The previous post ("Lying liars...") has been intentionally removed. It will eventually be re-posted, if I feel like getting around to it. I have the whole thing saved locally, so it's a possibility.

It was NOT removed because of its content, not as such. I felt that point I was trying to make was simply missed completely: It wasn't that I was trying to substantiate any evidence one way or the other, but simply bring to light a few of the points that some have been trying to argue, that haven't yet been obliterated from the face of the earth by Big Brother.

I read 1984 in 1982. I thought that we didn't have to worry about that for a long time, because too many people would realize it if the government tried to revise history so blatantly. Little did I know that I would see it happen in my lifetime.

Today's society is, by comparison, largely ignorant. The people (and I'll stick to Americans, because that's what I know, being one) insist on having things now. If it doesn't fit into a five-second sound bite, it's too long. If it isn't summarized in the first paragraph, the point will be missed altogether. Wikipedia is considered "authoritative", even though many "facts" are subjective and completely lacking in opposing viewpoints that may affect the understanding of some subjects.

If one wants to provide evidence that a sitting president may not have been in the United States, good luck. As existing web pages are brought to light exposing what was once "common knowledge", they are eradicated or edited to hide or deny that it was ever the case. Before Obama began running for President, nobody questioned the idea that he wasn't born in the U.S. Statements from Michelle Obama that Kenya is his "homeland", statements from his paternal family that they were present at his birth in Kenya, they're all written-off as "anecdotal" at best. Apparently first-hand witnesses aren't worth the powder to blow them to hell anymore.

Instead, we as a people allow ourselves to depend too heavily on a computer system that (like 1984, hence the reference above) is easily manipulated. Editors don't seem to care if they allow "typographical errors" because they can just go back and "fix" things later. Ethics are crap, and nobody cares.

The US Constitution is moot. The people that it has empowered to govern are corrupted beyond repair. They pass laws that they themselves are not subject to. Congress attaches "riders" to laws that cannot stand on their own merits, knowing that it's the only way to get them into law. Congress members accept what basically amount to bribes from special interest groups, giving these groups more sway over how this country is governed than the people that the Congressman is supposed to represent.

In the early years of this nation, members of Congress would be elected, go spend a few months a year doing what they had to do, go back home and work, mingling with their constituents, rinse and repeat, until their term was over. Re-election was done, but not because it gave them any more clout; they were re-elected because their constituents thought they were doing a good job representing them. Congress was not seen as a "career move". Nowadays, people (generally) seem to be getting into Congress and doing whatever they can to stay there. The "junior" members are seen as neophytes, learning the ropes. "Senior" members are seen as more powerful, and the more time one spends in Washington, the more pull one has. FDR, being the only president elected for more than two terms, was seen as "too powerful", and Congress sought to limit this "power" by imposing term limits on the presidency. They never thought that they might need limits too, but good luck with getting anything like that passed through Congress.

If one cannot garner enough financial support, one doesn't stand a snowball's chance of getting elected, so the "average" people are effectively being ruled by elitists. The sad thing here is that the current political parties (BOTH Democrat and Republican) are sadly out of touch. The Democrats have a golden tongue: they seem to know what to say to sucker the people into believing that they are on the side of the less-wealthy, who in turn are completely oblivious to the fact that the Democratic candidate has no idea (or has forgotten) what it was like to struggle to make ends meet. The Democratic Party has allowed itself to be taken over by people with Socialist leanings, who wish to take from the "rich" and give to the "poor", thus eradicating any incentive for people to make it out of the hole. Republicans seem to have ideas that might work (on paper), but they aren't given time necessary to fix problems created by those before them (from either party). They have been watching the Democrats and have been learning how to cajole the people into following them too, and so they are gradually changing to become more like the Democrats. I don't expect it to be much longer before the only difference between the two will be in name only.

I think this rant has gone on long enough, for the moment. You will notice that I do not have comments enabled. I'm not terribly interested in what anyone else has to say about any of this. You'll like it or you won't. It doesn't matter to me.

I am not following what others are writing in JEs (I don't have a lot of time to do so), so commentary elsewhere that is directed to me will go unnoticed.

Reuters has an article about how White House adviser Paul Volcker is suggesting that taxes should be increased, and that the US should consider a European-style VAT to help take the bite out of ever-increasing deficits.

Of course, it never enters his mind that maybe, just maybe, spending should be curbed or even reduced.

I wonder how long it's going to take before the politicians decide to just take 100% of our income and be done with it?

No, it's not that grandiose a scheme.

The experiment is to see just how well my kids adjust to a Linux box.

I was given a retired PC by a previous employer[1], which had a site license of WinXP Pro on it. The system had become horribly infected despite the fact that I had current antivirus in place, and I felt the best (read "easiest") solution was to wipe it clean and reinstall the OS.

The problem is that I didn't have the disk to do the install, and I can't find XP disks in local stores any more.

Easy solution: I've wiped the disk and installed Fedora 12.

I'm going to wing it and see what needs doing as I go. Among things to play with are Wine and Samba. Most of the games the kids play are (notoriously) Windows-only, and I have a pinter shared from my laptop (running Vista) that I would like to use from the Linux box.

It's been a while since I've configured Samba, but it shouldn't be difficult. Getting wine to do what I want should be interesting. I should be able to get most things running, but to what degree the kids find acceptable remains to be seen.

---
[1] The system was inherited by said employer through an aquisition and was deemed to be not worth keeping, so IT Management gave it to the first to speak for it.

Late last year, the leader of the guild I am part of in WoW experienced a nasty event, where his account was hacked. He (temporarily) lost access to everything he had worked on over the last five years-- he's been playing WoW pretty-much since it launched. Fortunately for him, Wife and I were on at the time that the perpetrator signed on and started doing his damage. We got him (and Blizzard) involved pretty quickly. The damage was minimized and we got back to some semblance of where we were before it all went south. Unfortunately for him, the damage was not limited to his WoW account, but he managed to act quickly enough where nothing else seems to have been affected.

This sort of thing isn't rare-- many MMORPGs have experienced the "gold farmer", someone who has large amounts of the game's currency-of-choice to sell to players that are too impatient to earn it themselves, usually at rates of about $7 or so per 1000 units. Even if there are any gold farmers out there that are honest in how they raise their in0game currency, the nature of the games' economies is such that it's unlikely that most of them are honest, simply because they need to have a substantial amount of it across all the servers that it would cost them more to gather it than they would get to sell it to players. (For the unknowing, most of the games I am aware of treat a server or "realm" as a world unto itself, where one generally cannot easily move money or items from one realm to another.)

One way that Blizzard has come up with (and this is where the title of this JE comes in) is the Blizzard Authenticator. It is a fob (or an app for mobile devices such as the iPhone) that is "connected" to one's Battle.Net account. It has an eight-digit "pin" that changes every 30 seconds. When one logs in, this pin is needed, right along with the usual username (email address) and password.

The idea is not to guarantee security, but to greatly reduce the chances of a person's account from getting hacked.

In my opinion, it's a neat idea (despite the fact that even this has its weaknesses). It's certainly not a new idea, as RSA has had something like this, the SecureID, for several years.

I don't know if there are any legal ramifications to the similarities between the two devices, but that is something that Blizzard and RSA have to work out. :D

I have heard a lot of people complain about the push (by Blizzard) to get players to buy the Authenticators, but I honestly don't think that Blizzard is out to make a quick buck through these things. Blizzard is selling them for $6.99 USD / £6.29 GBP / â 6.99... If you have a supported mobile device, the app is free.

I think they are a great idea, especially if one puts a lot of time into one's characters.

[This JE is mostly a reaction to the front page article about the guys that got banned from the Apple Store (seemingly) because of their involvement in jailbreaking.]

I'm one of those people that drive Apple zealots nuts: I have an Apple IIgs that I will not part with. I have an iPod Touch. I used an Apple MacBook when it was issued to me by a previous employer... Generally, I can take 'em or leave 'em (well, except for the fore-mentioned IIgs). They're tools. That I don't fawn over All Things Apple, even though I have owned or used Apple products, is what drives the fanbois crazy.

The IIgs, as much as I love it, is outdated hardware by today's standards. I guess I keep it around mostly as a reminder of where I came from-- it's the last of the Apple II series, which was the first personal computer I ever laid eyes on.

The MacBook, that went back from whence it came when I was laid-off in December of 2008. No great loss. It did what I needed it to do very well, with far less problems than any Windows system gave me, and it has a unix variant OS underneath the hood to boot. Would I get one of my own? Maybe. I guess it would depend on what I was looking for at the time, and where I wanted to go with it. I really couldn't say with any level of certainty.

The iPod Touch, I got that for my birthday. It's a cool little device, for the most part. I'm only annoyed that I can't develop any apps for it (so far as I know), unless I have a Mac. Since I refuse to use "developing apps for iTouch" as a justification for a computer when I generally don't need another one (nor can I afford one at the moment), that means I'm kinda stuck.

I have no interest in jailbreaking my iTouch. I'm annoyed with Apple for being so anal about what they "approve" that entire classes of applications are refused out-of-hand. I mean come on... Do we really need another "big-boobs-on-sexy-women-you'll-never-meet app"? What poor soul has to wade through those things? Why can't a scripting language be developed for the iTouch that would be useful to do things (SNMP management and customized notifications come to mind), yet not have loopholes to do something potentially destructive? (I am assuming that this is the primary reason Apple refuses to allow any scripting/programming language on the iPhone and iTouch...)

If you are critical of the Obama administration, then John Brennan says you are. He is Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, so he should know what he's talking about, right?

He says:

Hrm. That sounds just like what the Democrats were doing while George W. Bush was in office, but Speaker Pelosi described such ranting as "patriotism". What's different? Oh, yes: His Royal Majesty Barack Hussein Obama II is in the White House now.

He suggests that many critics [of the treatment of Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutalla] are "hypocritical and clueless", but then he makes stupid commentary like:

The operating word here is nearly. Military personnel are (generally) more aware of what sort of information is necessary in a "war", be it an actual ground assault or a "war on terrorism".

Civilian legal systems are generally in two camps: the Defense and the Prosecution. One is looking to save the accused's neck and the other is trying to justify having made the accusation.

It's a similar idea in the military system, but the military system is also looking for more information on sources, so that said sources can be stopped before another attempt is made to break through security measures.

Brennan points out that hundreds of terrorists have been convicted in criminal courts while only three have been convicted in the military tribunal system. Fine. What have the civilian criminal courts done about the "upstream"? The convicted people had to be trained somewhere. Someone had to draft them into service. Who did it? Where was it done? How was it done? The civilian legal system, quite frankly, doesn't care because nobody "upstream" has been accused, so the trial doesn't have any bearing on that information. Military legal systems, on the other hand, might actually look for answers to those questions, and might actually seek to act on that information if (and when) they have the authority to do so.

Over and over again, Brennan says "We need no lectures". What he's really saying is "We don't care what anyone says or thinks. We're doing this our way."

That's His Majesty's administration at work, folks... Like it or lump it. Are you surprised at this attitude? I'm not.

The National Post is reporting that Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams is scheduled to undergo heart surgery later this week.

This comes as a bit of a surprise, the article states, because he hasn't shown evidence of any health problems lately, and is considered an avid hockey player.

The bit that does seem to be surprising some is the fact that Mr Williams is coming to the United States for the surgery.

This tells me that either Mr Williams doesn't have a lot of faith in that prime example of health care in North America that is Canada's... Maybe he wants better doctors. Maybe he just doesn't want to wait in a queue before surgery can be done.

Either way, I'd say that this is just another in a long line of examples why socialized medicine is a bad idea.

There is an article at MSNBC that tells about a recently-released audio tape attributed to Osama bin Laden. In the article, he blames Western society, the United States in particular, for global warming, and among the actions he suggested was bringing "the wheels of the U.S. economy" to a halt.

Let's see... Blind adherence to the "global warming" junk science? Blaming the United States for all the world's woes? Failure to take responsibility for one's part in said problems, even indirectly? (Petroleum-fueled engines a big part of the cause of this "global warming"? Where is the oil coming from?) Attempting to destroy the American economy? Yeah, that sounds like a Democrat to me...

At this writing, polls don't close in Massachusetts for another 40 minutes or so, so it's technically still too early to tell who's going to win.

The Boston newspapers are reporting that the turnout is something in the order of 40-55% of registered voters in Massachusetts. This is pretty impressive, when you consider that the preliminary election held December 8th last had only 20% or so.

If Scott Brown should manage a win over Martha Coakley, I wonder how long it will be before the finger-pointing starts? I know that the DNC is already saying that Coakley's campaign was the "worst case of political malpractice in memory, so I guess it's started before the victor is even announced.

As it stands, Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) is already stoking the fire for a change in the Senate rules, so that the Democrats wouldn't have to worry about a Republican filibuster, even if Brown won. (See, that's how things work in Massachusetts: if it looks like your power might be affected, change the rules to minimize the effect a loss at the ballot box might have. The Democrat-controlled legislature in the Commonwealth changed the rules when Kerry ran for president so a Republican governor [Mitt Romney] couldn't appoint a Republican senator to replace him. When Kennedy realized his time was almost up, he urged the state legislature to change the rules back so the current governor, Democrat Deval Patrick, could appoint his replacement and not risk a loss to a Republican. Thankfully, the state legislature didn't move fast enough. Read more about it here.)

I'll post something more on this tomorrow, once results are in.

Tomorrow Massachusetts voters get to choose who will fill the Senate seat vacated by the death of Ted "Chapaquiddick" Kennedy. If current polls are to be believed (and we all know that I consider "accurate polls" to be coincidental), Massachusetts will have it's first Republican Senator in a long time.

What is making the race funny is that the Democrat offering, Martha Coakley, can't get any love. Joe Kennedy [strike](D-RI)[/strike] kept calling her "Marcia" last night. Obama's people don't think Coakley will win. There are many that, if you can believe it, are stooping so low as to blame Dubyuh for her poor showing in the polls.

True to form, the Dems are already looking at ways to have their way in the event the polls are right and Brown wins.

I think it's time the Democrats wake up and realize that the REAL reason for the upswell in support for Brown is that people are tired of having craptastic legislation rammed down their throats.

EDIT: The Kennedy family can get confusing sometimes. It was brought to my attention and I found that I was mistaken over which Kennedy couldn't get Coakley's name right. It was Representative (not Senator) Patrick J. Kennedy (D-RI), not Joeseph P. Kennedy II. My apologies for the confusion. (Thanks to damn_registrars for the catch.)

I've enjoyed the fact that my Karma level has been "Excellent" for several months. Today, I noticed that it is "Good".

Not a lot has changed lately-- my comments and/or replies have been at about the same rate, my journals (though spaced out a bit) are about as frequent... I wonder why the downgrade?

Here's wishing everyone in Teh Circle a safe and happy New Year.

I generally try to avoid making any resolutions, but here's a sure-fire one to keep: I hereby resolve to not care in the least what anyone thinks about where I get material I choose to write about, whether it starts out as a visit to Drudge Report, World Net Daily, The Beeb, or even the occasional visit to al Jazeera. I know I'm not going to please everyone here, so if certain people choose to sleep in blissful ignorance because their favorite sources refuse to report on a particular subject, that's not my problem. I refuse to make it my problem, so there. :) I'll write about what I want when I want, and I will give sources when necessary. If someone doesn't like my choice(s) of source material, too d-a-r-n bad.

See you all on the flip side!

An interesting op-ed piece at Der Spiegel gives an opinion that does not seem to be isolated.

I'm left to wonder what Obama did to piss off his speech writer(s).

It looks like Darl McBride got the ol' Heave-Ho on October 14th, but didn't find out about it until today. McBride has a Grand Plan in the works, so don't count him out just yet.

I can't quite make out the first sentence...

http://web.archive.org/web/20040627142700/eastandard.net/headlines/news26060403.htm