BunkBlog

This morning was some sort of Asshole Contest on the drive to work. No less than three pickups (gotta love Texas) attempted to prove which of them was the biggest jerk – swerving through lanes, avoiding blinker use, causing as many other drivers as possible to slam on the brakes…

It’s a good thing I don’t live in L.A. these days – I’d be a living Road Rage poster boy.

I’m not surprised by recent revelations regarding Karl Rove, as anyone with a brain could see it coming a mile away. I’m somewhat surprised that he actually got caught, since this administration is absolutely fantastic at keeping things hidden.

I’m disappointed in two groups lately – politicians and the intelligence professionals I know. Politicians are disappointing pretty much as a matter of course in recent decades, and increasingly so with each passing year. As the whole Iraq War/Wilson/Plame controversy rages, it shows a distressing willingness on the part of a political party to put the harming of another political party above the safety of American citizens and the intelligence network we work so hard to build.

When Valerie Plame was outed as a covert agent, it didn’t hurt just her career. It hurt the ability of this country to gather intelligence which was vital to supporting the War on Terror. If the War on Terror is the most important thing in the minds of the current administration, why would they harm our fragile human intelligence collection ability just to score public relations points with the press? It’s astonishing, it’s disgraceful, and it’s par for the course in recent years.

I’m also disappointed in some of the people I’ve known for years in the intelligence community. It’s hardly a surprise to most people that the military and (by extension) the intel community are largely Republican. What might surprise some people is how many of these supposedly intelligent and highly-trained people are able to go along with the most convoluted justifications for the poor behavior of some politicians. Just because the President is Republican doesn’t mean he can do no wrong. Nixon was a Republican and he didn’t get forced from office by Democrats, but by his own party.

Yesterday I was privy to a conversation wherein two intelligence professionals, each of whom had more than two decades of experience in the Mideast area, were discussing how absurd it is that the Democrats are so obsessed with Karl Rove leaking Plame’s identity and blowing her cover. Why shouldn’t the Democrats be obsessed with this? We should all be obsessed with it, because it is part of a bigger campaign to discredit the press, abuse the intelligence community, and falsify materials to further an agenda which is not supported by facts. Intelligence professionals should be interested in truth and not in political agendas. To apologize for someone leaking classified material and damaging our ability to collect intelligence on Bad Guys is, in my mind, onconscionable.

This goes for any political party, by the way. Sandy Berger swiping classified material from the National Archives is just as slimy as Rove outing Plame. Anyone who is that cavalier with classified material should go to jail and never be trusted by any other American again.

I’m also disappointed to hear the President say that he will fire anyone in his administration who is convicted of a crime. Last year, it was anyone who was involved in leaking classified material, the year before that it was anyone who was involved in the leak of Plame’s identity. Nice to see that he keeps raising the bar on what will constitute an offense worth firing someone. Of course, this is a President who has fired nobody ever, as well as never once vetoing a bill. Sounds like he doesn’t want to make tough decisions except in the case of throwing our military on a bonfire.

I leave you with one thought. Take it any way you please.
The oath of enlistment that I took when I was active duty includes the phrase, “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Once again, the challenge is to identify the lyrices without resorting to Google. Anyone?

Yo, I used to check out lyrics upon the format
Build with skill with technique. Computer A-DAT

My lyrical form is clouds on your brainstorm
I get hyped think thought flow. Acrobat, sink the track, pump the track

Dance missions,clubs like spores react by. Strong visions
And hurrying more. Reflects on the dancefloor

Flow it up and having now people showing up
Packing crowds jam packed venues
Needles collapse, while atmosphere continues

Sprinkle that,
Winnin’ like that, movin’like that, hittin’ like that
The melody is phat

Yeah, I’m on the energy source
The cosmic force

I had some custom shoes made at the tail end of the Dot-Com Era. They were cool. I actually still have them, although they’re kind of worn to the point of being slippers. Anyway, I wandered over to their site tonight, just out of curiousity about what new designs they might have. Last time I headed over there was maybe a year ago. Tonight I discovered they seem to be gone. There is another site with a similar name (Customatix Kix) but I’m not 100% sure that’s the same crew, and they don’t do individual shoes.

Damn. I was kind of thinking about getting another pair of uniquely Gary shoes sometime this fall. Oh, well. Guess it’s Big 5 specials for me. *sigh*

As mentioned earlier, the Congress has now passed the bill that makes it harder for anyone to declare bankruptcy. Well, anyone but large corporations that donate millions to politicians, that is. Any bets on whether the President will develop a conscience and veto it? Yeah, me neither.

Pretty sure I saw JabberJenny down by the Concho today, with her family. I was a bit distracted trying to corral The Boy, as usual, but how many women in San Angelo have short dark hair with pink streaks, and a couple kids in tow? That’s my thought too. 🙂

Alex had another birthday party to go to this afternoon – grabbed a present from the cache in the closet. That is a tradition I’m going to keep up for as many years as kids will let me get away with it – we bought up a bunch of cheap toys at after-Christmas sales. Makes it really easy when one of his classmates has a party. So, this party was at the Rink; Alex has never skated before so you can imagine how much fun that was. Interior monolog: “must not laugh at him…must not laugh at him” heh

Drivers in San Angelo seem to be especially bad, although I’ve noticed a trend toward increasingly rude behavior on the roads the past two decades nationally.

This morning added evidence to the growing pile of “SUV drivers are assholes” reports. As I was driving east, a woman who was parked on the wrong side of the road to my right pulled out and made a right-hand turn in front of me without turn signals into the oncoming lane of the road. It was another block before she had moved to only straddling the middle of the road instead. By the time we got to the stop sign she didn’t even slow down for, she had finally found her way to the right side of the road.

Then, a few minutes later, I almost got my rear bumper removed by a guy in an SUV who decided he needed to change lanes at the same time I was. The difference being, I had a turn signal and he didn’t. Somehow, this seemed to infuriate him and he drove off in a huff, just to make a right-hand turn not one block later.

As Bill Hicks said, “The People Who Hate People Party” is a good idea some days.

Crasch pointed me to this, and I’m intrigued by GlobalFreeloaders, as anyone who’s ever romanticized the notion of backpacking across Europe would be. What a concept – a network of people who all volunteer to let other folks crash at their place when they’re in town. Not that anyone would want to visit San Angelo, but if so – I’ve got a futon.

I love the Green Day album, “American Idiot” – it’s been on my MP3-playing Clie for the past several months, I have it on the MP3 CD at work, etc. Today is the first time I’ve ever heard the title track on the radio (butchered heavily, of course). They played it on the local “best variety” station (like ClearChannel but lower production values), with no comment. I guess it took winning a Grammy for redneck radio to give ’em a listen. Think they realize that most of the slams made in that track are directed at folks like the majority of this town? Probably not.

Standing at the vending machines…

D: I didn’t get what I wanted.

B: I hate when that happens. I pushed Dr. Pepper the other day and got Sprite.

D: No, I got what I ordered, just not what I wanted.

B: Huh?

D: They never have anything I truly want in this machine.

I owned the Battlestar Galactica Boardgame, when I was young. I remember the black holes were used to sneak behind your enemies and shoot them with your tiny plastic Viper fighters.

I also remember having a Viper toy that shot a plastic dart out of its nose.

So, with that in mind, is it any wonder that I’m really digging the remake? Yes, I am a big geek.

The brain comes up with some really strange stuff as you awake or fall asleep; the transition must do something interesting with electrochemical balances I’d guess.

This morning the name of a new canine hip-hop group came to me unbidden: Barky Bark and the Stinky Bunch.

Making your morning slightly more surreal….

Just a few thoughts bouncing around my noggin:

• People in San Angelo accelerate like sailboats.
• We finally got MTV2 on our local cable and they seem to have stopped showing videos. WTF?
• Why in the world am I tired? I’ve only been up 13.5 hours, I have no business being tired.

Cya

It’s been twenty years since the year 1984 ended. In memory, I finished re-reading the novel 1984 yesterday. It seems Orwell was about fifty years off in his predictions, looking at his explanation of how the societies of Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia coexisted.

Orwell made the assumption, common to many novelists and (especially) politicians of his time, that socialism/communism would be an unstoppable force for change in the coming decades (remember he wrote 1984 in 1948). The doctrine of fear and hatred and constant war, on the other hand, sure seems like it’s moving in. Using words for their opposite meaning is a fun little game, as well – anyone feel more secure with the Homeland Security Department’s announcements of fear and dread?

War is peace

If you haven’t read Coventry, go buy Revolt in 2100. Tell me that theocratic dystopia is not possible with the way the country is heading.

Had a conversation with one of my cow-orkers today which was quite surreal. It’s like I’ve had a similar conversation before…

One of the geeks at work is the only person who really understands how some of the tools work. This is because he’s the one who wrote the tools, and he uses the strangest user interface non-standard widgets seen since Kai’s Power Tools. So my cow-orker says the problem we’re having is that Mike just is so smart he thinks differently than we do.

This is insulting and wrong. It’s insulting because it supposes that Mike is smarter than I am; I’ve seen no evidence of this. It’s wrong because smart people need to remember to make their projects accessible to the people who will be using them. If you’re a designer and you break every convention that people expect to see, you’re an idiot or an artist. If you’re an artist, get off the Intelligence Training System. If you’re an idiot, stop being dumb.

And why do people continue to lump me into the group that does not include the “crazy smart people” anyway? Is it because I’m capable of a normal conversation? Is it because I try not to pepper my speech with too many obscure references? Is it because I’m not a prick, as so many of these people who are perceived as “crazy smart” are?

Maybe I should start insulting people gratuitously and then they’ll think I’m smarter than they are. Still won’t make any more money, but they’ll stop asking for my help anyway. 🙂

Google has introduced yet another search tool – Google Print. This is like Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” feature, which lets you do full-text queries of any book in the database.

Neither of these two services cover public domain works, over 10,000 of which are already scanned in and converted to readable ASCII text. I guess if you can’t make money at it, Amazon doesn’t see a benefit; but Google probably isn’t making much money off of this to begin with, so I don’t understand why they haven’t hooked into Project Gutenberg in some official way. Yes, I know that Google can be used to search PG archives, but linking it to the print.google.com URL would be cooler.

Shoot, with the availability of print-on-demand machines, Google or Amazon actually could make money off of public-domain books. Wouldn’t that be an interesting profit-generating idea?

Driving down a four-lane one-way street this morning, I had the interesting experience of watching someone turn left from the second lane right in front of a motorcycle officer of the local PD. The officer, sensing an easy ticket, did . . . nothing at all and drove away.

This is such a typical move by the police here. The only laws they enforce seem to involve speeding in school zones. Park on the wrong side of the street? No problem. Park on a corner, rather than the required 15 feet away? Still good. Run every stop sign in town? Hey, you’re from Texas. Never use your turn signal? That’s okey dokey. Go 22 miles per hour in a school zone, with no children within a mile? Busted!

Is it any wonder we have more accidents in this small city than in the much larger Midland-Odessa area? Our drivers suck and the police let them.

This poster is one example of why so many people in the non-coastal states think that lefties are communists. Capitalism isn’t necessary, with the implication that you would like to get rid of capitalism then? Replacing it with one of those nice systems like centrally-controlled economies or anarchy, I suppose. Those work so much better.