JaBbA's Hut

There's been a lot of really really stupid things happening out there. The wingnut Right is just getting crazier and crazier, led by the pied pipers of idiocy Rush and Beck and all the other professional rabble-rousers.

But this whole thing about not letting kids see the talk by the President of the United States just really freakin' annoys me. I've been shaking my head at the rampant stupidity that is being shown in this country. And I was getting ready to really really have a good rant.

Then I came across this:

Finally, consider the message that you're sending to your kid. Here's the message: "If you so much as think that you are going to disagree with what someone has to say (even if that person is the President of the United States of America), you don't have to give that person the time of day." Let me know how that message tastes when it's reheated and served back to you when your kid is a teenager.

And I realized he said it better than I could. So JaBbA says go read the whole thing.

Oh, yeah. It's not that I ever left. I just kinda needed to take a break. We'll see what happens. I've got some things to say - meantime, follow me on Twitter if you want.

Well, that didn't take long.

McCain ended his very funny speech last night with this:

I don't want it getting out of this room, but my opponent is an impressive fellow in many ways. Political opponents can have a little trouble seeing the best in each other. But I've had a few glimpses of this man at his best and I admire his great skill, energy and determination. It's not for nothing, but he's inspired many folks in his own party and beyond. Senator Obama talks about making history and he's made quite a bit of it already. There was a time when the mere invitation of an African-American citizen to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage and an insult. Today is a world away from the cruelty and prideful bigotry of that time - and good riddance. I can't wish my opponent luck, but I do wish him well.

His campaign is now making robocalls with this:

You need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home, and killed Americans. And Democrats will enact an extreme leftist agenda if they take control of Washington. Barack Obama and his Democratic allies lack the judgment to lead our country.

And this:

I'm calling on behalf of John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama and his Democrat allies in the Illinois Senate opposed a bill requiring doctors to care for babies born alive after surviving attempted abortions -- a position at odds even with John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama and his liberal Democrats are too extreme for America. Please vote -- vote for the candidates who share our values. This call was paid for by McCain-Palin 2008 and the Republican National Committee at 202 863 8500.

It's not quite "He fathered a black baby" (which would be odd considering the circumstances) and "Cindy McCain has a drug problem" (both of which happened in 2000, thanks to Karl Rove) but we've got 19 days left. It could get there.

I get the feeling that McCain may be feeling a little bit liberated by the fact that there really is very little chance he's going to win. He was completely hilarious, and gracious, at the Alfred E. Smith Benefit dinner tonight.

And so begins the rehabilitation of The Honorable Senator John McCain.

[I'm not one for email forwarding. But this was sent to me, and it's too priceless to pass up]

I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight.....

- If you grow up in Hawaii , raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."
- Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, yours is a quintessential American story.

- If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
- Name your kids Willow,Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

- Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.
- Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.

- If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
- If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive and next in line behind a man in his eighth decade.

- If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
- If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and then left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a true Christian.

- If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
- If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

- If your wife is a Harvard graduate laywer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America 's.
- If you're husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

OK, much clearer now.

Althrough there seemed to be definitive proof that the Gold Medal winner of the uneven bars was underage, there won't be any kind of investigation into the matter:

The International Olympic Committee opened up an investigation into the age of two of China's gold-medal-winning Olympic gymnasts this weekend -- and closed it a day later, following a security consultant's discovery of online documents listing the competitors as too young to compete.

The security consultant, Mike Walker of the Intrepidus Group, used tailored searches of Google and Baidu to find excel spreadsheets that appeared to show the ages of Chinese gymnastic competitors at meets prior to the Olympics. If the competitors are found to be too young, as many as four of China's medals could be affected. On Sunday, the IOC reportedly indicated that an initial review of documentation has not found any issues and that the medals will not likely change hands.

Last week, China blamed the entire issue on paperwork errors, according to the New York Times.

The spreadsheets, on a Chinese government website, that showed the gymnast to be 2 years younger than claimed simply disappeared, and the Chinese govenrment claims that it was all a misunderstanding.

OK, so that sucks for Nastia, but what does that have to do with the U.S. election?

Soon after Walker, who blogs under the name Stryder Hax, found each document, the evidence quickly disappeared. The lesson, he said, is that -- while it is difficult to delete documents from the Internet -- an entity with the power and reach of China seems to be able to make information about He Kexin disappear quickly.

"I think I'm going to grab a beer and watch this young woman's life vanish into thin air," Walker wrote on Sunday. "If you're watching it with me, think about our upcoming American elections, which are going to be decided by voting machines which generate only electronic documents. Think about the permanence and weight of electronic documents. And think about a future in which our identities are purely electronic. Cheers!"

Cheers, indeed.

Stolen, in it's entirety, from Woot! - One Day, One Deal

• 200,000 pizzas sent to "Chinese Taipei"
  
• Ceremonial lighting of the Tibetan monk
  
• Entire crowd replaced by more photogenic stand-ins
  
• New technology allows the "completely live" fireworks display to run backward
  
• Everyone looks under their seat to find a gift bag containing a DVD copy of Watchmen, one of those cans of Coke in a different language, and a female child
  
• Numerous mistakes by Chinese dancers (but no points deducted by judges)
  
• Bela Karolyi given Andy Rooney's old spot on 60 Minutes
  
• One more silver medal awarded to Shawn Johnson, just to rub it in
  
• Olympic hostesses return to their docking stations and power down
  
• Everyone leaves satisfied but then somehow want another Olympics about fifteen minutes later
  

Arthur C. Clark, Scientist, Author, Visionary, died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90.

Rendezvous with Rama was the first "real" science fiction book I ever read. My mother had picked it up in an airport and I found it on a table. That was it, I was a science fiction fan from then on.

Later, I discovered Clarke's laws:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
   
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
   
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
   

The world lost a great light today.

Bruce Schneier posted an article today on the false dichotomy between Security vs. Privacy:

If you set up the false dichotomy, of course people will choose security over privacy -- especially if you scare them first. But it's still a false dichotomy. There is no security without privacy. And liberty requires both security and privacy. The famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin reads: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." It's also true that those who would give up privacy for security are likely to end up with neither.

The American people have been bombarded with so much fear and anxiety that they have stopped thinking. And, unfortunately, for many people that's the way they like it. But I take some heart from the freefall of Rudy "9-11" Guiliani in the Polls - given enough time, people finally started looking at something other than his constant fear speech, and didn't like what they saw. He miscalculated, thinking that the security message could last almost 2 years. It's not that people are beginning to wake up - I think it's more that they have become habituated to the constant drumbeat that they are able to look past it.

But Schneier's right - security comes before social issues like privacy on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. We have to get over the fear before we can worry about civil liberties - and that's what the government is counting on. But there is a way - and that is to get people to fear the loss of privacy. Unfortunately, balancing fear of government intrusion against complete paranoia is difficult - and it's much easier to make people fear a violent attack.

This may be why I'm attracted do Obama's message of hope. If we can look forward to a future where we don't see enemies all around us, we can be more cognizant of the importance of personal liberty. I am beginning to believe that Obama sees that future and wants to lead the country there.

JaBbA says check it out.

I don't know why it struck me, but if I could find a radio station that had a playlist like the random play function on my MP3 player, I'd probably listen to radio more. I just didn't feel like listening to NPR this morning on my ride in, so I set the player to random play, and it came up with this soundtrack for my morning:

(Nothing But) Flowers, Talking Heads
Now That I Can Dance, Funk Brothers
Hot Fun In The Summertime, Sly And The Family Stone
Little Wing, Stevie Ray Vaughan
Baba O'Reilly, The Who
She's A Rainbow, The Rolling Stones
Manic Depression, Jimi Hendrix
Anybody Seen My Baby, The Rolling Stones
Traveling Riverside Blues, Eric Clapton
Dead Flowers, The Rolling Stones

Bruce Schneier has written another excellent article on the perception of risk:

...when faced with a very available and highly vivid event like 9/11 or the Virginia Tech shootings, we overreact. And when faced with all the salient related events, we assume causality. We pass the Patriot Act. We think if we give guns out to students, or maybe make it harder for students to get guns, we'll have solved the problem. We don't let our children go to playgrounds unsupervised. We stay out of the ocean because we read about a shark attack somewhere.

It's our brains again. We need to "do something," even if that something doesn't make sense; even if it is ineffective. And we need to do something directly related to the details of the actual event. So instead of implementing effective, but more general, security measures to reduce the risk of terrorism, we ban box cutters on airplanes. And we look back on the Virginia Tech massacre with 20-20 hindsight and recriminate ourselves about the things we *should have done.

He's written about risk, perception and "security theater" many times.

JaBbA says check it out.

(Yes, I know, I've been quiet. Maybe I'll get started again)

I attended Antioch College my freshman year. Why only one year is a long and not pretty story, but my year at Antioch was a good year.

This is the 4th time - it closed during the Civil War, in the 1880's for financial reasons, 1917-1918 and now.

Antioch is a unique place. In the 50s it was a place where professors blackballed for "anti-american" activities could find work. There are no letter grades, unless you request them. (All classes end up with a narrative evaluation).

from WOHIO TV:

Antioch College To Suspend Operations In 2008

YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio -- Officials at Antioch College said it will close after the 2007-2008 school year while it searches for enough money to reopen.

The small school in Ohio has a history of social activism and civil disobedience.

It counts Coretta Scott King, "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling and evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould among its graduates.

The college has a small, $30 million endowment and depends heavily on tuition revenue. But a student body that was 2,000 strong in the 1960s has dropped to around 400.

School spokeswoman Linda Sirk said the college hopes to find enough money to reopen in about 2012.

They missed Jorma Koukonen (Jefferson Airplane guitarist) and Leonard Nimoy.

Interview with Antioch's president at NPR

First, an explanation: Early in 2006, my son and I decided to start following the English Premier League. We each chose a team - he chose Arsenal because they had won a few times and because he really liked Thierry Henry. I chose Liverpool because Liverpool reminds me of Cleveland, and Craig Bellamy had just moved from Newcastle to Liverpool, supposedly because he had always wanted to play for the team he loved as a boy in Wales. Reminded me of how Clevelanders feel about the Browns.

So I've been following Liverpool fairly closely. Liverpool is involved in the Champions League tournament, which is the European Championship for club (as opposed to national) teams that earned their way in based upon the results from 2005-2006. Football (soccer) tournament games are usually determined by random draw, rather than seeding like American sports playoffs are.

So Liverpool gets the (it seemed) unfortunate draw of the defending champions Barcelona in the round of 16. Last week, the team went to Portugal to prepare for yesterday's match, the first of a home-and-away series (called a 'two-legged tie' in football parlance).

While there the team got very drunk at a karaoke bar. Bellamy, who has a history of getting drunk and getting in trouble, decides that his teammate Riise, a much more reserved Norwegian, should come up and sing. Riise thinks not. They get into a fight, and Bellamy eventually grabs a 9-iron and hits Riise's legs with it. Not a good idea.

Bellamy is fined $155,000 by the team and the soccer pundits assume that his career at Liverpool is over. Riise is fine, apparently he didn't hit him as hard as was first reported. Surprisingly, both Riise and Bellamy start the game.

So what happens?

Bellamy scores. As all Footballers do, he begins a completely over-the-top celebration. And he begins it by....

Pantomiming a golf swing. A complete stick-in-the-eye of the entire Footballing world.

More irony - Liverpool's winning goal is scored by Bellamy taking a rebound and feeding Riise at the top of the box, who puts the shot in.

When they're bad, they're very, very good

Check out Magnatune. Basically, Open Source music. Good open source music. Artists get 50%. You get high-quality downloads, with album art, guilt-free. And you are encouraged to give away 3 copies.

WAV for burning to CD. MP3/Ogg/AAC/Whatever for playing on your media player. All of it 100% up front, legal, no DRM.

What a concept. Support them. The more they sell, the more artists will try a new way, and the more great music we'll have available.

Also, I wonder what Courtney Love could have done if she hadn't gotten so into drugs. Because she can write amazingly well when she needs to. Well worth a read about just how screwed up the music industry really is.

As part of my spiritual practice each day, I print a chapter of the Tao Te Ching on my webpage for me (and others) to read. The chapters aren't tied to any specific day, but are printed in order, looping endlessly.

Today's was chapter 18, entitled Hypocrisy. Reading it this morning caused one of those rare moments of clarity:

When the Way is forgotten
Duty and justice appear;
Then knowledge and wisdom are born
Along with hypocrisy.

When harmonious relationships dissolve
Then respect and devotion arise;
When a nation falls to chaos
Then loyalty and patriotism are born.

(Emphasis mine)

Think about it. It has a lot to say about where our country is today.

Cleveland resident and Blues legend Robert Lockwood, Jr. died yesterday at 91.

Lockwood was our last direct connection to the great Robert Johnson. He learned to play from Johnson, who had moved in with Lockwood's mother, and was the only person left who played in Johnson's unique style - everyone else who plays Johnson's music had to learn it after learning guitar another way. Lockwood's guitar playing was Johnson's style.

Lockwood has been playing Wade Oval Wednesdays here in Cleveland the last couple of years. Two years ago, a storm blew in as he was starting. Last year, I was stuck doing something else. Now he's gone.

Blues fans have lost a treasure.