“The doctor said he’d have to cut it off if it didn’t stop oozing. Unbeknownst to him he had it for five years. But we all have do deal with Satan where we least expect him, it’s God’s way of testing us. He said if he lost another twenty pounds, he could go off the diabetes medicine. I pray to God he can do it, but I can’t know His plan.” – woman that works with me yakking on the phone for an hour with her door open
for the love of all that is holy, SHUT UP!
So, dumb people never fail to amaze me. I was driving to work today (at exactly 65 miles per hour, of course) in the middle lane of a three-lane-each-way highway. A car comes up behind me, rides my tail for a while, and then flashes its lights at me. What do I do? Since I’m in a good mood today, I did nothing. There were about two other cars on the road, neither anywhere near me. So I started watching the guy in the car behind me. He began looking rather exasperated and then honked at me. Yes, honked at me. With an empty lane on either side of us. At this point I was just loving it too much to do anything but watch, and he tore around me, in the right lane, and flipped me off as he passed me. There’s someone that needs to chill out.
It’s always fun to poke around slashdot. Slashdot is a community forum for geeks with nowhere else to go during the day. Moderators post articles there and geeks from around the world discuss them and comment on them. It’s like a huge star trek convention without the costumes. Recently, an article was posted to the wolves regarding Sun Microsystems’ campaign to start putting ‘Powered by Java’ stickers on things that run Java. This inexplicably includes such appliances as microwaves. It was mentioned by many people that almost exactly no one cares what makes their microwave run, and I can’t see an older couple standing in a store looking at refrigerators trying fervently to decide between the Kenmore and the Maytag with Java(TM). They don’t care. No one cares. I don’t care that my mobile runs some lunatic flavor of the Symbian OS, my Powerbook doesn’t have a sticker that says ‘Power960 Inside!’, my mom’s computer has no sticker reading ‘Powered by x86 Assembly Language’. As I sit here staring at the Windows and Intel stickers on my work PC, it occurs to me that I haven’t owned a computer without an Intel Inside sticker (yes, I put one on my Athlon when I built it…) and the Windows sticker is kind of a joke, something that dates a computer more than illustrates what it has. I’ve seen servers with Windows NT stickers running Server 2003 and even Linux. Sun is just copying people, with the major exception that no one cares what runs Java. It too, shall pass. Which is good, considering Java was once considered the end-all and be-all of programming languages and operating systems. It somehow never became an OS standard in mobile devices like it promised to be. Which might be good.
So I register for classes today. Looks like it might be a fairly boring semester; I’m taking the History of Math to avoid taking Africana or Chicana Studies. Yes, I do think it’s more important.
If nations could overcome the mutual fear and distrust whose somber shadow is now thrown over the world, and could meet with confidence and good will to settle their possible differences, they would easily be able to establish a lasting peace.
-Fridjof Nansen
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Abraham Maslow
We teach them proper principles and let them govern themselves.
-Prophet Joseph Smith
Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
Laurence J. Peter (1919 – 1988)
The time has come for all good men to rise above principle.
-Huey Long
Only the winners decide what were war crimes.
-Gary Wills
I’ve made a few updates to the sidebar, most notably the Daily Quotes section. It’s powered by a nifty script from quotationspage.com. It’s pretty straightforward, but it’s a little tricky to implement CSS formatting for it. That aspect isn’t mentioned anywhere on their site, so it’s kind of one of those “left as an exercise for the reader” sort of things. It wasn’t too tricky to browse the code (thanks to clean, standard code from the script author) to figure it out. In the spirit of sharing, here’s the CSS code I used:
.tqpHeader {
display:none;
}
.tqpQuote {
font-family: "Verdana", "Arial", sans-serif;
color:#333;
font-size:x-small;
font-weight:bold;
padding-left: 3px;
margin-top: -5px;
}
.tqpAuthor {
font-family: "Verdana", "Arial", sans-serif;
color:#333;
font-size:x-small;
font-weight:bold;
}
.tqpFooter {
display:none;
}
Yeah, I’m a bad person for hiding the title and footer they provide, but I’ve put their copyright credit in my new Legal Info section of the sidebar. If they don’t like it, I’ll put it back in.
And since I’m feeling kind of nice today, here is a link to the stylesheet I heavily edited to format this site. Don’t sell it and don’t claim it as your own. And cite me if you use it. That’s all I ask.
“Activist judges and local officials in some parts of the country are not letting up in their efforts to redefine marriage for the rest of America, and neither should defenders of traditional marriage flag in their efforts,” Bush said in a statement.
…then isn’t it all the more reason to let the states decide? “…the rest of America” might want to pass a ban, but the other parts might not. It’s called Federalism, and Republicans used to support it. But I guess the Bush White House sees a difference when people want to extend equal rights. Thank God he wasn’t in office in 1964. “Let us preserve the Anti-Miscegenation Laws”, I can hear him arguing, “we’ve had them so long, and it’s a traditional American value.”
Would the American public have allowed the Constitution to be amended to read “Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a white man and a white woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a white man and a white woman.” ? I think not. Why is this any different?
Random informative link: A series of lectures on ancient philosophy from the University of Washington. They’re easy to understand and presented well.
“The constitutional amendment we’re debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans,” McCain said. “It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them.” (read more)
…McCain for President?
And the Constitution survives another Attempted Battery.
…as reported by FOX ‘News’ and The Miami Herald.
First off this morning, I’m trying my hand at censorship. I’m starting to block IP addresses that abuse my comment-posting system. These are bad people. If you want the list so far, perhaps to update your own IP ban lists (or to, say, drop the hammer and dispense some indiscriminate justice) you can grab my IP-BAN list.
That aside, I’d like to say that this morning was interesting in terms of things I saw.
1) A cop going 90mph
1a) A guy passing the cop going 90mph
1b) The cop slowing down to 65mph after the guy passed him
2) A very dignified older black woman in a Bentley with one of those hats with the little half-veil thing. This was my dose of Good Old Culture for the morning. So cool.
3) A couple (I assume… they had three kids in the car as well) that looked so similar they could have been fraternal twins. Not cool.
I’ve added A Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace, a 1996 credo by John Perry Barlow in the left (formerly right… hm, political significance?) link bar. In related news (i.e. where I grabbed the link from), Wired.com reports that hacktivism is becoming a more legitimate form of expression, highlighted by the HOPE conference.
So I went and watched Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday. Someone else needs to step up and take over the production of that sort of film from Michael Moore. Every time I watch a movie of his, I can’t help but think that given a decent research staff, I could do better. Not to say the film was bad. It was just .. not as good as it could have been, I feel. Yes, it was biased. Yes, it bashes Bush. But I think the video clips especially are very important for the public to see. Sure, it’s edited, but it doesn’t matter that the majority of the clips are taken out of context. Most of them are pretty damning however you frame them.
I take issue, however, with Moore’s treatment of the House of Saud and the Bin Laden family. His (leading) interviews tended toward the opinion that because Osama is a Bin Laden that every member of his (huge!) family should have been detained and questioned following 9/11. I know I’d better not be held responsible or detained and questioned based on the actions of some of my relatives… and I feel the Bin Ladens were rightfully allowed to go (more likely than not simply for their own protection… can you imagine Joe Sixpack coming across a person named Bin Laden two days after 9/11?)
Similarly, Moore (and his ring-in-the-nose interviewees) condemn the House of Saud (and particularly Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador) for being all but responsible for Bush’s rise(?) to the Presidency. Moore cites the vast Saudi investment in the US and the fact that Prince Bandar is a personal friend of the Bush family. Imagine that, leading wealthy families from leading wealthy nations know each other and interact with each other. I can’t imagine that people would have the same problems if the Kennedys and Rothschilds and Carnegies and Gates(es?) and Windsors and Astors and the like got together for tea and to discuss international investment. Yeah, well, the Saudis are brown, right? They and the Bushes are both in Oil, right? Yeah, whatever. Moore’s had his tinfoil hat on for too long. But the film really just goes to confirm my beliefs (formed from information culled from global news sources.. I read BBC, Al-Jazeera, Times of India, Frankfurter Allgemeine and others regularly):
1) Bush is a fool
2) The war is a sham
3) Bush is losing the support of the military
4) The folks that signed up for the Armed Forces got into more than they bargained for
4a) A few (and increasing number of) people aside, the majority of the American public can’t seem to distinguish the war in Iraq from the soldiers in Iraq
5) it’s important to remember Heinlen’s (Hanlon’s/Goethe’s/James’ [:wiki:]) Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”
and, perhaps most importantly:
6) there’s still time to salvage America’s dignity
Moore engaged, in a latter section of the film, the testimony and support of a family (mostly the Mother, “a conservative Democrat”… which I kind of doubt, but whatever) that has a long military history and recently lost a son in Iraq. I feel that this section bore quite a lot of significance as it illustrated the difference between the War and the Soldiers (Servicemen? Service-persons?). [spoiler alert] The mother goes to Washington to seek closure (initially seeking to see the President, but since they don’t let people that disagree with the President go anywhere near him, she had to be content with walking around outside). There, she met an old [ethnic] woman with pictures from the war proclaiming in her broken English that these terrible things were going on in Iraq. She was (understandably) moved and tried to strike up conversation, or at least commiseration, with the woman (who had apparently lost someone close to her as a result of the War). Presently, another woman walked up and proclaimed that the photos on the [ethnic] woman’s boards were a lie. Enter conflict. Moore’s friend (from Flint, MI, maddeningly enough) couldn’t take it and told Skeptical Woman that she had lost a son in Iraq. You know what S.W. said?
“There are others.”
It’s that sort of person that we ought to be fighting against.
It sounds unfortunately trite now, but we need to ‘support the troops’. Especially when they come back. Um, call it the Hug a Soldier initiative I guess. Or the Hug a Relative of a Soldier initiative. There’s a slogan for a sticker. But the sticker on my car will read:
“Republicans for Anyone But Bush”
In other ‘mad-mad-mad-mad-world’ news, someone needs to send a few memos to the Republican and Democratic parties that their platforms are all wonky. Today alone I observed the following:
I don’t know… on top of it all, I still haven’t decided who I’m voting for. Not Bush. Likely not Kerry. Definately not Baradnik. Ditto for Nader. Right now I’m edging toward Bat-man. He’s tough on crime and disappears when he’s not needed. Sounds like a great President to me.
“Our local manager made the decision that displaying bomb imagery in New York City in the current environment is inappropriate,” Meyer said. (read more)
…and in other news, it’s ok to display bombs from airplanes over anywhere there’s sand. At least, that’s what the Ministry of Peace says. It’s ok, because we’ve always been at war with Middle Eastia.
Worth Considering:
Zombie PCs: Silent, growing threat
“War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength.”
-George Orwell, 1984
In the light of PBS censorship of various words in a new show, I think it’s high time we start using ‘bleep’ as a swear word. We pick up a lot of what we say from the media, right? I say its time to catch on to their new swear word that they’ve been pushing for such a long time. It’s quick, sharp, catchy, and ubiquitous. I mean, even comic books have their own (“Shock you!”).
Join with me now in using this wonderful new expletive. And just wait until someone claims you’ve offended them 
Bleep bleep bleep bleepy bleep bleep. Uh-oh, now I’m going to bleep for bleep sure. Eh, bleep it.
