http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/katrina_brown;_ylt=AuPgG9pm.AMn5n2a0wGBSiCs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ--

As FEMA director, Michael Brown drew on his vast experience as a copyboy and gopher in Edmond, Oklahoma to manage one of the most stupendous failures of federal, state, and local government planning and oversight in recent memory.

Prior to his stint as embattled failure-at-life, Brown also tanked the International Arabian Horse Association after miring it in lawsuits deeper than the crap in the stalls that his ex-employees weren't cleaning out while they sued their former employer. What sent him packing though wasn't his combative-to-the-point-of-litigation management style, but his ill-gotten gains after he started his own private "legal defense fund" - replete with the pre-requesite for any serious Bush administration official: conflict of interest contirbutions - despite the fact that the IAHA was fully responsible - by contract - to pay any and all legal bills he incurred on the job.

Despite Brown's apparent lack of any qualification, rest assured that back in college he DID room with Bush/Cheney 2000 campaign manager Joe Allabaugh, which actually made him one of the most qualified members of the Bush adminsitration until about an hour ago when he quit. Maybe he was overqualified?

Oh, "Brownie", you will be missed. Surely, nobody can argue that you certainly did do a "heck of a job".

How many of you folks who consider yourselves conservatives listen to people like Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy, Ann Coulter, Limbaugh, etc.? If so, please note who it is that you listen to in case I'm not familiar with him/her.

I have a sneaking suspicion about something....

So, Bush's job approval floats ever closer to only 1/3 of the population responding positively, and what is the response from the Radical Right?

Is it a citation of the fact that most of America is still moderate like it has been for decades, and that Bush's radical right-wing views keep becoming more and more obvious to the majority, which doesn't usually pay attention unless the country starts heading down the crapper?

No.

Is it admission of the fact that after failings in the Corporate America Bush and most of his friends hail from, Iraq, The "War on Terror" (so.. where IS OBL and how many legs DOES Al-Zarqawi have anyway?), and now Katrina, Americans are getting fed up with the constant excuse-making and head-in-the-sand responses from the Right?

No.

So, what do they say?

"It's just because the media is lying about everything!"

That, my friends, is truly a glowing example of some extremely unhealthy cognitive dissonance.

I predict a less radical conservative president in 2008 and, so long as the radical right-wingers don't fundamentally alter the way elections work to lock-in authoritarian control (which I have no doubt they're fully willing to do, I just have doubts about whether they could actually get away with it), I predict another lefty in the white house in 2012.

Just like Reagan and Bush I. Carter gets slammed with a bunch of lies about his handling of a few key issues despite an otherwise excellent record, and a radical from the right goes into office. They re-elect him, but in the second term it becomes more and more apparent to the public that he's a kook who's actively destroying America, so they go for somebody a little less extreme next time. He screws the whole thing to hell, so they put in a lefty who, again, has an overall excellent track record and then screws up on a handful of issues, so they put another extremist righty in.

It's quite a vicious cycle. It's also quite unfortunate that people can't be bothered to notice the pattern.

...of freedom? Hat tip to Luke727.

Am I missing something here? How can it be "free as in speech" software if you're explicitly revoking the right of certain people to use it?

This is why open source will fail as a "movement". Major open source projects have great software to offer - the BSDs, Apache, PostgreSQL. But people like Stalin and Eric "Arrogant Gas Baron" Raymond are working ever so hard to destroy it.

Of course, unlike Raymond, at least Stalin has actually contributed software, not just spittle-laced rants and facist visions of an "idyllic" American life.

Prior to Eric Raymond's hijacking of the Jargon File, there was the Hacker's Dictionary:

http://www.gh-sts.com/HOWTO/original-jargon-file.htm

This is not the original original, but it's from before ESR went on his one-man rampage and altered it to fit his own political and religious views.

Not really I'm not, but I'm tired of yelling at you and everyone else. I know you all mean well, but you still piss me off (actually, sometimes you piss me off BECAUSE you mean well). Also, there's really only so many ways that you can say that Bush is a meatslamming polerider before you just run out of new ways to abuse the English language.

Anyway, the next HOWTO will be up shortly. It's the HOWTO on running a FreeBSD router with a simple firewall and a DNS cache for the rest of the network. I'm not going to do the QMail portion because Bernstein already has good documentation on cr.yp.to about replacing sendmail with qmail.

After I get this one up, I'll expand it to include running syslogd effectively.

I have decided to begin a set of HOWTO documents documenting how I did stuff. This will include the common and obscure tasks of day to life, from computing to car repair to cooking (which maybe I should avoid, but...).

So far I have completed two HOWTOs:

HOWTO: Make a Patch Cable
HOWTO: Remove and Replace an H-Pipe on A 1999-2002 Ford Mustang GT

Some of these things, such as the latter, will be done when I learn something new. Others will be done as I complete tasks I already knew how to do but don't do commonly, such as the former.

In the works:

HOWTO: Repair clothing tears with needle and thread
HOWTO: Build a FreeBSD Router w/Firewall, DNS Caching and Qmail
HOWTO: Run multiple sites on localhost with one Apache instance

These will be located at http://www.gh-sts.com/HOWTO in the form of a series of text files. I will also include links to other, specialized lists of HOWTOs.

No guarantees on how long this project will interest me though.

Um. Let's see.

George Bush skated through school with Cs, failed to meet the expectations of a National Guard unit - twice - during the Vietnam war, worked for three failed companies in some sort of high-level leadership role, completed illegal stock trades several times, turned the Texas public education system into one of the most dysfunctional school system's in the country, won the presidency after a majority of voting Americans said they DIDN'T want him to be president, choked on a pretzel, fell off his Segway, started a war on completely false information, and showed such poor leadership in one of the nation's worst natural disasters that it would have probably been better if he'd have just stayed in Crawford since he not only came off like he didn't care, he came off like he was using the situation for a publicity stunt.

I really took the wrong approach to my life. I think if Bush has taught us anything, it's that an alcoholic underachiever with a seriously diminished capacity for intelligent thought and measured decision-making is worth a whole hell of a lot more than some stupid sucker who actually believes that the best way to make it in America is to work hard.

Ahoy matey's, first order of business in the "Be Like Bush" campaign is to down a bottle of Scotch for breakfast and, since I don't have any shareholders to rob, maybe rob a bank.

I'll keep you posted on how that works out for me.

I think if you decide you want to be the leader of the free world, it's not unfair in the least that you forfeit the privilege of regular vacations.

I think it should be illegal to cherry pick friendly crowds when you're not just holding rallies for re-election. Either that, or there should be a clear disclaimer on every audio, visual, and print quote, image, etc. that comes out of it that clearly states it was all staged. Why is it that you can't sell a vaccuum cleaner on TV without making it clear that you're not using impartial, unscripted customers, but you can sell a nationwide public health plan that will affect everyone that way?

I think if you have strong objections to things like the Kyoto protocol then you shouldn't sign them even if it makes you unpopular, but I also think that "China doesn't have to" isn't a valid complaint about it if you're supposedly the world's policy leader.

I think if you yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, and 50 people die in a stampede, and if you yell "Nukes!" in an international theatre and tens of thousands of people die in a war, and both times it wasn't true and you couldn't have proven it was true when you did it, then the only difference is a matter of scale and either way you're culpable for each death.

I think if you have a strong history with the oil industry, and you approve an energy policy that gives tax dollars to that industry at a time when it's reaping windfall profits, then people have every right to wonder where your loyalty lies.

I think if you do something stupid like cut levee funding to a threatened area, and a lot of people drown a few months later, it's probably not your fault they drowned, per se, but I also think it's not unfair that people frown on you for it since the only thing that made it clearly not your fault was the timeframe.

I think if public officials move 25,000 people to a shelter during a hurricane, and you can't tell me that they did that more than 24 hours after they did it, even though it was all over every major media outlet in the world, and people die because you didn't know that and it was your job to be informed, you should be brought up on charges of gross criminal negligence.

I think if one of your defining acts as a public servant was creating the term "freedom fries" you should be stripped of everything you own and mailed via parcel post to the Yukon territory.

I think if you don't drive at least 1/3 of your SUV/Truck mileage either hauling more than 3 people, towing something for work or recreation, or in poor road conditions, and you don't have a job of some sort where it's crucial you're available 24/7/365 (doctor, firefighter, etc.), you should have to pay a Stupidity Tax of 30% of your gross income every year, and that the money should be used to pay for everyone else's increased gas prices.

I think people who believe that building more refineries is a good idea for solving an energy crunch probably just don't have any good ideas.

I think that if you're so obsessed with your vehicle that you actually put it up in your photo gallery with your family, you shouldn't be allowed to have access to a camera.

I think that people that actually respond to spam are just trolling the rest of us.

I think that if you believe that nobody ever needs welfare because there are always enough jobs in society to go around, and that they're always accessible to the people who need them, you might as well have just dropped out of school because you probably weren't paying any attention anyway since you're so proud of yourself for being average and think you really "made it" on your own.

I think too many conservatives tend toward being willfully undereducated and have very myopic views of the world as a result.

I think too many liberals spend too much time assuming that everybody wants to be as open-minded as them, or that it's a good thing that they're so open-minded, and forget that sometimes people have to step back and fend for themselves at the expense of others.

I think too many conservatives don't know the difference between taking things from other people for survival and simply exploiting them because they're greedy.

I think too many liberals don't know the difference between helping someone get back on their feet and dragging them along in a little red wagon because they just don't want to walk beside you.

I think too many conservatives and liberals try too hard to make everybody else be like them.

• Didn't plan where to evacuate people to who had nowhere else to go.
• Didn't begin to move food, water, and medicine toward the afflicted area for DAYS after the event.
• Didn't put a significant number of National Guardsmen on notice to create a rapid response to the crisis.

Don't worry, I have it on good authority from the Slashdot Humanitarian crowd here that it's entirely the niggers' faults for not evacuating. Also, I assume its entirely the fault of all those critically ill patients who were literally dying in the hallways of hospitals that they didn't get up and march 45 miles to Slidell like some people apparently think they should have done.

Oh, and don't worry. Bush has "zero tolerance" for dying looters, so hopefully we'll just shoot those animals dead who are so crass that they would rob an abandoned Wal Mart to survive.

Yay America.

Don't worry, though. It's not like our the federal and LA state governments have been COMPLETELY inoperative. They DID:

• Thank Bush a whole lot, presumably for playing banjo (or whatever) and eating birthday cake while the city died. Like father like son, I suppose. Bush I was just as big a bastard in Andrew.
• Pat each other on the back for evac'ing the city into a death trap that much better resembles a concentration camp than a shelter.
• Make a lot of excuses (especially FEMA directory Brown) for dragging their feet and CAUSING people, women, children, men, the elderly, to die.

Fuck them.

Railgunner: It's not Bush's fault, It's not Bush's fault!

Bethanie, Ellem, HokieSeas, HBI, etc: It's the people's fault for not leaving, it's the people's fault for not leaving!

My response to each of them: Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. I wish cancer AND AIDS on your whole families. If the magnitude of this catastrophe starts and stops for you with defending your chosen political candidates or pointing fingers, you can suck my flaccid cock while I take the luxury of shitting in a working toilet.

Go fuck yourselves. And if you cockblockers have soemthing to say about it, I have a non-obfuscated email address on this account, so bring it the fuck on.

I am seriously considering trading it in on the purchase of an econobox such as a Corolla, Civic, or Lancer. It would be less money per month on the loan, less on insurance, and less on gas. :(

Fucking republicans.

When we're talking about an a/c compressor, and we talk about a "blown seal" that's leaking oil back onto the engine block, is that the same seal we're talking about when we're talking about a "shaft seal kit"? Or, is the "compressor shaft seal" a different beast from the "compressor seal"?

Thank you in advance, good folk. If this kit can alleviate the problem, we should be able to repair my fiancee's overheating issue and recharge the A/C for under one hundred bucks.

If you're interested in this type of thing, here's the full story:

She complained on Tuesday about the car overheating while idling on her way home. After work, I drove it around awhile but could only get it to get unnaturally warm when it idled AND the a/c was running. We already knew it was low on refrigerant, so I charged it last night and it seemed that while the system was sucking the cans dry it was good, but it also seemed like the oil and refrigerant were coming right back out. This was confirmed when the whole things started billowing smoke. I suspect the compressor seal is blown on it, or at least just plain damaged, but getting to the a/c is a serious pita so I can't get in there to see if the seal from the kit is the same as what's actually leaking, and I don't know anything specific about a/c compressors other than how to charge them and that they're really annoying, failure-prone pieces of equipment.

And what really pisses me off is that $1.95 of every gallon is probably flowing into some fat rich fuck's fat fucking wallet that he sits his fat ass down on while he gorges his fat face with $75 sirloin and $250 bottles of wine.

But what pisses me off even more than that is the fact that this bullshit excuse for a president had his minions ship off an energy bill that gives these cockcheese-licking bitches MY fucking tax dollars to "invest in renewable energy resources".

CLUESTICK YOU FUCKING FRAUD: these pieces of human shit are gouging taxpayers at the pump on a daily basis and reaping huge, windfall profits in the process. So what's your fucking plan? Do you do something for, you know, the people you pretend like you represent and set forward mid and long range plans to reduce oil dependance while encouraging sensible use and moderation in the short term?

No, your cock is so lubed up from their greasy fingertips that you hand them my goddamn wallet while your lying little bike-riding ass pays some sort of bullshit lipservice to pie-in-the-sky "renewable" resources like that mystical hydrogen-powered vehicle that doesn't actually exist outside of two lousy fucking prototypes.

I fucking hate republicans. Jesus Christ what a bunch of two-faced little dogcum-sucking dick jugglers.

And the democrats are fucking morons. Dip into the strategic oil reserve? Let's crunch some numbers, dipshits:

SOR contains 700m barrels
U.S. consumption is about 21m barrels per day
U.S. production is down about 1/4

700/(21*.25) = 133 days of oil

So if we tapped the whole fucking thing out, we'd give ourselves about 4.5 months.

If we could refine it.

Oh, gee, there's where your "plan" falls to shit you dumb cunts. While you would buck up the somewhat limited impact Katrina had on shipping lanes, you wouldn't have one bit of impact on all those refineries that still have to be brought back up.

You want to have an impact on this bullshit situation? Here's what you do. First of all, you raise both middle fingers to George Bush, his oil buddies that are felating him 24/7, and all those dipshit democrats who wouldn't know a plan if Hillary Clinton stapled it to their nut sack. The easiest way to do that is to print this out and mail it to the president, your congressMEN and congressWOMEN, because congressPERSON is what sandal-wearing hopheads say.

Why? What possible impact could that have, mailing something like this to elected officials?

None. Just like everything else you could do that involved actually trying to get their attention, because nobody in this fucking government gives a shit about anyone that's not slipping them cash on the campaign trail. So you print this out as a big "fuck you" because you know they're useless and they're not on your side.

Then, you take a few simple steps:

1. You ditch the unncessary SUV and your "bad boy" image of yourself. You just look like a flat-chested soccer mom anyway in it.

2. You learn how to fucking drive. This means not driving 85 fucking miles an hour to and from work. Not squeeling your tires and racing from one red light to the next.

Basically, it means quit being a dick and grow up.

3. You carpool. Or take the bus. Or the train. Quit being such a snippy little bitch. You'll save money, and maybe if you walked to the bus stop instead of just into your heated garage you fatasses that are making this country so obese would slim the fuck down and you could start going to movies again.

4. You vote these motherfuckers out.

See, this is an important one that nobody ever gets. None of these people are on "your side". They're not on "your team" or in "your party". They're their because some special interest greased the wheels and put them there so they could rake you over the coals and steal your money via the government. Okay? Got that? ALL OF THEM. Just vote them all the fuck out. I don't give a shit if you write in Gumby for president, no president at all would be a fuck lot better than any alternative we're going to be getting in '08, and forget those cocksuckers in Congress. They're just a bunch of self-interested pricks and if you don't know that, you have a serious problem.

Fuck this, I'm going to bed.

So I have this FreeBSD system functioning as a router. I have Intarweb access from the router (which is where I'm typing from via lynx) and I can have one machine hooked up to share the connection at a time.

Alas, you cannot have multiple NICs with different IPs on the same subnet in FreeBSD, and I cannot figure out how I might go about this.

Basically, I'm trying to avoid Forking out $40 for a hub. I have two other NICs, and if I could find some way to relegate them to a different subnet as if they were different physical machines, I could treat those two as a hub, and the other two as inward and outward facing gateways.

Alas, I do not know how to do this. I'm envisioning some static routes, but they're not working out.

Help me slashdot! I'm a cheapass bitch and I don't want to buy a hub!