Old Ex Cathedra

It’s shocking that an Alabamian has to go to the national press, the liberal national press, to learn the story behind one of the strangest events in Alabama’s political history: Gov. Riley’s attempt to overturn a regressive tax structure and massively fund education. But it turns out they got the story the corporate media didn’t tell.

In an article in The American Prospect Francis Wilkinson tells the story of Susan Pace Hamill, a student at Beeson Divinity School, whose masters thesis has shaken the foundations of the alliance between fundamentalists and corporate wealth and power that has carried the political Right in this country out of the backwaters and into the White House.

It’ll be fascinating watching this play out. The Alabama Christian Coalition has already started playing hardball. It seems they like their corporate allies, and aren’t anxious to give up the power and the perks. But their national organization cut them off at the knees by endorsing Riley.

People are often amazed at the power of a simple idea, particularly conservatives for whom new ideas are seldom good news. And maybe this is an idea whose time has come.

The Tao that is seen
Is not the true Tao, until
You bring fresh toner.
- Bill Torcaso

The winners in Salon’s haiku error messages contest are delightful. I’ve used a lot of them over the years.

Kelly reminded me that there’s nothing whatever preventing anybody from reading the ten commandments in an Alabama courtroom. They can carry them in their heads (there’s only ten of them, an order of magnitude smaller than the number of keywords and attributes in Ada). Or they can carry them in their pockets.

In fact they can carry in a whole Bible and read it at will (provided they pause in their reading long enough to observe the proprieties like standing up when the Judge enters). They can even wave it about, so long as they don’t do it when a witness or member of the jury is present.

But let’s get back to reading, because while they’re reading, they might run across Matthew, chapter 6:

1. Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.

2. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

3. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:

4. That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.

5. And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

6. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

The ten commandments brouhaha is all about the public display of Judge Moore’s religion. And we’ve already heard what the alleged rock on which that religion is built has to say about public display.

I trust none of you are surprised after all this time that the religion of the religious Right isn’t just bad politics, it’s bad religion.

Oh. And Kelly wanted to know where the protesters on the courthouse steps were during the civil rights struggle. They didn’t shirk their duty, you may be sure. They were the ones unleashing the dogs and manning the fire hoses.

What? Well it sure wasn’t no damn lib’ruls who were throwing rocks at the marchers, now was it?

Y’know, when somebody’s writing on States’ rights, a pretty good predictor of where they’re going to come down on the issue is where they put the apostrophe.

But even the members of the pro-States’ rights crowd that didn’t appear in Dukes of Hazzard have an embarrassing problem.

The problem is, the rights of States to do what?

And that’s a problem. Because all you’ve got to do is look at our history to see what the States were doing – and claimed they had a right to do – when the “oppressive” Federal government stepped in.

The Federal government wasn’t stopping the States from building institutions of scholarship or philanthropy or research. It wasn’t preventing them from establishing symphony orchestras or great art galleries or drama festivals.

No, what the government, representing all the people, told a few of the more backward States was that they couldn’t treat their fellow Americans as sub-humans. They couldn’t put them in segregated, broken down schools. They couldn’t refuse to serve them in restaurants. They couldn’t declare the better neighborhoods off limits to them. They couldn’t arbitrarily prevent them from getting credit or health care or jobs. They couldn’t stop them from voting. They couldn’t incarcerate or execute them on a whim.

And that in a nutshell is the glorious history of States’ rights.

If these States’ rights conservatives and libertarians want the rest of us to give more power to the States, then we have an obligation to take a good hard look at what they’ve done with power in the past. That’s what they’ve done with it. And if you ask what’s to stop them from doing it all over again, all you get from the States’ rights-ers is an embarrassed silence.

And simply saying those issues are all in the past won’t do. True, we’ve constructed a legal edifice protecting the rights of African Americans that will probably withstand any assaults from the States, were they ever to be given that kind of power again. But never think the bigotry enshrined in law and civil practice ends there. Gays, women, Jews, Latinos – all have little niches where the decency of the country as a whole is going to have to be applied to stop the exercise of the nastier aspects of conservative power.

No problem. We’ve got time. And we’ve got the will. And we can take heart from two things: the States’ rights conservatives have been in the wrong every single time, and they’ve lost every single time.

Three things to be wary of: A new kid in his prime
A man who knows the answers, and code that runs first time
- Marsha Drake “Three Dogs and Pony”

The full poem is a masterpiece. Go read it.

I put up a GeoURL which identifies me as living in Alabama (it’s under “Blogs & Friends” in the other column), but I just wanted to say up front that I’m in a whole different Alabama from Judge Roy Moore.

I mean, damn! Just when you think we’ve finally moved into the twentieth century, some moron comes along and pulls a stunt like this, and we’re right back where we started.

If you remember Phil Ochs, “Judge Moore, find yourself another state to be a part of.”

I thought, innocent child that I am, that some of the things I’d seen libertarians talking about in their stranger moments were simply aberrations, individual quirks. For instance, the whole “Lincoln was a despot” idea that’s getting a lot of press in libertarian circles. That had to be somebody’s pet peeve. There can’t be a whole anti-Lincoln movement out there.

Wanna bet? The anti-Lincoln essays are just the most publicly recognized output of the Neoconfederate movement, as reported by Mac Diva on Blogcritics. And Neoconfederates aren’t just providing copy for libertarians. They’re lobbying legislators, and when cornered they play dirty.

But did you really doubt that?

All it took was for the libertarians to swallow States’ Rights as enthusiastically as they have, and the Neoconfederates perked right up. “Wonder if they’ll swallow this?” Short answer: yup.

If you lie down with dogs, you’re gonna get up with fleas. If you start off as a conservative and go farther right than that, you have to be damn careful or you’ll end up in some truly despicable company: the Holocaust deniers, the Identity Christians, and now the Neoconfederates.

On a microscope: Objects are smaller and less alarming than they appear.

The author (alas, unknown) has to have had the same experience as I had. For some reason which is now unclear to me, we had decapitated a wasp in high school biology class, and we were now taking turns examining the head under a binocuar stereo microsocope at about 50x magnification. Apparently bugs can still twitch their antennae after they’re dead.

I’ll leave the rest of the scene to your imagination, except perhaps that was the point of having decapitated that poor bug: to scare the bejeezus out of some kid.

It’s a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
– Andrew Jackson

I got moved up from the first grade to the second grade around Thanksgiving time, and one of my earliest experiences as a brand new second grader was a spelling test. As a child of the Fifties, I dutifully spelled “does” “Duz”, and was heartbroken to find it was wrong. It was all downhill from there.

Now you gotta understand, I was an overly bright kid who was content to muscle through the tests by sheer brainpower instead of studying. Studying was way too much work, and besides, I had the normal aesthetics of your average Pittsburgh boy, so my rotten spelling didn’t bother me at all.

This happy state continued until I ran into my sixth grade teacher, Miss Merenic, who, not being your average Pittsburgh boy, was offended by my spelling. She was a gem, and she proved it by conspiring with my mother to get me involved in the city-wide spelling bee. That was about as plausible as suggesting that Steven Hawking train for the triathlon, but for some reason, I bought it.

After weeks of torture (probably more for my mother than for me), I got to the point where I finished high enough in my school’s spelling bee to participate in one of the preliminary sessions for the city-wide championship at Buhl Planetarium. I didn’t get knocked out on the first word, but the second (mayonnaise) done me in. I didn’t really mind, but of course the damage was done. My spelling was no longer abominable.

Miss Merenic wasn’t able to get me a writing certificate (something every sixth grader in our school got – except me – to prove that they’d mastered handwriting – which, to be fair, I hadn’t), but she figured out how to get me to spell.

Any misspellings in this entry are my fault, not hers.

The left foot on my neet has just started squeaking.
Does anyone know what I can use? – MacIndoe

There’s a fine line between child-like charm and being cutesy. I think this sig stays on the right side of that line.

Oh, OK, it’s ancient history, nearly a year old, but when Blogcritics posts an article about memory sticks as though nobody had ever heard of them, and since I worked my tail off at work and went to bed last night instead of posting a blog entry, what the heck.

For those of you who were absent, S2690 affirmed in no uncertain terms that “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance is a Good Thing. The House concurred, and this stupid little bill even went to a conference committee where they added even more detail.

You can tell these guys were having a good time, diligently copying every quote the fundamentalist lobbyists could feed them. If one of our founding fathers or respected legal scholars even vaguely referred to a higher power, in it went.

Conservatives, as most of us know, are born without irony detectors. And in this bill they’ve outdone themselves in obtuseness. First, and I have no doubt about this, they quote Justice William O. Douglas with an obvious glee. “This’ll burn the liberals’ butts,” I hear them saying. They’re utterly deaf to the delicious irony that if Douglas, who was the target of such virulent right-wing vituperation during his term on the Court, wrote so reasonably about the subject, what must it make them to have attacked him so viciously?

But the final irony is that when you take a close look at the act, the only thing they’ve managed to do is to present a convincing – no, a compelling argument why the official religion of the United States is and always has been… empty pietism.

Let me tell you what else is in trouble here: the Internet. In the end, the Internet itself will not be able to survive if it becomes a haven for illegal activity. – Edgar Bronfman

Way back in the early days, long before Hilary Rosen, Edgar Bronfman, CEO of Seagrams, was the spokesperson for the RIAA. This is one of his stirring pronouncements about what’ll happen to the net if we don’t knuckle under to the corporations.

Of course, what Bronfman is talking about is the Corporate Internet. Those of us who were here long before the first bloated, gimmicky corporate website stuck its pimpled head up in our datastream are greatly amused by Bronfman’s fatuous arrogance.

The good news: the Asus mobo, the DDR RAM, and the RAID-0 disk striping turned my box into a real screamer. Much better than a CPU upgrade. The bad news: I think it may be a trifle too fast. Either that, or there’s a bug in my RAID controller. I’ve been getting occasional BSOD disk errors (“Can’t write to D:”) and hangs.

Anyhow, loading the box with software and chasing down the problems has been taking all my blogging time. Consider this a placeholder for a real entry. Unless you’ve got an educated guess about why, for example, a smallish file copied from my Win98 box using NetBEUI can’t be deleted or opened without giving me a BSOD.

Since these were the symptoms before my machine gave up the ghost the last time, I’m not inclined to let it slide, and I’m getting NACA involved.

What sorta rhymes with blog? Glög!

I first tasted glög several years ago in the Julmarknad (Christmas market) in the Skansen, a historical park in Stockholm. The following recipes (courtesy of a USENET drink cookbook) look plausible. If you drink 3 or 4 and can’t do anything but lie in the snow saying “Glög!” you made it right.

Version 1

Source: A.E. Mossberg (aem@mthvax.miami.edu) 12/25/88

This is a traditional Swedish holiday drink. It cures the common cold.

Ingredients:

• 1 quart, cheap red port
• 1 quart, cheap vodka
• 1-1/2 cups, sugar
• 4 cups, water
• 8 pods, cardamom
• 20 cloves
• 1 peel, of orange
• 2 sticks, cinnamon broken
• 1 handful, raisins
• 4 almonds

Procedure:

Dissolve sugar in water and add the last 6 ingredients. Boil 15 minutes
then add vodka and port. Bring back to boil and remove from heat. Serve
warm.

Version 2: Grandfather’s Glogg

Source: Jan Lien (lien@lysator.liu.se), rec.food.drink, 11/22/92

Ingredients:

• 1 bottle Red wine
• 1/2 bottle Madeira
• 3-5 clove, alternatively 2-3 teaspoon ground cardamon
• 1-2 pieces cinnamon
• 10 to 15 cl sugar (about 3.5 to 5 us fl.oz)
• shredded peel of 1/4 lemon, without the white part. Organic for your
  own health.

Procedure:

Mix wine and spices, and heat it under cover some minutes on low heat – DO
NOT BOIL. Add sugar, lemon peel and stir. Keep on heat and covered for a few
more minutes. Serve with raisins and almonds. (You have to throw the almonds
in boiling water for maybe a minute, and peel off the brown
‘coating’. They should be white for use with glogg.)

Lawrence Lessig reports that, jumping right up to salute heavy lobbying from Microsoft and others, USPTO Attorney-Advisor in the Office of Legislative and International Affairs Lois Boland wrote a memo opposing an upcoming meeting on open source.

Go read the article at that link. It’s enough to make you sick. Boland spoke as an official representative of the United States Government. She spoke for you and me.

Well, of course she didn’t. Boland was appointed by Under-Secretary and USPTO Director James E. Rogan, who in turn was appointed by President – and corporate extremist – George W. Bush. That’s who she’s speaking for.

A: Yes
Q: Is top-posting bad?
- Derek Milhous Zumsteg

Also seen as:

A: Top-posting.
Q: What’s the worst thing the newbies on this list do?

I’ve got to give credit to the folks on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.* who found a pretty decent reply to top-posters: just google for “top posting” and read what turns up.

A name that resonates with all but the youngest folks who ever spent time in Baltimore. There’s a site with some of his photographs shot for the Baltimore Sun and other places. A fellow subscriber to one of the model railroading lists I belong to recommended it, and I’ve just had a very pleasant time roaming.

It seems to hate everything but MSIE, but what else is new? The two books from Amazon that were on my doorstep when I got home, Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer on CSS give that observation an extra little twist, don’t they?

I have never seen a spec I hated more than the W3C’s DOM Level 1 spec. Go here, go there, see this, see that. It’s an exercise trail, an obstacle course, a stack of 3×5 cards that someone dropped and picked up.

Well, after a day of hard shoveling, I’ve got a web page that’s an organized summary of the important parts (just the XML section) and, more importantly, some JavaScript examples that show the objects and attributes in a useful way. I’ll have them out here in a while.

I hate to admit it, but I’m actually reasonably happy with Microsoft’s Windows Scripting Engine and the way it works with MSXML. Double-click on the icon for whatever.js in Explorer, and up comes the alert box with the answers. All my hassles were with the spec, not the tools.

This is my first actual blog kinda thing, where you talk about stuff you’ve got as though anybody else would care:

North Alabama Computers returned my once-superbox to me. It had suffered a hard drive failure (stinking IBMs) that took out some of the caps on the motherboard. Or maybe the mobo took out the disks. Either way, since I’ve set it up as RAID0, all the data is gone, but I’d thought it through when I set it up that way, and I was prepared for that. Lots of backups, nothing really important kept on the disks.

So I’m some hundreds of bucks poorer, but now have:

• Two new 80GB drives. I had 40s, but 80s have become commodity, so why not? Western Digitals, not IBMs this time.
• A new motherboard. This one’s an A7N8X.
• PC3200 SDRAM. Can’t use the old stuff. I got my box just before DDR was available, and now you can’t hardly get a motherboard without it. Sigh. They’ve got it running dual channel, and they claim that now I’ll be able to drop in a 3GHz Athlon (I decided I had to stop spending somewhere and kept the 1.2). We’ll see.

We’ll also see how good my backups were. Already I’m realizing that if the floppy holding my PGP keys is bad, I am so screwed, because all my backups are encrypted. Keep a happy thought for me, won’t you?

Kelly has informed me that as part of the kitchen re-do that’s now necessary after we got the new refrigerator (I shoulda seen that one coming), I’ll be moving my computer desk to the other wall. So I figured out where to put my cable modem and router and Wi-Fi station on the same wall where it was, and got some tan CAT-5 cable that’ll look reasonably inconspicuous as it runs around the door, and we’ll worry about using the printer/scanner/fax as a fax (which we’ve done exactly once) some other time.

But at least I’ll have something a little easier to use than this pathetic 200MHz laptop, and that’s something.

SCSI is *NOT* magic. There are *fundamental technical reasons* why it is necessary to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain now and then. – John Woods