Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

La Fin Du Monde. Brewed by Unibroue in Chambly, Quebec Canada.

The beer’s name translates to “the end of the world” and it is one of my favorites. La Fin Du Monde has been one of my New Year traditions since the Y2K Nonsense. Go Figure. Happy New Year!

I’ve never been a fan of New Years. I’ve always found it to be a depressing mess of a holiday full of drunken depressing messes. It’s little more than amateur night, where the world unleashes the very dullest of its people on a billion bottles of hard liquor, equips them with silly hats and noise makers and then sends them to wander around my neighborhood to make asses of themselves and urinate on the sidewalk. Whatever.

My wife bought me Kurt Vonnegut’s new book A Man Without a Country for Christmas. The book is an unexpected treat and a very quick and delightful read. Sometime last Sunday night I sat down to read it and came across a passage that I thought was really appropriate for New Years. I can’t remember what I was thinking, but here’s the paragraph:

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milkey Way - with a century of transportation whoopee. Our government is conducting a war against drugs, is it? Let them go after petroleum. Talk about a destructive high! You put some of this stuff in your car and you can go a hundred miles an hour, run over the neighbor’s dog, and tear the atmosphere to smithereens. Hey, as long as we are stuck with being homo sapiens, why mess around? Anybody got an atomic bomb? Who doesn’t have an atomic bomb?

Happy New Year!

It’s doubtful that anyone has noticed, but I’ve removed all donation links to the American Red Cross from this site for the time being. This has everything to do with the recent call center scandal coupled with an inept response to Katrina. Don’t get me wrong, the American Red Cross has done wonderful work in the past and I’m sure they will continue to do so, but they need to get their house in order in a big hurry. When faced with operational ineptitude in crisis coupled with clear cut corruption, what other conclusion can a reasonable person come to? I hope to see a change in that organization’s operational structure in the coming weeks along with a clear plan for reform. Not that my input matters, but when that happens, I’ll eagerly resume my support.

As a migrant worker in the geek farming industry I deal a little with computer security issues, so I’m probably more aware of problems in that area than some. That said, I was somewhat stunned to see this:

Security researchers uncovered a record 5,198 vulnerabilities in software products this year, nearly 38 percent more than the number of flaws found in 2004, according to statistics published by US-CERT, a cyber security information-sharing collaboration between the Department of Homeland Security and the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

According to US-CERT, researchers found 812 flaws in the Windows operating system, 2,328 problems in various versions of the Unix/Linux operating systems (Mac included). An additional 2,058 flaws affected multiple operating systems. There may well have been more than 5,198 flaws discovered this year; these were only the ones reported to US-CERT.

Here’s the list. Needless to say, security flaws are a hot topic lately as the WMF exploit, for which there is no patch, is making everybody a little panicky and looks bound to be a disaster. Here are a few things you can do to provide yourself with some minimal protection. First, use a browser other than Internet Explorer for the time being. This will not insulate you by any means, but the exploit is a little more automatic with IE than it is with Firefox or Opera. Second, if you use Google Desktop or a similar utility, disable it until Windows has been patched. Google Desktop indexes any image placed on your computer automatically and that process alone will trigger an infected WMF. Lastly, you can keep WMF files from rendering. This is very easy. Click on Start and then run, type in “regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll” without the quotes and hit OK. One side effect of this is that Windows Picture and Fax Viewer will no longer work. Keep in mind that none of these steps will insulate your computer 100%, but will provide some minimal protection.

Don’t say I never told you anything.

I’m not going to attempt to make a grand point here, but I’m curious about what sort of degenerative psychological disorder leaves a moral person comfortable seeing their efforts described as “Pro-War Activism.”

I picked up this image from an article entitled “Some Conservatives Return to Old Argument” in the Wall Street Journal which describes the sort of disconnect amongst professional conservatives (in the professional wrestling way) that one wouldn’t wish on the cruel or the beastly. Alas, they are well paid for their delusions, but that knowledge doesn’t change the fact that there are many among us who believe and believe well. The men and women in spandex who are willing to go to the mat for insanity and for war, if the price is right, are not as troubling to me tonight as those who believe that their wrestling heroes are not frauds. What do we do about that?

(Via some guy you have never heard of)

I’m not a fan of the Blog Meme and have lived in dread, for well over a year now, that some sad soul might tag the ragged likes of me. And so it has come to pass. I have been tagged with the always dull and never delightful “meme of fours.� I already know this is going to end badly.

As it turns out, the tagger is one of those popular kids with a website people actually like to visit. Indeed the tagger is something of a militant suburbanite who, I fear, is a good deal tougher than me. This forces me into the awkward position of following the rules widely observed in the middle and high schools of our great nation and bow to the dastardly desires of the popular kids in the vain hope that they might one day look upon me as something more than snot on the wall.

It’s not really a coincidence that this meme tag forces me to live by high school rules, as blog memes generally have a very grammar school scented funk about them. This funk is natural to the medium, because long before there were big influential political blogs, there were overly emotional teenagers writing about how life shattering it is to be dumped by somebody they had been dating for less than a week. Combined with black backgrounds, illegible fonts and lots of god awful suicidal poetry, the rants of recently jilted teenagers are the bedrock of this fine medium - the blog. So it goes.

Four jobs you’ve had in your life: Dishwasher, Line Cook, Law Firm Gopher, Geek Farm Cubicle Fertilizer (current)

Four movies you could watch over and over: Moulin Rouge (If I hear you laugh, this is going to get ugly), Dead Man, Naked Lunch, Primer

Four places you’ve lived: Fairmount, Rittenhouse Square, Bryn Mawr, Washington Square West

Four TV shows you love to watch: This is going to get ugly, because while I probably watch a little too much TV, love is just way too strong a word. Are there really people out there who love the crap on TV? Oh well, here are four things I watch regularly: Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Charlie Rose, West Wing and do seven hours of football on Sundays count? Was that a yes? Football it is.

Four places you’ve been on vacation: Pshaw! This militant suburbanite speaks with a forked tongue. Do people go places on vacation? When do they get the time and who pays to send them? Wait. Fuzzy memories from years long forgotten are flooding my brain like so much sewage on a warm Summer’s night: Montreal, London, Bermuda and somewhere in Mexico with a beach and a jungle.

Four websites you visit daily: The Liberal Avenger, Philly, Above Average Jane, Football Outsiders

Four of your favorite foods: Peking Duck, Yellowtail Sashimi, Greek Octopus, Bun Dac Biet

Four places you’d rather be: Nowhere. I like it right here .

Tagged: I’m going to be lazy and name one site with four words in its title – Forever a Square Peg

Christmas Ale, brewed by George Gales & Co. LTD., in Horndean, UK.

I’m not sure why I got away from it this year, but this is my first holiday beer feature in 2005, save for that one on Fitzmas. This ale is named, quite appropriately, Christmas Ale and is a pretty decent, fruity ale. More importantly, the label features Santa, which is an important feature of any self respecting Christmas beer, wine, ale or liquor.

I’m often asked for food recommendations to go with the beers I feature, and since it’s the holidays I’ll oblige. If I were you, and I’m not so don’t get all freaky on me, I’d drink any number of Christmas Ales on an empty stomach shortly after Noon (so as to be respectable), followed by a pot of coffee and a roll of Tums. The Noon part is important, because you might be looking for a job soon and potential employers probably aren’t interested in people who get liquored up at 8:30 in the morning. I will, however, make one exception to the noon rule, but only if it involves the Christmas Ale, or some other holiday beer. Should you receive a few bottles of Christmas Ale as a gift on Christmas morning, you are free to drink up regardless of the hour. Enjoy yourself, because the rest of the day will, in all likelihood, be miserable.

But enough about beer, let’s talk a little about Santa. As you know, the reason we put ourselves through this annual misery is that Santa died for our sins. More accurately, Santa died for your sins. By your sins, I really mean your sins. I know you’ve had a sneaking suspicion about the whole thing for quite a while - a dark cloud in the deepest, dirtiest crevices of your otherwise sparkling mind. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but yeah, this is pretty much on you.

I’m not saying there wasn’t a lot of sin that led up to the poor guy’s demise, but you were the one who pushed it over the top. Do you remember that friend you had in the 10th grade? The weird kid? You know who I’m talking about; he was the guy who had duel American/French citizenship, was a little off and everybody called him “French Boy.”

No?

Okay, let me remind you - he was the buddy whose mom had the real thick French accent, made an unbelievable chocolate mousse and wore high heeled boots along with extraordinarily short leather mini skirts.

Now you remember, don’t you?

Ok, so do you remember that time you were sitting around in your French buddy’s living room, watching a little TV with some friends and she came in to get your buddy to do some housework or something? Do you recall what happened when she left?

No? Well then let me tell you.

The guy sitting just to the right of you said “Dude, French Boy’s mom is totally hot!” You replied “Dude, I would so totally [expletives and references to naughty bits deleted]” Yeah, you remember that right? It got a pretty good laugh?

Well that was one bridge too far my friend, and just at the moment you uttered the word “[reference to naughty bit deleted]” Santa, who was busy building toys in his workshop in Hoboken, burst into flames. To make matters worse, those little bastard elves spent the night roasting freshly killed reindeer over the flaming carcass.

Yup - that was all you kiddo. Don’t feel too bad though, some of this has been reconciled. If you believe what you see on TV, and I almost always do, then you should know that Santa has been rebuilt using spare parts purchased from the black market beyond the moon and is now a robot, or Santabot if you prefer. Apparently, those sexually ambiguous, bastard elves have some sort of a fetish for corpulence, manliness, a jolly laugh and good cheer. If it eases your mind further, you should know that the Santa who died for your sins, wasn’t the first. According to the television, he was originally an ape (Sir Santa of Claus) who fashioned toys from the bones of dead animals and his own feces. One day a year he would hurl these hand crafted “toys” at chimp-like creatures, causing them terrible pain and agony. The “toys” would later be defecated upon, or something to that extent.

The rest is boring.

I found this article in Salon, by Wil Wheaton (the actor I think), describing the gradual change in his parents, from liberals into right wing pod people, prodded along by the rise of right wing talk radio, interesting. Wheaton is a few years older than me, though I suspect his parents are about a decade younger. I gather that they were probably baby boomers, while my parents were both born before the Second World War. What I found interesting about the article is my experience with my own parents has been quite the opposite of Wheaton’s.

When I was growing up, my parents were both registered Republicans, of the mainstream variety, who mostly voted that way. Both have now changed their party affiliation, and I would describe my father, at least, as a more vocal liberal than myself. He actively works for gay rights and equality, among other things, and was quite firmly anti-war from the start. Granted, the views of people who grew up in Republican households, in what was then a very Republican Philadelphia, when my parents were growing up, are probably mostly out of line with what that party has become.

My wife’s experience has been different as well, or at least I think it has. I should probably call her and ask, but I don’t want to interject fact into an otherwise pointless post. Anyway, I’d venture to guess that her parents’ political viewpoints have remained pretty much unchanged for the last three decades or so, while the two parties have drifted right (or whatever the hell you call this mess). I imagine they seem more liberal today than they did in 1975, though I doubt much, in terms of their outlook, has really changed.

I’ll stop now, because this is probably among the blandest gazes I’ve had at my navel in ages. Stale lint. Bleh.

(Via Susie)

I just had the not so unique pleasure of watching Colorado’s Republican Governor, Bill Owens, defend, in very broad strokes, the most intrusive aspects of the Patriot Act as well as the President’s ability to authorize the National Security Agency to spy on United States citizens. The program was Hardball, where Owens was debating an all too accommodating, thought not entirely inept, Bill Richardson.

Now I’m the first to admit that I’m not well traveled, but I’ve always presumed that any politician who has a prayer of a chance in a square, western state like Colorado needs to proclaim the virtues of rugged individualism, while simultaneously denouncing the nanny state and the liberal eastern elite. Holy shit, was I ever wrong. Here was Owens, on national television no less, throwing the United States Constitution under the bus because he’s a scared, sniveling little wimp. Watching his appearance, one might almost have expected him to throw himself into the arms of a waiting NSA agent as soon as he was off camera.

How is it that an East Coast art school graduate (that would be me), watches a televised appearance by a big tough western governor from a big tough square state and thinks to himself, “wimp?” Actually, the words that crossed my mind were a good deal more crass than “wimp”, but I’ll restrain myself. Some Daddy Party that one.

No links, no transcript, no nothing - pure hyperbole. Enjoy.

This post will be mostly worthless and just a little geeky, but I don’t recall making any promises that any would be anything other than that. Anyway, I very rarely look at this site’s stats because, well I don’t really know - because of stage fright I guess. Today, however, I was fixing a stat counter that I had broken intentionally, though not maliciously, on a certain militant suburbanite’s website, so I had a quick peek at my own. Nothing too exciting, but something I did find strange was that one of the most frequent entry points for robots (the programs search engines and professional spammers use to catalogue or defile the internet depending upon their preference) is a silly little post I wrote in March dealing with some nonsense from Jerry Falwell.

In the post I included a quote from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson in 1820, along with the full text of the same letter. In light of the ongoing War on Christmas, I thought it would be fun to be fun to post the quote and the letter again. Granted it’s not at all relevant to the war at hand, but it’s good to remind oneself, from time to time, of our country’s founding in the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment. Some, though not all, of the ideas contained within would likely disturb the tender, persecuted psyches of many a member of our ruling party.

I say, that this free exercise of reason is all I ask for the vindication of the character of Jesus. We find in the writings of his biographers matter of two distinct descriptions. First, a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications. Intermixed with these, again, are sublime ideas of the Supreme Being, aphorisms and precepts of the purest morality and benevolence, sanctioned by a life of humility, innocence and simplicity of manners, neglect of riches, absence of worldly ambition and honors, with an eloquence and persuasiveness which have not been surpassed. These could not be inventions of the groveling authors who relate them. They are far beyond the powers of their feeble minds.

The letter was written to William Short, by Thomas Jefferson on August 4, 1820. I have included the full text after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wow, the FISA process really is pretty stringent. It demands a reason to spy on somebody. Shit, it even demands the name of the person who is going to be spied on. WP:

One government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the administration complained bitterly that the FISA process demanded too much: to name a target and give a reason to spy on it.

Now that just fills me with holiday cheer.

As usual, somebody says it better than I can. Go have a look.

Well this is quite an old thought that I would have written a little about had I been writing at the time. If you recall, one of the qualifications cited for Harriet Myers’ nomination to the Supreme Court was that she had served as a Dallas city councilperson. That caused a rather horrifying thought to cross my mind which went something like “Oh god, there isn’t any danger that somebody might nominate Janie Blackwell to the Supreme Court, is there?” I entered a fugue state, but with the aid of modern medicine I was able to regain my senses pretty quickly.

Like I said, it’s an old thought that isn’t at all relevant to anything, but I wanted to share it anyway. I’ll lay off Harriet and Janie both for the time being. Neither has ever done anything to me and it is the holiday season after all.

I just wanted to expand a little on yesterday’s post. It’s not entirely unlikely that at some point in the future, some asshole is going to strap explosives around his waist and blow up a bus in some city somewhere in America. It’s doubtful that it’s all that hard to pull off if the individual in question is hell bent on doing it. It’s even more doubtful that there is a damn thing we can do about it. Shit happens. Curtailing our civil liberties in the extreme, allowing full governmental oversight over every aspect of our lives might make the hypothetical bombing just a little harder, but certainly not impossible.

We hear lots of talk about surrender and cowardice coming out of certain circles, generally aimed in the direction of liberals. But who is really scared here? Who is running away from the founding principals of this nation in order to gain just a little comfort? Senator Cornyn provided a perfect example of what I’m talking about. He wondered out loud what good civil liberties are when you are dead. None of course, but I’d rather die with them than without. One or the other is bound to happen. By advocating the abandonment of our civil liberties, aren’t the defenders of unchecked domestic spying surrendering America? It strikes me that they advocate giving up on the idea of America and trying something less free and less enlightened because they are scared - Scared of some asshole, somewhere, who wants to blow up a bus and probably will, no matter what rights we give up.

I wonder about the condition of the laundry that Judge James Roberson is walking out the door of the FISA court with and if we’ll ever be privy to any of it. I bet it smells something awful.

A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush’s secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson, one of 11 members of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, sent a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. late Monday notifying him of his resignation without providing an explanation.

Two associates familiar with his decision said yesterday that Robertson privately expressed deep concern that the warrantless surveillance program authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may have tainted the FISA court’s work

This resignation in protest will likely be easily dismissed as the politically motivated, spiteful actions of a Clinton appointee who is just out to get Junior. In a not so strange way, I have to admit that I wish that were true. I mean, if secret judges, serving on secret courts, approving secret warrants can’t stomach the NSA scandal, you can put good money on the odds that something truly awful has transpired. Every time we allow our nation to drift away from its founding documents and core principals, we lose ourselves. This is, in a word, unacceptable.

Having accidentally caught a little of Barbara Walters’ special on Heaven, I’m reminded that it’s not an entirely bad thing that I enjoy a stiff drink from time to time. Now is the time.

I’m originally from York, which is just down state route 74 from Dover, PA, probably now and forever known as the land of intelligent design.

I can’t tell you how happy I was to hear the US District Judge’s ruling that struck down the Dover School Board’s decision to require the teaching of Intelligent Design. I was particularly amused by some of his rather scathing remarks:

The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has not been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

I have no problem with religion, far from it, but I don’t understand why this needs to be brought into school. I grew up learning the theory of evolution in high school biology and I never really thought the concepts of evolution were inconsistent with the possibility that maybe someone/something created that first minuscule atom from which we all evolved. Whether you buy creation or evolution or a combination of the two, I think maybe the theories can co-exist in our brains and not cause any undue confusion.

And really, I don’t know how much time and space could be devoted to this subject. Once you say that something may have created that from which we evolved, well, what else is there to say? How can you possibly devote entire texts to the subject?

I guess I just don’t get it. Thank goodness the U.S. District Judge didn’t get it either.

If you ever wanted to know a little something about cutting and running, you might want to have a chat with Senator John Cornyn who is apparently the chief spokesperson for the Senate’s wuss contingent.

“None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead,� said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a former judge and close ally of the president who sits on the Judiciary Committee.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), who has led a bipartisan filibuster against a reauthorization of the Patriot Act, quoted Patrick Henry, an icon of the American Revolution, in response: “Give me liberty or give me death.�

He called Cornyn’s comments “a retreat from who we are and who we should be.�

What a wimp. I don’t know if any of you recall the video game SimCity 2000, but it had a newspaper feature where you could read little stories about the city you were building. Anyway, one of the frequent headlines was “You’re Gonna Die!” which is, of course, quite true. Indeed, while it may be an uncomfortable reality, most of us can handle that basic fact of life without soiling ourselves. Apparently Cornyn can’t handle it without soiling the Constitution, or at least advocating the same.

I don’t expect great acts of heroism from elected representatives, but I do expect them to have enough intestinal fortitude to uphold their oaths and protect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. If they are too scared of the terrorist hiding in the closet to perform that very basic duty, they should find a new line of work.

You can’t do a post on this subject without the requisite Ben Franklin quote (I beleive it’s mandated in the blogger code of conduct), so here it is:

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

As I’m sure you know the teaching of ID in science classrooms has been ruled unconstitutional. I just wanted to highlight a rather brutal paragraph from the decision since it’s such good fun:

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

So it looks as though everybody’s favorite dog loving, cream puff, drama queen senator has come out against the constitution. I wish he had used the “really just guidelines” meme, because that would just make my day, but I’ll take what I can get. Considering the fact that he seems incapable of getting anything right, it’s probably too much to expect Santorum to do the Anti-Constitution thing properly. From the Inky:

“The senator recognizes that in times of war, the President has the constitutional oversight or the constitutional ability to do whatever is necessary to protect the American people,” Santorum spokesman Robert L. Traynham said. “He fully supports the President’s ability to protect American lives by going this step in terms of listening in on conversations.”

So now I get to add something about him being against the constitution in my ever growing string of nicknames for him.

Santorum Hatred™. Always a smart choice!

(Via AmericaBlog)