BunkBlog

Remember that New Design I posted two weeks ago? One of my coworkers is proud of her “Blame Me – I voted for the moron” button. She feels that he’s not a moron, but she considers it a “buck stops here” statement. Although she and I have vastly different views on the proper role of government, we do agree on one thing – there’s been a whole lot of stupid to spread around on all layers of government lately.

By the way, the buttons don’t refer to any particular political candidate or official, so you can give them to anyone who you think has voted badly, for any race. Cheers.

In case you don’t know why the “Trusted Computing” concept is an inherently bad one, please go view the short video that was recently pimped on BoingBoing. It explains a bit, and hopefully it’s enough to get people to look into it more.

Trusted Computing is not a new idea, and it’s been growing lately. It’s all part of the same RIAA/MPAA mindset, the one that says, “Consumers are crooks and must be controlled by the copyright holders at all costs.” The technology industry (well, Sony anyway) stood up for your rights against commercial interests over 20 years ago, and for that we have VCRs, and MP3 players, and burnable CDs, and TiVos and all the wonderful things that allow you to control your own media that you’ve legally purchased. Now, the technology industry has largely been purchased by or merged with the entertainment industry. So, who will stand up for the customer?

Proving that charities are infinitely more responsive than governmental organizations, the Red Cross is paying thousands of hotel bills for hurricane victims. If you haven’t donated to the Red Cross yet, do it.

Not only has the Red Cross been handing out thousands of debit cards, days before FEMA even considered them, they’re paying for people’s hotel bills, getting them out of shelters and on the path to normalcy.

Great quote:

“I have never seen anything with the government that is this simple.”

What’s up with the GOP? The formerly solid wall of “Bush can do no wrong” is crumbling lately. Not only has Bill Frist gone against the White House by following his medical experience instead of faith-based science and supporting stem cell research, now he’s calling for hearings on the federal reaction to Hurricane Katrina. Damn. They haven’t even counted the dead yet, there are hundreds still to rescue from rooftops around New Orleans, and Frist is hacking at the Prez? Where was your spine when you could have prevented something, Mr. Majority Leader? Did you have to wait for Maxine Waters to pull her Jesse Jackson-assisted publicity stunt at England AFB before you could start questioning some of the bizarre decisions the administration has made?

Y’all know I don’t often link to anything right-wing except to mock it, but this post is dead-on. The emergency response plan for New Orleans included everyone who had a car driving away. Full stop.

Meanwhile, the 100,000 residents (20% of the population) who did not actually possess cars were unadressed by the plan. And the school buses which were owned and operated by the city were left in their lot, now filled with water and unusable. How many buses? Enough to evacuate all 100,000 carless citizens in something under 3 days, if they went all the way to Houston.

As Michael says, this isn’t a political issue. Democrat, Republican, Libertarian – doesn’t matter. If you have hundreds of buses and you don’t plan to use them to evacuate the city, you’re just a dumb ass.

In case there’s anyone who isn’t watching The Interdictor journal – you should. I’ve known this guy for a few years now, and his no-nonsense views from the heart of the New Orleans business district are enlightening.

Take care, Michael.

Live television has a way of producing unexpected comments.

I’m amazed that Mike Myers attempted to stick with the script while Kanye West is ranting about the Administration ignoring the refugees in New Orleans because they’re black. Amazing.

There are some truly messed up people in the world. This guy, supposedly a man of God, preacher of the Gospels of forgiveness and love, has this to say about why Katrina was a blessing to New Orleans:

“New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion — it’s free of all of those things now,” Shanks says. “God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there — and now we’re going to start over again.”

I have no words.
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Blame Me – I voted for the moron (not really, but that’s the design)

Sarcasm 3 is my latest attempt at graphical humor. If you are humorless, don’t bother going there – you’ll just get mad.

Despite the things I’ve been hearing from my cow-orkers and family members, the FCC has proposed 2009 as the deadline to change from analog to digital television, and it looks like Congress is going to sign that into law. So, all of you who thought your television was going to stop working soon – don’t worry.

Here in San Angelo, the local cable company (sure, there’s theoretically more than one, but get real) has been in a pissing contest with the local CBS affiliate since the beginning of the year. This has resulted in no CBS channel available on the cable system, free rabbit-ears antennas for cable subscribers that ask for them, and a striking rise in the use of satellite television receivers.

I don’t get the satellite thing. Of course, I don’t get the fascination with digital cable either. Both of them force something on the consumer that is, in my mind, unacceptable – the adapter. This is nothing less than an external tuner, rendering the tuners in my television and VCR useless. Many people wonder why I think this is a bad thing. This can be summed up in one of the marketing points for the local Dish Network folks – they brag about allowing you to have televisions in up to five rooms in your house. Allowing you to have them, you see? Because, unlike television as broadcast over the airwaves of old, the satellite provider now controls your usage of the signal.

No longer can you watch one thing and record another – oh no, your VCR has to be connected to a second external tuner to record something that you are not watching in that room at that moment. Ah, but then the Dish folks point out they are offering a free DVR upgrade, so you can record the full digital signal of other shows directly on this magical box. Ah, but can you? When the television industry is trying to get legislation passed to allow the Broadcast Flag to rise from the dead, when Tivo now puts commercials on you recorder while you’re trying to skip commercials, when the broadcasters are coercing the DVR manufacturers to disallow permanent archiving of shows… Well, I don’t trust a DVR that I don’t control 100%, and the DVR from Dish network would be a DRMed, MPAA-friendly, unexpandable, unchangeable piece of junk to me.

I don’t understand why so many people find it acceptable to cede control of the airwaves to the content providers. There is a balance in copyright law; the citizens are assumed to have some rights too, not just the people in Hollywood.

So, until I can use a standard tuner in a standard television or DVR or computer tuner card, I’ll stick with analog, thanks.

I’ve just bookmarked NK News under “Online Oddities” – it’s a searchable archive of all the wacky DPRK propaganda spewed onto the web from the Korean Central News Agency. Fun stuff, and the host is Kim Jung Il (as portrayed in Team America).

I love the amazing chutpah of people who mindlessly back a political personality. Some jackass drove his pickemup truck over a war memorial. This good ol’ boy destroyed hundreds of crosses memorializing the fallen servicemembers and desecrated the American flag by driving over dozens of them as well.

So, as Patridiot says:

bq. That’s some kind of moral relativism from the right wing. If you put up a memorial to fallen soldiers and you support the war, that’s a valuable moral thing and any desecration of the memorial is treason. If you put up a memorial to fallen soldiers and you oppose the war, that’s a godless, anti-American thing and any desecration of the memorial is patriotic.

Way to go, moron. Way to help your side look like reasonable and sane human beings. Yep.

Twelve years I served in the United States Army. I shudder to think that anyone could be persuaded to believe this type of behavior is supporting the troops. You ran over the crosses and ripped up the flag! Holy crap, what a jackass.

Kung Fu Monkey has a great post on The President and Intelligent Design

bq. Opinion has been enshrined as superior to fact. No longer need a person take into account the way the world works when forming their worldview — they can instead hunt down “facts” and “theories” which support their own comfort zone, and what’s worse, we can NO LONGER CALL BULLSHIT. Because if our leaders — pardon me, your leaders — don’t call bullshit, who will? They have undermined the very process by which we know WHEN to call bullshit!

The end of an era…With Brokaw and Rather retired, and Jennings gone, the big three anchors that most of us grew up with are no longer on the news. This is akin to when Cronkite and Brinkley retired for our parents, I suppose.

I wonder if any of the new crop of anchors will have the staying power of those three. I can’t see Stone Philips being the grand old man of television news, and certainly not the idiots that pretend to be journalists on the cable news channels.

Bush used his authority to make Bolton the new UN Ambassador, during the Congressional recess. This is not the first time Bush has used the recess appointment ploy to bypass the Senate, so I guess nobody should be surprised. When the going gets tough, the Prez gets sneaky.

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.”

Nine Inch Nails Drop Out Of MTV Movie Awards Over Bush Dispute

bq. “While we respect Nine Inch Nails’ point of view, we were uncomfortable with their performance being built around a partisan political statement. When we discussed our discomfort with the band, their choice was to unfortunately pull out of the Movie Awards.”

What I find amazing about this is that MTV can, without any hint of irony, refer to a simple photograph of the President of this country as “a partisan political statement.” What does that say about the bizarre extremism that has gripped our public speech, when a photo of our leader is considered partisan?

Trent Reznor made this post on his site, NIN:

bq. Nine Inch Nails will not be performing at the MTV Movie Awards as previously announced. We were set to perform ‘The Hand That Feeds’ with an unmolested, straightforward image of George W. Bush as the backdrop. Apparently, the image of our president is as offensive to MTV as it is to me. See you on tour this fall when we return to play in America.

I guess MTV doesn’t trust their viewers to have opinions that aren’t spoonfed to them. If it’s not approved by AOL Time Warner Viacom Twentieth Century Paramount, it’s not a viable point of view. And, more importantly, the American people are apparently so stupid that they can’t decide what parts of a performance to pay attention to and which to ignore. I’m sure there are plenty of Republicans who like NIN, just as there are a number of Democrats who do. Who freakin’ cares what political party you belong to when you’re watching the MTV Video Music Awards escapes me, though.

As reported in What’s New:

bq. It’s been traveling for 28 years and is now 8.7 billion miles from Earth. It just reported that it has entered the region of the heliosheath, where the solar wind begins to dissipate. It may be in this region another 10 years. Its Pt-238 radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) should keep operating until about 2020. When Voyager 1 crosses that final boundary, becoming the first human artifact to enter interstellar space, Earth won’t know. Communications with Voyager will be cut off to save $4.5M of NASA’s $16.5B budget (.025%), for Bush’s Moon/Mars “vision.”

Why has The secret Downing Street memo received so little (some would say no) coverage in the United States? Is there perhaps something to the theory that our entire news media are corporate shills afraid to upset the administration?

Fox News Alert! Bizarre Sex Habits of The Extreme Right-Wing

Radical anti-abortionist assists in killing doctors, and admits to past beastiality. Also, hints at past gay sex. Oh, the hypocrisy! The humanity!

Hehe