Monday Never Comes: Joseph Dunphy's Soapbox

Star Simpson's first interview on the Boston airport LED sweatshirt scare

2008-11-03T19:55:00.000-08:00

Following up on A little reality intruding on the spin: The Star Simpson Incident: I recently came across this video on BoingBoing. A few commercials come before the interview ...

... which is memorable. Let's take a good look at the "lump of putty" the Massachussetts state police reported seeing in Ms. Simpson's hands, one which she says they refused to return until fairly recently. It's a flower, made out of what Star describes as oven hardened clay. In other words, unglazed ceramics.

A view from a different angle

leaving us with no rational way to avoid a simple conclusion: Pare's career needs to be over. His report to the press, one which so inflamed local sentiments as to deny Ms.Simpson the possibility of a fair jury trial, was fraudulent. A ceramic flower is not a lump of putty. It can not honestly be mistaken for a lump of putty. There is no room for a judgement call on this one - Pare and the police deliberately deceived the public, and the fact that the public was eager to be deceived does not excuse such an action. Not that one had to be in the police to join in on the fun, if one lived in Beantown, as those scanning the increasingly ignorant and outrageous blog reactions during the trial probably would have guessed.

"STAR: I've become very turned off to living in Boston. I'm taking time off to travel, because that seems like a much better plan than continuing to live in that state. The reaction of people in Boston has been -- based on news reports containing any number of lies by the police, and little embellishments by writers, people have -- any number of reactions towards me. While biking one day, some complete stranger spit on me, spit on my bicycle, and shouted that I should have done time. I know he doesn't know anything about what actually happened.

XENI: Does that happen often, hostile reactions from people on the street?

STAR: Yeah. Every time I'd go out, I'd meet some person who had something to say, and had formed strong opinions and decided to take that opportunity to take them out on me.

I will agree with some of the comments that I skimmed that Boston should pay a real price for this outrage, and given the heavy dependence of that second rung metropolitan area on tourism, an obvious means of extracting the needed pound of flesh presents itself. My hope is that people will simply elect to not travel to Boston, not even with the thought that they're going to be part of some kind of organized boycott or attempt to reform Boston in spite of itself, but because the town simply looks like a nasty, crazy, unfriendly and unwholesome place to visit; who needs to deal with people who think like this? Especially when there are so many far more pleasant vacation choices. Like, say, Hawaii. Or is that Hawai'i?

Enough would-be tourists exercise that kind of prudence, and the long fading city of Boston is going to be in for some well deserved economic misery. May it never end.

WikiCafe: Can you say "hypocrisy"?

2008-08-09T00:11:00.000-07:00

Metacafe is one of Youtube's competitors, a video hosting service that is a distant second to Youtube in popularity (if even that), which is perhaps best known for the number of women one can see naked on it without needing to log in. Having thus distinguished itself in one way, Metacafe decided to stand out in another, a few months ago. It decided to become the first major video hosting service to wikify the descriptions, titles and tags for the videos it hosted.

Wikification is an extreme thing to do to existing webspace. Think of the complaint that used to be directed against Blogger, back some time before I started posting on it: that there was no comment moderation. That any troll could come along and drop any number of outrageous remarks that he wanted, and that the author of a blog would have to play the proverbial game of whackamole to keep his blog clean if the troll got his friends involved. I understand that there was some real unhappiness about that lack of screening, which I could easily understand, and as Blogger eventually did understand - note that comment screening is now an option - but picture what the experience would have been like if far from having to settle for just leaving rude remarks, they could rewrite one's posts or delete them altogether. That's what wikification is - taking the bad concept of denying the user effective control over the comment section of a page, and pushing it to the point of letting the trolls barge their way into the page itself.

I posted a few questions about this change on the Metacafe company blog, reprinting my comment in a post to one of my Googlegroups, having found that Metacafe's staff seemed to have gone deeply into "do as we say and not as we do" territory. I had asked if the users would be able to opt out of having the "metainformation" on their posts wikified. Lurking in their forums, I found that the answer to this would seem to be no - no live and let live with their users on this one, the Metacafe staff was going to force this experiment on all, whether they wished to take part in it or not. "Give it a chance, it might work for you", they said. But take a look at that company blog. These same people who forced their users to admit all other users as collaborators, "come one, come all, whether I want you to or not", with no prescreening of changes, wouldn't even open the comment section of their blog in that manner. Which seems more extreme - not having control over what somebody posts after one's words, or not having control over one's words, themselves?

Some weeks have passed, more posts have appeared atop the Metacafe company blog, but my comment (which was left awaiting moderation) still has not appeared, and as you can see for yourself, it doesn't even come remotely close to qualifying as trolling. While I am not saying that comment moderation is censorship - I practice it myself, and with good reason - I am saying that there is something kind of questionable about forcing others to do that which one isn't willing to do, even to a diminished extent, oneself. "Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" is a cliche for a good reason; if one is unwilling to do something, and one feels that there is a good reason for that, why do those good reasons suddenly evaporate when somebody else stands to be inconvenienced?

When somebody posts about what some would dismiss as being "the unfairness of life", the usual refrain is "what can you do", but in this case, there is a simple answer. Youtube's traffic dwarfs that of Metacafe, and they haven't denied their users the freedom to post without being interfered with by any busybody who feels he has the right to second guess their creative choices, and the willingness to get into a test of wills about the matter. Usually, the problem in getting a provider to behave itself is one of asking a group of total strangers to cooperate in giving something up - the use of a valued service - in exchange for the deferred gratification of better service (should the other boycotters stick together and get the provider to back down, but getting more traffic and more creative freedom in exchange for having fewer headaches isn't much of a sacrifice, temporary or otherwise. In this case, the greatest good is worked by the users going out and seeking immediate gratification, which in this case can be found on Youtube and a number of other video hosting services for free.

So really, why not pursue it? Metacafe is not being nice about this, and they have no leverage other than that which their users are foolish enough to give to them. Let's hope that they'll decide to not let that be very much.

I did not know that!

2008-05-04T07:09:00.000-07:00

I discovered something remarkable today. For all of these ... months ... I've been under the misguided impression that I was living in and blogging from Chicago, when, in fact, I've been in Southern India the whole time. Why, you could have knocked me over with a feather, but Alexa couldn't possibly be wrong, could it? Let's take a look at the Alexa listing for this site and see what we find:

Joseph-dunphy.blogspot.com
9/4 IIIRD STREET SUNDARAM COLONY , TAMBARAM WEST
CHENNAI, TAMILNADU 600045,
INDIA

Phone: +1 415 538 8404
Fax: +1 212 629 9305
dns-admin [at] google.com

Oh, and good news - Google is ready to help me with my newfound national identity! Quoting what just came upon my screen as I backed up my work:

Blog in your native Indic script
Convert English characters to Indic script as you type! Learn more about transliteration on Blogger.

Why, thank you, boys! If only you could teach me to understand my native indic script and maybe even a few words in my brand new native tounge, I suspect that that new found ability to blog in a less European mode would be even more helpful.

Now some people, some very boring people, might suggest that I'm still an American and still in Chicago, and that what we're seeing is an excellent example of the problems that arise when a site accepts contact information from any Tom, Dick or Harry who wishes to offer it, or in this case, I suppose, any Dinesh, Tushar or Haresh, to be properly non-anglocentric about these things. They might even go so far as to say that the submission didn't even come from me, but instead, from somebody who seems to intend to hijack the url for this blog, and not understanding the difference between domains and subdomains, doesn't know that a registrar can't submit joseph-dunphy.blogspot.com as a domain name. Can you imagine that? I will tactfully decline to comment at length on the making such terrible accusations in this more sensitive and enlightened era in which we all know of our duty to assume good faith, especially since I am one of those shameful people who has been denying that this contact information is accurate, and if one can't be tactful with oneself, truly, who can one be tactful with?

While I work through the obvious self-esteem issues posed by my insistence on my own Midwesterness, I would make a request of anybody coming to this site from Alexa. Regardless of what you might have read in the site description in the search results, please accept that this is not, in fact, the number one site for "Alien Resurrection" downloads. I wouldn't even know where to begin to look for such things, so please don't ask, and please don't be too disappointed when you discover that there aren't any other bootlegged downloads at this location, or at any other location I have anything to do with. No movies, no mp3s, not even any faked nudes of the Bush twins ... nothing. I know, it's a terrible oversight on my part, leaving out the contraband like that, one which I must confess I have no intention of ever rectifying, but one for which I might someday be forgiven, if only by the truly gracious few.

Addendum, June 14: A few weeks after this post, I sent Alexa a correction of the contact information, and they removed the address and telephone numbers. Eventually. The url for this blog, however, remains listed as if it were a domain name to this day.

Blink and you'll miss it

2008-02-29T11:34:00.000-08:00

A first, as far as I know - a link to an image in my gallery at Flickr, from somebody else. Somebody at "Schmap" wrote to me and asked me if I would object to their inclusion of a thumbnail of the photo you see below, along with a linkback, in the fourth edition of their Chicago neighborhood guide.

Of course, I was very happy to say yes, and you can see the image appear as part of a slideshow here. You don't see it for long, before, as your arm lightly brushes across your mouse as you reach for something or your hand twitches, you automatically skip into Chinatown or somesuch place within a few scale inches / miles of where I was shooting, but my picture is there, and the fullsized version has seen 50 visits in the few hours that have passed since I received the acceptance letter. Not a bad start to my afternoon.

Out of curiosity, I decided to see which pictures had proved the most popular. I wasn't surprised that the few chrysanthemum pictures had done better than most, but mildly surprised that the effort you see to your left was proving so much more popular than this far less heavily shopped one that follows. Not that I'm complaining. This is valuable feedback, and I may be learning from it. Having just written that, I now have to wonder if some funny person will now find the absolutely worst image I did and start clicking on it repeatedly.

That would probably be my picture of this ferocious little guy, who could be heard a block away. On his scale, that was probably like a mile for one of us. I was so delighted by the subject, this tiny little dog who was going to defend the building all on his own, that I had to post the picture, even if the photoshopping needs a lot of work. Getting detail out of a black subject against a much lighter background isn't easy, which is why our little hero seems a shadow of himself; this is one of those cases in which I'll probably just accept the surrealism of the results as I bring out the lasso tool and see what I can do.

Delayed Bayer Recall Story

2008-02-16T12:19:00.000-08:00

Referring to: this article.

Having never heard of this drug or this study, I asked a retired physician in my family what he thought of both. While he wasn't familiar with either, he did raise a question. While one might, perhaps, see a reason why Bayer would, were this report accurate, want to keep the public in the dark about any corporate misdeeds, why would a small army of prescribing physicians prove cooperative? While he was in practice, every month the FDA would send a report to practicing physicians warning them of reports of possibly dangerous side effects, with a form on the last page that the physicians were encouraged to use, to report problems that they had witnessed. While drug companies have been known to give physicians kickbacks for agreeing to do things things that might not be in the best interests of their patients, such as enrolling them in experimental drug trials (this was reported in the Wall Street Journal), bribing the entire profession would take some doing, even if the whole profession were open to being bribed.

He stated - arousing a little of my own skepticism - that thirty avoidable deaths from a medication would be considered a scandal, leaving me wondering how one would detect such a statistical blip in a population (open heart surgery candidates) in which the mortality rate is going to be high under any circumstances, at present. But I suppose that was the point - we are not looking at a reasoned reaction but an emotional one, and if what may be nothing more than an artifact arising from poor stratification in a study of what is a not a very homogenous population to begin with can result in a draconian response on the part of regulators, what would be the regulatory response to killing patients by the tens of thousands?

This might bring forth the easy answer that given that we are now in year eight of the George W. Bush presidency, living in a country under the administration so psychotically pro-big business that it is literally willing to send its own nation down a path very likely to lead to its destruction (see: earlier comments regarding outsourcing) for the sake of short term corporate profit boosting. That, and for the sake of making nice with India, which said frighteningly inept president still seems to hope will become an ally in America's "war on terror" and send massive reinforcements to our troops in Iraq, and never mind the fact that India has, at length, failed to show any signs of real interest in doing so. Construct your own Moby Dick metaphor with Bush cast as Ahab, I suppose. One possible problem with that easy answer: eight years is far from long enough for the Clinton era appointees to have retired. Would they have all cooperated in this hypothetical burial of what would have been physician reports of problems with the drug in question which would have been arriving by the tens of thousands, or at the very least, certainly by the thousands? A conspiracy of silence involving thousands of nonfirable bureaucrats that lasted for years? Does that really sound plausible?

Even granting that Clinton's liberalism was more a whacky, fashion conscious love of narcissistic self-indulgence and trendy rhetoric than it was anything genuinely progressive, are we to believe that every single appointee from that era was a good, Bush supporter style corporatist, or that the few who weren't would be so easily silenced? No, I'm not saying that stories can't be made to go away. I've certainly seen that happen before, but generally in places where those cooperating with that conspiracy of silence had to fear for their own jobs, worry about whether or not they'd get to graduate, were in some way in danger of suffering from the reprisals if those who desired their silence became unhappy with them. To what extent does that describe an FDA administrator?

Questions are sometimes just those - questions. In this case, I do not claim to have the answers, and suggest that the reader seek them on his own. I wonder if any of them will.

Perhaps not. In the filler post I put in place before writing this, I said something about being more interested in the reaction to the article on Digg, than I was in the article itself. What interested me was the willingness of somebody to imply that market forces would so strongly compel a company like Bayer to be nice and abstain from producing a product that would hurt its customers that if they did, it was probably an honest mistake. Quoth one of the users:

Free markets and capitalism provide greater amounts and more advanced technological breakthroughs than purely government run and controlled systems.

Except that both free markets and capitalism could exist without corporations and the detachment from personal responsibility for personal misdeeds they sometimes offer, so being anticorporate doesn't necessarily mean that one is opposed to capitalism. Know what a single proprietorship is?

This is demonstrated both logically AND historically.

Which brings us to why Economics is not a real science: in a real science, the scientists know that knowledge about the external world can not be generated ex nihilo, through the pure application of reason without need to ground the starting assumptions of one's arguments in observation, because Logic can do no more than reveal the consequences of the assumptions one makes - garbage in, garbage out. Any argument that would claim to circumvent that limitation is, at best, a well crafted fallacy.

Economics fails to be a real science because it fails to be empirical. Instead of looking at the evidence to see how the participants in a market actually do behave, the true believers will offer arguments about how one should expect them to behave, declare the conclusions of those arguments to be as good as observations on the basis that they sound plausible, and then build their theory on that. That isn't science, that's Metaphysics, with maybe a dose of Calvinist theology. Take an old sermon, replace "G-d" with "The Market", and see how familiar the results sound.

A company such as Bayer makes money selling drugs to help people and obviously wouldn't make much money selling drugs that kill people. Thus, as they are a greedy company trying to make money, it is in their best interest not to kill people and to in fact help people.

Except - and this is where that failure of empiricism comes in - as a matter of historical reality, greedy companies during the Robber Baron Era frequently did knowingly market products that did grave harm to their customers, making very good money along the way. That's why all of that consumer protection legislation was passed during the early to mid 20th century in the United States. This is not a controversial view I'm sharing, either. This is something that was basic, high school level history until that magical time when the schools decided that being sure to "not be divisive" was more important than giving their students a sound education.

Case in point: Tort law during the period did not recognize the concept of "wrongful death", so, I'm told by an attorney, the Pullman Cars were designed to collapse in the case of collision and kill everybody inside, in order to shield the Pullman Car Company from the liability that would arise were some of the seriously injured passengers to survive a crash and need medical treatment. Certainly not very good for the customer of the railroad that purchased such a car, but the cars sold well. Then there is the extensive history of adulteration in the meat packing industry, which market forces did little to nothing to curtail prior to the establishment of regulation and inspection in that industry.

The user might try to claim that he (?) acknowleged the point, when he wrote

The fact is sometimes they mess up and there should be oversight and a system in place to quickly fix the situation. There should also be enough prior study in place to be sure these mess ups don't reach the market in the first place.

but, if so, that's an evasion. If a tourist asks a new resident of Chicago which way Lincoln is while the two are standing at Clark and Belmont, the new resident tries to remember where Lincoln is, and then points eastward by mistake, the new resident has messed up. If, on the other hand, that same tourist, late at night asks for directions to Second City, and a lifelong resident gives him directions that will take that tourist to the Robert Taylor Homes, that resident has not "messed up", he's just plain evil. The difference is this - did the person offering the directions make an honest mistake and did he mean well? The user has tried to claim the presence of good intentions on the part of a corporation are self-evident, or logically necessary, when in fact History has shown that Corporations very frequently don't mean well at all, meaning that any supposed logical argument that they must is left in the same place as the old Scholastic arguments against the existence of sunspots - in direct conflict with observable reality, and yet, strangely enough, not discarded.

He continues:

These last two statements are where government and regulation come in.

Clearly implying the corporate mistakes must be honest mistakes, calling for the kind intervention of government which will help straighten them out, much like the confused newcomer in the above example. The Digg user then attempts to dispel any perception that he might be a neoconservative ideologue, writing

This whole "CORPORATIONS ARE EVIL" attitude is just as ridiculous as "GOVERNMENT IS EVIL" thinking. Both can be good/bad and both have their place,

Which sounds more reasonable than it really is, when it is seen out of context and one forgets what that place is supposed to be, and when one overlooks the fact that the user is setting up a strawman. The article didn't speak about corporations in general, everywhere and at all times, it spoke about a single corporation (Bayer) in a single era (our own), and responses made in Digg's limiting, soundbite format are made in that context. To criticise the moral direction the American corporate community has been moving in during the last few decades, overall, is not the same thing as criticising everybody who does now or ever has worked in a corporation, any more than an admission the existence of a gang problem in Englewood is an attack on all African-Americans, yet just as we saw that kind of false equating of very differing ideas with inflammatory intent so often during the Politically Correct 1990s, "playing the hysteria card" as I used to call it, now we see the same directed toward that which is questionable on the Right instead of on the Left, in a softer tone of voice, but clearly with the same manipulative intent.

but much of the polarizing anti-corporatism propaganda spit out on digg is just as bad as the support our troops or you're a terrorist thinking, its just on opposite sides of the table.

Yes, Heaven forbid that the chickens should develop a distrust of the foxes.

Notice the shift from the now recognized PC buzzword "divisive" to the more Centrist sounding "polarizing", but there is nothing Centrist in the ideas advanced so dishonestly. Real Centrists, unlike Neocon pretenders, are not shy about critiquing social institutions or bothered by the suggestions that some of the currently existing ones might have gone bad, or even, by their very nature, be rotten to the core. For reform to even be conceptualized as a possibility, one has to accept that such things are possible, and Neoconservatism is, above all else, defined by the misplaced anger with which it greets any attempt to achieve reform. I'd be more amused by the fact that toward the end the user seems to be stumbling in the direction of an attempt coopt Liberalism in support of Neoconservatism as well, with a last minute substitution of "polarizing" for "divisive", were Neoconservatism something other than a cooption of Conservatism by those formerly part of the New Left that became more palatable for those who got cushy jobs at a time when those were given out far too freely to a spoiled generation whose character, overall, has not improved with time. There is no humor in watching our friend attempt to coopt either Centrism or Liberalism, because humor requires the element of surprise.

Why would a corporation choose to do something not in its own best interests - assuming that poorly serving the consumer must necessarily fall into that category? Perhaps, in part, because a corporation doesn't make decisions, for the excellent reason that in a real sense, it doesn't actually exist. A corporation is a sort of legal fiction created to make a huge, complicated buzz of human activity comprehensible by helping people to imagine it to be a single collective entity, a person in its own right, in fact, and we are so used to the fiction that somewhere along the way, we forget that is what it is, and our own clarity of thought suffers.

For example: a man walks into a human resources office with solid credentials, applies for work, and as he walks away, gets to hear his application and resume being torn to shreds. In utter disbelief, he shares the experience with others, who tell him that he shouldn't question this, because that's the company's privilege - as if the company had torn up his paperwork, when, in fact, this was done by a nineteen year old intern who didn't want to have to bother filing it, and was still revved up after a stirring lecture in her woman's studies class about the evils of the White Male and decided to fight the imaginary power, especially when the imaginary power in the flesh wasn't as blond haired, blue eyed and buff as she preferred her apologetic young men to be; the insubordinate act of a spoiled little girl with a temp job becomes a sacred part of the American way of life, above any possible legitimate criticism.

The metaphor is confused with reality, the representative with the company and all of those who work at it, and the fact that she doesn't actually own the company that she has (on her own ungranted authority) refused employment at, is swiftly forgotten. Her actions are accepted as a personal, private exercise of freedom the rationality of which is guaranteed because of the demands of market discipline, the choice of a company which must surely act in its own best interests and therefore, through the acting of Adam Smith's invisible hand, work the greatest good for the greatest number, and never mind the fact that Smith never wrote that. True believers will speak as if the rogue employee and the company were one, so assuredly so that she couldn't have any agenda or issues of her own apart from a passionate desire to do that which would well serve her employer's interests, and that in an office staffed with her friends, her employer would surely know if she had done any less than her absolute, most responsibly professional best.

It's a common sort of experience, one that should make certain fallacies easier to see, and yet it doesn't seem to do so, very often. Corporate decisions at the higher levels of management aren't "made by the company" any more than the ones at the lower levels are, they're made by managers who jump from company to company, may very well leave long before the damage they do is noticed, and are looking for quantifiable results to cite when selling themselves to their next employer. As for being associated with a disaster - can anybody get very far into adulthood in any Western society without understanding some variant on the initials C.Y.A.? We have a job market in which almost nobody pretends that hiring is based on much other than successful networking, and one has to have allies to do that, preferably powerful ones. How is the truth to come out when lies are likely to prove so much more beneficial to the witnesses? The assumption that the company's interests will ultimately impact on a departed manager's interests would seem to require an assumption that the truth about who did what and why would be generally known and really, seriously - is there anybody out there who has never seen an unsavory incident or stupid act on the part of somebody in a position of authority just sort of go away, as people decided that they really didn't need trouble that badly?

How does life experience vanish so utterly the moment it has a chance to find application in political discourse? At so many moments like the one I alluded to, we witness, first hand, the ironic failure of Neoconservatism as an opposition movement to the Far Left - the neoconservatives will go so far as to radically empower the Far Left - their own supposed opposition - by refusing to ask the question "what happens when our supposed opposition or their darlings become those in power", and trying to shout down those who do, but the question remains. What happens when the inmates start running the asylum, if people have been conditioned to unquestioningly accept the dictates and actions of those in power, on the naive assumption that those in positions of responsibility must surely be responsible? This belief, our neocon friends have frequently clung to with absolute ideological rigidity, as if it were religious dogma, with seeming indifference to how appalling the consequences may be, or how surprising they aren't.

For example: Out of respect for law and order, we're told, we should always side with a police officer - any police officer - against anybody he has just arrested, and as good Americans be properly appalled that taxpayer money is wasted manning a department like Internal Affairs, which, they will passionately insist, is there just to try to get good, honest hard working cops as they try to protect you and me. One can see such people go so far as to defend the use of torture as a means of interrogation (eg. Commander Jon Burges of Area Two in Chicago). But what if a gang manages to get one of its members on its local police force - and yes, that has happened before - in this perfect world in which there is no oversight? If the mental image of a lucky member of the Disciples or Kings being able to grab citizens off the street on a whim and torture or even summarily execute them with impunity would not be enough to be one of our ideologue friends to reconsider the extreme position he has taken, what would be? The answer is: nothing at all.

Our neocon friends are beyond the reach of reason, building the core of their own identity as a group around a theory of government designed for a perfect world, never asking themselves what a government would be needed for in that perfect world. The only dispensation that seems available for those who would flirt with heresy on this point would seem to come when a breaking with this doctrine of their faith is needed for one of them to attack a popular neocon whipping boy, eg. one of the surviving Kennedys, or a democratic appointee, when railing against bureaucracy is in fashion and the appointee proves useful for that purpose. As when an anemic Catholic is granted leave to have his steak during a friday in Lent, the doctrine has not been questioned, it merely has been temporarily neglected for the sake of the perceived greater good, with the hope, perhaps, that G-d or the Market will understand.

This is the failure, and I would argue, on some level a willful one, of Neoconservatism, and it's a persistant one - neocons never seem to ask what happens when society starts to deviate from the ideal, as it inevitably must, and those they would acknowledge to be the wrong people get into power. Will society's response tend to correct the problem, or exacerbate it? If, on every occasion, the response to the very question is to respond with the zealous rage of a fundamentalist whose faith has just be questioned, the former (self-correction) will not be in the realm of possibility, because criminals do not, by their nature, voluntarily respect boundaries or go where they're expected to go, and few crimes, either great or small, ever solve themselves.

Obama Support: Just a question, if you can deal with it.

2008-02-04T20:30:00.000-08:00

Something I've often found strange is the way in which some can argue a point at length and with passion, and at the same time ignore its simplest implications. For the last seven years, much has been said about the Bush administration's alleged shredding of the bill of rights, and I understand that some basis for this has existed in fact. If so, then the implication of this is that the office of the presidency has become far more powerful than the founding fathers ever intended, and dangerously so. Civil liberties are supposed to be a natural outgrowth of the system, not a gift to be granted or denied on the whim of any one man.

That having been said, what do we now see a large chunk of the democratic party ready and eager to do? Fast track somebody with a very limited political past into that dangerously enhanced office. The question for the would-be supporters is this: how much does one really ever know about somebody, until he has established a track record of performance? Without that, what does one have to go on? A platform? The discarding of those on attainment of office has been the stuff of bitter jokes longer than most of us have been alive. Some nice speeches? Good writers are easily hired. The fact that he's a passably good looking black man who can hold a crowd's attention?

If that's all it takes, then maybe I should add a second question. Is this the presidency of the United States we're talking about, or the presidency of somebody's high school student council? Because if our standards of choice are something so superficial as how fashionably beddable a candidate is, I think our electorate might be taking that collective trip back to high school, and not even back to senior year at that, at a time when the stakes are a lot higher than those represented by the choice of next year's prom theme.

The usual overwrought and factually unsupported charges of racism may now begin.

Rooting out nofollow and asking for a little assistance

2008-01-13T16:04:00.000-08:00

Recently I wrote about the unhappy surprise of discovering that a number of social networking sites that I had established presences on used "rel=nofollow" tags on their homepage links, explaining why this practice is unethical. I was even more unpleasantly surprised to discover, as I read this post on Tips 4 blogspot, that said tag is automatically entered in the links on visitor posts to Blogger. As I discovered by quickly unrendering the redirect used by a number of Typekey equipped blogs, Typekey seems to do this, too.

The good news is that as the owner of this blog, I seem to be able to remove those tags by taking them out of my template, which I just did. I do appreciate civil feedback on this blog, and am more than glad to show my appreciation by doing my part to help give your site a boost. All I ask, other than the obvious "please don't leave spam", including the barely disguised Bravenet guestbook variety, where somebody says "great site" on one's post about architectural preservationism and then links to his discount pharmacy page (just how much Xanax does America need) is that you please keep my journal in mind when you start installing a few links of your own.

Getting people to notice a new blog is very difficult, and there is something a little discouraging about going to Technorati and noticing that all but one of the references to one's blog appear on one's other blogs. Nobody knows you're there, so nobody links to you, so nobody finds you ... chicken, egg ... you know the drill. The fact that I'm not really very far to either the Right or the Left probably doesn't help, either. A bushite (bushie? bushwhacker?) who visits a neocon site where the virtues of torturing prisoners are being extolled knows within seconds that he is among his own. He settles in, he's at home, and already starting to network in less time than one needs to fry an egg. Knowing what a Centrist blog is about, on the other hand, takes time. Maybe this is one reason why one finds so few of them. With your help, at least there can be one more of them that isn't completely invisible.

ADDENDUM: On posting my thanks to the blog where I found the suggestion, I found rel=nofollow appearing in the links in my post. The problem has not been fixed at all.

Spiders on Drugs

2008-01-10T11:07:00.000-08:00

Vital information for the kids of today in this instructional video from apeman888

Keep an eye on these sites ...

2008-01-05T08:57:00.000-08:00

... and I don't mean that in a good way. If you recently visited one of my mashable sites, you might have noticed that the list of social networking sites I have in that left bottom sidebar has grown shorter. There's a good reason for that.

I've started posting to my StumbleUpon blog. If you haven't used Stumbleupon, then I'll start by saying that any brief description fails to explain it. It's a site for sharing links and reviewing the sites linked to. That doesn't sound like much, does it? But it is. One installs the toolbar, clicks on the Stumbleupon icon (next to which is the word "stumble"), and is instantly transported (yes, there's the cliche you were waiting for) to a random site that fits into one of the areas of interest one has listed in one's profile. A lot of these are really good sites, places you'd never hear of, and a lot of them are really creative and different (yes, more cliches, wow do I stink). The sites are natural conversation pieces, and where one finds conversation pieces, one tends to find some sort of conversation, and that's one place where community begins - something which Stumbleupon encourages, providing options to review other member's blogs and to link to them by becoming their fans. There are a few twits, but they seem ignorable enough, and so far at least, the crowd seems friendly and if I've known them too briefly to comment on how bright they are, at least they have generally good taste, and that, at the very least, is something. (Third cliche. I'm on a roll - and there's the forth).

What, then, is the problem? As I started posting reviews, I would sometimes have cause to link the review that I was writing to relevant outside source material, sometimes commentary on one of my sites, sometimes not - and noticed that the system was inserting these tags into my links:

rel="nofollow"

That tag tells the search engine spiders to ignore the link. Some bloggers have been putting that tag to use in the comments section for their blogs in an attempt to dissuade spammers from posting comment spam, by removing the search engine boost the homepage link attached to their comments would give to their sites. This, of course, is futile, as it ignores the reality that nothing seems to dissuade spammers, who've been submitting comment spam to moderated guestbooks for years, even guestbooks with clearly posted notices that "all comments are screened before they appear", meaning that nobody other than the soon to be annoyed site owner will ever see the spam. The spammers hit, anyway; spamming is not economically rational behavior in practice. These same bloggers ignore the fact that they are harming somebody, and I'm not talking about the spammers. How about those who do take the time to think out and post legitimate comments to their blogs and are now, for no good reason, being denied the benefit of those links? Is that really fair to them? That little boost is what gets a lot of new sites and new blogs going. But we're in the middle of a fad, and reason is going to have little impact on the Groupthink.

Stumbleupon seems to have followed suit, which is a little bothersome, but not quite what I'm complaining about. This morning, out of idle curiosity I checked the code for the page on my Stumbleupon site on which I get my one and only linkback to my homepage (I use my mashable site for that), and found that link, too, had the rel=nofollow tag. Stumbleupon's management had been playing me and many other users as well, by offering a linkback that wasn't really a linkback at all.

As I explained in my not altogether unfavorable review of Stumbleupon, posted on their own site, the problem with that goes well beyond the fact that my other sites are seeing no significant benefit from their association with my Stumbleupon site, while my Stumbleupon site has certainly been boosted in the search engines by the fact that those other sites link to it. Having to relocate my pages after the plug pulling incident at Internet Trash I mention over on my site at Newsguy and then having to regain the visibility that I had lost gained me a little practical experience dealing with issues of search engine optimization. One of the lessons I learned the hard way involved the severe drawbacks of having some of my pages link to some of my other pages, where the links are not reciprocated; creating "terminal pages" as I call them. I found that the terminal pages would soar in the listings, staying high for a long time, at the expense of the nonterminal pages, which would plummet; as if the spiders, on finding their way to the terminal pages, would get stranded there and forget where they had been previously. I soon started making a special point of not designing my sites that way. Now I find that while I wasn't looking, Stumbleupon slipped in a little code that had the effect of causing me to do just that.

I came back with a measured punitive response. I have enjoyed using Stumbleupon, seeing some real value in that site, so I'm not going to shun it or urge others to do so, but I'm also not going to be a sucker and continue reciprocating what I was never really being given. Blogger allows its users a lot of freedom in the design of their blogs and the writing of their posts, and one of the freedoms it gives is the freedom to tailor make one's links. If you unrender this site and take a look at my links, you'll find that every link I have to Stumbleupon has that same rel=nofollow tag that I was so displeased to find Stumbleupon putting to such sneaky and really almost unheard-of use. The linkback to the user's homepage is sacred. A provider should not touch that, ever, because aside from the inherent sleaziness of seeking to gain a consideration that one is sneakily refusing to reciprocate, one has the fact that the gain in visibility for one's sites in general is the only way one is repaid the time and work one puts into posting to these sites. For them to fail to respect this, especially in the way they did, then, is unethical and for me to overlook this particular breach of ethics would be foolish. Where I could not reciprocate with rel=nofollow tags of my own, I removed the link to Stumbleupon altogether, and resolved never to link to that site again from Tribe or anywhere else where one can not edit the HTML used for the establishment of external links.

I found myself even more curious than before - who else was doing this? I've recently established presences on a number of social networking sites with the intention of putting them all to use. Most are still sitting idle because I have a lot of sites and haven't had time to get to all of them, yet, but I wanted to make sure that I'd didn't miss an opportunity to claim my own name on these sites before somebody else did. I'd much rather be the user "joseph_dunphy" than the user "joseph_dunphy_69260" or something like that, as the latter is just ugly, and when one's name is as common as mine is, that becomes a real concern. I thus had a major incentive to establish myself quickly, which I did, but having done so, I then was faced with the question of what each of these sites would be for. I don't want my blog at Wordpress to be a clone of my journal at Blogger. I want each of my sites to have a purpose and a character of its own. This one, for example, which I finally gave a less generic name to last night ("Joseph Dunphy's Soapbox / Blog to Come" - what was that) has evolved into the place where I go when I feel like commenting on politics or the directions that American popular culture has been moving in (closely intertwined subjects, those) and choose to pretend that somebody other than me will care. As the site counter at Yahoo 360 (the previous location for this blog) racked some thousands of hits in its few months of existence at the old location before I switched over here, I guess somebody must, but ... yes I'm digressing, and there's another cliche.

I really need to get slapped. So, as I piece it together ... Multiply is where I'll post my photos of places of worship and write about any and all things Jewish, Imeem is where I'll post most of my short stories and pictures of the parts of Chicago that maybe aren't always considered the best places ... and I find out what Stumbleupon has done, I find that I'm wondering who else has put my trust to bad use. No sooner do I start unrendering site source code and looking, than I find a number of sites doing what Stumbleupon has done, and I am much disappointed by the list. I expected better. These are some I've found so far:

Googlegroups. What was that about "not being evil", guys?

Yelp. That hurt.

Digg

Mag.nolia

Youtube

Metacafe

Vimeo

A few of the sites I'm involved with that had enough class to not do this include

Blogger. Yes, It's a Google enterprise, just like Youtube and Googlegroups, but as is the case with Yahoo, Google's different divisions seem to function almost as if they were little companies in their own right, some good and some not so good. Blogger, so far, has seemed to me to be a very good one for the most part, and nothing that happened today undermined that view.

Imeem. I am delighted for no particularly logical reason. Little experience there, yet, but something felt good about the place. I don't know why, so don't take that seriously just yet.

Flickr

Yahoogroups. One does get rel=nofollow in the group descriptions, but not in urls posted to the lists, at present.

Tribe. Very limited formatting options, but an interesting looking collection of communities that puts out a lot of striking, original photography.

Wordpress

Livespaces (MSN)

Mashable

DeviantArt

Uber

Squidoo

Vox

iLike

Bakespace

Opensource Food

Livejournal

Librarything. A mixed performance. They do insert rel=nofollow into the "also on" links, which is very much not cool given the fact that those are most of the outbound links, but they didn't seem to do this to the homepage link back to Mashable.

Twitter

eBay. No homepage link, but one can place outbound links on one's blog, which eBay doesn't seem to be tampering with at all.

IGN. Haven't used it much and the homepage link is in a slightly out of the way location, but the code for the homepage link looked fine.

Mog

Multiply

Veoh

Break.com I wasn't able to put into a category, because the programmers have used some strange non-html Stylesheet coding that leaves me, so far, unable to find the code for my homepage link using my admittedly rudimentary knowledge of the subject. I'll try to find out what the status of that is sometime in the next week or two, but if I remain confused at that time, I'll just assume the worst. In the case of those sites which I've determined aren't honestly reciprocating the links they've been getting from me, I've already removed feeds from those locations on my other sites, and as with Stumbleupon, inserted rel=nofollow into my remaining links to those places. I will still make some use of them, contributing a little content at each, but these are going to be very minor, secondary efforts, the sites on the second list definitely being a much higher priority.

I do take some pleasure in the fact that this time, the good guys outnumbered the bad guys. Most of the sites I was looking at, in this at least, did right by their users. I'll keep those Googlegroups in place, as they have been very reliable, experiencing little if any downtime and serving the essays I've posted to them at a good speed, and those little essays are still relevant for the blog posts to which they are attached. Certainly, they are a wonderful source of traffic, if Google's traffic counters are to be trusted - the Googlegroups / Dejanews archive is a popular resource and deservedly so, and probably a great many of my visitors did their searches there. However, what Googlegroups will be getting from me, henceforth, will be synopses, teasers, call them what you wish, with the actual essays they refer to being posted to some of the better behaved sites. The more one is willing to give, the more one should on one's way to getting; Googlegroups gets something out of my participation, it merely doesn't get everything, and this is fitting.

If in a very disappointing kind of way. At least, though, the hard decision of where to begin as I start to flesh out my new sites just became a lot easier.

Which brings us to the present

2007-10-22T19:55:00.000-07:00

Given the logic of the circumstances, as explained in that preceding post, I can't say that I was very surprised to discover that I had, indeed, been right. A few days ago, Yahoo announced the closing of its 360 profile and blog service. The author of the deservedly unpopular announcement tried to avoid using the word "closing", assuring the reader that the blogs and friends networks would be moved to some nebulously described global profile service that nobody outside of Yahoo had seen any trace of, leaving any reasonably attentive user with the question "exactly what is the functional difference between 'closing down a service' and 'relocating the contents of the accounts on that service to a new service' - isn't that a little like arguing that Yahoo! Photos is still with us because so many of the images from there ended up on Flickr" - which is not to say all of them. The move to Flickr, from what we could see looked far more solidly planned, and still ended up with a sizable number of users complaining about images that were lost in the move. History had left us with no reason to think that our blogs would far any better, and the loss of work would tend to be far greater, so some of us, myself included, decided that a move of this magnitude was a thing best done by hand.

I looked at a number of services, but was stunned by some of the choices I saw system administrators making. Consider, for example, multiply.com, a popular choice, one offering many tools for the user, but my understanding is that one can't screen comments before they appear on one's multiply profile. That was just asking for trouble, so I moved on - but found that the much-praised Wordpress had its own annoying feature - one couldn't modify the eye straining font size without the letters overlapping each other. At another location - I stopped looking before I even started, because the owner was a fairly well know outsourcer, and you've already seen what I've had to say about that practice, raising the question of just how long my relocated blog would be allowed to stay. So this went, until I finally just decided "to H*** with it", and began relocating my Yahoo 360 blog to a new location here at Blogger.

I still do see the virtue of having more than one active blog on more than one server - this incident should serve as an excellent illustration of why that is - but eventually one does say "I've spent enough time doing this" and takes a few shortcuts. Maybe I'll use the place at Wordpress as a photoblog - visitors seem to enjoy those, and one can keep the eyestraining text to a minimum. You may have noticed that the look and feel of this blog has changed in the course of the move, which is inevitable to a degree since Blogger and Yahoo 360 use different templates, but I've also replaced backgrounds, substituting the wood page background you see for the blue smoke background I used on 360. I hope you'll find the look more restful.

(If for some reason you actually want to know what the old look was, you can see it on this post on "the Urban Backpacker's Quarterly". A link at the bottom of that post should bring you back here).

I might put the blog that comes with my account under the new Yahoo service to some use - assuming that there will be such a blog - but I can't very sensibly ignore the fact that Yahoo, for no compellingly good reason, decided to break every single link to every single member's blog, putting the not inconsiderable amount of work many of us put into promoting our blogs to waste. How does one respond to such a position rationally, aside from noting that those who've done an injury once, and done it casually, ought to be expected to be equally casual about doing it again, especially when the logic the injury is done under is so conspicuously lacking in coherence. The Yahoo 360 team is dissatisfied with the level of activity on the current service, so they're going to break every link to it - how can that do anything but reduce the level of activity seen?

The answer is to assume that one is likely to see more of the same, and design one's sites in such a way as to minize the damage done by the expected inconsideration. One might note that my blog at Lycos serves as an annex of sorts for the Urban Backpacker's Quarterly, the articles there being expansions on points made on that other journal of mine here on Blogger. Hardly anybody is going to link to my Lycos blog (Joseph Dunphy's Notebook) because of this; if I resume blogging activity on Yahoo, I will be approaching my blog (at its new location on a new service) in much the same way, as an add-on to this and other blogs of mine. That way, if Yahoo flakes out on me again, all that I have to do is reload the affected posts to a new location, and edit some of my own links.

As for those "return to your post" links on my Googlegroup that will now take you to what will be a defunct Yahoo 360 url - sorry about that, but Google has configured its system in such a way as to thwart any attempt on my part to fix that. The posts are over a month old, so I can no longer reply to them on the group, and so I can't upload good new links to replace the soon to be bad old ones, as much as I wish I could. The best I can do is learn from the experience, and try to route the return links through pages which, unlike Googlegroup posts, can be edited indefinitely far into the future. This might look a little sloppy, but we are left with a choice of annoyances, are we not?

Welcome to the new location. Yes, this did used to be "Joseph Dunphy's Blog to Come". I hope you like the new location, but I should tell you that the Urban Backpacker's Quarterly will be the main site for my blogging for a while for a few reasons, one of which is a simple desire on my part not to think about politics for a while. Yes, I know, we're about to replace Bush, so what a strange time to start ignoring politics, but to be realistic - how likely are we to see him replaced by anything better? Wake me up when the circus is over and all but one of the clowns have left the stage.

Shifting emphasis over to other blog, maybe temporarily

2007-10-22T10:34:00.000-07:00

First posted on my Yahoo 360 blog on Friday August 24, 2007 - 11:22am (CDT)

This blog will be going on a temporary hiatus of sorts. I'll leave it up as long as Yahoo allows me to leave it up, but until certain issues get resolved, I'm going to do my posting elsewhere, probably most on my journal over at Blogger (The Urban Backpacker's Quarterly). Rumors about the closing of Yahoo 360 are floating about, and these rumors seem to have some basis in fact. Maybe not a conclusive basis, but enough to warrant some concern. Consider, for example, this quote from an article about the Yahoo! Photos closing from TechShout

"In closing Photos, Yahoo is adopting a major tenant suggested in an internal memo by Brad Garlinghouse, a senior vice president at the company, which was leaked to the press in November. In an article dubbed the Peanut Butter Manifesto for his description of Yahoo being spread too thin, Garlinghouse called for a number of the company’s products to be eliminated as way to help revive growth and restore focus. There was no word whether Yahoo planned to close other products. In his memo, Garlinghouse had mentioned redundancies involving bookmark services Del.icio.us and myWeb, and Yahoo Groups message boards and Yahoo 360 social network service, among others."

"Now, Joseph", somebody will probably write, "Techshout is just a website, and as you've said yourself, anybody can put anything he wants on a website". True, but this is very far from being an isolated report of rumors that Yahoo has to know are going to tend to induce a little panic in its user base on 360, because the relocation of a blog is going to result in far more upheaval for the user than the relocation of a few photos. Think of the links broken, the comments lost, the massive efforts that would merely go into cutting and pasting to code for the posts at the old blog into the archives at the new. Users have to be expected to have questions about such rumors, and what are they to think when their providers stubbornly refuse to answer those questions? When I wrote to the Yahoo 360 team to ask them about these rumors, the team did not respond to my query. Others have reported being stonewalled in the same way on their 360 blogs, and one can see, just by reading the comments on the Yahoo 360 team blog, that still others, in asking the simple question "is Yahoo 360 about to close" or variants on it, don't get replies from anybody other than fellow users.

One might well ask why the fellow users feel qualified to post on the subject, as not a one of them seems to work for Yahoo; the blind are volunteering to lead the nearsighted. As for Yahoo's refusal to say a word, they would have to be unusually clueless to not understand that, while in case like this one can remain silent, one can't possibly fail to answer the question being asked of one. Silence will be read as an affirmation, because if one could squash a false rumor that is starting to hurt one's business merely by having a few employees saying "it isn't true", why wouldn't one do so? The only reasonable user response, under such circumstances, is to assume the worst and act on that assumption until he has a factual basis for doing otherwise, especially when one can read reports about an upcoming Yahoo product called "mosh" that would push Yahoo 360 further in the direction of redundancy, like this one on TechCrunch.

I'm hoping that Yahoo 360 will stick around. If I'm given some real reason to believe that it will - and no, handholding from another user does not qualify - then I'll probably start posting to this blog again, but until then, I'll do what I can to minimize my prospective headaches, and that is going to include sending my next few posts to where they are least likely to evaporate. Namely: HERE.

Where should I be after I escape Chicago?

2007-10-22T10:30:00.000-07:00

Originally posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Tuesday August 14, 2007 - 07:49pm (CDT)

Mystery resolved ...

You Belong in Paris

You enjoy all that life has to offer, and you can appreciate the fine tastes and sites of Paris.

You're the perfect person to wander the streets of Paris aimlessly, enjoying architecture and a crepe.

What European City Do You Belong In?

And this seems to be a pattern ...

You Should Learn French

C'est super! You appreciate the finer things in life... wine, art, cheese, love affairs.

You are definitely a Parisian at heart. You just need your tongue to catch up...

What Language Should You Learn?

I can already hear somebody saying it: "generations later, your DNA is still your destiny". Or part of it at least, in this case. Sorry, bubbe. I think I'll go make myself some chicken soup.

Penelope Trunk brings us doublethink to sooth the troubled heart

2007-10-22T10:19:00.000-07:00

First posted on my 360 blog at Yahoo on Thursday August 9, 2007 - 06:44pm (CDT)

Reading some commentary about generation Y and its future in the workplace by one of my least favorite bloggers (Penelope Trunk, aka "The Brazen Careerist"), I couldn't help but notice just how much our smugly passionate defender of the status quo was predicting that the very youngest adults would be able to get away with, and the reasons she gave for this.

"What’s the point of baby boomers complaining about Generation Y at work? First of all, it’s a cliché, because people over 40 have been complaining about “young people” since forever. Even worse, it’s a losing battle. Generation Y is huge. It’s one thing for boomers to verbally squash Generation X — that was no problem. Gen X is tiny and the baby boom was huge. ...

1. They won't do work that's meaningless. These kids grew up with parents scheduling every minute of their day. They were told TV is bad and reading is good, and are more educated than any generation in history. They just spent 18 years learning to be productive with their time, so they're not going to settle for any photocopying/coffee stirring job. ...

2. They won't play the face-time game. We've known forever that it isn't necessary to be in the office from 9 to 5 every day to get work done. But many of us have missed family events only to sit at a desk all day getting pretty much nothing done because of the stress of missing a family event. And there didn't used to be any option -- if you wanted a successful career, you made sure co-workers saw that you were putting in the hours. Generation Y wants to be judged by the work they do, not the hours they put in. ...

3. They're great team players. If you've climbed a corporate ladder your whole career, then it's probably inconceivable to you that Gen Y doesn't care about your title. But it's true -- they don't do rank. Chances are they saw their parents get laid off in the '80s, so they know how ephemeral that special rung you stand on is and they don't want to waste time trying to get there. Generation Y played on soccer teams where everyone participated and everyone was a winner, and they conducted playground politics like diplomats because their parents taught them that there's no hierarchy and bullies are to be taken down by everyone. And Gen Yers take these values to work -- they expect to be a part of a team. Gen Y believes that no matter how much experience an individual has, everyone plays ...

4. They have no patience for jerks. Generation Y changes jobs every two years, typically because the work isn't a good fit, or the learning curve isn't steep enough, or they don't like their co-workers. And Gen Yers will disengage from a jerk before trying to get along with him or her, ..."

Stripping away the rhetorical spin, what are we left with? A "team" being built of insubordinate post-adolescent employees who may or may not show up for work on time, heading out the door whenever they feel like, treat their jobs like they were hobbies, really not with much more seriousness than that, and will just get up and quit if their every whim is not indulged. A work place in which the 22 year olds are calling the shots, and take a look at the argument being offered as to why this is the case, something we may well wonder about when we consider, for example, how thoroughly disempowered generation X has been in the workplace. So much so, in fact, that far from asking to be pampered as Trunk's glorious twentysomething divas have supposedly been doing, the members of the crowd immediately preceding generation Y were often viewed as being throughly unreasonable because they asked for safe working conditions, to be paid for the overtime they worked and to have some reasonable limits on that overtime so that they could have personal lives as well as jobs, to in general be allowed to live like human beings and to be treated as such. Why the difference? According to Trunk, because generation X is small and generation Y is large. In power politics, that may work as an explanation, but in the context of the free market dogmas that we are expected to accept without question, as those who (like Trunk) are fond of saying that what is reality in the market defines what is justice, this produces an ideological crisis that Trunk herself does not seem to see. Why? Go back to the Microeconomics 100 course in which you were first indoctrinated into believing that economic might made right, and remember the theory that you were taught.

"That which is scarce becomes dear, that which is abundant becomes cheap". But if labor is just a commodity, as our apologists for outsoucing and other neoliberal delights insist, then labor should be a more valuable commodity when it becomes scarcer, which means that generation X's negotiating strength, member by member, should have been increased by the small size of that generation, and generation Y's negotiating power, on an individual basis, should be decreased by its large numbers. Yet we have Trunk insisting that the exact opposite is the reverse, and who notices the incongruity of this?

Interesting, don't you think? So which is the fantasy? The rosy picture that Trunk is painting for this reportedly privileged generation, or the economic theory that is used to tell us that what common sense would tell us is unjust is merely the inevitable way of the world, and thus above question? Or perhaps, could it be both? What happens to a political ideology should the supposed social science underlying it start to crumble?

Brokeback 1776

2007-10-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

Posted to my Yahoo 360 blog first on Thursday August 9, 2007 - 06:39pm (CDT)

History as I'm sure it will be taught someday, brought to us by Pinkwhig ...

Sensitivity Training

2007-10-22T10:07:00.000-07:00

Originally posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Friday August 3, 2007 - 10:22am (CDT)

Sometimes you just have to show that you care (video previously uploaded to Metacafe by bloodasp69) ...

Sensitivity Training
Uploaded by negativeone. - See more comedy videos.

Can you say chutzpah?

2007-10-22T09:59:00.000-07:00

Originally posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Friday August 3, 2007 - 10:14am (CDT)

Some stories bring back such happy memories. Here's one:

Japanese companies slam YouTube
By HIROKO TABUCHI
Associated Press Writer

TOKYO --A coalition of Japanese television, music and film companies slammed YouTube Thursday, saying the online video sharing service was not doing enough to rid the site of cartoons and other clips that infringe on copyrights.

(snip)

"YouTube has to stop how it runs its site and get rid of the illegal clips. We want them to reset the service," composer Hideki Matsutake told a joint press conference in Tokyo Thursday. The coalition met with YouTube and Google executives earlier in the week, the second such meeting this year. "There is no middle ground," Matsutake said. "We demand that all copyrighted material be removed immediately." Talks with YouTube and Google will continue, said Matsutake, who was acting as a spokesman for the group.

One of the personal quirks that helped me during my coursework in grad school was that I have a very good long term memory, and so I have no difficulty at all remembering something that our friends in Tokyo might want us to forget at this moment. Let's turn back the clock to the 1980s, at about the time American industry started going south in more ways than one, the Job crunch was beginning to materialise for scientific professionals, and let's remember a brash East Asian country that, as it clamored to be taken more seriously as world economic power, was confronted about a number of its trade practices. One of them, of course, being its habit of hypocritically screaming whenever another country would consider closing its markets to imports from that brash East Asian country without feeling the need to reciprocate by opening its own markets at home, but there was something else. What was it, again?

Oh, yes. It's seems that the budding young economic superpower was in the habit of not honoring patents from overseas. Circuitboards that would be designed in America would be duplicated there, with no greater alteration being made than a changing of the colors of the covers put over the chips, and that was good enough for the government of that brash young power. Complaints about this practice from the United States, made on behalf of home grown companies which had actually spent the money for the research that produced the designs that were being pirated were greeted with a stonewalling test of wills, and on being interviewed, the man in the street in that country seemed to offer a stereotyped response, saying in one way or another that America needed to stop whining. This took away much of the economic incentive to engage in research and development, derailing careers and damaging lives, and doing much to help create the present day rustbelt in the American Northeast and Midwest, many cities to this day having not recovered.

Now, what was the name of that country? I seem to remember it's a big place built on an island chain, east of China, south of Korea, next to the sea of JAPAN.

Thought for the day: what goes around comes around, and it should. If Japan is not going to honor the intellectual property rights of those living outside its territory, those of its own citizens should be shown no more respect. For far too long, that nation has been allowed to steamroller its trading partners into going along with a series of double standards that have benefitted it while scr**ing everybody else. When America had legitimate demands to make of Japan, Japan refused to listen. Now that the situation has reversed, America should absolutely return the favor, and expect those companies headquartered in it to do likewise. Tokyo might squeeze, but Washington can still squeeze a lot harder, and pardon me if I'm blunt, but Japan needs America a lot more than America needs Japan. Without our military support, Japan would be Finlandized by the Chinese at best, and would most likely be on its way to becoming a province of that country. The Cold War is long over, there is no enemy that poses a plausible threat to the United States, and the time for us to take abuse from so-called allies who act like anything but is long since over. Let's start reminding a few of those nonallies that actions have consequences. There is something to be said for holding a grudge.

Half Judaism

2007-10-22T09:54:00.000-07:00

First posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Thursday August 2, 2007 - 09:37am (CDT)

Counting my blessings as I view this video by chocolatecakecity.

William Shatner, The Beetles ...

2007-10-22T09:47:00.000-07:00

Posted first on my Yahoo 360 blog Wednesday August 1, 2007 - 03:25pm (CDT)

This is just wrong, so very wrong ... and no, I don't know who made this or even who uploaded it ...

Singing Tesla Coils

2007-10-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

First posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Wednesday August 1, 2007 - 01:44pm (CDT).

Posted by demjp8RqDA, you're watching an engineer play with one of his toys out near Naperville (a suburb of Chicago) at Duckon, a science fiction convention that has been taking place out there for some years. Yes, the music is being made using the electrical discharges. Very cool.

Sensitive love of the Intifada: Shall we cut the c**p?

2007-10-22T09:39:00.000-07:00

First posted on my Yahoo 360 blog Wednesday July 25, 2007 - 12:20am (CDT)

I'm reading a few posts over on Liz Taken's blog, about things that are just sad and pathetic. Here are a few: "Jihad Bee replaces Terror Mouse", "A video sent from a friend", "NY times has selective memory", "Farfour Murdered in Season Finally", "Please sign this Petition (about the practice of 'honor killings'), "For anyone who thinks we can negotiate with Terrorists". "So, about what a menace the muslims are?", some will ask expectantly. No, but how interesting that this would be their take on this, especially in the case of the honor killings article because, as Ms.Taken points out, we're witnessing behavior that is in direct conflict with Islamic law. No, what we're witnessing in most of these posts is a hate movement sustained by people who are culturally Muslim; to oppose that isn't to be anti-Muslim any more than to oppose the (mostly Christian) Ku Klux Klan is to anti-Christian. What I find most interesting is not so much the existence of people like the ones Liz portrays - though they do represent a movement large and dangerous enough that they do need to be noticed - but how some supposedly compassionate Western liberals will counsel the Israelis to deal with this hate movement in their midst, basically telling them to drop their guard, give all that is asked of them and more, appeasing their enemies no matter what the cost. "Being anti-zionist is not the same thing as being anti-semitic", some will say. "We don't hate Jews, we just politely disagree with a few of them".

The thing is, I get to see a bunch of those people from a different point of view, in part because of what I am. People hear the name "Dunphy" and they instantly assume "Irish Catholic", for reasons that elude me assuming that I'm purebreed, even though one would think appearance alone would be enough to convince them otherwise. Some of these very same people seem to have a very definite, narrow image of what a Jew should look like and be like - usually either somebody looking like Woody Allen or that "Neumann" guy from Seinfeld. Short, maybe fat and bald, approaching life and its threats shaking with fear; such is the stereotype. I, on the other hand, am somewhere around 6'6", having grown considerably since I started posting, and my memory of the school bully involves me beating the living snot out of him. To these people, I didn't look the role, and that fact had consequences. I got to hear things that some might have otherwise been shy about letting me hear, and this has been enlightening.

I've heard "nice, liberal" people defending the Holocaust on the basis that "the Jews owned all of the banks". "You know what Jews are like", has been a popular one. That and more, and then, the moment that somebody who does fit the popular image of Yiddishness shows up, out has gone that rhetoric and in has come the forced openmindedness and false sweetness, generally from "nice" people politically leaning to the left of center. If you've ever wondered why I seem to feel insulted on those occasions when somebody has referred to me as being a "liberal", this is one of the reasons why. I respond to that movement, not on paper as a theoretical construct, but as a living reality, one that I've found to be hostile in a sneaky kind of way. I'll accept "Centrist" or "Conservative", depending on where the political pendulum has swung at the moment, maybe "Progressive" though our Politically Correct friends would probably feel ill at the suggestion, but not "Liberal". "Liberal" to me suggests an unwholesome blend of self-righteous hypocrisy and passive aggression, overlying well-established and weakly rationalised bigotries that are barely, if at all, concealed.

When Israeli soldiers are condemned for defending themselves against those who are "merely armed with rocks", as we're expected to be as cooperative in our forgetfulness as to exactly what the most popular means of execution has been in that region for the last few thousand years (stoning), this is not about somebody's love for the Muslims. Note the lack of general outrage among those same "sensitive" elements of the US population during the "Road of Death" incident toward the close of the First Gulf War, when all those being burned to death were guilty of was running for their lives away from a hostile army they knew they couldn't possibly defend themselves against; note how many of the victims were Muslim and note just how lonely an experience questioning that act was in the United States, at the time, not really so very long ago. No, this is about hatred of the Jewish soldiers. It is about an indirect route to homicide, as those offering the sermonettes try to get their intended target to essentially commit suicide by engaging in a course of action that he is very likely to be killed in the course of pursuing. On a larger scale, this is what is being asked of Israel, which is condemned on a regular basis merely for being somewhat diligent in her own self-defense, by a large number of "nice", generally upper class liberal people in the United States, and should the rest of us be surprised by this?

All you have to do to understand so many of them is listen, so when one hears the preaching, perhaps one ought to be willing to be "mean" enough to consider the source, remembering just how much of that "sweetness and light" is an illusion. There is, as I've said before, a hate-filled cultural movement underway, one whose supporters clearly long for a world in which everybody is exactly the same, places no value on the life or dignity of the individual and will stoop to anything to get its way, but it's not Islam. It's Modernism.

The Daily Annoyance, from Google / Blogger this time

2007-10-22T09:32:00.000-07:00

Originally posted to my 360 blog at Yahoo Tuesday July 24, 2007 - 05:37pm (CDT)

As you may have noticed from looking at the feeds on my Yahoo 360 profile I have a place at Blogger, which I had been thinking of doing most of my posting at, henceforth. In theory, it is my main blog, even if I've been doing a lot more posting here in the last few months, so this didn't represent a change of plans, so much as it did a return to what my plans were, but sometimes plans need to be rethought, even over as little a thing as one's choice of provider. I find myself doing a little rethinking right now. I went over to edit a post, which is now a draft again and not because I want it to be. As I go to edit it, I see this notice atop the page:

This blog has been locked by Blogger's spam-prevention robots. You will not be able to publish your posts, but you will be able to save them as drafts.

Save your post as a draft or click here for more about what's going on and how to get your blog unlocked.

I was, to say the least, curious, as I've never attempted to sell anything in the brief history of my little place. This turned out to be a very good thing, because on clicking on "click here", I found myself presented with a notice that if I didn't notify Google / Blogger within two weeks, I think it was, that my blog would be automatically deleted! It had been flagged, apparently, because (according to Google) it displayed the "characteristics" of a spam blog. What those "characteristics" might be, I can't imagine, and if you look at the little thing, I think you might be a little mystified, too. I will say that this was definitely not cool, especially during summer when one should expect that people are going to be out. The only reason I looked is because, by pure chance, I looked at my most recent blog post, thought "OK, people aren't going to entirely get that I'm telling a joke because 'Dunphy' doesn't 'sound Jewish', as if such an expression even made sense since Jewishness is matrilineal and surnames are patrilineal, and how many of the ancient Israelites would have had names sounding like Abramowitz, anyway, such a headache I'm getting ... where's my iced coffee?" What was I talking about? Oh, yes. Blogs that people take time, good time, to put together, being put up for deletion while they're away, without any human being having so much as having taken the time to look before they were put up for deletion. This is a breaking of faith with the user who, reasonably, expects that his work will not evaporate without reason. Far from living up to that trust, the company has squandered it through an act of sheer recklessness. As Google itself writes

"Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive."

"We apologize for having risked putting your time and effort to waste, by having oversight on our system being done by what we know is an inherently unreliable piece of artificial intelligence software" ... and thank you for being our guinea pig, I guess. I am, to say the least, very disappointed with Blogger and Google, at a time when I was already busy enough being disappointed with Lycos.

Skateboarding Dog

2007-10-22T09:24:00.000-07:00

First posted to my 360 blog on Yahoo, Sunday July 22, 2007 - 05:45am (CDT)

Found this on YouTube, where it was uploaded by rnickeymouse ...

Lycos/Tripod offers a merry f*** you to its users!

2007-10-22T09:05:00.000-07:00

First posted to my old Yahoo 360 blog Tuesday July 17, 2007 - 05:03pm (CDT)

There are some moments that just leave one scratching one's head in wonder. One of those moments happened just now. Let's say that you're running a free webhosting service. Presumably, since your income depends on the ad revenue generated by the visits to the sites on your system, content provided to you free of charge by the way, you might be seen as having a vested interest in supporting your users, as they try to make the best sites they can. So, what would be one thing that you might want to really, really, really NOT want to do?

How about, arbitrarily lock people out of their own accounts, thwarting any attempt on their part to add new material to their sites or otherwise update them in any way? Forget the usual babbling about the accounts being free and beggars not being choosers - which is garbage anyway, because we pay for those services with the loan of the content we provide - and get back to the common sense question of why on earth a provider would want to do that. Yet I can report firsthand that Tripod (a subsidiary of Lycos) did exactly that, just last night.

I attempted to login to Tripod in order add a little material to Joseph Dunphy's Cowboy Wannabee Site, and to my amazement, as I clicked on the "login" button, found myself on the Lycos search engine page. "Has the system mangled my password?", I wondered, knowing that I hadn't, because I had it written down. I clicked on the link on the Lycos page marked "forgot username or password" - and absolutely nothing happened. I went nowhere. I closed then closed all but one of the widows, cleared my cache and rebooted - standard operating procedure. Same result, and I noticed a few other interesting details. See the part where it says "write a blog, build a site, share your photos"? I clicked on the button that says "start now", which a prospective new user would hit if he wanted to begin a new account and found myself, not on an application form - but back on that seach engine page!!! Anything I did ending up leaving me there, and logged into nothing.

Clinging to my admittedly mystifying belief that when something has broken down, one ought to write to support about it, I did, and promptly got to watch support play the stand BOFH game of pretending that the problem didn't exist, as it sent out a form letter response.

Your message on Mon, Jul 16th 2007 5:42 pm

Your system will not let me log into Tripod, and when I click on the "lost password" link, nothing happens. Not that the password I'm entering could possibly be wrong - I have the darned thing written down. What happens when I try to log in, is that instead of ending up in my member space, I end up on the Lycos search engine page

http://www.lycos.com/

where the "lost username or password" link I tried clicking on is displayed.

Message by Tyler on Tue, Jul 17th 2007 6:50 am

Please note that we are able to log into your account with your username and password.

Clearing your cache will likely fix most of the errors you are receiving as well as significantly improve the speed and performance of your browser.

The following procedures provide steps to clear the cache memory from your browser:

Clearing Cache on Microsoft® Internet Explorer 7.x

Select the TOOLS menu, then select INTERNET OPTIONS
Under the heading entitled Browsing History, click the Delete button
To clear the cookies select the DELETE COOKIES button
To clear the stored temporary Internet files select the Delete Files button
Click close to return to the Internet Options menu, then click OK to return to your main browser window.

Clearing Cache on Mozilla Firefox 2.x

Select the TOOLS menu, then select Clear Private Data
Ensure that the Cache and Cookies selection boxes are checked off.
Click the button labeled Clear Private Data Now.
You will automatically be returned to your main browser window.

Clearing Cache on Netscape 8.x

Select the TOOLS menu, then select Privacy.
Click the Clear button next to the Cookies heading and click the OK button when prompted.
Click the Clear button next to the Cache headingand click the OK button when prompted.
Click OK to return to the main browser window.

Clearing Cache on Microsoft® Internet Explorer 6.x

Select the TOOLS menu, then select INTERNET OPTIONS
To clear the cookies select the DELETE COOKIES button in the middle of the window under the Temporary Internet files section
Click OK in the Delete Cookies window
Click OK to return to the main browser window.

--
Tyler D.
Customer Service
Lycos Services.

Your message on Tue, Jul 17th 2007 12:44 pm

Tyler,

I cleared my cache last night before I wrote to you, and I did so repeatedly, and I got the same result. Further, just out of curiosity, I checked to see what would happen were I to try to go to the form used to set up a new Tripod account. Once again, I found myself on the Lycos search page.

So you'll forgive me, I hope, if I view your response with more than a little skepticism, and ask you to please respond to a serious problem report with something more serious than an attempt to bluff the user into believing that he didn't see what he saw, as you dust off the same form letter every ISP seems to send to every user who reports any problem with the system. Clearing the cache does not cure all ills. Sometimes you guys will need to actually break down and do some maintenance.

But if they're actually going to do any maintenance, I've seen no sign that this is going to be the case. All that "Tyler" (if that is his real name) was willing to do was cut and paste the form letter that you just saw and expect me to be satisfied with that, and I obviously can't be satisfied with that. Not being able to get into the file manager is not something that I, as a user, can simply work around. This is something that is going to stop me absolutely dead in the water. As for Lycos itself, the company these staffers are supposedly working for, how does it imagine its Tripod subsidiary will fare when its users, discovering that they've been locked out of their own accounts, eventually give up and move to other providers, and new users, ones who I assume wouldn't have heard of this, find that they can't sign up?

I'm going to write to the technical contact for Tripod and see what the company has to say about this, and be sure to post about any further developments on this blog. But until then, I've added a new member site to the Lycos Homepage Ring, a forum entitled "ISP Reports: Tripod, Ringsurf, Webring and the Rest, where you can talk about what has gone right and what has gone wrong at the service you use. New members will always be sought, but as usual, postmodernists, corporate shills and other undesirables need not apply.

Added Thursday, July 19: Googlegroup post

A Three State Solution for Palestine?

2007-10-22T01:20:00.000-07:00

Original posting on my Yahoo 360 blog Saturday June 30, 2007 - 01:16pm (CDT)

Yesterday, I grabbed a copy of the Chicago Tribune with blogging in mind and started scanning it for stories to write about, and the pickings were slim. There's the problem when one does this - one can go to the newspaper, which for budgetary reasons is limited to the publications of stories that are little more than soundbites, or one can go online where space is abundant but credibility is not. But I did come across one piece that got enough of a "huh?" out of me to merit a post.

"In the West Bank, Hamas supporters told to lie low"

NO! Surely that can't be the case. Why, everybody know that there is war in the Middle East only because of those wicked, wicked Israelis, and the Palestininian authority has taken over in Gaza and is expanding its territory in the West Bank, so all should be peace and love and butterflies and daffodils. Is this not so? Maybe not.

"Nablus, West Bank - Khulud al-Masri, a deputy mayor of this Palestinian city, doesn't go to work at city hall anymore. A city councilor representing Hamas, she was ordered out of her office by gunmen from the rival Fatah faction last week in retaliation for Hamas' rout of Fatan-lead forces and takeover of the Gaza strip. 'They told me, 'This is your last day here. You can leave safely now, but tomorrow we will prevent you'', she recalled. 'I haven't been back since.'"

Now, help me out here - which of these groups was set up as part of an Israeli plot? Being as busy as I am with our own American Jewish plot to take over the banks and press in the US (a role I've cleverly hidden by living below the poverty line), to say nothing of the fluoridation of the drinking water of Aryans everywhere, I don't always have time to keep up with what the boys overseas have been up to, but I guess they've been busy, because this was not an isolated incident.

"The other deputy mayor, hafez Shaheen, also a Hamas representative, has received similar warnings. He ventures to city hall only every few days, mostly after office hours, for paperwork and brief consultation with Fatah council members who are still running daily affairs. 'I avoid going not because I'm afraid but because I want to avoid complicating things', Shaheen said."

Arguably, they could not be complicated any further than they already have been.

"The state of the city administration in Nablus, where Hamas controls 13 or 15 council seats, is a window into the altered balance of forces in the West Bank since the militant Islamic group seized control of the Gaza strip. Hamas officials in the West Bank, swept to power in local and parliamentary elections in the past two years, have been driven underground by a Fatah intimidation campaign, and the group's supporters are lying low. Offices and institutions linked to Hamas have been ransacked and burned, dozens of the group's leaders and supporters arrested by Fatah-led security forces, and civil servants affiliated with Hamas warned not to show up for work."

See where this is going? In the beginning (sort of), there was the Palestinian trust territory which was divided into a Jewish state (Israel) and an Arab state (Jordan), but that little detail was forgotten somewhere along the way, so the Jewish state was eventually divided itself, into yet another Arab state and a smaller Jewish state, and as for why the Arab state saw no splitting, given the reality of how many of the Sephardim were themselves uprooted from Middle Eastern homes they had lived in for centuries? Don't ask so many questions.

Now Hamas would seem to be in control of Gaza, and Fatah in control of the West Bank which means that instead of having two states in the initial Jewish state's territory (Israel the diminished and Palestine, not to be confused with the original trust territory), we now have three - Israel (maybe we can call it "Israel II"), the Gaza Strip ("Hamastan"?) and the West Bank, which I guess we can call "Palestine the diminished" or "Palestine III", as it is clearly the larger of the two chunks, or we could be even handed and call it "Fatahstan". How about "East Palestine" and "West Palestine"? So many possibilities, so many questions, not the least of which is "when will these two rump states start firing rockets at each other, a la Lebanon, with the trajectories taking them through Israeli airspace, and how long will the Israelis be expected to accept this". But then, we all recall, I'm sure, the way in which the Israelis were expected to accept it and not strike back when missiles for Iraq weren't just flying over Israel, but were being target on Israel, which seems a perfectly reasonable request for the American government to make, when one considers the mild response it gives when any portion of the United States gets bombed. No hypocrisy there, no siree! And no democracy in Palestine.

"'The aim was to take control of the West Bank, and we have it under control,' said Mahdi Masraqa, a local leader of Al Asqa Martyrs Brigades, whose gunmen led the anti-Hamas rampage in Nablus. 'Hamas is a banned organization; we will watch it and strike at any of its activities.'"

To say the least. Later in the article, we read

"In one building, a scorched first-floor facade leads to what used to be a women's center, Al-Juthur, or Roots, that was run by al-masri, the deputy mayor. The center sponsored embroidery and cooking projects, fitness classes, computer courses and a kindergarten. Now it is a blackened wreck, its equipment looted and burned.

'What does this have to do with what happened in Gaza?' said al-Masri. This place served people's needs. What is the message?'

Al-Masri said she and her husband left home for a week with their five children after the gaza takeover, fearing an attack."

Fears which do not seem unwarranted. Let us now ask the forbidden question - is an independent Palestine still sounding like such a good idea? How viable is this state looking? But, on the other hand, would Egypt really want to send its forces into a place like Gaza, and how comfortable should Israel be expected with the thought of the Egyptian army being so close at hand, even if the Egyptians were masochistic enough to agree to be there and had the funds to support an indefinite peacekeeping mission? How much trust has been earned?

An obvious solution presents itself, and I'll leave it to the reader to guess what it is, because I guarantee that almost nobody is going to like it and no, I'm not talking about genocide, a nonsolution I've already heard suggested. Still, maybe something not so nice, or perhaps rather, something that might not be seen as being very nice, if one takes Libertarianism and a Western definition of "Modernism" as given, together forming something that should be seen as being rationally desirable for all people in all places.

Go away, Paris Hilton!

2007-10-22T01:12:00.000-07:00

Original posting on my Yahoo 360 blog Saturday June 23, 2007 - 10:36am (CDT)

I think it's just terrible, the way spoiled rich heiresses get treated in this country. Don't you?

Especially when they're so talented.

The first video was from youtube user GoAwayParisOfficial and the second was from omovies, and you'll be thrilled to know that you can fight corporate privilege the old fashioned way: by buying stuff.

Globalization's latest gift to you and me

2007-10-22T01:07:00.000-07:00

First posted on my Yahoo 360 blog Monday June 18, 2007 - 05:47pm (CDT)

Shipping the manufacturing of consumer goods overseas to countries where US consumer protection legislation doesn't apply, with those goods allowed easy access to US markets in the name of "free trade"? Oh, yes, what a good idea, as this story about the Colgate scare helps to show.

But hey, nobody's forcing you to brush your teeth, right?

"Identity Soup" ... ummm, ummm ....

2007-10-22T00:50:00.000-07:00

Original posting on my Yahoo 360 blog Wednesday June 13, 2007 - 02:07am (CDT)

Referencing this post to my Googlegroup, entitled My reply to Dvorak Uncensored, "Identity Soup - Intolerance or Tradition" ...

Yes, this mishling is feeling more than a little embarassment, that the embarassment is connected to a part of his heritage, and it's not the French part, right now. In the past, I have heard arguments that "Jews are intolerant, too, man", and when I've heard them, have generally had little difficulty rebutting them. Consider the fact that an integral part of the process of conversion to Judaism is the attempt on the part of the rabbi to try to talk the would-be convert out of converting - if one harbored any desire to impose one's religion on another, would one do that? There would, in fact, be no conceptual basis for such a desire on the rabbi's part. Jewish Law is tribal law, something that comes out of a covenant between G-d and Israel, not something that is thought of as representing any sort of categorical imperative, binding on everybody, everywhere - and if He wished to establish a different covenant with another nation, who would we be to tell the King of the Universe that He could not?

Judaism has been, with what until recently I would have called a logical inevitability, very much a live and let live kind of religion. There are very real demands made of those who would follow it, but these have not been demands that we have made of anybody other than ourselves, aside, of course, from that which is properly part of the moral law. "Thou shalt not kill" ("kill" in the sense of murder) is a good thing to be evangelistic about, but one really isn't about to see a group of Hassidim lobbying to have the banks shut down on Saturday, as passionate as they are in their own personal commitment to Jewish Law, including that part of it that deals with doing business on Shabbes, and the non-Orthodox would be even less inclined to make the sacred secular, in such things. So why would I be embarassed, when tradition would seem to give me so much reason to be proud of the Jewish people, as I almost always have been in the past?

Because lately I'm seeing a number of Jews, younger ones apparently, act in a manner that strikes me as being screechingly, shrilly un-Jewish in its intolerance. In the post I link to, I talk about an incident in which the distribution of a very French soup, one that seems very much like something my Eastern French grandmother would have made, was being forcibly halted by government action because the soup was made from pork, and thus was unsuitable for Muslim and Jewish poor people. Generally speaking, such things have produced a shrug among Jewish poor people - we all know what the United Jewish Appeal is. Jewish communities have created their own relief efforts for years, and we've understood the need to take care of our own. Certainly, one didn't see Jews arguing that kashrut should be imposed on the goyim, because a Jew might wander into one of their soup kitchens.

Until recently, that is, and I hope this is just a few crazies I'm hearing from, and not the start of a new groundswell. "The fact that this is being called identity soup says it all" has been the refrain from a number of allegedly Jewish posters, who have seriously argued that any attempt to maintain a French cultural identity would be inherently intolerant and racist!!! I've seen allegedly Jewish participants in discussions seriously argue in support of a demand that I had apparently wrongly assumed to be purely the work of some of the fringe elements of the Muslim community a la Al Quaeda, seriously arguing that French food had to be made kosher and halal, and that traditional French food should not be suffered to be served in France.

Note the use of the word "allegedly". On the Internet, nobody knows that you're a dog, as the saying goes, but then again, I've encountered some of these same sentiments offline, where I've been much more certain of who was what, and it is deeply disconcerting. This is not a matter of saying "why aren't Jews better than everybody else", this is a matter of wondering, out loud, how one can find a good number of them embracing an evil so clearly at odds with their own religion. Consider what we celebrate on Chanukah - the preservation of Jewish ways against the efforts at forced homogenization on the part of the Graeco-Syrian rulers of Israel during the Hellenistic era, a much earlier era's version of globalization. Consider what has always been said of that celebration - that we celebrate, not just our own people's freedom to maintain its identity as a people and preserve its own ways, but that of every people to do likewise.

This real tolerance goes back deeply into antiquity. Consider, for example, what did not happen when David conquered the Moabites, et al. He did not forcible Judaize his new vassal states. All that made them who they were was accepted, within reason. That was his way, and it is ours, so who are these haughty children we have produced who would presume to tell a modern people - the French - who they have the right to be, demanding that they surrender their very existence as a distinct culture, and what excuse can they find for such outrageous arrogance, in a background that has for so long pointed people away from that particular brand of arrogance?

Do you see why I am embarrassed and uncomfortable? When the youngest contingent of adult Jews in my midst can be seen producing more than its share of narrowminded, culturally intolerant idiots, there's an awkward question that arises - who is in the community that raised these disappointing children? Perhaps I have just had bad luck offline and encountered a string of young people far worse than the actual norm, and certainly I can't deny that I seem to be some kind of magnet for the worst elements of society, but if this sample of the local Jewish youth that Life has brought into my presence is not so very atypical? If so, then I can't sit back at a comfortable distance thinking "wow, did those people foul up", without wondering if maybe I was one of the people who fouled up and horrifically so, if these are the values we're passing along to the next generation coming. How did they become the heavies, these young people of ours, and where did we go wrong, as their elders? Let's apply a little logic - if one was never a dissident in one's community (I know I wasn't), and the community starts tilting in a strange and bad direction, how logical is it to think "oh, it's those other people who did that, surely not me"?

Yes, I'm childless so far, unless one of my ex-girlfriends has a surprise for me, but you know what a shul is like - every adult becomes an influence, so who can truly say "it's not my responsibility"? But I can honestly say that I'm baffled, and more than a little concerned.

John Edwards is feeling pretty

2007-10-22T00:43:00.000-07:00

First posted on my old Yahoo 360 blog Tuesday June 5, 2007 - 03:28pm (CDT)

Yes, I'm relocating content from Livejournal, starting with this short piece posted to Youtube by OneoftheImmortals.

Mildly amusing, and an opportunity for Edwards to show a lot more class than some of his semi-anonymous detractors, which he did. (Video posted by wnycradio).

But that I could say the same of the Livejournal community, where I first posted this, but ... oh, forget it. If you wanted to post a film on YouTube on your own 360 blog, or any other site for that matter, here's the code that I used to post the first film, which I found floating around somewhere:

<center><embed src=http://www.youtube.com/v/2AE847UXu3Q width=425 height=350 type=application/x-shockwave-flash allowScriptAccess="none" wmode="transparent"> </center></embed>

The first film is found at this url on Youtube

http://youtube.com/watch?v=7kCAFkfFLQQ

so if you have a film at location

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ID

where "ID" is some alphanumeric string, and you replace "2AE847UXu3Q" with the string (in the url for the film you want) in the code above, you should get a code snippet that will allow you to insert the film of your choice on the page of your choice. Livejournal, Blogger and a few other blogging hosts seem to require special coding, though, so check with YouTube's site about that if you wish to post a film to another blog hosting service.

"On campus, politics determine who is subject to punishment"

2007-10-22T00:40:00.000-07:00

Original posting on my Yahoo 360 blog at Sunday May 13, 2007 - 10:16pm (CDT)

So lazy! I'll do little more than link to this post on TheRealityCheck.org and observe, out loud, that while I'm not familiar with the specific individuals involved, that I found something very familiar about the standard of injustice being described. Let's ponder the absurdity of sending wave after wave of young people through a place where the fix is always in and the very notion of fair play isn't so much as paid lip service, and then being surprised when a good number of them come out with more than slightly dented consciences themselves. The faculty and administration at our universities were once expected to remember that they were role models for their students, and so, even if being merely human, they could be expected to sometimes slip short of sainthood, they were nevertheless expected to hold themselves to a much higher standard than that commonly encountered in the outside world.

There is a considerable difference between striving to live up to a higher code and slipping, and simply not bothering to try at all, as one tries to see exactly what one can get away with. The tragedy of our era is that those whose recognition of that difference is most crucial, such as those who have so much power in determining the course of the beginning of a young person's adult life, aren't expected to recognize it at all, and that the free-for-all that results is reacted to with a wink and a shrug, rather than with the widespread sense of outrage that civilised attitudes would demand.

I've now officially turned into my father

2007-10-22T00:14:00.000-07:00

Posted to my old Yahoo 360 blog Thursday May 3, 2007 - 09:41pm, before being reposted here (CDT)

I've been getting a few Yahoo! 360 invitations lately, one of which came from this lady, who is about the right age to be a college freshman; the image links to her 360 profile.

So, beautiful young woman writes to me, saying that she would like to stay in touch, and my first thought.

"But I don't understand what she was writing about!"

Not even a whistful "oh, to be that age, again", just a "I wonder what her literary style is", before I suddenly have a mental picture of my younger self of some years back looking at me reproachfully and going "dude, you are now officially the world's biggest geek - when the pretty girl asks you if you'd like to talk you say yes". Then one very scary day, it occurs to you that that didn't occur to you, and you don't even want it to occur to you and wouldn't even if she were closer to your own age. Oh, and that while we're at it, that you have absolutely no desire to go club hopping at any point in the forseeable future, and looking toward the corner of the room, you've noticed that you have a favorite chair, and that spending a night in it doing your reading doesn't sound so bad.

I picture my younger self looking on, jaw dropping, going "this isn't funny, man, you're freaking me out, what's this PTA wannabee stuff, come on, ..." as he starts to fade into oblivion. There is no escape. My destiny has finally tracked me down. I've become an adult.

Would anybody like a nice, hearty winter vegetable soup?

A Surreal Day at Ameritech, a few years ago.

2007-10-22T00:09:00.000-07:00

Originally posted to my Yahoo 360 blog on Wednesday April 25, 2007 - 03:47pm (CDT)

Ah, memories ...

I'm reading a post entitled "Constructing a mnemonic circuit using stone knives and bearskins" at GlobalPov (to which I posted a response) and a delightful incident immediately comes to mind. Some years back, I was being stalked by a psychotic ex-girlfriend, and oh, the wonderful questions that one often gets to hear from those who should know better, when one says that. "What do you do to these girls, Joseph?" Notice that when women get stalked by their ex-boyfriends, you don't see such a question being asked of them. What did I do to her?

I became part of her delusion. She became convinced that a certain celebrity was plotting her assassination, I asked the forbidden question "what makes you think that", and paranoiacs do not handle skepticism well. There are some people who put on a great performance and seem very sane and stable when you first meet them, but then one day, you learn better, and oh dear G-d, did I learn better. Ever see "Fatal Attraction"?

I moved and then moved again, being as meticulous as mathematicians and engineers tend to be as I went to each and every location that I could think of where my personal information was stored, telling them about what was going on, and really, just about anything that leaves one's door splattered with blood does tend to get people's attention, as it certainly did mine. Everywhere I went, I was assured that those working there understood the situation and that my personal information would not be divulged, and almost all who said this kept their word. But one only needs one exception, just one, for information to start circulating.

A few weeks of misguided comfort later, I discovered that my brand new and supposedly confidential address was, once more, being circulated to the junk mail senders, when I noticed that the junk mail was appearing with my personal name affixed. I tracked down those who sent the mail, asked them where they got my name, and then tracked down those people, who in turn got it from another group of people ... and following the trail, eventually found my way back to Ameritech, who had assured me that my address would not be given out! I was, to say the least, curious about that, especially because they knew about the death threats. "Guys, why did you do that and what happened to your word", I wanted to know.

What I had asked of them and what they had agreed to, going into some detail as to the manner of their agreement, was to set my account so that my phone number would be publicly available but not my street address. I would not do that today, having learned how fond some netizens are of responding to online political disagreements with obscene phone calls placed at odd hours, but in those days I had just one lunatic to worry about, and I thought that I could survive an odd phone call or two. (A few shots from a .38 would have been a different matter). Like a lot of people, I had old friends that I had lost contact with who I wanted to hear from again, and if they came into town, I wanted them to be able to be able to get in touch, back in those days before webpages were invented. This was all explained to the Ameritech representative, who then suggested the very type of account I got and said that everything was taken care of, which made what had then followed all the more interesting. "So guys, what's the deal?"

What the deal was, was that when they said they wouldn't divulge my street address, they had their fingers crossed behind their backs. They had a policy on their books that held that if the phone number was being released, then the address could be sold to telemarketers and the like, and that there was no need to inform customers as to the existence of this policy. They then sold my personal information, and even after I made all of my information (supposedly) publicly unavailable, continued selling it until, thoroughly and justifiably enraged by what was occuring as well as by the fact that I was successfully tracked down using the information sold (and got to move again), I called up somebody's supervisor and screamed at him until he agreed to get his company to behave itself, and the squeaky wheel finally got some grease.

A lot of libertarian-leaning people have some very romantic ideas about what the free market will do, ideas that reality seems to have little impact on. I posted about this elsewhere, and was amazed at the people who would write in to defend the company, one idiot in particular writing in to say that no, I hadn't shouted at the supervisor - and no, he wasn't from Ameritech, so how would he know? He just knew, that was all. But the best came from somebody who shall remain unnamed who insisted that Ameritech had the legal right to do as it did, because when I got them to agree to not give out my address to anybody, I didn't get them to stipulate that "everybody" included telemarketers. "So, in other words, for the agreement to be binding, I have to have seperate agreements for every single possible subset of everybody?", I asked, absolutely incredulous. Apparently so, and here's an interesting number for you to crank out on your calculator - at the rate of one per second, how long would I have needed to list all possible subsets of the first 100 people). Give you a hint - that's two raised to the one hundredth power seconds, and when you calculate how many years that is, you'lll find that it is some orders of magnitude larger than the expected length of time before the heat death of the universe. As inefficient as Ameritech might have been, I suspect that they might have been able to make a sale in slightly less time. What our far right-wing friend was trying to offer as a reasonable demand to make of the customer wishing to opt out and was claiming to be a matter of law, was simply not in the realm of physical possibility, which I guess was the real point. To leave the illusion of respecting the individual's right to opt out, but redefining that right on terms that would render it meaningless, preserving a little bit of the Neo-conservative free-for-all that a once reasonably orderly society was degenerating into, in this and so many other ways.

G-d forbid that a business should have to honor its commitments, right?

These were the old days and there was no Web, or at least most of us didn't know about it, yet, so the information died there and the worst that came out of all of this, in the end, aside from the cost of all of that relocating, was the memory of some truly assinine discussions, but if such an incident happened to somebody today? Even after Ameritech or somebody else stopped giving out the information, it would still be out on those sites, and being copied onto others. How, on these terms, is somebody who finds himself in the situation I did back then, supposed to get his life back? Even if one should choose to never have a social life, which is about the only way of ensuring that one will never get to know a psychopath - are we to all refrain from posting anything that some lunatic, somewhere, might get violently angry about, knowing that there is now a cottage industry devoted to helping stalkers find their victims? Think about it. What legitimate use is there for a site of this nature? If somebody really wants to be found or really wants to share something about himself, creating a webpage with or without contact information is easy and one need not even pay for the hosting, as there are stable providers who will host one's site for free: Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire and Bravenet come to mind, to say nothing of Myspace, Blogger et al. What a site like Spock is doing then, is helping its users find those who don't wish to be found and get personal information about them that they don't want to give, and if they don't wish to be found or they don't wish to let others know something about themselves, isn't that their right? What good is a right that others are left free to trample?

The fact that some of our ideologue friends don't seem to get is that privacy isn't just a luxury, it isn't even just a right, it is at times an absolute necessity. There are unstable people out in the world and there is no good way to ensure that one will not run into them, but at the very least one should have the legal right to insist that they not be given too much assistance as they go looking for a map to one's front door, and I dispute both the sanity and the decency of anybody who would argue otherwise. Let's be serious. I've said it before and I'll say it again. The Internet needs responsible governmental regulation, and it needs it today.

Jessica Lynch speaking out.

2007-10-22T00:03:00.001-07:00

Originally posted to my Yahoo 360 blog on Tuesday April 24, 2007 - 12:47pm (CDT)

This kind of honesty always comes as a welcome surprise: Jessica Lynch denies Army's account. The lady refused to play along when others tried to make her into a legend, pointing to others who deserved such credit more.

Some still believe in honor.

Why one kills a feed from one's own blog

2007-10-21T23:58:00.000-07:00

First posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Saturday April 21, 2007 - 09:18pm (CDT)

Very recently, I set up a livejournal for a few reasons. I wanted to have a place where I could post videos on youtube, whose owners have insisted on setting their system so that one has to give it the password for one's blog before it will give one the code for embedding a video into one's blog. I wasn't about to give them or anybody else my Yahoo or Blogger password. What I needed was a blog that I wouldn't be as upset about losing, should somebody at the other end misuse the information I was sending to this unfamiliar company, contrary to what is usually considered just basic common sense on matters of security. Also, having an account at another large provider like Livejournal would have the virtue of allowing me to post replies to blogs on that other service.

I set up a new blog called "Stuck in Limbo"

(url and link removed)

and then set up blog feeds, only to make an annoying discovery, which one can see for oneself just by following this permanent link

(url and link removed)

Looks really shabby, doesn't it? The formatting doesn't carry over to individual posts, when one reaches them through a feed. Why they would set it up this way, I don't know and I don't care. One might also note that there is no provision for setting up feeds there, or for creating a blog roll, meaning that I can't really link from there to other sites of mine, I can't swap links and owing to the very limited formatting choices available, I can't even make my livejournal look like anything other than a site one might have put together sometime around 1996.

I might put a little effort into it, but the kind of "drop dead" attitude that leaps out of these design choices does nothing to make me want to put a lot of effort into making my livejournal into anything other than the minimum effort that I'm being encouraged to make by the provider. The best that I can do is keep the amount of text on the new place to a minimum, just showing a lot of films, so the dodginess of the look is no more of an issue than it needs to be, and not use any permanent links - and that means no feeds from that blog.

I guess that takes care of any trust issues with third party providers who don't seem to respect security consciousness, because I won't have any writing to lose over there? Yes, at least there's that. Why are people like this?

Comment added later: Maybe I'm assuming the worst too quickly, projecting past bad experiences (eg. the guy at Internet Trash who flew into a rage when I reported the nonworking FTP on his service) into an assumption of a future bad experience. I'll report the problem and we'll see whether Livejournal can handle the news any more maturely or professionally than have a number of other services I could name. At this point, how much do I really stand to lose if they lose their minds? Maybe they'll pleasantly surprise me?

There's a first time for everything.

Note added June 5: But this was not to be the first time for that, as noted in this post to my Googlegroup. I've removed "Stuck in Limbo" from my blogroll, and will probably only be using my livejournal membership for commenting in the future.

Note added, October 7, 2011: I've since recycled the name "Stuck in Limbo" - it's going to be the name of my real time photography microblog on Typepad. Livejournal would eventually fix this "feature", but was never willing to work on its notorious censorship issues, which seemed to stem from its willingness to give unchecked administrative power to adolescent volunteers. I mean this literally - at least one former member of the abuse team described himself as having been "a typical teenager" at the time he started work on the team. Use your common sense, and imagine how that would work, in real life.

I decided that I didn't need that headache, which is why you aren't seeing any links to Livejournal in this post.

I've started using Technorati

2007-10-21T23:40:00.000-07:00

Originally posted to my Yahoo 360 blog on Friday April 20, 2007 - 08:12am (CDT)

Or at least I'm trying to. Technorati has been fouling up, or maybe Yahoo has, or how about both? I went through Technorati's bleepity-bleep "claim your blog" process, and got to enjoy the experience of being given the runaround by a mindless piece of software. First, the system will give one a piece of code to insert in a new blog post, which I did. (That's where this post first came from). Then one clicks on a button saying "release the spiders", I which I did, only to get this error message:

"Sorry, your claim could not be completed because we couldn't find the claim code on your site. Please make sure you've followed all the steps above and try again.

I go over to have Technorati ping my blog, to make sure that it is seeing the updated version on which one will find the link and wonder of wonders, discover that every time you do that, their system changes the url on the link one needs to insert. Isn't that a hoot?

To make the system work, one needs to have the code one will get after one pings, before one pings, meaning that one has to sent that information back in time to one's earlier self, and good luck with that . What can one do? Other than report the problem, shrug, note that I've made a good faith effort and stop caring. The question is, who should I stop caring about. As per Technorati's suggestion, I checked this mini-blog over at the w3.org validator service and got this impressive menu of errors, not a one of which I could fix, as one needs root level access to redo the source code on this blog. Lovely. Assuming that the problem isn't the validator, and if it wasn't, how would I know?

Here's the link Technorati's system provided me. I've done my part, now let's see if they care enough about what it is that they do, to do their part as well. I'll give them until tonight, but that's it. The maddening question is - who are "they"? Technorati or Yahoo? Do I stop bothering with the service or with this blog? One tends to assume that Yahoo will be at least marginally technically competent, but that code check was really discouraging. Then again, a check of my place over at Blogger produced even more errors, and that got into Technorati just fine. Both pages seem to display well, so maybe the validator is what is messed up? Oh, and how did working this one out become my job?

Aftermath: Technorati had a decent work around for the problem, so the whole problem became a moot point: Instead of using the full blog url, one uses

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/(user name)

or, in the case of this blog

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/cafe_satan

for very minor historical reasons

http://cafesatan.bravehost.com/

Comments, added in October: It wasn't that decent of a workaround - Technorati still couldn't find links to any of my posts on my 360 blog, not even the ones that I knew existed, because they were links that I had made myself, on my other blogs!

At the time of this reposting, Yahoo 360 is due for elimination in a few months, so if you're coming in much later, that short url might take you nowhere. I include it only for the sake of making this archive as complete as possible. I'll talk about this later.

Twit watch: Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech

2007-10-21T21:53:00.000-07:00

First posted on my Yahoo 360 blog Friday April 20, 2007 - 04:53am (CDT)

Interesting what one finds, sometimes. I found this on a Technorati search under the terms "Virginia Tech". Profanity softened as per Yahoo's TOS.

Shane of Marietta, Georgia writes

"that cho a**hole

little fucking n** sends a bunch of pictures of himself trying to look like some kinda thug to nbc ... by the way...i can kinda understand why he would be interested in shooting himself after having to look at that mug in the mirror his whole life). ..."

not that there is anything racist about that at all. No, of course not. By the way, Shawn, "N**" has traditionally been a derogatory word for those of Japanese descent. The Virginia Tech shooter was Korean. Not that this is going to slow our racist friend down one bit as he baits the next kid whose family just made the mistake of moving into his hometown from Osaka or Taipei, I suppose. Good thing that this was an isolated incident, huh?

Oops, maybe not .... Cunning Linguist writes

"fucking g**k!"

Current mood: angry

it's been a while since i've written here, and usually i don't write about things which are serious. however i feel i should get something off my chest.

i was at a local grocery store buying some breakfast cereal (honeycomb, because it kicks a**.) when some caucasian guy decided that it would be appropriate to pick me out of a crowd and vent his rage at the virginia tech shooting at me.

"hey g**k! yeah you you slant eyed piece of s**t! i'm talking to YOU!"

naturally this got my attention, seeing as how i'm asian.

"excuse me? what did you just say?" i enquired.

"yeah you heard me g**k! i bet you're REAL happy that your friend in virginia murdered all those people!"

i remember distinctly feeling a sinking sensation in my stomach, like my guts were all being compacted into it.

"are you proud of how your g**k buddy slaughtered all those people? well? are you? ... he continued on his rantings as a crowd attracted by his screaming started to gather, i saw the faces of many. some sympathetic, some looking as if his hatred being directed towards me was deserved. ... "f**k you! the ONLY tragedy is that you goddamn g**ks weren't the ones that were killed! get on your f**king boat and go back to korea!" he screamed in my face, slapping my purchase out of my hand and kicking it away.

... it makes no sense, NONE. come on people, we're better than that. "

Not by much, to judge from from some of the quotes wal-loveless shares with us:

"Mauryce(11 hours ago)

Shhesh i say we should gather all the asian and mexicans and send them back on thier boats. Especially Koreans thier the most racists of all asians and viets too...freakin immigrants i tell u, LOOK how you scared our country. NO BODY LIKE's YOU G**KS NOW and you will feel the backlash around the country....

crhmaniac (10 hours ago)

f**k nigg**s, sp*cs, ghandis, ch**ks, g**ks, j*ps and any other person of color. your just as bad as a nigg*r you fagg*t. get with the times, we arent racist, were white pride. and for your f**king info we arent the minority anymore, maybe you should watch some news and see how many of us there are you f**king s**tbag n*gger b*tch. FTG - F**k The Ghetto

biggino2007 (1 day ago)

a FU##### g**k did this hope u route in hell

tintin166 (12 hours ago)

f**king korean !!!

damn them all to hell!!! f**king animals!! even in asia ,nobody like them

winrx (6 hours ago)

Korean guy was probably a paranoid schizophrenic and was never diagnosed as such - this is what happens when you don't take your pysch meds....!!!

Osmium14 (13 hours ago)

The sl*pe walks into a dorm, sees his race-mixing Jewess girlfriend with a n*gger, shoots them both and then goes on to shoot 30 other people dead (hopefully, mostly more non-whites like that peruvian b*aner that died), and then shoots himself dead. Perfect story with a perfect ending.

jazzandpunk (14 hours ago)

Watch out for korean!!!

Most korean naturally have psychoneurosis.

Their genes held heavy hysteria.

crhmaniac (10 hours ago)

b*tch asians will NEVER f*cking take over the world you small d*cked rice cooking ch*nk piece of shit. WHITE people run America and the world get used to it f*ggot. all ch*nks, g**ks and j*ps are good for is working in factories for 10 cents a day qu**r. and as for your honda, it sounds like a 4 speed blender you wide eyed fucking c*ck s*cker.

SatanicSlaughter616 (14 hours ago)

F*CKING ASIANS.

masabsn (14 hours ago)

You f**king Korean....All of the Koreans don't care about others. They just care about their moneys. Even they can't speak English after living this country for 18-30 years. They always hire illegal immigrants and use them as a slave. Now they start shooting Americans. I am angry about this.

Derekdraken (16 hours ago)

Also in the U.S. Forces base in South Korea,

Koreans have caused the rape trouble to an American woman.

Koreans are sick."

How very lovely. Is that all? Please, we haven't even started. Let's take a look at what Bino Rino had to say

"You can blame bullying, harassment, drugs, alcohol, narcissism or anything else but it all comes down to one kid with one choice to make. The little f**king g**k that shot up Virginia tech can go s*ck a fat c**k."

So far, all comments on that individual's post have been positive. What has been truly sickening has been just how easy this kind of commentary has been to find and guess what? The people who get targeted for it, sooner or later, get tired of it. Without disputing what would seem to be obvious (that Cho came completely unhinged) - do you think that he might have had a little help going as insane as he was in the end? I might also say something about the way in the very suggestion that there be any sort of limitation on immigration or that the distinctiveness of Western cultures ought to be preserved would be responded to with hysterical outbursts of politically correct rage and calls for censorship and blacklisting in one decade, yet garbage like this is considered acceptable in the next. But then, were Cho an African-American instead of a Korean immigrant, would the casual racial generalizations be accepted even today?

Probably not, judging from what just happened to Imus. Even the faintest hint that one has engaged in that kind of racism, no matter how unjustified by the facts, still brings on howls of outrage, so why the double standard? Here's a thought - how about because the old racism never went away, it just went underground, and when you take a look at the minorities whose bashing is currently politically correct, like, say, Middle Easterners, as we saw in an ePlaya post that I made an earlier reference to on my homelist, a pattern most definitely begins to emerge. Looking at the frequently and openly maligned Jews, and South and East Asians among others, one finds visibly non-Anglo-Saxon peoples who've often had the bad taste to outachieve their fairer skinned so-called "betters", held onto their traditions and managed to live well, even during those all too frequent times when courtesy of real discrimination, they've had to learn to live with less. They have, in short, not minded their places at all, and some of our "progressive" friends aren't prepared to accept that. They look at some of those coming out of places like Englewood, broken in body and spirit or addicted to playing the fool, in either case not looking like prospective competitors who might get in the way of the ambitions of those who wish to advance without having to work or learn anything, and ask so many others "why can't you be more like them".

Perhaps because some of us remember that dignity comes from within, and that the true disgrace that comes from abuse lies on the abuser, not on the abused. I didn't know Mr.Cho, and under the circumstances feel fortunate in this regard, so I don't really know how much of this applies to his case, but can't help but wonder when I see some of the comments about his case.

If anybody is pushed hard enough and long enough, he will push back. Everybody has a breaking point, and it is the shame of a supposedly civilised society that so many of its supposedly civilised members will work so hard to find that point, and then posture as victims when they find it, but - take a look at what follows. Looking at the body count and taking the short time available to a shooter before the police arrive should be enough to squash any theory that the shooter in such a case is giving his targets their just desserts or anything like them, that the people he is taking out are his tormenters. We heard that suggestion after Columbine and now we're hearing it again, and to give that one a reality check - every try finding somebody on a college campus who wasn't hiding from you? Know that "needle in a haystack" feeling as you try to find a lab partner or a friend? What are the odds that Cho would have been able to track down a few dozen of those who mistreated him in rapid succession?

Answer: Approximately nil. The tormented shooter in such a case does not dispense social justice, he cuts down innocent people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time; heroic innocent people, as in the case of that professor who died holding the door shut while he helped his students to escape. The actual tormenters in such a case will most likely be off shopping for toilet paper or something at the time, and survive to give gripping firsthand accounts of ordeals they weren't present for themselves, and in all of the confusion, we'll probably never know who they were, especially given the reality that so many of the prospective witnesses are hostile that their testimony would have to be regarded as being tainted by any reasonable person. In his reaping of the innocent, Cho ensured that justice was the one thing that would never be seen and, of course, he ended up dead - a lose-lose proposition for all but those who deserved to lose, assuming that there were any of those and that we're not just hearing stories created after the fact by those who want to be sensitive. A few decades into the Political Correctness era, with respect for the truth on college campuses at a historic low, one can't reasonably discount that as a possibility.

But let's say that it's true. Cho is dead and gone and has taken his victims with him, and we can't fix that, but we can intervene in cases in which somebody seems to be starting down the road he took off a cliff, and we can do it with greater wisdom than that seen in such quasi-fascistic suggestions that he should have been involuntarily committed because some women found him vaguely creepy or that some instructor got nasty vibes from his writing. (Not that I wouldn't understand why, if the contents of this page are an accurate copy of the script of Cho's play "Richard McBeef"; please read it for yourself and see what you think). That sort of thing is the death of civil liberty and will, ironically, generate much of the very kind of explosive rage that it is offered as a defense against. One intervenes, when one sees somebody else being mistreated, by making it one's business and letting him know that he's not going to be left to fend for himself. "You mean, intervene when a member of an oppressed group is mistreated because of his race or his ..." No. Anybody who is being ganged up on and bullied because of something that in no way negatively reflects on his character is being oppressed and to worry about whether his oppression counts or not, whether the group he is being used as an icon for has seen enough hatred yet for it to qualify as an oppressed group, is to say "let's wait for the explosion and then do something about it". Waiting until there are dead bodies before acting to avert a firefight is not a very conscientious choice or a very prudent one, yet it is one we can count on seeing many people make.

And when we can't get the creeps to behave? Maybe some of the Asian kids at some of these schools ought to go hang out with some of the Jewish kids and compare notes. While I don't know whether or not what I've heard about the treatment seen by Cho was true, let's say that looking back on the experience of being Jewish and noticably non-Anglo-Saxon in appearance in a more rednecked location, I find a lot of what is being described very, very familiar, and if we all acted on every urge we felt, that the herd would be very seriously thinned out at this point. So why didn't we and don't we? Maybe because when the day got to be too much for some of us, we would turn to others for support and could count on getting a needed reminder that the whole world had not, in fact, actually gone insane. I can't help but wonder if Cho ever got that needed reminder, and if in an era in which all complaints of injustice by those not officially recognized as being among the oppressed are dismissed as whining in a fashionably "in your face" manner, if maybe any sign that he needed it was responded to, perversely, with more abuse. By the time he got to Virginia Tech, trying to be the person who gave it to him might have been unwise, but getting to the bad place he ended in is something that didn't happen overnight, and what if there had been somebody there for him before he got to that point? Say, maybe when he was a mildly unhappy middle school student instead of a borderline suicidal undergrad?

But that's the problem, isn't it? Consider the pop wisdom that gets in the way of answering a sensible question - "other people have it worse than you". If physiological health issues were addressed in the same way that so many would have mental health issues dealt with, nobody would ever emerge from a hospital alive, because nobody would be let in until he was already terminal. The folk wisdom on this point is folk idiocy; one does not wait until somebody has been pushed to the edge before speaking up for him or being there for him. To say "others have it worse than you" is to say "what, this is all we get to do to you" and then wonder why an overtly hostile response follows to one's barely covert aggression. One doesn't wait until the one put upon has it worse than everybody else before seeing the need for him to see some support and some justice, because nobody should have it that bad or come close to having it that bad.

If one should insist on feeling otherwise, that is perhaps one's privilege, but then again it is equally well the privilege of the rest of us to not care very much if one should get to snack on a little lead before settling in for a good, long sleep. While I wouldn't go so far as to say that law enforcement should look the other way as violence is inflicted on our more callous neighbors, I will go so far as to say that there are some people who really aren't worth mourning, and that some of them exit this world with clean criminal records and undeservedly good personal reputations. (Note: My thanks to the writers at the Fairbank Report for linking to that script).

Added, April 24,25: Found a link to Cho's other play, Mr.Brownstone.

Note inserted October 22 - the one and only copy that I could find of that play, which every single other source made reference to, has been taken down, and the Internet Archive only had time to archive the cover page of the script: 1. I looked and looked and found nothing, except maybe a fresh reason to look down on CNN - really, guys, you couldn't afford to keep your own copy of a piece of news story documentation? Diskspace costs what - 1/4 of a cent per Meg, but you have to mooch off of some blogger at AOL instead of handling your own file storage?

If I find out about another copy, I'll insert the appropriate link or links in an appendix below, but I'm not optimistic.

More of the same sludge; "Richard McBeef" looks less like an isolated outburst and more like what somebody was in class to create. I'm not at all surprised that his instructors would want to show him the door, under the circumstances. The Fairbanks report has posted some excerpts from a New York Times article about Cho that creates a picture of an individual that almost any sensible person would view with concern, raising the question of what somebody could possibly be thinking about as he went out seeking the attention of this troubled individual by baiting him. Did some of these people not understand the concept of being silent and letting trouble drift past one?

Mayor Nagin speaks out in New Orleans ... about something

2007-10-21T21:41:00.000-07:00

Initially posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Wednesday April 18, 2007 - 10:42am (CDT)

About what, I'm not entirely sure, but listen for yourself. (I'd recommend that you click on "open" instead of "download" after you right click on the link on the page you'll be going to, as the file packs more than 1 MB worth of mayoral babbling into a 30 second soundbite. That has to be some kind of record). At moments like this, I listen to Daley stumble through a speech and think "it could be worse". Then I take a look at what Daley has let Rubloff et al. do to Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast, compare that to what I've seen in the French Quarter and Garden District and think "but not by much".

Credits: I found the .mp3 on Metroblogging New Orleans in this post by Laureen Lentz, reachable at http://tinyurl.com/ywrflc

If you were looking for the link a little while ago and not finding it, that was not an accident, as this note I just sent to support at a particularly worthless service will explain. The service is hotlinkfiles.com, and I would strongly urge you to not do business with these people.

I used your service to upload a copy of a segment of a speech by Mayor Roy Nagins of New Orleans for posting on a blog. I soon regretted my decision to do so, as the moment I clicked on the link that would take a visitor to the recording on your site, I got an error message stating that Internet Explorer needed to close. No such error message was to be had when I clicked on the original, nor when I clicked on the copy on my own hard disk.

Occasional downtime, I can understand. Browser crashing, on the other hand, is absolutely not cool. But looking over your TOS, I see you feel otherwise, specifically stating that you don't support "Safari", raising the question of how a hapless surfer using that browser is supposed to know that he's about to run into trouble when he visits a site run by one of your users.

Outrageous. Absolutely outrageous. I am not in the business of laying out boobytraps for those visiting my sites and I question the decency and sanity of those running any service who work from the assumption that I should. As soon as I send this message, I will check to see if there is any way in which I can delete this account, but even if there is not, rest assured that I will never use it again, and I will warn others to not use it in the first place.

Go have a good laugh, as I'm sure you will, but as hard as you may find this to understand, I think that you'll find that by and large that people do care about the experiences had by visitors to their websites, and don't think too highly of site admins who adopt a "f**k you" attitude in response to reports of bad experiences their bad coding are causing those visitors and then try to hide behind their TOS, as if a bad attitude could become anything other than a bad attitude just by being made a matter of policy. Here is looking forward to your speedy bankruptcy, not just on a company level, but G-d willing, on a personal one as well.

People like you are what is wrong with the Internet.

I will always make the effort to not be one of those people, myself, which is why the link is gone, for now. Having just gone through the process of looking for a provider that doesn't delete sound files once every month and then taking the time to apply - only to find out that my time has been wasted by somebody else's grossly unprofessional attitude, I'll hold off for a while before taking the time to do this again. I do, however, hope to eventually find a free file hosting service that isn't a bad joke. You never know - I might even succeed. Until then, sorry about the annoyances involved in visiting my current (temporary) upload location, but this is the best that I can do, for now.

This industry is in bad need of governmental regulation.

Anti-Intellectual Student Blog Post Reply ...

2007-10-21T21:36:00.000-07:00

First posted to my former Yahoo 360 blog Monday April 16, 2007 - 08:46pm (CDT)

I just posted a reply to somebody's blog post here, maybe overdoing the response a little. I stand behind what I said, but maybe I should have loaded something of that length as a post on my own blog? At any rate, you get to see me cheering for the decline and fall of ~~the Roman Empire~~ the United States.

http://theteemingbrain.wordpress.com/2007/03/26/education-vs-student-anti-int...

"And have a nice day, Joseph?" I guess so. I'll post a backup copy to my Googlegroup on general principle.

Sanjaya: I'm not really going to pretend to be completely surprised by this ...

2007-10-21T21:18:00.000-07:00

(Article originally posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Wednesday April 11, 2007 - 11:28am (CDT))

I'm not going to comment on the merits of Sanjaya's performance on "American Idol", because I don't watch the show, but I couldn't help notice a curious disconnect between what I was seeing on ... I think it was Fox news, but definitely a traditional medium news broadcast ... and what I'm seeing on the Internet news.

On the traditional medium news station, I find myself watching a story about how those responsible for putting out the show are thinking of suing somebody who has been urging people to vote for a contestant named "Sanjaya", who is supposedly notoriously untalented, in the hope of making a laughingstock out of the show. A representative from the show is on the news talking about such an attempt should not be tolerated, that it is damaging a valuable commercial property (the show) and then there is an argument about how far the first amendment goes in protecting one's right to do what somebody was doing as a joke. At which point, I zone out and wander off to do other things.

Some days pass, I go to log into my Yahoo! account, and come across this bit of new media journalism from Yahoo! TV

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=245724&cl=2361665&src=tv&ch=...

in which I now hear about how Sanjaya is HOT! HOT! HOT! and I find myself wondering - did the people who put together the webcast not hear about the earlier broadcast? If somebody is manipulating the poll results by getting those not otherwise interested to try to tilt the vote for the purposes of mockery, then the thoroughly scorned beneficiary of their efforts may be LUCKY! LUCKY! LUCKY! but he is not HOT! HOT! HOT!

I'd like to say that I'm amazed by this, but then I'm not really unfamiliar with the phenomenon of willful blindness, especially in an online context. I've certainly written about it enough, and if looking to read the post that somebody posted a misleading followup to is too much work for the average netizen, I suppose that getting up to turn the TV set on would be even more work, especially if one didn't have the foresight to put one's remote next to the monitor or if one has carelessly put that case of cheetos on top of it. No, I guess that I can't really be disheartened by such an episode in any way in which I haven't already been disheartened, especially when the stakes are as low for society as a whole as they are this time. Western civilization survived Tiny Tim, and I'm sure that it will survive any short lived phenomenon this show produces, as well, and somewhere in this is a halfway decent satirical moment to be placed in a movie someday, after this current era is dead, buried but I hope, not forgotten. I'm sure we remember that quote from Santayana, and as mildly amusing as an incident as this is, widespread idiocy is not always so benign.

I would like to think that people will be getting brighter after this, but then I don't exactly have a lengthy history of getting what I want, do I? Still, one can hope.

Suggestions sent to Yahoo re: 360 Profiles

2007-10-21T21:08:00.000-07:00

This article was originally posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Wednesday April 4, 2007 - 11:17pm (CDT)

I sent a few into Yahoo Support. The letter I sent can be found here.

http://groups.google.com/group/Joseph_Dunphy/browse_thread/thread/2d2caa3707c...

Yes, I have my own Googlegroup, with one whole member in it. I rock. I guess. One particular suggestion probably should stand out, should you be looking at the left hand side of your screen, now:

"1. Looking at my blogroll, I noticed that instead of being set against the white background the text was set against, it was set against the page background. This is a mistake, because it just about guarantees that the links on the blogroll will be almost unreadable.

In order to make the profile page look nice, one has to have some kind of tonal contrast - light against dark, dark against light. Light against light is just going to look washed out. But we only get to choose one set of link colors, which will be chosen to make the links stand out well against the light background of the boxes the text is in. What stands out well against a light background, does poorly

against a dark one. "

Take a look at the blogroll to your left. See what I mean? I can get away with having that link as faint as it does, because the guy who owns that other blog is me. Were it somebody else, I don't think he'd be amused, and there really is no clear reason to create this problem. Yes, to have the light tag cloud and Message boxes above the dark calendar makes a nice visual statement, which having a light blogroll box beneath the calendar might detract from, but at least two options for dealing with that problem come to mind.

Move the blog roll up into the white box above the calendar.

Notice that the profile is put together with style sheets, meaning that the usual limitations of an HTML page don't apply. Having not written a style sheet, I'm not sure if this is possible, but couldn't one have the user specify one set of link colors for the white text boxes and another for links appearing outside of those boxes, set against the background graphic?

While we're at it, having the option to moderate comments would be nice, as well. Right now, it's all or nothing - either somebody can post whatever he wants in your comment section and it will appear without your prior approval, or he can't post at all. This means that in order to keep the trolls from spreading their virtual excrement over one's site, one has to turn nice, reasonable people away, telling them that one doesn't want to hear what they have to say. Given the subject matter of much of my own site, not a problem for me, but certain to be an unnecessary problem for many other users, who probably would have enjoyed much of a dialogue that they might no longer feel free to engage in. Comment moderation is hardly unknown on other services, and one wonders why it would be unknown on this one. Certainly, this doesn't help to build community, which Yahoo seems to want to do, very, very badly.

But what are the odds that anybody's going to be listening? This was probably a vain effort on my part, but then I suppose that one could say that about most of blogging, in general.

Durbin Hiring Bill - This is mildly interesting

2007-10-21T20:01:00.000-07:00

Originally posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Tuesday April 3, 2007 - 07:55pm (CDT)

I haven't looked over the bill, and more importantly, I haven't had a qualified lawyer look over the bill to tell me what he thinks about it, so I'll hold off on speaking in support or opposition to it, but on the surface it does look like an interesting change of pace from business as usual:

"High-tech companies and others clamoring for additional H-1B visas to hire foreigners would be forced to give priority to American job seekers under a new U.S. Senate proposal.

Just before Congress departed for its spring recess at the end of last week, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) introduced a bill--which appears to be the first of its kind in the Senate--designed to curb abuse of the controversial worker visa system.

'Our immigration policy should seek to complement our U.S. workforce, not replace it,' Durbin said in a statement. ...

The 32-page Senate bill would impose a host of additional obligations on employers. They would be required to pledge that they made a 'good faith' effort to hire an American before taking on an H-1B worker and that the foreigner was not displacing a prospective U.S. worker.

Employers would also have to advertise job openings for 30 days on the Department of Labor's Web site before making H-1B visa applications, and they would be prohibited from advertising positions only to H-1B holders.

In addition, companies with 50 or more workers would not be allowed to employ more than half of their staff through H-1B visas.

In an attempt to discourage employers from hiring foreigners at lower wages than their American counterparts would command, employers would have to pay all H-1B workers the 'prevailing wage,' as calculated by a different method that raises the minimum to a higher level than it currently stands.

The proposal also aims to beef up the Department of Labor's authority to investigate abuses, giving the department the power to conduct random audits on employers, to review applications for 'clear indicators of fraud,' and to hire 200 additional employees to administer, oversee and enforce the H-1B program.

Grassley described the bill as aimed at 'closing loopholes that employers have exploited by requiring them to be more transparent about their hiring and...ensuring more oversight of these visa programs to reduce fraud and abuse.'

...

High-tech industry trade groups have long said the H-1B system is critical to relieving shortages of qualified U.S. workers and have called for its expansion. ....

Groups such as the Programmers Guild and IEEE-USA that represent American programmers and engineers argue that it's far more important to remedy the existing system. They say it's riddled with abuses that make it possible for firms to hire H-1B workers at substandard salaries and to scrimp on recruiting Americans.

Programmers Guild founder John Miano said he is 'genuinely enthusiastic' about the Grassley-Durbin effort, which he called a 'comprehensive' approach that could go a long way toward fixing what critics perceive as problems with the system. ...

Kara Calvert, director of government relations for the Information Technology Industry Council, said she found components of the bill 'worrisome' and hoped the measure would not go anywhere. ITIC's members include Apple, Dell, Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel and Microsoft.

'The bottom line is we are not opposed to U.S. laws that prevent fraud and abuse within the immigration system, particularly within the H-1B, L and employment-based programs,' she said. 'Any revisions to U.S. law, however, must be carefully and narrowly drafted to avoid unintended consequences that will hinder the ability of U.S. companies to innovate.' "

.... (find the rest of the article at

http://tinyurl.com/2cl734 )

Translation: "How can we save the US economy, if we aren't allowed to reduce the American people to peonage? What fascinates me more than the attempt of certain companies to put this spin on their push to get cheap labor is the willingness of the very people they'd cheerfully reduce to starvation to buy the spin. Can you say "cognitive dissonance"? But that's probably hoping for too much out of my fellow citizens, so how about an Orwell reference like "doublethink"? Because if we're living in an era in which holding suspects without charge, indefinitely, is OK with people who see nothing about this being done in the name of the fight for freedom, I'm thinking that 1984 may be the book for our time, and this is just more of the same - seeing a population become so worshipful of authority that there is no mental contortion that it won't go through to rationalise what it is hearing, and no contradiction that it will feel compelled to notice.

How does one look at the dismal job market in engineering and almost everything else in the manufacturing sector, accept the reality of that, and at the same time maintain that there is a shortage of skilled personnel requiring that the government step in and intervene in the marketplace on behalf of employers with a desired change in immigration policy? How does one manage to simultaneously believe in a glut and a shortage? In the case of some of the companies speaking out, we know exactly how as we see in this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette site, quoting an article in yes, that well-known liberal rag, the Wall Street journal.

"Behind engineer 'shortage': Employers are choosy

Wednesday, November 16, 2005
By Sharon Begley, The Wall Street Journal

Many companies say they're facing an increasingly severe shortage of engineers. It's so bad, some executives say, that Congress must act to boost funding for engineering education.

Yet unemployed engineers say there's actually a big surplus. "No one I know who has looked at the data with an open mind has been able to find any sign of a current shortage," says demographer Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

What's really going on? Consider the case of recruiter Rich Carver. In February, he got a call from the U.S. unit of JSP Corp., a Tokyo plastic-foam maker. The company was looking for an engineer with manufacturing experience to serve as a shift supervisor at its Butler, Pa., plant, which makes automobile-bumper parts.

Within two weeks, Mr. Carver and a colleague at the Hudson Highland Group had collected more than 200 resumes. They immediately eliminated just over 100 people who didn't have the required bachelor of science degree, even though many had the kind of job experience the company wanted. A further 65 or so then fell out of the running. Some were deemed overqualified. Others lacked experience with the proper manufacturing software. ...

To JSP, taking six months to fill the position confirmed its sense that competition for top engineers is intense. Company officials "struggle to fill" openings, says human-resources manager Vicki Senko.

But for candidates facing 200-to-1 odds of getting the job, the struggle seems all on their side. "Companies are looking for a five-pound butterfly. Not finding them doesn't mean there's a shortage of butterflies," says Richard Tax, president of the American Engineering Association ...

'Every few years there is a spurt of panic that we won't have enough engineers in five years,' says Paul Kostek, a systems engineer in Seattle who recently got a job at Boeing after working as a consultant for a decade. 'And I say to myself, gee, I'll still be here.'

http://tinyurl.com/2c5xwu

In other words, the companies are terrified by the thought that insanely well-credentialed and talented people who've worked themselves to death putting themselves through demanding professional programs have become so scarce that if the law isn't changed to tilt the economic playing field more in their favor than it already has been tilted, that they may not be able to capriciously reject job applications any more and horror of horrors, might have to start paying these people for those decades of hard work. It is, of course, vitally important that the government step in to help drive down the wages of American professionals, and if you believe otherwise, obviously you don't believe in the free market.

At which point almost anybody should respond with a strange look and the word "huh?". Excuse this recovering campus libertarian, but that's not even Libertarianism. That's Corporatism. Libertarianism, in its nastier incarnations, may be indifferent when the American worker is shoved flat on his back and told to enjoy what is about to be done to him, but it is never cheerleading for the effort. "Lassez Faire" means that the government is neutral, not that it's anti-labor. "I steal from the poor and give to the rich" is a line from Monty Python, not from the Libertarian Party party platform, and until the Bush dynasty decided to grace America with its ruinous presence, this was not really what the Republican Party stood for either, though it certainly is what it stands for, now. Consider the nature of this allegedly free market. If Intel sends its factories over to a hostile country, technology, equipment, a few trainers and all, they are granted leave to do so in the name of free trade. If I, as an individual engineer, do a little research, develop a technology, and export it on my own, I get a twenty year prison sentence during peacetime, and face the possibility of execution for doing so during wartime. The law guarantees that American engineers become a captive source of labor for American employers, and the Bushites dare to call this legally unequal relationship the product of a free market.

It is nothing of the sort.

Opening the borders to let allegedly American companies bring in foreign labor while threatening American engineers who would sell their work overseas, then, is not justifiable even under the skewed criteria of the campus libertarian. Under the standard of common sense, it is even less so. Let us consider what is being asked of those going into the field, something that we've seen every American president since Reagan promote as an option for America's young people as each made use of the prestige of his office (to say nothing of the tax supported air time) to influence the views and choices of those at a trusting age - not that we should view THAT as being a form of intervention in the marketplace, Heaven forbid. To get through such a program, even on the bachelor's level, takes at least four years, and probably more like five, because courtesy of the YOYO (you're on your own) philosophy of that has dominated American government in the last few decades, one would be paying inflated tuition at schools that are known to price fix, sending tuitions skyrocketing at many times the rate of inflation, without any meaningful financial aid, at a time when the jobs they can get as they work their way through school barely pay a living wage. So they will get to work long hours before study, slowing their pace through school even more, and making the job of guessing precisely which skills will be in demand when they get out even more a matter of blind luck and guesswork, but they'd better guess right, because if they don't come out with precisely the right mix, their lives are over. They will never find work, and will spend what remains of their lives on public aid, waiting for the welfare reform axe to fall, or scratching out a meager living doing odd jobs, because if you have one noticable skill that an employer doesn't need you're "overqualified" and there's no bouncing back from that.

Part of me is wondering when I should expect to see Rod Serling show up, because this can't possibly be happening, but as an old roommate of mine once pointed out, he never showed up during Night Gallery episodes, and this really does go beyond the Twilight Zone. The argument boils down to this: "Mr.Bush, if you don't distort immigration policy sufficiently to give us more of an upper hand when dealing with skilled labor, we won't be able to reward talented, hard working honest people for their years of labor by capriciously destroying their lives", and not only does most of Washington think that this makes perfect sense, most of the American people seem to do so as well. There's a word that applies to this kind of outlook, one that has fallen out of use in our postmodern, multicultural, Politically Correct world, but maybe it needs to be heard some more.

Evil

When somebody fights to twist the rules so that an entire class of people can be paid back for working harder and knowing more than most of their peers with a massed attempt to pile driver them into the ground, that's not another point of view we're seeing in action, that's not another way of seeing things or a different lifestyle choice, that's just plain f***ing evil, and if there are any other words that fit, very few of them will be any more complimentary. "Live and let live" is not an appropriate response to this. Righteous rage is, and to raise a question that I've found myself wondering for some time, if this is what America stands for now, could some of us be finding that our patriotism has been sadly misplaced? At the very least, some of us should have the courage to tell our "friends" when they speak in support of such outrages that by definition, a friend is somebody who watches out for one, and then walk off, never to speak to such friends again. Tolerance, like patience, should have limits. Nobody would expect a steelworker to feel otherwise, to be accepting of the suggestion that there would be no injustice in him being arbitrarily left out on the street to starve, and there's no reason why an engineer, a scientist or any other professional should demand any less consideration. The day we truly lose hope in seeing that truth accepted is the day we should turn our backs on this country and find another where we will be better treated. Until then, let's take a look at bills like this one and see if there is still some hope for America as a place to live and care about, or if it is time to give up to reaching its people people and their government and move on to a place where ability and hard work still earn one respect, not barely disguised hatred.

As for those reading this who are not engineers or any other kind of professional who might wonder why they should care about the fate of a few privileged eggheads, I'd remind you that an education is not something that we were given for free or could be. It is something that those who possessed it worked long and hard for and it is the product of that work; if one has to work longer and defer gratification longer in exchange for less pay, in exactly what sense is one "privileged"? What we are looking for is nothing more than what other Americans have come to take for granted - a chance to have lives of our own, with enough pay to not have to wonder if dinner is going to be on the table, enough free time to catch our breaths and enough security to not have to always be looking over our shoulders wondering "what's next". That's getting to be part of life for fewer and fewer people in this country for a number of reasons, but highest on the list would have to be the fatal fascination the American people seem to have with the idea of looking for excuses for throwing each other to the wolves, one that signals to the predators among us that they may pick us off piecemeal, for they need not fear the possibility that one of us will see the support of the others. Yesterday, it was the machinists losing everything that they had in life, today it is the engineers, and tomorrow, who knows? What you can be sure of, though, is that if you and everybody else remains complacently accepting of this trend, your turn will come and when it does, you will have nothing that you can say on your own behalf, for nothing will have been done to you that you were not unreasonably comfortable with seeing done to others.

Still don't see a problem? Then let me leave you with this thought. We almost all come from other places, don't we? What happened to your families' loyalties when they came to this country? Did they not stop being Italians or Frenchmen or Germans and become Americans, albeit hyphenated Americans of some sort, and did their first loyalties not, very suddenly, become ones they felt for their new country and not their old? Let us say that the multitude of discouraged engineers, finding that their own people are enthusiastically embracing the idea of their gross betrayal, follow the precedent set by the ancestors of almost us all and seek greener pastures in other countries. Now let's say that the United States, having driven off the people whose work and knowledge gave it the technologies that did so much to give its soldiers an edge in battle, finds itself at war with one of the countries those engineers went to, probably along with a great many other skilled laborers whose patience, by now, is probably greatly strained. Who do you expect that they will be loyal to, the people of the country that drove them forth for no good reason or their friends and newly found loved ones, in the countries that took them in? Do you remember WHY those immigrant ancestors tended to be so patriotic?

How do you picture such a war turning out for the United States? Because you know, kids, there is no such thing as a weapon that there is no defense against, and sooner or later, probably sooner, those ICBMs that so many assume to be the eternal deterrent are going to look as comically impotent as the once invincible Roman phalanx or a Medieval pike wall would on the battlefield today. You move ahead today, or you're tomorrow's victim and the day after tomorrow's old news, and the very people on the verge of being driven out of this country are the very people who make moving forward a possibility. We've been loyal to this country for reasons that are a mystery to everybody, including ourselves. Maybe it's because when so much of the life you've chosen to live centers on building the world up, the idea of doing anything to help somebody who intends to tear some of it down becomes especially unnatural. But like anybody else, we have to do what we have to do, and if we are backed into a corner, in real life, that may end up being something with fairly unpleasant consequences for those we left behind. Think of the foreign scientists and engineers who gave America an edge over their former countries in times of war, ponder the increasing level of authoritarianism that is coming to be taken for granted in American politics, and ask yourself very seriously - did you really think that sword couldn't cut both ways? Did you really believe that there was one rule for your own country and another for all others, and if so, then do you not deserve to be surprised most cruelly if you had so embraced such an arrogant belief? Pride goeth before a fall, and a well needed fall it is, if nothing less will teach humility to the proud.

As for us, those who've found that the technical knowledge that we had worked so hard to obtain has cut us off from life, as we try to get by in a land that no longer has any love for justice, one way or another, we will adapt. We're practical people and that's what we do, even when adapation means adjusting not just one's actions, but one's views and loyalties as well. As you ponder the likely outcome of a war in a deeply impoverished post-outsourcing future in which America no longer has an appreciable industrial capability and has fallen behind its foes technologically, the question you might do well to ask yourself is how would you adapt to the new realities, because you might find them to be a little harsh.

Note added in August: Somewhat related material to be found in the "Reuter's 'immigration reform' article" thread on my Googlegroup.

Echo! Echo!

2007-10-21T19:54:00.000-07:00

Originally posted on my Yahoo 360 blog Tuesday April 3, 2007 - 07:11pm (CDT)

Comment: D**n! The feed started working on this blog within less than a minute of my posting this entry. My remarks regarding the dangers of setting a horizon on the process of problem resolution stand, though.

My post:

I wonder if there's any online equivalent of that scene in Risky Business where Tom Cruise realises that absolutely nobody is going to see him, and turns up the volume on his parent's stereo and does that semiclad spin out onto their living room floor, as he starts on his way to doing everything that a repressed north shore boy would not do? Odds are, nobody other than me is ever going to read this, because the feed doesn't work. Yes, I reported it and guess what I got? A handholding letter telling me that Yahoo was hard at work on the problem but had no timetable on fixing the problem - followed a few days later by a letter asking me how satisfied I was with the resolution. What resolution? That's the problem with Yahoo's corporate model - the very customer satisfaction surveying process that is supposed to ensure quality service ensures that nothing of the sort will be seen, when a problem takes more than a day or two to fix. After that point, it's old news and the user is expected to just live with it.

For that reason, I'll be taking the feed for this blog off of my journal at Blogger if I don't see working feeds by this coming weekend, and if so, don't expect to see this thing updated. A blog without a working feed is a blog that nobody's going to visit, because nobody is going to know when there's anything new to see. But I suppose that it does make a nice decorative statement on this profile.

Sigh.

Location Selected for my New Mathematics Site

2007-10-21T12:58:00.000-07:00

Originally posted to my Yahoo 360 blog on Friday March 30, 2007 - 06:21pm (CDT)

This post previously sent the reader to a page at Angelfire that I replaced after Tripod (another subsidiary of Angelfire's parent company) censored one of my pages in response to a meritless complaint. The page at WebNG will have a sister site at 1hwy.com

Not that much deliberation was needed. For reasons given on this page

http://josephdunphy.webng.com/site_history.html

I had found myself with a site at Angelfire which wasn't seeing adequate use, and when one thinks about what the usual visitor complaint is, regarding pages on the Lycos server, one sees that this is an optimal use of that location.

The problem with Lycos is the advertising bar at the top of the page, which takes so exasperatingly long to load. One really doesn't want to make one's visitors go from one file to the next extremely often because of this. But Math, by its very nature, tends to run on - a math site on which I do proofs and work problems instead of just doing broad expositions is going to be a site on which page lengths naturally tend to be considerable, and on which the reader isn't likely to be skimming. He won't be happy about the slow advertising bar download, but he'll be more likely to be forgiving of it, especially, I suppose, because I'm not just giving him something that he wants, but very likely something that he needs.

"And beggars can't be choosers, Joseph?" No, I wouldn't say that, but I would say that beggars have more of an incentive to be understanding of paupers. I'm not as destitute as I used to be, but like most of those without tenure in this field, I'm struggling to get by in a job market in which the name of "Bangalore" has taken on a grim significance. My counterpart in India may be able to pay his rent and grocery bills in soft currency, but I can not, and so where my budget can't give in on one point, it must give in on another. If I could be assured of the funds, I would be delighted to take the ads off of my sites. I'm not happy to see my visitors inconvenienced at all, but I can only do what I can do, and seek out opportunities to find those for whom my best will be good enough.

Compose a first blog entry that is sure to impress.

2007-10-21T12:50:00.000-07:00

Originally posted on my Yahoo 360 blog, Wednesday March 28, 2007 - 01:51am (CDT)

Gee, no pressure there, especially when you count the number of ways in which this software is s**king. I just tried to include an image with this post. The software would have forced me to place the image atop the text, allowing no indentation of the image into the text a la Blogger, and the results would have just looked shoddy. Attempts to write a table into the code for this post to do the indenting were neatly shut down by the editor, as well. It's as if somebody wants these blogs to look like garbage, and is fighting to have his way.

Not that Yahoo is unique in this regard. Consider Googlepages' insistence on forcing its users to make use of templates on its homepages; what IS the point of that? The point, of course, is that there is no point. It's a managerial powerplay, one leaving some of us very, very glad that we set up sites at Geocities instead, where one has far more creative control over the look and feel of one's site. Others have responded in a more distinctively 21st century kind of way; by defending their choice of provider with published workarounds that supposedly overcome the intentionally built-in deficiencies their provider willfully handicaps its users with, and by going hysterical when others dare to point out that the proposed workarounds don't actually work. Tsk. Don't people like that know that Postmodernism teaches us that we can just hallucinate a reality of our own choosing into being? Why must some be so uncooperative as to hallucinate the wrong one, when a few hits off of the community bong can make it right? Peace out. Word.

Puke.

As I already have a blog, a good question to ask is why I have this one. The one I have over at Blogger works passably well, perhaps with diminished functionality courtesy of the last upgrade Google forced on its users, but still a dramatic improvement over what one can hope to see at some of Blogger's competitors, not that I'm naming any of them. Why here, then? Part of the reason is because until very, very recently I was posting to Yahoo! answers and I needed to get a Yahoo!360 membership to post an individualized photo for my Yahoo! Answers profile. I do so, see that a blog comes with the profile, and can't resist. We'll see in a while whether or not I'll regret the choice. In light of what happened over on Yahoo! Answers, I will make one decision about this very new and unformed secondary blog: You will absolutely never see Mathematics discussed on it. If you want to know why, I'll discuss the incident over on Blogger in a week or two, but suffice it to say that Yahoo on this occasion did not treat me right. For the most part I like these guys, and so for the most part I'm happy to do my part and make my small contribution to boosting their revenue stream, but this time they were far enough out of line that I have to hold a grudge about this. "Ask me for almost any other kind of content, boys, but don't ask me for this" is very mild retaliation for a total disrespecting.

Take a look at my answers, and you'll see that I put real time and effort into giving people the benefit of what I knew, and just how many grad school educated mathematicians does one see working the Math section over there? A few of those I wrote in to help were grateful, but most were not. For a while, a short while, I blamed myself, telling myself that I had been posting there too often and that was leaving people tired of seeing me. (I reached level three in a little over a month after I began). But that's ridiculous. They're tired of being helped? When I stay up late, going out of my way to help total strangers out of nothing more than a desire to be helpful, I might not expect people to fall down and kiss my feet, but I do expect a little appreciation.

When nobody has my back, appreciation is precisely what I'm not getting. What will this blog be about? It's not going to be about updates to my sites; that's what my homelist is for. Nor will it be about Chicago; my place at Blogger is for that. But I suppose that I could use a place where I talk about the strange people I've seen on the Internet, especially as I've promised the people on my homelist that I'll keep talk on that subject to a minimum there. It's not really going to completely be a gripe sheet, as all that I've done in most locations online has been to lurk during the last five years, and I don't picture that ever changing. This will be me looking in on the discussions that others are taking part in, and maybe sharing a few thoughts, all very theoretical in some cases.

Who knows? Maybe somebody will even read it.