Patrick M Brennan

I’m grateful to Republican State Representative Ben Bridges of Georgia for pointing out some interesting facts which I had somehow never heard of.

It seems that this “Evolution” thing – you know, the idea that plants, animals and people are descended from older forms which evolve over geologic time – isn’t just untrue. No, friends, it’s much, much worse. The ideas that, for example, the universe is billions of years old, that it is billions of light years across, even, apparently, the idea that the Earth moves in space – are all lies. And not only that, there is a sinister conspiracy to spread these lies and fix them in our minds.

Who do you think is spreading these lies? That would be the Jews.

Oh, and this “Gravity” thing is a Jewish lie, too.

You know, it’s one thing to come across some crank’s web site. Honestly, I’d rather just talk about that, because, Jesus Jones, is it hilarious. We’ll come back to it.

But here we have a really scary brew: we have a lunatic who has a crackpot theory of the world, driven to invent an evil conspiracy which is suppressing his theory. And where does he turn to supply the bad guy? To the closest little nub of hate he has in his heart, naturally. But then he gets support from not one, but two elected officials in two different states. The mixture of fanatic belief, conspiracy theories, scapegoating minorities, and government power, even though it is sort of small and comic in this episode, is something to keep a careful watch over. It’s like a pile of paint-soaked rags in your basement – you don’t want to tolerate it, even if you think the risk is small. You can expect that if there ever is a fire like that in America, this will be the place it starts.

The two elected officials in question are scrambling to backpedal their support for the kooky crank. They didn’t mean for a lot of people to notice that they were endorsing the view that Mathematics is a conspiracy to destroy Christian America. Just the kooky cranks in their districts. It’s entertaining to watch little men twist themselves into pretzels trying to pretend they don’t actually agree with this view, while putting out the wink to show the True Believers that, yes, actually, they do.

It goes without saying that they’re Republicans, doesn’t it? I think it’s probably true that the majority of Republicans would admit that the Earth moves, but in every important way, they truly are the party of reality-denial. We have been and will continue to pay the price for having them in office, as we shoulder the burdens of bad decisions based on delusions and lies.

But enough of that. Let’s get back to FixedEarth.com, a product of a gentleman named Marshall Hall.

I had thought that the battle between actual, enlightened, reality-dwelling people and kooky fanatics had moved off of the question of whether the Earth moves around the sun, and had moved into the issue of how human beings came to evolve into their present form. That’s what I thought the last time I wrote about this issue. It seems that, at least as far as Mr. Hall goes, I was wrong. He wants to take up the battle against Copernicus all over again. It’s too bad he’s about 460 years late to the party. His site (which is incidentally, a masterpiece of clueless Web design), shouts:

The Earth is not rotating…nor is it going around the sun. The universe is not one ten trillionth the size we are told. Today’s cosmology fulfills an anti-Bible religious plan disguised as “science". The whole scheme from Copernicanism to Big Bangism is a factless lie. Those lies have planted the Truth-killing virus of evolutionism in every aspect of man’s “knowledge” about the Universe, the Earth, and Himself.

Marshall Hall is a wheel in the political effort to remove evolution from the public schools in Georgia. Since he’s a fundamentalist, he’s gone back to the fundamentals. He feels he needs to demolish Copernicus in order to topple Darwin. I suppose he’s on to something, although it seems to me the facts of biology would remain the same if the Sun went around the Earth. But never mind that, and never mind the fact that even though Darwin is bedrock biology, Copernicus is even more deeply embedded in astronomy. In another part of the web site, he proclaims:

…the Copernican Model of a rotating, orbiting Earth is a factless, observation-denying deception that is the keystone which is holding up all of modern man’s false “science” and “knowledge". It’s time for the truth.

See? He’s right! There are no facts and no observations which support the idea of a rotating Earth! Stellar parallax? Poppycock! The retrograde motion of Mars? A Kabbalist illusion! Foucault’s Pendulum? A clever trick. There really is an entire section of the website devoted to showing how any observations which support the motion of the Earth are, in fact, lies and deceptions.

He even explains why geosynchronous satellites prove that the Earth does not move, and it’s such a mishmash that’s it’s damn near impossible to figure out. I don’t think he quite understands how geosynchronous satellites work in the first place, and comes really, really close to disavowing that there is such a thing as Gravity. (He also confuses gravity with atmospheric pressure, which is very funny if you’re a nerd like me.) As best as I can reckon, his explanation for why geosynchronous satellites prove that the Earth does not move is :

1. The Earth doesn’t move.
2. Geosynchronous satellites rely on the “earth-is-moving” hypothesis to work the way they claim to be.
3. But since the Earth isn’t moving, there can’t be any geosynchronous satellites.
4. If this gets out, it will expose The Conspiracy.
5. Therefore the Earth doesn’t move!

(Actually, it’s right there on his page, right after his paragraph which begins “Five things are certain at this point:"… I’ve just clarified the language.)

I also think it’s fun to note that his web site only vaguely implies that the Earth might be a sphere. Nowhere does he set that out explicitly.

At what point do you think Mr. Hall will admit that the Earth moves, and is more than 6000 years old? Let’s ask Thomas Kuhn:

During the century and a half following Galileo’s death in 1642, a belief in the earth-centered universe was gradually transformed from an essential sign of sanity to an index, first, of inflexible conservatism, then of excessive parochialism, and finally of complete fanaticism.

Well, Galileo’s been dead for more than three hundred years now…

This is rather bizarre. I got a letter from the Army today:

Now don’t imagine I’m not flattered. I think it’s about time the Army decided they needed a guy of my caliber. But, you know, I have read that they’re having a tough time finding new people to ship off to Iraq, and it seems to me that they’re kind of deluding themselves if they’re sending this to me. Right? Clearly they think I’m about, oh, half my age or something. They got my address right. I am the only Patrick Brennan living at this address. And I’m sure my records are good, judging from the other junk mail I receive. Commercial marketers know very well, for example, that I have a mortgage, a wife, a baby girl, and a degree. They know I’ve paid my student loans off. They don’t send me solicitations geared toward recent high school graduates. So how come the United States Armed Forces can’t figure that out?

There are all kinds of ways this letter diminishes my already infinitesimal respect for our current government’s ability to manage information properly. I mean, I’m not even trying to hide. What chance have they got against the terrorists? Speaking of which: talk about the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing! While the Army is trying to recruit me, the Department of Homeland Security thinks I’m someone who needs special scrutiny before I’m allowed to board an airplane. I suppose I’d rather the government thinks I’m a potential soldier instead of a potential terrorist, but they’re so laughably wrong on both counts that it just makes my head spin.

I’m not down on service. I even gave it some serious thought myself, for about ten minutes back in the eighties. The early eighties. (When, you know, I really was a recent high school graduate.) But ultimately I decided it wasn’t for me. (Believe me, I made the right decision for me and for my country.) Twenty-odd years later, I’m more sure than ever that being an infantryman is not really what I want.

Maybe I’m wrong about the Army. Maybe – just humor me now – they’re just being clever. Too clever by half, perhaps, but still. Maybe they think that if they flatter me, I’ll be more disposed to sign up. (Sure, I’m too old to join the Army now, but they’ve recently raised the maximum age for enlistment. Maybe by the time I’m 50, the maximum age will be 51 or something.) The letter was accompanied by a postcard which promises a cool knit cap with an Army logo. All I need to do is fill it out with all my personal information (or fill it out online). They’re gonna need that data in 2009, when they’ll need lots of new guys to occupy Tehran. And I’m torn about filling out that card, because on the one hand, I want to help the government keep its records straight. They only have all my tax returns, after all. On the other hand, if I fill out the card, I’m taking the risk that the Army won’t stop pestering me. When I retire, they’ll be asking me what I’m planning to do with my college degree. When I’m 90, I’ll be getting letters asking me about serving in the National Guard (”one weekend a month“). And they’ll still be promising the same lousy pay, bad benefits, and the constant possibility of being shipped off to a hostile country to be maimed or killed.

But maybe – just maybe – if I sign up, they’ll take me off their no-fly list.

No promises.

I’ve rekindled my enthusiasm for Orbiter recently. I had stopped playing Orbiter for a while, not so much because I lost interest in it, but because I had to explore some other games. (Oh, and also, contrary to what you might think after reading this post, I do have a real life.)

“Astronaut” isn’t the only fantasy I have. This past year, I also wanted to play “Gangster” for a while, so I played through The Godfather; and I took another couple of turns as “Badass“, so I played through Quake 4 and F.E.A.R.; and even now I take an occasional sojourn into being a “Zombie Apocalypse Survivor", so I am playing through Dead Rising. I’m also quite enthusiastic about Second Life, but I’m not sure exactly what I’m gratifying when I’m playing Second Life – my inner Libertarian/Capitalist/Sprawl-Dwelling/Gambler/Chat-Addict, perhaps.

In the end, though, my strongest fantasy is still “Astronaut", which is also why my lovely wife gave me a fantastic Christmas gift: she sent me to Florida to participate in the Astronaut Training Experience at the Astronaut Hall of Fame. ("Just think,” I said, “I get to hang with a bunch of middle-aged white male nerds just like me! When do I ever get a chance to do that?") It was actually a lot of fun, and I ended up participating in a “simulated Space Shuttle mission,” and even though I didn’t get to “fly” in the “shuttle", and was relegated to “Mission Control,” it was all actually pretty good – but not as interesting or as detailed as Orbiter. (Well, you know, they have to cater to their market. Make it too hard and you turn away potential customers, like the family who were there – Mom, Dad, and three teenagers, who were all acting like they’d rather be at Universal Studios.) All in all, the trip engendered in me an even greater desire to download the latest version of Orbiter and lose myself in it again. (But I don’t get a cool polo shirt from playing Orbiter.)

My new fling with Orbiter was also catalyzed by the recent NASA decision to build a new generation of space hardware, called the Constellation system. Constellation will be used to return to the moon by about 2020, and establish a permanent base on the Moon’s south pole by about 2024.

I don’t know if Constellation will ever fly. There will be four presidential and seven congressional elections between now and then. It seems to me that the moon base, while technically feasible, may not get the kind of sustained political support it will require. However, just because it may never come to pass, that doesn’t mean I can’t “fly” the proposed hardware; so I turned back to Orbiter. Orbiter has recently been updated, and there is an extensive online community of fans and modders, contributing add-ons which make it a very rich environment for the space flight enthusiast. As luck would have it, there exist a couple of add-ons which implement NASA’s Exploration System Architecture Study, a 2005 precursor to Constellation. That was close enough for me.

Orbiter is a very complex program - it’s not a game. It’s a lot of fun (if you’re a space nerd like me), but it doesn’t hold your hand, and there’s no guarantee it’ll even work, let alone that you’ll be able to do what you want to do. Sometimes, you even need to do a little math. (Horrors!) Although I’d flown a lot of Orbiter scenarios previously, I’d never done it with a vehicle as realistic (read: as limited) as Constellation. What a difference the realism makes! Flying these vehicles is difficult, but I have managed to do it pretty well. In the process, I got stuck once, trying to figure out how to launch toward the moon when it seemed as though the rocket I had didn’t quite have enough fuel to do the trick. It turned out that I’d only had Astronaut 101, and I needed the 201 class in order to pull off the maneuver. (But that points out another great thing about Orbiter: there’s a very friendly on-line community of sympathetic folks who are always willing to help you out.) Being able to fly to the moon has given me a real sense of satisfaction and accomplishment which I don’t really get from games.

You might be saying: “Accomplishment? What accomplishment?” And I take your point. See, beating a boss in a video game isn’t an accomplishment - games are purposely designed so that 10-year-olds can do them with just a little practice, after all. On the other hand, in Orbiter I’ve guided my boosters from launch into orbit, performed orbital rendezvous and docking maneuvers, left the Earth, entered lunar orbit, and landed, only 1.7 km away from where I intended to land, near the lunar south pole (In Shoemaker Crater, actually). Do these things really count as accomplishments? I’d argue they do, because I learned a lot about how these things are actually done in practice, even if Constellation never flies.

I’ve learned something else new: getting to the moon is actually pretty easy, compared to getting back. Every step of this trip has been more difficult than the previous step – and I’m told that reentry is the hardest part of all! I’m looking forward to it.

(PS - My wife also gave me “The Godfather,” “Quake IV,” and “F.E.A.R.” How cool is she?)

For the first time ever, George W. Bush has said that “We’re not winning” in Iraq. But, just so everyone’s clear, he also pointed out that we’re not losing, either.

See? Every time he holds out the tantalizing possibility that he’s actually capable of perceiving reality, he yanks it away the very next moment.

So … if we’re not winning in Iraq, and we’re not losing, than what exactly are we doing? Linning? Wosing?

Hey, news flash, Mr. “War President“: it’s a WAR. If you’re not WINNING, you’re LOSING. And the fact that you can’t perceive this, or talk straight about it, is one more tiny brick in the enormous edifice you have built – positive proof, for all who care to look, that inherited privilege and virtually inherited office is a prescription for bad government.

She’s very fetching. Unfortunately, that’s not an adjective which can be applied to the search engine she’s fronting for. Google doesn’t need a Flash preloader, either, or tell a joke even before it’ll let me search.

True story…

The middle of the night. HE and SHE are in bed. HE is vigorously shaking his wife.

HE: Honey, wake up!

SHE: (waking from a nightmare) What? Huh?

HE: Are you OK?

SHE: (Still disoriented) What? Why did you wake me up?

HE: You were having a nightmare!

SHE: I was? What – did I say anything?

HE: You were yelling.

SHE: Oh, that’s right.

HE: You remember?

SHE: Kind of.

HE: You were yelling, “You’ll never get away with it!”

SHE: Oh, yeah, that’s right.

HE: Who were you yelling at?

SHE: White House Press Secretary Tony Snow.

HE: (suppressing a chuckle) White House Press Secretary Tony Snow?

SHE: Yeah. It was a dream, OK?

HE: OK. What was he doing?

SHE: He was about to molest a child.

(A long beat.)

HE: Was her name Truth?

This week, the US Congress passed a bill, known as the “Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA)“. The corporations fought for (a.k.a. bought and paid for) this legislation, and they’re just jizzy over it. The act severely increases the criminal penalties afforded to animal-rights activists for some activities which were already illegal, and arguably for some activities which are just acts of civil disobedience. But this isn’t really about amending the criminal code; this act is purely political, and its real political goal is clearly to expand the rhetoric of “terrorism” well beyond all sensible bounds. Under this act, for example, you’re a terrorist if you and your friends chain themselves across the entrance to an animal-testing laboratory to prevent trucks coming and going.

Think about that for a moment. According to your Corporate Masters in the Republican Party, a bunch of animal-loving hippies singing in the Merck parking lot is exactly the same as Mohammed Atta and his band of suicidal thugs crashing into the World Trade Center. Isn’t that special? Doesn’t that warm your heart? Aren’t you glad they’re in charge?

Sure, folks, there are some people out there who have committed crimes – against property and people – and in their own minds, they may be doing it for a noble cause. Well, number one, we already have laws on the books to deal with these people, and number two, anyone heard of Paul Hill? How about Eric Rudolph? Why does nobody call these guys “terrorists"? (Any guesses?)

This new law has no other purpose but to chill dissent and shut down peaceful protest. Its impact on actual criminal behavior will be minimal; its impact on the rhetorical war against animal-rights activism and eco-activism will be large. Sure, today the targets may be the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Rights Militia. Today. Tomorrow, the targets will be PETA and Greenpeace. Green is the new Red.

The political program which is being deployed in our country is depressingly familiar. It should be obvious to anyone who actually reads. Those of us who do read have been expecting this for a long time.

We’ve already seen that in our country, those who are tagged as “terrorists” have no rights – no right to contest their imprisonment, no right to trial, no right to see the evidence against them – and they may be jailed indefinitely on the mere say-so of the executive.

“He’s a terrorist,” says George W. Bush, and nobody challenges that, and off goes someone, into a black hole where we will never hear from him again.

Once that bulwark has been established – once there is a distinct class of people without any rights – it only remains to enlarge the sphere of that class. It only remains to enlarge the definition of who is a “terrorist".

It’s a program which has been repeated over and over again, in many times and places. You probably know about a few of the more famous places; repeating them here would be redundant.

First they come for the terrorists.

They may take a while to work their way to you. (How do you feel about eating meat? Inhaling mercury? Having a private conversation with your attorney?) But they will, eventually.

Have you heard about Chad Catagana, the guy who just got arrested for sending fake anthrax and death threats via the mail to a number of prominent Americans whose politics he disagreed with? Turns out that intimidation via post was only one of Chad’s many gifts.

This guy obviously had so much “talent on loan from God", he clearly needed a second career. Or possibly a third.

Not content to merely be a cranky wannabee right-wing commentator (by way of the Free Republic), he also seems to have tried his hand at being a kooky right-wing terrorist-by-mail; and apparently he’s also a bitchy wannabee right-wing sci-fi critic!

Here’s Catagana railing about the state of SF on TV:

How about creating a new sci-fi anthology with none of the puerile baggage of Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry, Rockne O’ Bannon, etc., etc. It is time to end their reign of Left-wing innuendo, their anti-American, anti-mankind cynicism and fatalism.

(See this post for more.)

Boy, I bet he was pissed at Season Three of Battlestar Galactica! After two seasons of the Cylons standing in for The Terrorists, I’m sure he was absolutely appalled at the turn the plot took as the Cylons became the occupying power of the human colony and the humans resorted to suicide bombings. It probably flustered him so much, he got sloppy in his threat-mailings; and that’s how the Feds finally picked him up.

I bet Chad and his fellow travelers on the crypto-fascist message boards were just tickled when Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Jon Stewart received their death threats. Chad had an extra-special chuckle, of course, because he knew something his friends (probably) didn’t. Nevertheless, they were all sure that people who stand in the mildest opposition to the thing that calls itself “conservativism” deserve to die. Doesn’t that just warm your heart?

Unlike moronic asshole right-wingers like Chad Catagana, I don’t gloat when Americans receive death threats in the mail; much less would I ever send those threats. However, I do reserve the right to gloat when moronic asshole right-wingers like Chad Castanga are exposed for what they are, and when they receive a measure of justice for their crimes.

You’ve probably heard about Ted Haggard, the (former) pastor of the New Life Church, in Colorado Springs, and (former) president of the 30 million member National Association of Evangelicals. Until just recently, he was a big wheel in the Christian evangelical movement and in the Republican Party, participating in weekly conference calls with George W. Bush, Karl Rove and other senior strategists of the Party. It’s no secret that Haggard was in the vanguard of a movement which stokes up hatred against gay people in order to cement their political power, which is why there is a poetic element of rough justice in last week’s revelations that in secret, Haggard was abusing methamphetamine and availing himself of the services of a gay hooker.

The specifics are Haggard’s alone, of course, but the general outline of the story is so familiar, it’s become a cliche. Another highly-placed hypocrite gets hoisted by his own petard. Not very surprising, right? But what is it about these particular people that have made it such a cliche? After all, you wouldn’t think that the population statistics of leading evangelical preachers, who all agree that homosexuality is a vile sin, would track the distribution of homosexuality in the general population. In other words, you wouldn’t expect that some fundamentalist preachers are drug-abusing homosexual fornicators; you would expect that none of them are. And yet, here you have it: some of them really are drug-abusing homosexual fornicators, just like some of the rest of us. I’m not judging; I’m only pointing out what it means, which is just this: we’re all human after all.

But there’s another point that occurred to me when thinking about Haggard. One of the cornerstones of Haggard’s career, and the power of the movement he is a part of, and the power of the Republican party he served, is hatred. It might be impolite to point that out, but it’s true. Haggard was a willing participant in a system which stokes hatred, not exclusively against gay people, but largely against gay people. Encouraging and fomenting hatred is a political skill, and some people are better at it than others. I bet the people who are best at hating others are so good at it because they’ve had lots of practice hating themselves.

I feel very sorry for Haggard, and for all the victims of the corrosive ideology that he represents.

Let’s recap:

First there was the national debt, which has ballooned to the staggering figure of 8.5 trillion dollars ($8,500,000,000,000.00!!!) (I hope you have a spare $30,000 handy).

Then, of course, there was 9/11.

Then there’s the war we’re about to lose in Afghanistan.

Then there’s the war we’ve all but lost in Iraq.

Then there was the city we lost to Hurricane Katrina.

And now we have a North Korean nuke.

It’s quite an impressive list, isn’t it? Call it The Axis of Failure.

And the most impressive thing about this list is, it’s all Bill Clinton’s fault.

You’d have known this if you’d been paying attention, but you haven’t, have you? What are you anyway, some kind of fucking Democrat? Stop reading blogs and start watching FOX News, and you’ll know what the score is!

It’s all Bill Clinton’s fault.

George W. Bush and the Republicans had nothing to do with this sorry list of fuckups. I mean, hey, how could they have? After all, the Republicans have only controlled the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, the Pentagon, Wall Street and the Media for the past 6+ years. How could they have had anything to do with all these problems?

But if it wasn’t for Bill Clinton sending out those dirty IMs, we wouldn’t have had all these problems.

Yes, that was him, too.

So now the Bush gang and their lickspittles in Congress have passed the disgusting “Military Commissions Act". This piece of legislation is so vile, so corrupt, so evil in its core that reading its myriad details left me sick to my stomach.

Besides legalizing torture, this bill gives the President the power to arrest anyone, US citizen or not, and hold that person indefinitely, without charge or trial, and without ever having to show cause. The person so detained would have no recourse whatsoever. Should the President or his agents decide to torture that person, there would be no restriction. “Evidence” obtained from such torture would become admissible in court. Some “evidence” could be deemed “Secret” and could not be challenged by the defendant. These are just a few of the shockingly unconstitutional provisions of this new law.

For those of you who only watch FOX News, let me clue you in. This is one of the worst bills ever passed in the entire history of our country. Should we ever regain our freedoms, this day will be considered a low point for the republic. The things that have been swept away by the Republican congress weren’t just legal niceties – they weren’t just nice things we do cause we’re nice and we like to coddle terrorists. Stuff like Habeas Corpus are the very cornerstones of Liberty. Back in the days of the Revolution, there were guys who wanted to arrest people without cause, detain them without trials, and torture people. And guys like Jefferson and Washington and Tom Paine and Franklin had a name for them. They called them Tyrants, and rightly so. They fought a Revolution against them. And when they won, they created a Constitution which enshrined their values and helped to guard against any new Tyrants who might come along. This much should be clear to anyone who paid attention in high school civics class. It’s clear to me, even though I wasn’t paying attention in high school civics.

I had thought even Republicans wouldn’t stoop so low as they have. I had thought that even Republicans might love their country. The proof is now before me. The Republicans Hate America. I’m so angry right now, just to realize that some fucktard could have voted for this and then dared to call himself or herself an American. Well- actually, it looks like 253 fucktards voted for it. Nobody who supported this grotesque bill should have any position of responsibility whatsoever, let alone as a member of Congress. This bill is sick, disgusting, repellent, repugnant, shameful, un-American, and reprehensible.

Or to sum it all up in a word, Republican.

This legislation, if I may call it that; this stain on our great democracy, this spit in the face of freedom, must be repealed or struck down by the courts immediately.

I’m very happy to report that my play Milgram’s War was selected as the Second Prize Winner at the Attic Theatre’s 2006 One-Act Marathon in Los Angeles. A satirical play about prisoner abuse in an unspecified war zone, Milgram’s War was directed by John Timmons and featured Los Angeles actors Dave Huber, Scott Charles, and Rosemarie Li.

I received a $100 cash prize from the Attic Theatre!

Why has it taken me so long to post this news? Well, now you know how my life has been lately.

Bush says bin Laden is really Hitler …

On the very same day our “ally” Pakistan cuts a sweet deal with him. Tells him he’s free to stay as long as he lives a “peaceful life” …!

I’m confused. I’m not sure if this means Pakistan is really Austria or Czechoslovakia. Or maybe Neville Chamberlain. Somebody get back to me on this, will ya?

A Federal judge has ruled that the Bush administration’s warrantless spying program is unconstitutional and has ordered it halted immediately. It’s about time the rule of law was reasserted around here.

I don’t feel too sanguine about this, unfortunately. I expect that the judge’s ruling will be ignored by the people who actually run the program. I expect the administration to appeal the ruling to their reliable friends in the Supreme Court.

(Also, do I smell another TERROR ALERT coming?)

Seriously, here’s the question I’ve been wondering about ever since I learned about the warrantless surveillance program: Who are they really spying on?

In defending the indefensible spying program, reliable blowhard David Brooks says that if the US military in Afghanistan found an Al Qaeda laptop with 4000 telephone numbers on it, he’d absolutely want to have those numbers monitored, implying that liberals like me would rather not. Well, guess what? We’d all like to have those numbers monitored. And there isn’t a judge in the world who wouldn’t issue a warrant based on such information. So that brings us back to the same question: if the NSA was monitoring legitimate targets, why didn’t Bush seek warrants for it? The FISA court is extremely deferential: they’ve turned down 4 requests out of 15,000. It’s also easy to seek a warrant after the monitoring has begun: the law allows up to 72 hours between the start of a wiretap and the seeking of a warrant, and somehow I suspect that nobody would ever be punished if they slipped that deadline by a few days – again, assuming the target is legitimate.

The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from these facts is that Bush and his pals were not monitoring legitimate targets, i.e., they weren’t monitoring terrorists or suspected terrorists.

So who are they really spying on?

Political opponents? Journalists? Business rivals? Other assorted friends, enemies, family? Me? You?

Remember, this program has been going on since 2001 - since before September 11th, in fact. 9/11 only gave them some political cover for something they were already doing.

Who are they really spying on?

I’m a little obsessive about Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs. I think we should all be switching to CF bulbs in our homes. Don’t let the high initial cost of the bulbs fool you: they will save you money in the long run, and you don’t have to change them nearly as often. They use a lot less electricity, so they cost you less and they’re better for the environment. That’s a win-win. Around our house, I’ve been changing them in slowly, trying to get my wife used to the idea. She was afraid that she wouldn’t like the quality of the light, but the latest bulbs actually give off a very pleasant light. She was happy enough with the results that she hasn’t stopped me from switching out a bunch of lights in the house, and she even bought some additional bulbs. There are some fixtures where a CF won’t fit, unfortunately, and there are others attached to dimmers, which are generally CF-unfriendly. Then there are the decorative fixtures, where a CF just looks bad. I’m stuck using incandescent bulbs in all those places, at least for now.

Now, what I’m really waiting for is the day when I can replace all the incandescent bulbs in the house, and all the fluorescents, too, with LEDs! That day is coming, and it’ll be a great day.

I certainly agree with Dick Cheney when he says that the primary election of Ned Lamont to be the Democratic candidate for Senator from Connecticut is a victory for the “Al Qaeda types". After all, Joe Lieberman, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush know very well – it’s simple common sense – that the only way we can protect our airports and airliners against native-born passengers carrying bombs aboard is by launching a ruinously expensive war against a far-off country, and bogging us down for God knows how many more years in a long and bloody insurgency without any idea how we’re going to get out of it. The Defeat-O-Crats know this just as well as Joe, Dick, and George. Like we said, it’s just common sense. But they want the terrorists to win. That’s why this result can’t be allowed to stand.

(Of course, Joe, Dick, George, and all the rest of their buddies only want what’s best for America. They would never, ever exploit this issue for political gain.)

The Washington Post asked about 1,000 random Americans what year the September 11 attacks occurred in – and 30% of their respondents didn’t know. I mean, I guess I always knew Americans were generally ignorant of history. But this makes me feel like I’ve been too easy on America, because we’re not talking about, you know, what year the Gadsden Purchase occurred in. We’re talking about one of the defining moments of our own time, and 3 out of 10 of my fellow citizens can’t be bothered to remember that it happened on September 11, 2002. … or 2000. Or some year, who cares?

Guess which is the best toy? My daughter knows.

My wife gave me a TiVo. I like it a lot more than I expected to, especially considering I am nobody’s idea of a couch potato. I also try to convince myself that I don’t love gadgets excessively, but this is getting harder and harder all the time. For now, though, I’m happy with TiVo.

Of course, right after I thought my gadget lust was sated, this thing comes out…

Tonight is opening night of Attic Theatre’s Homeland Insecurity. Milgram’s War is the opening play.

I was thinking about my friend “Fred” a few days ago, as a TSA officer pulled me aside for “extra scrutiny", and my bag and laptop case underwent a shallow and perfunctory search by his colleagues. My boarding pass had big bold S’s written across it ("Search"? “Security"? “Stupid Waste of Time"? I don’t know). This is now routine for me; I get this treatment every time I fly.

I have written about the absurdity of finding myself on a so-called “No-Fly List” before. Fred is one of my five loyal readers, and he responded to my post by submitting the following comment:

“Oh no - we had better accept that truce! Osama alone holds our safety in his cowardly hands. LOL.”

(Fred is referring to the so-called “truce offer” in the January 19, 2006 tape of Osama bin Laden )

Fred’s politics, you may have gathered, are opposed to mine. Fred didn’t mean any harm, of course, but when he posted this comment, in his own way, he was calling me a cheese-eating surrender monkey. It’s a common accusation hurled at anyone who doesn’t uncritically and unconditionally support every tiny detail of the Republican right-wing agenda. Anyone who isn’t completely with them is just a filthy traitor who wants the terrorists to win, and that includes me, of course. This is what passes for debate these days.

Fred has uncritically supported everything done by George W. Bush and his corrupt crony government since January 2001, up to and including the many steady erosions of our liberty perpetrated by that crowd. My inconvenience at the airport is just a minor aspect of this trend. I’m much more troubled by the news about all the myriad new ways the NSA and the Bush Administration, with the help of the big telecom companies, are creating to ensure that whenever they want to listen in to anyone’s phone conversations or read their email, they don’t actually have to deal with the inconvenience of justifying their actions in front of a judge.

Based on what I know about Fred, I’ll assume he supports this illegal and unconstitutional wiretapping program 100%. I’m sure that he’d say, “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” Fred is also a full-throated supporter of the war in Iraq. What’s really hilarious about Fred, though, is that in all of this, my friend considers himself to be a patriotic American.

I thought that the Fourth of July would be an excellent day to point something out to Fred: The United States of America was formed in direct opposition to the values espoused by its current government. This should be evident to anyone who has taken any time at all to learn about the history of our country. Exhibit A is the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

See, the Founders didn’t believe that if you’re doing nothing wrong, then it’s all right for the government to search through your stuff. The Founders believed that if you’re doing nothing wrong, your stuff is none of the government’s god damned business.

“But we’re in a war,” Fred says. “And it’s a war against a different kind of enemy.” To which we Americans reply: Bullshit.

You know, during the Cold War, from roughly 1950 through 1990, the United States squared off against a nuclear-armed Soviet Union. That was a different kind of enemy, too. The Soviet Army was poised to overrun Western Europe and the Soviet nuclear arsenal was ready to utterly destroy the United States - not merely as a political or economic entity, but as a biological entity. During this same period, the United States underwent a tremendous growth in liberty. There were still many abuses (such as COINTELPRO ), but by and large the Cold War was marked at home with an expanding sphere of personal liberty. All this happened despite claims that the Communists were “a different kind of enemy.” Now, compared to the real threat that the Soviet Union posed to the United States (and by way, the real threat posed by the Russian nuclear forces, which still exist), what sort of a threat is Al Qaeda? The answer is not much. Al Qaeda is nothing more than a band of criminals, who should be brought to swift justice with all appropriate legal means. However, there’s nothing about Al Qaeda which necessitates the creation of a surveillance state.

If the President or anybody else in authority wants to listen in on telephone conversations or read email or detain American citizens, all they have to do is justify what they’re doing to a judge, and get a warrant. Why is that so hard? What is the objection to that? That’s the point of this whole NSA story. It was never terribly hard for Bush to get warrants, but he chose not to. Why not?

The Founders of America knew perfectly well that oversight helps prevent abuses of power.The Constitution was specifically created to stop the USA from becoming a monarchy or a dictatorship. Anybody who wants to call himself an American should know that.

I don’t know which rigidly authoritarian Eastern European police state Fred’s ancestors came from, but my ancestors came to America to get away from that shit. My ancestors, along with a lot of other proud and free Americans, stood together and fought a Cold War and a handful of hot wars to defend the liberties which define America, and I’m not prepared to surrender them because I’m spooked over a bunch of criminals.

Happy Fourth of July!

More Spine-Straightening Reading:
Are we such a bunch of wimps?
Big Audio Dynamite

A couple of weekends ago, we closed the Playwrights’ Platform Summer Festival. I’m happy it’s over, and I’ll be caught up with my sleep in about another month. (I’ll never be caught up with my blogging, but you knew that already.)

The best thing for me this year was the fact that we completely sold out the first weekend of the festival! It was literally Standing Room Only each night! It was a nightmare to keep handling people as they came in, but that was more than compensated for by the enormous energy and joy the playwrights and the performers derived from a packed house. It really makes a difference!

My one-act play Milgram’s War has been selected as a finalist for the Attic Theatre’s 2006 One-Act Marathon in Los Angeles. Milgram’s War will be one of six finalists produced as part of the Attic Theatre’s Written Word Festival, which starts on July 7th, 2006, and runs for six weeks. A panel of judges drawn from the LA theatre community will see all six of the plays produced, and vote on the winning script. The judges’ final ruling will be announced on August 12, 2006, and cash prizes will be awarded to the second and first place winners.

I’m pretty sure this will be the first play of mine produced in LA. Wish me luck!

I have to admit I’m a little annoyed by “writers” who don’t bother to learn how to use their word processors. Since I am a well-known techie in my circle of writers, I often field questions from my fellows, and I’m happy to help. But I’m also dismayed by the lack of knowledge some writers exhibit about their primary tool. Simple things like properly setting up a page can utterly defeat otherwise intelligent people because, as they lamely explain, “I don’t know anything about computers.”

Well, look: if all you want to do is bang out letters, you don’t need to know much about your word processor; it’s push-button simple. There’s not much formatting involved. On the other hand, if you are creating documents of any complexity at all, you should know how to manage that. Plays are rather complex in terms of their formatting. But there are simple commands in every decent word processor to create the formatting you like (and there are programs you can buy that will do the formatting for you, if you’re rich and lazy). It’s not hard, though, and it’s not “computers".

Things like highlighting a block of text, pointing to a menu, and clicking on a command aren’t arcane any more. They don’t belong to the realm of “computer literacy". In the age of the $500 laptop computer, they’re just everyday nuts and bolts stuff. It’s easier than driving a car (and less dangerous). Nobody is too stupid to learn this stuff. If you don’t know how to do it, then you just haven’t bothered to learn it – which isn’t a value judgement, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person – unless you’re a “writer". In that case, as I said, I’m a little annoyed. Are you a writer? Then be a writer. Take the time to learn how to use your tools.

I thought back to this on my vacation, when we took an afternoon to tour Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West. One of the highlights of the tour, for me, was visiting Hemingway’s writing room, which still has his portable Royal typewriter. This humble machine was the instrument Hemingway used to create some of his best work. Hemingway, obviously, was not a mechanical engineer, but I’m sure he knew how to change the ribbon and set the margins on his typewriter. In fact, given the amount of travelling he must have done with it, I’m confident he was able to make simple repairs to the machine.

Now what would Hemingway say to you if you told him you couldn’t figure out how to make your word processor format your document correctly? I’ll tell you.

He’d laugh. In your face.

A memory from high school visited me very vividly last night. I recall sitting in my high school library, and I was working on some science assignment, but I’ve forgotten the details. Nerd that I was (and am), I was solving the problem by creating a program on my handy TI-59 Programmable calculator. To create this program, I had written the program steps – essentially keystrokes – in a column on a couple of sheets of paper. A program would look something like this:

RCL 1
x
RCL 0
x2
+
RCL 2
x
RCL 0
+
RCL 3
=

The paper was at my left hand, and my calculator on my right as I keyed the steps into it (in “learn” mode).

As I was doing this, an older woman – whom I had never seen before or since – toodled up beside my table and without a word of introduction, she said:

“In my day, we didn’t need a calculator to add up a column of figures.”

And then she shambled away, smugly, without even waiting for an answer.

I think she was an administrator of some sort at the school.

PMB replies to a comment from Hey, They Were Right :
why isn’t that “made in china” picture on the cover of the Wall St Journal?

I thought it was pretty obvious that the Wall Street Journal wouldn’t care to call attention to that fact. The business types who read the WSJ have been the enablers of the sale of America to the Chinese, which is the awesomest historical joke I can think of (Also, that the biggest Communist country in the world would become the biggest outsourcing company in the world, once they had the market on Chinese labor cornered – oh, it drips with irony). So, those who already knew what was going on with China, didn’t need to read it in the Journal; and those who didn’t know, well, best not to upset them with the truth.

It was an awkward moment when I had to tell my manager and my coworkers that I had accepted a new job. I was working at a great company, and I was happy to work there, and I liked the people I was working with … but I received a really good offer from another company and it was just – well, it was one of those opportunities that only comes along once or twice in your career. The only problem was that I had been working at the new job for only about a month! Talk about your inconvenient timing. (Well, it’s not the worst problem I could have had; after all, how often do I get a chance to choose between two really good jobs?)

Here’s the thing: I left my last job to go to this new company in February. I didn’t continue my job search at that point – I wasn’t still looking for a new position somewhere else. However, little did I know there was an old friend who was looking for me. The timing was bad, but the job was exactly right – developing software for robotics applications.

Now, I don’t have any problem with selling paper and ink for a living, and there certainly were plenty of technical challenges at this place. Also, I am not easily bored – I find a lot of things to be interesting, and this of course has served me well in my career. But robotics isn’t just something I find interesting, it’s something I am fascinated with, and it’s something I went to school to study. I haven’t done it in a long time, however, having been diverted into various other sidelines by the vagaries of life and career. I thought I had left robotics behind forever, until my friend called me with an offer. It entailed a small pay cut and a big increase in my commute, but it offered the possibility that I could work on something that I loved, rather than just something that paid.

I told my supervisor that although it was awkward to leave a new job so soon, I didn’t want to turn the offer down and end up regretting it for the rest of my life. Fortunately, everyone at the old place let me know they understood. In fact, my immediate manager said that in my position, he’d do exactly the same thing. What can I tell you? They’re great people. They’re hiring, by the way – you should apply.

I’m now almost a month into this new job (– the new new job), and so far I’m really, really glad I jumped. (My friend has said that I was exactly right for this job, and what do you know? She was right.) The work is extremely interesting and the people are better than I hoped for. I jumped right into it and I felt exactly right. I am already making a contribution and it feels really good.

PS: If you’re one of the three people on the planet wondering why I’ve been so remiss with updating the blog lately, now you know. Getting up to speed at two new jobs while helping to raise my infant daughter and producing a small local theater festival has a way of eating into one’s blogging.

PPS: Comments are working again.

I guess a picture really IS worth a thousand words.
On the other hand, a US dollar is worth about 8 yuan – but don’t expect that to last.

I broke comments on my blog today, trying to install a plugin. I’ve been losing the battle against the comment spammers lately, and I thought I would make it harder for robots to post to the blog, but I seem to have shot myself in the foot instead.

I love my TV-B-Gone. It’s been a favorite gadget of mine for about a year now. TV-B-Gone is a universal TV remote with only one function: it turns televisions off. Now I’m not an anti-television fanatic, but I prefer not to be bombarded with TV in certain situations, such as when we go out to eat, or to have a nice drink out. It’s getting harder and harder to find public places without a television clutching at our eyeballs. Lately, even the local grocery store has installed TVs, in the aisles as well as at the checkouts.

Here’s the thing: having a television in the room makes it hard for me to pay attention to what I’m doing. A bit of movement, a flash of color, an unexpected sound, and my eyes will be drawn involuntarily to the screen. It’s very difficult to avoid being distracted by it. This drives me bonkers, since I don’t want to give my attention to something I don’t choose to give my attention to. For one thing, it’s rude to the person(s) I’m out with. Besides that, I am starting to feel cramped by advertising. Is there no time at all when I can be free of the relentless deluge of pitches to buy more?

Well: TV-B-Gone is made for such situations. It is programmed with the OFF codes for hundreds of models of televisions, and it will beam them all out at the push of a button. Most TVs will turn off instantly; the older the set, the longer it will take TV-B-Gone to work its magic. TV-B-Gone is discreet: it’s small, easily concealed, and it looks like any other electronic fob on a keychain, such as one might use to manage a car lock. I have found that even when I feel very conspicuous in my use of the device, it isn’t noticed.

There is a certain level of etiquette involved in using the TV-B-Gone. If the television is truly being watched by someone, I will not turn it off. I won’t turn off the TVs in a sports bar, for example. But you may have noticed that most of the time, a television in a public place is not actually being watched by anyone. It seems to be there for no other reason than the proprietor’s belief that someone, at some time, will wish to glance at the giant blaring tube. In these cases, not only has my use of my TV-B-Gone been appropriate, but I’ll bet that some of the other people there were actually glad that the TV had been turned off.

I recommend that anyone wishing to reclaim a bit of their mental space back from the advertisers go out and purchase a TV-B-Gone.

Last night was the first of two (only two!) performances of No Politics at the Theatre Cooperative, and it was an excellent debut! We had a full house! (In fact, the management of the house turned people away at the door, which I will have more to say about shortly.) The performance itself was perfect! And the audience went right along with it the whole time. They laughed! They gasped! They clapped! I stood in the back of the house with my director, and we were a pretty proud pair as the play unfolded. At each of the critical moments where we knew we’d have to have the audience, we were rewarded with the reactions we’d sought. It was a beautiful thing. After the performance, we had a Q-and-A with me, the director, and the cast. That part was OK, and I did in fact learn some things I hadn’t known about the script, but I’d already learned what I needed to know through the laughter and the applause of the audience, and through the smiles on their faces when the lights came up. The play worked, it was entertaining, and people weren’t sorry they came to see it. Of course, I was extremely blessed to have been paired with such a skilled director and such a talented and energetic cast. (If that hadn’t been the case, and the play flopped, I might be stuck wondering whether it was a bad script or just a bad performance; and I’d probably just blame the performance.)

Last night, we opened. Tonight, we close. It’s a small theatre in a backwater of the city. But today I feel a flush of accomplishment and pride unlike anything I’ve ever felt as a playwright. It’s a good feeling.

For the past three years plus, I’ve been working for Convoq, and it’s been a great time. They’re a great company to work for and I’ve really enjoyed myself. I’m proud of the work I did there and I like to think I contributed to their success.

Now I’m moving on to VistaPrint, where I’ll be doing a very similar sort of work. The technology is a little different, and I’m hopeful that I’ll be up to the challenge of tackling it. I can’t hope that the people at VistaPrint are nicer than they are at Convoq, because the people at Convoq were nicer than at any job I’ve ever had; but I can hope that they’ll be as nice. Wish me luck!

A few years ago, you may recall, some religious fanatics in Georgia managed to push a measure through their local school board mandating that biology textbooks should bear a disclaimer sticker which states:

This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

The fanatics insisted that they had no intention of advancing creationism in the classroom. (Of course not!!) They swore that all they wanted was to have students aware that a diversity of viewpoints existed on the question of the origin of life. This is the same line that the “Intelligent Design” (a.k.a. “Rebranded Creationism") crowd recently tried to use in Dover, Pennsylvania, when they managed to cram down their baloney into the local curriculum. Their main talking point is that we should “Teach the Controversy“. George W. Bush clucked approvingly of this talking point, and said that he thought teaching the controversy was a good idea.

Well, now that they’ve opened the door, I don’t see why teaching the controversy needs to be limited to science education. There’s plenty of controversy between religions, for example. People have fought wars over things like whether priests should be allowed to marry, after all! But you know, I’d like to get even more basic than that. How would the fanatics like it if we put this on the front of every catechism – or even every Bible? Here’s my first draft:

This book contains material about God. Students should be advised that God is only a theory, not a fact. The existence of God has never been proven. Most theologians and philosophers believe that God’s existence cannot be proven or disproven. There are many gaps and inconsistencies in the theory of God, and there are alternative explanations for every phenomenon routinely ascribed to God. Students should be aware of these alternatives, and should know that they do not need to believe in any God at all in order to understand the world and be successful in it. Belief in God can be beneficial, but it has also been known to have many potentially life-threatening side effects, such as feelings of moral superiority, delusional behavior, blind obedience to authority and even the commission of acts of heinous sin in the mistaken belief that God has commanded it. Students should be careful in how they think about God and know that no matter what they believe, the world is as it is. Reality is still there whether you believe it or not.

Hmm. That would be pretty hard to fit on a sticker, wouldn’t it? Well, it’s only a first draft. While I’m working on it, you can take a look at these alternative disclaimer stickers, made up by a biology professor.

Seriously, I think we should teach our children more about religion, not less. I think the Bible ought to be required reading – so that students can see for themselves a) what a magnificent work of mythic storytelling it is, b) what a fundamental piece of literature it is to this culture, c) how many truly appalling ideas it contains, and d) how anyone who thinks it’s literally true either can’t possibly have read it or is an idiot. (or is selling something.)

Oh, and P.S. If you haven’t read my post carefully, you may go off believing that I am hostile to belief in God. That’s not true at all. I’m just saying that you can’t say, on the one hand, you want people to have open minds, but then turn around and declare that some things are off-limits to open minds. Minds are either open or closed.

Thank goodness I don’t need to travel for business any more. A few weeks ago, I had to attend a family function, and there wasn’t any other way to get there except to fly. I don’t often fly, because I don’t do a lot of traveling, and when I do travel, I usually investigate all the other options before I’ll settle for flying. Flying is just too much of a hassle for me. But, sometimes, as in this case, there was no choice.

So just imagine the scene: I had my e-ticket, and I walked up to the electronic kiosk to retrieve my boarding pass. They’re not optional anymore, by the way; the airlines will not let you talk to a human unless there’s a reason you can’t use the kiosk. And, as it turns out, I couldn’t. The kiosk told me it wouldn’t issue a boarding pass, and I had to speak with a person. So I queued up to talk to a service rep. (Typical airline stupidity, I thought. After making me wait in line to use the kiosk so I wouldn’t waste their valuable time talking to a service rep, here I was waiting to talk a service rep, and the whole transaction ends up taking twice as long.) When it was my turn, I walked up to the desk and gave the rep my credit card and my e-ticket. She punched something up on her terminal, and I saw a look cross her face, and I wondered, is this what I think it is? And then I thought, Nah! You’re being paranoid! And then she picked up a phone and spoke into it in hushed tones, and I said, “is something wrong?” And she looked back at me and she said, “No, sir. Nothing wrong.” (Sure there isn’t! I whisper over the phone all the time here! It’s part of the job!) Then she said, “I’m just calling for a supervisor.”

By now I was starting to get a little nervous. The supervisor came over, and he peered at her screen, and he looked at me, and he furrowed his brow, and he asked me for some photo ID, which I gave him. I asked, “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

“Well sir,” he said, quickly looking around to see if anyone else was listening, “it looks like you’re on one of the no-fly lists.”

Ummm…. WHAT?

I started to get a little frightened, because I have no idea what this is going to mean. Am I going to be searched? Am I going to be arrested? Am I going to be forbidden to fly? And after all, I mean, look at me. Even to the untrained eye, it should be immediately clear that I pose no conceivable security threat to the United States, or indeed to anyone. “OK … How did I get on a No-Fly list?”

“We don’t know, sir ; they don’t tell us.”

He then asked me what my middle name was, and I told him, and he thought about it for a few moments as he looked at the screen. Then he punched a few keys, handed back my credit card and my ID, printed up a boarding pass, and handed that to me. “You’re all set,” he told me. “We can’t print you a boarding pass for your return flight, though. You’re going to have to get that at the airport on the way back.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What happens now? I mean, I’m on a no-fly list, right? So how do I get off that list?”

“We don’t have anything to do with it,” he told me. “You’re gonna have to talk to one of the TSA people at the security station.”

I thought about asking why, if I’m on a no-fly list, I’d just been handed a boarding pass, but you know, I really did need to fly that day, and I didn’t want to give them any opportunity to take that pass away.

Anyway, I got to my gate in plenty of time. (The airport is one place where I’m always early.) I was not scrutinized more closely than usual. I wasn’t searched or questioned. I didn’t even have to take my shoes off. I did seek out a TSA person to ask how I should remove myself from a no-fly list.

She had no idea, but she did ask a bunch of other people, including her supervisor, and ultimately, she told me to phone Homeland Security when I got home. They didn’t have the phone number. She just shrugged.

When I finally got to my hotel, I had a little time to do some research. The first thing that becomes crystal clear is that the no-fly list is not highly regarded among security experts. Bruce Schneier, who knows as much about security as anybody alive, thinks that the no-fly list is a bad idea. He writes:

There’s something distinctly un-American about a secret government blacklist, with no right of appeal or judicial review. Even worse, there’s evidence that it’s being used as a political harassment tool: environmental activists, peace protesters, and anti-free-trade activists have all found themselves on the list.

But beyond being un-American, the list doesn’t actually help catch terrorists. Why? Because

Any watch list where it’s easy to put names on and difficult to take names off will quickly fill with false positives. These false positives eventually overwhelm any real information on the list, and soon the list does no more than flag innocents - which is what we see happening today, and why the list hasn’t resulted in any arrests.

I got off easy. A lot of people have experienced much more hassle with the no-fly list than I have. A man who wrote a book critical of the Bush administration, for example, is routinely searched when he flies. Why? Nobody tells him. It’s not unreasonable to believe that the no-fly list is used to harass political opponents of the administration. (Without transparency and oversight, these things are always used to harass political opponents of the administration. Any administration, but particularly this one.)

In one particularly high-profile case, Ted Kennedy found himself on the no-fly list and it took him three weeks to straighten it out. He’s a US Senator, and he’s rich and famous. What chance have I got?

Well, the TSA web site says there is a procedure, but the process is lengthy and the form is, shall we say, intrusive. In order to comply with their procedure, I need to provide my name, current address, gender, place of birth, date of birth, Social Security number, height, weight, hair color, eye color, and home and work telephone numbers. Then I need to supply certified or notarized copies of at least three of the following: my passport, my visa, my birth certificate, my naturalization certificate, my voter registration card, my driver’s license, or my government or military ID card. This really sucks because I don’t even have three of these, let alone notarized! So in order to comply with this procedure, I’d have to track down this paperwork, get it notarized or certified, and then file it with Homeland Security. And then, I’d have to wait at least 45 days, after which TSA will do whatever it is that it does with this information. And after all that? What do I get? TSA is helpful enough in spelling out the futility of my efforts:

“Please understand that the TSA clearance process will not remove a name from the Watch Lists.”

So even after going through all that rigamarole, I’ll still be on the list.

I’m not paranoid. I don’t think I’m on a no-fly list because of anything I’ve personally done or said or written, or because of anything anyone thinks of me personally. The most likely plausible explanation is that some person of interest, at one time or another, either has the name Patrick Brennan or has traveled under the name Patrick Brennan. It’s a common enough name, after all. (Just take a look: http://www.google.com/search?q=patrick+brennan) That person may be a terrorist or just a political foe of the administration; I don’t know. But from what I can gather, the No-Fly list isn’t a list of people; it’s just a list of names. So my name is on it, for whatever reason, and apparently, it’s going to stay there.

And here’s the thing about my experience with the No-Fly list: Whether you’re left, right, or center, there’s something in it to scare the shit out of you. You tell me which scares you the most:

• I found myself (and so can you!) on a secret government blacklist for no appreciable reason, with no explanation given, and which might at any time have grave consequences for me. I have no recourse, no redress, no appeal. There is no due process. I can be denied travel, detained, arrested, searched, or God knows what else, for secret reasons, and I can’t do anything about it.
• I can’t get off the list. The process of attempting this is a Kafkaesque labyrinth of pure pointlessness, seemingly calculated to bring joy to the heart of Soviet-era East European bureaucrats everywhere.
• But, even though I’m on the list, and even though I’m told I’m on the list, a boarding pass is given to me and I walk right through security without the slightest additional scrutiny. Everyone who works in the airport knows it’s bullshit, and pays it very little attention. I surmise from that fact that there must be a large number of false positives. So how many actual terrorists haven’t been caught even though they were on the list?
• What’s the real point of the list, after all? It is manifestly ineffective. Is it merely to provide the appearance that our government is doing something to help stop the terrorists? Is it to harass political opponents? Is it there because our government can’t really think of any better security measures? Maybe a little bit of all of these?

Like I said, you tell me. All I know is, I thought I heard Osama laughing his ass off that day.

I’m very excited to announce that my one-act play, No Politics, is being performed at the Theatre Cooperative in Somerville this February 3rd and 4th! We’ve got an outstanding cast and crew, and I’m expecting it to be a really fun show!

No Politics is a comedy about the challenges of keeping the peace in a family where everybody has a different political opinion. If you’ve ever been to a family gathering where the mere mention of “George W. Bush” or “Bill Clinton” could ignite another War Between the States right in your own home, then this is the play for you! Somewhere between Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and What’s the Matter With Kansas?, No Politics is a hilarious and provocative exploration of a group of people who love each other, even as they look at each other across the Red-Blue divide. No matter what your politics are, you’ll enjoy No Politics!

As part of its New Play Series, the Theatre Cooperative is mounting a special two-night full performance of No Politics on Friday and Saturday, February 3rd and 4th, 2006, at 8:00 PM.

Tickets for No Politics are $10.00 and are available at Theater Mania : (http://www.theatermania.com/content/show.cfm/show/116299)
Or you can call the Theatre Cooperative Box Office at (617) 625-1300.

More information about the Theatre Cooperative’s production of No Politics is available here (http://theatrecoop.org/newplays06.html).
More information about the Theatre Cooperative is available here (http://www.theatrecoop.org/) and here (http://www.theatermania.com/content/theater.cfm/int_show_id/116299).

The Theatre Cooperative is located at 277 Broadway, in Somerville. A map and directions to the theatre can be found here (http://theatrecoop.org/map05.html). A cool bird’s-eye view can be seen here (http://local.live.com/?v=2&sp=adr.277%20Broadway%2c%20Somerville%2c%20MA%2002145).

I’m proud and honored that the Theatre Cooperative has chosen No Politics as part of its New Play Series, and I’m confident that it will be a great show! I hope to see you there!

The thing about changing a baby’s diaper is that it’s not a two-handed job. I need three hands, minimum, to change my daughter when she’s gone “number two". Unfortunately, I only have two hands. So without going into too much detail, please just believe me when I say it’s nigh-impossible to get away from the scene of the crime unscathed. Her little suit is going to get soiled, or the changing pad, or my hands, or more likely, all three, and it’s not a pretty sight.

I was in the middle of one these clean-up operations, and it occurred to me that all by herself, without even trying very hard, my daughter refutes the doctrine of “Intelligent Design". I mean, after all, an intelligent designer would very likely have come up with a built-in method of waste disposal which was a little neater, don’t you think? Say, something which makes it possible for me to change her diaper with only two hands, and avoid leaving streaks on her pajamas (or my hands)? In fact, if we had been intelligently designed, wouldn’t a diaper be unnecessary?

I don’t know, but I’m willing to bet that not one single man in the ID camp has ever changed a diaper. It’s not the only way they’ve avoided reality, so who knows if it would help, but it sure couldn’t hurt.

The web is a wonderful thing. Once upon a time, it was difficult to find rambling, incoherent, grandiose, paranoid delusion in a single narrative. It used to be that the best way to get this stuff was to be a celebrity, in which case the paranoid-delusional out there would send it to you in the mail. Nowadays, you can find a veritable smorgasbord of conspiracy on the web. This is one of the tastier samples out there:

“…The US government controlled all of my conversations since my birth with a computer program, beam weapons, and subliminal messages that went back in time to control us, so that I have been isolated most of my life from the rest of society. Government agents and secret society agents, claimed that the US military and the CIA had been targeting my person and associates with beam weapons, and that the CIA had done most of the time travel beam weapons body possession of my person back in time that changed my physical form from one form to another.”

Much, much more where that came from here.

I admit I’m a junkie for this kind of material. Aside from its sheer surface entertainment value, I’m also drawn to the people who write it, though I’m a little hard-pressed to explain what I find so fascinating about such characters. There’s mental illness here, sure, but there’s more. They’re a little sad, I think, that the world is altogether too mundane to contain their fantasies, or that they didn’t turn out to be as important as they deserve to be. Well … there but for a well-regulated prefrontal cortex (or lack of a good thought screen hat) go I.

Someday I’d like to write about one of these guys.

(ENTER BILL. BILL wears a short-sleeve white shirt with a name tag, a black tie, pressed slacks, and unassuming black shoes. He is in a television commercial:)

BILL:The looks on their faces when I’ve done my best to help ‘em – that’s what makes the job worthwhile.

ANNOUNCER 1:(Voice Only)Bill O’Keestis. Father of three, and a Flawed-Mart employee for fourteen years.

BILL:We’re here to help the customer find exactly what they’re looking for, and when they’ve found it, they need to know that they’re going home with the best price they could possibly pay.

ANNOUNCER 1:He’s been an assistant manager for the past eight years.

BILL:And if that means that we have to work a few hours off the clock, well, we’ll do whatever it takes.

ANNOUNCER 1:He’s finally got enough time with the company to qualify for health insurance.

BILL:I’m not asking my people to do anything I don’t do.

ANNOUNCER 1:And he’s finally got a wage that lets him afford it, unlike most of the people he manages.

BILL:It’s been a long time since I had that health insurance.

ANNOUNCER 1:He used to run the hardware store downtown. But the hardware store isn’t there any more.

BILL:People want low prices!

ANNOUNCER 1:Neither is downtown.

BILL:I don’t mind working a little overtime. Neither do any of the people I manage.

ANNOUNCER 1:Of course, it’s completely against Flawed-Mart policy to ask or expect our sales associates to work off the clock.

BILL:I was only doing what the store manager told me to do.

ANNOUNCER 1:And we don’t expect our managers to alter employee time cards.

BILL:He told me to do that, too.

ANNOUNCER 1:I said, our managers don’t alter employee time cards.

BILL:I have three daughters at home.

ANNOUNCER 1:Of course there are targets to meet. Flawed-Mart works hard to keep payroll costs down, in order to pass the savings to you.

BILL:I need this job.

ANNOUNCER 1:We don’t tell our managers to time-shave. We don’t have to.

BILL:My wife is sick. I need health insurance!

ANNOUNCER 1:And it’s men like Bill O’Keestis that keep Flawed-Mart the kind of place it is.

BILL:It won’t happen again. I swear!

ANNOUNCER 1:A place where you can find the finest Chinese-made products at the lowest rock-bottom prices.

BILL:Please!

ANNOUNCER 1:Flawed-Mart. Always willing to find a scapegoat. Always.

BILL:It’s the fucking media! If they hadn’t run this story, who’d've cared!

ANNOUNCER 2:(Voice Only)Now seeking sales associates in your area! Apply at your nearest Flawed-Mart.

Someone who knows asks the question: If this suite’s a success, why is it so buggy? Andrew Brown’s got a good point. I like OpenOffice and I use it on a daily basis, though I don’t think it’s terribly buggy. It’s never mangled my documents the way Microsoft Word has. However, I have never contributed money or code to OpenOffice, even though I really should.

I sometimes listen to the “alternative music” channel on XM radio. One of their shticks is to use the station ID break (which is wholly unnecessary on satellite radio, isn’t it?) to taunt their listeners, who are hip and ironic enough to enjoy having their hip ironic hipness ridiculed.

So the other evening, while I was driving home, my XM radio said of the alternative music channel, “…the music that used to make you cool … The way the minivan and the stock options don’t now.”

And meanwhile the XM radio display, which usually displays the artist and the track title in big bright amber letters, read:

You’re out of Huggies, alt boy.

And I thought, “I do NOT own a minivan. And we use Pampers, so there.”

They think they know me. Hah!

Was it simple intolerance? Xenophobia? Class resentment? Insecurity? Mental illness? Self-loathing? Or a combustible mix of all of these? Whatever it was, put on display on this video segment from Trading Spouses, it made for a hell of a show (in more ways than one, apparently). This poor woman from Louisiana loses it when she returns from “dark-sided” Massachusetts, and launches into a tirade about being a “prayer warrior,” about “gargoyles,” about the horrible “soltice party” [sic] she attended, about how she had to force her hosts’ children to go to a Catholic Church! I watched slack-jawed – appropriately enough, I suppose – as this woman screamed at her husband and children, humiliating herself and her family on national television. (and I thought, “those girls aren’t going to let their mother ever forget about that“) At one point, she tries to throw out all the crew members who aren’t Christians, and screams, “Get the hell out of my house – In Jesus’s name, I pray.” Brilliant.

It was great TV. I feel sorry for her, because there are no do-overs on national TV, and she’s had her bite at the apple, and she will forever be the fundamentalist crazy fat lady on the TV who doesn’t even know what a solstice is. (Hint: It has nothing to do with Satan.) However, sorry as I feel for her, it was still great TV.

If I had written her words as dialog, I would have been accused of being an anti-Christian – or anti-Southern – or anti-fat bigot, a hater of people who are not like me. If I had written her words as dialog, they would have been dismissed as totally unrealistic and over-the-top. Now I have a counter-example. Serious, steadfast, insular, raging lunatics really exist, utterly convinced of their own rightness and the rightness of their particular version of reality.

It’s sad, and I pity this poor woman and her family – not that she would care. I come from the hated state of Massachusetts, and I’m not a Christian, so I must be dark-sided. For what it’s worth, I agree with Margaret Perrin that astrology, psychics, and tarot cards are baloney; where I part company with Margaret is that I don’t think they’re evil. Also I eat less.

Somewhere at a secure, undisclosed location, a grey-suited government official gives the word to a junior officer. In the other room, a prisoner waits. He knows where a bomb is hidden, and when it’s going to explode. Clearly, the gloves are going to have to come off…

Milgram’s War is a black comedy about the war, terrorism, and torture. It’s a one-act play which we will read for the first time on Sunday, December 4th, at Playwrights’ Platform. It’s not a polemic – I wanted to write a real play which, while being thoughtful and interesting, would also be funny and entertaining. I think I’ve largely succeeded. I’ll see how close to the mark I got on Sunday.

My short plays Simbiotic and dog_eat_dog.com have just been published by JAC Publishing & Promotions of Burlington, MA. I just received some copies, and they really look great. JAC Publishing is lately picking up a lot of the good local work – there are some terrific pieces in their latest crop – and I’m very proud to be counted among that group. If you’re looking for a good play to perform, or if you just want to help me justify my writing habit to my family, please go spend some money there.

Spammers really bug the crap out of me. I manage my own spam filters, and naturally I don’t have any interest in Viagra, so one of the words I add to my filters is “Viagra". If you’ve had email for 5 minutes, you already know where this is heading. It’s true that I no longer receive any mail exhorting me to buy “Viagra". In other words, the filters work! Instead, now I am solicited to buy “V1A G’ra” and “vi 4grA” and “V!a6ra", and so many more permutations that the mind reels.

What are they thinking? I mean, when I set up my filter to reject Viagra ads, wasn’t that sufficient to convince someone that I’m, I don’t know, not interested in buying Viagra? Someone obviously thinks that the fact that I’m not interested in Viagra, spelled correctly, clearly implies that I am interested in “V1A G’ra". Some moron, somewhere, must actually imagine that I’m sitting there saying, “Say, that’s not how I usually spell Viagra! That looks interesting! I think I’ll click on that message!”

And of course, it’s not just Viagra. I’ve had my current email address for an Internet Age (since 1992), and it’s been exposed on the web more than once, so it’s had time to get on a lot of lists. Prescription drugs and every variety of the Nigerian scam are big hits on my inbox, along with viruses, worms, and phishers, and I can’t even begin to tell you some of the varieties of stupid, vile and disgusting spam which comes across my email queue. (Hm, maybe I should rephrase that.) I’ve taken to adding even the common mispellings to my filters, but this is a sucker’s game, obviously.

And obviously, the spammers know that I’m not really interested in “v i g a r a". They just don’t care.

The economics of the spam game are rigged in favor of the spammer, and they’re rigged in favor of the spammer doing things which would be irrational in other contexts (say, direct mail advertising). The marginal cost of sending out a spam is essentially zero, so there’s no penalty for sending out millions of messages to addresses which don’t exist, or to people who aren’t apparently interested. And spammers don’t pay for bounced messages, since they forge the return header. So maybe I’ve changed my mind about Viagra since setting up my spam filters, and maybe this message is the one I impulsively click on the exact moment after I’ve changed my mind, so the probability that I’ll return this message isn’t zero, it’s just really, really tiny; and that is enough for a spammer, since sending the message cost him nothing. Therefore, he has a perverse incentive to beat my spam filters by spelling his product wrong, because even though I said I didn’t want it, maybe, maybe … maybe, I do today.

Talk about not taking no for an answer.

What do you do when your brand of politics isn’t the same as your in-laws’? When you can’t agree on whether George W. Bush is the greatest president ever or … well, not, you might do what Jack and Amy do when they’re hosting their parents. In their house, when the in-laws are visiting, the rule is, “No Politics". But in a family of strongly-held opinions, it’s hard to stick to rules like that…

No Politics is the title of my new comedy, which will be playing at the Theatre Cooperative in a workshop production on February 3rd and 4th, 2006. The performance will be followed by a talk-back session with the director, the cast, and me.

I’ve been writing No Politics since 2003, when I had the sense that a lot of people are experiencing the strains of our current political situation in their families. Family comedy is a new genre for me, and I’m really pleased at the opportunity which the Theatre Cooperative has extended to me in offering this workshop production. If you’re in town on those nights, please consider coming to the show! Whether you vote Blue or Red, whether you’re celebrating or seething at the current administration, I promise you a lot of laughs!

(No American soldiers, “former Hill staffers", or New York Times “reporters” were harmed in the making of this play.)

Lizzie Grubman took her truck
And backed up over some white-trash fuck.
When she saw what she had done
She backed up over another one.

I saw this today while waiting in the checkout line.

You know, most things I see in the supermarket aren’t this honest.

I see that George W. Bush has nominated John Roberts for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, even before Rehnquist’s body is cold. Bush sure can move quickly, when it’s about something he gives a shit about.

Coming up on the Katrina front: first, Michael Brown gets the Medal of Freedom. Second, some sort of commission gets convened to “investigate” (i.e. whitewash) what went wrong.

I just saw George W. Bush on the television, announcing his program to help the victims of the terrible disaster on the Gulf Coast. In response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, Bush has announced that the United States will invade Cuba. “We can either fight the hurricanes in the Caribbean, where they spawn, or we can fight them on our own soil,” he said. Makes a whole lot of sense to me. Let’s Roll!

I’m sorry, but Larry King is an idiot. For proof, see this actual quote from last night’s program :

LARRY KING: “…how can you out-and-out turn down creationism, since if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?”

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, he really said that. And that is why Larry King won’t do two shows a night. He just won’t. It wouldn’t be fair to him or to his audience.

I see that UK Home Secretary Charles Clarke has announced new rules under which foreigners in Britain can be deported or excluded from the country. Under the new rules, “fostering hatred or advocating and justifying violence to further beliefs” makes one eligible for deportation if already in the UK, or exclusion, if one is seeking to enter the UK.

“Individuals who seek to create fear, distrust and division in order to stir up terrorist activity will not be tolerated by the government or by our communities,” said Mr Clarke, promising a crackdown on “preachers of intolerance and hatred". “These are unacceptable behaviours and will be the grounds for deporting and excluding such individuals from the UK.”

I expect, then, that Pat Robertson won’t be traveling to Britian anytime soon.

I wish I had had Fog Creek Copilot a long time ago, but they only just released it last week. It really helped me get out of a jam!

See, I spend a lot of time providing computer tech support for my family. This is more by chance than by design. Most programmers I know are also the designated tech-support persons in their families. (Even though programmers aren’t necessarily the best people to do tech support – but I digress.)

I don’t mind providing advice and troubleshooting for my family (and some of my friends); the way I look at it, it’s one way for me to be useful. However, since my family is spread out across several states, inevitably much of my tech-support duties are performed over the phone. This can be an unbelievably frustrating experience, as anyone who has tried it knows very well. Here’s an actual transcript of a portion of one such conversation:

“Press Start. Yes. Start. Start, in the bottom left-hand corner. Right. Then Programs. No? How about ‘All Programs’? Okay. Never mind. Click your desktop. Your desktop. The big blue area that doesn’t have any windows on it. Behind all your other windows. Okay. Is that Microsoft Office bar up now? Is it on your screen now? It is? On your screen? Okay, good. Now, is there some kind of a menu attached to it? Okay, is there something there that looks sort of like a title bar? A title bar. A title bar – some type of area that isn’t an icon? You’d mentioned that you click in the upper-right hand corner to make it go away, but is there an upper left-hand corner to it?…Yes, go ahead and try, I’ll wait…”

My wife had to leave the room while I was on this call. She later told me that listening to this conversation made her want to stick needles in her eyes. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the luxury of either leaving or sticking needles in my eyes. Instead, I kept trying for another 45 minutes, until finally I gave up. One of these days, when we are visiting family, I will sit down at my relative’s computer and probably take about 2 minutes to make the fix the trivial problem he was having.

I’m not relating this call to make fun. I’m relating it to make a point, and to celebrate a real breakthrough which will provide real relief for this pain.

Providing tech support to family and friends can be frustrating for two reasons. The minor contributor is that although my clientele tends to believe I know everything about computers, inevitably they ask me about applications which I don’t know or don’t use. A much bigger problem is that every computer really is different, and I have no way of knowing how your computer is set up unless I see it.

Example: How do you get to the mouse settings? Well, on my computer, I press “Start", then I hover over “Settings", then I hover over “Control Panel", then I press “Mouse". The way to get to your mouse settings is probably a little different. And once you get to the mouse settings, you may have a completely different set of tabs than I do. So I can’t just tell you over the phone how to open your mouse settings. You and I will have to work together, with you telling me what you see, and me telling you what to press. (If I say, “open your mouse settings,” and you say, “OK, now what?” then you probably don’t need me to do tech support for you. If, on the other hand, you say, “how do I do that?” then you have probably had this experience. Hi, Dad!)

So this is why providing tech support to people over the phone is so frustrating. I’m driving blind, and you’re describing what you see. But we don’t have a shared vocabulary for describing things! It would make my tech support job a hundred times easier if the folks I am supporting knew what I was talking about when I say things like “Taskbar", “Desktop", “Right-click,” and “Title Bar".

It just so happens that just a couple of days after Fog Creek Software announced Copilot, another relative called with a problem. He couldn’t play preview clips from Amazon anymore. He was used to listening to preview clips in Windows Media Player while shopping for music, and suddenly they weren’t working anymore. I asked him if fixing the problem was worth ten bucks to him, and he said yes, so we both hooked up through Copilot.

The great thing about Copilot is that there’s no setup and no configuration, for either of us (although one of us has to send a credit card payment through first). After that, it enables me to see exactly what’s on the other person’s screen, and to take command of the keyboard and the mouse of the remote machine.

I would never, ever have been able to figure out and fix my relative’s problem the old way. He had inadvertently blocked the content from Amazon in his 3rd party firewall software. In order to find it, and fix it, I had to do a bit of poking around, not entirely sure myself what I was doing, because I’d never used this particular piece of software. But fixing it, once it was found, was trivial, and that’s why I think Copilot has a big future ahead of it – and my wife will be spared sticking needles in her eyes.

Thank Jesus for James Dobson! See, without insights like this, I would never have realized that I am (are you ready for this?) – gay!

…most homosexuals “…were not explicitly [so] when they were children. More often, they displayed a ‘nonmasculinity’ that set them painfully apart from other boys: unathletic … somewhat passive, unaggressive and uninterested in rough-and-tumble play. A number of them had traits that could be considered gifts: bright, precocious, social and relational, and artistically talented. Tip: Discern whether your boy struggles with feelings of ‘not belonging.’”

Say – I thought to myself when I read these words. Wasn’t I “unathletic, passive, unaggressive and uninterested in rough-and-tumble play"? I bet my gym teachers thought so! Wasn’t I “bright, precocious, …and artistically talented"? Yeah… Didn’t I feel like I “didn’t belong"? Yeah… hmmmm….

<a moment of reflection later…>

Oh My GOD! I must be GAY! And worse than that – I’ve been in deep closeted denial all these years – even though I am totally uninterested in having sex with men! My wife sure will be surprised when she finds out! (So will all those girls I dated…most of them, anyway…)

Dobson also helpfully blows the whistle (no pun intended) on the Homosexual Campaign Against Children. For a while after reading the article, I was puzzled, because it didn’t convince me that there actually is a Homosexual Campaign Against Children (outside of Dobby’s paranoid mind). See, for reasons I can’t quite discern, he doesn’t actually bother to back up his charges with any, um, you know, sources and facts. But never mind! If Crude-but-Inaccurate Stereotypes and Proof by Assertion^[*] are good enough for Jesus and Doc Dob, they’re good enough for me!

Since my recent revelation, I’ve changed my mind about Ronnie Paris, Jr., who really took James Dobson’s teachings to heart. I used to think that this man was a despicable murderer, a man who would kill his own child for the sake of his ignorant rage and prejudice. But now, I realize that Paris was only trying to help his Boy Become a Man^TM. See, I know now that thanks to Dobson and papa Paris, little Ronnie (3 years old and GAY!) has been spared the prospect of growing up and becoming a part of the Homosexual Campaign Against Children; and countless other little children, as yet unborn, have been spared the prospect of being little Ronnie’s victims. Instead, I’m confident that even now, up in Heaven, little baby Ronnie has been cured of homosexuality by Jesus’s magical touch, and the Apostles are showing him how to have some rough-and-tumble fun in the great outdoors, just like Real Men Who Aren’t Homosexual do.

This is something my wife just brought home for the baby. It kind of creeped me out.

I’m calling it the Sesame Street™ Baby’s First Gallows™.

Don’t tell me it’s a jungle gym, either, because if this was a piece of exercise equipment, the Muppets would be able to reach the floor with their legs. They also wouldn’t be permanently attached to the thing. That’s all I’m saying.

It’s pretty clear from her profile in New York Magazine^[1] that Isabel Kallman is an intensely annoying person, and I’m really glad I don’t know her. (Not that she’d get caught dead knowing me, but that’s a different story.)

This woman has found her own uniquely psychotic solution to the anxiety which faces almost everyone who becomes a parent: that we won’t be good enough, that we’re not up to the job, that we’ll fail as parents.

Her solution is equal parts denial, shameless shilling, amphetamine abuse, business contacts, more denial, and gobs of cash. She’s launching a TV network! She will become the Martha Stewart of parenting, the “Alpha Mom” who will show all the slobs out there how much better she is than they are. Her empire will grow “from television to radio, to broadband and wireless, and on into toys, beauty products, books, and music … The end goal is for the Alpha Mom brand to become like Oprah, … who is ‘the template for success in media today.’”

Oh, yeah. Somewhere in her to-do list, there was a baby. How does she find time to take care of her child while she’s out conquering the universe? Answer:

[T]he hottest experts… talked about the right way of parenting: …You wear him on your body so that he gets used to your voice, develops language skills more quickly, “becomes,"… says Isabel, “a smarter baby."… But she could never pull that one off. The more Isabela’s child demanded of her, the more she went out to learn. And the more she learned, the more she was told to stay close; and the more people she hired who could do that for her.

This was motherhood’s magic bullet, the most valuable lesson Isabel learned in her studies: “It takes a village.” Isabel quickly hired one. Her son was just 2 weeks old when she retained a night nurse. When he was 5 months, “I started realizing I needed to get out more,"… and she brought on a nanny. Then after about a year, when she started working, “I obviously needed more help,"… so she hired a regular babysitter as well; also often employing her father and an Alpha Mom intern.

Isabel began to see that all things were possible again, that with her village, she could pursue the extraordinary goals she had both for herself and for her child. While the village watched him, she set out to master motherhood.

Where “motherhood", I guess, means something other than “being a mother to your child.” To Isabel, it means, “getting rich(er) by exploiting other people’s feelings of inadeqacy.” As for the actual motherhood thing, well hey, that’s what servants do while you master motherhood.

Hey Isabel, here’s a hint. There’s a name for a village when the “villagers” are actually your employees: it’s called Potemkin.

footnote: I couldn’t honestly tell from the article whether the writer was fawning over Isabel or mocking her, even sometimes in the same sentence. Then again, they mocked Martha, didn’t they? And look where she is.

Thanks to my lovely wife for pointing out this article, via a little pregnant.

It’s the 36th anniversary of the first moon landing, and Google is celebrating by debuting Google Moon. This is just the thing when you need driving directions from Mare Tranquillitatis (site of the Apollo 11 landing) to the Descartes Highlands (where Apollo 16 set down). Just don’t look too closely at the moon…

At several points in my career, I worked for companies which did business with the US Government, and as part of that work, I was sometimes obliged to handle secret information. Before I was allowed to do so, I was thoroughly checked out by the government, and I was required to fill out a small mountain of paperwork to promise that I would never, ever reveal anything that I learned in the course of my work.

I don’t remember any more whether I actually filled out a Standard Form 312, but it’s likely that I did, and if I didn’t, I certainly filled out something which is essentially the same. Everyone who handles classified information fills one of these out. That applies to drones like me, and it applies to everyone else up the chain, all the way up to the top. It’s worth reading, but intimidating.

The sort of information I used in these jobs was boring and technical, and was classified at the lowest level of security, but even so, I’m here to tell you that the US Government takes the protection of that information very seriously. In addition to the original mountain of paperwork, I was also required to submit to random drug screening (the first and only time in my career), the office was subject to periodic security audits, and I worked in a locked and electronically sealed windowless steel vault, where I couldn’t even take a bathroom break. The hard drives for the computers were locked up in a safe every night, and the computers could absolutely never be left unattended with the drives in them – even though they were in a locked vault. I once spent an entire night in the vault while the computer churned through a complex (and secret) calculation. In order to start working on a more normal day, I would have to enter no fewer than seven access codes or passwords (that’s counting doors, safes, and computers, and we didn’t have swipe cards). Of course, disclosure of the secret information I handled, even if inadvertent, was a firing offense, and would also be investigated as a possible crime.

Now, I say the information was boring and technical, but I have no idea where some of it came from, and for all I know, it was extremely valuable. It’s not for me to say whether “my” secrets were important secrets. I made a legally binding promise to keep them secret, and I have kept that promise. That’s not just because I fear the legal and career consequences of breaking that promise – it’s because I want to do what’s right, because I obey the law, and because I love my country. (Apparently these days, unless you shout that loudly in public, often, then it’s not true.)

I’m fairly annoyed, therefore, at some talking points being circulated around the outing of a covert CIA employee (Valerie Plame) by somebody in the Bush White House (Karl Rove, probably Scooter Libby) as an act of political retribution against somebody (Joseph Wilson) who had the nerve to use facts to criticize the one of the administration’s main rationales for attacking Iraq (they were supposedly developing nukes, and buying uranium from Niger). Some of the people defending Karl Rove say that the identity of Valerie Plame wasn’t a “real” secret, or an “important” one. But Karl Rove doesn’t get to decide which secrets are freely available to share, and which ones aren’t. He made the same promise I did, and he should be held to the same standard. Period.

Eric Rudolph was sentenced yesterday to two life sentences for a series of deadly bombings he committed. Rudolph issued a statement in which he justified his crimes by claiming to be a part of the movement to end abortion. One of Rudolph’s bombs did in fact target a women’s clinic (and killed an off-duty policeman), so that checks out. I didn’t know that abortions were also being performed in gay nightclubs and at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, where two more of Rudolph’s bombs exploded, but that just goes to show that you learn something new every day.

Of course, after having killed two people and injured 150, Rudolph’s spree, in the end, never prevented a single abortion. There are plenty of people out there, who are both for and against a woman’s right to choose, who work on the issue legally and nonviolently. Some activists have found common cause in working from people on the opposite side of the issue to reduce the number of abortions. If Rudolph was so concerned about abortion, there were lots of things for him to do that didn’t involve explosives. Unfortunately, they did involve hard work, and apparently that just wasn’t exciting enough.

I don’t think Eric Rudolph is a hateful Christianist terrorist of the Paul Hill variety. I think it’s closer to the truth to say that Rudolph never really cared about abortion. What Eric Rudolph really wanted was to be the hero in his own action movie. He only needed a cause, but not to give his life meaning – he needed a cause as a plot device. In action movies, it doesn’t matter what the backstory is; all it needs is a good guy, a bad guy and the thinnest veneer of plausibility. Beyond that, nobody cares as long as the chases are cool and the explosions are big.

Rudolph got his explosions and his chase scenes. It’s too bad he left so many destroyed lives in his wake. It also kind of sucks for him that the real heroes of the story were the men and women who tracked him down and brought him to justice. May he rot in prison, and may we never hear from him again until the footnoted obituary; with luck, nobody will even remember the name by then.

My blog is currently under attack from the vermin known as comment spammers. You may have heard of these cockroaches. Striking from cleverly-hidden bases in their parents’ basements, they boldly overwhelm the defenses of unsuspecting blogs’ comment systems, turning what was once an interesting, fun and useful tool for socializing and intelligent discussion into advertising space for their useless and parasitic web sites. In this case, it’s impotence pills and hair-loss products. I mean, gosh, where’s a guy to go when he needs to pill to produce an erection, after all? Or something to prevent hair loss? These products are so difficult to get, you know? Clearly, he needs to turn to the comments posted in a very obscure, rarely updated, and nearly-unread blog!

In the time it took for me to write this post, 13 new spam comments appeared. No doubt by the time I’m done typing this sentence, another two or three will show up. Fun, huh?

I’ve had to put up some additional defenses against these worms, and I’m confident that I’m not done yet. For one thing, I will have to personally approve all new comments. For me, that means that simply maintaining this blog, and guarding it against fat assholes with no talent, no brains, and more time than they can usefully employ – oops, sorry, I got off on a rant there. Now where was I? Oh yes …

For me, it means that guarding my blog against these lowlife scum becomes yet another chore, not unlike the daily grind I already endure guarding my email from mail spammers. USENET isn’t even useful any more due to spam. It’s sad and pathetic that there are jerks who have nothing better to do than waste good tools in this way, and it’s even sadder that people who have something to contribute must spend their time fighting the abuse.

Words to make all free people proud:

I wish to speak directly to those who came to London today to take life.

I know that you personally do not fear giving up your own life in order to take others – that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society and I can show you why you will fail.

In the days that follow, look at our airports, look at our seaports and look at our railway stations: Even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfill their dreams and achieve their potential.

They choose to come to London, as so many have come before, because they come to be free; they come to live the life they choose; they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don’t want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.

    – London Mayor Ken Livingstone, in the aftermath of the bomb attacks in his city.

“Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.”
    – Senator Rick Santorum

Even though he wrote it three years ago, I only read Rick Santorum’s vile words today, and I have only one thing to say to a man who blames my home town for the sickening pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church : Go Cheney yourself, Rick.

Isn’t it so very Republican of him to do that? Pedophile priests were and are all over the country. In every diocese, the institutional response to child abuse at the hands of priests was to cover it up, to shuffle the offenders around, to protect the institution at the expense of the victims. When people finally had had enough of the institution’s lies and evasion of responsibility, they finally organized and sued. (And where did they do that first? Boston, that’s where.) But Rick doesn’t have any issue with the institution, which enabled the abuse and covered it up. Cardinal Law is a big wheel in Rome now, after all. Not an issue, says Rick. It had nothing to do with the institution. Instead, Rick blames it all on Boston (which is code for Liberals and Democrats).

See? Says Rick. It’s all the Democrats’ fault. How very, very Republican of him.

Meanwhile, on Planet Reality, a Kentucky diocese has agreed to a $120 million settlement with fifty years’ worth of children abused by priests, the largest ever such settlement. A similar settlement has been reached with the Diocese of Orange County California. Gee, it seems to me that Kentucky and Orange County are pretty “conservative” places. What would Rick say about that? Never mind, I already know. He’d blame the Democrats.

“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.”
    – Pig-Faced Hack Karl Rove, impugning my patriotism again.

And then there were the people who saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and figured that it was the the perfect pretext for the big war in Iraq they’d wanted for years. There were also the people who saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and prepared to use it as a campaign issue.

Oh, hey, those were the same people – and Karl Rove was leading the whole pack of them.

Recycled old joke of the day: How can you tell Karl Rove is lying?
answer: he’s still breathing.

You may recall that a few weeks ago, Dick Cheney said that the Iraqi insurgency is in “its last throes.” That would have been good news, except for that fact that it’s not true, and a lot of people got a good laugh out of how Dick expects us to keep swallowing his bullshit. I mean, they would have gotten a good laugh out of it, but some of them got killed for his bullshit, and the rest of us didn’t think that was very funny.

Well, it turns out that Cheney wasn’t lying to us, he was just misinterpreted. “Look it up in the dictionary,” he said. “See? It says right here: ‘throes (n.) : a violent period’. So there, I was right.”

Well, sure, Dick, except, you know, it wasn’t the “throes” bit which we thought was a stretch. We know it’s violent in Iraq right now. It was the “last” part.

“Oh, that,” said Dick. “See, I was misquoted. I said last throes, but I meant to say, lasting throes. You know, I meant, “these throes are gonna last a long time.”

Well, how long would that be? Dick said 2009. Other people, people without a track record of lying, say, oh, maybe, 2012.

Andrew Sullivan posted this remembrance today:

Today is the late math genius’s birthday. Turing was a brilliant Englishman, one of the founding fathers of computer science, and a patriot whose cracking of the Nazis’ Enigma Code was critical to winning the war against Hitler. His amazing work was rewarded by being offered the choice in 1952 of choosing chemical castration or imprisonment for being gay. Two years later, a broken man, he killed himself. Today is a day for honoring him and the countless men and women over the centuries whose gifts and dignity were obliterated by ignorance, oppression and hate, hate that is still being excused and perpetrated today. May those of us lucky enough to have been born in their wake never forget what they went through, never forget the cruelty and evil they had to confront, and do everything we can to prevent these wounds being passed to the next generation.

I wish I believed that a lot has changed since the 1950s. Turing was an atheist as well as an intellectual and a homosexual. I am confident that he would not last long in the political climate of these times, regardless of his accomplishments and contributions.

Last week, I was assigned to fix a very subtle bug in our product, and I found myself very hard-pressed to figure out what exactly the problem was. A little bit of digging convinced me that it wasn’t a client issue, and I am primarily involved in the client side of our product. I asked a couple of the server guys what their opinions of the bug were, and we narrowed the search down to a single flag which was apparently not being set correctly… even though we could plainly see the code which was setting the flag correctly.

This is one of those bugs which causes programmers to tear their hair out in frustration. We can see it’s correct, the code is clearly correct, yet the output is clearly wrong. Of course, in this case, as in most such cases, we aren’t seeing what we think we’re seeing, which is even more occasion for a programmer to tear out his hair.

My colleague discovered that in an obscure bit of server-side JavaScript code, there was a simple and maddeningly easy-to-miss error. In fact, the flag was being set correctly, but the thing that it was being compared to wasn’t being set correctly, due to a pseudo-syntax error in the JavaScript code. My colleague had inadvertently typed a ‘:’ where he meant to type a ‘.’, so a line which should have read
foo.bar = 1;
turned out as
foo:bar = 1;
Instead of creating an object property foo.bar which equals 1, we set a global variable bar which equals 1, and the statement which does that is labelled as foo. (How useful is that?) Later on, we evaluate flag == foo.bar, which will always be false, because foo.bar was never initialized, and this was the proximate cause of our bug.

Technically, the typo is not a JavaScript syntax error. JavaScript lets you define statement labels for reference by the break and continue statements. Therefore, when my colleague ran this code, the compiler gave him no indication that there was an error of any sort. However, there were three opportunities for JavaScript to help us out before this trivial error propagated into something which sucked up several expensive hours of our company’s time. See how JavaScript failed:

(1) the typing mistake was repeated three times in the file, creating three labels with the same name, and JavaScript never complained that we were recycling labels.
(2) the label name was identical to a previously defined object, and JavaScript never complained that there was a collision between the names. (this is a “feature” of JavaScript.)
(3) when bar, a previously undefined variable, was written to, JavaScript never complained about that, either. (this is another “feature".)

JavaScript is great, but it’s a simple language meant for small-scale rapid development. It’s not a good match for large-scale system programming, and unfortunately we’re locked into it here for a number of good reasons. Though they’re good reasons, we could still use better tools, to scrub this code for more errors I’m sure are lurking in there somewhere.

At the same time, I can take comfort in the fact that we’re still a small company, so the impact of our typos aren’t very widespread. Some of the worst bugs in history have been due to simple typos, such as the Mariner 1 crash. Of course, nobody would dare to write a control system for a rocket using JavaScript. No, instead, they’d use a serious, industrial-strength programming language for the job, like Ada.

My play Get Out of My American Way, which was performed at the Fourth Boston Theater Marathon in 2002, has been published by Baker’s Plays in their BTM4 Anthology, which is on sale here. (Better late than never, I suppose).

My short plays dog_eat_dog.com and Simbiotic have been accepted for publication by JAC Publishing. These will be available shortly as individual books.

Finally, my short play Bits was performed at the 33rd Annual Playwrights’ Platform Summer Festival of New Works this June, and will be performed at the XXX Annual Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Original Short Play Festival in July. I’m not sure how I feel about performing at an XXX festival, but I am proud that the Platform has been at this longer than Sam French.

I started a Blogspot blog today: patrickmbrennan.blogspot.com. This is another idea I had to get around the trouble I’ve been having with Blogger. No FTP issues between Blogger and Blogspot! (Well, what would I expect? Probably Blogspot’s servers are sitting right next to Blogger’s; the publish was certainly quick.) And I can blog again that way. Seriously, I’m starting to get annoyed by this problem. How many blogs do I have to maintain, after all? The count is up to four at the moment:

www.pbrennan.net : Where I want to blog, but Blogger won’t let me.
www.pbrennan.net/wordpress : Where I don’t want to blog, but I can.
patrickmbrennan.blogspot.com : Ditto.
world.std.com/~pbrennan : Where I used to blog, but I don’t anymore.

Obviously, I want to pare this list back down again. To ONE blog. Are you listening, Blogger?

Sometime around 2:00 this morning, I was in the baby’s room (having taken the baby and left my wife in our bedroom to sleep), trying unsuccessfully to rock my daughter to sleep in the glider rocker. At least she was calm. I was only half-awake at the time, in my bathrobe and slippers, and when I looked down at my feet I saw one cat dozing next to my left foot, and the other cat soundly sleeping with her head propped on my right foot. And I thought, this is a great image. Here I am, the ur-Daddy, father and protector of small creatures.

You see now what sleep deprivation does to you?

So, I’m thinking about just giving up and moving everything from Blogger to WordPress. Blogger has taken three weeks so far to fix a simple FTP issue with my ISP, and they haven’t responded to repeated email requests for information. Rather than rely on them, I’d rather have my own solution installed on my server. It’s just simpler all around, except for one major problem – migrating all my posts from Blogger format to WordPress format. There is an easy way to do it, but I can’t use the import script everybody else uses, because that relies on Blogger’s FTP working correctly – gotcha!)

Do I really want to do this? Suffer through weeks of translating hundreds of posts, and more weeks of tweaking my template, until I’ve got some reasonable approximation of what I’ve had for the past couple of years? I don’t know. It’s not as if I need a project to fill all my time – I’ve got those in spades.

<whine>All I wanted was a simple tool which enabled me to make timely posts to my website without fussing with a lot of nitty HTML code. Why is everything so much more complicated than it seems at first?</whine>

When I think of Caribbean fun, I think of Bill O’Reilly.

That’s why I’m really disappointed to discover that the Caribbean cruise with Bill O’Reilly has been cancelled for lack of bookings.

I can’t imagine why. I mean, really, ask yourself: Who would you really rather be on a cruise boat with, than a loudmouth obnoxious control freak, boor and serial sexual harasser? It’s like being stuck in an elevator with this guy, and he’s yelling, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut UP!” Or else he’s whispering in your ear, “once people get into that hot weather they shed their inhibitions, you know they drink during the day, they lay there and lazy [sic], they have dinner and then they come back and fool around…” For a week. And you’re seasick.

Fun, huh?

I saw this in the convenience store today:

“Lottery: It may change your life.” (As in: it will make you poorer.)

Above the register, it says, “Chance of a Winfall: HIGH. Don’t forget to play!”

Also helpfully posted near the register: “ATTENTION LOTTERY PLAYERS: Help is available for you or someone you know who has a gambling problem.”

(I think anyone who believes they stand a “HIGH” chance of winning the lottery has a gambling problem. Or else they’re high.)

I took a crack at writing my own lottery slogans.

     “Baffled by MATH? Play the LOTTERY!”
Or
    "The LOTTERY: The only place where a one-in-a-million chance is considered high!”
Or maybe:
    "The LOTTERY: it takes one million losers to make one winner.”

The flood didn’t stop while we were away from the house. When we returned from the hospital, my wife and I found a stuffed mailbox, and a significant proportion of that was made up of offers from credit card companies. We get offers addressed to me, we get offers addressed to her, and we get offers addressed to some person who has exactly the same first name, last name, address and credit history as my wife, but a different middle initial.

Now, I don’t know about your house, but in ours, we have clearly defined gender roles, and that means I dispose of the credit card solicitations. (Here’s a hint: we don’t need any more credit cards. We’re doing our best to get out of the debt we already have, as we’re being eaten alive by interest charges.) I used to just tear the solicitation letters up and throw them away, but in our town, we have to pay for every bag of trash we put out to the curb. It doesn’t seem fair to me that I should pay for the credit card companies to keep offering me something I don’t want. Therefore, I have adopted the vastly more amusing tactic of cutting up the offer letter into tiny pieces, stuffing it into the postage-paid envelope, and mailing it back to them. Let them pay for postage and for someone to open it and process it; maybe someday they will take the hint! (Yes, I know, they can’t very well figure out who it came from, so they can’t take us off their lists by this criterion. I kind of like it that way.)

One of the offers in our latest batch, however, really caught my eye, just as I was about to put the scissors to it. This one was festooned with the United Airlines logo, and was offering a Visa card tied-in to United’s frequent flyer program.

Wait a minute: Is that really United Airlines offering a credit card? United Airlines? What’s going on here?

United Airlines, you may recall, was recently allowed to default on its pension fund under the terms of its bankruptcy. The pensioners will see their benefits cut by more than half, and those benefits won’t even be paid by United. That will be done on the taxpayer’s dime. In other words, you and I, the ordinary taxpaying public, are now assuming billions of dollars’ worth of promises that United Airlines made. This will be the largest corporate-pension default in US history. (For now. Now that this smooth move has been given the green light, expect it from every mega-corporation saddled with a pension fund it would prefer to forget, starting with all the other airlines.) And yet, even though they need the court to shield them from their creditors, they have the wherewithal to plaster the country with credit card solicitations.

Isn’t that great? United Airlines, filing for bankruptcy protection, gets to stiff a whole bunch of people it had promised to pay. At the same time, thanks to the noxious bankruptcy bill recently rammed through Congress, this is exactly what you and me and United’s employees and retirees are now expressly forbidden to do, even when we get in over our heads and are forced to declare bankruptcy. A lot of United’s retirees are going to be forced into bankruptcy themselves by this event, since many of them will no longer be able to afford their bills when their pensions are cut by 50% or more. Yet, these people will not have the option of going into any kind of meaningful bankruptcy protection. Hooray for Republican hegemony as they force-march us all into debt slavery!

As the bankruptcy bill was being pushed through a Congress bought and paid for by the banks and the credit card companies, its champions repeated the endless refrain: “people should pay their debts.” Well, sure. That’s just good old-fashioned common sense. We can all agree on that. People should pay their debts, and they shouldn’t be able to discharge those debts except under extraordinary circumstances.

But if you aren’t careful with how the Republicans use words, you might have only heard what they said, not what they meant. See, when they said, “people should pay their debts,” you might have thought they meant that everyone, everywhere, in all circumstances, should honor the promises they make. And if that’s what you heard, good for you: you are a very good, right-thinking American. And you’re also wrong.

See, these are the new rules. When people make promises to large, well-connected corporations, those promises must be kept at all costs. On the other hand, when large, well-connected corporations make promises to ordinary people, those promises can be broken at will. If you don’t think this will affect you … just wait.

In the meantime, your friendly neighborhood Congress has some advice for you: don’t get sick. Don’t get laid off. Don’t get divorced. Don’t let anyone in your family get sick. Don’t let your employer steal your pension. And on top of everything else, don’t get behind on your monthly interest payments. The payments are more important than your food, your rent, your medical bills, or anything else. After all, there are a lot of K Street lobbyists who want that money. They are depending on you. And they’re not about to let you let them down.

PS: Tired of the bullshit? Join the Plastic Revolution - http://www.plasticrevolution.org/

My wife was trying to calm down our infant daughter a few nights ago, and she was walking around with the baby, singing to her. She thought I was asleep, and she was singing:

Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky
Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are.

What a lame song, I thought, and I picked up the next verse, singing my own version of the song, surprising my wife.

We know you’re a ball of gas
Held in tight by gravity,
Excited to incandescense by
Nuclear fusion in your core.

You are very far away,
And your light takes many years
To reach the people down on earth,
Where we watch you twinkling.

Which incidentally is caused
By turbulence up in our air,
Which differentially refracts
The light you’re shining down on us.

Our Sun is a star like you
Which our earth is circling.
Lots of planets have been found
Orbiting stars just like you.
Twinkle twinkle little star
Now I know just what you are.

I think I’ll keep cleaning this one up and adding to it in anticipation of teaching it to my daughter. In the meantime I’ll settle for having made my wife laugh so hard she had to set the baby down.

This is me and my brand-new daughter.

How did this happen so fast?

I use a lot of different bits of software on a daily basis. The heavyweights in my software universe – the companies that supply a hefty percentage of that software – are Microsoft, Macromedia, Adobe, Palm, Mozilla, OpenOffice, and WordPerfect (Yes, WordPerfect). I run their applications every single day.

This lineup has a new member lately: Google. I have suddenly found myself in the position of using a lot of Google software, and doing so on a daily basis. Of course I’ve been using Google for search for a long time (who doesn’t?), and I’ve been using Blogger for a couple of years; but it’s only been in the past couple of months that I really incorporated Google into my daily routine, with a new Gmail account, Picasa and Google Desktop Search. I just never noticed until now that I’m running a lot of Google software.

Why shouldn’t I run a lot of Google software? It’s always high-quality, and it’s usually free (although Gmail and Google Search are both laden with advertising). What has surprised me is the sudden ubiquity of Google in my life. Since I’m not a reflexive upgrader, I am usually behind the curve on these things. Based on that fact, I’m guessing that Google has achieved a similar ubiquity in a lot of other people’s lives.

Another indicator that Google has grown up: Bill Gates is bothered by Google. He’d like to do to Google what Microsoft has done to countless other entities in the past. I mean, take a look at my list again (except for Microsoft): Macromedia, Adobe, Palm, Mozilla (standing in for Netscape), OpenOffice, and WordPerfect. It’s a Microsoft hit list. They’ve all been beaten and bruised by Microsoft; some of them driven out of business by Microsoft. Most of them made technically superior products, but were routed because Microsoft could leverage its Windows monopoly against them and “cut off their oxygen". (The only reason Mozilla and OpenOffice are still around is that their products are offered for free.) Google, with its own free and web-based products, will be much harder for Microsoft to compete against. It will be interesting to see what happens as these two square off against each other.

I expect to keep using Google software for a long time to come. Whether this will be a good thing or a bad thing, I can’t say just yet. In the meantime, it is great software.

“I played around with [Firefox] a bit, but it’s just another browser, and [Microsoft’s Internet Explorer] is better …. So much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?”
     – Bill Gates, quoted on the BBC

You said we’re headed to war in Iraq – I don’t know why you say that. I hope we’re not headed to war in Iraq. I’m the person who gets to decide,not you.
      – George W. Bush, moral coward, Crawford, Texas, Dec. 31, 2002 (audio)

When he said these words, he’d long since decided to have a war in Iraq. More evidence of that surfaced on Sunday, when the Times of London revealed that Tony Blair had already pledged British support for the war in April 2002. For the Republicans and other math-challenged reading this, that’s at least 8 months before Bush claimed that “I hope we’re not headed to war in Iraq.” He said that with a straight face, but I bet he was snickering on the inside, because he had been planning to invade Iraq since at least April 2002. Some people say the planning went back to January 2001.

In Britain, Tony Blair is in a little bit of trouble because the independent media over there are revealing that he was telling his public that he had no plans to attack Iraq, even though the decision had long since been made. In America, where there is no independent media to speak of, it’s not even a story. So your president is a big fat liar? Yawn. That is so 2002. Nothing to see here, folks – oh, look, runaway bride!

PS: Why is Bush a moral coward? It’s not just that he’s a liar. It’s that he won’t even tell the truth for policies he supports. Rather than stand up for the things he wants, and face the consequences, he prefers to let other people do that for him. See Josh Marshall’s excellent analysis of this brand of cowardice.

Dice has pretty much fixed their embarassingly bad ads for tech jobs. I can’t find a whole lot wrong here, because they’ve finally quit trying to write an ad that’s supposed to read like code. See: they’re writing comments in the code instead! (Clearly, Dice has received the recent memo that Comments Are More Important Than Code. In any case, comments always compile.) And find_great_jobs() is a perfectly respectable function call. But … isn’t that an unbalanced brace at the end? Or is the matching brace just somewhere up beyond the top edge of the ad? I guess we’ll never know…

The Retail Alphabet is a fun little diversion. Twenty-six letters are presented by each separate puzzle (there are four of them at the time of this writing). They are all lifted from various trademarks and logos you see every day. Your task is to identify the company or product associated with each. The letters are presented out of their familiar context, so it’s a challenge.

It’s all a bit of harmless fun, but while you’re playing this, try to compare the number of corporate logos you can easily identify to the number of birds or leaves you can easily identify. What does that say about us?

For a related bit of fun, have a look at this bit of satire. (Satire, yes, but more true every day.)

The Iraq War in 30 Seconds is a cool Flash movie giving a British perspective on the Iraq War. Sums it up pretty well, and it’s entertaining, too!

“Winning or losing is not the issue for ‘we,’ in my view, in the traditional conventional context of using the word winning and losing and of war.”
        - Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Yes, he actually said that, and he said that in response to the simple question: “Is the United States winning in Iraq?”

See: they’re just words. Words can mean whatever you want them to mean, you know? Whatever you define them to be.

(Has anyone sicced Cardinal Ratzinger on this guy? Cause he’s sounding more and more like a relativist to me.)

Anyway, if Don Rumsfeld can play games with the meanings of words, so can I.

So if you define “the United States” to mean “the current administration in Washington";
and if you define “in Iraq” to mean “about the war in Iraq or its planning and execution";
and if you define “winning” to mean “lying";

…then YES! The United States is winning in Iraq!

Makes me proud to be an American.

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. – Woody Allen

Everyone thinks about their mortality. Probably, everyone thinks about how to transcend it. There sure are plenty of ideas out there, as there have been for thousands of years (many of them have plenty of currency today). Of course I’ve been thinking about this because my wife and I are about to participate in the single most popular mode of achieving immortality, that is, we’re about to have a child.

I don’t want to get specific in this post, though, because I want to do something a little different with this post. I want to solicit your opinion this time out. Since everyone brings their own assumptions to the question, I don’t want to prejudice your answers.

So: How do you plan to live forever?

Feel free to interpret the question as you like. Consider it as a spiritual problem, a philosophical problem, a metaphysical problem, or even a biological problem. Everybody has something to say about immortality, especially their own.

Post anonymously if you like, but please post. I will follow up in a later post, though I can’t promise how much later, because baby is due any day now.

It seems Jeff Gannon, aka James Guckert, aka Bulldog, aka “Only a top”, was in and out of the White House a lot. And the Secret Service wasn’t keeping very good track of his goings and comings. He seems to have been admitted to the White House on several occasions when there was no press briefing, which begs the question: just what was he doing there, and for whom?

I mean, let’s not forget that the guy is a whore. Not figuratively. He is literally a prostitute who has sex with other men for money. He says that’s all in his past, but you know, wouldn’t anyone claim that? And given that he’s been caught in an extensive net of lies, why should we believe him anyway?

So, once again, what was this “aggressive top” doing at the White House, with such sloppy record-keeping applied to him?

“On several of these visits, Guckert either entered or exited by a different entry/exit point than his usual one.”

It’s just sooooo easy to turn that into a cheap and gratuitous joke. Good thing I don’t have to – you thought of it yourself. You have a really filthy mind, don’t you?

You might have missed it, if you weren’t looking. Another couple of servicemen were killed in Iraq this weekend.

Did you read that? See it on the news?

That’s in addition to the 24 dead and 58 wounded after four car bombings in Baghdad and Tikrit. In general, the level of violence in Iraq seems to be back on the increase. And in other news, George W. Bush just got Congress to pony up another $80 billion (borrowed money, of course) to finance the war and occupation. Remember when he promised this occupation would fund itself? Oh, never mind. And so, the numbers just keep climbing: 1,571 killed and 11,888 wounded, and financial costs of approximately $300 billion. (I’m expecting the Congress to rubberstamp this request, just like it always does.)

Hey, did you hear? We’re Still At War! In fact, we’re kinda losing it!

Was this news on the front page of any newspaper? Did it lead any newscasts? It wasn’t even easy to find on the Internet.

Did you catch those great “elections” in Iraq back in January? It’s been three months since then. Let me ask you a few questions about those great elections. Who ran for office? Who won? Who were you rooting for? Do you even know? Do you even care?

And now, three months after these great elections, this Glorious Victory for Democracy, where’s the government? The fact is, they still haven’t formed a government – three months after elections!

(If you’re still keeping score at home, 127 American service members have been killed and 1,118 wounded while we’ve been waiting for the Iraqis to form a government.)

Who’s driving this clown car? Oh, wait: I already know.

We’re now two years into the Second Bush War. It’s been two years since “Mission Accomplished,” and we’re still bleeding over Iraq, literally as well as figuratively, blood and red ink in alarming volumes, and I’m still sitting here wondering just what the fuck was the reason to get us into this mess again?

And while I’m wondering that, it seems like the Iraq War has disappeared from the national news. Why do you suppose that is?

Have we just become numb to the steady drip-drip-drip of American and Iraqi deaths? Or has the news been squelched by the media, reduced to the minimum volume necessary so that they can still say with a straight face, “we covered it – now move along"?

Well, on the one hand, broadcasting quagmire and failure is bad politics: it reflects badly on the liar and fool who got us into this mess, who is well-known to be nasty and vindictive to those who are seen to disagree with him or his party. We have abundant evidence that the mainstream media are either on the Republicans’ side already (e.g. Fox News) or have been effectively bullied into meek submission to the Republican agenda (e.g. CNN). On the other hand, quagmire and failure is a real bummer: it just doesn’t sell advertising, a lot of which is incidentally bought by Republican companies.

And so, it makes all kinds of sense that we have a steady turn-down of the news from Iraq. Slowly it is scrubbed from the news, and the air minutes and the column inches are fed a different diet. Instead of hearing about anything which actually has any bearing on our lives, the newscasts are led by Scott Peterson, then Robert Blake, then Michael Jackson, then Terri Schiavo, then John Paul II, then Charles and Camilla, then Michael Jackson again, then Cardinal Ratzinger Pope Benedict XVI … Who’s next? Who cares, as long as the public is sufficiently distracted?

And on and on and on it goes, while somewhere, in a far-off land, another American lies bleeding to death in the street. While you’re watching Fox News tonight, his body will be secretly conveyed under cover of darkness back to the United States, safely shielded from any media attention, and he will be quietly buried and forgotten. His government, so eager to get into this war and now with no fucking clue how to win it or otherwise disengage, is keen to just forget the whole thing, and hopes that you will want to just forget it as well.

I guess it’s just the Patriotic Thing to Do.

Last week, I had a short play of mine performed in a festival in New York. The festival producers had asked me to supply a short bio for the program, and I sent them something which began like this:

Patrick M Brennan is a playwright trapped inside the body of a computer programmer…

I think that’s a pretty good joke. At least it’s a not-bad joke. All right, it’s a joke!

Anyway, when I went to see a performance of the festival, this is what was written in the program:

Patrick M Brennan is trapped inside a computer programmer…

ummm… What?!? I’m trapped inside a computer programmer? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? They took my joke and they turned it into a confusing non-sequitur. Thank You! I’m sure that made a terrific impression on the audience!

See, I’m a writer. I think about the words I’m writing. Even when I write a bio, I’m careful about my words. Words are all I have. Screwing up an actor’s bio would be bad, but not nearly as bad as screwing up a writer’s bio.

Anyway, of course I know they didn’t do it on purpose. Someone clearly typed my bio into the document for the program, and made an honest mistake.

Since I sent the bio to them over email, however, it kind of baffles me that Copy and Paste seems beyond their comprehension …
(as does actual proofreading …)

No, it’s OK. I’m over it now. Really. I didn’t even mention it to them. I only blogged it for the whole world to see!

No, really, it’s OK. The medication will kick in any moment now … really.

(mumbling to self:) “trapped inside a computer programmer.” Oh, hey, that’s a great joke. Yeah.

That was a bolt out of the blue! Taking a train back to Boston from New York, I picked up a newspaper and learned that my two favorite companies have decided to get married! How exciting!

The past five years of my professional life have been dominated by Adobe and Macromedia. When I was working for Adobe, I was helping to build LiveMotion, and directly competing against Macromedia’s Flash. I have spent the past three years with Convoq, developing a client application in Flash, and Adobe has been less of an issue in my life. I don’t know how the merger will affect the direction of our product, but I’ve always considered Adobe to be a very well-run company, so I’m not really worried. Besides, with a baby on the way and another release of my own company’s application to get out the door, I’ve got bigger fish to fry.

That doesn’t mean I don’t wish I’d bought some Macromedia stock, as I’m sure this guy did.

10. Kirk jostles better when the Enterprise is hit.

9. Kirk doesn’t have some kind of foofy accent.

8. Kirk rips his shirt at the drop of a hat. Picard keeps pulling his shirt down, as it keeps riding up, and that really bothers him. (What is he hiding?)

7. Kirk : Screw the Prime Directive, let’s kill something!

6. Picard delegates the landing parties to his first officer; Kirk insists on doing it himself.

5. Picard delegates the overacting to his first officer; Kirk insists on doing it himself.

4. Kirk drinks coffee ; Picard drinks tea. ‘Nuff said.

3. Kirk makes sure to show all the alien babes the “Captain’s Log".

2. Kirk: Red-blooded American. Picard: French? British? We’re not really sure, but it’s definitely suspicious.

1. Kirk: not afraid to wear a rug.

Boy, if there’s anything we should learn from the Terri Schiavo case, it’s that we should all make living wills. Believe me, I’ve learned my lesson, and I decided that the best way to make sure that my living will is honored is to post it on the web. (That way, there won’t be any doubt as to its authenticity.) So here goes:

LIVING WILL
I, Patrick M Brennan, being of sound mind and body, do affirm and declare that this is my LIVING WILL, and reflects my decisions regarding my care in the event of a medical condition which renders me incapable of making informed decisions for myself. I make this declaration of my own free will, without any force or coercion whatsoever.

IF, in the judgment of my physician, I am suffering from an irreversible condition so that I cannot care for myself or make decisions for myself and am expected to die without life-sustaining treatment provided in accordance with prevailing standards of care:

(a) I would very much like my breathing yet mindless body, the bag of reflexes which I have become, to be reduced to being a political football, to be kicked around the media by the likes of Tom DeLay and Randall Terry in the pursuit of a cheap political stunt which ensures them a few days’ worth of headlines;

(b) I definitely do not want my spouse to be making any decisions for me whatsoever; I think that’s best left to my parents. After all, once upon a time, when I was capable of exercising my own free will, I chose of that selfsame free will to spend the rest of my life with my spouse, and I have only spent years sharing my home and my bed with her. Therefore, clearly, not only do I share none of my religious, moral, and ethical values with my spouse, but she also knows nothing about my religious, moral, and ethical values. My parents, on the other hand, who visited our home on holidays and weekends, and with whom we occasionally have spoken on the phone, know all about my values, which is why they wish to impose their values on my decision regarding how I control the end of my life. Therefore, they should have the final say, not my spouse.

(c ) Speaking of my spouse, if I were somehow capable of receiving and integrating outside stimuli and understanding what was going on around me, it would please me immensely to watch on live television as my spouse’s name is repeatedly dragged through the mud in the House of Representatives by crass and opportunistic politicians, simply for attempting to fulfill what she perceives to be my wishes and my best interest.

(d) I’d also like someone to explain to my spouse exactly what she’s doing wrong. Apparently, she didn’t realize that when the Republican Party claims to be the party of getting government off the backs of the people, they weren’t talking about gravely personal decisions within a family. When it’s an industrial plant, owned by Republican donors, belching tons of toxic filth into the air and water, that’s a private matter, and the government should get off those donors’ backs. When it’s my family, struggling to come to terms with my basic wishes regarding the end of my life, that’s where government belongs.

(e) And I’d really love it if somebody could make sure that there are boatloads of creepy anti-abortion protesters hanging around outside my hospital room, especially if they could harass my spouse as she is coming to visit me. That’s because it’s not bad enough that she’s dealing with my illness and impending death – she should be hounded by crazy fundies with their own agenda who claim to be “pro-life” but who literally couldn’t care whether I live or die.

(f) I’d be particularly pleased if the astronomical costs of my care placed a horrible burden of debt on my spouse, and if, thanks to the very same Republicans in the Congress, she would be utterly denied the ability to get out from under it. It would make my afterlife a real joy to know that she would lose our house, our savings, and all our property, literally everything we have worked together to build; and she would be reduced to a life of poverty, working only to pay off what she could of her debt burden, and that without our savings, our daughter would be deprived of any chance to ever receive a decent education, and therefore a way back into the middle class, which is where we were before I had my accident.

(g) Speaking of costs, I wouldn’t want any of the burden of my illness to fall on the government. That’s why I support the Texas law that George W. Bush signed when he was governor, allowing hospitals to overrule even the decisions of the family, and finally remove my feeding tube once there isn’t any more money left to pay for my care. You see, once my spouse is finally bled dry by the costs of maintaining my breathing, bedsore-ridden carcass in a state of living death, I know that the Republican-dominated Congress, which just gutted Medicare and Medicaid, has ensured that there will be no money left; and given the choice between honoring their commitment to “life” and their commitment to tax cuts for their corporate friends, well, you know – the TV cameras won’t be running forever. Once they’ve been turned off, so will my life support. Finally.

(h) And of course, nothing would please me more than to have the whole sad saga of my family’s suffering splayed across FOX News and talk radio as some cheap maudlin moralistic circus, as a feeding frenzy for the kind of bottom-feeding media types who need my story to sell advertising, and who will be on to the next soap opera in another couple of weeks.

Signed on the 23rd day of March, 2005, by my hand and seal:

/s/
Patrick M Brennan

What’s the fastest, safest, cleanest, most efficient way to travel ever invented? And is it a good idea to buy one? That’s the question Claude and Shannon are asking themselves, in my new ten-minute comedy Bits, which is having a performance in New York this April and a short run in Boston this May!

In New York, I’m very pleased to be returning to the American Globe Theater’s 11th 15-Minute Play Festival, running April 18th-30th. (For information or ticket reservations call American Globe Theatre at 212-869-9809, or go to Theater Mania. Call early, they’re always sold out!) I was at this festival two years ago, and it’s one of the best venues I’ve ever played in. I’m pleased to note that Stacie Scaduto and Don Downie, the same actors who took Bits up in its last performance in New York, are performing at the American Globe.

In Boston, this will be my first time being part of the Devanaughn Theater’s Dragonfly Festival, running May 5-22nd. (Go to Theater Mania for tickets.)

Each venue has a different cast and director, so I am particularly excited to see what different groups of people are able to find in this script. Besides that, these two festivals are absolutely worth the price of admission ($15 in both cases, I think).

Dice persists in posting bad code on their online ads!

Since their last ad, they’ve definitely improved, but good syntax doesn’t mean their logic has gotten any better.

The ad still says, in plain English: “If you’re salary isn’t good, go to Dice.com. If your salary is good, suck it up.”

What?

I thought “Suck it up” meant something like “endure pain bravely", or “be strong“.

Maybe somebody knows an interpretation of “suck it up” that I’m not aware of. Maybe it means “good for you!” or “way to go!", or “guess you don’t need Dice.com!”

I have a suggestion for their advertising folks:

if ((You.workFor("Dice.com") || You.haveAdClient("Dice.com"))&&(You.writeAdCopy()))
{
   You.stopTryingToWriteCode(please);
}

The basic idea of marriage is to raise kids. So says Fox News’s John Gibson, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. He’s got it exactly right. Marriage is for raising kids. That’s why we don’t allow anyone who is infertile to get married, birth control and single parenthood are illegal, you have to prove you’re not married before getting a vasectomy or a hysterectomy, and divorce is compulsory once your children have grown up (and strictly prohibited beforehand).

Can you believe this moron got paid to write this column?

How the hell can I get a job like that?

I have had a CLIE NX-80V for a few weeks now, ever since my last CLIE died on me. (It turned out it was only playing dead – but it didn’t rise from the grave until after I had the new machine in my hand.) Even though I knew that the NX-80V was an excellent machine in nearly all respects, I had resisted upgrading for a couple of years anyway, since I knew the NX-80V used Graffiti 2, and I feared that Graffiti 2 would be a disaster. My initial fears have proven sadly true. Graffiti 2 sucks. I tried really hard to adjust, to unlearn eight years of Graffiti and relearn the new system, and although it doesn’t suck as badly as I thought at first, it’s still bad enough that I had to finally find an alternative.

I’ve been using Graffiti ever since 1997, and it only took me a couple of weeks to reach a plateau of proficiency at which it was really useful. For short pieces of information, i.e. phone numbers or email addresses, it was excellent; and in settings such as classes or business meetings, I could very nearly take decent notes with the thing. (I still prefer paper and pencil for free-form notes, because it’s faster and less error-prone, plus it’s less confining than ASCII text – I can draw diagrams, for example. At the same time, it’s always nice not to have to type up my notes – because they’re already typed.)

That was all with the original Graffiti. I find that with Graffiti 2, I can’t achieve anywhere near the speed and low error rate I had with the original. The worse failure, however, is that with Graffiti 2, I am concentrating far less on the content I am entering, and far more on how to enter it, than I was used to.

Here are three examples of how much Graffiti 2 sucks:

Using Graffiti 2, it is common for me to attempt to enter a word ending in an L, followed by a space. Usually, this case ends up with a T at the end of my word. (Turning “the full effect", for example, into “the fulteffect".) This error is extremely common, occurring 90% of the time.

Graffiti 2 almost always (75%) renders my H’s as N’s.

I tried to enter someone’s phone number, in which a group of digits began with a 1. What did I end up with? Not “999-999-1999″; I got “999-999+999″.

These failures are representative, but they are only a subset of what I was seeing. Graffiti 2 is constantly frustrating. It sucks.

The original Graffiti isn’t just single-stroke, it’s stateless, meaning that when I’m making a stroke, I don’t have to think about what my last stroke is. Each stroke uniquely maps to a character. If Graffiti 2 was stateless, if, for example, a left-to-right stroke was only ever the horizontal line on the T, then it would be OK. But sometimes, when I draw a vertical followed by horizontal, I mean “T", and sometimes I mean “L-space", and so I have to think more carefully about what I’m doing. I have to remind myself, “I just drew an L. Now I either have to wait a second before entering my space, or I have to draw my line down on the bottom of the Graffiti entry area". But I only want to be thinking about the text I’m entering, not how to enter it. With Graffiti, I didn’t have to think about it. With Graffiti 2, I do. Therefore, Graffiti 2 sucks.

Why does Graffiti 2 suck so bad? Based on its name, you might expect that Graffiti 2 is the second revision of Graffiti, with improved functionality and more features. If that’s what you thought, you’d be wrong. Graffiti 2 is a direct result not of any engineering or marketing decisions, but of a court decision that the original Graffiti infringed on a patented Xerox technology called Unistrokes. I don’t know a lot about the lawsuit, but apparently the court decided that Graffiti infringed Unistrokes precisely because of its one-to-one correspondence between a single stroke and a character. Therefore, Graffiti 2 is pretty much a crippled Graffiti, crippled just enough that it doesn’t infringe on Unistrokes.

(To be precise, Graffiti 2 is a slightly modified version of CIC’s Jot, itself created to sidestep the Unistrokes patent. The effect is the same. Jot had been trying to supplant Graffiti for years without much success. Now they have succeeded.)

Now, I know Palm didn’t want to foist this garbage on me intentionally, but they did try to put lipstick on this pig by claiming that Graffiti 2 is “easier to learn", “more natural and intuitive” than Graffiti, but that’s baloney. If it was really easier to learn, I’d have achieved a similar level of proficiency with it by now. Instead, I’m far behind where I was at the same point in learning Graffiti.

Graffiti 2 isn’t all bad. To be fair, its design has some good points. I like Graffiti 2’s “a” and “e", for example, and using the middle of the writing area for capitals is a good idea. The trouble is that its good points don’t go anywhere near outweighing its deficiencies. And the deficiencies are all in the state-bound nature of the system. It’s like any other aspect of product design: good design gets out of your way and lets you concentrate on what you’re trying to accomplish. Bad design forces you to think about details of how the machine works, details which are irrelevant to your task.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. For example, I could always switch to using one of the way-hot Xerox PDAs, using Unistrokes.

Oh, wait. There’s no such thing as a Xerox PDA, with or without Unistrokes; and there never has been. (Clearly, Xerox loves to develop technology that it never sells; and then it gets mad when somebody else successfully brings something similar to market.)

Since I do have a Sony CLIE, I can use the built-in keyboard, or one of two (two!) on-screen keyboards.

Another alternative, built into the NX-80V, is a system called Decuma, which is definitely very cool. This is a good high-resolution handwriting recognition system which isn’t as fast as Graffiti, but it is more fun to use. I use it occasionally, and I can see how someone might use it as their primary means of entering text. Check it out and try it.

For a really good solution to this problem, however, what I really needed was to be able to install the original Graffiti on my new handheld. Fortunately, a little desperate digging produced a procedure for accomplishing just that, provided I had a Palm handheld with Graffiti already installed; and fortunately, I had one at hand: my CLIE NX-70V, the rumors of whose demise had been exaggerated. The procedure was easily followed, and worked exactly as advertised.

Now, I have a late-model CLIE with the original Graffiti installed, and it’s great. And that’s the way I’m going to keep it, until Xerox sues me.

I’ve always had a problem with SUVs. They’re too big, they’re too expensive, and they get lousy gas mileage. Although there are lots of legitimate reasons to own a truck, most people who buy SUVs don’t need them, and only buy them for their status value. “Look, I can afford this!” (Yeah, well probably you’re overextended.) Plus, people don’t seem to modify their driving habits when they buy SUVs, so behavior which is just dumb in a car becomes positively dangerous. People drive their SUVs too fast in all kinds of weather, they follow other cars way too closely, and they don’t know how to maneuver their trucks in tight corners.

Of course, it’s none of my business what anyone else drives. You know? I’m drive-and-let-drive. If you want to spend more money than you can really afford to buy more car than you know how to drive, hey, that’s what you want to do. It’s dumb, but it’s none of my business.

But then you had to go and rear-end my pregnant wife’s car with your giant gas-sucking monstrosity! I think that’s when it becomes my business.

My wife was flung forward in the collision, crushing our unborn child between her and her steering wheel. She was rushed to an emergency room, where I met her, and we spent an anxious day in the hospital, getting tests done and monitoring the baby to ensure that she wasn’t hurt … though of course we won’t know for sure until she’s born. In the meantime, my wife began having serious contractions, and the doctors had to give her body a pharmacological reminder that baby’s not ready yet. It was a difficult and stressful day for both of us. Needless to say, neither one of us made it into the office that day.

I feel very confident that right after you nearly killed my wife and my daughter, you got to your office only a little late. You probably resented the imposition of having to talk to the police.

You claimed that there was ice on the road. This was on the second clear and sunny morning after a light snowfall. I don’t think there was any ice on the road; there wasn’t any when I visited the site later that evening. So what does that say about you? Well, what does an SUV say about almost anyone? You just hit a pregnant woman, and what are you worried about? You’re worried about whether someone’s going to actually demand any accountability from you.

Look, I think you just weren’t paying attention. That’s not an evil thing in of itself, but for God’s sake, how can you not be paying attention when you’re driving a 3,000 pound Deathmobile? It’s irresponsible, is what it is. You have more car than you know how to drive.

You could kill somebody with that thing! And you don’t seem to care about that. Idiot!

PS: Here’s a timely link about the false economics of owning an SUV. It’s not (usually) a rational choice, but I’m not pretending people buy SUVs for rational reasons.

My wife and I went to the first day of childbirthing class this morning, where among other things, my wife is supposed to learn some techniques to help her relax. In order to put everyone in the proper frame of mind, the instructor had set up a CD player to play relaxing music for the expecting couples. Which by itself, I don’t have a problem with. I like to relax. I like it when my wife relaxes. And she’s going to have to get good at it by the time she goes into labor.

But you know what? We don’t get relaxed by any chimey-ass New Age music. When we came into the classroom, the CD player was playing something consisting of harp accompanied by pan flute. You know, yoga music, or upmarket massage music. Or downmarket massage music, for all I know. The kind of music that is usually accompanied by incense, and although it was very, very earnest, it was not soothing. It was, in fact, a little irritating. Plus, as this was the beginning of the day, we were wondering just what we had wandered into. As the harp finished plinking out its intro, and the pan flute whistled out its first few notes, like a sad little Zamfir, my wife turned to me. And she asked, “What do you suppose the name of this song is?”

“The name of the song is: ‘Pleeeeeeease’.”

This is my cell phone. It’s a Handspring Treo 300 running PalmOS 3.5. It’s fun and easy to use, and since it’s also a PalmOS device, it’s convenient in lots of other ways (I’m not worried about losing my address book if I lost the phone, for example). I use it as my main email client when I’m traveling. I’ve noticed lately that I tend to use the speakerphone feature on this thing a lot, and I hold the phone in front of me as I speak. Then, when I’m done, I flip the cool lid down with a nice satisfying click.

This is my PDA. It’s a Sony CLIE NX-80V running PalmOS 5.0. I’ve found it to be enormously useful in organizing my life. I keep my address book, my calendar, my to-do list, a calculator, a sketch pad, a web browser, another email client, and a notebook for writing. A lot of my work began life as a couple of paragraphs jotted down in the Palm Memo Pad. I haven’t written a whole play on this thing yet, but I could if I needed to.

The coolest thing about this PDA, though, is that it’s more than just a PDA. It’s also a still photo camera, a movie recorder, and a voice recorder. Imagine that: it records three things…

I don’t know if anyone’s planning to come out with a phaser that runs PalmOS, but I’m pretty sure it’d be a very popular device, and I’d be right in line to get one if I could. I guess once I’ve started down that road, it’s only a matter of time before I started wearing form-fitting shirts in bright primary colors and high-heeled black leather boots, so probably it’s all for the best that no such product exists.

I don’t think it’s an accident that these things look like Star Trek gear. Or maybe the prop guys on Star Trek were just pretty good industrial designers. Either way, I can’t open that Treo without wanting to ask Scotty to beam me up, and I can’t open the CLIE without wanting to scan for lifeforms. If I had the PalmOS phaser, I guess I’d be looking for Klingons or malevolent computers to shoot, so again, it’s probably all for the best that no such product exists.

At what point does it become more trouble than it’s worth to own a computer? Or several? This is the question I’ve been asking myself after a rather hellish string of failures. In the space of a single week, my main computer checked out, my Sony CLIE fizzled, and my office Thinkpad came down with a bad case of Adware. In the process of restoring from these failures, I came dangerously close to the point of fundamentally questioning whether the investment of money, time and energy I put into these machines is really paying a worthwhile dividend.

Now consider. I have been a computer enthusiast for as long as I can remember. I have programmed computers for my entire adult life and my whole professional career. Not only do I have a lot of knowledge and experience regarding how to work around computer difficulties, I have also gained a certain level of immunity from computer frustration. Plus, I am fanatical about keeping my data backed up (and so far this week, I haven’t lost any data), so I don’t have any anxiety and frustration around that. But even with these provisions in place, the past week has been really trying. What do ordinary people do when they’re faced with these issues?

I’m starting to think they just grin and bear it, until they can’t take it anymore, and then they just bail. My father was so frustrated by the internet, for example, that he permanently disconnected from it, deciding that email and the web weren’t worth the hassle of spam, viruses and pop-ups. He hasn’t bailed on computers entirely, but I know that he is constantly experiencing inexplicable failures and weird behavior with his applications. He asks me about them –- a lot -– but he uses obscure programs which I am not familiar with (like Serif), and I rarely get a chance to sit down with him at his computer to see the behavior, so I can’t help him much.

Another couple of friends of mine, after valiantly trying to make do in the Windows world, have decided to bail into the Macintosh world. Macs seem to cost more upfront, but apparently they are happier and less frustrated now. That’s not really an option for me, not yet, but who knows? A couple more weeks like this one, and I might be tempted.

I thought my friends and my father were just outliers. I’m beginning to wonder about that now.

So what was my week like?

First to fail, naturally, was my main computer, the one I do most of my work at home with. I have a real love/hate relationship with this laptop, which I bought back in August 2004. When it works, it works great. It’s fast, it’s powerful, and it’s very pretty. The trouble is that in the six months I’ve owned this machine, I have brought it back to the shop to be serviced four times, and it’s been in the shop for a total of about a full month. The last time I brought it in, it was because I had plugged a USB device into the computer, only to watch it turn off like a light bulb. (No blue screen, no restarts, just –- pffft! – dead.) It took the manufacturer a month to decide it wasn’t worth repairing the motherboard, so they just sent me a new machine. This time, I plugged a USB device –- not the same device! – into the computer, and promptly lost the use of all my USB ports. Granted, that’s better, and less panic-inducing, than simply checking out, so that’s an improvement. But it still puts a crimp in my ability to use the computer, because now I can’t print, I can’t use my mouse, I can’t Hotsync. I couldn’t even use the built-in flash card readers, because they’re USB devices internally. So now, for the fourth time, I brought this computer down to the service department (which is an hour’s drive from my home), to be fixed or replaced by, oh who knows? Let’s just say, at some unknown date in the future. Maybe in another couple of weeks. When I complained to the service manager about the level of reliability of this machine, this is what he actually said:

“If you were to come into the store today, I would refuse sale of this machine to you. This machine is pressing the envelope of what’s really possible in a laptop. You’re the sort of customer that falls in love with the specs, and you don’t have a realistic expectation of how reliable these machines really are.”

See? I’m just being unrealistic. It’s clearly unreasonable of me to pay $2500 for a computer and expect better than 80% uptime. It’s just absurd of me to expect that when I plug a USB device into my computer, the machine continues to run. Who ever heard of such a thing?

It will probably take another two, or possibly three or four weeks for this machine to be replaced. They were nice enough to remove the main drive and put it into a nice USB drive enclosure for me, so I’m able to keep working. In the meantime, I’ve renamed this machine to “Hangar Queen”. Fortunately, it’s still under warranty, so it’s only costing me a boatload of my time, and I have the last laptop I bought from these people, which is still running like a champ. (Ironically, I bought the new machine because I’d had such a good experience with this last computer.)

A couple of days after this failure, I put my handheld (a CLIE NX-70V) into its cradle to Hotsync with my work computer. Now this is something I have literally done about 500 times before without any trouble at all. This time, my CLIE decided to check out. In a fashion eerily similar to the experience I had with the laptop, this machine’s screen went black, and it simply stopped working. It wouldn’t react to a hard reset or any other action I could think of.

Well, I can make do without my laptop, especially since we have other computers in the house, but I was really put out by losing my handheld. I’ve had a Palm of some type ever since 1996, and I’ve got practically my entire life encoded on the thing. (Ever since my car got jacked in ‘95, with my Day-Timer in the trunk, I knew I needed a way to keep my data safe, and the original Palm Pilot fit the bill. Since then, I was hooked.) I didn’t lose my Address Book, my Calendar, or my legendary To-Do List: I’ve got it all backed up Nine Ways To Tuesday. But I couldn’t carry it with me without the CLIE.

I don’t know if it was because of my computer dying earlier in the week, or because Sony has discontinued their whole PDA line, but I kind of panicked. Since they’re no longer available in stores, I got on to eBay and immediately bought a replacement CLIE. This was the NX-70’s big brother, the CLIE NX-80V, but I wasn’t going to have it for another few days. Like I said, I was in a bit of a panic. I went down to the local Staples and I bought a brand-new Palm Tungsten T5.

“You did what?” said my wife. “We’re about to have a baby, and I’ve been working hard for the past six months to save money on all the baby gear we have to buy, and you go and blow almost a grand on two new PDAs? I’m OK with you getting one to replace the one that broke. I know how much you rely on that thing. But two? No. You have to return one of them – and get the money back.”

Well, that’s what my wife would say if we were living in TV Land.

In real life, where my wife’s understanding and patience are truly astounding, she said she would really, really like it if I would return one of the two units and get the money back. I told her that I would take a few days, try them both out, and let her know. So I spent about five hours laboriously reconstructing my life on the Tungsten, restoring files and settings from my backups, reinstalling software, and ensuring that everything was safe (It’s about a 20-step process. I know that because I’m thorough. But it wasn’t conceptually hard, just tedious). Then I spent a couple of days living my life out of the Tungsten, to see if I liked it. And so, when the CLIE arrived, I wasn’t sure I wanted to try it. Suppose it was better than the Tungsten? Then I’d have wasted my time, and I’d have to go through the exercise of migrating my data all over again.

In the end, of course, that’s what I did. I found a lot to like about the Tungsten, but in the end, I had to bring it back. It’s a marvelous machine, but there’s not much it does better than the CLIE, and the CLIE does quite a few things better than the Tungsten. Like, it has a camera. And a voice recorder. And Wi-Fi. And it’s faster, even though it’s running a “slower” processor. And I had all these CLIE peripherals around already. And I could put the CLIE into a real cradle. One thing the Tungsten had over the CLIE was that the newer OS5 apps were more polished, and did a few minor things better than the CLIE’s versions. In the end, this didn’t outweigh the value of the CLIE.

So now I had one new live CLIE, and I had one old dead CLIE, and I had just returned the Tungsten, and I was searching on the net for any information about CLIEs dying the way mine had a week ago. And just by accident, I found an article which recommended a procedure I hadn’t tried before; in fact, I had never heard of it before: an “In-Cradle Reset". Since I had nothing to lose, I tried it on my old CLIE, and what do you know? It came up just fine. After all that time and money…

Finally, this past weekend. After all my computer woes, I was looking forward to a nice quiet weekend without any major failures. That’s when my wife said:

“Honey? Can I surf the web using your work laptop?”

Isn’t there a joke that starts this way?

I didn’t think twice about it. What could go wrong? My wife is not a novice computer user. She knows her way around a machine and around the net. She reads the news and her favorite blogs.

So why, after only a few minutes of my wife’s surfing, was my work machine crawling with popups, adware, and spyware?

When she asked me about it, I was surprised. I wasn’t getting any pop-ups or spyware before my wife started surfing. “What did you do?” I asked her, perhaps with a little bit too much of an accusatory tone to my voice.

“Nothing! I was just surfing.”

“With what browser?”

“Internet Explorer.”

That told me pretty much everything I needed to know. See, I don’t use IE on my work machine, except to access a few inhouse applications. For general web surfing on my work machine, I only use Firefox, and I manage the security on Firefox pretty well. Unfortunately, because I only use IE inside a well-protected network firewall, I don’t manage the security there so well, and apparently it only takes a few minutes of surfing before malicious programs take advantage of a poorly-secured instance of IE, and my machine was badly infected. The adware had burrowed deep into the guts of Windows, and IE pop-ups were appearing even when I used Firefox to browse to a site!

The infestation proved to be very hardy and difficult to remove. When I used Spybot – Search and Destroy to clean out the infections, they managed to reinstall themselves by the next reboot. They were hardy little devils. When I used msconfig to disable Startup items which might be reinstalling these applications, I noticed that they were adding themselves back to the startup list! ("Who writes these things?” my wife asked. It’s a good question.) A little bit of detective work actually yielded two Spyware items which had installed themselves just like normal applications, with their own folders, their own start menu entries, even their own uninstallers. One had a text file explaining itself:

“You downloaded Preview AdService from a Website that is able to offer its content for free because it shows the Preview AdService ActiveX popup. The Preview AdService program is installed only once the user has agreed on it by clicking on ‘yes’. Through the ActiveX, the user can review the license terms and privacy policy before installing the software. Each and every distributor is carefully reviewed to make sure that their distribution techniques abide by a strict code of conduct.”

See, that’s total bullshit.

“I never downloaded anything or clicked on any license agreement,” my wife told me, and I believe her. It’s my work machine -– she wouldn’t download anything on it. “All I did was surf to some sites and read.”

It took me a while longer to finish fixing the problems with the pop-ups. In the end, I had to manually delete files from the WindowsSystem32 directory, which I do not recommend for the faint of heart. I kind of think I overdid it, in fact, because now I seem to be unable to connect to my company’s VPN from home. However, otherwise, my work computer seems to be fine, which is a good thing, and the pop-ups have not afflicted it since. Total cost to me: practically the whole weekend. And I still wish I understood what I was doing better.

All three of these little tales of computer woe, different as they are, have a few things in common. In each case, a very large failure occurs for poorly understood reasons, each failure is followed by a tedious restoration to the status quo, and in each case, there is no good reason to expect that it won’t happen again – without warning.

People do not get a kick out of maintaining their computers. They do not derive enjoyment and life value from backing up, troubleshooting, and restoring their computers. They derive enjoyment and value from having access to their applications and data. When a computer fails, it often marks a profound downward shift in the value it represents to the owner. When the owner is someone like me, who has the time, patience, knowledge, experience, and cash to solve the problems, that’s one thing. I’m just put out by my computers. But I think computers have gotten both so complex and so fragile, in such a short period of time, that nonspecialists have no good recourse when their machines fail. They either replace the machines –- if they can afford to -– or they simply stop using the machines. In either case, they usually lose whatever data they had on their machines.

A machine which is not reliable and unobtrusive, which calls attention to itself, which requires undue amounts of bother and care just to stay stable, is not a machine which is creating value. When snarky technicians claim that I’m being unreasonable for demanding an entirely appropriate level of service, they’re not helping the problem.

I’m not sure what it is about my computers I fear more: their unreliability or their opacity. If I could count on my computers more, I wouldn’t care so that they’re black boxes. On the other hand, if I could understand my computer better, I wouldn’t fear their failures so much. But I doubt I’m going to get either wish. The way we build computers, and the software that runs them, seems only to head in the direction of increased complexity, meaning increasingly unstable and insecure systems, exposing fewer clues about their inner state to the user. I wonder whether this will reach a point where it starts to turn off ordinary users, and whether they will turn away from what they view –- correctly, in my judgement – as a hostile technology. I wonder whether that’s already occurring. It almost happened to me this past week.

This ad was created by a group called USA Next, giving the Bush White House absolutely airtight deniability that they have anything to do it. The campaign is being mounted to discredit AARP for its traitorous opposition to the Dear Leader’s Social Security phase-out plan, and it’s very well-funded. Obviously, this is a completely independent group of civic-minded individuals… the same individuals who gave us the spectacle of the Swift Boat Liars for Bush. Which also, by pure coincidence, happened to benefit Bush politically.

Honestly, I wasn’t buying USA Next’s line. But then I went to the AARP’s web site, to get their side of the story, and what do you know? The AARP does hate our troops! I found article after article after article detailing the AARP’s treasonous and virulent hatred of the American military.

I also found … well, I didn’t find anything at all on their site about gay marriage. (Obviously, they’re hiding their real agenda from us real Americans!)

Yes, it’s clear, isn’t it? The AARP isn’t an organization “dedicated to enhancing quality of life for all as we age”; it’s an organization dedicated to the destruction of the US military and the advancement of the radical homosexual agenda!!

I mean, WOW! Who knew?! And to think, my parents are members! I’d better tell them right now!

… oh, hey. Can somebody tell me what the fuck this all has to do with Social Security?

My wife and I just went through the thoroughly unpleasant exercise of figuring out our household budget. We’re expecting a new member of the family in the next few months, a baby is rumored to be very expensive upfront, and the new mom will be taking some unpaid leave to get the baby off to a good start. So we needed to take a look at what was coming into the house, and what was going out, and we needed to make some decisions about how to reconcile these numbers with our desire to somehow stay solvent, save for our retirement and our baby’s education, pay our immediate expenses and pay down our debt – all at the same time!

My wife and I are very lucky people: we’ve been pretty frugal, we’ve made some good decisions, we both have good jobs, we are in good health, and we’re not deeply in debt. So, fortunately, the decisions weren’t hard. Even so, the process was a little rough, because there’s a lot of detail involved, and it literally entails generating and then analyzing several sheets covered in numbers, and not just any numbers, at that. These are numbers which have strong emotional resonance. Who wants to do that? Imagine how much harder it would have been if we had a number phobia, or if we knew we had a real money problem and didn’t want to face up to it. In the end, though, we did the responsible thing. We balanced our budget, and now we’re financially prepared for the baby’s arrival. We think.

At the same time that my wife and I are wrestling with our budget, our town is also facing an issue with its own. The town is currently projecting a shortfall of between $1-2 million this year, and nobody seems to have a good idea around that uncomfortable fact. Cutting the budget will entail real pain: the biggest single line item in the budget is the school system, which would necessarily have to bear the brunt of any cuts. The town has been covering its shortfall with its savings, but this has been a stopgap and is clearly not a long-term option.

The town can ask us to pass a property-tax override, enabling them to raise our property taxes over the 2.5% per year maximum increase allowed under Massachusetts Proposition 2 1/2. Predictably, when word of this possibility spread around, the signs sprouted on the larger lawns in town: “NO OVERRIDE.” No decision has been reached on whether to hold a vote on an override, though, so it might not happen. My wife and I aren’t sure yet how we feel about the town budget. We don’t mind paying our fair share of taxes, but we certainly want to make sure we’re getting our money’s worth for what we spend, especially since our daughter is going to be going to school here. (…or maybe not.)

Regardless of whether we’re talking about our own household budget or that of the town, however, we’re talking about operating under the same set of rules. No budget, no matter how large or small, must operate according to these rules: Income must be equal to or greater than expenses. The numbers must add up correctly. Nothing must be left out of the budget. (This was the sticking point in developing our household budget. Gathering all the receipts, adding them all together, categorizing them – does this one go under “Groceries” or “Baby Supplies"? – and ensuring that we hadn’t forgotten whole categories of spending, was probably the hardest part.) And most critically, no matter how we feel about it, the numbers are the numbers. We must make the choices that make the numbers balance. The budget must be honest. Otherwise, it’s worthless.

With those simple rules in mind, it’s useful to take a look at the US Federal Government budget which has just been proposed by George W. Bush. This document is one of the most breathtakingly dishonest documents to ever come out of an already amazingly dishonest government.

The claim that caught my eye in this part of the document was that this budget actually contributes to reducing the budget deficit. Supposedly, by 2010, the deficit – the annual amount that the government borrows, not the total debt, which is still spiraling out of control – is to be cut in half. In order to get there, however, the budget also assumes that none of the three signature George W. Bush policies – the War, the Permanent Tax Cuts, and Social Security Privatization – exist or are enacted, even though they are Bush’s own priorities in his second term.

The federal budget makes no provision – none whatsoever – for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not even a guess! These wars are officially budgeted at zero! See, instead of putting them in the real budget, they ask Congress for the money in “supplemental” requests (like this one); and they claim that since they don’t know how much, exactly, the wars are going to cost, they can’t put even an estimate in the budget. While the real cost of these wars is already about $300 billion, the official estimate of the cost is ZERO.

The budget assumes that Bush’s signature tax cuts expire, as they are currently set to. It’s really impossible to balance the US Budget with these tax cuts in place, so even though Bush is committed to making them permanent, his budget magically wishes them away, so that he can claim to be cutting the deficit.

Finally, the budget assumes that there is no Social Security privatization, even though, once again, Bush is committed to enacting his cherished private accounts this term. Here’s the rub: in order to set up Bush’s private accounts, the government will have to borrow enormous sums of money – somewhere between $750 billion and $2 trillion. Clearly, there is no way to reduce the deficit by half, let alone balance the budget, and enact Bush’s private accounts scheme, so it’s not in the budget.

How easy would my life be if we could run our household budget by W Rules?

“Honey? We’re doing great! All I have to do is take the mortgage payment out of our budget, and look! We’re running a big surplus! While we’re at it, let’s borrow a whole bunch of money and go on a spending spree. And, yes, I am buying an SUV, but since I don’t know whether I’m buying a Hummer or a Bad Boy, I’m estimating the cost as … zero. But I promise – “, with my fingers crossed behind my back, “– I promise that in five years, we’ll borrow less than we’re borrowing this year. Wheeeeee!”

Well, you know how that ends. Sooner or later, a banker (Republican, naturally) will come around and take possession of my house, my car, and anything else I have of value. We would end up in a homeless shelter, assuming those were still being funded (they’re being cut back, of course).

Because government budgets contain such enormous numbers and are difficult to read, and – frankly – because they’re being lied to, people think that governments operate under different budget rules from their households, but it’s just not true. Even the federal budget, with its dizzying heights of debt and its byzantine depth of detail, operates according to the same rules as our little household budget or our town budget: the numbers must add up, and the budget must be honest. (The biggest difference is the amount of say you get. I mean, hey, at home, I get one of two votes. In the federal budget, well, since I am not on the Bush Pioneer list of big-money donors, the Republicans let me have exactly zero votes.)

When it comes to government budgets, like our town’s, there are only two choices. Either taxes must be raised, or expenses must be cut. (Our town doesn’t sell T-Bills, and I’m betting yours doesn’t, either.) Those are the only two choices, and neither one is easy. It takes honest and brave people to face up to these problems. By borrowing madly, shifting the burden of currenly liabilities on to future generations, and by pretending that other major liabilities simply don’t exist, Bush is only demonstrating his dishonesty and his moral cowardice.

It is true that the US government has a better credit rating than you or I do, but that’s because the government can always squeeze people for more money to pay off its debt. And believe me, it will. Bush is busy piling on a mountain of debt right now, and – I’m assuming you’re not a billionaire Republican friend of W here – sooner or later, the government is going to come looking for you and me to pay it back, because whatever else a government can do, it can’t borrow its way out of debt.

(By the way, remember back when balanced budgets were a Conservative issue? Now I’m a hippie for pointing out that you can’t borrow forever. Proof that God has a sense of humor.)

“Freedom,” wrote George Orwell, “is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four.” This week, as we ponder the glorious steaming fetid lie that Bush will truck up to Congress and call his Budget Plan, that phrase resonates on more than one level.

Want to find out how you’ll do under George Dubya’s Social Security privatization scam? Pay a visit to this Social Security Calculator. It’s pretty easy to use and very informative. Want to check the assumptions? You can ‘View Source’, which makes this page a lot more transparent than anything coming from the Republicans.

Did you hear the one about the right-wing media whore who got into the White House under a false name and turned out to be a real whore?

It sounds like a bad joke, but “Jeff Gannon", allegedly a “reporter” for a flyweight outfit calling itself “Talon News", was a regular presence in White House press briefings. He got called on by Bush a lot, too, so he could lob Winger-friendly softball “questions” like this:

“[Democratic leaders] say that Social Security is rock solid and there’s no crisis there. How are you going to work – you’ve said you are going to reach out to these people – how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?”

(More examples here)

“Gannon’s” “news stories” were usually just copied and pasted from Republican talking points and White House press releases. It’s obvious that “Gannon” was no journalist, he was just another White House shill who plays one on TV.

Looking into “Gannon’s” background, a group of journalists and bloggers have unearthed a trove of material about the guy.

First of all, Gannon’s name isn’t Gannon. His real name is James Guckert. He’s been getting a White House pass for months on his false name, but they claim they knew his real name (or maybe not: the story seems to have changed. Sometimes they knew his name, sometimes they didn’t). They furthermore claim that they never heard of the guy who set up the “Talon News” site, even though he’s a major Republican donor. How likely do you suppose that is? Here’s a nobody from a rinky-dink web site, applying for White House credentials, getting the credentials only a few days after the web site goes live, and getting called on by Bush all the time at press conferences. You really suppose they don’t know who he is?

If you’re still unconvinced that they know him, consider this. He’s one of the guys who got the Plame leak! That’s right – when someone in the Bush White House wanted to punish Joe Wilson, the ambassador who exposed Bush’s yellowcake lie in the State of the Union address, they did it by leaking the identity of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame – who was working for the CIA – to a select few “journalists", including Judith Miller of the New York Times, Robert Novak (the only one who published the information), and … “Jeff Gannon". I guess they know who he is, all right.

Here’s where the story starts to get bizarre. An investigation into Guckert’s background reveals that he has been running an escort service on the web. But he’s not just the pimp – he’s selling his own services! The web sites (you really have to see them to believe it) are military-themed, with names like “US Male Corps.com"; Guckert appears to have served in the Marine Corps, and is now applying a military theme to his “services", for guys who are turned on by that kind of thing.

How much stranger can this story get?

In situations like this, I like to apply the “Shoe on the other foot” test. Imagine for a moment that the Clinton Administration had planted a friendly shill in the White House press corps, and allowed him to get credentialed under a false name. Assume, furthermore, that this friendly shill had been given access, in strict violation of the law, to classified information exposing the identity of an undercover CIA operative. Assume, furthermore!, that this friendly shill turned out to have served in the US military as a gay man, and then used his association with the military to further a career as a gay prostitute!

Can you imagine the Right-Wing Shitstorm that would ensue? There would be such a hue and cry from the Wingnut blogosphere and the “mainstream media.” It would make Monica tame by comparison! It would be everything we’d hear about every time we turn on the radio or watch television. It would be grist for endless hours of O’Reilly, Russert, and Limbaugh. Congress would demand investigations. Articles of Impeachment would be introduced.

Oh, but I forgot. “Jeff Gannon” … is a Republican. So the “mainstream media,” owned and operated by the Right Wing of the Republican Party, yawns a collective yawn. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, no story here. And I guess I can’t really blame them, after all, since, really, how unusual is a Republican who will do or say anything for money and power?

I guess it just goes to show you: A Ho is a Ho is a Ho.

A few more links, because I can’t really do this story justice:
A man called Jeff
Why Gannon matters
‘Jeff Gannon’ Signs Off: Tells E&P He’ll No Longer Talk to Press
Gonna Party Like It’s 1998
“Jeff Gannon’s” secret life
McClellan Tells ‘E&P’ He Didn’t Know Guckert Used Fake Name for Nearly Two Years
Jeff Gannon owes back taxes
Jeff Gannon / James Guckert: a gay prostitute

It’s been just about a year since ASAP 1.0 shipped, and now I’m very pleased to say that we’ve launched our latest versions. The company demonstrated our new product at the DEMO Conference, where we demonstrated the last version of the product last year. Convoq ASAP is a much more mature product – we’ve had a very good year to sand and polish it, and it shows. We’re now offering two flavors of the product: ASAP Express is free and allows anyone to have a one-on-one videoconference with anyone else – even somebody who hasn’t installed the software! ASAP Pro allows up to 15 people to participate in your meetings, for only $250/year. It’s a great product, and I’m proud to be a member of the team that created it. Try it!

Related links
Start-up offers Web conferencing on the cheap
Convoq Offers Free Web Conferencing
Web Meetings for Nothing, Collaborate for Free

[disclaimer: This site is my own personal site. The opinions expressed here represent my own, and not my employer, Convoq. I just wanted to mention that here in case it wasn’t blazingly obvious.]

I’m not alone in being sorry to note the passing of Arthur Miller. Miller was a great playwright and a great American. His moral clarity and his willingness to question prevailing orthodoxy set an example for all of us. I have always been profoundly influenced by his writing. We need more such men today.

John Pultorak is my kind of nerd. This guy has built a replica of the Apollo Guidance Computer, the computer that flew on the Command Module and Lunar Module of the Apollo manned missions to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s.

Pultorak built the replica over the course of four years of nights and weekends, with some assistance from his son and a lot of understanding patience from his wife.

Recreating a 40-year-old computer is not an easy task, even if the hardware isn’t exactly cutting-edge. Pultorak didn’t just simulate the AGC (although that’s what he did as a first step). He didn’t even just emulate the AGC (i.e. build a modern computer and program it to pretend to be the AGC). He built real hardware which works just like the original. He didn’t replicate the original in all respects, because he discovered that some of the parts which were used to build the original AGC weren’t available any more. (Just try to find core rope memory these days.)

The AGC was definitely cutting-edge for its time (roughly 1962). It was the first digital computer to replace discrete transistors with Integrated Circuits, which were new and risky. It also was the first digital autopilot for any kind of piloted vehicle, and its user interface (the Display and Keyboard Unit or DSKY) was far ahead of its time, even if it seems a little quaint to us, and is one of the earliest examples of a real-time interactive user interface. In the 60s, after all, most computer users interacted with the machine via punch cards and printouts.

Others have implemented simulations of the AGC/DSKY. The Virtual AGC Project is one such effort, and the NASSP Project has implemented a DSKY in their Orbiter add-on (See this image). A more accessible, but less complete, partial implementation of a DSKY can be found here. I recommend it to anyone who is curious but doesn’t want to be overwhelmed. It’s a nice introduction, but it only works in Internet Explorer.

All of these efforts to replicate the space flight experience inside our modern computers are commendable, but for sheer geeky bragging rights, nothing really beats being able to say, as Pultorak can, “I built the real thing myself.”

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Since I started scanning the search strings which lead people to my blog, I have found it’s a little addictive. Here are the latest entries.

• “gw bush orwellian slogans”
• “orwellian moments/current events” : Bush and Orwell : they really do go together like Freedom Fries and W Ketchup.
• “jasher 6000 end of world” : You’re looking for Bible passages, and you came to my site? Whatever.
• “i’m so fat that i repulse my husband” : Heartbreak is never in short supply. I wish that wasn’t true.

This is George.

George is in charge of the biggest and most successful retirement insurance program in the world.

This is George’s friend Ken. You might remember the company he used to run.

George has a terrific idea for you …and Ken. Mostly for Ken. Here’s what he’d like to do.

First, George will borrow a dollar from Ken. He’ll do this by selling US Treasury Securities to Ken. Ken knows this is a pretty good investment, because they’re backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, with a low rate of return but with virtually no risk.

(George has been borrowing a lot of dollars on your behalf from Ken lately, but that’s another story.)

Next, George takes a dollar from you in Social Security payroll taxes. Right now, when you give that dollar to George, you’re paying part of some retiree’s monthly Social Security installment, and you expect that somewhere down the line, some other person will help pay yours when you retire. That’s the contract that forms the basis of Social Security.

Well, George takes your dollar and gives it to the retiree just like he’s always done. However, George says he’s got a better idea for the second part of the deal: you know, the one where you get paid back that dollar when you retire.

Here’s the deal, says George. (He almost said New Deal.) He’s got that dollar that he just borrowed from Ken. He says, instead of giving it to you when you retire, he’ll give it to you now, and then let you invest it in the markets. He says that he’s sure that by investing it in the markets, you can earn a high rate of return. High enough, he says, that you’ll end up with much more money in your retirement than you’d end up with if you just had Social Security.

Well, that sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Who wouldn’t want more money when they retire, right? So you say, Sure, George. Sign me up. And you hold out your hand for that dollar.

Oh, no, you don’t understand, says George. He didn’t say he’d just give you your dollar back. See, what he meant was: He’s going to invest this money in the markets for you. And then, when you retire, he’ll give you that dollar back, plus whatever you earn on it from investing it in the market.

That’s not exactly what George said at first, but what the hell. You’re still going to get those great returns from investing in the market, right? So okay, you go along with it.

George takes the dollar he borrowed from Ken, and he puts it into an account with your name on it. Then, he uses that dollar, from that account, to buy a share of stock in Ken’s company. Now, your account is just one of many millions of accounts that George controls this way, so when he starts buying stock in Ken’s company, he’s buying a lot of stock, and the price of the stock starts to rise. Pretty soon, the stock that George bought for you for one dollar is worth two dollars.

Ken has a few shares of his company’s stock, too. Ken likes the fact that his stock price is going up, especially since he didn’t pay anywhere near what you paid for the stock. But hey, as long as stock prices are rising, who cares? After all, it’s worth a lot more than you paid for it, isn’t it? So everybody’s happy. Pretty soon, the stock that George bought for you for one dollar is worth three dollars.

At this point, George tells you that there’s something else about your account you need to know about. Since it’s a private account, he’s going to charge you a quarter to administer it for you. Well, what the hell? After all, you put a dollar in, and now it’s worth three dollars, which is two dollars more than you would have gotten back with old Social Security. So even minus a quarter, you’re still way ahead of the game.

A few years later, Ken is found to have committed a few felonies in the conduct of his business.

It seems his company wasn’t doing nearly as well as everyone thought it was doing. Ken was lying about the state of his company’s finances in order to get people to keep buying his company’s stock. That’s called securities fraud.

Of course, Ken has known for a long time that the jig was up. (When you have friends like George, you know when the FBI is on its way.) That’s why he sold all of his stock, at three dollars per share. Ken made a lot of money. But by the time word of his arrest and his company’s collapse reaches you, the selling frenzy has already begun. Ken’s company’s stock is worth a penny a share.

Remember that dollar? All you have left of it is one cent.

There’s nothing I can do about that, says George. Investment carries risk. You read the prospectus before you signed on.

That’s right, says his friend Paul. “Part of the genius of capitalism is that people get to make good decisions or bad decisions. And they get to pay the consequences or to enjoy the fruits of their decisions.”

Well, says George, now that it’s time for you to retire, let’s see how you did.

You have one penny in your account.

You owe George a quarter for managing the account. That doesn’t depend on how well you did.

Oh, and remember the dollar you started the account with? George borrowed that dollar from Ken, but in thirty years, a 2.5% bond has doubled in value. Remember, George borrowed it in your name.

So now you owe Ken two dollars and George a quarter. Those are tax dollars, by the way, which makes George’s IRS, in effect, Ken’s collection agency.

You haven’t got it? You were counting on that three dollar return? That’s too bad, but George will be all too happy to help you out by liquidating your house or anything else you have of value.

Ken needs that money, after all.

See, after bankruptcy reorganization gets that company back on its feet, Ken has some penny stock to buy.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n03/wein01_.html

A dizzying compendium of the lies.

Hey Bush Voters! Now I have something new to thank you for!

See, I have a daughter on the way. In just a couple of months, she’s going to enter this world, and thanks to years of reckless, irresponsible Republican fiscal policies, she’s going to start life already $26,000 in debt!

Thanks, Bush Voters!

You can’t blame the Democrats: as you can clearly see here, the Democrats have been the party of fiscal responsibility. Under Clinton, the deficit had nearly disappeared. We were even looking at budget surpluses when Bush came into office. Once you Bush voters had your say, that changed dramatically.

(Click the image for a larger view)

The Republicans have not only dramatically widened the budget deficit (which is only the yearly increase on the total national debt), they don’t even pretend to care about its consequences any more. With complete domination of all three branches of government, they’d do something about it if they cared to. But thanks to the free pass you’ve given them, they don’t think they have to do anything about it. In fact, Bush wants to add TWO TRILLION MORE to this pile of debt, in order to fund his Social Security piratization plan.

The result? My child already owes $26,000 to the federal government, and she hasn’t even been born yet.

Call it The Birth Tax.

Thanks, Bush voters!

Since interest is accumulating on that money every day – and since the Republicans haven’t stopped their borrowing binge – you can be sure that she’ll owe a whole lot more by the time she’s able to start paying that money back.

Bush voters, you may be too stupid to realize this, but there is only one way that money is going to be paid back. Those loans were taken out in our names, and it is our obligation to pay them back. The money will be collected in taxes and the debt will be paid. And you morons will probably think that the inevitable pain of increased taxes will be someone else’s fault, because that’s what Fox News will tell you.

There’s another reason $26,000 is actually an understatement of the real value of the Birth Tax. See, that number is simply the national debt (about 7.6 TRILLION dollars) divided by the total population of the United States (about 295 million). But since Republican policies of the past twenty years are systematically moving the tax burden off of corporations (few of which pay any tax at all any more) and rich people (ditto), and on to working people, by the time my daughter is old enough to work, her tax burden will probably be much larger than mine is.

$26,000 is an amount which doesn’t matter to a guy like Bush. If you’re already rich, after all, $26,000 isn’t so much. Daddy can write a check for $26,000 without breaking a sweat. Of course, for guys like Bush, who have never in their entire lives actually paid their fair share for anything, it’s probably something that can be taken care of with a phone call to the right people. Right this way, sir; no, of course your ticket has already been paid for. Yes, sir. See, actually paying for things, that’s for proles. Not for Bushes.

But for my daughter, $26,000 can be the difference between getting a good college education, or a mediocre one – or none at all. It can be the difference between owning her first home at 25, or 45 – or never. It can be the difference between getting first-rate care in a medical crisis, or poor care – or none at all. It might literally be the difference between a long, healthy, good life, or a short and bad life. When you’re just starting out, and you’re middle-class like me and my daughter, $26,000 is a LOT of money.

This is the Birth Tax, the Bush tax, the most durable legacy of Republican hegemony. Long after George W. Bush has faded from memory, people will stay be paying for his profligacy and irresponsibility.

Thanks, Bush voters! You got your $300 checks?

Good, because guess what? It’s not just my daughter that has to pay that back. For something like 98% of all you dopes out there, your kids will be paying it, too. And rich Republican kids will be laughing their asses off – at you. Just like Bush is right now.

Damn! Who could’ve guessed that I’d still be wrong about George Bush!?

Here’s the thing. I remember so well that night two years ago, when Bush stood up and delivered his Pre-Invasion Address 2003. I remember it like it was yesterday. He stood up resolutely and he said:

“…We will invade Iraq in order to remove a tyrant from power over his people, and then, instead of installing an American puppet regime, we will hold elections so that the Iraqi people can participate in their own government.”

And so now, with the Iraqi vote behind us, does it really matter that the candidates in the election were anonymous? That whole swathes of the population were excluded from voting? That we have now spent 150 billion dollars (and counting) and 1,400 American servicemembers (and counting)? Does it matter that nobody seems to have any clue to getting out of Iraq?

NO! None of that matters! Not when it’s measured against our ideals! Dammit, didn’t you hear the man? He said it was about Democracy, damn it! We’re spreading democracy!

But I was so wrong about Bush! See, when I heard him speaking in January 2003, I only thought I heard him say a lot about Weapons of Mass Destruction! I thought I heard him link Saddam Hussein to Al Qaida. I thought I heard him say

“Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Invading Iraq was necessary to protect ourselves against terrorists! That’s what I thought I heard him say in 2003.

(Now, I thought that was a crock of shit back then, and I was also 100% wrong about that, but that’s a different story. I guess I just wasn’t watching the right TV station for the State of the Union address, because I didn’t hear Bush say anything about delivering Democracy to the Iraqis. But I suppose I’m one of those people who think that brown people can’t run their own country, so maybe I wouldn’t have heard it even if I’d tried.)

But just a few days ago, I found out what my problem is.

You see, my Memory Hole was clogged up. It seems I wasn’t forgetting all the stupid things I was supposed to be forgetting. But now that we figured that out, everything’s better, and boy am I sorry about all the shit I was spreading about George W. Bush. Now, repeat after me:

It was about Delivering Democracy. It was always about Delivering Democracy. There are no Weapons of Mass Destruction. There never were any Weapons of Mass Destruction. Bush never said anything about Weapons of Mass Destruction.

If you thought Bush told us we needed to invade Iraq as a matter of defending ourselves against terrorists armed with Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, please do as I have done, and report to your nearest Memory Hole Cleaning Center (there are convenient kiosks in your local mall or Wal-Mart).

My web hosting service, like most such services, provides a facility for me to view this site’s statistics, such as how many times the site is visited, which pages are the most popular, etc. (In case you’re wondering, my site doesn’t generate a huge amount of traffic, but there does seem to be a more-or-less regular readership. Thanks, Mom!)

In the very detailed report which my hosting service delivers to me on a daily basis, one of the more interesting headings is called “Search Strings". Did you know that when you type a search term or a set of search terms into Google, or Yahoo, or wherever, your search strings can be passed along to any page that you access by clicking on the links that the search engine displays to you? I didn’t know that, either, and apparently the details of how your search terms are encoded into the referring page’s URL vary with each search engine, so my hosting service can’t deliver a comprehensive report of the search terms which have led people to my site. Still, the ones which do arrive provide an interesting glimpse into the minds of at least some of my visitors. (For example, that most people still haven’t learned how to use quotes to group their search terms. But I digress.) Judge for yourself:

• “asian religious text that predicted the tsunami tribe moves to”: Looking to convert?
• “dell sony bank of america boycott abortion”: Ah, yes. Dell, Sony, and Bank of America. Bring them down, and you end the scourge of abortion forever!
• “george bush on the issue of evolution the verdict is still out”: It’s hard to tell where this person stands on the issue, but at least he knows where George stands.
• Current Favorite - “help me humiliate my husband”: Sorry, lady, I can’t help you.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away".
         – Philip K. Dick

A car carrying a father, a mother, and their children was stopped by US gunfire yesterday as the car approached an Army foot patrol. The mother and the father were killed by machine-gun fire; several of the children were wounded. There were no weapons on or in the car.

Here’s a question, especially for the Republicans out there: As the children in that car heard the bullets flying all around them, as they watched their mother die and their father absorb “so many bullets that his skull had collapsed, leaving his body grotesquely disfigured”, what emotion do you suppose they felt? Might it have been … terror?

Let Freedom Reign!

So some children saw their parents gunned down in front of their eyes, but hey, says the US military, it was their own fault. And there, in microcosm, is the whole fucking war: blow some shit up, kill a bunch of people, blame them for their own deaths, and when they resent that, push the boot down harder. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat…

“But we’re not there as conquerors – we’re there as liberators,” I hear you saying. Sure, we just liberated some kids from their parents, just like we’ve liberated thousands and thousands of Iraqis from their loved ones, their homes, their security, their health, and their lives. You think that makes them love us?

If you voted for W, you voted for this. Are you enjoying your war?