3 boxes up and running at ApartmentNet. So far so good, no major upsets. I even managed a "JumpStart"(*) install of 7.0-B1.5 on a box without a CD/DVD without too much hassle. SMP seems to handle noticeably faster, but like the Ron Paul/Kucinich test, there is no hard data to back that up.

What I've also never had any hard data to back up is why I have never really been comfortable with Linux and more specifically the Linux "community." It would be cliche (and also false) to say that my disdain goes back to the 0.9X kernel days where you had to download 20 floppy disk images over 28.8k modem, but I think that the real turning point actually came shortly thereafter when people started distributing their pre-packaged versions of Linux on CD-ROM. "No good," I thought to myself back then in 1994 and 1995, "can ever come of this."

It should be noted that even that early on I was already well on the path of Unix snobbery having been given or taken shells on various AIX and Sun machines, not to mention having a brief stint as a junior systems administrator for an extremely small ISP running BSDi on literally two 386 boxes whose combined horsepower pales in comparison to my shitty cellphone -- hell, an iPhone today probably outpowers those boxes by an order of magnitude, and if you could figure out how to hook up a dozen serial modems to an iPhone, you would have twice the dial-in capacity.

My first ever legitimate shell account (using the term legitimate in its loosest possible sense) was on a research server at Case Western Reserve University run by the then wife of one of the local stoner/hackey-sack/2600 geeks. The machine was an RS6000, roughly the size of a small "beer" refrigerator running AIX, and we all used tcsh (the Turbo C Shell) because you could use arrow keys to edit your command line or page up and down through a buffer of recently typed commands -- an innovation later picked up by the Linux community and applied to the Bourne shell in bash, the Bourne-again Shell. Despite the extremely cumbersome conditional syntax of tcsh, the desire for rapid command-line editing won over sh (Bourne)'s easier structure.

Ironically, I still use tcsh for my login shell (along with an environment that is essentially 15+ years old), but I code shell scripts exclusively in Bourne.

Having as real-world examples only academia to rely on in the very early days I became accustomed to there being a right and wrong way to do things on the command-line; ourselves, right or wrong, not actual students or academics by any stretch of the imagination (some of us being 13 or 14 at the time, still some even younger) would nevertheless mimic in our own burlesque way the formalities of proper Unix habits. As teenaged crackers, we kept neatly (if not clandestine) organized home and working directories, wrote properly tabbed and commented scripts, and would even go so far as to fix or preempt problems on machines we weren't supposed to have root on.

For some time Linux remained a marginal pass-time for like-minded hobbyists, something you could install on an old 286 and show off to your fellow hacker friends, bragging, "yeah I have root@my house." ${DEITY} forbid your modem should fail forcing you to spend 8-10 hours recompiling your kernel to accommodate a new or different modem -- especially considering the fact that the odds were not in your favor that the new driver would even build, much less work. Everyone running Linux back then would also become intimately familiar with "fsck", and would run it at their own peril.

Regardless, running Linux at home was a convenient way to stay logged onto (and logging) irc all day, provided you ran it inside screen. And having a stable, always up dial-in connection to the internet, or a machine on "the backbone" whose resources you could purloin for the purposes of running screens and irc put us scallywags at a strategic advantage compared to our peers, fellow hitchhikers on the 1nph0rm4t10n sup3r h4lfp1p3, all vying for dominance of one thing: Internet Relay Chat.

In the ancient times, the days of lore, there were BBSes -- bulletin board systems. The BBS was like the New York punk scene for anti-social losers in the late 1980s, early 1990s. Massive amounts of wire fraud and toll theft was perpetrated for the express purpose of one teenager in one area code being able to call into a BBS run by another teenager in another area code or even country. In fact, to say it was just teens is to be unfair to the burgeoning cottage industry of international software piracy run by enterprising adults in that era; these criminal enterprises relying on a small and powerful subculture of phone phreaks and crackers to grease the wheels and pave the way. Out of this came the distinct subculture that came to be known as the "H/P scene" for hacking/phreaking scene, or "the scene" to be ominously short.

Entire BBSes were set up as electronic hang-outs devoted exclusively to "the scene." Some scene members began to shun piracy, the porn trade, and cheap hucksters trading in calling and credit cards, not to mention the underground art scene on the BBSes (ANSI kids -- a subject for a future post). Rifts were formed, and naturally turf wars and rivalries erupted out of the BBS h/p scene, which brings us back to irc.

The Internet Relay Chat was a natural evolutionary step above BBSes because it enabled users to communicate across the globe in real time en masse at a scale that far exceeded the biggest BBSes. IRC was essentially a globally networked version of multi-user chats available on BBSes with more than one dial-in line. Some BBSes could have as many as 30 or 40 dial-in lines -- although these bigger BBSes were almost exclusively paid-subscriber systems (AOL, famously, was originally nothing more than a multi-line dial-up BBS), meaning h/p scenesters would have to purloin accounts subject to frequent suspension, and BBS systems operators (sysops) would limit the time users could tie up limited phone resources. Internet Relay Chat offered scene kids chat rooms on servers that were always online with practically no limit as to the number of simultaneous users. If you had access to a stable shell account on a server with a perpetual connection to the internet, you could literally stay on irc 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

And if you are going to be online that long, you might as well make yourself at home. But like any frontier, when the settlers started getting in each other's way, conflicts naturally arose.

Like a young Ian McKay being in the right place at the right time to see the Bad Brains come onto the punk scene in DC, I happened to butt my head into the burgeoning IRC scene at just the right moment in internet history and subsequently got caught up in the maelstrom.

For sure, it was a wild ride that took me places I could have never imagined as a teenager living in the suburbs of Cleveland.

(*) Its not really JumpStart, but it sure isn't KickStart. But, it's getting a bootfile from DHCP (which is bootp on steroids) and then NFS mounting root and running an install.

Grow a Flower, Go to Jail

2007-12-02T17:25:00.000-08:00

As this (early) political season and Christmas season heats up, remember that millions of Americans, wifes, children, fathers, mothers are separated from their loved ones held as political prisoners in America's war on Black Men and The Poor. Remember as our wars become more and more existential, our freedoms suffer as a result: the war on hunger, drugs, terror, ephemera, et cetera, et cetera.

I saw Ethan Nadelmann give this speech, repeated several times on public access cable in Cleveland, Ohio over the Thanksgiving break. Nadelmann heads the Drug Policy Alliance, one of many organizations dedicated to decriminalizing victim-less crime and bringing awareness to alternatives to imprisonment of drug users and dealers. To be sure, Nadelmann forcefully points out that when someone harms someone else, whether or not as a result of drug or alcohol use, then that person must be held accountable. But in the drug war, he points out, usually no-one is helped and those harmed most are people on the margins of society: overwhelmingly persons of color, and the poor.

Here is a talk Nadelmann gives in Detroit, Michigan. In Michigan, the statistics and the census is very similar to the make-up of Ohio, both in minority population (under 15% African-american) and prison population (50% and over African-american). Please watch this video with an open mind.

Merry Goofballs Christmas

2007-11-24T10:27:00.000-08:00

I know its a little early, but apparently department stores were open since 4am yesterday until midnight last night, so fuck it.

Go Go Gadget Kucinich, Planespotting

2007-11-17T10:12:00.000-08:00

Looks like Dennis the Menace managed to Ron-paul the Kos post-debate poll:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/15/22252/245

And now for something slightly substantive. I'm sitting between gates 29 and 30 of terminal 1 of KSFO, San Francisco International Airport. The airport in general and this terminal in particular seem to have been designed by someone with a real love of flying: directly in front of me is the Bravo-Hotel taxiway, followed by 1L/19R and 1R/19L, and a view of approaches, plus the end of 10R/28L, approaches from the southeast. In the distance, the San Mateo Bridge, any frequent fliers favorite approach landmark coming out of 4000 feet. A Quantas B74 just taxied by on followed by a CO B73 and an AA B76.

That I can't, whenever I want to, take the train in from the city into the BART station located just South of United International in terminal 3, walk through security and spend an afternoon watching planes is probably the most annoying feature of our new security apparatus post 9/11, more annoying that the degrading shoe ritual, or not being able to smuggle booze on-board (I used to put Jim Beam in a ginger ale bottle). Okay, the booze thing is the most annoying part.

A JAL B74, JA8076, taxis by followed by a Ted Airbus, then an AA B71, N964TW(?). Ted is now on his take-off roll, as a two-engine wide-body floats down onto 28L, probably a B77.

It's 10:34, I'm listening to Norcal approach on iTunes and looking at my battery I know I'll have to plug in and charge soon, which I dread, since that will take me away from my view of the runways; despite the fact that I am baking in the sun.

I board at 11:55, an Airbus 319. I don't have a tail number just yet because my equipment is not arrived at the gate yet. She's going to PHX and then on to EWR, but I will part company with her in Arizona for another A319 destined for beautiful Cleveland, Ohio -- the Forrest City -- home of one Dennis Kucinich, the next President of the United States, and one Michael Symon, the next Iron Chef America.

When Kucinich wins, I'll write him a letter and ask him if there is anything he can do about opening up our airports for observation again.

ETA - 11/18/2007

Tail numbers were N833AW and N828AW respectively.

While whoever designed KSFO has a real love of air travel, the designers of KPHX do not. In fact, it is possible that they hate humanity itself. It felt like the airport was intended to be a giant particle accelerator with evenly placed spokes as terminals. At least, that is what it felt like for the 1/2 mile hike from the A terminal to the C terminal, where, mind you, jets of the same carrier and same type were "docking" (Phoenix Airport -- the "Sky Harbor", as they fashion themselves).

As you can see from this link, its really a series of different length particle accelerators. Regardless, its ugly. And "Harbor" is not the first thing that comes to mind when I walk around in the airport, nor is it the first thing that comes to mind when I am in Phoenix, smack in the middle of a dessert. In fact, if I think of harbors at all, it is that I would much rather be at one as opposed to being in the middle of a fucking desert.

I do not see the appeal of Arizona, but I am not a well-to-do baby boomer with burgeoning interests in sepia and sienna toned faux-Native spiritual "connectedness with the land." If you really felt connected to the land, perhaps you wouldn't choose to live somewhere without an abundant nearby source of fresh water.

Being there made me think of a Coen Brother's film, title slightly misspelled. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to dwell on what I mean by that.

ETA - 11/19/2007

Dennis the Menace does it again: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/15/politics/main3508272.shtml

Ringing Endorsement

2007-11-13T05:50:00.000-08:00

Wait, I'm confused.. a Republican.. with nice things to say about.. a.. liberal.. Democrat.. does not compute.. head.. exploding..

Just say "no" to Newt Gingrich

2007-11-10T14:41:00.000-08:00

Here is my response to a recent article and interview with Newt Gingrich over at Salon.com:

How about "no."

How about "no" to sky-god worshipping white-male imperialists who want to turn the clock back to 1830 and the empire back to 1948.

How about "no" to people who feel neither guilt nor shame at the systematic, institutionalized racism applied to our continent's first settlers and African slaves, and their decendants?

How about "no" to old, white men who spend so much time and energy trying to figure out how to control a woman's uterus (especially now that the hysterectomy has gone out of fashion). Why? Is it out of jealousy?

No. How about a "no" to those dirty, nasty men who will not let two people who are in love have the same rights as any other couple in love because they had the misfortune of being born with the same sex organs. These same dirty nasty men who seek illicit and unsafe trysts in public restrooms or prey on young gay men or use gay male prostitutes, paying extra for the privilege of going without a condom -- as if the threat of HIV is as unreal to them as their own homosexual urges.

A thousand times no!

Surely, polite society will take up the mantle of green policy, slowly, ineffectively, deliberately, as long as it pleases the shareholders.

But I'll be damned if that means I have to cast a vote in favor of the enemy of humanity and progress and liberty, these white men and their angry, racist, sociopathic, narcissistic sky god: truly, they created him in their image, and continue to fashion his countenance to fit their insatiable needs.

Two words: fuck Gingrich!

Cheers!

Datacenter Confidential #11

2007-11-07T23:13:00.000-08:00

Shotgun Re-org

A shotgun re-org is my own term for what happens when a business runs out of operating funds and immediately shuts down operations, or worse, posts a message like this:

Feedster is Changing...
We'll be back up soon with exciting news!

I am citing this particular (and very recent) example by name because they failed to notify my company, their paying client, of their feed shutdown.

As a result, my pager would go off twice every six hours: first, when my cronjob would complain that no new feeds were coming in and second, when our offshore "noc" would ditto the page (I swear, I think they just exist to infuriate me).

Last night, as I was going to bed, I had the amusing thought that "wouldn't it be funny if they had gone tits up?" This morning, that intuition was confirmed when my co-worker IMed me to tell me that they had, indeed, gone tits up. I literally LOLed, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

I worked for a marketing firm in 1997 that had a version of a shotgun re-org. What had happened is that they bounced a couple of payroll checks, and after that I left. Not long after that, a similar "Coming soon!.." not appeared on their main page, I can only assume there was a mass quit or mass firing. Amazingly, years later I checked their web page -- somehow they got additional funding and actually pulled themselves out of the weeds long enough to be acquired by a larger firm.

Conversely, I have been on the ass-end of shotgun re-orgs as an employee of an acquisition-oriented company that grabs a company only to have all of its employees quit en-masse. In one case, myself and ravinald worked practically around the clock for three or four days to integrate user shells, dialup accounts, DNS, dedicated customers and mail from an acquisition into my network.

Regarding the latter service, mail, when you consider that in 1998 one couldn't simply turn to Google to solve all your problems, it is nothing short of miraculous that we were able to convert and import this companies qmail/maildir spools into a Berkeley mail spool format under sendmail replete with aliases and virtual domains, given the extreme conditions: neither myself nor ravi had barely heard of qmail and maildir, much less used it; the large number of users; the, for the time, size of the dataset (we enforced mail quotas, they did not), number of files, NIC wire speeds (we ended up moving their mail server onto the same switch as ours to speed up xfers) and the method we used to concat the files together (formail and procmail).

This was, of course, back when you actually had to read man files. I oftentimes miss those days.

Coming soon.. trading porn with Cisco support at 4am!

Your Tax Dollars At Work

2007-11-07T22:12:00.000-08:00

Wow, is our government really this stupid?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/7/112926/221

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

Watch out, Rainbow Coop! Big brother is watching what you eat!

Stupid, stupid, stupid..

Meta- and Pro-Blogging: Ron Paul Edition

2007-11-06T13:18:00.000-08:00

Meta-blogging is a term of my own invention about bloggers who blog about blogging (which, unless you are a moron, I bet you could have figured out yourself).

I developed an aversion to meta-blogging, and its kissing cousin pro-blogging, out of a disdain for the types of blogs which are written centered around the idea that the object of blogging is to (a) attract readers and (b) create revenue.

Certainly, it would be wrong of me to suggest that no one should blog for profit, to wit, pro-blogging; however, I can find nothing less interesting in than bloggers talking to other bloggers about the best way to snare readers and the best way to place ads or exploit patronage. That is my personal opinion on the matter. I have drawn criticism on places like stumbleupon for thumbing down meta- and pro-blogging related sites and articles. Incidentally, I've also been called everything from a fascist to a liberal to a racist and everything else, and I suppose I deserve it, since I am opinionated and not very tactful (fuck you if you can't take a joke).

Anyway, in the interest of levity and a little light-hearted hypocrisy I offer you this tip, Bloggers of the World:

If you want to attract attention to your blog, simply mention Ron Paul. -me

Far be it for me to break my own rules and not back it up with some content, I offer you this irc snippit for your arguing pleasure:

<chris> damn dude, youre guy is blowing up
<ian_:#channel> ?
<bruce:#channel> yeah, he is eating all the shrimps
<ian_:#channel> that makes me hungry
* ian_:#channel admits that i'm really just a 12yr old iranian hacker stealing ppl's paypal accounts to vote for ron paul so that we can take over the great satan while they sleep
<bruce:#channel> chris still need to explain what the hell he meant
<chris> what?
<chris> your candidate, he is blowing up
<bruce> yer dood is blowing up
<ian_> 4.2 million in one day
<bruce> yeah, what does that mean
<bruce> that means like 50 things
<chris> ticker tape parade,
<chris> it means what it means in current american urban slang, you idiot
<bruce> chris, when all those republicans were in texas a while back he made more money than all of them put together
<chris> what is it about you kool aid drinkers that makes you so sensitive
<chris> i was paying a compliment, you douche
<bruce> i am a facist, i dont like ron paul :)
<chris> but you're going to vote for him
<chris> i'm still voting for kucinich
<bruce> yeah.
<ian_> people need to be angry about the media's treatment of him regardless of their voting intentions
<ian_> it is an insult to the underlying idea of journalism
<bruce> if it is denise -vs- ron i have to take ron based on gun control
<chris> although, i think its great, great that he's drawing attention to this stuff
<bruce> well ron paul needs to start paying for ads on national tv
<chris> and i'll vote for kucinich because of abortion
<tim> Sweet, so you can buy your way into the house.
<chris> neither candidate is going to win the primary
<bruce> i'm not a chick.
<bruce> i could care less about abortion atm
<bruce> women will go back to what they used to do, pills, hangers, and kicks in the stomach
<bruce> there are greater issues at stake
<chris> well, i'm particularly sensitive to the abortion issue right now, and gun control is a non-starter
<ian_> i'm sick of ppl saying so-and-so can't win.. regarless of the person; it is that faulty logic that perpetuates self-fulfilling defeat
<bruce> bush won, anything is possible
<chris> there will be and never has been any serious gun prohibition in the united states
<ian_> im fine with paul being against abortion because i agree with him that it is not a federal issue
<chris> that is not his position
<bruce> well, i think it is a federal issue.
<ian_> the more important the controversy, the more local the laws should be.
<ian_> Yes, it is.
<bruce> no, that is his position chris
<chris> he is for a federal ban on abortion
<ian_> No, he has stated MANY times that it is not a federal issue
<bruce> he is against it but he does not believe it is up to the federal gobberment to decide that
<ian_> he wants to remove roe.v.wade and make it a state-based deal
<bruce> he has stated very clearly that it is up for the states to decide
<chris> until and unless he says otherwise, i refuse to believe it when his "supports" dismiss that they heard from someone else that he is against a federal abortion ban. if he is against it, get on tv and say it
<bruce> i feel that is incorrect myself, but it lends itself to stronger states rights
<ian_> i dont speak from other ppl, i speak only from what i hear from him... dont act you know where i get my info.
<bruce> please show me something he has said that gave you this confusion
<bruce> i've not seen him back pedal on anything he has said thus far
<chris> well, nevertheless, i havev my criticisms of the guy, i will not vote for him, but i appreciate what he brings to the political discourse or lack thereof in this country
<bruce> i have also not seen denis back pedal
<chris> you guys are free to vote for and support whomever you want to, and may the best candidate win
<bruce> well, we know yer vote is to the obama or the woman
<ian_> do whatever you wish but don't bring up points that arent correct then give them as reasons not to vote for the guy
<bruce> chris, remember when you called kevin all those names because he voted for bush?
<chris> i'll take the obama over the woman any day
<chris> obamas have more soul
<bruce> recall how you felt about him?
<ali> sofrito
<chris> yeah, i felt he was an idiot
<bruce> you have 2 choices, denis or ron, if you vote for anyone else you are the same idiot
<chris> but he has a right to vote for whomever he wants to
<chris> i still think kevin is a moron
<chris> ;)
<bruce> yeah, ppl have a right to be as dumb as they want
<chris> and i'll be happy to remind him if he wants a refresher course
<bruce> so, you can vote for hilary, and i will love you but realize you are a fucken tool.
<chris> well, we do live in the world greatest dumbocrasy
<chris> trust me, i am never, ever voting for hilary
<bruce> i like denis and my views are in line with his except one issue
<chris> unless we are talking about REDACTED
<ian_> mike gravel rocks too
<bruce> a vote for the obama is the same
<ian_> he gets no respect
<bruce> the only acceptable ppl you can vote for and not look like a tool are denis and ron
<chris> gun control is a non-starter, and i will develop a position so that i can make that clearer to you in person
<chris> yeah i like gravel too, and i kinda wished he'd be the left's ron paul
<chris> well, chris dodd scores points for standing up against telco amnesty
<ian_> you must clarify this non-starter idea...
<ian_> gravel is the number one reason why we finally left viet nam
<chris> the kind of gun control that dennis kucinich may advocate, whatever it is, cannot be legislated, enforced or enacted
<ian_> that isnt the point.... someone who--in most ways--points at the constitution should have a better knowledge of taking arms from the people.
<chris> congress makes the laws concerning gun control, and as long as americans love owning guns, and american gun makers love giving money to candidates, there never will be a meaningful ban on guns. however, and i want to make this very clear, guns are easier to get than a driver's license
<ian_> the whole point of us being able to arm our selves is to protect us from our government not foreign.
<chris> and, i think that there are pro and con anguments about the ease with which either should be available, and they should be, as they are, left up to the state
<ian_> guns are not a state issue
<ian_> its a constitutional issue
<chris> in fact, governmental control of driving regulations (seat belts, license requirements and ages, drinking ages) are more stringent than gun control on all cases
<chris> ian, it is, in fact, both a state and a consititutional issue
<bruce> chris, denis is not a protector of the constitution, he is a facist who just happens to support many of our social views
<bruce> he is you or me as president
<chris> and that is what would make kucinich's ideas of federal gun bans impossible
<ian_> i'm against off of it... fokways, mores, and normative community control has--in all human history--been far better at controlling
<bruce> he is for more federal mucking about in our lives
<ian_> off=all
<chris> i would vote for ron paul if he advocated a people's constitutional convention convened to give each american the right to health care and education
<chris> i will vote for kucinich because he is for those things, even if they are extra-constitutional
<tim> chris: You're asking a lot there..
<bruce> the reality is denis doesnt have a chance.
<bruce> ppl laugh at him for seeing ufos
<chris> i haven't seen anything that suggests that ron paul is against the idea of health care, other than the fact that it is not provided for by the constitution
<tim> We'll be living in a marshal-law world soon. So it won't matter.
<bruce> no one is giving him money either
<ian_> health care and education need to be a cultural achievement, not an enforcement.
<chris> in fact, his position on that is very very clear
<tim> You won't be able to fart because it contributes to global warming.
<bruce> so, if it is anyone -vs- ron paul, you need to vote ron paul
<bruce> period
<tim> You'll need a permit to watch TV.
<ian_> he has stated that he'd much rather be spending trillions of dollars on education and welfare rather than war
<tim> and you know, watchign TV is a privledge, not a right.
<ian_> in a lesser of two evils sense
<chris> but as much as he is against the federalized education system as it stands today, he is also against the unconstitutional national security state that has been in existence since 1947 and had its beginnings in 1898
<tim> You'll have no privacy. Your RFID will log you into the internet.
<bruce> which has helped the 5 jew bankers keep the black man down
<ian_> his primary argument against federal level education is that fed level education sucks at doing its job
<chris> spending trillions on healthcase and education is exactly what we *should* be doing
<tim> Sounds a lot like Cyberpunk:2020
<chris> school teachers should mnake as much as plastic surgeons
<ian_> well, chris, no you are going to vote for ron paul :)
<ian_> his stance is to turn all of our war funding into those until we can change our dependence on it.
<chris> if its giuliani versus clinton, i'll think about it
<tim> chris: I think you solved the root of the stupid american problem :)
<chris> but i'm more likely to write in joe walsh
<ian_> yea, stupid americans.
<tim> ian_: It's true, most are fat and lazy.
<tim> and dumb.
<chris> our public education system is third-rate, third world
<ian_> i'm aware ... i'm allergic to stupid
<tim> Kids in other countries know more about the US than our own kids.
<ian_> i agree.. and even on that i agree with you more than i do with ron paul BUT my choice to vote for him is all about methods of argument over issues more than the issues themselves.
<tim> oh, I don't do politics. I just state the obvious.
<chris> we have an ever growing class of restless, jobless and stupid people, mostly inner city and rural, and they think they have nothing in common but when they realize that the toothless rednecks are the same as the yo's on the corner slinging rocks, we're going to have a big problem on our hands
<tim> chris: You're scaring me.
<ian_> cuz he's right
<tim> chris: Since when did you start making sense?
<chris> however, ron paul is correct, good or bad, public education is extra-constitutional and should be federally defunded
<bruce> yes, and if we are lucky the mexican will come in and get good educations and those rednecks will die off
<chris> these are beliefs i have pretty much always held
<chris> but the poilitical dialog is usually so vapid in this country its hard to get these ideas out
<chris> so, hats off to roin paul
<chris> anyway, back to work
<ian_> word
<chris> ron paul even
<ian_> groin paul!
<bruce> chris is gonna vote for hilary.
<tim> chris: I dunno man, you've always just talked in circles and sounded like a babbling idiot. :P OK, more like everything you said had about 30 gallons of sarcasm on it.
<bruce> he still sounds like an idiot here
<tim> GROIN!
<chris> bruce: only if steve jobs is her running mate.. smell ya later!

Also, for your amusement: http://letters.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/11/06/paul/view/index.html

[ ETA - 6th Nov, 2007, 19:12 PDT: ]

Ron Paul is interviewed over at PBS.ORG here, explains his position regarding abortion (follow the link to read the whole interview, which is excellent):

JUDY WOODRUFF: Abortion, you've said you'd like to make it impossible for the federal government to regulate abortion, which would, in effect, I guess, negate Roe v. Wade.

REP. RON PAUL: Yes, it would, because I think that's a state issue.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And then the states would be able to do away with abortion.

REP. RON PAUL: That's right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I mean, in effect, would you like to see abortion banned everywhere? Or what's your position on that?

REP. RON PAUL: I'd like to ban the federal government intervention in abortion. So since I've only been a federal official -- a congressman and then running for the presidency -- I say that we should keep our hands out of it.

And there are some extreme circumstances that I may not even endorse but I recognize that we're always arguing about it. The states, they should deal with it, because they're difficult. The more difficult an issue is, the more local the solution ought to be.

Once you get into a difficult problem, and then you have one monolithic answer, like Roe v. Wade, then you come up with a solution where the courts legislate and allow abortion to be done a minute before birth, and I can get paid for doing one of those, yet a girl, because she throws her baby away, we arrest her for murder. There's something awfully inconsistent about that.

And I have so much legal responsibility as a physician, if I do harm to the fetus, I can be sued. So the fetus has legal rights, but we should figure that out at the state level on the extreme circumstances and not legalize abortion at any time during pregnancy, which is essentially what the Supreme Court did.

[ ETA - 7th Nov, 2007, 22:19PDT ]
It is difficult to summarize the raging debate that ensued on Salon.com after Greenwald's post about the meaning and impact of Ron Paul's candidacy, however this letter stood out to me, making a point about the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution that I have often had trouble putting into words (except):>

there was a draft during the Revolution? How does THAT square with the 2nd Amendment types that separate well regulated militia and the right to keep and bear arms (for the militia)? Not very libertarian is it? A draft? But there it was, right in the middle of the Founding BY the Founders themselves!

The well regulated militia being a necessity (according to the Constitution), citizens who can be CALLED INTO THE MILITIA have a right to have arms for the purpose of serving in said militia. Of course, that is bad policy in the modern world. Require your soldiers to pay for and keep their weapons? Ever check out the price of a good military weapon these days? I have one...they are pricey. The militia is for the rich then under the R Paul system. Same with edumacation.

I have often said that the 2nd Amendment doesn't guarantee the right for the average citizen to carry an Uzi, or even own one, nor does it say that there cannot be limits on the wait time for getting a fire arm such that you cannot simply walk into your local WalMart and walk out 5 minutes later with a shotgun and shells. I have used guns, and I like them. I have friends who own guns, and are gun enthusiasts. I have friends and relatives for whom owning a firearm is a necessity (for fending off foxes, bears or other predators). I am not for banning guns, but I do not think a gun should be an easy thing to acquire, and I do not think guns should ever be regarded casually.

Most everyone I know who use firearms with any regularity that I have spoken to agree that guns are to be taken seriously. I have never heard any of them ever advocate immediate access to any and all weapons. I think this resistance to waiting periods is driven by the manufacturers. Anyone who "needs" a gun "right away" probably really doesn't need a gun, especially right away(*).

(*) The only exception to this rule I can think of is the coming Zombie Apocalypse. In that case, the laws and bureaucracy will very quickly be superseded by mayhem and bedlam. I'll be going for the liquor and the pills, I'm a terrible shot and wouldn't be much help.

Wait, what?

2007-11-01T02:11:00.000-07:00

The piece of tooth fell out after game 1, where I after who knows how many agonizing moves finally checkmated my roommate(*).

On Halloween.

I was literally on the third pack of Smarties when I felt something weird.

"Hm.."

I thought to myself,

"The factory must have fucked up, because one of these Smarties has a crunchy part."

I pulled the candy and everything else out of my mouth, and looked at the offending chunk of hardness. That's right around the same time my tongue found the gaping hole in the interior side of one of my right molars.

Oops.

My roommate went to bed, but I'm loosing as white: I have her queen, one rook, one bishop, one knight and two pawns but she has my queen, one rook, one knight and four pawns, and a positional advantage.

The point is, (1) Happy Halloween and (2) brush AND FLOSS..

Dear Norm Podhoretz

2007-10-30T08:38:00.000-07:00

Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is not Adolf Hitler. He is not anything like Hitler.

Shut your war mongering fascist pie-hole, Norm.

Colbert Nation

2007-10-26T13:17:00.000-07:00

Have you joined "1 million Strong for Steven T Colbert"?

Well, have you?

If the election were held today, Steven Colbert would be President-elect tomorrow. Easily, handily.

Datacenter Confidential #10?..

2007-10-19T18:33:00.000-07:00

Yes, let's call this one ten. Nine needs a rewrite anyway.

I just spent 24 of the last 48 hours racking and stacking since one of my hosting companies decided they needed to move me.

I'm venting toward the middle of the room since I'm pretty sure that they are 4+1 CR/AC units short of what they will need if they fill their room up with servers (not to mention the power, but that's another issue -- I have three extra 20amp circuits for an insanely cheap $150/mo, so I'm good to go and fuck everyone else, haw haw). Also, 80amps per cabinet is twice as much as the hosting company upstairs lets me get away with, although, as I said before, the lack of air condition and UPS may just bite me later -- nothing too important down there though.

So, here's how you know you have been working too long on racking and stacking: when, at 5am, you drop a 1u grid machine (don't worry, the thing had a value in today's dollars of probably $350, but it cost $1700 back in 2005 when we bought it -- rest in peace).

Power, space, cooling.. first principals. Next week I have to find space, power and cooling for 18 new machines (including another SAN tray). I have ROR for space adjacent to my 5 upstairs racks, but they aren't sure they can give me two 20amp circuits. *FROWNY FACE*. I saw someone carting out three dozen Dell's last week, there better fucking be power. I hope we don't have to go downstairs, because I will have to go with something cheaper for SAN, like a sucky commodity 3WARE on-board JBOD.

Oh, also, I wanted to return to the idea of mise en place when talking about jobs like this.

At minimum, each machine getting racked will need two rails, measured to length, 4 square nuts with threaded screw-holes, and four screws. For the thirty-five or so machines I moved, that's 70 rails, 140 nuts, 140 screws. How does one divide up this tedious labor (the most tedious of which, in my opinion, is adjusting the rail lengths to the horizontal length of the front and back risers on the rack, left and right)? By 5am this morning, I had devised the following attack strategy:

Working 5 machines at a time (5 boxes, 10 rails, 20 nuts, 20 screws), I marked off and installed the nuts, measured (or had pre-measured) a length template for the rail, adjusted all the rails (not including the template) and hand installed each rail, screwing in the screws with my fingers and tightening or adjusting them with a screwdriver when the machines slide into the rails.

Then I would drop the power (because my retarded hosting company put the power receptacles on top of the racks as opposed to in them, on the bottom), bundled 5 power cables at a time, on the left, and I would pull and drop the cat5 on the right. Cat5 goes in first, then power, then a KVM to verify that (a) I'm in the right NIC (all hosts were dual NIC) and (b) that the machine actually boots.

Which brings me to admin pet peeve #272 -- there is never, EVER, *EVER* any reason to boot into runlevel >3. I'm talking to YOU, Lunix lusers.

A datacenter grid machine or server NEVER EVER EVER needs some fucking gimpy stupid fucking douchebag GUI. Its in a RACK, its not a DESKTOP, idiot. So, to the previous admins who initially installed these machines, I say to you, thanks, thanks for making me edit /etc/inittab to undo your stupid runlevel 5 moronocity. On a dozen machines!

Next week: software RAID, stupid or just mean-spirited?

Birdie Num Num

2007-10-17T23:01:00.000-07:00

A moment of levity..

Fuck it, I'm voting for Colbert..

Yessss....

2007-10-08T20:51:00.001-07:00

Congratulations to the Cleveland Indians!

Dear Mr Lebron James, Millionaire

2007-10-03T17:44:00.000-07:00

Sir, let me first say that I appreciate you remaining in Cleveland and playing for the Cavaliers, and continuing to support the community. Certainly, I do not need to remind you that Cleveland is a city with numerous image and economic problems, and while I do not agree that having a successful sports franchise is in any way a panacea or even a suitable Band-Aid for our city's ills(*), I cannot argue that your continued support does do some good.

That said, when you (allegedly) tell your friend not to tip a valet because "they get paid to do that anyway," I feel I must take offense and correct you. Certainly, valets are paid. Usually, they are paid a fraction of the minimum wage. The reason this is possible is because they are employees, like waiters and bartenders, who earn a portion of their income from tips.

In July, the minimum wage for Cleveland, the lowest in the nation, went up to a dismal $5.85. According to the text of the bill, an employer may pay 'less than [the proposed minimum wage] but not less than half of [the minimum wage] if it can be demonstrated that the employee also earns tips.' Half of the minimum wage is $2.93, and you can bet that almost every employer will pay their tip-earning employees the exact minimum the law allows.

So, sir, with all due respect, if you do not tip valets, and if you tell others not to tip valets, then that means that not only are you a cheapskate, you are also a douche-bag.

Regards,
Goofballs

(*) Regarding the phrase "successful sports franchise", I do mean a winning one; in the words of Stringer Bell to Omar Little and Brother Mouzon, "get on with it, motherfucker."

A Recipe for Sadness

2007-10-03T11:03:00.000-07:00

I just finished watching a surreal interview with Chris Matthews and Jon Stewart on last night's The Daily Show.

"This is the worst interview I've ever had in my life!"

Damn straight, Matthews.

The book is called "Life's a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation and Success." If that doesn't make you NOT want to read this book, I don't know what won't.

In fact, if that title does make you want to buy that book, you are probably a fucking scumbag.

I will not deny that there is a place for politics and political tactics: politics. But there is a reason that "politics" gets a bad name: politics are bad. Politics is what politicians are doing when they aren't helping their constituents (voters, not companies) -- which is my not so subtle way of insinuating that politics is what politicians are doing 99.9% of the time.

And what are the lessons, the aims of politics: get out there and make the most money, say the most whitewashed generic things you can say, do not offend anyone by not having any distinguishing characteristics, smear your opponent and have no soul.

The person with the combination of the most charisma and cash "wins." What do they win? They win the chance to shill for their corporate and special interests masters while failing entirely to accomplishing any of the lofty goals they may have had decades ago when they first decided to enter politics; "to make a difference."

Or perhaps your goal is to win for the sake of winning. This makes you a perfect "candidate" for politics. More likely, if you don't play the "game" right, this makes you a perfect mark for people selling self-help books or "The Secret" DVDs. You are a prick with a false sense of entitlement, you think the Universe owes you something and you are willing to compromise ethics, morality and common sense to get your way.

Pat yourself on the back, if this is you, and go out and buy a copy of Chris Matthews' book.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon

2007-09-30T20:27:00.000-07:00

I you haven't watched this movie, you should do so ASAP.

Also, G. Gordon Liddy is a douchebag.

wtf?

2007-09-30T12:06:00.000-07:00

I didn't know the Pentagon hired trans-genders. Maybe I've been wrong all along about the administration.

Oh, wait.. "I hate all Iranians." Looks matches the ideology.

Datacenter Confidential #8

2007-09-28T01:28:00.000-07:00

Vindication!

What is this?

INFO   | jvm 1    | 2007/09/28 02:20:33 | 2:20:33> |||| [inprogress/] S! 
[clown]/1/gg_cars-com.product.spd5//-1/1{t:119 c:gg-cw01.dev.COMPANY
p:100.30 ems:3839652 qms:28414413

I'll tell you what that is.. that's Java running our application on Free-fucking-BSD, that's what..

How you like them apples, Product Manager?

Her Job

2007-09-24T21:01:00.000-07:00

A moment of levity.

Iran..

2007-09-23T11:34:00.000-07:00

Wondering where to find resources online to help in the struggle to defend the sovereignty of Iran against criminal mad-men Bush and Cheney?

Look no further: http://www.iransolidarity.endofempire.org/

If you live in New York, or you simply love the first amendment, please let this scumbag know:

As the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, prepares to address Columbia University today amid a storm of student protest, state and city lawmakers say they are considering withholding public funds from the school to protest its decision to invite the leader to campus.

In an interview with The New York Sun, the speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, said lawmakers, outraged over Columbia's insistence on allowing the Iranian president to speak at its World Leaders Forum, would consider reducing capital aid and other financial assistance to the school.

Regarding the World Trade Center debacle, in which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wanted to place a wreath of mourning from the Iranian People on Ground Zero, well, why not? I think that's nice. Iranians held vigils after 9/11/2001 for the victims, and offered material and "spiritual" support.

The only real problem we have ever had with Iran is conflicting views of who should control what oil interests in the region. This is why we backed the Shah's illegal coup against a democratically elected government in 1953. This is why in 1979 when the public resentment for the brutal lawless leadership of the corrupt, US-backed Shah government reached a boiling point, US government officials and citizens were captured.

To say that Iran is the enemy of the US is backward, the US is the enemy of Iran. That we continue to bait and taunt them, to drum up our war rhetoric against them, is further proof that foreign policy in this country is off the rails. Statecraft no longer embraces a philosophy of valuing democracy, freedom, human rights and the betterment of all mankind but focuses on the allocation and distribution of wealth and resources, and being the biggest gorilla on the top of the mound.

KBR and Halliburton are considered by our corrupt government as having more rights than a human being. How more obvious can this be? Look at this Blackwater business. Bush claims to believe in a religiously revealed Truth of the Culture of Life, yet he holds back a helping hand when real, living people needed it in New Orleans and he attacks and kills with the other hand in the Middle East in a war of choice for control of oil and a support of the Biblical prophecies regarding the fictional battle of Armaggeddon.

So why wouldn't we let one fanatical, religiously aligned leader speak in New York city when we allow criminals like Bush to do the same there all the time? Why don't we ban Bush from using Ground Zero as a bully pulpit if we won't allow a world leader to make a gesture of mourning and solidarity there?

ETA - of course, as Fmr Ambassador Peter Galbraith will tell you, the Iran situation is complicated.

Datacenter Confidential #7

2007-09-21T23:54:00.000-07:00

As if I needed more evidence that the Project Manager title was a secret cabal intent on interfering the the affairs of operations personnel I give you the following example:

This morning the same project manager described in Datacenter Confidential #6 sent an email to my boss complaining about, well, let's put it in his own words:

We’re running short on PROJECTNAME grid machines. I wonder if we have a status on PROJECTGRIDWORKER, which went down few weeks ago. Also, is it possible to run Linux on PROJECTMYSQLSERVER? It appears that in order to run our java programs on it, we have to modify/port the underlying scripts. We’re really have no time to do such a thing. It will be much easier if all grid machines are consistent and run on standard operating system. I’d strongly recommend we standardize on Linux for all of our production and development grid/non grid, as it is consistent and seems to be the industry standard.

We need a couple of machines to be configured for golden gate grid with sufficient memory and horse power ASAP. Can you please help us?

Regarding the shortage of grid machines, well, we have an RMA out to the vendor on the missing worker. Regarding resources, we can and will order extra RAM for all the machines. Regarding running Linux of PROJECTMYSQLSERVER, the answer is a resounding NO.

This is a development environment, and there were 6 machines purchased for it. The specifications for the hardware were clear, three of these machines would have RAID storage built in, and three would serve as JVM "workers", or dumb machines running java processes which would populate the various MySQL databases on the other three large storage servers.

These machines were purchased months ago, and per the production standards, the JVM "workers" run Debian GNU/Linux and the MySQL servers run FreeBSD 6.2.

The Project Manager is raising a stink because he wants to run a JVM on the FreeBSD machines. Luckily, I have solved this problem, and in fact run JVMs on FreeBSD machines in production. I have even gone through the trouble of changing the startup scripts for the wrapper utility we use to control JVM processes to play nice with either BSD or Linux. I have even checked this code into the source revision control system, Perforce, for the exact reason of avoiding such petty OS related debates.

Yet the Project Manager wants to "standardize" to Linux.

I for one am all for homogeny. I truly am. But I will be damned if I let some Project Manager tell me what I am and am not going to run on the machines I am responsible for maintaining. So I sent this to my boss:

my boss Ahh, if only it was so simple. I will be meeting with PROJECT MANAGER. Maybe you want to join.
Not really. If a someone above me wants to tell me what OS to run, they will be receiving my badge, keys and laptop. It is absolutely a waste of time for E-staff to even be discussing this, and if PROJECT MANAGER is not satisfied with what I tell him my operating environment is then that is cause for me to officially complain about cross-departmental interference or obstructionism. My word on this is the law, and if E-staff does not agree, they are free to remedy that however they can. I cannot be any more clear or unequivocal about it. PROJECT MANAGER needs to stop wasting my time, your time and THE CTO's time. Moreover, I will not tolerate E-staff second guessing trivial details such as this: that is the very definition of micro-management, and I will not be micro-managed. Feel free to convey my feelings on this matter however you deem appropriate.

Once I had a few hours to cool off, I drafted this response and sent it to my boss:

There are a number of OS choices available to technology companies running a Java Development Platform, ranging from MS Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Solaris, FreeBSD 5.4, FreeBSD 6.2, Linux 2.4 Kernel, Linux 2.6 Kernel as well as platform choices like Intel X86 32-bit, AMD X86 64-bit, SPARC or even IA64 (Tru-64).

More confounding, Linux offers literally scores of distribution choices, the most popular of which range from fully-commercial, for-pay distributions like Red Hat and Novell SuSE, or free varieties like Gentoo, Fedora-Core, Debian and Ubuntu.

Unfortunately, choosing one distribution over another, or even Linux over BSD in many case, is not as simple as making an arbitrary choice for an overall common operating environment unless you are not vendor agnostic; moreover licensing, and therefore budget concerns play a role in the choice. For the latter reason we have shied away from embracing Red Hat, SuSE or Solaris X86 due to the cost of licensing the number of CPUs we use.

What is also oftentimes the case is that new hardware, or varying system hardware configurations do not allow all distributions or operating environments to even install or run correctly: in many cases, we had to make distribution choices based on what would run on a system at the time the machine was needed rather than what we would have preferred.

One thing is true in the arguments for BSD versus Linux, and that is that in the majority of cases, CPUs, boards and peripheral support is more mature and support is more universal and standardized in the BSD kernel than in Linux, meaning that often newer hardware will not even run Linux. This has been the case in production nearly half a dozen times. For instance, the Sun AMD Opteron servers officially supported Red Hat and SuSE originally, we have three unlicensed SuSE servers and one FreeBSD server on the X4200 platform. By the time we acquired the X4100 and X2100 servers, Sun had added support for Ubuntu, which is based on the Debian distribution and packaging system, and is ostensibly free. The Dell 2950 servers, which are Intel 64-bit platform, would not, at the time we purchased them, run any current, non-beta or non-development Linux distribution freely available: not debian, not Fedora, not Gentoo, not Ubuntu, etc. As a result, those machines are all FreeBSD. Which is good, because the stated purpose of those machines are to run MySQL, and MySQL always runs on FreeBSD because that is the industry standard, and more subjectively but just as significantly, that is our standard. FREEBSDSERVER1, a content window, is a SuperMicro Intel-based 64-bit server and also would not run any Linux, so it too runs FreeBSD. I am sure there are more modern Linux distributions that would run on these machines if we installed them today, but that would not change the environment for the Dells and we are not going to take down a content window to satisfy a Linux-leaning operating environment preference.

A note about Debian Linux: newer machines and newer Linux distributions mesh better, which is why we run Debian on LINUXSERVER1 and LINUXSERVER2, and Ubuntu on LINUXSERVER3, LINUXSERVER4 and LINUXWORKER1, LINUXWORKER2, LINUXWORKER3 and LINUXWORKER4 (because these are Sun systems and they do not support Debian). Debian is a natural choice over Red Hat (commercial, bloated) and SuSE (ditto), as well as Fedora Core (bloated) or some lesser distribution such as Gentoo, etc, because Debian has better package management, and the package maintainers are more responsive. That we continue to run Red Hat and Fedora Core in production is only a function of legacy, and as always as machines running FC or RH are aged out, they will be replaced with either Debian or Ubuntu Linux, or FreeBSD.

In fact, there are few or any arguments not to run a uniformly FreeBSD environment except for legacy binary issues such as SVM, i18n, Chasen, Sleepycat and so on. One of the arguments in favor of Linux touches the UFS/FFS versus ext3 or ReiserFS debate. It is true, ext3 is somewhat faster than UFS/FFS, but ext3 is also less stable and therefore more dangerous than UFS/FFS, more so with ReiserFS. The choice, then, is clear when data-protection is made a priority, as it is in our architecture. ReiserFS is something we have used to side-step the need for an inode table for filesystems, allowing a filesystem to grow to hundreds of millions of objects in some cases. More recently, however, we have made a decision to move away from this model for several reasons: loss of objects is a very real threat with ReiserFS, filesystems with that many objects are hard to manage (move, transfer, archive) and filesystems over a certain number of gigabytes are undesirable for this same reason, not to mention Lucene has a limit of X number of objects and Y number of gigabytes it can reasonably be expected to manage per index. And, obviously, Lucene is effectively agnostic about UFS/FFS versus ext3 because the indeces are held in large files where platter RPM is as much a factor as the relative speed of the filesystem for I/O, and Lucene's "MAILDIR" type object store format allows fast-traversal of actual objects (eg, files). I'm fairly certain that if we tested a UFS Lucene index versus an ext3 index, the speeds would be marginally different, or at least within acceptable parameters.

So, in fact, the question of what the standard is can be answered succinctly enough for the sanity of upper management and project managers: if the platform allows, the OS will be one of Debian Linux or Ubuntu Linux, except for MySQL servers, which will run FreeBSD. All other machines will run FreeBSD, unless there is a package dependency that requires a Microsoft platform; however the onus is on project management to remove all Microsoft dependencies and that objective has been in place since 2005. All other distributions and platforms are supported as legacy platforms to be aged out and replaced with one of the above stated platforms.

Hopefully I have made myself clear on this issue and we can put this to rest. Thank you and have a good weekend.

Hopefully this will shut down the Project Manager interference into my fiefdom. Or, you will see me soon blogging about job hunting in the Bay Area.

For the Record

2007-09-21T14:52:00.000-07:00

If you are a "pro-blogger" you are a columnist.

Saying "pro-blogger" is like saying "professional amateur."

goofballs has spoken!

(Watch this come back to bite me later.)

START THE RIOT

2007-09-19T19:54:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to an interview with Reverend Lennox Yearwood, the man illegally battered and politically imprisoned by fascists in the video above. Government should fear the people not the other way around. Revolution now.

Vodka, again

2007-09-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

Apparently (and it comes as no surprise, again), I can list as an intellectual ally one Anthony Bourdain:

Chocolate martini: Both chocolate and liquor are good in bars, but ordering them together announces that you don't like or appreciate either. Anyone who requests this drink should also get a T-shirt that says "I am an asshole, please take my money."

Chef Bourdain has been known to guest blog over at Michael Ruhlman's site, who is a fellow Clevelander. And of course the Bourdain quote is a direct ideological validation of my previously stated thoughts regarding the state of the modern cocktail in general and "status" vodkas in particular.

Goofballs Music Reviews #2

2007-09-18T22:49:00.000-07:00

Here is the playlist and text of the "liner-notes" I am sending to my Aunt and Uncle in upstate New York. Briefly, on background, I used to send them tapes when I was much younger. My Aunt, who was then a school teacher for troubled children, would play my mixes and discuss them with her students. My Aunt, my Father's Sister, has always demonstrated a greater appreciation for music I deemed "cool" or "relevant" than my actual parents, probably as a result of dealing with a large number of individuals in my age group.

---
JANE & TED'S EXCELLENT MIXTAPE (AHEM, CD) 2007 EDITION

PROGRAMME A:

01) The District Sleeps Alone Tonight / The Postal Service / "GIVE UP" 04:44
02) Easy On Yourself / The Drive-by Truckers / "A BLESSING AND A CURSE" 03:28
03) Don't Leave the Light on Baby / Belle and Sebastian / "FOLD YOUR HANDS CHILD, YOU WALK LIKE A PEASANT"
04:28
04) Between The Bars / Elliott Smith / "EITHER/OR" 02:21
05) Just Like Anyone / Aimee Mann / "BACHELOR NO. 2" 01:21
06) Arabian Knights / Siouxsie & the Banshees / "JUJU" 03:07
07) Misery is a Butterfly / Blonde Redhead, "MISERY IS A BUTTERFLY" 05:08
08) Family Tree / Belle and Sebastian / "FOLD YOUR HANDS CHILD, YOU WALK LIKE A PEASANT"
04:04

PROGRAMME B:

09) Feb 14 / The Drive-by Truckers / "A BLESSING AND A CURSE" 03:41
10) Crooked Teeth / Death Cab for Cutie / "PLANS" 03:25
11) Spellbound / Siouxsie & the Banshees / "JUJU" 03:17
12) Angeles / Elliott Smith / "EITHER/OR" 02:57
13) Faded From Winter / Iron and Wine / "THE CREEK DRANK THE CRADLE" 03:18
14) Two of Us / Aimee Mann / "I AM SAM SOUNDTRACK" 03:32
15) Waiting for the Moon to Rise / Belle and Sebastian / "FOLD YOUR HANDS CHILD, YOU WALK LIKE A PEASANT"
03:12
16) Each Coming Night / Iron and Wine / "OUR ENDLESS NUMBERED DAYS" 03:28
17) Rose Parade / Elliott Smith / "EITHER/OR" 03:28

It seems like 20 years since I have done a mix tape for you guys, and I'm pretty sure that's not too far of an
exaggeration. So it is approriate, then, that this compilation comprise of three decades of music from the 1980s
to today, to quote just about every generic Clear Channel owned "Lite Rock / Less Talk" venue in a city near you.

The mix begins with the opening track to 2003's "GIVE UP" by The Postal Service, a side-project of Death Cab for
Cutie vocalist Ben Gibbard and producer Jimmy Tamborello. "GIVE UP" features tightly crafted pop melodies over
obsessively tweaked pops and beeps of modern electronica. The LP features the ubiquituous single "Such Great Heights"
which is featured in a number of television advertisements, including the introductory "thrive" campaign of
Kaiser-Permanente, and has been covered far and wide, most noteably by Iron and Wine, whose acoustic version is
featured on the "Garden State Soundtrack".

We move on to Athens, Georgia rockers "The Drive-by Truckers" with their song "Easy on Yourself" from 2006's
"A BLESSING AND A CURSE". The band is lead by Patterson Hood, son of a Muscle Schoals studio player, and was
founded in 1996. The band has been cranking out one superb record after another of pitch-perfect Southern-
rock and country influenced music ever since. Their "SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA" 2-CD set is an essential for any
serious Y'allternative (alt country) fan.

"FOLD YOUR HANDS CHILD, YOU WALK LIKE A PEASANT" marks the return-to-form of "chamber pop" mavens
Belle and Sebastian, and "Don't Leave the Light on Baby" is probably as close to personal band
leader Stuart Murdoch tends to get in terms of songwriting, following his breakup with former bandmate,
cellist and vocalist Isobel Campbell (who has since enjoyed a successful solo career).

The next song is the cellphone ringtone for someone very special to me. Honest. Isn't technology great?

Aimee Mann is an indie heroine, former leader of 80s pop group "Till Tuesday", who saved up enough money to buy
back her back-catalog from Geffen later in her career and maintains sole rights on all of her music to this
day. She is married to composer and pop artist Michael Penn, brother to Sean and the late Chris Penn. Mann
gained a recent bump in popularity with the 1999 Paul Thomas Anderson film "Magnolia" by scoring the entire
soundtrack. Anderson and Penn had previously worked together on "Boogie Nights," and Mann had worked with
Anderson's then-girlfriend Fiona Apple.

Siouxsie and the Banshees was a post-Punk art-rock band popular in the 1980s lead by vocalist Siouxsie Sioux,
and was formed in 1976 as a last-minute fill-in for a UK punk rock festival. The band has (some say unjustifiably)
been given the post-hoc genre designation of "goth" (although old coots like me still refer to that genre as
"death rock"), along with other post-punk icons such as The Cure and Bauhaus. The "goth" designation emphasised
style often over substance, two qualities that are not at all lacking in the music and stage presence of
Siouxsie and the Banshees.

A more modern version of the highly stylized music of Siouxsie and the Banshees might be the art-rock trio
Blonde Redhead comprised of members Simone and Amedeo Pace and Kazu Makino. Their first album was produced by
Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley. Sonic Youth is the famed New York City punk, post-punk outfit comprised
also of bassist and vocalist Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore. As in the 1960s with the Velevet Underground,
Sonic Youth is both a cool-barometer and a cool-magnet.

Death Cab for Cutie lead by frontman Ben Gibbard has been recording for a decade and shot to "post-indie"
superstardom with the inclusion of several of their songs on the popular television drama (dramedy? trageo-comi-
drama? soap opera for teenagers?) "The O. C.", a show about a bunch of dumb, rich white kids getting into
fistfights and car crashes with sexy results. Regardless, the pop stylings of Gibbard and company are
unassailable, and they deserve all that fame and fortune.

Iron and Wine is singer/songwriter Sam Beam. A native of South Carolina, Beam plays guitar, banjo, slide
guitar, piano, mouth-harp, and an attick full of other strange and magical instruments, and tours with a
full band of sometimes more than half a dozen players including family members and friends. Beam is a
graduate Florida State University Film school (go Gators!) and writes introspective and folk-inspired
songs. Ironically, he rose to prominence after covering a Postal Service song for "The Garden State
Soundtrack" as previously mentioned.

The mix ends with "Rose Parade" off "EITHER/OR" by Elliott Smith. Born Steven Paul Smith on August 6th, 1969,
Elliott thought his name made him sound too much like a "jock". He showed signs of musical talent early on,
composing songs in Sunday school, and putting on talent shows. His mother, a caberet singer, divorced Elliott's
father when Elliott was young and moved the family to Texas, where Elliott stayed briefly before moving in
with his father instead. His mother had remarried, and there was a great deal of tension between Elliott and his
step-father, who he considered to be abusive. Elliott's estrangement from his mother is a common theme in
many of his songs. His solo career began in 1996 after leaving the Portland, Oregon band Heatmiser. Elliott
shot into the public eye after being nominated for a "Best Song" Oscar for "Miss Misery", a song from the
"Good Will Hunting Soundtrack", a film directed by friend and fellow Portlander Gus Van Sant. Elliott battled
drug addiction throughout his career and tragically ended his life on October 21st, 2003. It's too bad, because
he really was probably the best songwriter of my generation.

Monday Mid-afternoon Miscelany

2007-09-17T16:58:00.000-07:00

A few items (possible future blog topics):

watching a short promo for a KQED program entitled "immigration in-focus" i looked up to notice that they were subtitling the, in english, words spoken by an indian woman with a slight accent. i was having no trouble understanding what she was saying until my brain was suddenly saddled with reading and listening (at the same time! omg hard). are americans really that dumb? of course we are, and, in fact, i often wish there were subtitles in real life when some of them speak (and i'm not just talking about the president).

allen greenspan insinuated that the war in iraq is about oil, but then insinuated that is wasn't. we report, you decide.

meta. let's talk about meta-blogs. you know, blogs about blogs. worse, blogs about writing better blogs. almost without exception, a blog written about writing a better blog is not worth reading. moreover, the raison d'etre of writing a (boring) blog about how to write blogs is slanted in the direction of writing better blogs to attract eyeballs to your blog, which inherently is meta-ironic, since these blogs SUCK to begin with; to-wit, if you sit down and write a blog giving advice to others how to write better blogs, with the intention of, ultimately, sucking of the teat of ad-revenue or attracting eyeballs, you have already lost entirely the whole point of blog writing in the first place. in fact, i'm sick of myself for even talking about it at all.

"I CAN HAS" grammar -- just really awesome or also a great way to attract attention to your new blog?

xoxo, dr von drinkensnorten

All that money..

2007-09-15T18:07:00.000-07:00

http://www.crunchweb.net/87billion/

That's a lot of money just to blow up a few hundred thousand brown people.

Idiots, Redux #1

2007-09-14T21:13:00.000-07:00

Folks, let's talk about a menace creeping across the nation. It may already be in your town or province. You may know someone who has succumbed. You may have already fallen victim.

I am talking, of course, of "premium vodkas."

What is vodka? Well, vodka is a grain alcohol and it can be made with wheat or potatoes, or in a pinch, rice. Here's how wikipedia defines it:

Vodka is one of the world's most popular distilled beverages. It is a liquid containing water, ethanol purified by distillation from a fermented substance such as grain or molasses, and an insignificant amount of other substances: impurities and possibly flavorings. Except for various types of flavorings, vodka is a colorless liquid.

Vodka usually has an alcohol content of 35% to 50% by volume. The classic Russian and Polish vodka is 40% (USA 80 proof). This can be attributed to the Russian standards for vodka production introduced in 1894 by Alexander III from research undertaken by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. According to the Vodka Museum in Moscow, Mendeleev found the perfect percentage to be 38. However, since spirits in his time were taxed on their strength, the percentage was rounded up to 40 to simplify the tax computation. At strengths less than this, vodka drunk neat (not mixed with other liquids) can taste "watery": above this strength, the taste of vodka can have more "burn". Some governments set a minimum alcohol content for a spirit to be called "vodka". For example, the European Union sets a minimum of 37.5% alcohol by volume.[1]

Although vodka is traditionally drunk neat in Eastern European and Scandinavian countries of the "vodka belt", its popularity elsewhere owes much to its usefulness in cocktails and other mixed drinks, such as the Bloody Mary, the Screwdriver, the vodka tonic, and the vodka martini.

First of all, the term "vodka martini" will make any purist shudder, since a Capitol M Martini is made with Gin; I suppose this may be where the slippery slope begins, and the humble grain alcohol of Eastern Europe can be manipulated into a "status beverage."

In 2005, the New York Times Dining & Wine section reviewed several unflavored vodkas. Their conclusion?

After the 21 vodkas were sipped and the results compiled, the Smirnoff was our hands-down favorite.

Smirnoff.

Let me put it in perspective: a fifth (750ml) of Smirnoff retails for $17 at the local bodega. The same amount, by volume, of Stolichnaya retails for about $20. Grey Goose, Ketel One and Belvedere can fetch in the high $20s, low $30s. It bears repeating that the winner of a blind and supposedly fair tasting by the food snobs at the New York "Paper of Record" Times picked fucking Smirnoff.

Good old handy, dependable Smirnoff. Of course, I have long been a fan of Smirnoff, and so it came as no surprise to me that it beat higher-priced status vodkas handily.

In poker, players with experience develop a keen sense of their opponent's intentions by reading what is called a "tell." This person is bluffing. This person is holding a good hand. This person has a playable hand but can be faked out into folding.

The same principal can be applied to real-life situations, or, if not quite "real life", the zoo that is the modern bar scene. It is easy to read, for instance, a drinker who goes up to a bartender and orders a popular mixed drink, such as a cosmopolitan, vodka and Red Bull or kamikaze or some other such aberration and then makes a point of calling out a top shelf vodka.

"I'll have a Grey-goose Cosmo, please."

Really? Well, that will be $10, jackhole.

What this is "telling" me is that this person is a moron.

Invariably, these are the same animals who tip $1 on a drink you had to stop everything else you were doing and make. A cosmo is not a hard cocktail to make, and it follows a simple ratio that every bartender on the planet is well familiar with called "the margarita formula": 4 parts base liquor, 2 parts flavoring liquor and 1 part juice. Add or subtract a splash of this or that and you have 90% of all the cocktails anyone will order in any given bar. The cosmopolitan is Vodka, triple-sec, cranberry juicy, perhaps a splash of Rose's Lime and a lime wedge, traditionally served up. It is standard practice to chill the cocktail glass (aka, martini glass) before straining the meticulously mixed and shaken cocktail into the glass. All this takes some time and skill, especially maneuvering around behind a busy bar with perhaps another bartender or a bar-back, while taking other orders or dodging customers.

It's not rocket science, but it does take some effort. In the end, you will get the same result ordering a beer and a shot, and in the process ingratiate yourself to the bartender.

Because people order these concoctions, some genius invented a device used in every bar known as "the speed well" or just "the well" for short. In the well you will find various cordials used in common cocktails like the cosmo or the margarita or martini, plus lime syrup, grenadine, bitters and the 5 common liquors: gin, vodka, rum, whiskey, tequila.

"Well" liquors are usually bargain generic varieties such as Vat-69, Powers, Kamchatka, Two-Fingers and Gordon's. Consumed in large quantities, these cheap libations will contribute greatly to a bad hangover. But poor taste in liquor alone is not the only factor in having a terrible morning-after.

Sugar.

To be specific, our favorite villain, high-fructose corn syrup. The darling of well mixers and cordials. Let's return to our example of the premium cosmo for a moment.

"Grey-goose cosmo, please."

The bartender reaches for a cocktail shaker, strainer, pint-glass and cocktail-glass. She fills the cocktail glass with ice and a spritz of soda from the gun (soda gun), fills the pint glass with ice and reaches to the top shelf for your precious Grey Goose. In goes a four count of vodka (two ounces as the crow flies), a two counts of the cheapest, shittiest Triple-sec money can buy from the well, a one count of cranberry juice in a speed-pourer equipped bottle in the well or more commonly from the gun, also the cheapest cranberry juice money can buy and a splash of lime syrup, Rose's if you are lucky. All told, about 3 tablespoons of corn syrup just went into the pint glass with your vodka, which gets a shake, the cocktail glass is dumped into the service sink and you get a nice pink cosmo for the bargain price of $8 or $10.

Putting it into perspective, imagine searing off a slice of foie gras, and putting it on a McDonald's Big Mac. If spending the extra money on premium vodkas wasn't a waste of money in the first place, it certainly is now that you have added the equivalent of Coney Island cheese sauce to your cocktail.

There is a proper way to make a cosmo, and I will get to that at the end of this post. But first, let's explore the vodka hall of shame..

If Little Lord Fontleroy drank vodka, surely it would be this one:

Clear. Verbena, coriander, cinnamon bark and cream aromas. A soft entry leads to a glycerous, dryish medium body of sweet cream, powdered sugar, lemon verbena, and peppery cinnamon flavors. Finishes with a long warming fade of sweet cream, confectioner's sugar, and peppery spice. Very refreshing and palate cleansing.

Say what? That doesn't sound like vodka, that sounds like some kind of Republican bath-house fantasy. No thanks, and not for $100 a bottle.

Speaking of "gold", what the fuck is this?:

Gold flakes in liquor is not new (Goldschlager anyone?) but this is the first time I have seen it in vodka. The Gold Flakes Supreme vodka is made with 24-karat gold flakes. The vodka is quadruple distilled and uses underground spring water (the press release doesn't specify what the base ingredients are). No word on when it will be distributed yet either but it will sell for $60 and will be distributed by Shaw-Ross importers.

Oh yes, a whole $0.001 worth of gold in each bottle! Nothing says "I'm a nuveau riche douchebag" like willingly drinking a potentially poisonous heavy metal! Pass.

Speaking of lethal, here's a vodka I can get behind:

The brand probably started out as moonshine. A clear, potent drink developed in 1906 by a family called Sigurdsson, the spirit got its moniker from the local Icelandic, “Svarta Daudi,” or “Black Death.” One surmises this name must be the outcome of the pre-distinguish “describe” phase. For the next 80 years, Black Death would stay largely out of the spotlight.

Yeah, there's truth in advertising! It's made from beets and its cheap, this is a real man's vodka.

And speaking of real man's drinks, here's a decent cosmo for you:

Hardware --
1 stainless steel cocktail shaker
1 stainless steel cocktail strainer
1 pint glass
1 8 ounce tumbler or cocktail glass (pro tip! real drunks don't mess with stemware, it breaks)

Software --
2 ounces of Smirnoff
1 ounce of Grand Marnier orange liquore
1/2 ounce premium, organic cranberry juice
2 teaspoons of home made lime syrup (recipe follows)
enough crushed ice to fill the tumbler and pint glass, about a 1 1/4 cup
1/8 of a key lime, cut into a wedge shape

Fill tumbler and pint glass with ice, and top off tumbler with water from the tap.

Pour vodka, Grand Marnier, cranberry juice and lime syrup into pint glass, cover tightly with cocktail shaker and give no more than three vigorous shakes, upend so that the ice and liquor are in the shaker, remove pint glass and dump the ice and water from the tumbler. Strain mixture into tumbler and garnish with lime.

Syrup:

Bring 1 cup of cold (preferably filtered) water to a simmer on the stove over medium heat in a sauce pan, reduce heat to low, add 1/3 cup of table sugar, 1/4 cup of fresh lime juice and two tablespoons of fresh grated lime peel and simmer for 5 to 10 minutes, until the sugar is melted. Strain into a bottle and refrigerate.

Na Zdrovya!

Who	Billy Shaheen, the co-chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign in New Hampshire
Date	December 12, 2007 in an interview with the Washington Post
Statement	"The Republicans are not going to give up without a fight ... and one of the things they're certainly going to jump on is his drug use... It'll be, 'When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?' There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It's hard to overcome."
Context	In his first book, Dreams From My Father, Obama admitted to using cocaine, among other drugs. Shaheen claims he was bringing up the drug use because the GOP will do the same, and that the democrats would do better to nominate someone whose past has already been vetted. His questions about Obama were really what the GOP would say, he claims.
Racialiciousness	Moderate. I cannot recall any white candidate whose past drug use was used to imply that he was an actual drug dealer. Given the prevailing image of drug dealing as a "black thing," Shaheen went too far.
Wackness	High. While it's true that candidates must show they are tough and can handle the general campaign, using hypothetical attacks as an excuse to attack your own party's candidate just seems weak.
Links	Washington Post Campaign Blog, The Trail, Dec. 12 2007 Hillary Clinton apologizes to Barack Obama for Drug Smear
Latest Status	Senator Clinton apologized to Obama in person, and Shaheen stepped down as co-chair of the campaign on December 13. BUT, no sooner than an HOUR after the debate Clinton SUPPOSEDLY apologized BEFORE, Chief Clinton Strategist, MARK PENN, was peddling the same swill on MSNBC'S HARDBALL. So, just how SINCERE was said apology from Clinton to Obama?