December, 2005 archive

Yesterday, while my class was taking their certification test, I got my True Type Fonts installed in Slack, thanks to this webpage (even though it’s written for Slack 9.x, it works for Slack 10.x).

No copyright issues here. I have a fully paid-for Windows installation I’m no longer using. I paid for those fonts, and they are mine, all mine.

Heh Heh Heh Heh.

Does the current Federal Administration recognize that there is a difference between being President of the United States of America and being God Emperor of Dune?

Congressman John Dingell read this on the house floor today

‘Twas the week before Christmas and all through the House
No bills were passed ’bout which Fox News could grouse;

Tax cuts for the wealthy were passed with great cheer,
So vacations in St. Barts soon would be near;

Katrina kids were nestled all snug in motel beds,
While visions of school and home danced in their heads;

In Iraq our soldiers needed supplies and a plan,
Plus nuclear weapons were being built in Iran;

Gas prices shot up, consumer confidence fell;
Americans feared we were on a fast track to…well…

Wait— we need a distraction— something divisive and wily;
A fabrication straight from the mouth of O’Reilly

We can pretend that Christmas is under attack
Hold a vote to save it— then pat ourselves on the back;

Silent Night, First Noel, Away in the Manger
Wake up Congress, they’re in no danger!

This time of year we see Christmas every where we go,
From churches, to homes, to schools, and yes…even Costco;

What we have is an attempt to divide and destroy,
When this is the season to unite us with joy

At Christmas time we’re taught to unite,
We don’t need a made-up reason to fight

So on O’Reilly, on Hannity, on Coulter, and those right wing blogs;
You should just sit back, relax…have a few egg nogs!

‘Tis the holiday season: enjoy it a pinch
With all our real problems, do we honestly need another Grinch?

So to my friends and my colleagues I say with delight,
A merry Christmas to all,

and to Bill O’Reilly…Happy Holidays.

with a tip of the hat to Phillybits.

Everywhere.

This being the United States of America, Big Brother is usually in the service of making more money.

For his research, Sorensen put radio frequency identification tags – tracking devices the military used to keep an eye on equipment during Desert Storm – on grocery carts in a store in Oregon and watched where they went. The Wharton professors helped turn the data into road maps of the routes that different groups of shoppers took.

As an aside, my company specializes in RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification). Electronic signatures are our business.

President Bush reversed position yesterday and endorsed a torture ban crafted by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) after months of White House attempts to weaken the measure, which would prohibit the “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment of any detainee in U.S. custody anywhere in the world.

The announcement of a deal at the White House yesterday was a setback for the administration, which had pressed the senator to either drop the measure or modify it so that interrogators, especially with the CIA, would have the flexibility to use a range of extreme tactics on terrorism suspects. In the end, McCain, bolstered by strong support in both houses of Congress, was willing to add only two paragraphs that would give civilian interrogators legal protections that are already afforded to military interrogators.

I find no satisfaction in this.

The current Federal Administration has dragged the reputation of the United States of American through the mud.

Given their willingness to ignore law, truthfulness, and moral standards whenever it suits their will, I suspect that they will hold themselves to this agreement with the same diligence that they have held themselves to their oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States (wonder if they have ever read it all the way through?).

Which they have, except for lying us into a war, spying on innocent citizens (Quakers being a historically dangerous group), selling off the assets of the country to the highest bidder, running concentration camps.

They make the Harding administration look like an exemplar of the public trust.

I found this column in the local rag to be especially touching; I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps because I see some parallels between the author’s description of her youth and my own, growing up on a farm, though they were half a world apart.

We did have more stuff, but I did not realize until much later that, for the first few years of my life (until my father quit farming and got a job working for the Commonwealth of Virginia), my parents were just barely getting by.

And we had one radio.

I did not have a telephone until halfway through medical school. I saw a television for the first time after I left the country in 1979. We had one small, old radio that had to be shared among five siblings with varied interests. (Imagine the torture of being forced to endure commentaries about a five-day cricket match in which you have absolutely no interest. Or, having to listen to “girlie songs,” and watching your sisters cry over silly lost-love lines.) Such was life for kids and parents alike. Today, I wonder why my parents never asked to listen to their favorites.

Recently, I have been pondering what it is like to be a parent in this day and age. Hoping for an answer, I tried the Internet. Then, I visited the local library. I found innumerable prescriptions on how to parent, and was further inspired to reflect on the triumphs and tribulations of parenting: the joys, the pangs, the angst, the zest, and the desires and dreams of a parent. This was a deep meditation.

Wow.

Now that’s what I call targeted marketing!

In my little corner of Delaware, Santa rides a firetruck.

Every Christmas, the local fire company (which doesn’t have a website) makes the rounds of the neighborhoods with Santa riding on top of the firetruck. A Fire Marshall’s vehicle precedes and one follows the truck, while Santa’s helpers (junior fire department volunteers) distribute candy.

They came by tonight, lights flashing and sirens blaring.

My son said, “That’s one of my favorite traditions.”

(I tried to take pictures, but, with the motion and the glaring lights, they didn’t come out well and I would be ashamed to post them.)

There’s certainly a big fuss in Blogosphereville about the Newsweek article, Bush in a Bubble, which describes Mr. Bush as perhaps the

most isolated president in modern history, at least since the late-stage Richard Nixon.

Yesterday, Mr. Bush, in attempt to burst the bubble, participated in an interview or two. What I found most disturbing is this exchange:

Bush: “Look, I, I, uh, I feel like I’m getting really good advice from very capable people, and that people from all walks of life inform me and inform those who advise me. And I feel very comfortable that, that I’m very aware of what’s going on.

“I just talked to the president-elect of Honduras. A lot of my job is foreign policy. And I spend an enormous amount of time with leaders from other countries, and they come right here in the Oval Office and tell me what’s on their mind. And I tell them what’s on my mind.

“And so — you know, it’s the first time I’ve seen those magazines, by the way.”

Williams: “Do you read this kind of stuff?”

Bush: “No.”

Williams: “You don’t read the newsweeklies at all?”

Bush: “I really don’t. I mean, I’m interested in the news, I’m not all that interested in the opinions.”

Persons do not act on facts (news). People act on opinions. The opinions may or may not be based on facts (consider those that claim that no 757 hit the Pentagon. They have formed their opinion and no facts can alter them.).

A person who is not interested opinions other than his own (or those given to him by his “trusted advisors”) is–er, how should I say this?–one who is unlikely to realize when his advisors and his actions may be, er, gulp, shall we say? (using corporate weasel words) in error.

In the Philadelphia Inquirer, from the AP wire:

In a year filled with political wrangling, natural disasters and pop culture curiosities, Americans turned to Merriam-Webster to help define it all.

Filibuster. Refugee. Tsunami. Each was among the dictionary publisher’s 10 most frequently looked-up words among about seven million users of its online site.

But topping the list is a word that some say gives insight into the country’s collective concern about its values: integrity.

One would hope that most of the hits came from members of the current Federal Administration, since they have demonstrated by their words and behavior that they do not know what “integrity” means.

But probably not.

Evidence of Iraqis torturing Iraqis, from the Washington Post:

The abuse alleged at the prison found this week appeared to have been more severe. Asked specifically what types of torture were found in the commandos’ prison, the official cited breaking of bones, torture with electric shock, extraction of fingernails and cigarette burns to the neck and back.

(snip)

International law, including the U.N. Convention Against Torture, bans torture in all cases. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad issued a sharp public rebuke of the Iraqi government after the secret prison was discovered last month, demanding in a statement that all detainees nationwide be treated in accord with human rights.

So, does that mean that, had Americans been doing the torturing in one of the secret American concentration camps, everything would have been okay?

Bill O’Reilly cooks the books.

And has to confront the effects of his rabble-rousing. He roused the rabble (or generated a crank call). But in the process, he contradicted himself:

This is the hostility that O’Reilly’s “Wwar on Chritsams (sic)” has started. Just because a waitress told this guy, “Happy Holidays,” the guy wanted to punch her in the face. (Like O’Reilly, I don’t know if the guy was serious.) Update: This has got to be a crank call.

Caller: I wanted to punch her in the face…

O’Reilly: I think you’re out of line.—-if somebody says “Happy Holiday,” there’s no reason to get offended.

Brad (http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002140.htm) has the audio.

Emailer Joe: “So then Bill O’Reilly ripped into the guy and said he was a jerk for not tipping her. O’Reilly said “What if you had been Jewish or Muslim” she didn’t know what your religion was. She was just trying to be respectful. Then O’Reilly discovered he had contradicted himself and tried to back pedal and explain the difference.”

And Chris Satullo wrote rationally in yesterday’s Philadelpia Inquirer:

. . . You really must watch Bill O’Reilly of Fox News more. He’ll set you straight. He’s singing his favorite Yuletide carol again, leading a chorus on the right: “They are coming after Christmas! The godless secularists who run America are coming after our sacred day, fangs dripping, trying to remove it from the public square.”

The War on Christmas crowd seizes on a few scraps of supporting evidence, stitches them into a fabric of hype, then uses it to alarm the credulous. (Hmm, sound familiar?)

(snip)

This year, the riff also targets retailers, Wal-Mart and so on, who allegedly are too liberal with “Happy holidays” in their ads and decorations and too stinting on “Merry Christmas.”

This is bizarre on so many fronts. Let’s review.

No. Wait. First, let’s grant something. Conservative Christians who howl about a plot to block them from the public square aren’t totally wrong. Their mirror image does exist. At the other end of the spectrum sit some equally humorless absolutists of agnosticism who imagine that the First Amendment shines on their biases. These partisans do tend to file lawsuits in reaction to any whiff of piety in their presence.

(snip)

The biggest threat to a distinctively Christian celebration of Jesus’ birth is not the smattering of Grinches, but the vast apparatus devoted to exploiting the sacred day as an excuse to sell sweaters, HDTVs and Lexuses.

That’s why the kvetching about Wal-Mart is so ironic. Christ-in-Christmas purists used to get angry at how retailers commercialized the holiday. Now O’Reilly gripes that the commercializers aren’t exploiting Jesus’ name aggressively enough to sell Obsession perfume and Xbox 360.

I was always a fan of the (now defunct) Xtree file management utility for DOS.

In the world of 32-bit Windows, it was reborn as ZTree, a full-featured 32-bit native Windows app with a strictly text interface. ZTree was about 700 kb in size and was wonderfully fast for managing files. It was the only program I put in my Windows “Startup” folder.

So I entered “xtree linux” in Google this morning and found Unix Tree on the first hit.

Note: It seems to work best when started from the command line, as opposed to being started from the KDE menu.

One of the political heroes of our era.

Senator McCarthy had the courage to speak up against the Viet Namese war. Others did also, most noticeably Senator Fulbright. Senator McCarthy, though, took it to the voters in the 1968 Democratic presidential primaries.

And the voters responded.

Frankly, I have never quite stopped resenting Robert Kennedy for his decision to enter the race, as a “peace candidate,” for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968 after McCarthy did the hard work.

Senator McCarthy was a good man who risked–even sacrificed–his political career for what he believed was the right thing to do, without focus groups, without image consultants, and without polling consultants.

May he rest in peace.

Ruth Marcus nails it in today’s Washington Post:

But there is an ugly, bullying aspect to this dispute, in which the pro-Christmas forces are not only asking, reasonably, that their religion be treated with equal status and respect but in which they are attacking legitimate efforts at inclusivity. It’s this sense of aggrieved victimhood that confuses me: What, exactly, is so threatening about calling the school holiday a winter break rather than Christmas vacation?

The latest alleged perfidy is the failure of the White House Christmas card to mention Christmas, instead expressing “best wishes for a holiday season of hope and happiness” and featuring a verse from Psalms. William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, calls this evidence that the administration has “capitulated to the worst elements in our culture.” I call it a recognition, especially welcome at a time of sectarian violence, that not all the 1.4 million folks on the Christmas list are Christian.

The irresponsibility of the current majority party is mind-boggling. They run up the bill and send out no invoices.

The House voted yesterday to extend a series of tax cuts from President Bush’s first term, arguing that the lower rates were crucial to sustain a rebounding economy, and shrugging off concern that the cuts would swell the federal deficit.

The House voted 234-197 for tax cuts that would benefit mainly businesses and investors and cost the Treasury $56.1 billion over five years.

The orgy of Republican disdain for the public good and Republican greed boggles my mind.

No, I don’t like taxes either. But as a recipient of the benefits of services provided by the government, I recognize an obligation to help pay for those services.

But, then, I’m not rich. Apparently, in the opinion of the current majority party, the rich need not pay for the services they receive.

That’s left for the rest of us.

Where’s my Di-Gel?

According to today’s Inquirer

Conventional perceptions of budget-bound college students scraping by on ramen noodles and peanut butter are as out of date as a rotary phone, say experts who track the market. Today’s 16.4 million collegians are conspicuous consumers, spending more than $200 billion a year (not including tuition and housing), up from $93 billion a decade ago, according to Student Monitor, L.L.C., of Ridgewood, N.J.

I miss out on everything. I’m told the sexual revolution was going on when I was college. It sure missed me.

And my roommate and I dined courtesy of a (banned because the wiring couldn’t handle it) hotplate and refrigerator in our dorm room. No $5.00 coffees for us. $5.00 bought a meal at the local “prey on students” restaurant.

And now students have credit cards, $1300 a month apartments, and parents that keep giving them money.

All I can say is, didn’t happen to my kids!

So well said:

So I don’t need any cheap reminders about supporting the troops. On the contrary, it’s the other way around. It is [those who keep reminding us to “support the troops–ed.] who need reminding that they owe the troops the highest level of respect. That means, among other things, explaining clearly and honestly why they are being sent into harm’s way. If that cannot be done — if you cannot tell soldiers why they might die — then you cannot send them. At the very least, you must stick to the strictest truth.

This is too good to pass up.

http://www.uglychristmaslights.com/

Courtesy Blinq.