First, my characterization of it as bizarre and curious. It is bizarre because historically most government programs – especially social programs and those that the right deride as “entitlements”, though there’s a lot of overlap – are safer, fairer, and more efficient than their private counterparts. For that matter they’re even more popular. For example, Medicare – our very own government-run health care – is consistently the highest rated health insurance provider in the country and though it suffers slightly on efficiency largely due to neglect (fraud, mainly – though new systems and guidelines to reduce fraud as well as unnecessary expenditures are in process in a big way starting a few years ago), and Social Security – every citizen’s guaranteed retirement package – is hugely popular even as it slides towards bankruptcy in the next couple of decades largely due to (you guessed it) neglect (a trend it would take only a fraction of a percent increase in the SS tax to reverse). And while many people choose additional private products to augment government programs (add-on insurance plans and IRAs, respectively) the core government program provides them a fallback because Medicare will never cancel your coverage because you go to the doctor too many times in a year and SS is reliable, unlike the markets.

I mentioned military back there, too. Private military contractors have a place, and there was a great story a while back about their work on infrastructure – communications and supply lines and such. Their place is not combat. It is not security patrols that result in civilian casualties and the PMC proceeds to shrug off and it is not guarding the embassy, a job traditionally, effectively, and efficiently performed by the US Marine Corps. The most powerful (all-volunteer, natch) military on the planet does not need to hire mercenaries.

The way in which this prophecy of failure becomes self-fulfilling when the right is in power is obvious if you look for it.  The policies espoused by the right lead to the failure of government.  Policies like tax cuts (which are the least effective form of government “spending” in every single study ever done about them) particularly when only for the rich – let me say right here that trickle down is bull – under rightist presidents since Regan, the gap between the rich and the poor has grown at an alarming rate and the middle class has trended toward the poor end of the scale… while under relatively leftist (centrist, really) presidents it’s slowed somewhat.  Tax cuts are an at once simple and egregious example of this – they exist under the theory that government won’t spend the money properly, and they are self-fulfilling in that since they result in defunding government programs which then teeter towards failure, they make government spending ineffective.  Furthermore they don’t do a damn thing for the economy – higher take-home pay as a result of tax cuts is generally saved (particularly by the rich) or used to pay off debts (particularly by the middle-class), both of which are economically worthless.  Well, savings and investment could result in a boost to the economy far down the line and lowering debt results in a reduced loss to the economy because interest paid on debt is economically useless, but the government can spend that money far more effectively (as mentioned before, studies consistently show that tax cuts are a lousy way to spend money – a significant portion of the stimulus bill was tax cuts, which the CBO recently graded as the single least economically effective program – by a huge margin – in the stimulus package).

Now, I don’t personally think this is malicious or even usually intentional, though there’s a growing faction on the left that feels it is malicious.  But there it is – rightist policies weaken government by crippling revenue streams while doing nothing to control spending.  This is why deficits have skyrocketed under Republican presidents and been brought into check under Democrats, a trend particularly pronounced since Reagan, whose miserable failure of an economic policy is still espoused by the various factions of the right (primarily Republicans and Libertarians, and if teabaggers had any idea what the fuck they were talking about they’d be talking about Reagan too) and painfully exemplified in the succession of Clinton – who led the country to a budget surplus for the first time in decades – to Bush II who through at least one war we had no business starting (at the cost of virtually abandoning the other war he started, no less) drove the country into a budget deficit of well over $4oo billion.

The same thing even comes up in health care.  When they’re not admitting to doing everything they can to prevent anything whatsoever from passing, the right is spewing nonsense about why.  The only coherent reason is will hurt insurers, which first off is bull since the legislation represents, in part, a massive earmark to the insurance industry, and second fuck ‘em.  The insurers are the problem with the system, or at least the biggest one.  The other reason that isn’t a bald-faced lie (lies: death panels, rationing, “end of life order”s from end of life counseling which actually deals with living wills, and so forth) is that government can’t do anything right.  Despite the fact that every country that has implemented some form of single-payer or socialized health care system provides a higher level of care to all its citizens for less spending per capita than we spend to cover 86% (a generous estimate – I think the number is actually lower) of our population (and many of the insured are still not protected in the United States because even with insurance the copays, cost-sharing, and deductibles are so incredibly high that anyone from any other country in the industrialized world is stunned by them), that wouldn’t work in the US because we’re special.  That bit is the already twisted doctrine of American Exceptionalism taken to an illogical, twisted extreme – not only are we better than the rest of the world, we’re so much better that we’d fail at implementing a system that’s been an unqualified success in almost every other industrialized nation, who have already implemented it.

Ask yourself, do you really want people who don’t believe in government running it?  I mean, you wouldn’t want a communist running a Fortune 500 company or an atheist as the pope, although both of those would be hilarious for those of us on the outside looking in.

There were a handful of people there when I got there, a few kids that I assume walked or biked from the nearby suburbs (being the kind of massive, cartographically confusing developments that cater to young families and older baby boomers with more gas money than sense) and apparently a couple of people there with their grandkids. I know the last bit because as I was walking back to my car – and they were getting into theirs – the grandmother for some reason felt the need to tell me that she almost called the cops on me because she thought I was creepy. Like, pedophile creepy. Keep in mind that aside from a glance at the playground and a walk through the woods at some point because they were the quickest way back to the parking lot (or so I thought – turns out the thing that I thought was a little land bridge across a ditch was just the ugliest sunken dam I have ever seen; it looked like it was made of Astroturf) I was far, far away from anyone else, mostly wandering around admiring the architecture of the amphitheater stage and checking out the picnic shelters scattered around the property. Anyway, I pretty much told her she was paranoid and went on my way.

But it got me thinking, because that kind of thing does, and it brought related things to mind.

Like the fact that 90% of child sexual abuse (much like rape in general) is from close acquaintances if not family, yet society encourages a paranoia of unfamiliar and especially unusual people. Now, to be fair, I fit what people are encouraged to be paranoid against, but also to be fair all that means is unknown, unusual, and unkempt (optional). Oh, and single male. It’s kind of stupid, really. It’s just a form of othering – a desire to believe that nobody like you could be (in this instance) a pedophile, or that nobody “normal” could be, or (to an extent) that you could not be. The fact is, the false sense of security it gives is harmful all on its own.

Also, assuming she called the cops, what exactly could they do? It’s a public park and I was on the deserted other side of the park from these people. I mean seriously. It’s not like you can have someone arrested or removed from a park because you’re paranoid and think they’re creepy because they’re a single male who looks kind of scruffy, which is the best I could come up with for the reasoning. Police would be more likely to check me for drugs, given the layout of the park.

Which brings me to the next bit – if she’d said drug dealer, I could have at least understood where she was coming from, aside from the fact that my coat isn’t thick enough (and here I am complaining about stereotypes – but the thick coat at least makes sense, it would hide lumps). I mean, the amphitheater stage has lots of bits that are well-hidden from the rest of the park and the entire amphitheater area is sunken enough to be invisible from the parking lot and especially the road so when there aren’t kids all over the park it would probably a good place for it, and I could see how one would think I was scoping it out for that purpose.

Yeah…anyway. People are crazy, yo. Silly WASPs in their silly little sterile planned communities with cul-de-sacs and loop roads being fine with letting their kids have the run of the town all day but god forbid they see someone who looks to be over the age of 15 or so wandering around in a park by themselves, they must be a pedophile. Whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.

The administrative office building there is signed as a community rec center or summat too – I wonder what that’s all about?

In my line of work, and the schedule I work, I get a lot of odd English expressions that come from various dialects.  Things like “raise a ticket”, which I understand is actually English (the country) in origin but still strikes me as weird, and “do the needful”, which seems to be an Indian Subcontinent thing that has crept into the rest of the Eastern Hemisphere.  One of my favorites is a phrase we get a lot from one of our resellers, informing us that they will “chase the customer” about an issue.  I’m pretty sure they mean “chase down the customer” but we’ve never corrected them because that would be rude and it brightens our day anyway.

Today we received an email from a help desk agent at one of our customers’ contractors (the communication structures get weird) in Saudi Arabia.  Now they’ve been having an issue with their VPN connection to our customer, and it’s been taking a long time to troubleshoot, as these things sometimes can.  When one of his users traveled to the UK, the VPN connection worked there.  And so he assumes the problem is with our customer’s firewall, not his company’s network – which doesn’t make any sense, but let’s set that aside.  This is what the end of the email said.

So please   look IN YOUR Collars  first and then point to others. Our PCs, our  connection are  100%  correct.
Now it is crystal clear that our connection is blocked on your firewall, unless you get changes on your side  it  just beat  the bushes and  waste  our  time and yours.

Now, like I said, the conclusion is emphatically wrong.  When you move from network A to network B and suddenly your connection to server C works, the problem is network A, not the firewall on server C, even without knowing it isn’t configured that way.  Simple logic.  If it was addressed to us, it might be annoying.  But it isn’t.

It’s just funny, because I have now seen someone berating someone else to look in their collars first before beating the bushes and wasting their time.  The fact that he’s wrong makes it funnier.

___________
Now playing: Dr. Bombay – Calcutta (Taxi, Taxi, Taxi)
via FoxyTunes

Yes, I know Calcutta isn’t anywhere near Saudi Arabia, and that song is probably horribly racist (or at least posting it here is).  But it’s funny, dammit.

___________
Update: the entire email was in this tone, very confrontational.  The kind of thing you expect to turn up on somebody’s tumblelog about their crazy landlord.  Well, not quite, but I wanted to give a shout-out because that tumblelog has brought me much amusement recently.  A few minutes later we received a reply from the person it was addressed to asking them to please be professional and then soundly refuting their conclusion.

The Iron Council network is named in honor of the book of the same title by China Mieville.  I originally got the ironcouncil.net domain name from a thing where Microsoft was giving away free domains to use with Office Live Online Beta or something, then got the unlock code from a Microsoft CSR and pointed DNS to nearlyfreespeech.net’s DNS servers, where my DNS is based to date.  I transferred the domain to NameSecure after a year, worried that MSFT would cancel it, and I plan on transferring to NameCheap because I get a free SSL cert (Comodo, but hey, free) that way.

Speaking of nearlyfreespeech.net, this blog, the RIT Sentinel (see links on the right), and a handful of other sites are hosted on my account there.  The service I’ve recieved from them is nothing less than stellar, and the price can’t be beat.

Originally, the IC network consisted of the NSFN sites mentioned above, Google Hosted Services, and kompak, an ancient (2001-ish) Compaq laptop that served as my primary/only PC for a while.  This was late 2006.  Kompak later gave way to hppie (an HP desktop) and faded into oblivion.  At some point, I purchased a Virtual Private Server from vpsFarm (I don’t really recommend them) and dubbed it crobuzon.  Crobuzon served as my shell (for IRC, mostly) and a just about everything until March 2008, when I discovered I could get a tiny VPS from prgmr for a quarter the price.  This new VPS was duly dubbed dryfall, and everything I wanted from crobuzon was migrated to dryfall.  Most recently, hppie ran into heat problems (due to three hard drives stacked with no breathing room in between, I believe) and was replaced by slake, a custom-built midrange gaming machine.

Dryfall is my main server now.  My opentapes, my personal image hosting, my IRC shell, a DNS subzone, postfix including relay to slake via UUCP, Dovecot IMAP, and probably services I’m forgetting.  It also intermittently runs icecast in a vserver instance (yes, a vserver instance on a Xen domU kernel – it can be done) known as dryice.

I’m planning to add a VPS hosted by rapidxen to the IC network.  News on that when it gets added, but for now, anyone suggest a name for the new arrival?

Maybe you’re voting McCain because you believe his policies to be better, and that he is simply the right man for the job.  If your decision is based on your opinions of policies and positions, this post is not for you.  You are voting McCain for the right reasons, no matter how much I disagree, and I’m not going to try to change your mind because that comes down to opinion.  Go ahead and stop reading now, or not.

If you’re voting for McCain because Obama is black, you plain and simple don’t deserve to vote.  Get out of my country.

If you’re voting for McCain because Obama is Muslim or an Arab, or somehow not really American, not only do you not deserve to vote, I’m more than a little surprised you’re able to read this post based on the intelligence you display with that opinion.  I’d point you to snopes.com (not even a political site) or factcheck.org (nonpartisan, run by a university) but you’ve obviously already made up your mind to ignore the facts.  Besides that, I’m too lazy.

If you’re voting for McCain because of Obama’s association with Ayers or ACORN, you need to take a closer look.  Obama was eight years old when Ayers was associated with Weather Underground, his closest associations were serving on an education reform board beside Ayers (along with a number of prominent educators and Republicans – you don’t see McCain attacking them, though) and living in the same neighborhood, and Ayers is now a respectable politician in Chicago (as much as politicians in Chicago can be respectable, anyway).

ACORN is a nonpartisan organization that happens to have a project that involves hiring people in need of work to stand on street corners and the like and get people to register to vote.  It’s a perfectly legitimate organization, and legitimate activity.  Some of the people they hired unfortunately submitted illegitimate registrations as opposed to actually going out and getting people registered.  The organization that hired them had nothing to do with that, and it’s unfortunate that it’s getting caught up in the unscrupulous actions of a few of its employees.

If you’re voting for McCain because of his choice for VP, what the hell are you thinking?  Palin was just a couple weeks ago found in violation of several ethics rules in Alaska (her saying that the report “vindicated” her? a rather bold lie, given the report is public), and while mayor she had a reputation for getting rid of people who stood up to her and filling the ranks of her underlings with friends and acquaintances.  She’s the one that stands idle at rallies while her supporters cry “terrorist” and “kill him”, referring to Obama.  This is not a person you want anywhere near the white house, much less as vice president.

Meanwhile McCain pays lip service to a clean campaign, calling on his supporters to respect Obama (he was booed for that, by the way) while his campaign continues to run baseless attack ads on Obama’s very thin association with Ayers and his association with ACORN, an organization guilty only of trying to increase turnout of potential voters.  This means one of two things: either McCain is really just paying lip service, or he can’t even control his own campaign.  Do you really want him as president, either way?

I know this post isn’t likely to change anyone’s mind, but if you’re one of those swing votes, I hope it will swing you towards Obama.

Really though, this isn’t.  I only mention the brands to differentiate these things.

It’s like this little ball of wax on this funky little metal stand thing, with a wick sticking up the middle.  It goes in a special holder that amounts to a very shallow bowl, but with this little bump in the middle that has a magnet in it.

You put little candle on stand thing on the bump in the middle and light the wick.  Candle proceeds to melt into a pool of wax in the holder.  This pretty much amounts to turning a candle the size of a tea-light into a pool of wax the size of that found in a jar candle.  The packaging has some stuff about how this dissipates the scent or whatever, and oddly enough it actually does work.  More surface area, more evaporation.  Or something.

As the wax remaining on the stand thing melts, the wick continues to burn even after it’s surrounded by a couple of metal tines and the bottom of the wick is about a quarter inch above the liquid wax.  There are these little slits in the side of the stand that let it suck up the wax using capillary action.  It’s kind of a nifty design, and I like that.

Also I like that the Oust ones (”odor neutralizing”) actually do work rather well, which was kind of unexpected.  I’d expect the Glade and whatever other brand ones work fine as well, it’s pretty hard to screw up a scented candle.

This series, unwittingly inspired by a good friend who may never know how helpful she’s been, is part self discovery and part self therapy.  I’m trying to be a happier person, or more optimistic, or something.  Maybe I’ll find a better definition as all this goes on.

If anyone should ever direct their attention to these, may they be as inspiring for you as I hope they’ll be for me.

But nukes have their downsides.  I’m not talking about civilian casualties or the fact that it completely destroys any structure within about ten miles of ground zero (let’s assume total war here), but the fact that after you drop a nuke, you can’t touch anything within a certain radius for decades.  That’s not cool.  So, great, you levelled an area… what are you going to do with it now?  It’s a useless wasteland.  Scratch that actually, it might be useful for a nuclear waste dump.

There’s another type of bomb that’s incredibly powerful for its size technically called a Thermobaric weapon, but more commonly known as a fuel-air explosive.  These are the most powerful weapons we have, short of a nuke.  The largest in the US arsenal is the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, also known as MOAB or the “Mother of All Bombs”.

Let me explain why fuel-air explosives are so cool.  Your basic FAE has two conventional explosive charges in it.  The first disperses the primary fuel into the surrounding environment.  The second is a more incendiary type of charge, used to ignite the fuel.  If you’ve ever seen that trick where they throw a cloud of cornstarch or something into the air and ignite it, it’s kind of like that.  Or more accurately, it’s like a grain tower explosion, but bigger.  And using a fuel designed to burn, not flour.

A large FAE essentially sets the air around it on fire.  This first creates a massive shock wave, and hellish heat – enough that a small device launched into a building can flatten it, and a large one can flatten and/or burn out a forested area – and then a backdraft so powerful that it can pick up and throw a man or asphyxiate them.  And when it’s done?  Everything destroyed by it, all the area cleared by it, is perfectly safe.  A bit hot, but give it a couple days.

So, even though the MOAB has only about the yield of a very small nuke, and less than one thousandth the yield of the nuclear weapons used in Japan, I’d rather use one of them than a nuke.  At least you can use the area you just blew the shit out of.

Anyone who’s likely to read this post already knows what wizard rock is.  For anyone who doesn’t, it’s a sub-genre of filk, which is a musical meta-genre derived from the word “folk” that includes any music tied to some kind of sci-fi or fantasy.  A very well-known (and rare good form, in my opinion) example of filk is the Star Wars Gangsta Rap.  Go look it up if you’ve never seen it (it’s part of a Flash animation).  I suspect the reason I’m attracted to that song is that it’s good parody that refuses to take itself or anything else seriously, and I love parody.  And the song is actually well done.

What bothers me about filk in general is that it’s ridiculously artificial, and a lot of it is a miserable attempt at instant nostalgia ala this decade’s sorry parade of genre parody movies (Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Superhero Movie, etc) that all suck.  You cannot create instant nostalgia.  What’s worse is when it sucks already and you’re trying to ride on the coattails of something hugely successful.  See my earlier comment about recent genre parody movies.

Which brings me to wizard rock.  Harry Potter filk, for the uninitiated.

In my (carefully and intentionally) limited experience, I’ve never come across wizard rock that had any chance of standing on its merits as music.  That is, it’s invariably the bad type of filk – it’s centered on a recent work of fiction, and it’s terrible, terrible quality as a work of art.

And when it comes down to it, Harry Potter is a kids’ series.  I’m not going to get into how the plot is simple and shallow, because as much as I can critique it, It’s a good story.  But it’s a kids’ book.  Let me break it down for you: you’re going to concerts and buying CDs of lousy music performed by people with no exceptional musical skill except maybe the ability to fit “Voldemort” and “Hermione” into this or that meter.  You look like a fool.

Hey, if that’s your thing that’s cool.  Fans of wizard rock don’t offend me (although they do have a tendancy to be rabid about it, which is annoying), and there’s much worse.  At least you’re not wearing your pants around halfway down your damn thighs.  That is offensive.

Aside from considerations of quantity, there’s quality.  Somewhere, someone is paying someone else (why else would they do it?) to post pseudorandom strings of text, containing links consisting of random text, linking to URLs that look like random strings of text.  What exactly are they trying to accomplish?  I am, quite frankly, afraid to click on said links – friend of mine works in high-level security at a rather large web-based transaction company and has plenty of horror stories.  Some of them are doubtless malware.  Some of them probably redirect to real web sites.  Maybe some of them are just referrer link lists.

And some people actually click them.  Maybe that’s the real WTF.

And no, electronic quasi-meat in this context has nothing to do with teledildonics.  Don’t google that at work, either.