A sort of vacation

I am not going into work this week, I have vacation time built up and the boys are on their spring break. 

Unfortunately, the money tree that I keep out back hasn't been producing lately.  I will be staying close to home.  Some hikes up the gorge, sleeping in late, digging in the garden, that kind of stuff.  I figure that it will take the two days to get off of work-oriented brain, four or five days to rest, then two days getting work brain back on-line and chugging.

I do find the combination of 640 million dollar jackpots and riots in Spain and Greece kind of interesting.  We here in the US aren't at that stage yet, but the groundwork is being laid and the same antecedent conditions are in place.  But here in the US, we are still in our "strike it rich" delusions and I have no doubt that the lotteries will play a big part of the process of staving off the mess until the last possible minute.

Oh, I buy lottery tickets.  One (and only one) when the sign on the way to work registers as a sufficiently large number to kick off my fantasy production subroutines (primarily centered around purchases of large acreage, high quality farmland.  Though I did take a pretty big side expedition into fantasizing about a heavily armed, sail powered ship once).  Nope, so I have no qualms morally about the true purpose of the lottery, farming the gullible.

Look, I agree with the critics, the lottery is a tax on dumb people.  The bad comparison that especially tickles me is "the chance of winning the lottery is about the same as being mauled by a polar bear and a regular bear on the same day".  Not at all true, but funny as hell as a visual.   Now, most of the money going into lottery tickets probably came out of the beer money.  No harm, no foul.  Yes, there are some dumbasses out there that used the rent money, but you really can't stop desperate dumbasses from following their genetic code. 

As for the tax revenues, I am good with those.  The more desperate dumbass money going into the communal pie, the better chance something valuable will happen.  The states have to take care of old people in nursing homes, have to maintain roads, keep up state parks, pay highway patrolmen, run schools, all kinds of little things which everyone can find something useful.  Better to pay for this by Billy-Bob foregoing his fourth six-pack to buy a couple of lottery tickets.  Nope, that is nothing but a win-win.

Also, the lottery acts as a kind of national pacifier.  Look, most folks out there are significantly afield of their stated dreams and goals.  The vast majority are doing well enough, but the dreams injected into their heads by the advertising/manufacturing complex are getting pretty threadbare.  The lottery allows a means for folks to think about buying the stairway to heaven.  Keeps them docile and not running around burning shit.  A means of keeping peoples eyes off the inevitably deteriorating conditions around them is just "best practices".

Nope, I have no problem with the lottery, I am just going to be sad when a sufficient percentage of the currently placated populace start realizing that things aren't working.  Some are looking forward to "rising up and throwing off the shackles".  I am not at all excited about the prospect.  I can't think of a period of time when this kind of thing was occurring that things got better for the common man.

Nope, if the lottery can pacify the populace for a little while longer and keep things running a day longer, I am all for it.

The other option really sucks.

Odd priests

Most economists also agree that there was a brief recovery from 1838 to 1839, which then ended as the Bank of England and Dutch creditors raised interest rates. However, economic historian Peter Temin has argued that, when corrected for deflation, the economy actually grew after 1838. According to economist and historian Murray Rothbard, between 1839 and 1843, real consumption increased by 21 percent and real gross national product increased by 16 percent, despite the fact that real investment fell by 23 percent and the money supply shrank by 34 percent. (1)

Russell (Vice MR) pointed out a book recently

America's First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder After the Panic of 1837

I don't know if we will suffer another depression.  I used to firmly predict one, but now it seems that the presumptious and jejune projections that I once so firmly espoused are just so much humility fodder for your humble correspondent.  I don't know economics work, I doubt seriously that anyone does.  Professional economists cling firmly to their models and schools, but in the end, most have a pretty unsatisfactory record of predicting anything useful.

What I do know is that squeezing nickels is becoming progressively more difficult.  I am pretty much stripped to the bone in my life and I still struggle mightily to make it from payday to payday.  I am not poor, I most assuredly am not rich.  But a simple lifestyle is getting harder to maintain.

I think that is what surprises me about economists.  They are like the Bishops and Archbishops and Deacons attending the early church councils.  I have always held in my minds eye a view of haggling churchmen, trying to carve points in each other doctrinal hides, viciously arguing over the prosopon or the hypostasis of Christ, dressed in fine robes, blessing the poor as they lay starving outside the basilica. 

We are having a debate among politicians about the economy.  Trickle down economics versus Keynesian stimuli.  Mises comes chirruping in with his say while Krugman unloads with both barrels.  The Chicago School watches from their entrenchments.  All of them in Bond Street Suits and degrees from Ivy league schools, coolly examining the statistics pertaining to the number of people who have ran out of their 99 weeks of unemployment without finding a job. 

I can't really see what good all this does to watch the gong show being presented.  It seems that the structure and the nature of our society has changed, and these folks are trying to stretch their models to fit the new data.  It is just an intellectual circle jerk. 

So, I think that I will try to cut back drastically on the amount that I read about it.  It really doesn't do me any good in my day to day life,  The Council of Chalcedon hasn't even been called yet, there are a lot of things to be worked out

Special Sauce

Now, over at small holding, they are bemoaning the fact that we might have to go back to locking gas caps.

Huh...never got rid of mine.

Folks.  In a real sense, fossil fuels in a fungible format are the ultimate form of currency.  The energy to move, stay warm, provide electricity, and do any number of needful things.  To keep the 2,070,000 BTU-equivalents found in your gas tank open for the world to use is just plain silly.

Look, here in the blogosphere we piss and moan constantly about the nature and value of money.  We prepare our bug out kits, build up our pantries, and do all the sexy little things that let us think that we are studs.  Then we leave our vehicles out on a city street, with the fuel cap open to the world, almost begging folks to come with a hose and steal the special sauce that makes all the other plans work.

Weird.

Obama as a poor man's antichrist

I have never seen a President who elicited so much pure hatred as Obama.  Even my buddy Busted got in on the game.

I just don't get it.  He is at best mediocre.  Folks call him a Communist totalitarian, yet he works for Wall Street almost exclusively.  His signature health care plan is shrieked at as being "Socialized Medicine", yet when you debone it, it is one of the most amazing sops ever thrown to the grossly entrenched medical insurance and medical industries ever invented.

Everyone say that he is going to go apeshit in his second term.  But, everything I have ever seen in my long years of watching the punch and Judy show called American politics leads me to believe that there is an excellent reason that folks call the second term of a presidency "Lame Duck".

As for the "Open Mike" incident that is drawing so much ire.  What?  We are trying to come to a rational negotiation with the Russians about missile defenses and nuclear weapons.  Last time I peeked, the Russkies had about 3,000 nukes, we had about 6,000.  We ought to talk nice with them.  Obama telling the Russian that he has to wait until the irrational posturings of the American elections are over before he can talk turkey is just common sense.  Yet folks act as though he is selling us out to the godless commies (who by the way, don't rule in Russia anymore.  The Soviet Union is quite dead and unmourned thank you).

Nope, Obama is at best a sleazy Chicago political hack.  He is owned by the party machinery who is owned by limousine liberals, public employee unions, and assorted Wall Street firms.  He is no more a communist totalitarian than Walter Mondale.

Obama represents the monied interests and entrenched political satrapies.  His health care "reforms" will probably be partially gutted during the next couple of months by a hostile Supreme Court.  He presides over a government intent on bankrupting the country (and folks, please remember that it is the congress that spends the money and sets the taxes, not Obama). 

Obama talks some trash about shooting the odd American in iffy countries in the middle east without due process.  Even if he does this, I really think that this is not the first time that someone in that office has caused something like that to happen, he is just the only one silly enough to say it in public.

Nope..Obama is just a mediocre President. 

Nothing to see here.

Move on.

Iconographies

I don't really think that most people think things through.  I don't  mean to imply that these folks are lazy, or ill informed, or even stupid.  I just think that the act of thinking things through, wrestling with all of the ambiguity and moral compromises involved are not the fare of the common critter.  Instead, folks just create an image in their head and worship it without thought. 

Jesus loves me.

Right to keep an bear arms.

Economic justice.

Nigger.

Godless commies.

Gun Control

Welfare queens.

Axis of evil.

Cracker.

Free market.

The list can go on as far as you would like to take it.  Complex issues with moral shadings and repressed voicing of self-interest everywhere around.  Simple logos applied to complexity.   All of them not to be questioned on pain of ostracism. 

Consider for a moment the crap going on down in Florida (God, we ought to just get it over with and rename that shithole Hell).   Keep and bear arms meets racism at the corner of fear and anger, tribalism meets the twenty-four hour news cycle.  Everyone in the country rings in with an opinion and none of them are completely right.

We confine ourselves willingly to self-made ghettos.  Suburbia, gated communities, 'hoods, barrios.  When other tribes dare to infringe on the homeland, nasty things happen.  The protection of ones icons from the "other" can take horrendous proportions.  It has happened recently, it will happen again.  To be honest, I see it becoming the norm in the not too distant future.

We are a society.  But more than anything, we are a society bound together not by common interest and a need to serve others, but rather, by a need to attach oneself to a group where one's self interest and petty prejudices can best be served.   The idea of a natural society, working for common goals is antique in this country outside of the occasional small town in the midwest or rural west.  

I don't know where the fiasco in Florida (is that phrase in itself redundant?) will go.  I don't know the facts and I doubt if the facts will ever be found.  There are far too many people making the two tragic players into icons to better serve a manufactured goal 

Dumbasses with too many guns

Look, I am not worried about a gaggle of folks on welfare getting all hinky because they don't get their welfare.  I think that if you spend any time outside of a clown car, you realize that the bulk of people who take welfare are struggling like crazy and, for the most part, not really that aware of the worlds foibles.  The folks on welfare are folks who have lost the struggle to live in our bipolar, angst-driven culture any longer.   The folks on welfare are usually just folks who want to get by, but don't really have the skills or the brains to do so. 

Now, I am not saying that there aren't lazy fuckers out there on welfare.  Nope.  But I would say that the percentage of lazy fuckers on welfare closely parallels the ratio of lazy fuckers in the workplace.  Maybe a little better.  Not much.

Nope, I am not at all worried about the welfare types.  I am worried about the guys with arsenals in their basement.  Now, I have my hardware.  Rifle, shotgun, pistol.   I am thinking about a 22, but can't really see the need.  For a small caliber, I might want to go with the .177 air rifle that may see more use.

But back from the joys of having a firearm in your house to having an effing arsenal with military grade weapons.  Don't kid yourselves folks, there are those folks out there.  Now, I will hear homilies about self-defense in response to this.  I regard that as just so much fertilizer.

If you have more than 10 military-grade weapons, you have an arsenal.  You can call yourself a gun collector, but it is still an arsenal.   Far too many of the people that I know with this sort of armament available are the kind of people that, if things went south, would put the guns to work feathering their nest and forcing their ideas on others at gunpoint.

The second amendment is has two parts of it.  The first clearly states "a well regulated militia".  I think that there is a lot more to this issue than "my cold dead fingers".

Structures

I took the day off today, had to get the eldest over to the college to get signed up for next year (hey, he is sixteen and the state will be paying for his first two years since he is still in high school, time to run with it).  Damned if it didn't snow like hell.  Boys are all on late starts and the plans for getting stuff done are in the toilet.  I'll spend a little time recasting them after I finish my tea and writing.

We are assimilated into a system which has no regard us.  It has always been a way to make the wealthy even wealthier. 

For a while we were able to forget that one little fact.  We were sucking so much out of the world that even us low-lives were able to get ahead and watch Martha Stewart without too much embarrassment.  But it would appear that the bon temps no longer roulez and folks are in a bit of a twitter due to the idea that they may well have to go back to living a life where happiness is no longer measured by the amount of crap in your house.

The real issue that we will have to deal with is the distribution of the rewards here in the US.  The period of time everyone seems to obsess on when everyone here in the good old USA had a pretty large slice of the world's pie.  Really, the slice we took was much larger than the slice that we deserved.  But we got thinking that the share that we awarded ourselves was only right and fair.

Now the world is changing and folks out there, both high and low, are coming to the conclusion that the infinite growth that we prayed for isn't there.   That simple realization is profound, because the next realization coming is that there isn't really enough to go around at the same level of consumption that is viewed as our "right".  That one is going to be the real ticket.

What we are seeing in the stratosphere of politics and finance is the initial phase of consolidation by the "haves" to make sure that the "have-nots" stay that way.  Because they, more than us, recognize that when there isn't an infinite amount of something, and there are a whole bunch of people, one of the most effective ways to go is make sure that you grab more than your fair share.

When it filters down to the clown class, things may get pretty damn twisted.  Who I worry the most about are the clowns with too many guns in their house and a worldview where Jesus says that they are special and should have whatever their little heart desires.  They will also figure out that more than their fair share is possible and all that they have to do is liberate it from the unbelievers.

While the wealthy piling up a portion of my share offends my delicate sensibilities, what I am really worried about is an extended tantrum by the populace.   Guys, that is way to easy a horse to ride.  The idiots who are denied their access to Martha Stewart wares and the latest upgrades of their margaritaville blender are who I am concerned about.  They will "vote their pocketbook" and screw anyone and everyone to get what they see as their due.  The cheap politico's will say what they need to co-opt the anger and channel it to their own needs.

There is a way around this, but it will involve the bulk of the American populace turning away from the phony dreams that have driven them.  I really can't see this as a good-odds bet.  Madison avenue and the "consumer economy" is pouring poison into their heads by any means of advertising that they can come up with.  When folks worldview is shaped by the false prophets of television and advertising, one can't place too much hope in a sudden return to humility.

Darknets

Tuesday now.  Good night of sleep behind me.  Some tea in the body to wake me up.  Less than two weeks to go before Easter and my first cup of coffee for forty days.  Smelled a cup yesterday and almost started drooling.

Our mutual little circle of friends reading each other and offering up in the commons of blogger and wordpress are dealing in "content" sharing.  Now, in other times and other worlds, these would be letters.   We would post them to friends and when the content was good, they would be shared with other friends of friends and the thought would propagate.  Now, I am by no means comparing us to him, but if you look at the thoughts of Cicero, you will get the idea of what simple correspondence among friends can do.  Another example of this phenomenon are the letters of Abelard and Heloise.  These letters added significantly to the thought in medieval Europe and some of the ideas still resound today

What we are doing here is exchanging letters among a group.  Some of our work is pretty good, a lot of it is derivative, some of it really stinks up the place.  But this interaction is an ancient and effective manner of getting thoughts and ideas about.  We are using a minuscule fraction of the corporate space that is currently defined as the "Internet" to propagate our ideas.  The cost is free (currently) and the satisfaction immediate.  We can even count our successes and mourn our failures because the soap-box that we mount in order to voice our thoughts monitors us constantly and even lets us look to see how we are doing (read here: google analytics).

I am thinking that maybe this open exchange of letters and ideas is not in everyones best interest.  The combination of the corporate and the political arms of a country gives rise to a culture where non-conformity is beaten down ruthlessly.   If we continue to have free and open exchanges of thought, there may be a need for a non-refereed platform to do so.

Darknets currently have a smelly reputation.  But there is really nothing immoral or illegal about the idea of a trusted web of individuals.  Especially if all that is being exchanged is ideas.

Got check out Retroshare.  If you find the idea intriguing, download it and get it running.  Send me a comment in this blog with your e-mail and I will set my system to go look for you.

This might be a decent alternative folks.  I hope that you will all consider the possibilities here. 

BBS and other such antiquities (for Publication 03/21/12)

Note:  It is a rainy kinda Sunday and I have been spending time working on the techniques necessary to ruggedize and make anonymous the process of blogging and the writing of less-than-complimentary-to-the-system thought.  This post is written behind a firewall that denies all incoming traffic.  It is written as an e-mail in Thunderbird with imbedded HTML and links.  Click things freely and comment if you find anything odd.

As you can tell from my last couple of posts, I have been thinking that the direction of the internet is not going in a direction that suits my style. 

The almost total commercialization of the internet, coupled with the constraints and monitoring being put in place by varying arms of the government lead me to believe that what is now considered free expression may in future become something else entirely.

I have a tendency of thinking that somehow, if the years-long conversations that we have been conducting here in blogoland are to continue, their form is going to have to change.  I doubt sincerely that the corporate structures that currently rule the vast majority of the internet are going to allow the rough and tumble of free speech in their sheltered gardens much longer.

So, where we go.  Folks who question the actions and the legitimacy of a standing government or system are rarely applauded.  Judging from the stat counters that figure prominently on nearly every website, getting a following past a couple of hundred is reserved for the very few.  Most of these folks are folks who try to tie their message with the idea that money can be made  (eg:  Jesse, Mish,  Charles Hugh Smith).  It is the rare individual who has a big following and questions the entire system (The Archdruid). 

These big boys are the folks that make google their coin.  Folks like me are parasites.  It won't be too long before the ISP's and the commercial content directors (google, facebook, apple, microsoft, etc) get impatient and jerk our free ride.

So, I am putting up a link to a documentary that I have put up before.  The documentary is BBS, the documentary.  I would propose strongly that you spent some time over the next couple of weeks to watch it and put your thinking cap on.

I'll get back to you tomorrow with the next step of the idea.

Couple of things to watch

I have been thinking more and more about the area delineated the intersection of by computers, the internet, blogging, free speech, and commercialisation.

Boring shit in other words.

But more and more, I am thinking that the way that we maintain our current hobby is not due for a long life cycle.  Doesn't make a lot of sense for it to be working the way that it does.

Google is a billboard.  A way to attach human eyeballs to the advertisements of companies who want to sell them shit.   James Whittaker was a pretty big player over in googleland and he just quit (after lining his pockets well with other peoples money) because he had a sudden epiphany that that was the true nature of the business.   The article just about make me shoot tea out of my nose.  I cannot for the life of me figure out which is the better visual, that of a whorehouse piano player getting religion and stalking out, or the clip above.

What Mr. Whittaker says is absolutely correct, but more than anything, Google is a fashion driven stock-selling machine.  All the technology companies are the same thing.  Facebook is the new current darling of the pump and dump crowd.  Apple is so vastly overvalued as to be ..... hell, I just don't know how to describe it.

Look, the whole worldview and business model of these companies is get rich or die trying.  So, back to the first three paragraphs.  Google is a money making proposition.  How long will little parasites like us be allowed a free ride on the bandwidth of Google for our hobbies?

Keep reading, I have the outlines of the next three posts in the works and I think that I have the seed of a possible option.

The Death of General Purpose Computing

I am a dinosaur.

My first class in programming was back in 1973.  Fortran was the name of the game then.   Spent some good times in New Orleans in the 80's learning:

1. How to be a sysadmin on HP1000 and HP3000 systems. 
2. How not to pick up women with adam's apples.

I used to speak VAX/VMS with RSTS as the operating system.  Ran a lab with bunches of data collection from GC/MS, GC, and HPLC data.  Did a pretty fair job.

Drifted out of that realm in the very serious operating system defined by the letters ATCG.  Spent the next twenty years or so in that realm.  Used computers as a serious tool the whole while.  I am in that nether world between serious geek and "Power User".

I am saying these thing to establish my bona fides.   

In the past couple of days, I have been spending a lot of time locked in mortal combat with a six-year old Compaq Presario C700.  I am too damn cheap to fork out the money to buy a new axe, so I spend time keeping this thing running.

I have spent the last week fooling around with operating systems.  It is not that I am trying to get back into the computer game.  Nope, I have been to that mountain and I ain't going back.  It is a game for young men.   Nope, just trying to use some old chops to keep expenditure low.

What I did see through my whirlwind tour of these systems is the ruthless and almost unimaginable dumbing-down and commercialisation evident in the last ten years.   I think that the lesson was brought home by my downloading and installing the windows 8 consumer preview.

The commercial boys are doing everything in their power to link the OS of your computer (be it pc, mac, or android) to marketplaces.  Hell, even look at ubuntu's unity and tell me that it isn't being designed as a way to steer folks into the ubuntu "marketplace" for the coin needed for Shuttleworth's next little display of conspicuous wealth.

Now, apple has never been anything but a ruthless competitor, it OS is never been anything but a means of guiding revenues into the mothership.  Microsoft, with good reason, was dinged for monopolistic business practices.  Google is showing a bit more of it's true colors with each passing day.  Facebook is nothing but a way to sell people shit.

I am comfortable with the idea of a computer as an incredibly adaptable tool  I have used them for years as such.  But more and more these are means of control for that portion of your life defined by economics.

There is a short story out there somewhere.  I read it years ago.  The name is "Codemus".   I read it in some SF anthology years ago.  The upshot is that there were little devices that everyone carried that told them where to go and what to do, reported the actions of the individual to the authorities, and everyone liked it.

I am going over to Powell's and see if I can dig it up.

My long term, tragically codependent relationship

Google is having at it again.  They are the classic set of corporates who do want they want and let other people decide whether or not they can live with the changes.

Now, I have gone over this a couple of times now.  Hell, I even left blogger completely and started up my own chunk of a server farm in a vain and silly protest.

Blogger is rapidly being deboned and subsumed into the little google+ symbol in the upper left corner of your screen.  Over the last little while, If you carefully watch the actions, you can see the modification to the program that will make it little more that an extremely verbose twitter.

Whole bunch of little things are occurring.  Taken alone, they are minor annoyances.  Put them together and they are the evidence of google's ham-fisted efforts to be competitive in the "social media" marketplace and the highly focused effort by google's corporate masters to wrest back the spotlight from Zuckerberg et al.

Now, for those of you who follow this bit of inchoate rambling, you have been reading lately, you know my feelings on operating systems.  But I think that what we are seeing now is beyond the obtuse and somewhat esoteric battles for the control over silicon.  I will be writing more about this in my next post.

What is happening now is a battle for control of the space where the powers that be will attempt the control of your economic and intellectual life.  Microsoft and apple were the first to the part.  Google slid in next.  Facebook is organizing its bid.

For a while, the above clip was used in reference to microsoft.  I think that maybe it is more a reference to the mindset of corporations who wish to reduce us to consumers.

Things have just started to get interesting.    

Damn

Was working on a post and getting ready to post it when Russell went and wrote an article which forced me to revisit and edit my post.

So, go over and read Russell’s first,  it is right here.  I rework this and catch you on Monday.  Have a nice weekend

Titanomachia

More and more we seem to approaching a major change.  The music keep building and the portents becoming more frequent.  Hell, no one knows when the party is going to take off in a serious way, but it sure look to be coming this way.

I guess that I am kind of waiting to see how it turns out.  I have never been much of a mover and a shaker.  I really don’t think that my wishes and desires are anything but a vanishingly small subset of the worlds direction Probably these are smaller than even my most hopeful dreams would point.

The gods of technology and economics are currently on the pinnacle of our society.  If any two trends of society have the nature of deiform memes it is these two.  Which one will be Uranus?  Which one will fill the role of Chronus.  Gaia is always lurking there in the background, I wonder what she is whispering in whose ear?

Our role is limited in these kind of struggles.  The best that we can hope to be is one of the Korybantes or the Kuretes.

No, I am not going to give you links on this one…go look it up.

Up and at ‘em

More on the theme of operating systems.

I have been downloading patches and upgrades for the windows vista operating system for nearly three days now.  Now, some will think that this proves that windows is a sucky operating system.  That might be true.

But consider another way of looking at it.  Vista has been out in the wild for at least five years now and has been attacked daily by script kiddies, Russian hacker rings, the Chinese government, the NSA, and probably its competitors.  They live in a very rough neighborhood and their neighbors are nasty.  They have been improving the defenses on this thing steadily for over five years.  What does that have to say?

Apple is a cute computer.  But they have spent so much time and money on the idea of being cuddly that the bad folks seem to give them a free pass.  I wonder how they would fare if all the sudden the ecosystem of hackers and folks who make a hobby out of tearing down microsoft were to turn on them?  I have a feeling that the saintly apple reputation would start to tarnish pretty quickly.

Linux and BSD may very will be more secure and a better system (and always remember OSX is a pretty set of pictures plastered over BSD), but now one has went after these systems with the savagery reserved for microsoft windows.

How you get your computer to do the things you want to do is really a pretty trivial part of your life.  Folks who obsess over their choice of operating systems and somehow derive feelings of self worth from the vagaries of this choice may want to think about the grand scheme of things and what constitutes a useful system.  There appears to be more than one way of looking at these things

Back in Black

Sorry about the days off.  I have been spending time fixing a five year old computer.

I am giving up on Linux for a little while.  I don’t have enough time to hack anymore.  Like it or not, linux always ending up taking a bit more time than the commercial boyz for what is, at best, limited benefit.  Mostly it is a head game that you play with yourself.

The head game is that “I am in no way beholdin’ to a big corporation”.  While a noble thought, it just ain’t so.  Most of the internet is corporate, even down to little rant pages hither and yon.  I can’t say that I actually know someone that is directly plumbed in, maintaining their own server and their own hard link and direct hop to the backbone.

Just ain’t done.  The game is corporate.  So why would you be somehow more spiritually pure if you use a operating system that is primarily paid for out of corporate pockets (read here: Linux) with the bulk of development being paid out of company men somewhere.  Shuttlesworth didn’t get to take his joyride by being a non-profit.

So, back to a freshly restored and patched copy of Windows Vista with the doo-dads attached.  It does the same thing as the others used in these pages (There have been posts by Mac’s, BSD boxes, Linux boxes, and even a BeOS post for giggles. 

Might as well run for a hat trick and throw in some windows.

Rookie

Damn.  

I hate making rookie mistakes.  I just finished writing a pretty fair post using Blogilo and when I went and posted,  the whole post vanished.  

Now, unlike others, I am sophisticated enough to realize that this was probably my fault.

Crap.

Well, this is all you get today, yet another testament to my fallibility.

See you Monday, gotta hack at this thing to get it running, and do the usual weekend chores

Late Waking

Fridays are tough.  I am usually cooked.  This one is especially bad because for the next two weeks the other folks who I work with are taking time off.  They Need it…Place has been down a full employee for a year now.  My turn is in three weeks.

I think that folks here at the fedguv ranch are trying to keep things low key with hiring.  They still spend money stupid, but the process is getting tighter and better.  I think that it will take a while and results may vary.

Everyone is focused on the elections.  I think that people are trying to project their hopes that somehow a rabbit will be pulled out of the hat.  Can’t see it happening.   Outside of raw stupidity, I really can’t see how anyone would want to have the job of President of the United States.   The problems that you face in the job really have no solution.  You power is constrained by two branches of government that feel that they are also in charge.  To get the job, you have to whore yourself out to the highest bidder and service every interest group you can sweet talk.  There is no win there.

Nope, the guy we elect is going to preside over another section of the downslope to a smaller life for the good old USA.  Folks are going to continue having their toys taken from them.  They are going to be unhappy and they are going to blame whichever bozo we choose to elect.  In a way, I want Gingrich to win.  He is such an astounding ass, he actually deserves to be remembered in history as the president who presided over the slide.

There is something Nero-esque about Gingrich.  He is so puffed up and full of himself that he, more than anyone, deserves to wear the purple when Rome burns.

Persian Blues

The Iran thing is such a joke that it doesn't even make me laugh anymore.

We have just run up a huge tab in Iraq and Afghanistan.  With that money we accomplished little or nothing.  Our forces are beat up and tired.  Our command structure appears to be morally and intellectually bankrupt.

So now what do the AIPAC and the Neocons and the stupid ass bible thumpers want to do?  Let us invade yet another middle eastern country and see if we can break the string of none-to-good results that has been our lot of late.

Sit down and think about it.  There have been numerous articles outlining the lying and scheming by the military brass to keep their toys coming and their wars going.  The troops are on their seventh or eighth rotations in the rockpile now. 

Netanyahu and the three-pack of republican douchebags that are our current burden are having the gibbering shit fits about Iran.  Take that in the context of poseurs trying to get elected and a great deal of the smoke that they are trying to blow up your ass can be redirected someplace useful.

I am thinking that they really truly cannot be stupid enough to be thinking about this.

Can They?

Nothin' here...Move along

Not much in the brain this morning.  Wednesdays at 4:50 is not a good time to be trying to think up a post.  Hell day at work yesterday.  Not having the option of a beer when I get home (Lent is a good thing) made it a bit more difficult.

Press on is the motto.  Get back in the saddle.

An Annoying Habit

OK..If you want to flame me for this one, I will accept the flames.

I really hate the digital camera and camera phones for one simple reason.

The stupid damn pictures that people (>95% Female) take when they are together.  There are usually three to four of them with their heads tilted toward a common center, smiling like they are in a dental commercial, commemorating some insipid event.

My God.  You are wasting electrons and bandwidth, would you please stop this.  If you are taking a picture, take it of you doing something interesting.  The picture of you showing off your recent teeth cleaning is STALE.  Yes, you are wearing your nice clothes, but that isn't interesting either.

I don't know why you do this thing.   Truth is, I am certain that the fact that the reasoning escapes me has something to do with my having two ex-wives.  I think that the meme is now out there, and women feel the need to have pictures like this as some kind of odd trophy.

I don't get it, please stop.

Milieu de l’Intérieur

Coming out of three-quarters of a lifetime in biological science, and being a huge fan of history, I spent more time than is healthy reading about and trying to understand the way that science came about.

This isn't usually the case for folks in that field.  The norm in the field of science is to take the truth and correctness of science as a given.   The thought of subjecting the use and validity of the overall mindset and general practices of the field is not one that is often brought up.

The Ether, Phlogiston chemistry, and other such missteps in the 1800's have now been papered over.  In truth, the work being done today is more thoroughly peer reviewed than in the past, but now we are entering the time where who funds the research usually gets the results they want.

The drug companies are buying the research they want.  The new drugs available today are more likely to undergo a recall now than in the past.  The coal companies fund "clean coal" research, trotting out Ph.D.'s  to extol the virtues of putting another huge mass of CO2 into the air.

You see, science has always been done by the rich in order to make more money.  The huge mass of consumer goods that we call "the American Way of Life", is a mute monument to what science is used for.   Science is now, and always has been subverted to the creation of wealth.

Oh now, I know that you will all point to our noble universities and the selfless professors there, toiling away for the common good.  Well bucko's:  Got some news for you, most of University professors are English Lit, Sociology, Business, Commercial Recreation, Language, as far removed from science as one could possibly imagine.  These folks are probably as actively hostile toward science as the most dedicated Luddite.

Nope.  Science is concentrated in a pretty small area of most universities.  The medical field suck up a huge portion of the biological science curriculum.  Having worked in the field for a significant portion, you can rest assured the the greater portion of these folks forget the lessons of science as soon as they enter their professional life.  Science is a hindrance to people whose guilds are more akin to plumbing than Mendel.

The remainder of biological science is split between molecular work (whose sole goal is to make shit that they can sell), and the ecology types, with whom Linnaeus would feel quite at home.

Engineering has never been anything but the desire to make something.   Novel uses of proven principles are not science.

Chemistry pretty much goes the same way as biology.  Most of the work is funneled into producing guild members for the medical guild.  Most of it is forgotten.

Physics comes the closest to science.  Chasing unknowns in a serious way.  Some real world applications, but they are the boring stuff and have actually been shoved off to the sides.  Meteorology is home here more than anywhere, and they are reviled more than any by the folks who abuse science.

Nope...we have more people with grounding in science than ever before.  We just have the same number of scientists in the world.  Cause you see, science is about the search for truth and understanding.  Folks who chase that instead of wealth usually end up marginalized, with their work subverted by others to feed the incessant growth of growth.

When Words Fail

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Delusional Apes Redux

A repost from a while ago.

I am beginning to think that maybe the most pernicious lie ever told was that man was created in Gods image. Now some of you will go crazy and damn me to Hell. Oh well, such is life.

But consider it. I am an aficionado of Darwin. Not the pop culture Darwin that folks trot out for any purpose. But the real core. The simple fact that things adapt to the world around them.

Now think about what the "made in Gods image" does to that. By being a fragment of the divine, we get to mold the world to our wishes. The world must adapt to us, not vice-versa. We see ourselves as marching toward godhood. That we can do what is needed to fuel our "progress" toward that goal. Also, and most critical, by being in the image of God, we are also able to understand the universe and the will of God.

But I am of an older style Christianity, one described by Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. This Christianity accepts the truth of original sin. It draws clear distinctions between the city of God and the city of man. It accepts that we are deeply flawed and rooted in sin. We can be forgiven for our sins, but we will always be sinners.

Once you accept that we are sinners, the world around you starts making more sense.

Now, I am throwing in a reference here. John Michael Greer writes brilliantly over at the Archdruid Report. This entry was the result of me cogitating on one of his posts. So now I will use him as an inspiration (probably against his will), and get back to the points at hand. (Also, I find it howlingly funny that the Archdruid of America is named after a Christian saint and an Archangel, I wonder if he takes any grief about that?)

So from here on in, this is a disquisition on the root of the flaws of culture in the West stemming primarily from a serious misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the bible by the protestant reformation and the subsequent spin-doctoring of dogma by all christian confessions in search of converts/tithepayers.

I begin here from John Michael reminding me of the feverish and wacked-out writings of Joachim of Fiore. I can't say that I fully agree with JMG that Joachim started the mess, but he was the first one that managed to have a Pope or two cover for him while he wrote them, so I will concede the point.

Getting back to the point, what Joachim really did is enshrine the idea that man can know the will of God. Now, lets be real clear about it, he did it by reading the bible and figuring out what was going to happen by "interpreting" the book of revelations. But he still laid the formal groundwork that said that the future and God's plan could be divined by man.

At his point we started to run with it. Thomas Bacon (a follower of Joachim) kicked off the idea of Science. William of Occam followed up. Alchemy became trendy and we thrashed about for a bit, but around four centuries later, Isaac Newton came in and delivered the knockout punch which changed over the view of the world (I always was amazed at the egotism and genius that could actually name a book "The System of the World").

While this was happening, the protestants started up. At first, Luther and Calvin ( sixteenth century) started out by going even further than the Catholics toward the idea that people are fucked. This continued for a bit, but after the peace of Westphalia, things settled down enough that the different faiths started to have to sell their wares in the same manner that folks now sell toothpaste.

Needless to say, there are a lot of folks who don't want to go to a church that tells them that they are fucked up...bad business that. So, all the churches began to soften their pitches to bring in the converts.  Which leads us to where we are today, with churches that extol the wonderfulness of their flock, tells them how much God loves them, and passes the plate. This loosening of the idea of original sin loosens up the avenues of research available to the literati.

Because of this loosening, Newton and his followers are discovering some pretty cool shit. We are actually getting some traction on understanding some of the nuts and bolts of the way the world is put together. The biggie was thermodynamics with Newcomen and Kelvin and Carnot giving us the knowledge to use heat in a way that really got the party started.

We then got into the fossil fuel supplies and wow did the party really get going. A couple billion years of saving by the planet and God were went through in no time flat. But the trouble with savings accounts is that they are finite.

So, when you sit back and examine this bit of inchaote rambling, you start to see how stuff ties together. Once we got the incorrect idea that the City of God and the City of man were connected, we started down a path that led us to where we are today. But it appears to me that the path was doomed from the start. It allowed us to start the process where we used everything and every effort to build an edifice that is starting to show its cracks and poor design.

So now we are running out of the magic juice that allowed us to make the adaptations that gave us our Godlike powers. Maybe there will be a replacement. I don't think that will happen. So we will have to conserve what we have left, and start to examine our behaviors. Maybe we will notice that we are tainted with original sin and start to act accordingly.

Not a legitimate day

February 29th.

It isn't even a real day.  Made up.  A fix that really just kinda frosts me.  It means that we still haven't figured out a way to make a decent calendar. 

Granted, it doesn't suck as bad a daylight savings time, but it is still pretty lame.

I have a hard and fast rule.  On February 29th I never do a single damn thing useful. 

Today I played World of Warcraft and leveled my hunter up 4 levels to 57.

The tradition remains.