Not only do I have excellent Karma, but it seems that /. revived my previously deleted journals.

A couple of short excerpts, a few thoughts about the USA's post-election post selection mania, and a texttoon.

I do hope some bright person mentions the correct choices to Obama to head up the FBI and CIA. That being Sibel and Valerie, of course. And sends our Mr. Harper our baby terrorist boy back with all charges dropped. I really want to see Harper face him and have to tell him why exactly a Canadian child must spend his youth in a death camp. But there are perhaps too many issues that lay ahead. The quotes used today should blend both needs, that of progresivism and issue resolutionism. A number of subthoughts are implied as usual.

Quote(1):
On the 9th of June the meeting of deputies took the title of the Constituent Assembly. For the first time in centuries the king was forced to recognise the existence of a new power, formerly ignored--that of the people, represented by its elected representatives. The absolute monarchy was no more.

Feeling himself more and more seriously threatened, Louis XVI. summoned to Versailles a number of regiments composed of foreign mercenaries. The Assembly demanded the withdrawal of the troops. The king refused, and dismissed Necker, replacing him by the Marshal de Broglie, reputed to be an extremely authoritative person.

But the Assembly had able supporters. Camille Desmoulins and others harangued the crowd in all directions, calling it to the defence of liberty. They sounded the tocsin, organised a militia of 12,000 men, took muskets and cannon from the Invalides, and on the 14th of July the armed bands marched upon the Bastille. The fortress, barely defended, capitulated in a few hours. Seven prisoners were found within it, of whom one was an idiot and four were accused of forgery.

The Bastille, the prison of many victims of arbitrary power, symbolised the royal power to many minds; but the people who demolished it had not suffered by it. Scarcely any but members of the nobility were imprisoned there.

The influence exercised by the taking of this fortress has continued to our days. Serious historians like M. Rambaud assure us that ``the taking of the Bastille is a culminating fact in the history, not of France only but of all Europe, and inaugurates a new epoch in the history of the world.''

Such credulity is a little excessive. The importance of the event lay simply in the psychological fact that for the first time the people received an obvious proof of the weakness of an authority which had lately been formidable.

When the principle of authority is injured in the public mind it dissolves very rapidly. What might not one demand of a king who could not defend his principal fortress against popular attacks? The master regarded as all-powerful had ceased to be so.

The taking of the Bastille was the beginning of one of those phenomena of mental contagion which abound in the history of the Revolution. The foreign mercenary troops, although they could scarcely be interested in the movement, began to show symptoms of mutiny. Louis XVI. was reduced to accepting their disbandment. He recalled Necker, went to the Hotel de Ville, sanctioned by his presence the accomplished facts, and accepted from La Fayette, commandant of the National Guard, the new cockade of red, white, and blue which allied the colours of Paris to those of the king.

Although the riot which ended in the taking of the Bastille can by no means be regarded as ``a culminating fact in history,'' it does mark the precise moment of the commencement of popular government. The armed people thenceforth intervened daily in the deliberations of the revolutionary Assemblies, and seriously influenced their conduct.

This intervention of the people in conformity with the dogma of its sovereignty has provoked the respectful admiration of many historians of the Revolution. Even a superficial study of the psychology of crowds would speedily have shown them that the mystic entity which they call the people was merely translating the will of a few leaders. It is not correct to say that the people took the Bastille, attacked the Tuileries, invaded the Convention, &c., but that certain leaders--generally by means of the clubs--united armed bands of the populace, which they led against the Bastille, the Tuileries, &c. During the Revolution the same crowds attacked or defended the most contrary parties, according to the leaders who happened to be at their heads. A crowd never has any opinion but that of its leaders.

Example constituting one of the most potent forms of suggestion, the taking of the Bastille was inevitably followed by the destruction of other fortresses. Many chateaux were regarded as so many little Bastilles, and in order to imitate the Parisians who had destroyed theirs the peasants began to burn them. They did so with the greater fury because the seigneurial homes contained the titles of feudal dues. It was a species of Jacquerie.

The Constituent Assembly, so proud and haughty towards the king, was, like all the revolutionary assemblies which followed it, extremely pusillanimous before the people. -- G. le Bon

Still in the same theme, yet from a more traditional statist view point.

Quote(2):
Every good political institution must have a preventive operation as well as a remedial. It ought to have a natural tendency to exclude bad men from government, and not to trust for the safety of the state to subsequent punishment alone; punishment, which has ever been tardy and uncertain; and which, when power is suffered in bad hands, may chance to fall rather on the injured than the criminal.

Before men are put forward into the great trusts of the state, they ought by their conduct to have obtained such a degree of estimation in their country, as may be some sort of pledge and security to the public, that they will not abuse those trusts. It is no mean security for a proper use of power, that a man has shown by the general tenor of his actions, that the affection, the good opinion, the confidence of his fellow-citizens have been among the principal objects of his life; and that he has owed none of the gradations of his power or fortune to a settled contempt, or occasional forfeiture of their esteem.

That man who before he comes into power has no friends, or who coming into power is obliged to desert his friends, or who losing it has no friends to sympathize with him; he who has no sway among any part of the landed or commercial interest, but whose whole importance has begun with his office, and is sure to end with it, is a person who ought never to be suffered by a controlling Parliament to continue in any of those situations which confer the lead and direction of all our public affairs; because such a man has no connection with the interest of the people.

Those knots or cabals of men who have got together, avowedly without any public principle, in order to sell their conjunct iniquity at the higher rate, and are therefore universally odious, ought never to be suffered to domineer in the state; because they have no connection with the sentiments and opinions of the people.

These are considerations which in my opinion enforce the necessity of having some better reason, in a free country, and a free Parliament, for supporting the ministers of the crown, than that short one, That the king has thought proper to appoint them. There is something very courtly in this. But it is a principle pregnant with all sorts of mischief, in a constitution like ours, to turn the views of active men from the country to the court. Whatever be the road to power, that is the road which will be trod. If the opinion of the country be of no use as a means of power or consideration, the qualities which usually procure that opinion will be no longer cultivated. And whether it will be right, in a state so popular in its constitution as ours, to leave ambition without popular motives, and to trust all to the operation of pure virtue in the minds of kings, and ministers, and public men, must be submitted to the judgment and good sense of the people of England.

Cunning men are here apt to break in, and, without directly controverting the principle, to raise objections from the difficulty under which the sovereign labors, to distinguish the genuine voice and sentiments of his people, from the clamor of a faction, by which it is so easily counterfeited. The nation, they say, is generally divided into parties, with views and passions utterly irreconcilable. If the king should put his affairs into the hands of any one of them, he is sure to disgust the rest; if he select particular men from among them all, it is a hazard that he disgusts them all. Those who are left out, however divided before, will soon run into a body of opposition; which, being a collection of many discontents into one focus, will without doubt be hot and violent enough.

Faction will make its cries resound through the nation, as if the whole were in an uproar, when by far the majority, and much the better part, will seem for a while as it were annihilated by the quiet in which their virtue and moderation incline them to enjoy the blessings of government. Besides that the opinion of the mere vulgar is a miserable rule even with regard to themselves, on account of their violence and instability. So that if you were to gratify them in their humor to-day, that very gratification would be a ground of their dissatisfaction on the next.

Now as all these rules of public opinion are to be collected with great difficulty, and to be applied with equal uncertainty as to the effect, what better can a king of England do, than to employ such men as he finds to have views and inclinations most conformable to his own; who are least infected with pride and self-will; and who are least moved by such popular humors as are perpetually traversing his designs, and disturbing his service; trusting that, when he means no ill to his people, he will be supported in his appointments, whether he chooses to keep or to change, as his private judgment or his pleasure leads him? He will find a sure resource in the real weight and influence of the crown, when it is not suffered to become an instrument in the hands of a faction.

I will not pretend to say, that there is nothing at all in this mode of reasoning; because I will not assert that there is no difficulty in the art of government. Undoubtedly the very best administration must encounter a great deal of opposition; and the very worst will find more support than it deserves. Sufficient appearances will never be wanting to those who have a mind to deceive themselves. It is a fallacy in constant use with those who would level all things, and confound right with wrong, to insist upon the inconveniences which are attached to every choice, without taking into consideration the different weight and consequence of those inconveniences. The question is not concerning absolute discontent or perfect satisfaction in government; neither of which can be pure and unmixed at any time, or upon any system. The controversy is about that degree of good humor in the people, which may possibly be attained, and ought certainly to be looked for.

While some politicians may be waiting to know whether the sense of every individual be against them, accurately distinguishing the vulgar from the better sort, drawing lines between the enterprises of a faction and the efforts of a people, they may chance to see the government, which they are so nicely weighing, and dividing, and distinguishing, tumble to the ground in the midst of their wise deliberation.

Prudent men, when so great an object as the security of government, or even its peace, is at stake, will not run the risk of a decision which may be fatal to it. They who can read the political sky will see a hurricane in a cloud no bigger than a hand at the very edge of the horizon, and will run into the first harbor. No lines can be laid down for civil or political wisdom. They are a matter incapable of exact definition. But, though no man can draw a stroke between the confines of day and night, yet light and darkness are upon the whole tolerably distinguishable. Nor will it be impossible for a prince to find out such a mode of government, and such persons to administer it, as will give a great degree of content to his people; without any curious and anxious research for that abstract, universal, perfect harmony, which while he is seeking, he abandons those means of ordinary tranquillity which are in his power without any research at all.

It is not more the duty than it is the interest of a prince, to aim at giving tranquillity to his government. But those who advise him may have an interest in disorder and confusion. If the opinion of the people is against them, they will naturally wish that it should have no prevalence. Here it is that the people must on their part show themselves sensible of their own value. Their whole importance, in the first instance, and afterwards their whole freedom, is at stake. Their freedom cannot long survive their importance. Here it is that the natural strength of the kingdom, the great peers, the leading landed gentlemen, the opulent merchants and manufacturers, the substantial yeomanry, must interpose, to rescue their prince, themselves, and their posterity.

We are at present at issue upon this point. We are in the great crisis of this contention; and the part which men take, one way or other, will serve to discriminate their characters and their principles. Until the matter is decided, the country will remain in its present confusion. For while a system of administration is attempted, entirely repugnant to the genius of the people, and not conformable to the plan of their government, everything must necessarily be disordered for a time, until this system destroys the constitution, or the constitution gets the better of this system. -- E. Burke

It shall be interesting to see what Obama can do and who he can to find to do it. Until then.

Texttoon:
Fumetti : Stock photo of Joe Lieberman and Barack Obama. Overlayed speech bubble has Joe asking "No hard feelings?" Obama replies "No comma hard feelings." The spoken comma may be in italics, underlined and emboldenated.

Grunting and heaving the Great Satan once again prepares to chop its own head off and select a new one.

The reattachment process takes several months. And is attended by a number of possible events over this unique period of time. Second-term results are the odd one out in the metaphor--so I'll only take to here. The point from an external view remains, however, and this quote may only serve to abuse it more.

Quote:
Gentlemen, I am joking, and I know myself that my jokes are not brilliant, but you know one can take everything as a joke. I am, perhaps, jesting against the grain. Gentlemen, I am tormented by questions; answer them for me.

You, for instance, want to cure men of their old habits and reform their will in accordance with science and good sense. But how do you know, not only that it is possible, but also that it is DESIRABLE to reform man in that way? And what leads you to the conclusion that man's inclinations NEED reforming?

In short, how do you know that such a reformation will be a benefit to man? And to go to the root of the matter, why are you so positively convinced that not to act against his real normal interests guaranteed by the conclusions of reason and arithmetic is certainly always advantageous for man and must always be a law for mankind? So far, you know, this is only your supposition. It may be the law of logic, but not the law of humanity. You think, gentlemen, perhaps that I am mad? Allow me to defend myself.

I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering--that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD. But the reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the "direct" practical man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always does lead SOMEWHERE, and that the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all the vices.

Man likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond dispute. But why has he such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also? Tell me that! But on that point I want to say a couple of words myself. May it not be that he loves chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that he does sometimes love it) because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice he is constructing? Who knows, perhaps he only loves that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it at close quarters; perhaps he only loves building it and does not want to live in it, but will leave it, when completed, for the use of LES ANIMAUX DOMESTIQUES--such as the ants, the sheep, and so on. Now the ants have quite a different taste. They have a marvellous edifice of that pattern which endures for ever--the ant-heap.

With the ant-heap the respectable race of ants began and with the ant-heap they will probably end, which does the greatest credit to their perseverance and good sense. But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death.

Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that man does nothing but seek that mathematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacrifices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, dreads, I assure you. He feels that when he has found it there will be nothing for him to look for. When workmen have finished their work they do at least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to the police-station--and there is occupation for a week. But where can man go?

Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about him when he has attained such objects. He loves the process of attaining, but does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very absurd. In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all. But yet mathematical certainty is after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.

And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive--in other words, only what is conducive to welfare--is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.

There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. I hold no brief for suffering nor for well-being either. I am standing for ... my caprice, and for its being guaranteed to me when necessary. Suffering would be out of place in vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the "Palace of Crystal" it is unthinkable; suffering means doubt, negation, and what would be the good of a "palace of crystal" if there could be any doubt about it?

And yet I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness. Though I did lay it down at the beginning that consciousness is the greatest misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes it and would not give it up for any satisfaction. Consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four.

Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing. --Feodor Dostoevsky

Satire often gets us into the real meat of the issues and I thought that would be amusing to read that bit before this US election. It shall be an interesting day tomorrow, so I'll head into the bleachers and watch the US populous nibble away at the neck. Until then.

NYAITJ:
51018 : "We want to see the Iraqis take increasing responsibility for their own security. We are making good progress developing an indigenous Iraqi police force," he said. Mr Hoon said there was "no evidence" that either the US or the UK had reduced their commitment to post-war Iraq as a result of the increasing coalition death toll.

88905 : QUESTION: One of those organizations which got the money, according to the report, was also called "Friends of Cyprus Donkeys." May we know at least how many from this specific organization got the money in order to feed or to protect the donkeys in Cyprus on a bi-communal level?

MR. ERELI: I don't know that that information is accurate, Mr. Lambros. I think the point is, it is our assessment that the money disbursed was well spent and effective and consistent with the letter and intent of U.S. law and U.S. policy, which is to foster bi-communal activities.

121319 : QUESTION: Well, why can't you talk more about the allegations of secret camps?

MR. MCCORMACK: Again --

QUESTION: I mean, you talk about the openness at Gitmo, but you don't want to talk about other allegations which are out there and which affect people around the world in Arab and Muslim countries that you're trying to convince you're doing the right thing there.

MR. MCCORMACK: Again, you know, I know the news reports. I've read them myself. And in terms of what was reported, it refers to the CIA, the intelligence community, and I'd refer all questions on that matter to the intelligence community.

QUESTION: Understood. But reports like this that are out there -- true, untrue -- can only make Karen Hughes' job that much harder. How does she deal with that then?

MR. MCCORMACK: Well, I think that those -- what I was trying to answer Saul's question in talking about the issue that we face. The issue that we face, again, is how to deal with a group of people, with individuals who are committed to killing innocents, who follow no set of rules. How do we as a country of laws, how do we as a country that stands by its international obligations, how do we deal with it, with that problem? And you know, we've had lots of discussions, from here at the State Department, at the White House, at Department of Defense and Department of Justice and elsewhere outlining how we have -- our attempts to deal with that issue.

And what we can do, what Karen can do, what I can do, what others can do, is to try to explain the issue before us, before the world, and talk about how we -- the solutions that we have come up with at this point to deal with this problem. It's a tough problem.

Texttoon:
ink on paper/scanned/jpg : A drawing of a donkey and an elephant. The donkey looks coyly as it hands a tinfoil hat to the elephant. Speech bubble has the donkey saying; "It was all quite fun, but you can have it back now." The elephant replies with "Wut?!?" In the corner a captionesk small drawn black hat with stemmed free text says; "Black helicopters, ho!"

It's bad enough when you're actually serving the data from your own site but it's in some form where you can't audit it. That's one of the many reasons I hate Flash.

But even Javascript sucks, when you <script src="someothersite">. The moment you do that, you know that all sorts of horrible things can go wrong. You just have to have faith. Faith is what it comes down to. And it can be justified, I guess, because you can get away with it for years.

Until this morning when our webpage was only showing for a second and then the whole thing would then redirect to someone else's site. Adios, visitors.

(What actually happened: the domain we were including from, apparently expired and now any http request goes to a Network Solutions page, instead of returning a DNS error like it should. Fuck you, Network Solutions, as if we didn't already know you're evil and dangerous. But the same risk remains even if someone's domain doesn't expire; they can always serve a different script today than they did yesterday, and that script can do anything with the DOM that it wants to. There's no way to sandbox it.)

It's "standard practices" to include external scripts. Everyone does it. The ad people aren't techies; if I were to tell them, "uh, we don't want to include any external scripts that might change from load-to-load, and we also don't want to include any Flash crap unless we've compiled it from readable, auditable source ourselves," they would think I'm crazy. You know, one of those open source fanatics. They would say, "Gee, that's a shame you don't want the money," and go on sending the same dangerous ads to our competitors while we collect nothing.

Is it really an unreasonable weirdo religious fanatic position, to just want to be able to make sure that stuff will work and not do anything crazy? I don't think so. The fucking "standard practices" need to change, but how can one person do that? *sigh* I feel so powerless.

Today's journal entry has been illustrated in LEGO bricks. (850k jpg)

I have also repeated it here in the quote section for anyone who wants just the words. There are some additions in the photocomic that are not included in the quote, so you may wish to read both.

Quote:
No. X.--THE BEHRING-SEA ARBITRATION.
(Scene and Persons as usual. The Conversation has already begun.)

First Well-informed Man (concluding a tirade).

---- so what I want to know is this: are we or are we not to submit to the Yankees? It's all very well talking about Chicago Exhibitions and all that, but if they're going to capture our ships and prevent us killing seals, why, the sooner we tell 'em to go to blue blazes the better. And as for its being a mare clausum----

Inquirer (interrupting).

Who was she? What's she got to do with it?

First W. I. M. (laughing vigorously).

Ha! ha! that's a good 'un.

Inquirer (nettled).

Oh, laugh away, laugh away. That's you all over.

First W. I. M.

My dear chap, I'm very sorry, but I really couldn't help it. There's no woman in the business at all. Mare clausum merely means the place where they catch the seals, you know; mare, Latin for sea.

Inquirer.

Oh! I should have known that directly, if you'd only pronounced it properly. But what does clausum mean?

First W. I. M.

Well, of course, that means--well, a clause, don't you know. It's in the treaty.

Average Man (looking up from his paper).

It used to be the Latin for "closed," but I suppose it's altered now.

First W. I. M. (incredulously).

It can't mean that, anyhow. Who ever heard of a closed sea, I should like to know?

Second W. I. M. (hazarding a suggestion).

It might mean a harbour, you know, or something of that sort.

Average Man.

I daresay it might mean that, but it doesn't happen to be a harbour (relapses into paper).

Second W. I. M.

Oh, well, I only made the suggestion.

[A pause]

Inquirer.

But what are they arbitrating about in Paris? It says (reading from newspaper) "When Mr. Carter, the United States Counsel, had concluded his speech, he was complimented by the President, the Baron de Courcel, who told him he had spoken on behalf of humanity." I thought old Carnot was President of the French Republic.

First W. I. M.

So he is.

Inquirer.

But this paper says Baron de Courcel is President.

Second W. I. M.

Oh, I suppose that's one of Carnot's titles, All these blessed foreigners are Barons, or something of that sort.

Inquirer.

Ah, I suppose that must be it. But what have the French got to do with the Behring Sea? I thought it was all between us and the Yankees.

First W. I. M.

So it is--but the French are arbitrating. That's how they come into the business. I can't say, personally, I like these arbitrations. We're always arbitrating now, and giving everything away. If we think we're right, why can't we say so, and stick to it, and let the French, and the Yankees, and the Russians, and all the rest of 'em, take it from us, if they can?

Second W. I. M.

Take what from us?

First W. I. M.

Why, whatever it happens to be, the Behring Sea, or anything else. We're so deuced afraid of everybody now, we never show fight; it's perfectly sickening. But of course you can't expect anything else from old Gladstone.

Second W. I. M.

That's right--shove it all on to old Gladstone. But you're wrong this time. It was Jo Chamberlain, one of your own blessed Unionists, that you're so proud of, who arranged this arbitration.

First W. I. M.

I know that, my dear boy; but Chamberlain was a Radical then; so where are you now?

[A pause]

Inquirer (who has continued his reading, suddenly, with a puzzled air).

I say, you know, this is too much of a good thing, bringing the Russians into the business. It says--(reads)--"documents were submitted, on behalf of the United States, to prove that Russia had never abandoned her sovereign rights in the manner suggested by Great Britain." How, on earth, does Russia manage to crop up everywhere? And where is this confounded Behring Sea?

Second W. I. M. (vaguely).

It's somewhere in America, or Newfoundland, or thereabouts.

Inquirer.

But how about Russia?

Second W. I. M.

Oh, Russia shoves her oar in whenever we get into a difficulty of any kind anywhere.

Inquirer (persisting).

Yes--but how can she have any "sovereign rights" in America?

Second W. I. M. (haughtily, but evasively).

My dear fellow, if you had followed the thing properly, you wouldn't ask the question. There's no time now to explain it all to you, as it's very complicated, and goes back a long way. But you may take it from me that Russia has got certain rights, and that she means to make things as disagreeable for us as she can.

[A pause]

Inquirer.

It's rather a rum start, isn't it? sending out Sir Charles Russell and Sir Richard Webster. They're on opposite sides of politics.

First W. I. M.

That's just why they send 'em. Russell has got to put the Liberal view, and Webster the Conservative.

Inquirer.

Of course, of course; I never thought of that. By the way, have you ever seen a seal?

First W. I. M.

They've got one at the Zoo. Catches fish, and kisses the keeper, and all that sort of game.

Inquirer.

What, that big beast that looks as if it was made of india-rubber, with long whiskers and a sort of fish-tail?

First W. I. M.

That's it.

Inquirer (with profound disgust).

Well, I am blessed! Is that all they're jawing about?

--Punch, 1893

Many years ago in this journal:
47867 : "But let us be clear: Britain, our international partners, and the Afghan people themselves are united and determined that this shall not happen. Together we shall ensure a future for Afghanistan that the Afghan people deserve." The Afghan people will be given the opportunity to contribute to the drafting of the first post-Taliban constitution in December. It will enable them to choose a system of government that reflects their values and aspirations.

Texttoon:
Fumetti : A photograph of Dr. David Kelly with an overlayed speech bubble saying; "Clank, howl, and all that jazz."

Yeah, really.

Only took that organization like five years to see what the rest of the football world sees... 'bout time!

New job (back to consulting) and current client blocks 'social networks', so I may have to make my return here until the situation changes.

What really sucks is hurricane ike destroyed Cincinnati, and I've been without power at home since Sunday, so even if I wanted to blog on multiply, I can't...

Stay tuned, I suppose...

The technocrat.net public discussion site is shut down. Our thanks to the faithful readers, but eventually the site became more of an burden than fun. I have shut it down and will concentrate on other issues. - Bruce Perens technocrat.net

It was fun for us, at least. Thanks Bruce. Also Zog, Guy and the rest.

Texttoon:
Fumetti A drawing of a workman in coveralls walking away with a cut-out life-size photo of Bruce Perens standing up. A few bits of old bunting on the floor, wires tangled in the dust, and an open box of plastic sporks.

Out of the blue, I got an email from my mom. She's been corresponding with someone about some sensitive things, and asked how to encrypt her emails.

My writeup is 9 paragraphs long. *sigh* There's so way she's really going to be able to do all that without me eventually going over there.

This is on Mac OS X. Sheesh. A Unix that doesn't come with gpg out-of-the-box, and the preloaded mailer (mail.app) needs a hard-to-maintain 3rd-party hack just to get basic functionality: you call this "just works?"

I don't wanna turn this into a specifically-Apple flame (I know of another high-marketshare desktop OS maker that also makes some pretty shitty apps), so I'll just make this generic comment: mail encryption is a very fundamental thing and it's ridiculous for it to not be built into all desktops. That's like a web browser that can't talk https. The howto I sent to my mom should have been about key exchange issues, not installing plugins. It's a disgrace for any mailer to not have this. This kind of shit is half the reason crypto goes unused by so many people. It's a pain in the ass not just because of the complex concepts (e.g. learning how to exchange keys safely) but because the most highly-deployed apps don't even work as-is.

..a character was a byte, and you always knew what that byte meant, and you didn't have to worry about what database library the script interpreter was compiled against, and in turn what character sets the database library was compiled with support for? Remember when what you saw on the screen was the same as the underlying data?

How I long for those days. *sigh*

Wow, postgrey just got rid of 99% of my spam, before it gets to spamassassin, and with no false positives (any standards-compliant mailers can get through it). I should have done this ages ago.

Yes, yes yes! It has finally happened. According to slashfilm, Uwe Boll has mentioned that if an online petition gets to 1,000,000 votes he'll stop making movies. For all of humanity, please go sign this petition! Last I saw, it was only to 96,543... we need more signatures!

One of the things that annoyed the hell out of me when I made the "big switch" around 2000-2002 from AmigaOS to Linux, is the dynamic scheduling. I'm pretty sure I've bitched in my /. journal about this before, but I'm too lazy to go back and look.

Hey, when I "nice" a time-consuming process, I fucking expect it to not slow my computer down, no matter how CPU-intense it is. That's how it was on AmigaOS: I could run as many tasks as I wanted, and as long as I gave them a priority lower (or was it higher, damn I don't remember the specifics) than 0, it had absolutely no impact on the responsiveness of the computer, and anything that I ran at a normal priority, ran just as fast as it would if I hadn't been running those other tasks at all. That's the joy of an absolute scheduler: it starves the low-priority tasks, and as a user that's what I want.

But all the so-called "modern" systems after the 1980s, from OS/2 to Windows to Linux (and now Mac OS as of version 10) totally fuck this up.

My Mac here at work runs a long job every morning, that I have niced. When it's running, the whole damn machine feels sluggish and -- seriously -- I can out-type the speed at which my fucking keystrokes are appearing in this fucking web browser's textarea. It is so utterly ridiculous that a 1.5GHz machine can't run as fast as 50 MHz Amiga.

Niced processes should starve if there's anything better to do. Absolutely starve. That is a good thing, not a bad thing.

But can Unix have this? Nooooo, because something (I don't know what) might deadlock (at least according to Linus, when the topic comes up in the context of Linux). Well, get your locks sorted out, Unixheads, so that maybe someday Unix can run as fast as an Amiga that has a tenth of the processing power.

i haven't been around here in a long long while. i may post an update here. things are very difficult and just plain bad and have been for some time.

for that i've been quite busy with my music project. i'm actually working on a full blown record (which will be released on CD and 12" vinyl, as well as through Snocap.)

So, just to keep whoever is around here a heads up, i have setup a bit of a blog with links to music that i've been producing lately.

there is also a 3-song CD EP i released as well.

here are some links:

Blog: http://www.skyflyingbymusic.org
SFB on t61: The SixtyOne

i've engaged in this record project just so that i have something to look forward to. something i can do to keep my mind busy, and for no other real reason. its therapy, plain and simple.

i started the blog to just kind of document the process of making this record. post rough cuts of songs that may end up on the finished product and so on.

yes, i'm having vinyl pressed, but in a very limited run, 300-500 only. i just love records and have gone on at length as to why (in the blog and on my multiply site).

so that's that. if you ever wanted to follow the (very often boring) making of a small independent record by a small nothing artist, now's your chance.

Time beacon: T: -14 billion years.

And I see you've found me here. All aboard the time train!

I've scraped out a moment and built the time machine as the movie version of Galaxy Express for this particular journey --hang on, some of that fourth wall is still stuck to your eyebrow there allow me to remove it, pesky stuff. Anyway, let's head on into the bar-car. We can join everyone else there, and I'll begin.

No doubt, as you look out the window here, you'll see why I did. Less obvious, at first, is that the cast and the adventure also seems to resonate with events unfolding in our own time. The iconograpy also fit with the US election news. Thus the Cpt. Harlock sailor outfit I'm wearing, and this strange black bird. Curious, no?

But putting haberdashery, pets, horrid puns, and fowl [sic] allusions aside for a moment, let's ramp up the timeclockspeed and look out onto that which becomes us. That crap, there picked out against the rest, is the beginnings of our galaxy, and so in turn our sun.

And as interesting as that collection of matter forming, into the lovely little solar system we call home, all is... there are some good reasons to bring our viewpoint back this far in time. I will allow some others to expand on that in the quotes today. So drop, smoke, or drink what you like and let's listen to the first of them. Some news, previous entry links, and the texttoon. Oh, he's already started.

Quote(1):
...
How he of the Times has found Velasquez "slovenly in execution, poor in colour--being little but a combination of neutral greys and ugly in its forms"--how he grovelled in happiness over a Turner--that was no Turner at all, as Mr. Ruskin wrote to show--Ruskin! whom he has since defended. Ah! Messieurs, what our neighbours call "la malice des choses" was unthought of, and the sarcasm of fate was against you. How Gerard Dow's broom was an example for the young; and Canaletti and Paul Veronese are to be swept aside--doubtless with it. How Rembrandt is coarse, and Carlo Dolci noble--with more of this kind. But what does it matter?

"What does anything matter!" The farce will go on, and its solemnity adds to the fun.

Mediocrity flattered at acknowledging mediocrity, and mistaking mystification for mastery, enters the fog of dilettantism, and, graduating connoisseur, ends its days in a bewilderment of bric-a-brac and Brummagem!

"Taste" has long been confounded with capacity, and accepted as sufficient qualification for the utterance of judgment in music, poetry, and painting. Art is joyously received as a matter of opinion; and that it should be based upon laws as rigid and defined as those of the known sciences, is a supposition no longer to be tolerated by modern cultivation. For whereas no polished member of society is at all affected at admitting himself neither engineer, mathematician, nor astronomer, and therefore remains willingly discreet and taciturn upon these subjects, still would he be highly offended were he supposed to have no voice in what is clearly to him a matter of "Taste"; and so he becomes of necessity the backer of the critic--the cause and result of his own ignorance and vanity! The fascination of this pose is too much for him, and he hails with delight its justification. Modesty and good sense are revolted at nothing, and the millennium of "Taste" sets in.

The whole scheme is simple: the galleries are to be thrown open on Sundays, and the public, dragged from their beer to the British Museum, are to delight in the Elgin Marbles, and appreciate what the early Italians have done to elevate their thirsty souls! An inroad into the laboratory would be looked upon as an intrusion; but before the triumphs of Art, the expounder is at his ease, and points out the doctrine that Raphael's results are within the reach of any beholder, provided he enrol himself with Ruskin or hearken to Colvin in the provinces. The people are to be educated upon the broad basis of "Taste," forsooth, and it matters but little what "gentleman and scholar" undertake the task.

Eloquence alone shall guide them--and the readiest writer or wordiest talker is perforce their professor.

The Observatory at Greenwich under the direction of an Apothecary! The College of Physicians with Tennyson as President! and we know that madness is about. But a school of art with an accomplished litterateur at its head disturbs no one! and is actually what the world receives as rational, while Ruskin writes for pupils, and Colvin holds forth at Cambridge.

Still, quite alone stands Ruskin, whose writing is art, and whose art is unworthy his writing. To him and his example do we owe the outrage of proffered assistance from the unscientific--the meddling of the immodest--the intrusion of the garrulous. Art, that for ages has hewn its own history in marble, and written its own comments on canvas, shall it suddenly stand still, and stammer, and wait for wisdom from the passer-by?--for guidance from the hand that holds neither brush nor chisel? Out upon the shallow conceit! What greater sarcasm can Mr. Ruskin pass upon himself than that he preaches to young men what he cannot perform! Why, unsatisfied with his own conscious power, should he choose to become the type of incompetence by talking for forty years of what he has never done!

Let him resign his present professorship, to fill the chair of Ethics at the university. As master of English literature, he has a right to his laurels, while, as the populariser of pictures he remains the Peter Parley of painting. --JM Whistler

From one of the true classics and a personal favorite; The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. It was recently posted on PG and just skimming over it, before I stored it in my palette of texts, caused me to mark the above as 'use soon'. There's more there could be presented from it, and the preamble to the above is also of note. However, the idiotic press punditry, Rush flap etc, and general fearmongering of the last while about Obama (and Clinton) pushed me use it today. On to the next quote.

Quote(2):
The story of Medea, whose husband Jason married a new princess, and who then poisoned the bride and murdered her own two children, has been interpreted in various ways.

In some versions Medea is a witch and commits infanticide out of revenge; but the play by Euripides is surprisingly neo-feminist. There's quite a lot about how tough it is to be a woman, and Medea's motivation is commendable - she doesn't want her children to fall into hostile hands and be cruelly abused - which is also the situation of the child-killing mother in Toni Morrison's Beloved. A good woman, then, who does a bad thing for a good reason. Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles kills her nasty lover due to sexual complications; here too we are in the realm of female-as-victim, doing a bad thing for a good reason. (Which, I suppose, places such stories right beside the front page, along with women who kill their abusive husbands. According to a recent Time story, the average jail sentence in the U.S. for men who kill their wives is four years, but for women who kill their husbands - no matter what the provocation - it's twenty. For those who think equality is already with us, I leave the statistics to speak for themselves.)

These women characters are all murderers. Then there are the seducers; here again, the motive varies. I have to say too that with the change in sexual mores, the mere seduction of a man no longer rates very high on the sin scale. But try asking a number of women what the worst thing is that a woman friend could possibly do to them. Chances are the answer will involve the theft of a sexual partner.

Some famous seductresses have really been patriotic espionage agents. Delilah, for instance, was an early Mata Hari, working for the Philistines, trading sex for military information. Judith, who all but seduced the enemy general Holofernes and then cut off his head and brought it home in a sack, was treated as a heroine, although she has troubled men's imaginations through the centuries - witness the number of male painters who have depicted her - because she combines sex with violence in a way they aren't accustomed to and don't much like.

Then there are figures like Hawthorne's adulterous Hester Prynne, she of The Scarlet Letter, who becomes a kind of sex-saint through suffering - we assume she did what she did through Love, and thus she becomes a good woman who did a bad thing for a good reason - and Madame Bovary, who not only indulged her romantic temperament and voluptuous sensual appetites, but spent too much of her husband's money doing it, which was her downfall. A good course in double-entry bookkeeping would have saved the day. I suppose she is a foolish women who did a stupid thing for an insufficient reason, since the men in question were dolts. Neither the modern reader nor the author consider her very evil, though many contemporaries did, as you can see if you read the transcript of the court case in which the forces of moral rectitude tried to get the book censored.

One of my favourite bad women is Becky Sharpe, of Thackeray's Vanity Fair. She makes no pretensions to goodness. She is wicked, she enjoys being wicked, and she does it out of vanity and for her own profit, tricking and deluding English society in the process - which, the author implies, deserves to be tricked and deluded, since it is hypocritical and selfish to the core. Becky, like Undine Spragg in Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country, is an adventuress; she lives by her wits and uses men as ambulatory bank-accounts. Many literary adventurers are male - consider Thomas Mann's Felix Krull, Confidence Man - but it does make a difference if you change the gender. For one thing, the nature of the loot changes. For a male adventurer, the loot is money and women; but for a female one, the loot is money and men.

Becky Sharpe is a bad mother too, and that's a whole other subject - bad mothers and wicked stepmothers and oppressive aunts, like the one in Jane Eyre, and nasty female teachers, and depraved governesses, and evil grannies. The possibilities are many.

But I think that's enough reprehensible female behaviour for you today. Life is short, art is long, motives are complex, and human nature is endlessly fascinating. Many doors stand ajar; others beg to be unlocked. What is in the forbidden room? Something different for everyone, but something you need to know and will never find out unless you step across the threshold. If you are a man, the bad female character in a novel may be - in Jungian terms - your anima; but if you're a woman, the bad female character is your shadow; and as we know from the Offenbach opera Tales of Hoffman, she who loses her shadow also loses her soul.

Evil women are necessary in story traditions for two much more obvious reasons, of course. First, they exist in life, so why shouldn't they exist in literature? Second - which may be another way of saying the same thing - women have more to them than virtue. They are fully dimensional human beings; they too have subterranean depths; why shouldn't their many-dimensionality be given literary expression? And when it is, female readers do not automatically recoil in horror. In Aldous Huxley's novel Point Counter Point, Lucy Tantamount, the man-destroying vamp, is preferred by the other female characters to the earnest, snivelling woman whose man she has reduced to a wet bath sponge. As one of them says, "Lucy's obviously a force. You may not like that kind of force. But you can't help admiring the force in itself. It's like Niagara." In other words, awesome. Or, as one Englishwoman said to me recently, "Women are tired of being good all the time." --Margaret Atwood

The rest of that is online as I found out when sorting through possible texts to use. A google search to see if any of it had been quoted to save me typing it all in from "Moving Targets" had it off her official site. Yay internets! Anyway, moving along...

As much as I'd like to see Dolley Madison's record of double occupation broken in the best way, and also knowing I've gone on record here (long ago) in stating Hillary looked to me as being well on her way to becoming a far better politician than her husband ever could be, I'd like to see a man of colour in the Whitehouse. Not my call to make, and I'm not too worried either way there. Which leaves one ill matched pair unmentioned. This last quote will fill that void.

Quote(3):
I was his last disciple, as you say, I went to him, at seventeen years of age, and offered him my hands and eyes to use,

When, voicing the true mind and heart of Rome, Father Castelli, his most faithful friend, wrote, for my master, that compassionate plea; "The noblest eye that Nature ever made is darkened, one so exquisitely dowered, so delicate in power that it beheld more than all other eyes in ages gone and opened the eyes of all that are to come."

But, out of England, even then, there shone the first ethereal promise of light that crowns my master dead. Well I recall that day of days. There was no faintest breath among his garden cypress-trees.

They dreamed dark, on a sky too beautiful for tears, and the first star was trembling overhead, when, quietly as a messenger from heaven, moving unseen, through his own purer realm, amongst the shadows of our mortal world, a young man, with a strange light on his face knocked at the door of Galileo's house. His name was Milton.

By the hand of God, He, the one living soul on earth with power to read the starry soul of this blind man, Was led through Italy to his prison door. He looked on Galileo, touched his hand "O, dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, irrecoverably dark".

In after days, he wrote it; but it pulsed within him then and Galileo rising to his feet and turning on him those unseeing eyes that had searched heaven and seen so many worlds, said to him, "You have found me."

Often he told me in those last sad months of how your grave young island poet brought peace to him, with the knowledge that, far off, in other lands, the truth he had proclaimed was gathering power.

Soon after, death unlocked his prison, and the city that he loved, Florence, his town of flowers, whose gates in life he was forbid to pass, received him dead.

You write to me from England, that his name is now among the mightiest in the world, and in his name I thank you.

I am old and I was very young when, long ago, I stood beside his poor dishonoured grave where hate denied him even an epitaph.

And I have seen, slowly and silently, his purer fame arising, like a moon in marble on the twilight of those aisles at Santa Croce, where the dread decree was read against him. --Alfred Noyes

"And then you see things/ The size/ Of which you've never known before", he said, and we should be on track here to watch the arms of our galaxy build up from that storm out there, so I'll finish up this section.

What it comes all down to, in my opinion, is what you choose to do at those/these key times. We've all got choices at the junctions of futures. A really-really big broom used on that dust, out the window of this train, and it could never make it to be you or me. Classical-wisdom says we should all just watch and let the/that dust settle, as it may, in fear of altering the course of history or some deity's big plan. I'm not so sure about most, if not all, of that. If we all choose to make our own mark in that dust now, our current state says we must have --or had not, done so [here and now]-- in the past.

There are no locks on the doors of the train. And it's all taken much longer than seventy years to get back up the timeline from here and now to there and now. You may say it's one hell of a way to run a railroad, or a system of government for that matter. But I say, stately-farce it all may be, it is however, one of the better methods found so far. For those of you in the USA, I'll add that it works even better if you do choose to participate.

I've said my piece and I'm going to head on back now. The train is all yours, I'll try to see if I can see any changes when I get there. Until then.

News that doesn't want to fly:
3 out of 4 from the late news. And is on front page now as I edit this JE in.

Lard Tubby in the can. The UK peer will serve his sentence at a low-security prison 50 miles north west of Orlando in central Florida. He will also have to pay back $6.1m (£3m).

Taxi! Bel-Air, and step on it. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said negotiations could only resume after calm was restored. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is winding up a trip to the region on Wednesday in which getting the Palestinians back to the negotiating table has been a key target.

Speaking of key targets... The head of Opec, the cartel of oil-producing nations, has said it is unlikely to increase production at this week's meeting. It had been hoped members would boost the supply of oil to help prices fall from their historically-high levels.

Y helo thar! A controversial new talk show has hit TV screens in southern India. The programme, "Ipadikku Rose", is not only unusual in its subject matter but its new host has certainly broken from the ranks. The programme is hosted by Rose, who used to be a boy called Ramesh.

Previously in this journal:
100386 : QUESTION: This is a new topic, on Italy and the firing of the convoy. I know that you talked a little about it yesterday. But today, General Casey maintained that he did not know that the convoy was going to be arriving at this checkpoint. He couldn't rule out that nobody in the U.S. Government or the Embassy or anybody knew that the convoy was going to be moving in this area, and the Italian Government maintains that the U.S. Government did know. Can you say whether anybody at the Embassy or any U.S. officials out of this Department --

MR. BOUCHER: I'm not going to try do this piecemeal. What we need now, and I think we and the Italians agree on this, is a complete and cooperative investigation and we will be undertaking that with the Italians participating in the inquiry and that -- that's going to commence shortly. We will get to the bottom of this together with the Italians. We will get to the bottom of this and get to the know all the facts together. That's what's important.

I think we've very clearly expressed our deep condolences for the tragic event. We've offered Italy our assistance in dealing with the aftermath of the incident. I think the Pentagon has, in fact, briefed on this. But the important thing now is to get the facts and we'll be doing that and we'll be working with the Italians to do that together.

66476 : The United States is sending up to 2,000 more marines to Afghanistan to step up the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda and Taleban leaders. The troops will join about 12,000 US troops already in the country. Pakistan has also announced it is reinforcing its operation in the tribal areas on its side of the border. Pakistani forces there have launched a full-scale assault against al-Qaeda and foreign militants and the tribesmen believed to be protecting them. "We are pursuing with the Pakistanis parallel, complementary efforts on both sides of the borders," a US military spokesman told the BBC. This amounts to a significant stepping up of the pressure, but is not the final US push against al-Qaeda - nor an explicit mission to capture Bin Laden, says the BBC's defence correspondent Jonathan Marcus.

6191 : "We have Word, WordPerfect, and Acrobat, but the one that's easiest to manipulate is WordPerfect for the CD-ROMs."

Texttoon:
Colourized clipart/jpg: A drawing of the "Old Grey Lady" and "Rector Time" standing before a man dressed as an oversized schoolboy. Slouched in his seat with his book bag labeled "Radicalism" carelessly at his feet. The old lady tells the rector, "Go on, ask. Nicely!". He leans in and asks, "Excuse me, I was wondering if you could help us out?" The radical replies, "Blow me!!!", and continues over the rectors "What?!?" with, "No seriously. You, the grey Mrs. and all her flashy offspring have choked down the most appalling mushrooms before. Why be so prissy about it now?". The old woman says "This is going to be harder than I thought." with the radical replying "Flattery! Good start."