Fiat Lux

In the "how can this be serious??!?!?" department:

New York has no national monuments or icons, according to the Department of Homeland Security form obtained by ABC News. (Click here for the actual document.) That was a key factor used to determine that New York City should have its anti-terror funds slashed by 40 percent--from $207.5 million in 2005 to $124.4 million in 2006.

The formula did not consider as landmarks or icons: The Empire State Building, The United Nations, The Statue of Liberty and others found on several terror target hit lists. It also left off notable landmarks, such as the New York Public Library, Times Square, City Hall and at least three of the nation's most renowned museums: The Guggenheim, The Metropolitan and The Museum of Natural History.

What kind of dreamworld are those people at DHS living in?

UPDATE: More here.

When we moved to San Mateo, one of the things we liked about this apartment complex is the fact that out back, there's a pool and a hot tub for the residents. Today it was finally warm enough for us to pull out the bathing suits and go down to the pool for a dip.

Mmmmmm. Hanging out in the hot tub under a sunny sky - and without having to go to some pricey resort. That's California living. And to think, we spent 5+ years ensconced in the Fog Belt, where you need a jacket 11 months out of the year.

Yes, global warming may well trash the earth within our lifetimes, but it's nice to enjoy a bit of the good life before it does.

The Washington Note has a long and very interesting piece today on Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth.

It doesn't lend itself to easy exerpts, so just click through. It's worth a read.

By way of Yahoo:

To you, that angry, horn-blasting tailgater is suffering from road rage. But doctors have another name for it — intermittent explosive disorder — and a new study suggests it is far more common than they realized, affecting up to 16 million Americans.

Road rage, temper outbursts that involve throwing or breaking objects and even spousal abuse can sometimes be attributed to the disorder, though not everyone who does those things is afflicted.

By definition, intermittent explosive disorder involves multiple outbursts that are way out of proportion to the situation. These angry outbursts often include threats or aggressive actions and property damage.

I'm taking bets on how long it will take before a defense attorney tries to get his wife-beating client off by arguing that his client is a victim of this new mental illness.

Two weeks?

What do you think?

Gimi thinks the kitchen tap is more interesting than the CA primary today.

So does Tommy.

An old friend from high school and his lovely wife have started a travel blog. Given their upcoming travel plans, it should develop into a good read.

Welcome!

There's a small pile of links that I've been meaninmg to blog about but for various reasons they slipped past me. Rather than let them go completely, as I usually do, this time I'm rescuing a few of them:

- I liked Georgial10's take on the RFK 'Election Fraud' article.
- This excellent guest post over at Digby's place is a must -read for history buffs
- And this non-violent approach to rebuilding the Temple has been sitting on my desktop for months.

Also, welcome to the blogroll, Watching The Planet. Hope you're feeling a little less lost in cyberspace.

Thw Washington Note has been flooded with guest posts this week, and this afternoon another excellent one went up: If Jack, Bobby, and Kenny Had Breakfast Today. Here's a taste:

Thinking about the results in the California House seat this week, if the Kennedys and [Kenny] O'Donnell were having breakfast the morning after, does anybody believe they would be saying anything like this: OK guys, Kerry got 44% in that District, and we got all the way up to 45%, and forced the Republicans to spend twice as much as us, to win the seat again?

In fact, if Jack, Bobby and Kenny had breakfast the day after that result, the FCC would not permit me on talk radio to use the exact words they would have used, but the word would go forth to Democrats everywhere: do not let this happen again.

Side note -- "13 Days" is easily my favorite Kevin Costner film.

Seen on LiveJournal today. Very clever.

I'm not feeling so hot, though; it might have been what I ate for lunch (not a lobster!).

Ran across this assessment of Linux as Un-American today:

Unlike Windows, which is a mature commercial product which is normally included with every new computer, Linux is given away. Now it may not sound like much of a problem, after all there is very little profit in merely giving a product away.

This would be certainly true were in not for the Linux project’s seductive Marxist ideology and the effect that it has on ‘Blue-State’ liberals. Indeed, Linux is so pervasive amongst the blue states and many liberal universities that a leading computer expert Steve Balmer [SIC] (from Microsoft) described Linux as cancer.

The American software industry is worth more than $7 Billion; Introducing a foreign product like Linux which is often copied for free could threaten that entire industry. A generation of computer users might get use to accepting foreign software hand-outs rather than paying for a superior American products. If only the danger were just to our economy:

These days computers control everything from TV stations to battleships; Our crucial information and defense infrastructure is built on computer technology. If we allow this cancer into our networks, there is no knowing what the effect might be on our infrastructure, but that is just what liberals are trying to do.

Imagine if the State of the Union address were hacked because the TV station decided to save money by using Linux? Imagine if a stealth-bomber crashed because it’s software was written by anonymous Chinese or European hackers. It would make as much sense as inviting the French to come over and take over the White-House.

And guess what software Osama Bin Laden uses on his laptop?

If you guessed it was Linux you would be 100% right.

Frankly, I can't decide if this is somebody's idea of a joke or if these people are for real, but either way it's amusing enough to be worth a read.

Ah Digby, how well you put it:

Here's the plan. First, the Democratic terrorists are going to kick Lieberman's ass. After that, they are going to kick the Republican party's ass. And finally they will kick bin Laden's ass. We didn't create this hard core political environment, the Republicans did, with the help of self-serving Dems like Lieberman. Now somebody has to clean up all these messes. The crazed Democratic terrorists who are willing to cast aside all morality by ruthlessly supporting a primary challenger (who is not a travelling Deadhead, but rather a middle of the road self made millionaire) seem to be the only ones who are willing to do it.

I just hope you're right.

Everyone knows the saying, 'Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.' Maybe we ought to change it to include something about the special corruptive powers of government contracts? Or is this simply another proof that the saying is true as is?

As firefighters searched for survivors after the Sept. 11 attacks, heat from the World Trade Center's smoldering ruins burned the soles off their boots. They needed new ones every few hours, and Chris Christopherson made sure they got them. The moment that crushed Christopherson's faith was when his employer dispatched the trucks to the warehouse for those supplies, donated by Americans.

...

Kieger Enterprises of Lino Lakes, Minn., dispatched trucks to a Long Island warehouse and loaded hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of donated bottled water, clothes, tools and generators to be moved to Minnesota in a plot to sell some for profit, according to government records and interviews.

Dan L'Allier said he witnessed 45 tons of the New York loot being unloaded in Minnesota at his company's headquarters. He and disaster specialist Christopherson complained to a company executive, but were ordered to keep quiet. They persisted, going instead to the FBI.

The two whistleblowers eventually lost their jobs, received death threats and were blackballed in the disaster relief industry. But they remained convinced their sacrifice was worth seeing justice done.

They were wrong.

...

The lead investigators for the FBI and the Federal Emergency Management Agency told AP that the plan to prosecute KEI for those thefts stopped as soon as it became clear in late summer 2002 that an FBI agent in Minnesota had stolen a crystal globe from ground zero.

That prompted a broader review that ultimately found 16 government employees, including a top FBI executive and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, had such artifacts from New York or the Pentagon.

"How could you secure an indictment?" FEMA investigator Kirk Beauchamp asked. "It would be a conflict."

So... some agent keeps a desk ornament as a memento; that means you cannot prosecute the theft of tons of material for resale? Give me a freaking break!

That this current administration is so wrong in so many ways is no surprise, but even when I think theat I've lost the capacity to be surprised or upset by what they do, they still manage to find new ways to piss me off.

Worst. Administration. Ever.

While we were out for a walk, we spotted some Jamba folks out offering free samples in San Mateo this afternoon. They were kind enough to let me snap a photo even though we were carrying Starbucks drinks.

Before the topic of BJ's completely falls off the radar, I'd like to note that the whole kerfluffle over what goes on in the bedroom of two consenting adults generated orders of magnitude more heat and light this weekend than the fact that Louisiana now has an anti-abortion law that's nearly as stringent as the one in South Dakota. And I didn't post about it either, which makes me just as bad, I know. But then, I've never set up to be an officially 'feminist' weblog.

And as I was mulling over what I might say in a post about why, 20 years after first enthusiastically reading Betty Friedan and Adrienne Rich I don't always feel comfortable calling myself a feminist, Echinde put up a long post about the Working Mommy Wars and related issues. It gave me some clarity.

It's been 40+ years since the First Wave and we're still stuck on basic issues like the right of a woman to decide her own path in life without being shamed? Women still struggle with discrimination in the workplace, don't get paid as much as men do, and generally have a much harder time achieving economic security. Why are we worrying about who does what to whom in the bedroom when these much more important issues are still nowhere close to being resolved?

Why do I consider economic issues to be a primary focus for feminism? Because as so many women have discovered, if you don't have the ability to earn wages sufficient to keep a roof over your head and food on your table, then you don't have the autonomy to make your own life choices. And to me, that is the essence of feminism -- the belief that women should be just as able to set and steer their own life's course as men are. Without that freedom, the rest is meaningless.

If the Great BJ War has taught us anything, it's that even the most intelligent and self-aware women are not going to make the same choices in their lives. The problem lies when people, for whatever reason, think that not only are they are better able to decide what another person should or should not do, but that they have a better understanding of the underlying emotions and motivations that go into the choice. And what's worse is that much of the shaming comes not from "The Patriarchy" but from other women.

I won't argue with the fact that it's possible for a disinterested party to make a 'better' decision than someone caught up in the middle of a given situation, but when you start saying that a person is not feeling what they say they are feeling, then I draw a line. When last I checked, telepathy didn't work very well. Even psychotherapy isn't totally effective. To assert that an outsider better knows what is going on in a person's mind from a cursory examination of their words or actions goes directly against my belief that personal autonomy is what feminism is about.

To get around this little issue, some feminists have employed Engels' concept of "false consciousness," whereby the person is told that she is unaware of her real motives and is therefore incapable of correctly understanding the situation. (Many of them, I suspect, are not aware of the Marxist roots of this concept.) It's a great tool when you're trying to impose your beliefs onto someone else, because it creates a no-win situation for the person being accused of false consciousness.

I've wandered a bit far afield from my original topic, which was supposed to be about why I'm not comfortable calling myself a feminist these days. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that I don't feel very simpatico with many of today's feminist bloggers. I'm a happily married heterosexual with a ketubah hanging over my bed, after all. True, I didn't change my name when I married and I don't have children, but overall I've made pretty conventional life choices, and I don't regret having done so. I care more about the problems that women as a whole face than I do about the possible impact of patriarchy on my own life.

Call it false consciousness or tell me I'm a tool of the patriarchy for not thinking radically enough, and I and say with all due respect, piss off.

1) It's hot as heck, and our A/C isn't working. I'm too drained to go anywhere cooler & get work done.

2) The MT-Blacklist spam filter I rely on to make managing comment spam seems to be kaput. No response from the hosting company as to why.

Bear, lazing around on the hutch above my desk. Unfortunately I have a big class project due Tuesday so I can't be lazy.

The final project for one of my summer courses is due this week. Today, I need to put the pedal to the metal and turn the notes, ideas, and pieces of data I've been collecting into something a lot more organized.

What do I do instead? Decide that today is the perfect day to throw out old bags and scrub down the tea kettle.

Back when I was an undergraduate, inevitable my dorm room would be the cleanest right around finals, because when it came to crunch time, cleaning looked a lot better than studying.

All these years later, I'm still using the same techniques to avoid getting my schoolwork done. Some things don't change. Although these days, I can now add to my work avoidance by not only avoiding the work, but also blogging about the fact that I should be doing schoolwork but I'm not.

With that said, now I really am going to go get something done. I promise. Just as soon as I finish brewing the pot of tea made in the newly-cleaned kettle.

Watching The Planet is feeling Biblical today. Getting a huge dump of rain on your head can do that to you:

And the Lord sent hurricanes to Florida, THE red state of the 2000 elections. But the Bush Administration did not heed the message of the Lord in the storm, and lo, they did not get it.

And the Lord sent hurricanes to Louisiana and Texas, and the people did cry out with much anguish. And the President continued his vacation, and the people suffered. And the Administration did naught while the people suffered, and the Lord made those who care little for the people to reveal themselves. But lo, they still did not get it.

And the Lord sent rain to Washington, D.C. Five inches in one night. And the Lord caused great frustration among the people, for he caused the Beltway to be closed, and 66 to be flooded, and the 9th and 12th Street tunnels under the Mall as well. And along Constitution Avenue, from 6th to 17th Streets, around the White House itself, closed it was, for there was a great lake, and much frustration and gnashing of teeth. And still the Administration did not understand the wrath of the Lord, and lo, they still did not get it.

Thus Endeth The Lesson.

Gimi guards a big pile of papers that needed to be sorted & filed.

I have a big presentation to give in about 2 hours & am nervous.

So, this spring, Powweb, the company I use for my webhosting was sold. This caused me some concern, because it was announced to customers that as a part of the deal, all the sites hosted on the old web servers would be migrated to some new servers. And oh yea, that would involve an OS switch from FreeBSD to Linux.

I have my preferences for OSes, but I'm hardly a zealot on the subject. FreeBSD and Linux are both perfectly acceptable platforms for web hosting, and I'm not going to get too upset about which one my hosting company uses. However, I also know that switching from one OS to another is bound to cause problems. Things are installed in different places, some modules may not be installed at all, paths change ... in short, it tends to break stuff. I was concerned.

My site is not all that complex. I have a copy of Movable Type and a copy of Gallery up and running, and I have only one plug-in that touches my otherwise vanilla installation -- MT-Blacklist. It's a critical part of my website because it makes managing the trackback and comment spam that are the plague of a blogger really simple.

So of course, Powweb's migration of my site from the old servers to the new ones managed to utterly break MT-Blacklist.

If you're interested, here's the error I get when I try to use MT-Blacklist now:

An error occurred: Out of memory during "large" request for 2147487744 bytes, total sbrk() is 5480448 bytes at ../../lib/Storable.pm (autosplit into ../../lib/auto/Storable/thaw.al) line 366, at /home/users/web/b1970/[username]/htdocs/lib/MT/PluginData.pm line 28

I have done some web-based scripting, but that was a long time ago, and only using Cold Fusion. I can customize the settings on someone else's code, and if I really focused in hard I could probably make some very basic tweaks to an existing script, but troubleshooting something like this, especially on a server where I don't know what's installed on it nor what the paths are, is simply beyond me.

At any rate, I opened a ticket with Powweb Support about this problem, and waited. And waited. Every other day, I would send Support an e-mail asking what was up, and each time I was told, "Please be patient, someone is working on your problem." So I waited. And manually deleted the pings and trackback spam that I kept on getting. After Day 6, I sent a slightly more annoyed e-mail to Support saying that 6 days to fix one script was more than enough, and that moving to a new company was starting to look like a good option. I got a slightly more effusive response, explaining that the issue was being "forwarded to our senior specialist". I started looking at new web hosts, but decided to give Support a chance to do its thing.

Today though, I finally got the much awaited response from their senior specialist. And what was it? "We Googled your problem, and here's a blogger in December 2004 who also had this problem. Try their fix and see if that helps."

Some "Senior Specialist".

Now, I am pissed off. I waited 8 days thinking I was going to get some expert help, and all I got was a Google search? I can do that myself. I was expecting that someone would look at the script, notice what it calls, and then compare it to what is on the new server to see whether the switch from BSD to Linux caused modules to move, be missing, or act differently. That's the kind of thing that I as an end-user can't do.

Yes I know, a real geek would self-host and avoid the problem entirely. I'd rather pay for shared hosting than self-host from the DSL line in my home. Our DSL provider is good, but we do have outages from time to time, and I want the bandwidth, monitoring, uptime & redundancy that you get from a professional host.

In some ways, I'm SOL, and it's my own fault. MT-Blacklist has been integrated into MovableType since version 3.x, and I'm still using the plug-in version with MT 2.6x, so I can't go to the author for support: the response will be, "Upgrade". Which I have not wanted to do, because that would entail re-customizing all of the Movable Type templates in order to get the look and feel of my site back, and I didn't see the point of doing that when everything was working quite nicely the way it was.

With the long weekend coming up, and us not having much in the way of plans, switching web hosts and/or upgrading my Movable Type installation might be a good project to take up. But then the issue becomes -- will I just be trading one set of problems for another?

*mumble grumble grr*

Nice to know that some things are too egregious even for this Supreme Court. Per the WaPo:

The Supreme Court today delivered a stunning rebuke to the Bush administration over its plans to try Guantanamo detainees before military commissions, ruling that the commissions violate U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of war prisoners.

In a 5-3 decision, the court said the trials were not authorized by any act of Congress and that their structure and procedures violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949.

Now comes the fun part. Will the Bush adminsitration actually listen to the Supreme Court?