2011 archive
“We’re All Still Here, No One Has Gone Away” 0
The dude who was predicting the rapture to take place by the end of January, that is, by yesterday, has now revised his prediction to Rosh Hashanah, which is scheduled for mid-September.
I’ll have to update my Google Calendar. Wouldn’t want to miss it.
Afterthought:
One would think that always being wrong would send these folks some kind of message clue, but nope.
Revenue Enhancement 0
What Mithras said.
Make TWUUG Your LUG 0
Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source.
What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.
Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.
Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk-Employee Cafeteria. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.)
When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, February 3.
Directions: Lake Taylor Hospital-1309, Kempsville Road, Norfolk, 23502 (Kempsville Rd. at Lowry Rd.) 461-5001
Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks) at Uno Chicago Grill, Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). Accessible through the Janaf parking lot or directly from the ramp from Virginia Beach Blvd. to Military Highway north.
Egypt 0
I don’t know enough to comment on it. My knowledge of Egyptian history is probably slightly more than that of the average American, what with being trained as a historian, but that delineates the difference between somewhat ignorant and profoundly ignorant. I do know not to base my opinions on anything in Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Jewel of the Nile.
I do recall that, back in the olden days, when computers had tubes and took up entire buildings, an Egyptian medical doctor gave a talk on Egypt to the older grades at my elementary school (the local hospital welcomed immigrant doctors looking earn licenses in the States). At the time, Nasser had been in power for about a decade.
The doctor told us (I’m paraphrasing),
In Egypt, we have democracy, but it’s not like your democracy.
We do not have candidates running against each other. We hold up a candidate for president and say, ‘Do you want him?”
If the people say “No,” we hold up another candidate.
Even then, that sounded fishy to me, so fishy that I remember it almost five decades later.
I’ve learned not to believe what I hear in the news when events are moving quickly on the other side of the world, or even next door. Remember all the lies about New Orleans during the Katrina Army Corps of Engineer Floods–I fell for those and once bitten etc.
It’s not that I think major news organizations are falsifying stuff, but that, in the rush to fill airtime and column inches, they can fall into the trap of relying on guesswork, rumor, and wishful thinking.
This is certainly the case in the blogosphere, left, right, and middle. Andrew Sullivan’s giddiness over the Green Revolution in Iran, which petered out to nothing, amply illustrates this. (Indeed, a friend of mine with Iranian friends tells me that they have told her that the level of repression in Iran is now far greater than it has been in years.)
Sullivan’s changing his website’s banner to green as a show of solidarity had little effect on guns and beatings half a world away.
In reporting fast-moving events, an unverified twit may be worse than no twit at all.
Nevertheless, I know enough about American history to pretty much agree with the Rude One: our history of supporting dictators in the name of realpolitik has repeatedly come back to bite us in the behind and that laying low and letting events run their course is probably the best policy for the United States (Warning: Rudeness at link).
For an unusual perspective on events in Egypt, see the Linux Outlaws special podcast. It’s weighted towards reviewing the influence of “new media” and the internet in events in Egypt (two Linux geeks podcasting internationally via Skype and an internet connection–what else would you expect?). It also provides some international perspective Americans are unlikely to get first-hand, as one of the podcasters is from the U. K. and the other is from Germany.
The discussion of Egypt starts about 13 minutes into the broadcast.
Misplaced Machine Trust 0
I’ve done a fair amount of driving in the American west, though never in Death Valley.
Once you get off the main roads, it can get pretty damned remote pretty damn quick, and there’s likely no signal for Google Earth.
The number of people visiting Death Valley in the summer, when temperatures often exceed 120 degrees, has soared from 97,000 in 1985 to 257,500 in 2009. That pattern holds at Joshua Tree as well, which recorded 128,000 visitors in the summer of 1988. Last year: 230,000.
With another potentially deadly summer season approaching, Death Valley managers now are adding heat danger warnings to dozens of new wayside exhibits and working with technology companies to remove closed and hazardous roads from GPS units. They also have posted warnings on the park’s website, telling visitors not to rely on cell phones or GPS units.
I was driving to a job site once with the boss and advised him to strike out along some back roads rather than to go through the stoplight hell of Milford, Delaware.
As we went past the corn fields, eventually emerging right in front of the factory, the boss asked, “How did you find this route?”
“Map,” I said, and pulled out the atlas.
QOTD 0
Thomas Merton, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.
Tick Tock Schlock 0
Some bozo keeps coming on my telly vision saying that I should buy his book, Tick Tock, because “New York has never had a great detective hero.”
Like I’m going to buy a detective story from some doofus who denies Nero Wolfe, Ellery Queen, and John Putnam Thatcher, just to mention a few off the top of my head.
The Ballad of Bradley Manning 0
Aside:
The tune is not factually accurate, as least so far as is known now. No evidence has been uncovered linking Manning with Assenge.
Manning is being held in solitary confinement in conditions amounting to psychological torture (but hey! that’s not real torture, no vital organs have been damaged, so it doesn’t count) on word-of-mouth without trial.
Video via the Linux Outlaws.
Whitewashing History, Reprise 0
Dawn Turner Trice, writing in the Chicago Tribune, interviews Tom Burrell, retired ad agency owner, on the techniques of whitewashing. Burrell overcame vision problems and racial stereotyping to become the owner of one of the nation’s largest and most effective ad agencies. He knows a bit about propaganda.
A nugget:
“These messages have been passed down like tchotchkes through the generations,” he said. “Somebody had to say that if we can market this idea that slaves are not human beings — they’re chattel — then the Founding Fathers can say ‘all men are created equal’ and not have this profound contradiction. That’s how the advertising campaign came about.
“We’ve used the Bible, textbooks, symbols, the media, bad science to constantly reinforce those ideas. People buy into it, internalize it.“
No Lapdogging 0
Background: Seatack is an older, poorer, predominantly black neighborhood with a growing sense of identity a few blocks inland from the south end of the beachfront.
As has been common in these and other parts, the desires of the citizenry in older, poorer, predominantly minority neighborhoods are frequently ignored. Such neighborhoods are often not so much served as they are imposed on.
I am not a fan of Virginia Beach City Council member Bill DeSteph’s politics. He’s leans too right for me.
I am, however, a fan of his consistent refusal to come when Mayor Sessoms beckons:
“Have we talked to the community about this?” Councilman Bill DeSteph asked.
An awkward silence followed, and a vote was postponed.
Now, residents of a historically black neighborhood near the Oceanfront targeted for the shelter say they don’t want it. They’re outraged the city didn’t ask their opinion.
Read the whole thing.
Afterthought:
In a resort town, “left” and “right” don’t usually mean as much as “in the hip pocket of developers” and “not in the hip pocket of developers.”
Fiscal Responsibility, Teabag Dept. 0
J. M. Ashby describes what teabaggery has done to one of the wealthiest counties on Long Island: In less than a year of teabaggery in the county government, the county’s finances are in such tatters that the state has taken them over.
That’s tea with a nasty aftertaste.
Winning the History 0
The saying is that the victors write the history books.
In the case of the American Civil War, this is debatable. The whole Kentucky Colonel gracious-plantation-living happy-darkies-singing-as-they-labored image was a most successful cover-up of the reality of the war and its causes, and the cover-up continues.
Harold Jackson comments in the Inky:
The answer will be left to the writers of history. Let’s hope they do better than the numerous book writers who romanticized the Confederacy and made slavery seem like a benign institution in which the benevolence of good masters kept people who otherwise were incapable of fending for themselves from dying of starvation.
A recent article in the Anniston, Ala., Star noted that for decades after the Civil War, the United Daughters of the Confederacy had provided an approved list of textbooks for Alabama public schools. Students were taught that the Confederates had fought for a noble cause but lost. “The South lost the war, but they won the history,” Jacksonville State University professor Jennifer Gross told the Star, quoting a past teacher
QOTD 0
Barbara Tuchman, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by government of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any human activity.
