BunkBlog

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” – George Orwell

“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.” – Vladimir Nabokov

Further proof, if any was needed, that both sides of the political debate in this country seem to feel it unneccesary to actually use reason or logic or the issues themselves in any discussion. Just throw around insults, that will certainly convince others of the rightness of your logic. Apparently, I’m a slobbering idiot. Yeah, ok.

For more examples, see Michael Moore on the left and Dr. Laura on the right.

I’m not liberal or conservative – I find both sides to be filled with self-important assholes. Ideologues of any type are frightening, as they tend not to think and just regurgitate what agitators with more intelligence have created. Buzzwords and slogans are wonderful things; they allow the intellectually inferior to have a voice. Unfortunately, they are so obvious in their inability to think or speak rationally that they grow tiresome.

And, enlightening people is against the wishes of all ideologues – they just want people to agree with them, not to come to an understanding of an opposing (or merely different) viewpoint.

After discussions with a few people of varying political opinions and geopolitical experience, I think we’ve come up with a theory that fits the observed facts in Iraq vis a vis the search for weapons of mass destruction. First and foremost, let me say that evidence and proof are two vastly different things, with proof being hard to fake and evidence being pretty easy to muck up. For an example, see People v. Orenthal Simpson, 1994.

Let me lay out some things we have to take as givens in order to move forward:

• Saddam is not an idiot. Anyone who can be a military and political strongman for over 20 years has a brain cell or two to rub together.
• Nobody in their right mind thought the Iraqi military had a chance in hell of defeating the US military.
• The US military has a great deal of evidence that Saddam had WMD and had plans to use them, including evidence that they were deployed in defense of Iraq this past month.
• Nobody is sure where Saddam is.
• The US has no actual verifiable proof of any current or recent WMD production or stockpiles. If they had proof, they’d be crowing from the rooftops.
• Saddam had a lot of money and he may not have left it all for American soldiers to attempt to recreate bad movies with.

Now, with those items as a basis, we can make some interesting possibilities. The one that the current administration is betting on, because it won’t make them look stupid and/or hotheaded, is that there are chem and bio weapons and that some of the currently incarcerated Iraqi leadership coughs them up.

Here’s the possibility I came up with.
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“Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.” – Jerry Garcia

Monday

I hesitate to call anything that I do by such a lofty term as philosophy, but that seems to fit as well as anything else. Anyone who has any degree of introspection has, at one time or another, thought about how they approach life in general – the basis for their big life decisions. I call my approach the Risk to Reward Ratio method. I suppose others may invoke more-established terms like opportunity cost, but I’m not an economist and I would rather not muddy the waters too much (unless it’s to the strains of Mannish Boy, but I digress).

So, what is the Risk to Reward Ratio, and how does one use it? Simply put, every major decision in life (and most lesser ones) involves a usually-instinctive weighing of the pros and cons. I.e., "If I do X, I’ll lose out on Y."

I recently had to decide the mid-range path of my family’s lives. Would we stay in Arizona, where a company was offering me 10 grand more to do the same job I have done the past 2 years? This job, while dull as an old spoon, is not too difficult and I’m told I do well at it. Personally, I feel that I’ve been thrashing aimlessly the past two years, glad to have avoided detection as a complete fraud out of his depth. The other, non-Arizona, option was to take a job offer to move back to Texas. This other job is building on the job I did the last two years in the army, and I’m sure I’ll do well at it as well.

The pros and cons started to pile up. First, the plusses for each side:

And the negatives of each one:

This turned out to be much easier than I thought. However, in any risk-reward consideration, there are some risks that are larger than others. The house is a big risk: conventional wisdom says you’ll lose money if you sell a house less than 3 years after buying it. Fortunately, the market is wonky right now, and our realtor thinks we’ll be able to break even and maybe even get a nice dinner out of the sale.

Anyone want to buy a house in Southeastern Arizona?

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. – Kierkegaard

“In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.” – Mark Twain

Reminds me of many a day in Korea…
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This is silly.
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A day after Democrats suffered resounding congressional losses, one exasperated Democratic political consultant said he was going to put his displeasure into literary form. “I’m ready to write a book,” said Democratic strategist Peter Fenn, whose proposed title would be: “Why Democrats Have No Balls.”

From Salon today.
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Although your coworker’s mediocrity may annoy you, it makes your merely good efforts look outstanding.
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38 degrees according to the big thermometer outside the funeral home this morning. Wasn’t it like 90 just a couple weeks ago? Gotta love the desert…
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“There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.” – Thomas A. Edison
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_Tuesday_

Weblogs, blogs, online journals – all the same thing, different ways of referring to the same phenomenon. This phenomenon is not new, although you’d think it was invented in 2001 by the sounds of the media coverage of the blogging revolution, the traditional media way of describing nearly anything they don’t really understand but feel may be destabilizing their way of business. In my opinion, weblogs are part vanity site and part content management.

Like most personal websites, mine has long had a series of personal posts from me to the adoring public. My adoring public tends to be geeks, and not very many of them either. Nor do they seem to adore me too awful much, but I digress. The entire purpose of a vanity site, as personal websites were once called with derision, is to tell the world about yourself, to stake a claim to a tiny piece of the electronic zeitgeist. To that end, we old-school webgeeks painstakingly worked on webpages that looked like parts of a whole, building our own menus of links in text editors with exciting names like vi and notepad. It is a tedious way to update a site, and so many vanity sites tend to fall into disrepair. Fortunately, nothing actually decays online, so long as your host stays viable. There are a plethora of dead sites out there, with “last updated” dates in the last century.

Businesses which publish frequently-changing content online need a way to make that process simple, as well as accessible to the vast majority of their employees who are scared of that whole cyberspace information superhighway thing in the magic box. So, some clever folks came up with content management systems (CMS). The author of a document doesn’t have to know anything about HTML, CSS, tags, links, and other such exciting geek stuff. The author just writes up his story in whatever (usually proprietary but sometimes web-based) interface the CMS uses. This separation of content and format is usually based on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which kick serious butt in general.

So, we had serious tools for businesses, costing thousands of dollars, used by CNN and CNet and other big news sites. And, we had the personal users typing away in their text editors, hoping they didn’t miss a closing tag and hose their layout. Along came weblogging tools. The best-known tool is Blogger, and others include Movable Type, Greymatter, PHPNuke, and Livejournal. Livejournal was started in March 1999, Blogger in August 1999, and Movable Type in October 2001; I can’t find authoritative start dates for the Greymatter and PHPNuke projects. For most people, the two big players are the two oldest: Livejournal and Blogger. I’m a big LJ fan, and I’ll try to explain why.

All weblogging tools allow comments, although many users may disable that capability. Although I had a decent number of people coming to my site with my old manual system, I had no way for them to comment aside from email or a guestbook. The guestbook, like most guestbooks, has been largely stagnant for years; almost nobody emailed me from my site. So, interactivity being the hallmark of the web, weblogs allow a discussion to occur centered on any comment you put on your site.

I wanted a way to keep my website looking fresh, without the pain of editing a full page of HTML each time I had something to say. LJ has been very effective in fooling people that come to my site, making them think I actually have new content almost daily. LJ embeds into the HTML of my homepage, allowing me to use it as a CMS for my own page. But, the great thing about LJ is the community.

When you join LJ, your comments are on their servers. This is often a problem, as their servers have issues due to expansion beyond the founder’s wildest dreams. The architecture of the LJ code, some have said, is not really capable of handling the load to which it is subjected, and the servers slow down too often. These are valid complaints, in my experience, but I’m still sticking with the service. The good thing about a central repository is that every LJ user is findable in some way. It may be a tedious way of going through every user, which number is approaching a million, but it is possible to find anyone on LJ. It’s easier if they want to be found, as LJ has “interests” to search, as well as having regional searches. If you want to find everyone in your town that has a journal, you can. The immediate outgrowth of the searchability of LJ is the Friends Page. Rather than visit 10 different blogger sites, you can just go to your own Friends Page, which is in a style you specify, and view all the entries written by people (or communities) that you find interesting. No need to search with Google or wander around Blogspot, you can just hit the Random button on LJ. Or, look at the people that others find interesting. Many times I have added friends that were friends of older friends. Very goofy-sounding, I know, but the web of connections is the big draw to LJ.

When people join LJ and then leave to start a blog on their personal site, I just look at the single line of code it took me to embed my journal on my homepage, and wonder why.

Livejournal – because you like to think people care.

Just for Lysa.

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” – Sir Richard Steele
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Dan Quayle
“[It’s] time for the human race to enter the solar system.”
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Watching “Just Shoot Me” tonight, it occured to me that Rena Sofer should really never try to fake a New Jersey accent. It comes and goes.

Also, if there were ever a doubt who is the star of that show, one merely needs to look at Laura San Giacomo in a tight sweater. Wooh!
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From a review of Red Hat 8, the mildly off-topic quote which follows really amused me.

I do not like the idea that my government has enacted a law that turns me into a criminal for watching on my own computer a movie I paid for unless I do so using an operating system that same government acknowledges as an illegal monopoly (note that I’m not bashing Microsoft, just pointing out the absurdity of criminalizing me if I choose for moral reasons not to support a criminal corporation).

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When I asked someone on an icon group today the simple question, “Why do you prefer program A over program B?” I got told off and never got an answer. I realize that it is impossible to see the usual non-verbal cues to intent online, but how about if we all assume that people are not trying to be offensive when a statement could go either way?

I attempt to broaden my knowledge by asking for some information, and I don’t receive the information, just attitude. I still don’t know why she prefers program A over program B. If her reasons made sense, I might go through the learning curve of playing with a new program. Since she is apparently unable to form a response other than, “I am used to it so stop bugging me” I have no reason to think she even has thought about why she uses the tools she uses. That’s the way we’ve always done it is a silly way to make decisions. But, then I have noticed a remarkable lack of self-analysis among most folks online. I mean, other than the ones who do nothing but navel-gaze. 🙂
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From Cary Tennis, a columnist with Salon:

bq. So he wants to be burning for you and feel drunk with love all the time? That’s nice. Well, he’s a musician. Musicians are children. They’re courageous children but still, only a musician — or a poet — would be nearly 30 and say he wants to feel drunk with love for you all the time.

Musicians need a lot of care. They aren’t really equipped to deal with the world. He may need to go off and feel infatuated a few more times. But face it, what this also means is that he and you are both facing adulthood, which is a kind of unconscious code word for eventual death. That’s what it’s all about. Adulthood is about dreary day after day dealing with immovable reality.