Crickets Chirping

No, not that one.

This one.

“There were no victories. Surely no one in their right mind wants to go back to those dark days,” said Moore, a member of the Royal Green Jackets Regiment. “All it brought was pain, death and destruction.”

I’m trying my damnedest not to comment on current events, but a co-worker sent this and I had to share:

I guess he can focus on Castle Grayskull full-time now.

The League of Techincal Voters has organized a lock-in this weekend. It’s only blocks from my house, and they’re working on open source software to create transparency in government. How could I not try to go to this? Details.

I’m not a fan of Drupal (the CMS they insist on extending for this purpose) but their goals are noble. They seem to acknowledge the widely accepted principle that Big and Monolithic is bad in their FAQ, but don’t really say how they’re not doing just that by strapping all these features onto Drupal. Shouldn’t they instead build something that doesn’t depend on Drupal?

Seems to me like a set of services with well defined APIs would scale better for such a large application that involved reputation systems, social networks, reviews of documents and so on. Awww, who am I kidding? Only fools would do something like that. They don’t have any ideas worth stealing.

I kid, I kid.

Sort of.

The lock-in adjenda includes a couple of module proposals that interest me in particular: Legislative Semantic Structure and Social Network. The former more than the latter, simply because I’ve put some thought into it already.

via Defective Yeti:

Reynolds is using children at the press conference to keep reporters from asking about the Foley Instant Message scandal. The reporters should have just asked the difficult questions anyways after Foley refused to ask the children to leave the room. This is despicable, disgusting, indefensible, cowardly and coincidentally, the National Republican Congressional Committee chairman.

The YouTube comments suggest some new meanings for the GOP acronym: Grope Our Pages, or Grasping Old Perverts.

You know, Republicans have been trying to equate homosexuality with pedophelia for years. I find it interesting that they believe this strongly enough provide evidence from their own ranks to prove it.

GOP: Gay? Obviously Pedophile.

The New Republican Strategy

This scandal, on the heels of the Habeas Corpus’ death warrant, on the heels of “We’re less secure now”, on the heels of Abramoff, on the heels of DeLay, on the heels of oh god, where does it end with this stream of shit coming from them? I mean, any one of these things would have gotten a Dem impeached. Maybe the new Republican strategy is to throw so many fuckups at us as rapidly as possible that we don’t have time to concentrate on and address any particular one before the next, more outrageous affront to democracy is unleashed on us. You know, like shock-and-awe friendly fire.

I call it Inundate-Gate.

Seriously, if you’re a hard-core conservative and can’t bring yourself to vote for a Democrat this coming election, it is perfectly honorable to just not vote at all.

Scary shit, y’all.

My rep (Doggett) didn’t vote for it, God bless him. Not that it matters because it breezed through both houses anyway.

House Votes
Senate Votes

To all you jackasses who went on and on about a fucking stain on a blue dress: your guys are doing something far worse all over the Constitution. That was YOUR insurance against tyranny. I hope the next president Supreme Executive Appointee uses DHS to identify every single person who ever voted for Bush, takes them all into custody as “Enemy Combatants”, throws them into prison for life without charges, and rips all of their fingernails out. Because apparently they’re okay with our government (no matter which party is in power mind you) doing exactly that.

P.S. Jack Bauer is a fictional character on a TV show. If you like the way he does things, by all means keep watching the reruns. In fact, have yourself a little 24 marathon instead of going out and voting on election day.

From Embryo Ventriloquism: Not Just Almost A Googlewhack (in response to Sen. Sam Brownback‘s recent speech in which he played the part of an embryo and asked the Senate, “Are you going to kill me?”):

Interview With The Embryo
It was a strange thing, the other day; there I was, in the scientific laboratory, talking to an embryo. It had a small voice, like an angel crossed with a kitten, and it explained to me how it wanted to be killed.

“I’m doomed anyway,” it said nobly, drawing what passed for shoulders up so it stood up straight in the test tube. “It’s not like I was destined for life; I’m a spare, made just in case some other embryo fails, or I was donated by some other couple. Fact is, there aren’t enough wombs to go around to take all of me and my brethren, and we have decided to make something of ourselves.”

“But… that’s such a sacrifice…” I stammered.

“We would be garbage otherwise,” it commanded me. “You brave souls donate your organs so that others can live – and so we throw ourselves into the breach to donate our whole bodies for the betterment of mankind! We want to do it! It’s the only rational thing to do!”

“You embryos,” I said in an awestruck hush. “You’re so much better than we petty humans.”

“It’s what Christ would have done,” they told me.

“But…” I protested. “You could become humans. Fully-fledged children. Isn’t that a temptation?”

“It might be,” the embryo said, a half-formed tear in its half-formed eye. “But the truth is, we embryos are very sad.”

“And why is that?”

“The Republicans,” it said. “We’re kings and queens of mankind to them, but once we emerge from the womb they don’t care about us any more. Don’t they understand that we embryos grow into children who must also be nurtured? Many of our would-be parents are toiling for minimum wage, either making $5,000 below the poverty level or working two jobs to get by… And suddenly, we’re neglected. Our education suffers. Why would we want to come into a world that’s governed by people who hate what we will become?”

“It’s as if the Republicans loved the caterpillar, but hated the butterfly,” I said.

“Yes. Better to give ourselves to the betterment of mankind. If one man will ever walk partly because of me, then I will have done more than I would have ever been able to do for humanity under the Bush administration.”

“You are wise, tiny embryo,” I said, and watched with a gasp as it grew tiny angel wings and flew into the waiting arms of science.

[Brent recently pointed out that I haven't posted anything political in a while. I think he was thanking me for that, but it actally inspired me to write about politics again. Sorry, Brent.]

I often think of voting Republican as indicative of some kind of personality defect. I say that in jest, but it turns out that there is actual quantitative evidence to support this conclusion:

In an interview with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, former Nixon counsel John Dean explained a largely unknown 50 year academic study. The data shows that conservatives are much more likely to follow authoritarian leaders.

That guy is a self-proclaimed fan of Barry Goldwater, and he’s saying this. Transcript and video of the interview here. The data seem to suggest that conservatives are more easily manipulated than other people. Who would have thought?

I’ve also been reading about Leo Strauss (after watching this BBC documentary) who was a professor at the University of Chicago in the 50′s and 60′s. Seems as though he had a large impact on the Bush adminsitration and advisors who say things like this:

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The Standard offered a fairly weak defense of Strauss and dismissal of his alleged negative influence a couple of years ago. It may be the case that Strauss wasn’t that influential, but it sounds like he was an antidemocratic conservative elitist who thought it was a good idea to cynically manipulate media and religion in order scare the masses into building an international empire. Tell me that’s not what the Bush administration has tried to do.

I remember seeing theyworkforyou.com a while back and thought it was a great idea. Then I did some experiments with webscraping the Texas Legislature for similar purposes. Then today I see this lazyweb request on O’Reilly Radar. In the comments a reader points out that theyworkforyou has released their source code as open source.

So I registered theyworkforyall.com.

This article in the Washington Post describes how Tom DeLay’s cronies sent the IRS after the non-profit Texans for Public Justice. Why is this interesting? TPJ monitors and reports on Texas campaign finance issues. They also happened to collect a lot of the evidence being used to prosecute DeLay for his TRMPAC shenanigans.