October 12, 2006
Was Thomas Paine Too Much of a Freethinker for the Country He Helped Free?
I have always felt that Tom Paine was the voice of the American Revolution, far more so than Jefferson, Adams, Jay, Hamilton, Madison, and the other, better known founders. Far many more people read Paine's work Common Sense than say, the newspaper, magazine, and subscription letters-of-correspondence works of the other better known founders. So why hasn't Paine received his due?
"Thomas Paine is,"says Jill Lepore writing in the bookreview section of the New Yorker website, "at best, a lesser Founder. In the comic-book version of history that serves as our national heritage, where the Founding Fathers are like the Hanna-Barbera Super Friends, Paine is Aquaman to Washington’s Superman and Jefferson’s Batman; we never find out how he got his superpowers, and he only shows up when they need someone who can swim. For all that, Paine’s contributions to the nation’s founding would be hard to overstate. “Common Sense” made it possible to declare independence. 'Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain,' Adams himself wrote."
Good point. If Paine had stayed in America and kept writing instead of decamping after America's victory (as Trotsky and Che Guevara both did as well) for France where he became caught up in their revolution. Paine went on to be elected to the French National Assembly, arrested, imprisoned, and was very nearly executed as a counter-revolutionary. Then he returned to America. Go figure?
Wondering what might have been is usually a waste of time, but in Paine's case, I dunno..? At least he didn't end up dead like Che and Trotsky both did. Had Paine stayed and wrote he might have had a bigger impact on American society. Or not.
Posted by Ali Massoud at 01:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Firefox Security Exploit - The Good News & The Bad News
It seems that the kerfuffle about the Firefox browser 1.50 "zero day exploit" is just bad noise and nothing to worry about at all. Just as my favorite Internet expert said when I asked her about it. Now comes this update from C/net.
"Want to make dozens of Mozilla developers", says the article, "work on a weekend for no reason at all? Just do what hackers Mischa Spiegelmock and Andrew Wbeelsoi did at this year's ToorCon conference in San Diego.
A few days after announcing that they had found a JavaScript-handling flaw that could be exploited to attack Firefox users, Spiegelmock and Wbeelsoi said they were just kidding. The joke was so funny that the entire Firefox user base and Mozilla Foundation forgot to laugh."
Just goes to show that you can't believe everything that you hear on the Internet. What impresses me though is the way that the Mozilla folks jumped right on it. Compare that with the way that the Microsofties let things slide for weeks until a patch issued.
I also wonder what an appropriate punishment would be for these two idiots wasting everyone's time? Please go to the link at C/net and get a load of these two morons. Sheesh.
And on a related note comes this news in re the Internet web browser market.
"It's no surprise", says this Ars Technica post, "that Internet Explorer has been losing ground steadily over the past couple of years. There have been no significant innovations in the browser since XP SP2 was released over two years ago, and most of those were security tweaks."
Firefox is up to 13% and gaining, in user preference. Whoa!
Posted by Ali Massoud at 10:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 08, 2006
This Is What "Waterboarding" Looks Like
Pictures and descriptions of what it is (torture) and how it works (makes the victim suck in water until they pass out). It's a throw back to the medieval days when forced confessions were the norm. We are moving backwards as a culture when otherwise decent people try and defend this and other such practices, even on ostensibly utilitarian or practical grounds.
Via the AlterNet blog.
Posted by Ali Massoud at 02:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 07, 2006
Going Broke on $100,000 A Year? Yes, It's Possible
I have to admit when I first read this review of Green with Envy, I was kinda looking forward to reading about this couple's financial pain. See, WASPy Republican Southerners, (i.e. GWB types) irritate me greatly. Other sorts do too, but these folks have such a huge chasm between what they profess to believe in and how they live their lives. But this example even made me feel badly for them.
“But no matter how much larger they lived," says the excerpt at MSN Money, "they could never catch up with their friends' more exciting lives. Other people always had more impressive cars, parties that were catered, expensive furniture made of rare woods they had never even heard of. Tammy started feeling anxious about their life. Was she dressing well enough? Shouldn't they move into a larger house? Why wasn't Dan more ambitious?
Dan started getting larger bonuses, but the amounts were unpredictable. Tammy, who had handled the finances since their wedding day, started making only minimum credit card payments, and the balances grew larger. Instead of reining in expenses when money was tight, she simply went to an ATM and transferred $1,000 from the home-equity credit line to the checking account. At the same time, the couple started projects like installing granite counters and hardwood floors, all designed to put their house on a par with everyone else's. My husband has a good job, Tammy told herself. We can afford it.
Then, one month, Tammy asked Dan to cash in some stock options to pay for basic monthly expenses. A few months later, she had to ask again. That's when Dan realized something was wrong. He knew that it had been a while since his regular paycheck had covered all their bills. But since Tammy handled the money, he didn't know the details. We should slow down, he told his wife. We can afford it, she insisted. You're about to get your bonus.
True, the annual bonus was coming. And it was huge. By far the largest bonus Dan had ever gotten, it totaled nearly $100,000-much more than his annual salary. With this windfall, they could pay off everything and start over with a clean slate.
But to quell his anxiety, Dan wanted to review the details. For the first time, he asked his wife to hand over their account statements. One night, he took them into the home office, along with their credit reports, which he'd obtained on the Internet. Going down the list, he noted the current balance for each card. Then he broke out the calculator. As a store manager, he was used to tallying up figures, but when he hit the Total key, he assumed he must have made an error.
Once again, he started down the list: American Express, MasterCard, Visa, another Visa, another MasterCard, Discover, Gap, Dillard's, Ann Taylor. Again he hit the Total key-and stared in disbelief. The first figure had been correct. He felt sick. Overwhelmed. Deceived-not just by his wife, but by himself. Now he knew the truth, and it was almost like discovering that his spouse was having an affair. She had never told him how far behind they were falling, and he had just looked the other way. On credit cards alone, the couple owed nearly $100,000.”
Yikes!
Now, I must admit to thinking that hypocrisy isn't as much of a sin as most people say it is. What hypocrisy really means is that one isn't able to do the "right thing", that is to say, to resist temptation or impulsiveness even when their moral compass tells that they're going in the wrong direction. People are just weak sometimes. Is a smoker who is ill from smoking being hypocritical when they advise you not to smoke? Surely they are, but it doesn't mean they aren't sincere though, does it?
What it does tell me is that for some people moral bankruptcy proceeds the financial kind. And so it goes...
Posted by Ali Massoud at 04:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Where There’s War, There’s Kissinger
So says political columnist Molly Ivins in her column today. I generally dislike hyper-partisan political columnists like Ivins and her ilk, because in the end, all they really do is slime the opposition statist party and engage in shameless boosterism for their own side. But today the headline for her column struck me as apt.
“The Old War Criminal”, says Ivins, “is back. I try not to hold grudges, but I must admit I have never lost one ounce of rancor toward Henry Kissinger, that cynical, slithery, self-absorbed pathological liar. He has all the loyalty and principle of Charles Talleyrand, whom Napoleon described as ‘a piece of dung in a silk stocking.’ "
It does seem as if every fookin' time there is a war declared, contemplated, or advised, the ugly little face of that unrepentant uber-war criminal Henry Kissinger seems to pop up. Unless of course it’s a Democratic Administration that is in power though. Then it's the ugly, decrepit face of that party’s uber-war criminal, the ex-Kennedy/Johnson era’s Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara. Eww...
It's funny too, in an ironic sort of way, that such champions of justice and peace such as Ivins et al, who all bombastically expose any and every mistake and injustice in the world (when criticizing the GOP) fall strangely silent and even defend domestic tyranny, oppression and even murder when it is perpetrated by aparatchiks of their preferred political party. Odd, isn't it? Remember Janet Reno, Molly? More people died at the hands of Federal LEO's under her tenure as AG than ever before in American history. But I digress.
And all of which reinforces my despair of ever changing anything by using the Democratic/Republican two-party dynamic that passes for politics in America. And so it seems to me that party loyalty, like jingoistic patriotism, is the last refuge of partisan pundits as well as scoundrels.
Posted by Ali Massoud at 10:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 06, 2006
Watch Your Mouth! And Your Email, IM's, Blog Posts...
It should go without saying in the information age that if you want your private stuff to stay private, encrypt it or stay off the Internet. But nevertheless I will say it again: Trust no one, and nothing when comes to your communications and data. Wired.com's sex columnist Regina Lynn says this in her Sexdrive blog post today.She is speaking here of the ex-U.S. Rep. Mark Foley's (Republican of Florida), email scandal, but the larger point is worth noting, eh?
"Did Foley truly not realize that with each e-mail," says Ms. Lynn, "each instant message, he entrusted his career that much further to those teenagers?
Did he not know that every single thing you say or do online is documented? That he could not expect to get away with inappropriate sexual advances as soon as he made them on the Internet?"
Foley wasn't, or was so buzzed or horny that he didn't care. Word to the wise, folks.
Posted by Ali Massoud at 11:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 05, 2006
The “Dance of the Lemons”
The “Dance of the Lemons”– An Illustrated Guide As to How to Fire A Public School Teacher in NYC
The series of steps a principal must take to dismiss an instructor is Byzantine. And not in a good way either. This is the story what it takes to fire sex pervert teachers in NYC. It is a sad, but funny, tale.
“The rules were well-intended. The union was worried, says John Stossel writing in Reason.com, “that principals would play favorites, hiring friends and family members while firing good teachers. If public education were subject to the competition of the free market, those bureaucratic rules would be unnecessary, because parents would hold a bad principal accountable by sending their kids to a different school the next year. But government schools never go out of business, and parents' ability to change schools is sharply curtailed. So the education monopoly adopts paralyzing rules instead”.
Oh? How so you ask? Well, read on:
“The regulations are so onerous that principals rarely even try to fire a teacher. Most just put the bad ones in pretend-work jobs, or sucker another school into taking them. (They call that the ‘dance of the lemons.’) The city payrolls include hundreds of teachers who have been deemed incompetent, violent, or guilty of sexual misconduct. Since the schools are afraid to let them teach, they put them in so-called "rubber rooms" instead. There they read magazines, play cards, and chat, at a cost to New York taxpayers of $20 million a year.”
But hey, WTF? It’s only taxpayer’s money, and which flows as easy as water in NYC. And so it is probably easier and cheaper to spend the $20 mil than have some unionized and tenured perv molest, bugger, or otherwise traumatize the children, eh? That’d be my choice.
Posted by Ali Massoud at 12:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Want Full Time Pay for No Work at All? Join the DC Metro Police
"In late 2003," says a Washington Post investigative piece, "11 percent of the force was out, the equivalent of an entire police district. In the years since, Ramsey said, the department has made 'good progress.'"
This is "good progress?" I wonder what Chief Ramsey would consider abject failure? A total collapse of the force and followed by mass desertion like the NOPD had during the Hurricane Katrina emergency last year? Sheesh.
"One officer who hurt his knee at the police academy without ever making it on patrol did limited work at full pay for five years. Another officer who injured his legs in an off-duty motorcycle accident earned full pay but worked partial duty for 14 years. Told he would have to retire, the officer made a videotape of himself running and said he was fit for work."
Hah! The old "miraculous recovery syndrome" at work here. One officer on a multi-year disability leave of absence (at full pay and benefits) was found to have moved to Pennsylvania where he was working as a full-time cop! Go figure eh?
Why not save the taxpayers some money and just hire Blackwater Associates to patrol the streets? They'd probably be cheaper and do just as good of a job. And you could fire or replace them if needed. But really, why the fook even have a municipal government at all, never mind the lousy police force it hired? Too bad we can't "outsource" or "privatize" those mooks.
Posted by Ali Massoud at 10:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 04, 2006
Is Privacy Possible in America Today ?
Businessweek's on-line edition takes a look at the latest in espionage gadgets and technology in response to the recent Hewlett-Packard boardroom scandal. The article looks at devices designed for counter-espionage, which range from mundane confidential email services to sophisticated camera and listening-device detectors.
"[And](...)for every method of spying," says BW, "there's a counteroffensive. One of them is the eavesdropping protection kit, manufactured by Dynasound in Norcross, Ga. To secure a room in an office building, devices are placed on ceiling plenums, floors, HVAC ducts, doors, walls or windows — basically anywhere voices can travel."
This concept looks pretty good to me: vanishing e-mail. Called VaporStream, the system lets people send e-mails that cannot be tracked, copied, forwarded, or printed—leaving no trail. Users pay $39.99 a year to subscribe to the service and must log into the site every time they want to send a confidential e-mail.
It seems to me that you can make your life more private (than it is now anyhow), but not completely so. I am sure that there are plenty of exotic snooping technologies on the market that the public is unaware of and that's not even to mention the custom-made stuff that the geek-for-hire snoops can devise for you if you pay them well...
Posted by Ali Massoud at 11:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 03, 2006
End "Automatic" Citizenship!
From the crypto-Libertarian, (but officially Republican) U.S.Representative Ron Paul: End "Automatic" Citizenship!
"I’ve introduced legislation", says Paul, "that would amend the Constitution and end automatic birthright citizenship. The 14th amendment was ratified in 1868, on the heels of the Civil War. The country, especially the western territories, was wide open and ripe for homesteading. There was no welfare state to exploit, and the modern problems associated with immigration could not have been imagined.
Our founders knew that unforeseen problems with our system of government would arise, and that’s precisely why they gave us a method for amending the Constitution. It’s time to rethink birthright citizenship by amending the 14th amendment."
Well, now. I guess I would agree that the modern notion of citizenship today means in reality "what's in it for me?" As in, what goodies can I receive from the politicos in exchange for my vote? And in return? You and/or your progeny have to be cannon fodder and tax doners when required.
Some bargain eh? No thanks.
Posted by Ali Massoud at 10:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack