Rants and Revelations

I got a phone call from the NRA. They’ve been persistent about it - evidently they called a couple of times and asked for me when I wasn’t there, so somehow I got on their list as a gun owner, even though I haven’t owned a gun since long before I moved to this country. They made me listen to a recorded message from the president of the NRA with a bunch of bullshit about how Barack Obama wants to team up with Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton to steal your guns. Then they asked me a couple of questions:

The first one was “Are you a proud gun owner” - I said yes, even though I’m not, just to see where they were going with this (as if I didn’t know).

The second one was an incredibly leading question about Obama, something about being worried about his “anti-gun ownership agenda”, and when I said “Absolutely not”, the questioner was utterly flat footed, like she’d never heard anybody answer the wrong way before. She thanked me for my time and hung up.

Don’t forget, that because of massive overcrowding last time, Democrats vote next Tuesday, and Republicans vote on Wednesday.

Just doing my part.

Bush cements his legacy: Bush quietly seeks to make war powers permanent, by declaring indefinite state of war

I don’t know about you, but I’m scared. And the thing I’m most scared about is if Feisty McGeezer gets elected, he’ll stack with Supreme Court with more Scalitos who will be happy to rubber stamp more outrages.

Someday we’ll look back at 2001 as the year the US stopped marching forwards towards greater and greater civil liberties, and started a permanent slide into despotism.

The Democratic Party has had a rarity, two highly qualified and good candidates this time, and consequently it’s taking a bit of time to decide which of them should be our candidate. People have invested time and money and their personal feelings on one or the other of the two candidates. But if you get peeved that your candidate didn’t win and sit out the election in protest, vote for a third party candidate, or even worse, vote for McCain, you’re condemning the country to at least 4 more years of the same rampant incompetence, cronyism, pandering to the crazy Christian Right, preemptive wars against the wrong enemies, and hatred of anybody different from them as we had under Bush. Only as well as all that, McCain has a violent temper and is borderline senile. And don’t forget, some of the remaining left-leaning Supreme Court judges are getting up there in years. How safe do you think our civil liberties would be if we had another Rhenquist or Alito on the bench?

The media has decided that McCain is a tough maverick and a renegade. But the truth is, he is a Bush neocon through and through, and toes the party line. Take
The Bush-McCain Challenge and see.

Last night, I heard somebody say possibly the stupidest sentence ever uttered in the English language. Now, I could tell you that it started with “Bill O’Reilly hit the nail on the head last night”, and most of you would say “Stop right there, you’ve already won the prize”. But the stupidity continued to pour forth like sewage: “when he said that Putin got Time Magazine’s `Man of the Year’ instead of PatreiusPatreaus because PatreiusPetraeus is winning the war in Iraq and Time would never admit that”. At this point, I threw up in my mouth a little.

But because I hang around with pilots, and a large number of them are the types who believe any bilge that Fox News tells them to believe, I shut up and try to steer the conversation away from the things that would make me have to stab this guy in the face.

I’ve been telling anybody who listens that now that Bush has managed to simultaneously over-stretch the US Military beyond the breaking point and put the US in debt up to our eyeballs to China, to expect China to start flexing their muscles towards either Taiwan or the Spratleys, or maybe both.

And so today I read that the Chinese have demonstrated that they can get a sub within torpedo range of a US carrier without being detected. Things like this don’t happen by accident - China is sending us a message. And that message is “we’re the major sea power in this area, not you”. If they were planning to try a political move in the area, this would be a good first move.

Congress Approves Surveillance Measures | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source

I agree 100% with Ed Albaugh: “You won’t need to eavesdrop to hear this: I voted for you assholes because you said you were against shit like this.” (Well, in my case substitute “gave money to” for “voted for”.)

WASHINGTON - Democrats gave up their demand for troop-withdrawal deadlines in an Iraq war spending package Tuesday, abandoning their top goal of bringing U.S. troops home and handing President Bush a victory in a debate that has roiled Congress for months.

HT: This Space For Rent

Ok, they wouldn’t promise to restore habeus corpus or outlaw torture, they’ve done bugger all on restoring New Orleans and the environment, and now they’re screwing us on their promise to hold Bush’s feet to the fire on Iraq. Idiots.

Watching a bunch of conservative pilots talk about Al Gore and global warming, I think a lot of them should be selling “Intelligence Credits”, since they’re obviously not using theirs.

Restore-Habeas.org | Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007

Listen here

It is beneath the dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured.

and

Attorney General Ashcroft said we got assurances. Assurances? From a country that we also say now “oh, we can’t talk to them because we can’t take their word for anything”.

Man, it’s great to listen to a Senator who remembers that there are three equal branches of government, not just one and two rubber stamps.

Still muddling along on the project mentioned in Rants and Revelations » Stress, stress, and more stress. My boss wants my bit to be test-able and demo-able by the first of the month, and I’m not sure I can do it. I don’t think the other bits are going any better. The Chinese team have delivered something, but we can’t test it yet until my bit and Tony’s bit are finished. Kris is working on a bit that we were going to farm out to the Chinese team, but we decided it would be faster for him to do it than to try to explain it to them. It seems that in order specify the requirement in sufficent detail that you could just hand it over to a foreign team, you need a formal language. And the formal language we know best and can produce fastest is Java.

In added aggravation, just as I was turning into the parking lot at work this morning, my muffler started dragging on the ground. A quick examination seemed to indicate it was just the strap hangar broke, which is exactly what it turned out to be. Cheap, but time-consuming and annoying.

Meanwhile, the peridontist is going to be fixing my front teeth this Saturday. He says they have to make an incision in the front of my jaw, scrape out crud, and put in something to make the bone grow back. He says I won’t be able to “incise” for a couple of weeks.

Saturday is also the day when we have our MoveOn.org Call For Change party. I have a bit of a mental block against making phone calls to strangers thanks to an incident from my childhood, but maybe I can just play host.

On Monday, my 1U server goes off to the colo. I just got the network settings, so sometime on Sunday I have to take down the server and set up the networking.

Let’s say that around 8pm you noticed that your linode is suffering from a lack of memory. And so you decide that the Mailman processes have gotten bloated and need to be restarted. So you do an /etc/init.d/mailman restart. And let’s further say that as you’re heading off to bed 2 hours later, you still haven’t gotten any messages from any of the mailing lists on that server.

Do you

1. Assume that everybody suddenly got real quiet, and head off to bed without a second thought? or
2. Assume that the restart didn’t actually restart, and send a test message to one of the list-request addresses, and when it doesn’t come back, do another mailman restart?

Because last night, I did the first one, and didn’t do the second one until this morning. Which is why on these graphs you’ll see no activity for 11 hours, and then suddenly a big spike.

Sorry, people.

In other news, today I’m wearing my Enemy Combatant t-shirt to mark the death of American democracy. Well, it was nice while it lasted.

The following Democrats voted for torture, against Habeus Corpus, and for the establishment of an Imperial Presidency. They will never recieve another penny from me, as long as I live.
Continue reading ‘Democrats on notice’ »