Ahab Has A Blog.

Bad, bad news.

I know that aside from the knee jerk fuckwads who can say terminally stupid shit like this - They say let the government dictate it...I urge my colleagues to reject government regulation of the Internet - that most people have little understanding of what the stakes are. And part of that is right wing public brainwashing - the sort of "Capitalism" that doesn't believe in open, free markets, just corporate control. In other words, the kind of capitalism once practiced in Mussolini's Italy and today in Russia and China and many other countries America should not attempt to emulate. The worst kind of capitalism - no free markets, just state and corporation as one and the same.

Make no mistake - this is about turning the Internet back into cable tv.

It would be one thing if there were a market in Internet connections in America. But there isn't. And it's due to the worst kind of government interference - granting of monopolies - and the worst kind of government non-interference - no creation of a market through rules promoting competition. Even where the rules allegedly promote competition - say, requiring the "naked DSL" offering - the major corporations are allowed to flout these rules with impunity. The result is that the USA is well on its way to becoming a second-class nation in terms of Internet access. From Europe to Korea and Japan, healthy regulation provides consumers with more choice and better (faster) and cheaper selections than we have in the USA. And wonder of wonders, their corporations still turn a profit. If we had these kind of choices, I would not be worried about equal access to the Internet - any provider who denied their customers equal access would soon perish.

But we fucking don't have free market choices in the US. No free market, no freedom, protection of individual rights necessary.

Again, let's be clear: this is ALL about the kind of "capitalists" who don't believe in competition. And I say fuck them, fuck their inherited money, fuck their privileged access to capital, fuck their anti-competetive practices, fuck their bribery of elected representatives, fuck their antipathy to free democratic discourse, and fuck the horse they rode in on.

I think this goes beyond fear of being yelled at. You look at national political players - press, congress-critters, whistleblowers - and you see a disturbing trend.

Take Snowe or Specter in regard to the NSA spying. Outright criticism and then... meek silence, and a return to the party line. Same with the McCain mutiny. Same with all the 9/11 probes.

And now consider the things the NSA spying might afford a ruthless power elite. There's a real possibility that the man behind the curtain has been using espionage on domestic political opponents to silence people somehow. Blackmail? A tease of enough information (true or fabricated) to say "hey, you are one of us now, you have a moral obligation to keep silent about this"?

Or both?

I think it's high time we start discussing in public how you would take over a democratic government by:

• avoiding totally fixing all elections (just enough to help)
• neutering the press (and more importantly, enlisting them to trash the few who buck the system of privilege) - but allowing "independent press"
• arm-twisting critical political opposition with a high degree of reliability (90% would be enough with good strategists on top)
• constructing phony narratives and pressing them with "big lie" techniques (e.g. Iraq and Al Qaeda connections - "no I never declared that, but it's easy to understand why people have the impression there's a connection')
• using "boiling the frog" techniques to slowly yet deliberately erode fundamental rights.

i'd love to reject all of the preceding as tin-foil hat stuff, but i can't. point by point, it looks exactly like what they are doing.

if the dems win the house in the fall, their house of cards falls. i have no doubt that election shenanigans are queued up. the question is whether democracy in the USA survives into 2007.

Funny, the press falls into the trap of considering the NSA domestic spying scandal as a contest of ideas between the government and the press. I rather thought it was a contest between fundamental American values vs. unchecked governmental power. But, hey, when some white house stooge puts it that as a free press issue, it flatters the press, and so they distort the debate. too bad for the american people.

all they have to do is say "publicizing this endangers the USA; our playbook is on page one, while al quaeda's is secret". really? actually, al qaeda's playbook has been on page one for quite some time now: announce attacks before springing them; engage multiple attacks simultaneously; use spectacular attacks on insecure targets; use a mysterious, charismatic leader to inspire new leadership worldwide; keep ties loose so the organization cannot be easily taken down by capturing senior members;

so.. let's see if bushie boy has been paying attention.

1. don't catch OBL
2. steal hundreds of millions of nail clippers from innocent americans while leaving plenty of soft targets (because you can't protect them all), as opposed to focusing our billions on locating existing cells or gaming the next possible target
3. announce a capture of al qaeda's #2 or #3 in charge every couple of months.
4. distribute anti-terror funds on the basis of politics, not risk
5. protect critical targets capable of doing the most damage:
6. appoint unqualified cronies to response agencies and give no attention to remediation
7. outsource without regard to effectiveness - cost OR results. use an uncompetetive process directed at business world cronies.
8. Shut down the terrorist training camps in afghanistan, and turn iraq into the biggest and best training camp the world of terror has ever known, with no order and no security, plenty of unemployed elite army members, fervent islamacists, untold tons of explosive material available, and a populace with an unsympathetic view of the targets.

OK, that's ZERO FUCKING POINTS for bushie boy. here's what he should have been doing:

1. find OBL. nuff said.
2. minimize the stimulus to formation of new terrorists, cells, and organizations. don't pick new fights with al qaeda: keep the focus on their unprovoked attacks on civilian targets and the unislamic nature of this behavior
3. Protect the most critical resources with stringent security - nuclear plants, major financial institutions, water, power plants, other infrastructure. focus attention based on the number of people potentially affected. do not waste energy on targets too diffuse to be protected - shopping malls, tiny rural towns.
4. in forming a DHS, find the people and organzations already in government who excel in the following areas; arabic and islamic culture, disaster relief, biowarfare
5. redefine their missions towards DHS, empower them to train other public safety organizations throughout the country, and use outside contractors to help develop spread this training rapidly throughout the nation.
6. Don't

Tranmission interrupted

Proponents of "Intelligent Design" are prone to say things like "Well, if you saw a Buick on a beach, would you conclude that it just made itself out of nothing? Duh.

What they don't see is that things made by designers that we know of bear little resemblance to the things evolution is said to have engendered.

Ever seen a Buick repair itself? Not much comparison to the starfish cut in half that grows into two new starfish. Try that with your Buick.

Ever seen a watch build a new watch? No, stupid.

Name one example of anything that a designer makes that resembles a living form? Eh.

All fun is now being removed from playgrounds. But that's not enough; running, too:

"To say `no running' on the playground seems crazy," said Bartleman, who agreed to be interviewed on a recent outing at Everglades. "But your feelings change when you're in a closed-door meeting with lawyers."

Die, don't run. Right. It would no longer seem crazy, it would just seem heartless and evil and a sure sign of the immediate death of society. It would seem much more sensible instead to kill the lawyers first, then if a parent sues over their child, say, breaking an arm from tripping while running, break the parent's arm, too.

My childhood bridged the era of metal "monkey bars" over concrete to the nasty beginnings of crippling our children through kindness - if they don't learn by skinning a knee, they'll learn by getting hit by a train because the signal was broken and they didn't think to look anyway. In our playground, that meant no using the swings, because someone might fall onto a bed of dangerous mulch, and no using the other equipment because it was near the kindergarten and might "distract" a bunch of 5 year olds (how would you be able to tell - seriously?). After school, we could break our necks and no one would care, but during recess (when we actually got it), that left 4-square, dominated by a small, co-ed tribe of total assholes and flaming prigs.

I decided one day that it would be fun instead to catch the leaves falling from a tree. My friend started doing it, and pretty soon it was a big rowdy fun game. The neighborhood toughs would try to push people out of the way just before catching it, but eventually they tried to catch the leaves, too and while we didn't dare push them, we weren't above snatching the leaf just over their outstretched hands. Kids were actually having fun, even kids who didn't usually play together. Of course this was banned. That's right there was a new rule announced: No Catching Leaves. I'm not kidding.

So to all my elementary school teachers, I say: fuck you, you shrill fascists. To all the school district lawyers, I say: an excess of caution can do more harm than good, and you're wasting time on playgrounds while you've got more important things to worry about: schools built on landfills, teachers fucking students, students throwing bricks at people, bullies, bomb scares, teachers' contracts, etc. And to the parents who sue over every playground injury, no matter how accidental or unforseeable, I say: fuck off and die a painful, slow death; you are destroying civilization with your selfish, childish, parasitical behavior.

Every behavior does not need to be controlled, not every accident requires a counter-measure, and not every injury implies a wrong. Grow up, you soulless idiots.

First, Perl 6 is on the road to going somewhere. They are fixing the substantive criticisms of Perl 5: a syntactically ugly (though eminently flexible) OO system; and general obscurantism (though the latter applies wherever the users of a language will test its capabilities severly, which is to say: wherever things aren't boring). They seem to be ignoring (thankfully) the less substantive critiques: Too Much Freedom, Insignificant WhiteSpace, and Punctuation. I've never understood that last criticism, personally, but it seems to be very popular among the Significant WhiteSpace and B&D OO programming advocates. That these "problems" seem not to matter in practice recalls the (possibly apocryphal) French Academic "joke" (see the Sunday NY Times: we don't need no stinkin blodges) that goes something like "yes, that is true in practice, but the problem is, will it be true in theory?"

Second, the most interesting thing (to us) on this graph is that around day 30, there's an innput of new committers and a temporary flattening of the number of commits. A micro-visible example of Brooks' LawUpdate: Autrijus pointed out I seemed to have the lines reversed. Either that or I was seeing a signal in noise - frankly I can't remember enough to distinguish. Anyway, I can report that Pugs works (and there's even a FreeBSD port), which is cool. I think Perl 6 looks very promising and I'm starting to believe it will happen in time to keep Perl from being slowly overtaken by Python.

Also, Autrijus is apparently Taiwanese. Also interesting, if you know what I'm talking about, which you probably don't.

Also, this pretty much sums up this entire content zone: Warnock applies

There's a bankrupcty reform bill currentlly winding its way through Congress. The bill makes it harder for consumers to declare bankruptcy, even though the the two main reasons for bankruptcy in the US today are medical bills (even for those with insurance) and shady lending practices by credit card companies.

The funny thing is, the avowedly religious President and many who style themselves as both Christians and conservatives are driving this bill onward. The reason it's funny is that they deflect criticism of the bill by saying, well, if people buy too much crap on high interest cards, it's their own fault. The reason that's funny is that, well, the Bible is pretty clear that usury - the charging of excessive interest - is a no-no. Back in the day, see, that was one of the main forms of debt servitude. Not much changes. Except that many so-called Christians seem to think it's a great idea.

It's funny, for a minute I was going to ask how the administration gets away with pretending to be observant Christians when their actions say otherwise at every turn. Oh, that's right, it's because they are fucking liars.