“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”
— Thomas Jefferson
Month: June 2006
06/24/2006
Apparently the Bush administration is (slowly) realizing that the words “al Qaeda” no longer inspire the thrilling fear they once did. People aren’t being hoodwinked by Bush and his cronies waving the Nine Eleven Flag, chanting “terrorism” at every turn, and justifying their growing list of abuses of power and privacy by saying it’s all to protect us from al Qaeda.
So, looking for a new scare tactic, we see people like Attorney General Gonzales talking about “domestic terrorists”. In a news conference yesterday, he mentioned that domestic terrorists could become as big a threat as al Qaeda. Thus, we need to be vigilant and diligent and give up a couple more freedoms along the way… because our next-door neighbors could be terrorists! Or our kids’ teachers! Or the guy next to us at the stoplight!
Only a fool would believe all terrorists come from other countries or are card-carrying members of al Qaeda. Obviously there are terrorists living amongst us, and there have been since long before 9/11. But it’s funny (not in a “ha ha” sort of way, though) that the Bush administration is now turning its propaganda machine in that direction, because the specter of the dreaded al Qaeda doesn’t conjure up the same horror.
06/21/2006
Straight from the Associated Press comes this article about a thief who wanted to participate in this year’s Darwin Awards:
Officials in Reading PA say a man was electrocuted on Tuesday, apparently while trying to steal what he probably thought was copper wire from atop a 50-foot utility pole.
Fire Chief William Rehr says employee found the victim, 33-year-old Samuel Ortiz-Valle, about 15 feet from the base of the Met-Ed pole at Cambridge Lee Industries Incorporated. Police Captain Francis Drexler says a pair of wire cutters was found next to the body, leading investigators to believe that Ortiz-Valle intended to cut down the wires to resell as scrap metal.
Note to self: don’t steal copper if it’s fifty feet above the ground.
06/21/2006
Those of you using Dell laptops (like me) should know about the Exploding Laptop caught on camera at a Japanese conference this week. Yikes.
06/21/2006
From Unclaimed Territory, talking about Iraq:
Virtually every prediction the President and his followers made about this war has proven to be false, while virtually every prediction made by war opponents has proven to be true. The President and his followers controlled every part of this war with an iron fist, ignoring anything which their political opponents said and insisting on the right to exert full-scale, undiluted control over it. And now it has failed, and it’s everyone’s fault except theirs.
06/20/2006
Apparently this is the month for stupid amendments. After the defeat of the Marriage Protection Amendment (thank goodness) we’re now faced with the frighteningly real prospect that the Flag Desecration Amendment will be approved by the Senate– it’s currently only a single vote shy of passage– and sent to the states to be ratified.
In one pundit’s words, this is “the dumbest law ever”. It boggles the mind that people want an amendment to the Constitution that specifically takes away one of the rights protected under the First Amendment. Burning a flag is, at its core, free speech. Sure, it makes some people angry. Voltaire once said, “I may not agree with your opinion, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to have it.” Apparently his words fall on deaf ears these days, because politicians seem more intent on taking away freedoms than protecting them.
I think it’s more “un-American” to prohibit flag burning than it is to actually perform the act. And if this atrocity comes to pass, I may very well burn a flag to protest it.
06/19/2006
The good folks over at Worth 1000 sponsored a contest for new Boy Scout merit badges.
I think the toast making badge is my fave.
06/18/2006
Today, apparently, is Father’s Day. This evening we returned from our nine-day jaunt through the Southwest, and the kids quickly went to work making Father’s Day gifts for me. After dinner we had a grand party while I opened them.
Alex gave me a couple of his most prized rocks from his rock collection.
Kyra made a bird feeder from half of a two-liter bottle and some construction paper, and even included the birdseed.
Zack boxed up a few things and presented them to me. In the box were:
- a red plastic comb
- a marble
- a Koosh ball
- a fingernail clipper
- one half-liter of bottled water
When I commented about how exciting these items were, he proudly told me that he gave them to me so I could have “my very own”.
Ahh, kids. They’re such a riot.
06/09/2006
Direct from the New York Times:
Fed up with the inability of two lawyers to agree on a trivial issue in an insurance lawsuit, a federal judge in Florida this week ordered them to “convene at a neutral site and engage in one (1) game of ‘rock, paper, scissors'” to settle the matter.
Our legal system in action. Woo hoo!
06/09/2006
Roger Duronio has recently gained fame as the IT guy you shouldn’t annoy.
It seems he works (err, worked) for a bank called UBS Paine Webber, making a nice comfortable salary of $125,000 a year. He expected a hefty bonus of $50,000, but was sorely disappointed with a mere $32,000 bonus.
Unhappy with this, he decided to take a bit of revenge on his company… so he created a malicious piece of software that deleted all files on the bank’s central server, and then moved to all branch servers and did the dirty work there as well. The program worked nicely, erasing files from every server in every branch. A total of 2,000 servers went down in flames.
In what can only be described as a classic IT situation, backup files didn’t work. Everything Duronio’s little program erased is gone. The bank called in 200 IBM support engineers for what was probably the largest IT firefight of the year, and the director of IT for the bank said the disaster rated “a ten-plus” on a scale of one to ten.
Wow. Never, never make the IT guy mad.