Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
hey all,
it's been quite a bit since I posted. The site went down for a little while when the domain ran out. Not a huge problem. However I have been feeling lazy about posting for a while.
I am doing an experimental video project for a little bit, and also back working at Politics in Minnesota for the next directory. This has taken all the brainwaves pretty much.
I have been getting some random feedback from the internet and hits from all over the place. People seem to like it, though of course we are the tiniest fish in the infinite sea.
Some searches on Google are coming our way well, and it's been interesting to see which stories are the most popular. I am still pretty pissed with the hosting company, they are not willing to do anything about the slow ass databases, so either way this site is 'geared down' until February or March. That's just as well.
It is a lot more fun to futz around with video than just do the same old writing. I will post what I come up with (with help from my friends)
On the upside, I am also going to whip up a spot for Chinibby.com before the end of the year, and Nick and Abby are going to do a bit of blogging from overseas. I've decided they're gonna have Wordpress instead of Drupal, especially since Drupal is way too pokey with the bad database servers.
So that is the plan right now. Best holiday wishes for everyone.
Thinking of M.F.
We miss you and your sense of irony...
Well that settles it. I am gonna try to dump Drupal into the current system in the Blitzkreig method of web development. and ya know i'll try to do it tonight. not sure if it's gonna work. the site may go down all day. if the whole thing gets messed up it will suck. that is all.
nick's gonna kill me if i don't get chinbby working. i know its possible. its just been frustrating to have the process go several steps back. and im not gonna feel motivated to try to hack it after my job here at macalester wraps up this Thursday... Gotta make it happen soon or it won't at all....
The new system, temporarily located here, is called Drupal and in it, basically all the content is called 'nodes'. There can be regular blog post nodes, image nodes, video nodes. They can be associated to other nodes, and have comments. There are a lot of RSS headline feed features around too, including an audio node + RSS feed = Podcast feature.
On the plus side, there is going to be podcasting support set up, image gallery handling, polls and more static content that is tied to dynamic content.
Overall the software seems to work pretty well. The addon modules might not work as expected, but I will basically turn stuff off and on until it works.
The site is going to replace the front page within this week. That's the damn goal!!!
There is also a page called the 'HongWire' which will have a lot of feeds from various sites. It needs to be cleaned up, but it works with new headlines every 30 minutes, and that'll give us something interesting every 30 minutes without any more work from me!!
'Nyarlahotep Chooses' is a block reserved for a random selection of David's artwork, when that gets put together after his new computer finally shows up.
There is going to be a box on the front page connected to the del.icio.us service that will allow folks to send links over from their browsers.
Basically most anything contributed by a registered user will be posted. I've got some individual blogs set up and they will always be marked at least on the sidebar and probably on the main page too.
These are the tricky things. So far the only major bug is that the auto-banner rotating feature is not compatible with caching. So it runs hella slow. So the fancy logo that changes every time will have to wait.
The "HongWire" news aggregator is probably going to have to be tweaked for it to work fast enough.
The other random image box is going to be random images from the library. Might not keep that.
Any creative contributions are appreciated and individual contributors keep their own copyright for their own work and if they ever want it taken down that's fine.
I'm probably going to have to put in ads to try to pay for the web hosting. If it breaks even that will be a shock.
Well, damn skippy!
All right, that took long enough. But yes, in fact, I was able to dump the entirety of HongPong.com into Drupal, by first going from MovableType to WordPress, and then using the fine and polished 'Wordpress to Drupal Migration Utility' module by Borek Bernard at borber.com.
Notably, my beloved lengthy headlines have been truncated a bit, but this is due to Drupal's maximum headline size, which is going to have to be hacked. This was not the fault of Wordpress or Borek. Also some HTML encodings, like for example ampersands, have become garbled. HTML encodings are the tricky monster of MySQL, so there are other messed up characters yet to be found.
I imported this onto a new test Drupal server at
http://drupal-test.hongpong.com .
This will probably be molded into the production server, and I will just copy over the customizations already at
drupal.hongpong.com .
Thanks for your patience with this process. The colossal technical hurdle that held things back (apart from my laziness) was overcome with a triple-bank shot. Thanks too to WordPress. Excellent software but not quite right for the task at hand.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING US OVER THE YEARS.
THANK YOU, C.I.A., DEPTS PENTAGON, STATE AND JUSTICE FOR VISITING AND AMUSING ME.
(you guys ain't seen nothing yet)
THANK YOU CONTRIBUTORS FOR ROCKIN.
THANK YOU SPAMMERS FOR BOOSTING OUR GOOGLE RANK!
MOVABLETYPE IS AT AN END.
HONGPONG.COM (VERSION 6?) IS ON THE WAY.
This is one of those annoying times for engineering this site. Currently running on MovableType 2.661, the last free version they offered, but on the new, faster and generally good web hosting I now get from PowWeb, it glitches out. I get out of memory errors when posting, and the Total Post Exporter function doesn't work completely.
I want to get the site into Drupal, and I've decided it's gonna 'go live' before I have perfected its design. Anything would be better than this situation, and I have a couple folks who want to contribute goodies when it's finally working. They have been very patient, but it's taken far too long to kick this process into action.
Unfortunately, the big stumbling block so far has been getting the data from MT into Drupal. There are a number of methods that people have devised, but each suffers from certain drawbacks: version incompatibilities, failing to import categories, and other toxic problems.
So I have been checkmated and unwilling to deal with muddling through this while programming all day at work. But just now, an obvious potential solution has popped into my head.
Last summer I experimented with yet another popular Open Source blog platform, WordPress, which is quite good and fairly mature now. I got most of the site put together, but there were some problems I didn't like in how it structured things. Drupal solves these problems - namely heirarchical categories/tags/taxonomies. All these billions of del.icio.us bookmarks I've been making in the last couple weeks are closely related to this scheme.
Most importantly, I was able to import all of Hongpong.com, including the comments, from Movable Type into WordPress. I did this at least twice, so I know it works.
So today I thought, if MovableType > Drupal is not working, why not try MovableType > WordPress > Drupal ?
So I just installed Wordpress again, simply to pull this off. It's so crazy, it just might work!! Please stand by............
Drupal.hongpong.com - i swear it'll happen!! (Currently it's just a few test posts) Eventually!!!!
I had a power failure and lost some goodies. Not a colossal disaster, but lame! I used to have a backup power supply but the damn battery gave out. Anyhow, I discovered that there are some plugins that let Firefox remember what tabs you have open if it crashes or there's a power failure. There are lots of awesome Firefox plugins and extensions, and Tab Mix Plus is among the best. It will save the browser windows and tabs you have open if Firefox or the computer suddenly konks out!
Del.icio.us experimentation: del.icio.us is a 'social bookmarking service' that allows you to save bookmarks to the public, attaching tags so that you can have a sliceable and diceable batch of links. Right now I have a home page on del.icio.us, organized with quite a few bookmarks.
My plan is to have the Del.icio.us bookmarks appear on sidebars in their respective category pages, once I switch to Drupal (this is not too hard to do). In the meantime, I'm going to have del.icio.us spit out my fresh links to the HongPong.com front page every day. Ideally this should produce some more daily bite-sized content. The usual style around here is to aggregate stuff into huge, unwieldy posts, and a good strategy is to give everyone more little things on a more regular basis – and it's easy to do from other computers. Our other occasional contributors will also be able to include their del.icio.us bookmarks when the Drupal site FINALLY comes together. (see del.icio.us tags on Drupal!) Drupal kicks ass, i really gotta get this moving.
In lieu of writing this evening, I have decided to attack the 7000+ individual items of comment spam that have flooded into the server. As per our long-standing strategy to take over the internet, this collection of spam helped elevate our rank in the search engines, but overall creates far more static than anything funny (though sometimes, of course, it's pretty funny).
Some of the crew have been waiting patiently to contribute to this website once I get it switched to Drupal. One of the major barriers was getting the comment spam cleaned up. I want to import the comments into the new site, but I sure as hell don't want all that spam messing up the process. A little bit of spam, perhaps, for fun, but not all that shit.
So now we are already down to 1,464 from some 7000+. Basically once it's down to a few hundred, that will be good enough. Of course, I also gotta close off many old stories to comments, since those are the ones that get pounded by spammers.
If anyone's real comments got deleted, I am really sorry. I personally glanced over each entry and I hope none of the good stuff got nailed. When I switched over to PowWeb, all the old comments from the last site got detached, even a really interesting thread by a few Turks on the Kurtlar Vadisi Irak story. With a bit more engineering I'll get the old (also spam-filtered) comments back up onto the new site.
So to recap, this was one of the shittiest steps to deal with before going to Drupal. Now it's basically ready to go!! On the content side, that is.
Yet again movabletype is bitching out over posting a major, long update on Lebanon-Israel situation. Damn it.
Fortunately this past week i put together a Plan for the New Site, finally, with all the layout details really needed to get rolling. i have decided that we are going with structure first, filling in content as its ready, rather than waiting for all the content i want to put up to actually come together (meaning the batches of photos, especially).
What does this mean? Pretty much that more about the war is going to have to wait until I get the damn Drupal site done. It's going to take a sacrifice of some hours that I would rather spend in any other way during the summer. But now, obviously, it's gotta happen.
However I don't think it will take an inordinately long time to get the major parts together. I have promised various parties that their new areas were going to gear up a while ago. Since the damn old scripts this site runs on are finally just shitting out too much, it's back on the front burner for this week. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow night – I just can't bring myself to code like that during the day. Shit!
there is some kind of glitch that truncated the end of the post. no time to deal with it now, but the rest will be put up tomorrow. another reason to get moving on the new damn website.
update: the post is split in two now. lame.
Sorry for the lack of updates. I have decided there is something unsavory and a tad depressing about a blogging lifestyle in June. I am moving out of the spot in Loring Park right now, getting into the web development job at Macalester. Right now I gotta take apart my desk & get it ready for my dear roommate's movers or his head's gonna explode.
There are quite a few separate things I wanted to write about, but first I wanted to do a little *actual* research with some books from the library. I've got the books now, so I'll be on that once things are set up in St. Paul.
Don't expect much for updates until Saturday at the earliest.
Michael Bower, known for playing Donkeylips on I think the old Nickelodeon show Salute Your Shorts, says Scientology is bollox.
This shit is disturbing: WWTDD.com: Connie Chung is insane.
You can watch "Why we fight" the documentary on Google Video.
Juan Cole is always the go-to guy for Iraq analysis and his bit on post-Zarqawi is good.
AP:News analysis: Iraq insurgents fight on despite major setbacks:
Sunnis demand the release of a top Sunni religious leader Saturday in Tikrit, Iraq. Protesters said the United States wrongly detained him. (BASSIM DAHAM/Associated Press)
Now that's what I call freedom!
Tony Snow and Dan Bartlett don their Darth Vader helmets on the Bush plane to Mess'o'potamia
It is late but I am just posting to note that the major barrier in moving the site over to the Drupal - a problem so onerous that has delayed me for weeks while I hunt for a real full-time job and chill at political conventions - has abruptly been solved this late Thursday evening. All true computing breakthroughs occur after 3 AM, it is well known.
I started from scratch on a new Drupal installation now at Drupal2.hongpong.com, and basically I discovered that I did entirely foolish things when trying to install the AcidFree gallery/media juggling system. There was no flaw on the developer's work at all, just my own dumb ass.
Behold a working gallery page as the cops march towards protesters in New York City at the RNC - 2004. Register for the site if you like (registered users from the old installation will be brought over in a bit).
In other positive news, I found a benefactor on the Internet to refer me into the BlogAds system so there will hopefully be enough revenue to cover the web hosting fees.
Get used to seeing this little Drupal face. It's happening!
How to Pick a Satisfying Career: Know Yourself
Hongpong.com Drupal development: Some new advancements: I have organized the menus a bit and set up a basic forum. It is colossally easy to register an account on the new system, which allows you to put up files and such, as well as personal blogs and polls. Anonymous comments are also turned on.
Check out the new RSS headline aggregator thingy set up - viewed here as a big list of mixed things, or here broken into the component sections (or "wires")or a set of the sources we're putting together. NOTE: Right now the auto headline updater doesn't work - in other words it won't check sites on its own yet. Therefore I think anyone can hit drupal.hongpong.com/cron.php to force updating the feeds. (we're gonna do some SEO somehow, too)
Meanwhile some randomness: Bill Salisbury on polarization in MN nominating processes. He is an intrepid reporter who's been around the Capitol for a long time.
Help Palestinians but dodge giving Hamas government money? Sounds dubious.
Aspyr is releasing Civilization IV for Macintosh tentatively in June. I just saw it on PC again, and it is excellent.
Porter Goss: shitty leader goes back to Capitol Hill. Never should have brought his greasy face outta the House.
You gotta see the Truth live. The word is law, bitch! Wayne Madsen promotes Al Gore comeback in 2008 in the Salt Lake Tribune.
If you care at all about South America you need to check out Greg Grandin's "Rumsfeld's Latin American Wild West Show" on TomDispatch.com. Basically the U.S. is militarizing its relations with the whole region, as one country after another slips out of Washington's orbit. Only a small part of a CRUCIAL read about how direct American imperialism/Full Spectrum Dominance has been field-tested south of here:
Latin America, in fact, has become more dangerous of late, plagued by a rise in homicides, kidnappings, drug use, and gang violence. Yet it is not the increase in illicit activity that is causing the Pentagon to beat its alarm but rather a change in the way terrorism experts and government officials think about international security. After 9/11, much was made of Al Qaeda's virus-like ability to adapt and spread through loosely linked affinity cells even after its host government in Afghanistan had been destroyed. Defense analysts now contend that, with potential patron nations few and far between and funding sources cut off by effective policing, a new mutation has occurred. To raise money, terrorists are reportedly making common cause with gun runners, people smugglers, brand-name and intellectual-property bootleggers, drug dealers, blood-diamond merchants, and even old-fashioned high-seas pirates.
In other words, the real enemy facing the U.S. in its War on Terror is not violent extremism, but that old scourge of American peacekeepers since the days of the frontier: lawlessness. "Lawlessness that breeds terrorism is also a fertile ground for the drug trafficking that supports terrorism," said former Attorney John Ashcroft a few years ago, explaining why Congress's global counterterrorism funding bill was allocating money to support the Colombian military's fight against leftist rebels.
Counter-insurgency theorists have long argued for what they describe as "total war at the grass-roots," by which they mean a strategy not just to defeat insurgents by military force but to establish control over the social, economic, and cultural terrain in which they operate. "Drying up the sea," they call it, riffing on Mao's famous dictum, or sometimes, "draining the swamp." What this expanded definition of the terrorist threat does is take the concept of total war out of, say, the mountains of Afghanistan, and project it onto a world scale: Victory, says the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, "requires the creation of a global environment inhospitable to terrorism."
Defining the War on Terror in such expansive terms offers a number of advantages for American security strategists. Since the United States has the world's largest military, the militarization of police work justifies the "persistent surveillance" of, well, everything and everybody, as well as the maintenance of "a long-term, low-visibility presence in many areas of the world where U.S. forces do not traditionally operate." It justifies taking "preventive measures" in order to "quell disorder before it leads to the collapse of political and social structures" and shaping "the choices of countries at strategic crossroads" which, the Quadrennial Defense Review believes, include Russia, China, India, the Middle East, Latin America, Southeast Asia -- just about every nation on the face of the earth save Britain and, maybe, France.
[Read the next one carefully then check your phone records: -Dan]
Since the "new threats of the 21st century recognize no borders," the Pentagon can, in the name of efficiency and flexibility, breach bureaucratic divisions separating police, military, and intelligence agencies, while at the same time demanding that they be subordinated to U.S. command. Hawks now like to sell the War on Terror as "the Long War," but a better term would be ‘the Wide War," with an enemies list infinitely expandable to include everything from DVD bootleggers to peasants protesting the Bechtel Corporation. Southcom Commander Craddock regularly preaches against "anti-globalization and anti-free trade demagogues," while Harvard security-studies scholar and leading ideologue of the "protean enemy" thesis, Jessica Stern, charges, without a shred of credible evidence, that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is brokering an alliance between "Colombian rebels and militant Islamist groups."
.....In Latin America more generally, it is increasingly the Pentagon, not the State Department, which sets the course for hemispheric diplomacy. With a staff of 1,400 and a budget of $800 million, Southcom already has more money and resources devoted to Latin America than do the Departments of State, Treasury, Commerce, and Agriculture combined. And its power is growing.
For decades following the passage of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, it was the responsibility of the civilian diplomats over at Foggy Bottom to allocate funds and training to foreign armies and police forces. But the Pentagon has steadily usurped this authority, first to fight the War on Drugs, then the War on Terror. Out of its own budget, it now pays for about two-thirds of the security training the U.S. gives to Latin America. In January 2006, Congress legalized this transfer of authority from State to Defense through a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, which for the first time officially gave the Pentagon the freedom to spend millions from its own budget on aid to foreign militaries without even the formality of civilian oversight. After 9/11, total American military aid to the region jumped from roughly $400 million to more than $700 million. It has been steadily rising ever since, coming in today just shy of $1 billion.
Much of this aid consists of training Latin American soldiers -- more than 15,000 every year. Washington hopes that, even while losing its grip over the region's civilian leadership, its influence will grow as each of these cadets, shaped by ideas and personal loyalties developed during his instruction period, moves up his nation's chain of command. [And that in turn, could be the backdoor for American-directed coups and direct political pressure --Dan]
Training consists of lethal combat techniques in the field backed by counterinsurgency and counter-terror theory and doctrine in the classroom. This doctrine, conforming as it does to the Pentagon's broad definition of the international security threat, is aimed at undermining the work civilian activists have done since the end of Cold War to dismantle national and international intelligence agencies in the region.
BagNewsNotes on Pitching the Zarqawi bloopers.
The Ny Times says today:
Two related National Security Agency surveillance programs begun after the Sept. 11 attacks have provoked legal controversy because the agency does not seek court warrants for their operation.
In the domestic eavesdropping program, the N.S.A. listens in on phone calls and reads e-mail messages to and from Americans and others in the United States who the agency believes may be linked to Al Qaeda. Only international communications — those into and out of the country — are monitored, according to administration officials. Until late 2001, the N.S.A. focused on only the foreign end of such conversations; if it decided someone in the United States was of intelligence interest, it had to get a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Now such warrants are sought only for communications between two people who are both in the United States.
In the telephone record data-mining program, the N.S.A. has obtained from at least three phone companies the records of all calls — domestic and international — showing the phone numbers on both ends of each conversation, and its date, time, duration and other details. The records do not include the contents of any call or e-mail message and do not include personal data like credit card numbers and home addresses, officials say.
Security agency employees perform computer analysis in an effort to identify possible associates of terror suspects.
Meanwhile a nice birthday present from the AP - May 11: Justice Department Abruptly Ends Domestic Spying Probe
The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.
The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.
"We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey.
Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press.
Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.
"Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation," wrote Jarrett.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program "has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception."
Meanwhile it is interesting that the Carlyle Group has some control over how those security clearances are handed out via the U.S. Investigative Services, USIS, entity. $13 million in a recent contract.
Man, to hell with it. I'm gonna go have fun now.
....But I've been hanging out with people all over the place, and right now I need to run to the RiverCentre for the graduation ceremony. We'll get some goodies up later this weekend, but not now. Deal!
For my birthday I decided to give myself the gift of a brand-spankin new website system that blows everything else away.
I am throwing a party later today, after 9:30 PM or so, at 1764 Portland Ave. APT 4, St. Paul. Everyone who manages to read this is very much invited. It would be nice if people could throw in some beer but that's not required at all! My cellie is 651 338 7661 if anyone needs info.
There are a number of good Content Management Systems out there. A CMS is basically the back-end of any dynamic website - from a newspaper to a band to a blog to whatever. I like to tinker with these different systems, but HongPong.com itself has been hosted on MovableType 2.661, the last free version ApartSix released, quite a few years ago. Sadly, the spammers know MT's weaknesses all too well, and since I switched to Powweb hosting, I've gotten a torrent of comment spam that I just don't care about enough to erase.
Anyhow, the final decision is Drupal, a really great system that runs The Onion, for example. Most any site where you see "node" in the URL is a Drupal site.
See Drupal.hongpong.com for the test site, and register if you want. That part should work already. We get all kinds of bells and whistles with this, including photo galleries, easy file uploading, events and other cool dynamic shit. Also there is already a massive RSS syndicator thing in operation that will give you fresh headlines from around the internet constantly.
It will be put onto the front page when I am done working on it. In the meantime there's a new banner and a sweet upcoming features menu I just whipped together.
It's gonna be frickin' sweet. What more can I say?
"While I don't doubt any word of Hong Pong's diary, I have to wonder...hmmm...is Hong Pong actually just playing the part of a nice Minnesota conspiracy buff with a web log...but he is actually holed up deep inside a secret bunker in rural Virginia, with dark sunglasses and a black jumpsuit on, sucking us deep inside a complex web of psyop war games designed to further alienate the most politically informed American progressives from the public at large. Behind him, Dick Cheney stands, rubbing his hands together, cackling gleefully..."
--DailyKos member themank - eerie, isn't it
My computer is acting a little dodgy so I'm a bit concerned right now. Hopefully one of the interested parties that's been around Hongpong this week didn't hack my shit.
I crossposted Monday's Zarqawi PSY OPS story to the DailyKos and The Agonist, where it got read by thousands of people! (and featured on the Agonist's front page!) Within a few hours, as I slept Monday morning, my DailyKos entry had been voted up by dozens of people as a "recommended diary," which caused it to be listed in a privileged spot on the front page. Also a top DailyKos contributing writer, SusanG, included a plug for my story in her main frontpage story at 12:15 PM. Which was sweet:
If you think "leveraging xenophobia," as the Washington Post article examined by Hong Pong claims the military is doing in Iraq, is confined to our Middle East policy, think again.
The story sparked a lively discussion in which all could take a certain freaky pride in the fact that in this case, Paranoia is Right. All could agree that this Psychological Warfare planning against the American public is some fucked-up shit, and since my sources were Sy Hersh and the Washington Post, it was pretty hard to refute what I was saying. It got more than 160 comments. A huge counterintelligence success!
I wrote a poll for "Favorite Pentagon PSY OP of the war", which 887 people voted in. Results:
"It's like every day is an October Surprise!" polls really well. Though my veiled suggestion that the Nick Berg decapitation video was faked also did surprisingly well. (I don't really believe it was faked, but its worth considering how it could fit into a PSYOPS "marketing strategy"). And of course Jessica Lynch's fabricated Pentagon tale is still a classic favorite.
So within the 24 hours of Monday, a deluge of hits came mostly from the DailyKos. Damn, it sure caught the interest of some Big Wheels. And lots of government agencies. So these were some of more interesting visitors: either some random worker was surfing around, or else the word got passed and the story was Monitored by Gray Actors. Or a good bit of both.
Readers In 24 Hours: Most of the cabinet? Including the federal courts, NASA, the FAA, the FCC, the Postal Service, NOAA, NIH, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Health and Human Services, the State Department, Treasury, Homeland Security, many Army, Navy and Air Force computers, iraq.centcom.mil, army.pentagon.mil. And "croydon.gov.uk".
Many esteemed members of the military industrial complex, such as Boeing (several different hits), Halliburton, ChevronTexaco, the Citadel Group, SAIC, Northrop Grumman, the Shaw Group (of Katrina contract-hustling), Raytheon, Citgo (Chavez!) and even the Rendon Group. Now they are some shady cats.
Some in the media liked it too: E Entertainment, Disney, CBS, ESPN, NBC, NY Times, Scripps, Al Hurra (the American-funded mid-eastern TV network: [are they also tied to Zarqawi ops?]), TimeInc.com, Reader's Digest, Sony Pictures, RandomHouse, the Prague Post, McGraw-Hill, Discovery.com, PR Newswire, Union Tribune, HarperCollins...
Why not? WalMart, Napster, Intel, Microsoft, PlayBoy, Adobe, Apple, Ford, Kodak, Philips, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Progressive.com, Blockbuster, and a ton of random law firms.
Traffic Tuesday was back down to normal levels. Oh yah, check out Rolling Stone's National Affairs Daily page, in which Tim Dickinson uses the same opening quote for a fine piece along my lines -- Hyping Zarqawi, and also The "Selective Leak", about how Dexter Filkins at the New York Times was made into a cut-out for Pentagon disinformation about Zarqawi.
So the story has not been missed by the mainstream, I think it's safe to say (see above). I wonder if this counts as a dangerous counterintelligence effort?
The recent adventure in Arizona, (of which I still have some nice bits to put up), provided a few minutes of video that I want to get edited together. That will have to wait for the weekend, if I get ambitious.
In the meantime, I just made some tweaks to the site layout, adding a block of links to various places that friends are at. If I left some people out (i know i did) let me know and up it goes. I also shrank down those avatars to 40 pixels, and made a nice little table, so they are iconic yet not intrusive.
To inspire me to try a video blog, consider MNspeak.com's Videoblogging Week 2006. On an unrelated but cool note, see City Pages: 30 years of Minneapolis punk.
Well that is all for this evening. It seems that a swing through St. Paul is in order......
If this works, it means that the new hosting system XMLRPC works completely. And that is fantastic news because it means I can get down to Tucson and land... exactly 24 hours and 10 minutes from now.
So... does it work?
Ok, here's a first test entry to see if the new webhosting actually works. Sweet!!!
I feel very much obliged to write something about the entering the fourth (fourth!) year of the Iraq war, seeing as how our side was pretty much right about the likely problems and eventual sectarian breakdown of the country. However, that is hardly any comfort to anyone, since it's everyone's national disaster.
Since March 10, 2003, when the post-high-school version of this site was inaugurated from my sophomore Dupre single, this has been pretty much the loose axiom:
There is something wrong. There is a war about to go underway which will kill thousands without just cause. People must object to the unilateral, hasty, and unjustified conflict. We have to get the word out and the Internet is an exceedingly valuable tool for this. There should be several news and opinion links a day as we go forward into what Thomas Friedman is already calling "World War III."
Well, I would say that this website has scored pretty well, in terms of exposing the conspiracy of War Lies, rationalized annihilation, the vile agendas of radical right-wing Zionists, the humorous hypocrisies of the War on Drugs, and other assorted favorite topics. While these have been gratifying to share, it is not always a productive element connecting me to the real world rushing past me.
Either way, over the last few days my calcified and generally unsatisfying order of priorities in my life has been shaken, but I think in a good way. I have to take some actions to get rid of really negative and contemptuous facets of my own life. My birthday is in less than two months, and I feel that this year of my life has mostly been one of waiting for things to happen, unhappily. Part of that was due to being under an indictment for many months, which put me in a bit of a Scooter Libby/Abramoff frame of mind.
But January/February/March 2006 have been a kind of continuous slouch that has provided no real benefit. Seasonal Existential Horror Disorder is a deeply-rooted problem at these latitudes. I need to get into another line of work. I have to take my own fool problems head-on because no one else will.
What does that mean for the website? Oh well, i don't really know. Thanks for sticking with us over the last few years. I think I at least ought to put up a tip jar or something to cover the technical expenses.
We will remain vigilant, resolved, ever watchful for Psychological Operations, information operations, the men in the military-industrial complex stealing money from our wallets and eating the government, messianic and eschatological structures of political thought, humorous tidbits and technological wizardry, the many benefits of open-source software, the nature of fourth-generation warfare, the corrupt state of American partisan politics in the 21st century, the glories of atheism, and the latest words from the friends who follow this website from half a world away.
I am going to hang out with Mordred in Tucson during March 27-April 3rd. I have never felt the need to get out of town so badly as now.
Welcome Back to America, Buddy...
Eat Up.
I apologize for the delay in this posting. I've been in Mexico, on the worst vacation of my life (more on that later). As we've seen little action from our merry band of HongPosters, I am going to offer up some Saturday Grab Bag™ action for anyone out there who's just looking for something to pick at...
Dean Johnson: I'm a Flippin' Idiot, Give Me Another Chance: Why oh why, Deanster? Had to laugh at this news item, actually. It seems that MN-DFL Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson (or MNDFLSMLDJ for short) met with a group of Pastors in his constituency some time back to discuss the proposed ban on Gay Marriage (I assume this is the one being forwarded by the great Satan herself, Michelle Bachman) and told them that he had spoken to members of the state Supreme Court, who had assured him that the 1997 law that defined marriage as [blah, blah, blah] would be sufficient to hold off any advances on the homo-hitching front. Well, turns out that not only was Mr. Johnson apparently lying (no MNSC members recall ever discussing the issue with him) but he was being taped by one of the pastors in attendance. As you might have guessed, the Forces of Medievalism have already pounced on the issue as proof of the need for stricter anti-non-white-middle-class-suburban-protestants legislation and Johnson's essential unfitness in his role as Majority Leader. Well, they're right about one thing; Johnson is a hack politician extraordinaire, and hopefully this ugly episode will make room for someone too bright to lie to a bunch of spies for Jesus. [Story Here]
Navy Exchanges Fire With Sexy Pirates: Two American ships, the USS Cape St. George and the USS Gonzalez (A guided missile cruiser and guided missile destroyer, respectively) came upon a 30 foot fishing boat towing several smaller skiffs this morning while in a Dutch-led patrol off the coast of Somalia. When the American craft moved in to board the Somali boats, they were fired upon by small arms and possibly an RPG launcher. The Navy fired back, wounding five and killing one with no American casualties. I had to read the article a couple of times first in order to giggle, and then I had to find this picture (this is what I imagine the lead pirate to have looked like) before I could really consider where the pirates went wrong. I think I've got it now, though; Their first mistake was probably firing AK-47s from a 30-foot boat at 300+ feet of American military hardware, packed to the gills with a terrifying array of missiles, artillery and, apparently, more conventional heavy machine guns. Interestingly enough, Piracy is actually on the rise around the world, especially on the coasts of East Africa (where there were 35 attacks last year) and in the South China Sea, where large-scale piracy against major shipping craft and, in one case, a racing yacht have become commonplace in recent years. Personally, I think it is time to declare a Global War on Sexy Piracy, if only to hear all of Rummy's iterations on the theme as he fails to do anything about it- "Worldwide Struggle With Extremely Provocative Maritime Thievery", anyone? [Story]
Cheeseburger in Paradise
Mexico was a bust this Spring Break '06, for a variety of reasons. A trip to the Baja with Tha Fam went horribly wrong. Dreams of sandy beaches and great seaside food gave way to days of huddling indoors as the 50 degree winds whipped the windows of the darkened, unheated house we were staying in, forcing water under the doors and leaving all of our clothes smelling dank. The first problem was planning- the planner of the trip, who shall remain unnamed, didn't bother to find out that Baja California Del Norte is, as a rule, cold in March. Quite cold, really, rarely climbing out of the mid-60s during the day. Also, Baja California Del Norte sucks, a collection of corrugated shacks clinging to the side of a cliff along a steep, rocky, unprotected coastline, with no culture of any sort, a complete lack of any kind of shopping (other than, of course, I Fuck on the First Date t-shirts) and shitty restaurants whose defining feature is the zeal of their employees in their attempts to coerce you to eat at their establishment, including (no joke) jumping in front of the car in order to entice you to park (for free!) outside of the joint. Should you get in, you will be met by the likes of this gentleman above, fat southwestern types who come down in droves to sand race on the dunes in heavily-modified trucks and ludicrously overpowered sandrails. Apparently, driving around in circles on sand is a sport, not just something that ataxia-addled meatheads do in the absence of a real life. The less said about it the better, really. We left early, and it is 80-some degrees here in Tucson.
Hopefully Dan will be down here soon and we will keep you guys posted.
I noted earlier that someone was forging Russian spam emails from 'thwart.net', one of the mysterious domains that I purchased because they seemed like good ideas at the time. (some people get tattoos, I purchase little slices of the information universe).
Anyhow, since email header forging is trivially easy (faking the 'from' address), the spamming continues, and my inbox gets all the rejection notices sent to thwart.net. It would appear that besides the advertisers noted before, a Russian web hosting company is also doing it.
It would appear that a Russian web company named web-911.ru has been spamming various Russian email servers with promotional advertising, faking email addresses owned by me. This would anger me, although there's little to be done about it. However, upon viewing the site, I have decided that those who operate web-911.ru have an excellent sense of humor:
From: earth-bounces@mlist.sgu.ru
Subject: The results of your email commands
Date: March 16, 2006 2:14:14 PM CST
To: info@thwart.net
The results of your email command are provided below. Attached is your
original message.
- Results:
Ignoring non-text/plain MIME parts
- Done.
From: "Web-911" <info@thwart.net>
Date: March 16, 2006 11:46:04 AM CST
To: downhill <aspirant@mlist.sgu.ru>
Subject: Юридические услуги в Москве
I know better than to break off a spat with Russian IT experts. Who knows what kinds of interests want Ethernet and web hosting in those parts. Actually, it would probably be sort of a fun industry. But if they sent me some good local vodka I would be happier.
Well it had to happen finally. Those naughty Pakistanis trashed Ronald McDonald, thus finally giving life to the "Jihad vs. McWorld" thesis of Benjamin Barber.
You may notice the array of icons along the side, to indicate our expanding circle of contributors. I won't ask anyone to do anything on a regular basis, just whenever they feel like it. I also did a little CSS trickery to get the appropriate icons to appear next to our posts, which should add a certain ego-projection/avatarity quality to things, helping to disambiguate us and provide a more amusing environment for the site.
My own avatar is India's fourth prime minister, Morarju Ranchhodji Desai (1896-1995), the first leader not from the Congress Party. A Brahmin from Gujarat, he was selected to lead the Janata Party in 1977, at the age of 81. Apparently he drank a cup of his own urine every day and lived to be 99.
If anyone else wants in on the gig email me. Or if anyone wants their icons changed.
I am working on a badass Politics In Minnesota thing right now so I won't write further, but I wanted to take my new Icon out for a spin.
...I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in...
My condition is: Lots of Wisdom Tooth Vicodin + I hate Valentines Day.I have been laying low and taking Vicodin after my wisdom teeth operation on Wednesday. That's five straight days of codeine, and my moods are kind of weird and raw by this point.
Introducing:
From the depths of the Intarweb comes a shadowy character known only as Pixeldusted. S/He works in the shadows, interacting with the most arcane and mysterious parts of a vast and sprawling industrial complex.
Well sort of. I'll leave it to Dusty to explain. Pixeldusted is not a fictional character, though of course, in the current climate of Information Operations, a reader cannot assume such things.
So currently our stable of contributors includes:
And that's about it. Any of our regular visitors (and irregular confused lookers-on) are invited to contact me at NOdan.feidtSPAM@gmail.com if they would like to get an account here. I am trying to expand the operation a bit here. I have the inklings of long-term plan to design a better site. I would like to get friends contributing. There are no real hard and fast rules about it, because I don't really care that much. But I know a lot of smart people that could add some stuff.
So along with this polite general invitation to the visiting public, please keep my heavy recent course of painkillers in mind when reading the rest of this post.
Because yes, the structure of the site is antiquated and needs to be replaced. The HongWiki is probably not long for this world -- I look towards a better Content Management System setup like WordPress. In my day job, I am designing a new site for Politics in Minnesota's campaign coverage. Once that is done, I will actually have a very useful template for a new HongPong.com. Sweet.
*******
I looked at my web server logs for the first time in a while, and it turns out that well, things are going pretty well on the site. We are averaging 744 visits a day in February, of which I would estimate that 30% are spammers and 30% are search engines, but that's a rough estimate.
Here are the most popular search phrases of the last 13 days: (hits, then percentages)
And i don't even have the damn cartoons. Or a Mamoon falafel. Last month's search phrases were sort of funny:
"Amadeus Pegasus Watchtower" being the supposed three names of the CIA programs bringing cocaine into the United States, which Ruppert claimed to uncover (as we noted earlier). HongPong.com is now like #5 for that on Google.
U.S. Concludes 'Cyber Storm' Mock Attacks By TED BRIDIS
The Associated Press / Friday, February 10, 2006; 8:37 PM
WASHINGTON -- The government concluded its "Cyber Storm" wargame Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers.
Bloggers?
Participants confirmed parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose "Web logs" include political rantings and musings about current events.[......]
There was no impact on the real Internet during the weeklong exercise. Government officials from the United States, Canada, Australia and England and executives from Microsoft, Cisco, Verisign and others said they were careful to simulate attacks only using isolated computers, working from basement offices at the Secret Services headquarters in downtown Washington.
[.....]Homeland Security coordinated the exercise. More than 115 government agencies, companies and organizations participated. They included the White House National Security Council, Justice Department, Defense Department, State Department, National Security Agency and CIA, which conducted its own cybersecurity exercise called "Silent Horizon" last May.
An earlier cyberterrorism exercise called "Livewire" for Homeland Security and other federal agencies concluded there were serious questions over government's role during a cyberattack depending on who was identified as the culprit _ terrorists, a foreign government or bored teenagers.
It also questioned whether the U.S. government would be able to detect the early stages of such an attack without significant help from private technology companies. [I sense a Blackwater Offensive Hacking contract in the works -Dan]
Please recall the "Fight the Net" Defense Department concept in the "Information Operations Roadmap" (PDF) from earlier. Let's add a bit from the BBC:
A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.
Bloggers beware.
As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer. From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.
[.......]
The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.
All these are engaged in information operations.
Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.
"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads. "Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.
The document's authors acknowledge that American news media should not unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. "Specific boundaries should be established," they write. But they don't seem to explain how.
"In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States - even though they were directed abroad," says Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive.
So your own [American] brain is a target of military spending.
Accidentally.
Tax dollars >> Military-engineered thoughts.
Now that's what I call a feedback loop of sinister proportions. As for this site, well, it got 57 hits from the military just so far this month.
Jane Cat had surgery to repair his hematoma on the same day as my Wisdom Teeth, and the feline is now kinda tired, and pretty dusty. Tragic that a cat gets dusty when it can't groom its face.
Here, through my hydrocodone haze, Jane Cat is grabbing onto "Crossing the Rubicon" by Michael Ruppert, the conspiratorial work of parapolitical mega-non-fiction leading up to "Cheney did 9/11". I had pulled out this weird book because an old high school friend randomly stopped by today, and we talked about the likelihood that Wellstone was assassinated.
Could he have been Done In?
"People have been killed for less," I said. And Ruppert has an extended conspiracy theory about the subject, included in his book and featured on FromTheWilderness.com (and a followup). I tend to favor the electromagnetic pulse weapon theory – which explains the cell phone anomalies in northern Minnesota that day.
(My photo from a peace march in St. Paul on March 23, 2003)
The leading book on the Wellstone assassination theory, though, is apparently American Assassination by Don Jacobs and Jim Fetzer, a U of M professor. From a review:
Since becoming active in this issue, local residents have contacted Dr. Fetzer and related strange electronic interference in the area at the time of the crash. One experienced an odd cell-phone phenomenon with a form of noise unlike any he had heard before.
Its auditory pattern appears consistent with the use of "electro-magnetic" (EM) weapons developed by the Pentagon to take out computerized systems and wreak harm on human targets. It was part of the plan to bring down the plane using kinds of weapons of which most Americans are unaware.
These weapons can disable radio communications, stall warning systems, course deviation indicator, and electrical switches controlling the pitch of the props, causing substantial loss of control. They can render persons unconscious, incapable of muscle control, or even bring about their death.
In the wake of the crash, 69% of Minnesotans blamed a "GOP conspiracy" for Wellstone’s death.
I want to know where that statistic came from.
I got an oil change today and the mechanic noted my Wellstone bumper sticker. "We were just talking the other day about how great he was," she said. "It's always brought me good luck," I said. "Never been pulled over as long as its been on there."
And it is worth noting again that Wellstone was the only Democratic Senator to vote against the war who faced election that November. His political "survival" — assured in polls just before the election – posed a grave threat to the rationale for war - the rational public of Minnesota threatened to upset the spectacle.
And then there was all that damn bad weather (or not). Wellstone was afraid of planes, that's why he had the bus. And he was once sprayed with coca defoliant in Colombia. Tangle with the Establishment's cocaine friends in the Global South, who even knows what trouble you'd get into...
Amadeus, Pegasus, Watchtower. Information Operations.
The Vice President shoots a man, and they cover it up for 22 hours just for shits and giggles.
Time for another Vicodin. Official candy of Valentine's Day 2006.
Hello, readers.
I am here to make a terrible confession. I have to admit to something, before shame eats away at me like salt-laced plow-snow on the rocker panels of a '74 Dart. I am totally, ridiculously, blindingly head-over-hells in lurve with NBC's The Biggest Loser.
For those of you unfamiliar with the program, NBC finds dangerously obese Americans who share a desire to lose weight. Competing either individually or in (generally) couples or family teams, these contestants are physically-trained within an inch of their lives for ten days, whilst learning about healthy eating and whatnot. After the ten days, they are weighed, and a preliminary prize (tonight, in a 'dream wedding' themed episode, a lavish honeymoon) is given. After that, they are turned loose and return to their hometowns to do all the work themselves without trainer supervision for something like six months. Aided by numerous sepia sequences bip-bopping gooey melodies in the background, we the viewers get to see the remarkable transformation in the lives of these people as they transition from prize hog to deflated balloon. Sometimes the fat dissolves to reveal beautiful, picturesque individuals and sometimes they look like trolls in wet gunney sacks, but their delight is always evident- the patina of exploitation just cannot dull the shine these people accrue through months of grueling physical labor.
And what labor it is- a good quarter of the show is the workout sessions of these individuals, pockmarked nodes of fat wriggling about under the voluminous skin of the heifer-human hybrid huffing it through another hill climb. Now is the time to feel smug, before the hard work and restraint force you to reconsider your wicked ways and sympathize- nay, connect, with the rapidly-dimishing men and women on the picture box. Muscles and smiles and puppies and special "surprise" visits from the telegenic and intellectually unintimidating personal trainers are harnessed together for a kind of tearjerker deathray, a combination of so many instinctual cultural cues that all Americans are rendered powerless to resist. In the face of such an authentic forgery of actual human emotions, one's eyes well up as quickly as if one had been pepper sprayed. With the twin voyeuristic urges of pleasure and pain sated, the show maintains your interest with the siren song of an eventual, winner-takes-$50,000 weigh-in.
I needn't tell you that I am practically salivating by the time the two tubby teams tilt the scales at the final weigh-in, aprons of lard disappeared from their body and tingling with anticipation. Sometimes the contestants are hardly recognizable by the end, having lost as much as 94 pounds and 30+% of their body mass. The rising strings, the transformation tale of grit and determination and a high tolerance for public humiliation, all in the name of fifty thousand bucks and half column in next week's People- Fat Ass Not So Fat, Anymore- Thinks America Cares About Her Life. The story is pure Horatio Algier, the kind of inspirational influence that has driven American efforts to expand our minds and extend our abilities to their furthest- so long as there's cash in it. When I see those whittled figures take to the stage and weigh in like steer at the 4-H show, I too dream of one day being obese enough to qualify as a contestant on a fat farm TV show. It is a dream I think we all can share, having a major network pay for us to undo thirty years of neglecting our bodies and stuffing our faces, possibly even rewarding us with large cash prizes at the end. In exchange for my dignity, I would snigger at the sucker's deal I was giving them in exchange for my fifteen minutes, a home gym, and thousands in specialists' bills.
God Bless America for having an endless supply of the morbidly obese. Without the Calorie-Industrial Complex, none of this would possible. Fifty years of research have gone into creating the starchy, fatty, greasy cuisine that is the real star in this drama. When one thinks of all the poor, urban populations that this food was tested on before it was deemed worthy of more widespread distribution, the dedication of company's like RJR Nabisco is all too evident. Outside of the watchful eyes of horizontally-organized global conglomerates, a show like The Biggest Loser mightn't even be possible.
"You have won the battle of the bulge, and that makes you the biggest loser."
Oh, and the host who says that is a little porky herself- I'm just saying, special "biggest host" episode?
At least they knew how to spark it in the old days. Ja made the Herb for man, they say. (timestamp a joke, kids)
The Guardian: Jesus 'healed using cannabis'
Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
Monday January 6, 2003
Jesus was almost certainly a cannabis user and an early proponent of the medicinal properties of the drug, according to a study of scriptural texts published this month. The study suggests that Jesus and his disciples used the drug to carry out miraculous healings.
The anointing oil used by Jesus and his disciples contained an ingredient called kaneh-bosem which has since been identified as cannabis extract, according to an article by Chris Bennett in the drugs magazine, High Times, entitled Was Jesus a Stoner? The incense used by Jesus in ceremonies also contained a cannabis extract, suggests Mr Bennett, who quotes scholars to back his claims.
"There can be little doubt about a role for cannabis in Judaic religion," Carl Ruck, professor of classical mythology at Boston University said.
Referring to the existence of cannabis in anointing oils used in ceremonies, he added: "Obviously the easy availability and long-established tradition of cannabis in early Judaism _ would inevitably have included it in the [Christian] mixtures."
Mr Bennett suggests those anointed with the oils used by Jesus were "literally drenched in this potent mixture _ Although most modern people choose to smoke or eat pot, when its active ingredients are transferred into an oil-based carrier, it can also be absorbed through the skin".
[......]
"If cannabis was one of the main ingredients of the ancient anointing oil _ and receiving this oil is what made Jesus the Christ and his followers Christians, then persecuting those who use cannabis could be considered anti-Christ," Mr Bennett concludes.
The question is: how deep was Buddha in the opiates? A shortcut to spacing out by a tree...
I have just killed around 12,000 bits of spam on the site. Tragically this may have swept away some legitimate comments in the past few months, but we don't really get too many of those.
Also I changed the hosting around a little bit, so the pictures here should load a lot more quickly. I also finally got around to obfuscating the basic ways that the spammers add spam, so the incoming flow should be cut by 99%. Not sure if you care, but I think this will provide a better experience for all!
Ugh. The site went down for a couple days after I installed the Linux 'udev' module which happened to be totally worthless. When I had to reboot the machine, it would not start back up because it couldn't find the filesystems. Really bad.
Then I had to patch some changes into Apache, and for the last few days I haven't wanted to bother with this crap, despite all the fun scandals we're hearing about.
Upcoming Indictment Day will be known as Fitzmas. Presents and drinking as the Empire goes down in flames. Nice.
Uhm, well I have to move out on Wednesday and nothing has been worked out yet, so it looks like I will take the default option of going back to Hudson for a while. On the plus side that means that the website will probably only go down for a few hours as I drag the server to Wisconsin. On the minus side, well, Hudson really sucks.
Fortunately I made a lot of progress with the apartment search today, so I think I will be back out on my own within a week or so. It will be weird to be in Hudson, it will be weirder to leave St. Paul as school starts for these youngsters.
Life is too weird right now, too weird to find suitable synonyms for weird.
A mercilessly geeky tale: I am recording this so that myself and others may deal with similar problems better in the future. I will soon forget the details of how I fixed it, so it is best to write it down now.
It took a couple days, but the Linux server (Tarfin), a reliable Dell Dimension 4400 running Gentoo Linux, is back from its brush with Hardware Hell. The problems began after I found out about my new mysterious Politics in Minnesota project... The work at this stage would best happen using MediaWiki, I reckoned. MediaWiki has performed well as the HongWiki platform, and has reliably served wiki pages that have done Real Well on Google, although with the service problems it's gone south a bit.
So my new WordPress-powered HongPong website (under development) takes a lot more RAM to serve PHP files than this current MovableType-powered HongPong.com, and as I sat down to get the Politics in Minnesota project going, I noticed that Tarfin was basically maxed out for RAM. It only had 128 MB, which is really way too low for this. It only had a few megs of RAM available and had 80 MB in the swap partition (which is the same as Virtual Memory on a PC or Mac). Gridlock.
So in other words the stress of serving had totally maxed out the RAM, which I noticed when the site -- which is usually lickety-split quick over the LAN here -- was going much slower. More RAM, always a good solution. I looked up my usual suspects, namely Tran Micro and General Nanosystems on University, whose prices will pretty much always beat Best Buy type places. Only Nano had the type of RAM for Tarfin, PC2100 SDRAM. So I got two 256 chips (though I'd have liked a 512, they didn't have).
The Dell only has 2 slots, thanks Dell, so I pulled the old 128 and put these in. Turned it on, it booted fine, and I ran 'emerge sync', the nice Gentoo command that permits me to update all the various Linux software packs I have running. This streamlines one of the bitchiest problems in systems administration - tracking down the damn software packs and keeping up with their security patches.
It ran alright until suddenly it hit a Segmentation Fault, followed shortly by a Kernel Panic, the hardest Crash that Linux can Go Down with - it's real ugly, gibberish and Hex codes spilling all over.
So I have to reboot. The file system checker program, fsck, auto-scanned the main partition and found all sorts of horrible errors. I tried to have it fix, but then it hit another Segmentation Fault:
A segmentation fault occurs when your program tries to access memory locations that haven't been allocated for the program's use.
Therefore I should have thought that maybe it was the damn new chips. I had a flashback to the death of the first Hongpong.com (the one that got me suspended from MPA) - which was an old PowerPC 6100/60 running a hacked old Linux, whose hard drive abruptly refused to come back from a nasty death right around when I graduated from high school. And I had no backups. In other words, the first HongPong server died almost exactly four years ago, and took with it the great contributions of everyone in that strange season of 2000-2001. It couldn't happen again, could it?
So I started looking around the various forums for a solution to a sudden filesystem corruption, one of the true hells of computing. To compound this, I hadn't backed up all the new HongPong site stuff, nor the Mysql databases that run the sites, in quite a while. Fortunately I had just exported this entire site a few days ago to put it into WordPress (as it is now - mostly purged of the spam), so if it truly crashed, the Bulk would be safe.
After reboots, I could come back to the low-level emergency maintenance fsck (file system check) shell, and from there I could READ the messed up drive, but not write to it without risking more damage. And I could see that most files seemed ok. But I couldn't get the file sharing, or Apache webserver, or MYSQL database running again, without risking wrecking it. And I couldn't figure out what was really wrong. The solution?
Install a brand new Gentoo Linux setup on another old hard drive I had sitting around, and then pull the old stuff of the messed-up drive in Read-Only mode. After I put the drive in, the handy BIOS error light told me something was dreadfully wrong and it wouldn't boot at all. I found that on a Dell you have to only set the 'cable select' ATA hard drive jumper pins - the machine automatically takes the last drive on the ATA cable to be the Master drive. So I did that but it was still stuck.
I had pulled out the new RAM earlier, but I'd put it back in by this point. Then I tried taking out one of them. It booted! I pulled that one out, and put the other in. It halted! When I put both in, it would boot, but if I switched them, it would halt. In other words, the Dell could detect the bad RAM when it's by itself, but NOT necessarily when it's with others, BUT this depended on their order.
So I returned the bad RAM to Tran Micro the next day, and they nicely exchanged for another one and tested it there in the store. It was OK, so I was on my way, and everything went smoothly afterwards. (Other than this incident of random bad RAM, Tran Micro are fine folks - this could happen anywhere - their service was all right)
I used the memtest86 memory checker on the Gentoo Linux install CD to Make Very Sure they were ok - i wish I'd done it earlier. So it took a few more hours, especially since when I installed Gentoo on this machine a year ago, I hardly took any notes about it. There are some weird things about the Dell machine - in particular, (some/all?) Dells have a strange first boot partition or /dev/hda1 in Linux parlance, which makes the Dell screen and some BIOS stuff happen. I think I destroyed this partition last time, and it's a huge pain in the ass to repair with floppy disks and stuff.
The problem is that Gentoo Linux install instructions tell you to put GRUB, the bootloader, on /dev/hda or /dev/hda1 , and this time I almost commanded grub-install /dev/hda before I caught myself. That would have taken hours to fix. Instead it must be on /dev/hda2 or /dev/hdb1. hda2 is I think automatically loaded up after the Dell thing is done. But I did it right, and so I was able to reboot Linux and finish installing the system.
Downloading & installing the key web programs was easily done with 'emerge apache php mod_php' and the correct USE flags. Other various things were properly updated and recompiled.
I was able to get back into the messed-up drive using read-only mode, which doesn't touch the filesystem. All the elements of the site easily copied to the new drive. Happily, the Mysql database -- which can really be a bitch to put together from a crashed system, if you don't export it cleanly first -- went over VERY easily. All I had to do was 'cp -av * /var/lib/mysql' from the old /var/lib/mysql. Then a reboot, plugging it back where it belongs in my bedroom, and All Systems [ OK ].
So now, in short, I have a TON of Actual Real Professional Work for both Politics in Minnesota and Computer Zone. I don't have time to say much else about the Gaza situation and so forth. sry!
Sorry we are temporarily offline. I purchased some more RAM to speed up the server and one of the chips was bad. But I didn't realize this right away, and then fsck got involved.... Please Stand by.
Nevermind. The cat is observing matters from the kitchen, we are waiting for the weekend to start. Crushingly ordinary.
On the plus side I accomplished some useful PHP coding after 2 AM, which as usual is the most insightful time for these sorts of things. Right now I am trying to get a news aggregator type program put together, which will take posts from other blogs & news sources, and recombine them in order by date, so I can put together specialized subject news pages. It seems to work so far: http://wp.hongpong.com/agg-test.php.
I succeeded in importing all the stories from this HongPong site into the new one, but there are still some anomalies to be worked out (and I want to get rid of another 50% of the comment spam), so it's not quite ready yet.
I am trying to determine the best way to organize the new operation, and I have settled on making a few top-level categories, while stuffing the usual things - Iraq, Israel-Palestine, War on Terror - into subcategories, so that these posts don't wash out everything on the front page. Here is the topic layout so far:
Topics
• Uncategorized (36)
• geo (3)
• Iraq (168)
• Israel-Palestine (93)
• Afghanistan (20)
• Iran (1)
• War on Terror (114)
• politics (1)
• Military-Industrial Complex (57)
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Another CIA guy, Pat Lang, started a blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis, and he even put up some novel he wrote. Good for him.
Disturbing stuff about that "Over There" series on FX. Ok that's all for now. It's a really nice day, I want to go ride my bike. Syd Barrett knew it well. (Album: Piper at the Gates of Dawn, 1967):
I've got a bike, you can ride it if you like.
It's got a basket, a bell that rings
And things to make it look good.
I'd give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it.
You're the kind of girl that fits in with my world.
I'll give you anything, everything if you want things.
I've got a cloak it's a bit of a joke.
There's a tear up the front. It's red and black.
I've had it for months.
If you think it could look good, then I guess it should.
...
I know a mouse, and he hasn't got a house.
I don't know why I call him Gerald.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
...
I've got a clan of gingerbread men.
Here a man, there a man, lots of gingerbread men.
Take a couple if you wish. They're on the dish.
You're the kind of girl that fits in with my world.
I'll give you anything, everything if you want things.
I know a room full of musical tunes.
Some rhyme, some ching, most of them are clockwork.
Let's go into the other room and make them work.
As I have previously explained, my ironclad Internet marketing and search engine strategy so far has relied upon comment spammers or spambots to regularly plug their crap into old posts on my site, although periodically I close threads older than a month or so.
About a week ago, the number of comments on the site reached beyond a staggering 10,000 (10,921 was the highest comment serial number). This has a negative effect on MovableType's ability to export the entire contents of the site. in other words, it hasn't yet been able to create the complete export file because it gets overwhelmed with spam.
So I spent a few hours today trimming the fat off the spam, while opting to preserve the spams with funny quips and philosophical fragments about Hegel above the cialis links.
I also ran across *real* comments that I'd never seen before, as they were tucked away in infinite Texas Holdem plugs. It seems that, shockingly enough, people these days actually look at their referrer logs (which indicate to a website where surfers come from). I found that the proprietor of "NewsCorpse" took some umbrage when he found i'd described his site as somewhat "pretentious." I suppose I should clarify: I thought the graphics are a little cheesy, but NewsCorpse has an all right name and metaphor for its purpose. Anyhow...
There was a CNN reporter who responded to my post that addressed the Pentagon's new plans to scoop up high schoolers' data for recruiting purposes. They were wondering if I was someone who had initially supported the war, and become pissed off by the new policy. Unfortunately, as this site documents pretty well, I was opposed to this mad conflict before it started, and have since followed along by publishing stories (169 about Iraq, in all) about the deceptive and intentional schemes of fake intelligence and disinformation that were used to sell it to the public.
So if the draft comes along, I have enough evidence to prove I'm a conscientious objector. At least I'm planning ahead for a change. This from a kid who had to pay more than $140 for two incredibly late parking tickets today >:-(
This may be part of the reason that I keep getting all these hits from the government. The CIA openly returned on July 7, on a Google search for "text messaging IED" and ended up on the Afghanistan page. The "text messaging" keyword appears in a blockquote from, who else, Michael Ledeen, who is talking about what a great idea it is to arm the Iranian opposition. Fortunately the rest of it goes on to make fun of John Bolton and his potential connections to the Iranian terrorist group, based in Iraq, the MEK.
So let us consider the IP numbers of the CIA's openly marked relays. This is information released publicly (over DNS) - so don't anyone accuse me of going Novak. The CIA obviously has computers whose IP numbers don't say friggin "CIA.gov" when you look them up. 198.81.129.194 and 198.81.129.193. On the 193 address they came on a google search for "goss punish cia analysts cold war 2004" back on Nov. 10, 2004, when surely Agency employees were pondering the blowback from the election. They ended up on the War on Terror index page.
So for some bizarre reason the CIA also looked for "bloomington lrt condo" on March 17, 2005, and landed on some nighttime light rail shots.
Blah. Who knows what intelligence agencies want these days: condominiums or text messaging?
Anyhow here is a grand old list of every domain containing ".gov" that visited since the start of the year: (ignore the odd numbers there)
apm.gov.ec 2928
pix-a-20.gov.calgary.ab.ca
vance004.net.gov.bc.ca
ins.nh.gov
daoutside.hanford.gov
chameleon.doechicago.gov
strata.mt.gov
bhappy.jpl.nasa.gov
vance002.net.gov.bc.ca
bcccache6-3.tco.census.gov
nersc2.lbl.gov
some.security.gov.ge
gw.conab.gov.br 1 2
pix-a-20.gov.calgary.ab.ca
testcache.rtp.epa.gov
gk-central-23.srvs.usps.gov 0
nat-235.fw08nat.dot.ca.gov
lsm5.gtwy.uscourts.gov
sherman.state.gov+computer+logging 1
sherman.state.gov 2
sherman.state.gov 3
jaffwa.staffordshire.gov.uk
s0b1ed1.ssa.gov 0
vance002.net.gov.bc.ca
bcccache6-3.tco.census.gov
gk-west-24.srvs.usps.gov
n021.dhs.gov
ip12-156-194-3.ita.doc.gov 2
sherman.state.gov
vicce001.net.gov.bc.ca
relay2.cia.gov 6498
box.suffolkcountyny.gov
More below.. w00p w00p!
ip .gov.nf.ca
cache2.cdc.gov 6
152-130-7-130.res.net.va.gov
wkst146.uc.usbr.gov 0
152-130-6-130.res.net.va.gov
bowie-fc.census.gov 0
gtwy.uscourts.gov 1
office+of+personnel+management.gov 2
housegate4.house.gov 1
sherman.state.gov 1
gtwy.uscourts.gov 1
housegate4.house.gov 1
sherman.state.gov 1
management.gov 2
vance004.net.gov.bc.ca
smtp1.sanantonio.gov
n021.dhs.gov
sherman.state.gov
clayton.state.gov
cwood.etl.noaa.gov
turnerra.ornl.gov
152-133-7-130.kc.net.va.gov
unwgsgs3.customs.treas.gov
vicce003.net.gov.bc.ca
wcfc.ocio.usda.gov
gk-central-23.srvs.usps.gov 0
wdcsun24.usdoj.gov
sherman.state.gov 2
sherman.state.gov 2
denver-254.blm.gov
vance004.net.gov.bc.ca
enduser5.faa.gov 6498
unwgsgs4.customs.treas.gov
ns1.corr.ca.gov 6274
host246.welsh-ofce.gov.uk
ip12-156-194-3.ita.doc.gov
clayton.state.gov
internet.fsa.gov.uk
digger1.defence.gov.au
client1.ed.gov 6498
vance002.net.gov.bc.ca 2 0
152-133-7-133.kc.net.va.gov
user.plano.gov
ns2.corr.ca.gov
vicce002.net.gov.bc.ca
sherman.state.gov 1
sherman.state.gov 1
dknrgwpxav02.defence.gov.au
bcccache6-2.tco.census.gov
dknrgwpxav01.defence.gov.au 224
server4.gba.gov.ar
correo.transmilenio.gov.co
smtp.mpi.gov.vn
gatehouse.cambridgema.gov
a032-fw1.nyc.gov
housegate10.house.gov
vicce002.net.gov.bc.ca 168
sherman.state.gov 1
sherman.state.gov 1
pool3253.ihs.gov
pt .pnl.gov 1
clayton.state.gov
b12-arbiter-b.net.nih.gov
proxyout2.maricopa.gov 8
binhdinh.gov.vn 6778
smtp.mpi.gov.vn 84
bacninh.gov.vn 6934
relay1.ucia.gov
152-132-11-64.dal.net.va.gov
subnet84.idsc.gov.eg 1786
housegate10.house.gov
sherman.state.gov 1
sherman.state.gov 1
dnscachelastupdate.hongpong.com.txt: 50 130.20.172.158 pt .pnl.gov
dnscachelastupdate.hongpong.com.txt: 50 209.128.29.254 ip .gov.nf.ca
Hey, check it out, it's happening:
The WP stands for WordPress. it will move out to the regular www Real Soon Now. It has a lot of sweet tag features & other bells & whistles. Much better than MovableType, and I will have a more open way for everyone to get logins....
Also, site traffic is up sharply for July, and I am trying out a new program to measure hits. Should be sweet... I am averaging about 1000 hits a day, of which about 40% seem to be from the AskJeeves bot, and another 20% are pure spam attempts. So maybe around 300 real people a day? This new stat program should help me figure it out.
Also for some reason, muddled Macedonian characters have become my top Google search this month. Don't know why.
More later.
P.S. Tuesday morning is the long awaited appearance at the County Courthouse regarding the infamous Macalester Seniors vs St. Paul/Minneapolis/Airport Police May 11 incident. I could be a totally free man just hours from now!! Or not.
And I still haven't gotten my pictures from the police/DA/powers that be.
(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, well I can't blather about it on the Internet. If it's all over tomorrow, then I'll talk)
Right now I'm listening to the new Murs & Slug album, Felt 2: A Tribute to Lisa Bonet. Not bad.
I finally got around to changing the email address on this page to my new email address, dan.feidt AT gmail.com.
Also I'll note that I had a few glasses of Diet Dr. Pepper the other night in honor of Elizabeth Severance's six-month trip to London. Have fun Sev!!!
In other news I am working on a bit for the Politics in Minnesota newsletter based on the piece I put in the Mac Weekly about interviewing the Minnesota Legislature.
Then I really really really need to have this damn Job thing sort itself out. Augh.
I am tired of hearing about how the Israeli government is doing this that or the other thing, and the strange press reports about how Israelis in London got tipped off by Scotland Yard just minutes before the bombing piss me off because I don't want to ponder another bizarre conspiracy-lke situation. And yet here it is...
It's a strange time in Israel right now, with the Gaza disengagement only 30 days away. The settlers are doing all sorts of crazy shit there, blocking roads, fighting with Israeli soldiers, etc.
It's pretty damn hazardous to be a pro-withdrawal Israeli leader, as Sharon seems to be for the moment. Last time around, radical religious nationalists of the right wing wanted to murder Prime Minister Rabin, applied a talmudic theological concept called 'Din Rodef', a pronouncement that murder is acceptable for someone who threatens Jewish lives. Then a student, Yigal Amir, partly educated in West Bank settlements, killed Rabin.
Israeli politicians are maneuvering between the settlers and the rest of Israeli society, and in my view one of the shadiest operators is current Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a hardcore hawk who has made many declarations about the importance of preserving West Bank settlements. Consider this pre-bombing editorial by an Israeli rightwinger about the importance of finding a secular leader to protect the settlement movement. He names Netanyahu as a leading, but tainted, contender for that spot.
So it is quite annoying that Netanyahu happened to be practically on top of one of the bombings in London, and according to an early Associated Press report, his security team was warned minutes before the bombing occurred, as I posted yesterday.
Later press reports altered this account, and now the British and the Israelis Totally Deny everything. Not surprisingly, various people are taking this weird story and running with it. Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com is asking "What did Bibi know - and when did he know it?" with some antiwar blog entries about how the timeline of Israeli denials doesn't make any sense (because now the Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom is claiming they were warned after the first explosion, yet the Brits didn't detect it was actually a terrorist attack until around the third explosion) , and the right-wing blogosphere helping to spin the story towards oblivion. (including Powerline. Fuck those guys.)
In any case, I'm not going to level accusations. It's all quite weird and who knows what really happened. However, the private intelligence service Stratfor posted a very odd report about the London bombings, which someone put onto the Internet:
July 7, 2005
Israel Warned United Kingdom About Possible Attacks
Summary
There has been massive confusion over a denial made by the Israelis that the Scotland Yard had warned the Israeli Embassy in London of possible terrorist attacks “minutes before” the first bomb went off July 7. Israel warned London of the attacks a “couple of days ago,” but British authorities failed to respond accordingly to deter the attacks, according to an unconfirmed rumor circulating in intelligence circles. While Israel is keeping quiet for the time-being, British Prime Minister Tony Blair soon will be facing the heat for his failure to take action.
Analysis
The Associated Press reported July 7 that an anonymous source in the Israeli Foreign Ministry said Scotland Yard had warned the Israeli Embassy in London of possible terrorist attacks in the U.K. capital. The information reportedly was passed to the embassy minutes before the first bomb struck at 0851 London time. The Israeli Embassy promptly ordered Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to remain in his hotel on the morning of July 7. Netanyahu was scheduled to participate in an Israeli Investment Forum Conference at the Grand Eastern Hotel, located next to the Liverpool Street Tube station -- the first target in the series of bombings that hit London on July 7.
Several hours later, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom officially denied reports that Scotland Yard passed any information to Israel regarding the bombings, and British police denied they had any advanced warning of the attacks. The British authorities similarly denied that any information exchange had occurred.
Contrary to original claims that Israel was warned “minutes before” the first attack, unconfirmed rumors in intelligence circles indicate that the Israeli government actually warned London of the attacks “a couple of days” previous. Israel has apparently given other warnings about possible attacks that turned out to be aborted operations. The British government did not want to disrupt the G-8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, or call off visits by foreign dignitaries to London, hoping this would be another false alarm.
The British government sat on this information for days and failed to respond. Though the Israeli government is playing along publicly, it may not stay quiet for long. This is sure to apply pressure on Blair very soon for his failure to deter this major terrorist attack.
Also, Arutz Sheva, an extremely right wing Israeli news source affiliated with the settler movement and Arutz 7, a pirate settler radio station, posted this strange story this morning:
Report: Israel Was Warned Ahead of First Blast
10:43 Jul 08, '05 / 1 Tammuz 5765
(IsraelNN.com) Army Radio quoting unconfirmed reliable sources reported a short time ago that Scotland Yard had intelligence warnings of the attacks a short time before they occurred.
The Israeli Embassy in London was notified in advance, resulting in Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu remaining in his hotel room rather than make his way to the hotel adjacent to the site of the first explosion, a Liverpool Street train station, where he was to address an economic summit.
At present, train and bus service in London have been suspended following the series of attacks. No terrorist organization has claimed responsibility at this time.
Israeli officials stress the advanced Scotland Yard warning does not in any way indicate Israel was the target in the series of apparent terror attacks.
In typical style, Raimondo threw into his "When did Bibi Know" story a link to this incredibly strange FOX News story from 2001 about an Israeli espionage operation running across the United States. I'd never seen the actual FOX video until now. It has since been deleted from Fox's website.
At least the G8 is still going to hand out some aid. Huzzah.
Why not throw in some links to various reactions. Disturbingly, Fox commentators agreed that this attack was a good thing for the West. An oddball site Propaganda Matrix goes further with the Israel angle and posts a claim from the ever weirder Prison Planet site that as they say: "Cover-up in progress." The far saner Juan Cole has more to say. George Galloway said that this is the price for invading Iraq. A Dude on TomPaine.com. Tariq Ali reacted.
Last thing, I strongly recommend looking at what Efraim Halevi, the former director of the Mossad and now the head of the Center for Strategic and Policy Studies at Hebrew University, wrote about how after the bombings, a very generalized "we" have to escalate the anti-Islam war:
Ex-Mossad Chief Calls For World War After London Attack
Rules of conflict for a world war
By Efraim Halevi
07/07/05 "The Jerusalem Post"
......There will be supreme tests of leadership in this unique situation and people will have to trust the wisdom and good judgment of those chosen to govern them. The executives must be empowered to act resolutely and to take every measure necessary to protect the citizens of their country and to carry the combat into whatever territory the perpetrators and their temporal and spiritual leaders are inhabiting.
The rules of combat must be rapidly adjusted to cater to the necessities of this new and unprecedented situation, and international law must be rewritten in such a way as to permit civilization to defend itself. Anything short of this invites disaster and must not be allowed to happen.
So, you know, another ranting Israeli hawk. Big deal...
This post is a little more hodgepodgy than I intended, but I want to close by noting that I don't really support believing these accusations and innuendoes about the attacks yesterday. As the wise big guy in the film Control Room sarcastically put it, "Everything that happens in the middle east is an Israeli conspiracy, a water pipe in Damascus breaks, it's an Israeli conspiracy." I'm paraphrasing. There are some strange threads to this story, and I certainly think that Stratfor is a quite credible source. I've got no ultimate conclusions on the matter, just questions.
Yet another thing to roll my eyes about...
I'm going up north for the weekend so there might not be any more posts. I am also working on a new Hongpong.com version, and hey, you can check out how it's getting put together @ wp.hongpong.com. Go WordPress!
Kinda sweet. Skype provides free Internet telephony for your Mac, PC, Linux or PocketPC. Sounds frickin sweet! You can also get a phone number assigned to you for 30 euros a year, and in theory you could have the number in Chicago while you live in Paris, saving everyone tons of money.
Sweet desktop backgrounds for yr widescreen via the blog of
Blog Torrent. What a great name. Good work, Downhill Battle!
I am looking at new ways to put HongPong together, in the hope that it could improve my odds of fruitful employment. ftrain has some interesting elements, crazy pretentious tho. Tao Of Mac has wiki or Everything2-style features with each of its pages. (check out ten open source projects to watch) WordPress is going to replace MovableType as the main site engine, and hopefully the HongWiki will get more closely integrated with the pages... Wordpress has lots of plugins now. Liberals Aganist Terrorism and their TerrorWiki. I like the idea of a Terrorwiki.
SoSueMe, the aptly named blog by Jon Lech Johansen of DeCSS/DVD/iTunes cracking fame. He's talking about why VLC has a frickin traffic cone icon. Excellent. Apparently a bunch of affiliated kids came back drunk with a cone. And then they started a cone collection. As someone who has gone coning from time to time, I deeply respect this.
This is the shadiest Microsoft disclaimer I've ever seen, at Start.com: "This site is not an officially supported site. It is an incubation experiment and doesn't represent any particular strategy or policy. For other incubation experiments, see http://sandbox.msn.com. Enjoy!"
So damn funny, a t-shirt that says "I was Butt-Fucked at the NEVERLAND RANCH and all I got was this Lousy T-Shirt!" This kid gets a prize for t-shirt of the century. ()
This just rolled in: "Supreme Court Rules Cities May Seize Homes" for the purposes of profitable eminent domain, in this case a constructing huge friggin Pfizer research plant that locals objected to. So Pfizer has more rights than Joe pink Flamingo ranch house owner. Really quite awful. But that's just the beginning!
I forget who said: you're not paranoid if they really are out to get you.
Fortunately this circle will apparently widen to include all 16 to 18-year olds, whose private data will be added to a privately owned database administered on behalf of the Pentagon. Adding lots of personal information, including GPAs, Social Security numbers, and ethnicity, for the primary purpose of more closely targeting students to recruit into the military. I'd almost forgotten that the No Child Left Behind Act requires high schools to give the DoD information:
The Defense Department began working yesterday with a private marketing firm to create a database of high school students ages 16 to 18 and all college students to help the military identify potential recruits in a time of dwindling enlistment in some branches.
The program is provoking a furor among privacy advocates. The new database will include personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying.
[.....]
According to the Federal Register notice, the data will be open to "those who require the records in the performance of their official duties." It said the data would be protected by passwords.
The system also gives the Pentagon the right, without notifying citizens, to share the data for numerous uses outside the military, including with law enforcement, state tax authorities and Congress.
Some see the program as part of a growing encroachment of government into private lives, particularly since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"It's just typical of how voracious government is when it comes to personal information," said James W. Harper, a privacy expert with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "Defense is an area where government has a legitimate responsibility . . . but there are a lot of data fields they don't need and shouldn't be keeping. Ethnicity strikes me as particularly inappropriate."
Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the Social Security Administration relaxed its privacy policies and provided data on citizens to the FBI in connection with terrorism investigations.
Oddly enough, an AP story from last year entitled "Blog-Tracking May Gain Ground Among U.S. Intelligence Officials" has since vanished from Yahoo! News. However a Google search on the matter shows that many around the Internet found the story interesting enough to post in full. As the Maritime Homeland Security and Force Protection Blog posted it:
Yahoo! News - Blog-Tracking May Gain Ground Among U.S. Intelligence Officials
Tue Apr 27, 8:53 AM ET
By Doug Tsuruoka
People in black trench coats might soon be chasing blogs.
Blogs, short for Web logs, are personal online journals. Individuals post them on Web sites to report or comment on news especially, but also on their personal lives or most any subject.
Some blogs are whimsical and deal with "soft" subjects. Others, though, are cutting edge in delivering information and opinion.
As a result, some analysts say U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials might be starting to track blogs for important bits of information. This interest is a sign of how far Web media such as blogs have come in reshaping the data-collection habits of intelligence professionals and others, even with the knowledge that the accuracy of what's reported in some blogs is questionable.
Still, a panel of folks who work in the U.S. intelligence field - some of them spies or former spies - discussed this month at a conference in Washington the idea of tracking blogs.
"News and intelligence is about listening with a critical ear, and blogs are just another conversation to listen to and evaluate. They also are closer to (some situations) and may serve as early alerts," said Jock Gill, a former adviser on Internet media to President Clinton (news - web sites), in a later phone interview, after he spoke on the panel.
If they had read my stuff a while ago they might have learned more clearly that the neocons are dangerous liars and so is Ahmed Chalabi. But tragically that circle never got completed.
Well I am not terribly surprised. I have already gotten 95 hits from US military computers this month, 170 in May. More military computers than Israelis or French end up here for whatever reason. And of course the Central Intelligence Agency paid a visit last November, shortly after the election. hm, it doesn't seem that I wrote a post about that. The CIA also came to Hongpong earlier on a search for "tower bridge terrorism" and why not, the Department of Homeland Security came looking for "unedited iraqi prison photos and videos". And of course CENTCOM.mil, the US Central Command, downloaded the whole Iraq category page. The everyday military guys love searching for the helicopter kill video. (my post is lacking in details about the incident: apparently the dead Iraqis were farmers or something)
If you want to see more military video excitement, check out militaryvideos.net, with files via bittorrent. It was really quite shocking, although I couldn't play a lot of the WMVs on my infidel Macintosh.
If you have certain keywords sitting around, then it's not a huge surprise that your site might come up on a few Google searches. Once the CIA starts getting your RSS feed, then you must really be important... I recently noticed that I've also got the top result for "Pipelines balkans" purely because I laid out the sources for a paper on the Pipelines:Balkans hongwiki page, purely for my own use. Google found its way in there, and the rest is history...
Let's not forget,
there's a lot of flag burners who have got too much freedom and I want to make it legal for policemen to beat em', because there's limits to our liberty!
For the fifth time the US House addressed the serious problems facing our troubled nation and passed a Constitutional amendment barring the torching of the American flag. I suppose this will become a justification to bomb Iran. Thune speaks for the mythical fascists of the plains:
Among the new votes for the amendment is Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who pushed the issue in his campaign and helped recruit co-sponsors. "Out in the country, at the grass-roots level, it's seen as a common man's practical patriotism," Thune said.
Not surprisingly, John Kline voted for it, Betty! against, and unfortunately Collin Peterson (D-Rural MN) supported it, as well. Now that's settled, we just have to ignore the budget, steal the Arabs' oil, fund some Israeli settlements, design nuclear bunker-buster bombs and sit back and wait for the apocalypse. While the Pentagon tracks my little brother's GPA.
The moving process is a damn difficult one, especially when you live in one spot for two years and accumulate as much weird junk as I do. So I'm not done yet, and I am getting tired as hell of trying to get it all set up...
On the plus side, the Internet connection seems to be working fine. I have adjusted the DNS setting so that HongPong.com will come to the digital Selby Ave in the great infomatrix... blah blah blah... Actually the Domain Name System is pretty remarkable, as right now the updated IP number goes out into the world, one DNS server at a time.... So in other words it may take several hours for the change to register.
Something crazy happened to me at the bookstore, but I don't feel like getting into it now.
It is nearly time to relocate into 1630 Selby. Kennedy is gone for the week, visiting family, and Alison has already moved out, so it is eerily quiet at both ends. My stuff is more than half-packed up. I bid an ambivalent farewell to dowdy plaid shirts that stuck with me far longer than they should have, and threw away old notes and bits of paper, signifying elements of the trail over the last four years.
The server may go down for a while here, and may take some time to come back. Hopefully quickly.
Many objects found in the room, a mapbook of Paris, cards and CDs, photos from the war protests and London. The Hongpong.com Gentoo Linux server, a Pentium 4 Dell Dimension that has performed admirably since I got it from Dan Schned's brother Alex last summer, has faced the challenge of websurfers from the CIA and thousands of virus attacks with great stamina and more importantly, almost unshakeable stability. The server will go down after 42 days in operation. Not bad, but not as good as its all-time record of 111 days.
The electrical problems in my room (bet you didn't know the Uninterruptible Power Supply was grounded by a wire I installed) never blew up the computers, and the dust from all the shit in here didn't quite kill me.
The room was sort of an overgrown projection of my personality, hodgepodge with sprinklings of conspiracy, David's crazy art, wires and components, Rhymesayers stickers, burnt matches, post-its and printouts, critical theory readings and Poli Sci books scooped from the free table, a bookcase topped by Marx, half the Illuminatus trilogy, scribblings and bizarre charts taped to the walls. Many a long night hunched over the computer, following hyperlinks into arcane trivia until three or four in the morning. I tried real hard to "Get it" even though all too often I felt totally disconnected, hostile to the America outside.
Those days are over now... there were fun times, strange times. Someone once claimed that the center of the universe passed through the corner where the TV used to be. For some reason, I tended to believe it.
Here are some quick things.
Henry Earl: I heard about this guy before, but nowadays he really has more sense of purpose than anyone I know... Buy a t shirt. Best mugshot ever.
Data sets for emergency management scenarios in Minnesota - LOGIS - some sort of coordinated government IT system for MN municipalities. Weird.
I ran HongPong.com server log files through an analyzer for the first time since February and I found that there was a certain absurdity to the hits I get through Google. Site traffic is doing all right, although about 40% of it seems to be spam attempts.
As it is now, the old posts on this site have lots of comment spam, thousands of them, attached as dirty little digital barnacles to manipulate some sleaze merchant's search engine ranking. However, I let the practice go on for a while because it improved my own search ranking, and provided a certain surreal quality, a sort of natural accretion of Internet gunk.
In the long run this seems to lead some insane perverts (the "dark magician girl" searcher(s) were quite persistent) to my site, as well as some bizarre political and/or dirty searches such as:
More in a bit....
Sorry readers,
Sometimes Dan becomes so involved in his tech-speak that he forgets that you neither know what he's talking about, nor care. From now on, we'll try to trim these bits and bobs out of this august journal.
Thanks for understanding,
The Management
[a followup from Dan: That is precisely the genius of Linux. I myself had no idea what the effect of those errors really was, inducing uncertainty and a drive to pick things apart until it was fixed. Totally inscrutable, and yet so satisfying when it's finally solved!]
This didn't have any effect on the front end that I could see (except for when the site was off because I rebooted and forgot to reset the HTTP forwarding), but there was a weird problem that was causing HongPong.com's all-important Gentoo Linux server box to emit ugly messages whenever it did something called "caching service dependencies, like so:
Regenerating /etc/ld.so.cache...
Caching service dependencies...
/var/lib/init.d/depcache: line 16: overwritten!!: command not found
This has been a pain for quite a while but I did some looking around in the Gentoo linux forums and their bugzilla bugtracker. Read what happened here (the forums weren't terribly useful) or ignore this message. Hopefully some googler in the future will find the info helpful. The trick was to empty out a config directory, /etc/conf.d/, and then run 'emerge baselayout' to replace the config files. It took quite a while to determine this. A special thanks to Borja Pacheco on Gentoo Bugzilla entry #74404 for his useful solution to a similar problem.
The reconstruction process proved brutal but, with the will of the Amish at a roof-raising, we slowly pieced our rat-and-flame-damaged server room back together. Now, back after a brief slumber, HongPong returns, better than ever. Better, you see, because now I am doing this thing for real, having outfitted myself with the Nanoblog 4356(a). With this bad boy here,
I am SET. No more writing html like a schmuck. All I do is click a button, choose from a pulldown menu, find the appropriate section of the html code to enter information in, and do it! It's great! Also, for $4,563.43, can we say STEAL? Haha, I joke, I joke, it's hot- I didn't pay a dime.
Anyway kids, just stopping in to say hi, hope the day finds you well. Keep reading.
The website has had rather intermittent service lately, and for that I'm sorry. Among all this new job stuff I have been trying to solve the bizarre date-reset problem, and I think I finally have it licked. In Webmin I disabled some kind of clock syncing between the system time and the hardware time... this is a Linux thing that I don't quite fully understand, but now that the syncing has been turned off, the computer should be able to keep time accurately from now on and it won't puzzle me anymore.
The reason that this garbage pertains to the website is that when the clock would go back to 1901, it would think that the HongPong.com front page should have every post on it. Very annoying.
Also I tried to fiddle around a little bit with installing Squid, a proxy cache program that would make my site run quite a bit faster, as it holds in RAM the most frequently downloaded files, while Apache tends to have to read them from disk over and over. This can make a server dozens of times quicker, in some situations. However, as is so often the case with Linux stuff, the documentation to set up a 'reverse proxy for a local server' as i think the terminology goes, is pretty hard to find and incomplete. If it was easy, you'd be proxied right now. Oh well.
Other than that..... I have to write about 8 profiles tonight or else my boss might have an aneurism, or else have to buy another pack of cigarettes, so back to it!
A Summary: Straight from the Rambling Periphery to the Talkative Core
On Wednesday I quit Computer Zone Consulting and suspended my job at the library because I got a paid internship with an organization putting together a huge directory of the politicians in the state of Minnesota. This has chomped up all my time, and I won't have nearly the time to write on the site for probably about a month. Therefore some of those in Hongistan could perhaps offer a few tidbits to help keep us goin? And is it possible that Dan is working for.... a Republican??!!? More below...
An offer of 'Big Propz':
First of all, megadittoes to Nick for his quite clear and not at all spin-laden look at the social security mess. It does sound like a Ponzi scheme designed to help financial industry insiders shift giant mountains of government cash around to generate the appearance of prosperity, another great step forward in the Faith-Based Economy of the 21st Century.
In the field of major news, things have abruptly changed for me this week. Unexpectedly, last Friday Peter Gartrell got me a job with Politics in Minnesota, an organization which publishes a directory of all the legislators and key officers in the state. My job, which I've chosen to accept, is to go around and interview about a third of the state legislature, so that I can write their updated profiles for this term. It is a very challenging project, and the deadline is rolling around obscenely quickly.
On Wednesday I talked with a bunch of Republican representatives, and I was surprised to find that they were strong supporters of renewable energy, new state rail transit solutions and other kinds of policies that I think are quite important. It's a very new sort of thing for me, to say the least. I have had improbable talks with quite a few Republicans in my day, but I've never had to deal with multiple (R) representatives in a mere afternoon. Here, I'm trying my best to be professional about the whole undertaking, but it helps that I've been sort of indifferent to most of state politics for quite a while. Not reading the Star Tribune daily for a while really tamped it down...
Not a Likely Situation for Dan:
Well, the really ironic twist is that the publisher of this political Directory is one Sarah Janecek, a Republican lobbyist who's widely known and heard from in state media. She has only been around a little bit this week due to a business trip, but she is definitely one of the most interesting and informed people around these parts that I've ever dealt with. She's been telling some folks that Peter and I are her "Macalester liberal interns," which greatly amused some Senate Republicans. However, keep in mind that the whole operation has bi-partisan leadership, as associate publishers Blois Olson and David Erickson are DFLers.
So we've sort of been slotted into this little ideological gap where things look quite different than before. Essentially my role is first to prod the legislators into talking about themselves, their accomplishments in the last term, their policy interests and what they want to look at in this next term. As you might imagine, it is not insanely hard to get them to talk about themselves. Then I've got to write up or adjust the "analysis" section of their profile from last year, and send it in to get edited. I was a little nervous to get started on this, but my schedule has gone mad.
I've got to write stuff that reflects what the legislators want to see in the book, their basic story and situation as they see it, and has some kind of interesting zing to it. This does not require me to have an opinion about whether or not I support their positions. Just roughly 2,500 characters of text that would help illustrate to the interested everyday Joe just who their elected officials really are.
It does require me to get up ridiculously early in the morning. Real early. Ouch. It also eats up most of my time. As luck would have it, Arthur Cheng showed up in town during my first day running around the State Capitol. A shrewd operator in the field of economics is just who I need to help me sort it out at the beginning. So now I'm off to the races.....
Oh by the way, the Supreme Court o' the U.S. itself finally scratched the Hudson casino. Thank God.
Because of all this new internship stuff, I just can't spend much time working on posts here. It's too bad, I was hoping to put out some interesting information and weird links that I've linked to in the HongWiki, but haven't had the time nor inclination to further organize. Go to "Recent Changes" in there, and look at the various date entries like "8 January 2005." I guarantee you will find something interesting, though not necessarily truthful.
A Call to Rambling on the Internet:
So again I want to thank Nick for putting some excellent stuff together, but now I want to ask some other folks if they are interested in writing some guest posts for Shits and Giggles. Namely folks like A. Henry "Big Sky" Tweeten, Dan "what's all this now" Schwartz, Kellen "I live in Kirk 911, isn't that disconcerting in a postmodern apocalypse kind of way" Anfinson and the Gerberuses.
Of course there are a lot of other people who might be reading (or not), but those are just the cats that spring to mind right now. I am hoping we can get a few things going. I'm not even hoping for longer pieces of writing. Just a few paragraphs on the DNC race or what you've been hearing about lately would be extremely welcome.
In a final tidbit, something went a little weird with the date setting on the HongPong.com server over the last week or so. It kept setting back to 1901, although I don't quite know why, and haven't had the time to figure it out. I rebooted the server after a quite good 111 days of uptime, with a load average of 1.84 / 1.28 / 1.17. What does load average mean? Something to do with idle cycles in the user and system space. (the numbers tell how busy the computer was while serving Hongpong.com to the CIA, Pakistani spammers and whatever strange digital alter-egos of sketchy global characters happened to trip into here). Anyhow, with a reboot the date seems to be sticking to correctness.
Well, the time is upon us to certify last November's election, and there are some hopeful rumors that up to three senators were favorable to objecting to the certification of Ohio's electors. Possibly the certification of other states might be challenged, as well.
I will be back at the Dungeon of the Palace of DeWitt Wallace (ie the library computer lab) on Thursday so I will try to post some more stuff up as things in Washington unfold. Yes, the site has not been getting fresh content like we had going before finals. I would simply say that:
A) I have needed some time off of writing to read more–and actually read pleasant things, not the usual endless stream of insanity
B) the server had outdated versions of important software and it keeps forgetting what time it is. No, it is not 1904. So I've spent a while patching things up, strengthening the operation. This is especially important because
C) when looking through the hongpong.com server logs late last night, I discovered that the Central Intelligence Agency came back, (after their first openly identified visit—the real covert dudes would obviously use computers that didn't have IP numbers tied to CIA.gov) but this time, they downloaded a large section of things. I will say more about this later. Centcom.mil, the Joint Forces Command, and the usual jokers on Air Force and Army bases looking (via Google) for the violent military helicopter kill video keep coming back.
As you might imagine, the CIA has given me one of those weird post-paranoia feelings. I am not wildly alarmed, but it's motivated me to spend a while increasing the security of things, reflecting on what other script kiddies and spammers are trying to do all the time. I don't think the CIA has it 'in for me,' but it motivates me to keep a reasonably close eye on what is going on.
All this stuff has taken my attention away from looking at the election stuff and posting about it. But anyway here goes...
Your reading assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to look at the report by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee called "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio." [Full PDF] I will post the whole executive summary below this stuff because it is important.
So bradblog.com is offering some hopeful rumors and tidbits. The great Clint Curtis will probably get some attention as well, as he was making the rounds through Capitol offices. Three senators, says Brad:
We have heard that there was a hard coalition of three Senators in support of challenging the Electors, while a larger number had hoped to simply publish a letter calling for Election Reform instead of taking the more impressive stand as recommended by the Constitution. There is a reason why in a body of hundreds, only two are required to immediately halt all proceedings in order to debate and investigate any Electoral chicanery.Well, that makes me feel a little more optimistic that the whole issue of vote integrity will get propelled into the news cycle for a while, but these days I just don't think it will stick. If it weren't for the tsunami disaster, there would have been a lot more oxygen in the media spin chamber for elevating this fight.
While Election Reform is clearly necessary, that can be done next week, or next month. Tomorrow is the moment for Senators to stand up with the 24 House of Representative members to challenge Electors for being illegally seated.
We're happy to report we've heard that the three Senators in favor of challenge held strong, at least for the day, and did not fold in favor of the "Letter" option.
Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio: Executive summary
Representative John Conyers, Jr., the Ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, asked the Democratic staff to conduct an investigation into irregularities reported in the Ohio presidential election and to prepare a Status Report concerning the same prior to the Joint Meeting of Congress scheduled for January 6, 2005, to receive and consider the votes of the electoral college for president. The following Report includes a brief chronology of the events; summarizes the relevant background law; provides detailed findings (including factual findings and legal analysis); and describes various recommendations for acting on this Report going forward.
We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards.
This report, therefore, makes three recommendations: (1) consistent with the requirements of the United States Constitution concerning the counting of electoral votes by Congress and Federal law implementing these requirements, there are ample grounds for challenging the electors from the State of Ohio; (2) Congress should engage in further hearings into the widespread irregularities reported in Ohio; we believe the problems are serious enough to warrant the appointment of a joint select Committee of the House and Senate to investigate and report back to the Members; and (3) Congress needs to enact election reform to restore our people’s trust in our democracy. These changes should include putting in place more specific federal protections for federal elections, particularly in the areas of audit capability for electronic voting machines and casting and counting of provisional ballots, as well as other needed changes to federal and state election laws.
With regards to our factual finding, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.
First, in the run up to election day, the following actions by Mr. Blackwell, the Republican Party and election officials disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens, predominantly minority and Democratic voters:
• The misallocation of voting machines led to unprecedented long lines that disenfranchised scores, if not hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters. This was illustrated by the fact that the Washington Post reported that in Franklin County, “27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry.” Among other things, the conscious failure to provide sufficient voting machinery violates the Ohio Revised Code which requires the Boards of Elections to “provide adequate facilities at each polling place for conducting the election.”
• Mr. Blackwell’s decision to restrict provisional ballots resulted in the disenfranchisement of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of voters, again predominantly minority and Democratic voters. Mr. Blackwell’s decision departed from past Ohio law on provisional ballots, and there is no evidence that a broader construction would have led to any significant disruption at the polling places, and did not do so in other states.
• Mr. Blackwell’s widely reviled decision to reject voter registration applications based on paper weight may have resulted in thousands of new voters not being registered in time for the 2004 election.
• The Ohio Republican Party’s decision to engage in preelection “caging” tactics, selectively targeting 35,000 predominantly minority voters for intimidation had a negative impact on voter turnout. The Third Circuit found these activities to be illegal and in direct violation of consent decrees barring the Republican Party from targeting minority voters for poll challenges.
• The Ohio Republican Party’s decision to utilize thousands of partisan challengers concentrated in minority and Democratic areas likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of legal voters, who were not only intimidated, but became discouraged by the long lines. Shockingly, these disruptions were publicly predicted and acknowledged by Republican officials: Mark Weaver, a lawyer for the Ohio Republican Party, admitted the challenges “can’t help but create chaos, longer lines and frustration.”
• Mr. Blackwell’s decision to prevent voters who requested absentee ballots but did not receive them on a timely basis from being able to receive provisional ballots likely disenfranchised thousands, if not tens of thousands, of voters, particularly seniors. A federal court found Mr. Blackwell’s order to be illegal and in violation of HAVA.
Second, on election day, there were numerous unexplained anomalies and irregularities involving hundreds of thousands of votes that have yet to be accounted for:
• There were widespread instances of intimidation and misinformation in violation of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Equal Protection, Due Process and the Ohio right to vote. Mr. Blackwell’s apparent failure to institute a single investigation into these many serious allegations represents a violation of his statutory duty under Ohio law to investigate election irregularities.
• We learned of improper purging and other registration errors by election officials that likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide. The Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition projects that in Cuyahoga County alone over 10,000 Ohio citizens lost their right to vote as a result of official registration errors.
• There were 93,000 spoiled ballots where no vote was cast for president, the vast majority of which have yet to be inspected. The problem was particularly acute in two precincts in Montgomery County which had an undervote rate of over 25% each – accounting for nearly 6,000 voters who stood in line to vote, but purportedly declined to vote for president.
• There were numerous, significant unexplained irregularities in other counties throughout the state: (i) in Mahoning county at least 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to the Bush column; (ii) Warren County locked out public observers from vote counting citing an FBI warning about a potential terrorist threat, yet the FBI states that it issued no such warning; (iii) the voting records of Perry county show significantly more votes than voters in some precincts, significantly less ballots than voters in other precincts, and voters casting more than one ballot; (iv) in Butler county a down ballot and underfunded Democratic State Supreme Court candidate implausibly received more votes than the best funded Democratic Presidential candidate in history; (v) in Cuyahoga county, poll worker error may have led to little known third-party candidates receiving twenty times more votes than such candidates had ever received in otherwise reliably Democratic leaning areas; (vi) in Miami county, voter turnout was an improbable and highly suspect 98.55 percent, and after 100 percent of the precincts were reported, an additional 19,000 extra votes were recorded for President Bush.
Third, in the post-election period we learned of numerous irregularities in tallying provisional ballots and conducting and completing the recount that disenfanchised thousands of voters and call the entire recount procedure into question (as of this date the recount is still not complete) :
• Mr. Blackwell’s failure to articulate clear and consistent standards for the counting of provisional ballots resulted in the loss of thousands of predominantly minority votes. In Cuyahoga County alone, the lack of guidance and the ultimate narrow and arbitrary review standards significantly contributed to the fact that 8,099 out of 24,472 provisional ballots were ruled invalid, the highest proportion in the state.
• Mr. Blackwell’s failure to issue specific standards for the recount contributed to a lack of uniformity in violation of both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clauses. We found innumerable irregularities in the recount in violation of Ohio law, including (i) counties which did not randomly select the precinct samples; (ii) counties which did not conduct a full hand court after the 3% hand and machine counts did not match; (iii) counties which allowed for irregular marking of ballots and failed to secure and store ballots and machinery; and (iv) counties which prevented witnesses for candidates from observing the various aspects of the recount.
• The voting computer company Triad has essentially admitted that it engaged in a course of behavior during the recount in numerous counties to provide “cheat sheets” to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets informed election officials how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand recount mandated by state law.
Gooo Conyers, he's the man!
Hey all,
I have quite a few things to post but right now I am going to update the server's PHP and Apache code so things may stop working...
I have been getting some hits from odd places so I figure, why not up the security? More later....
Well, sweet children of the corn, guess who's bizack? Started with a FaceMob, time to get that pape, dawg.
Mordred's back, that's who, and he's got some shameless plugs to slip into the uber-serious train of thought that is Hongpong.
First, BlackOutBlog is back in full force- there will be daily posting on this site from here on out, so head on over for some mind-expanding goodness.
Second: 6-8 p.m. Sunday on 91.7 FM WMCN, DanF and I have a radio show entitled "Michael Powell, Make Me a Sandwich" that anyone with access to a radio should be listening to, because it kicks MONKEY ASS.
Third, tell Dan to redesign BlackOutBlog with spiffy graphics like his site- why do the good guys always get the big SHAFTerussky right up the pooper? Answer me that, huh?
While we're on the topic of Shafterusskies, check out this site here, an open apology to the rest of the world, who got shafted along with us. Also, see who got the shaft in a game of Congressional Am I Hot Or Not?
Just trying to lighten up the mood here at HongPong. Not that I think this Ohio story isn't intriguing, but we all know nothing will come of it. Let's face it, the Supreme Court would decide this one again if they had to.
OK, little ones, I must go fly with the unicorns now, a toute a l'heure.
I am down in The Mac Weekly office right now and I probably ought to start laying out the Opinion section now (including Jack Phinney's hilarious letter), but I thought that it would be a good idea to quickly post something about the changes on the site since last week and a whole new project that's now up and running.
This weekend I installed a powerful software package called MediaWiki on my server, which offers me the ability to stash an infinite amount of information on interlinkable dynamic web pages until the DogCows come home.
The new project is called the HongWiki, and for now it is a totally public system. That is, you don't even need to have a login on the server to make a page, add text or upload images. If this gets abused, the public access will have to be closed off, but hopefully that won't happen for a while.
Also, I have found that HongPong.com has achieved the top spot in some interesting Google searches, bringing this site to a (small) commanding height in the emerging global information economy. If you run a search for "Democratic Spectacle in Des Moines" or "west bank settler Douglas Feith," you will find HongPong.com as the top result. "West Bank Douglas Feith" puts my site as the fifth result.
It is not really a surprise that the 'Democratic Spectacle' search would come to this site, since that was the headline of a story I wrote when checking out the Democratic caucus process in Iowa a year ago. It is really just a funny search string.
But how did I get highly linked with Israeli settlers and our fanatical and dangerously incompetent defense undersecretary for policy? It just goes to show that not enough people, even out in this 'blogosphere' (I hate using that word) give a damn about the connection between messianic-eschatological political movements and the Pentagon.
So then, if I argue that there is an Israeli-American hegemon effect in politics, does this mean that since I dominate a search string that directly refers to this hegemon, now I'm a part of it? (talk about your foucaultian networks of power)
(By the way, what the hell is the DogCow Wiki?)
Election day is tomorrow. (Ok, it's actually today and I changed the time of the post a couple hours back for dramatic effect. Yay.)
On what will hopefully be the last day of this strange government’s political domination of our country, I thought that I should share something about the last four years. Where to begin… where to begin…
I wonder how much of this time has been wasted and whether the energy we spent in resisting served no purpose.
Then I think back to the times that we came together to declare with one voice that the war was wrong, the policies were wrong and the leaders were mad. Even in those dark hours, those symbolic gestures in the street assured me that there was some kind of link between people that even Bush couldn’t crush.
All the way back to the fall of high school’s senior year (2001), on that distant planet we once lived on, I felt that the good times couldn’t last. I thought the economy was cruising on a bubble. I thought that things would make less sense before they made more.
That bizarre election four years minus one day ago launched the country into the sea of uncertainty. Little did we know that the political strategy of this president was to burn away the basis of facts themselves, and substitute spin for reality.
After looking at Macalester College in the Clinton days, I found coming here in the calm, almost flippant season before 9/11. Somewhere I still have that summer’s Time magazine all about shark attacks.
We had ten glorious, blazing days at Macalester, partying on Turck Three, Turck Two, up and down Doty and Dupre. The social universe had no barriers. It was just as well that I didn’t yet have the computer my parents had ordered for school.
One Tuesday morning, I hadn’t yet done my work for Griffin’s film analysis class that afternoon. My crappy old clock radio clicked on, disjointed ramblings about some crash on MPR. Hit the snooze button. The second time I listened for a while, buildings on fire. Went to the bathroom and a floormate told me something crazy was going on.
We went into my room and fiddled around with Adam’s shitty old TV. Then the fuzzy image came up: the towers burning in a haze of static. Campus ground to a halt, everyone stopped to watch, agape.
In the days that followed, I looked again and again at the American flag outside the chapel. Anything was possible now. In a way that was a sort of freedom, the idea that from such a chasm something better might be fashioned. But I also feared that they would take this disaster and run away with it.
At least we would have the chance to start afresh in college, at least this epoch would let us cleanly break from the old days.
Unexpectedly, something weird happened to our class, and I think our class alone. The famed Macalester bubble hardened into a Macalester shell through the rest of that semester. We reoriented towards our friends and our studies. Generally, we rarely got far off campus. I think that somewhere among those crucial weeks, when the country wept and the flags flew out of stores, we missed some indoctrination session that everyone else got. We didn’t get saturated by the media—we barely saw cable. We were not formed into believers.
I still remember someone telling me that they could hardly believe that these flags were all over the place. It felt alien—more American than America.
Then came those slogans. “United We Stand” was the best because it was consonant with “United States.” Later the war brought “Support Our Troops.” One night in Mickey’s Diner with some of my Indian friends, I realized that among this group, the slogans became meaningless. If you were among foreigners, the ‘We’ and ‘Our’ become false, and suddenly you escaped from the mental box.
What, then, to say about the war? What to say about where God has gotten placed these last few years? There’s really nowhere to begin but with my persistent atheist beliefs. For me, the most threatening, doom-laden quality of this government has been the way its supporters have attached an eschatological, apocalyptic meaning to September 11. They believe (or purport to believe) that September 11 was not a ‘mundane’ event. Instead, the disaster is elevated to a spiritual or eschatological plane, as it becomes an element of God’s plan for the world. The crashes are not just plane crashes, they are a projection of supernaturally pure moral evil into reality, and a revelatory moment for the believers.
Such heretical thinking has a great political advantage. Over fall break, I saw a few minutes of a Congressional campaign debate from gerrymandered Texas that when the Republican related the dangerous idea. He said that God had allowed this disaster to happen, but God’s grace was revealed in the American reaction to it. The disaster opened a path of redemption, and Bush, as God’s agent, had moved down this path. The War on Terror became spiritually licensed.
No, I say to these people, No a million times. God was not involved. God does not exist, and everyone who says that there was Grace in what followed is fabricating a ghastly deity of convenient vengeance. The Republicans have exploited this unholy narrative and its profoundly evil nature should alarm any student of politics or history. Aggressive nationalists have run this kind of line throughout human civilization, because people fear the uncertainty of not placing faith in the story.
A professor of journalism, David Domke, visited my rhetoric of campaigns and elections class this fall to talk about Bush’s religiously colored language, as part of a tour for his fascinating new book, “God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the “War on Terror” and the Echoing Press.”
He describes how the Bush administration fabricated the “good vs. evil” and “security vs. peril” binaries, and applied them to make it seem as if Bush was carrying out God’s will.
Cynical atheistic political theorists like Leo Strauss have said that a political leadership’s appeal to God serves the purpose of lending cohesion to the society, and claiming to speak on behalf of the Invisible One effectively silences the doubters. Some leaders, like Bush, claim to act as prophetic agents or portals of insight into God. These are the dangerous ones; once followers buy into this, there is no stopping them.
Over the course of this government, I’ll say that the most profoundly frightening and disturbing moment of the whole adventure came during my attendance at a rally supporting the war in its first days, on March 22, 2003, where I took pictures.
There, our governor, Tim Pawlenty, uttered something I knew to be racist and totally false. I heard the grief of 9/11 cynically redirected to support the war, an abuse of power that literally made me shake. Pawlenty was speaking on the steps of the state Capitol building. He said that we were going to strike back at those who struck us on 9/11. I instantly knew this to be a lie, a horrible lie. The crowd cheered, and I shuddered.
Early in 2002, I started looking around at the points of conflict between the U.S. and the Muslim world. Without too much trouble, I found the Intifada. Here was a concrete case of Muslims getting crushed by outsiders with military aid from the United States. If we were to patch this War on Terror up, it would have to involve peace in the West Bank and Gaza. There was no other way.
My lifelong fascination with maps took a turn for the surreal when I first looked at the complex diagrams of settlements and Israeli roads on the West Bank. What the hell was this program? Why are these things expanding? Did someone say that God authorized this? Was there some kind of moral fiction being generated to sustain the process? And what does democracy become in a country that generates racially exclusive colonial suburbs?
In the fall of my sophomore year, October 2002, two men from this place came to Macalester. (I wrote an editorial about it a couple weeks before they came) I co-wrote the news story about their visit here, but of course someone failed to put that issue of the Weekly (Vol. 5, Issue 4) online.
I talked briefly with Ami Ayalon, Sari Nusseibeh and George Mitchell. Ayalon, the former director of Israel’s FBI-like security forces, the Shin Bet, and Nusseibeh, the then-president of Jerusalem’s Al-Quds University, came to the U.S. to talk about their sensible peace plan, which entailed removing virtually all the settlements, sharing Jerusalem and bringing the Palestinian refugees into the territories, not Israel. They hoped to promote the plan by getting ordinary folks on both sides to sign their statement.
For me, this encounter forever destroyed the idea that to be ‘pro-Israel’ or ‘a friend of Israel’ means supporting the self-destructive policies of the Likud. Ami Ayalon is as much of a hard-nosed Israeli security expert as you will ever find. He could have probably killed me with his ballpoint pen in a dozen different ways. Yet this tough man was acutely afraid of the settlers and the threat they posed to Israel’s stability. His years at the Shin Bet actually were among the safest and most hopeful that the people of that poor, beleaguered country ever had. It was Ayalon’s Shin Bet that cooperated with the Oslo Accord’s new Palestinian security services to prevent the Islamic fundamentalists from bombing and shooting Israelis. There were virtually no suicide bombings under Ayalon’s watch, because he determined how to coordinate Israel with willing Palestinian security forces. I learned it could be done again, because it had been done before. If only the constant process of the settlers’ territorial aggression—which increased dramatically during Ayalon’s tenure—had been checked, things might not have spun out of control.
At this same time, we began to hear rhetoric of plans to invade Iraq. I dismissed these rumors for a while, believing that the U.S. would have to intervene with Israel before breaking out into Iraq. I saw a couple patterns emerge as the deed went down. The first was the source of stories about weapons of mass destruction and lurid tales of terror training within Iraq. These stories tended to depend on the statements of defectors, who in fact turned out to be liars pimped out by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. It was difficult, if not impossible, to hear of the really threatening yarns from more objective sources.
The other key pattern was a sense that the government itself was divided about the war, because, as we found out later, there was a dramatic factional battle, roughly between the neoconservatives in Cheney’s office and the top of the Pentagon, versus the State Department, CIA, and some of the uniformed military staff.
Reading one of my weirder “news” sources, I found references to a 1996 policy document called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” This doc, widely available on the Internet, prompted me to rethink what exactly these neoconservatives like Richard Perle and Douglas Feith were gunning for. I have rambled extensively about the significance of the Clean Break, and probably will continue to do so for the rest of my days. Near the beginning of the war in Iraq, I posted my analysis of it on Everything2.com. As the war started during spring break, I remember reading one of the key passages to my family:
Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.
So before I get into the wretched nature of the war, I should explain a politically hazardous, yet profoundly important idea about our present situation. At this moment, we are deeply wrapped within something I call the ‘Israeli-American Hegemony,’ (a.k.a. ‘the Republican-Likud merger’) a crucial, misunderstood component of the ‘War on Terror’ campaign. In some ways this hegemony is a continuation of the old ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ we’ve heard so much about, but it is in fact a new, evolving political form that both the Bush and Sharon administrations have done their utmost to market to their countries.
This hegemony signifies that the national identities of Israel and the United States should merge together, on the basis of perceived political, moral, military and religious congruities between the countries. There is a specific moral calculus fabricated into the hegemony: namely, that Israel and the United States exist on a moral plane apart from the rest of the world, and their decisions are effectively guided by God’s higher moral purpose.
The Clean Break document states that Israel needs to match America’s language. In an institutional fashion, this is what hegemony and integration really means: the Pentagon starts to think and function like the IDF and the American messianic Christians move closer to the messianic Jewish groups in the West Bank.
The Clean Break document said that
Israel can make a clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity and mutuality — not one focused narrowly on territorial disputes. Israel’s new strategy — based on a shared philosophy of peace through strength — reflects continuity with Western values…
To anticipate U.S. reactions and plan ways to manage and constrain those reactions, Prime Minister Netanyahu can formulate the policies and stress themes he favors in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the Cold War which apply well to Israel.
To synchronize the language between our governments is precisely the objective.
Yet the success of this hegemon is based on insane, shaky foundations. For one thing, it defies a fundamental premise of international politics: different states have different interests. I’m sorry, but I do not have the same policy interests as a handful of messianic settlers on a West Bank hilltop, and my government should reflect that. The whole enterprise of the Israeli occupation itself is horrible: only our own Christian fundamentalists who see the construction of settlements as a means to fulfill the return of Jesus and bring about the apocalypse favor this undertaking.
This hegemony idea also is rather racist: it suggests that the Israelis themselves are incapable of charting their own destiny. Instead, they are expected to play out the end-of-the-world script that Christian fundamentalists believe they ought to play.
I’ve found that this hegemon has been quite easy to spot lately. We can pick apart political discourse just from the last few weeks of the campaign. We saw it when Sharon and Bush agreed that “Israeli population centers” in the West Bank could be annexed, as if Bush could somehow speak on behalf of the Palestinians.
Thomas Friedman says that Iraqis refer to American troops as “Jews,” while Arab TV networks show split-screens of Israeli aggression in the territories and American lunacy in Iraq. This, Friedman says, is harmful because it merges these identities into a larger complex, but not because it’s an objective fact of the current situation. As he says, now it is hard to know where American policy ends and Sharon’s begins.
Osama Bin Laden’s latest video references the crimes he claims were committed by this same ‘alliance,’ a charge probably not literally true (I doubt he cared that much in 1982) but with much more resonance after the U.S. has tried to kill vast numbers of Iraqis over this year.
I say to you Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike towers.
But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the America/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.
The events that affected my soul in a difficult way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American 6th fleet helped them in that.
And the whole world saw and heard but did not respond.
In those difficult moments many hard to describe ideas bubbled in my soul but in the end they produced intense feelings of rejection of tyranny and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.
And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressors in kind and that we destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.
Right-wing Israeli hawks crow about how the U.S. is finally absorbing the lesson it learned in Lebanon from the Marine barracks bombing. Our future wars, they say, will more resemble Israel’s campaigns in the West Bank and Lebanon. Hence, we need the Israeli operational methods to succeed (ignoring the fact that the Israeli ventures have been bloody, pointless failures). Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post:
…there is no doubt that the American military's view of Israel's strategic posture today bears little resemblance to its perception of Israel's strategic posture 21 years ago. Particularly since September 11, and as the situation in Iraq continues to evolve and mutate, the US military has increasingly come to see Israel's war fighting experience both against the Palestinians and in Lebanon from 1982-2000 as a composite of how America's wars will look in the future. Everything from Israel's need to have armed guards at the entrances to shopping malls and cafes to our tactics for land-air-sea combat operations and intelligence-gathering techniques informs the US military as its commanders prepare for battles of the present and the future.
Back in Beirut in 1983, US Marines greeted Israeli soldiers with hostility as they, like the rest of America, lived in denial of the reality that our nations' enemies are common ones. So perhaps the fact that as the US builds conceptual models for its wars of the future it asks Israelis to participate in its war games as "subject matter experts" is the best indication that in the final analysis, the Americans have drawn the proper lessons from their Beirut catastrophe.
Hawks also constantly assert that Hezbollah is an enemy of the United States, and its television station, Al Manar, even more so.
I argued in a paper this spring that as the U.S. military depends more and more on private corporations for doctrine, training and logistics, privatized military firms are an ideal transmission belt to strengthen this hegemon, as ‘Israeli security experts’ come in to provide the goods on how to manage these Arabs. In the other direction, the U.S. provides military hardware like Apache helicopters to Israel. If you think that national identity has nothing to do with helicopters, tell me if the images of Apaches blazing missiles that the Arabs constantly see .
Consider that al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia killed an American working on Apache helicopters there. Al-Qaeda is zeroed in on attacking highly visible elements of the hegemon like the Apache.
Perhaps, too, the same informational tools that the Israelis use to target individual ‘terrorists’ are being implemented throughout the U.S. military. In particular, CACI International has been lauded by Israel as providing informational tools to fight the war on terror, and CACI interrogators in Iraq construct matrices that tell the military which Iraqis to go after. What if these very tools are part of the political problem that has obliterated all goodwill between the U.S. and the Iraqis? What if the tools have gotten out of control, instructing the military to lock up the wrong Iraqis in places like Abu Ghraib indefinitely? For that matter, what about the rumors of Israeli interrogators within Abu Ghraib?
Seymour Hersh has reported that one book in particular, “The Arab Mind,” has been instrumental in shaping how the neocons developed their strategies in Iraq. “The Patai book, an academic told me, was 'the bible of the neocons on Arab behaviour'. In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged - 'one, that Arabs only understand force, and two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation'."
Now, Iraq. More than a thousand U.S. soldiers dead, many thousands more wounded and crippled. The war has reached out and killed folks in harmless backwater places like Ellsworth, Wisconsin. And now we hear estimates that one hundred thousand Iraqis have been killed by the war and civil disorder.
There has always been something strange and unreal about the invasion and the way our occupation policies have been carried out. There’s been a certain feel or metaphor to their approach that I would describe as the ‘Babylon complex.’
The Babylon complex was a result of the asphyxiated, closed decisionmaking process in the Pentagon, combined with the foolish, racist assumptions of horrible people like Undersecretary Douglas Feith. The image of a Free Iraq that they painted in our heads was one of great power, good for us and a friend of Israel. The operation would finance itself through Iraq’s vast oil revenues, an globally unmatched mountain of wealth under the sand.
The vision of this wealth overwhelmed the planners of the war, really. They bet everything on subduing the Iraqis and implementing their economic-political shock therapy plan. The Bush administration believed that any serious acknowledgement of their horrible planning would harm their political leverage in the U.S., so they did not fire the incompetent people in the belief that somehow Good Faith could carry them through the situation.
The continuity of the operation trumped its stability. Providing the spin or appearance of stability precluded actually working for stability. As the great CPA spokesman Dan Senor (who entered Washington as an aide for the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC) put it when talking about the al-Qaqaa munitions disaster:
(Image composited from the 'Metropolis')
How suitable, then, that in the very site of historical Babylon itself was the stage for this flight of fancy. It reminds me of the 1925 Fritz Lang classic, “Metropolis,” and the story of Babel contained therein.
Maria: Today I will tell you the story of the Tower of Babel.
Let us build a tower whose summit will touch the skies—
and on it we will inscribe: ‘Great is the world and its Creator. And great is Man.’
Those who had conceived the idea of this tower could not build it themselves, so they hired thousands of others to build it for them.
But these toilers knew nothing of the dreams of those who planned the tower.
While those who had conceived the tower did not concern themselves with the workers who built it.
The hymns of praise of the few became the curses of the many.
[Title:] BABEL
[A crowd rushes the tower, and destroys it.]
Between the brain that plans and the hands that build, there must be a mediator.
It is the heart that must bring about an understanding between them.
Worker: But where is our mediator, Maria?
Maria: Be patient, he will surely come.
Worker: We will wait, but not for long.
So now the hands are fighting the planners, surprise surprise. They are only fighting for the greatest material prize of world history, and they’re just settling in to fight to the death.
The spooky feeling stepped up when I heard that the U.S. military was finding mountains of arms all over the country, but lacked the manpower to capture and secure them. All these arms—of all the things you need to capture and secure in an occupied country, for the sake of ordinary folks and your own soldiers, you have to secure the arms. And they didn’t. Al Qaqaa is only the latest example.
The disastrous planning has quickly undermined our moral stature in Iraq, as small tactical victories are actually strategic failures. We play word games about terrorism then airstrike the hell out of Sunni city after Sunni city. As the conservative William Lind put it:
The point here is not merely that in using terrorism ourselves, we are doing something bad. The point is that, by using the word "terrorism" as a synonym for anything our enemies do, while defining anything we do as legitimate acts of war, we undermine ourselves at the moral level — which, again, is the decisive level in Fourth Generation war.
The incredibly astute Professor Juan Cole described how the Bush administration operates by representing, rather than reflecting reality.
The Bush administration will ask for another $70 billion for Iraq in another month or two if re-elected. Remember in the debates when Kerry said Iraq had cost $200 billion, and Bush corrected him that it was only $120 billion? Well, it turns out that Kerry was right, but Bush was being dishonest in postponing the further request until after the election. Another example of how the Bush administration is government by "representation" in the sense that Michel Foucault used the term rather than in the civics sense. Foucault said that people have a tendency to represent reality, and then to refer to the representation rather than to the reality. (This is also the way stereotypes and bigotry work.) So Bush represented the Iraq war as a $120 billion effort, and actually corrected Kerry with reference to this representation. But the representation was a falsehood, hidden by a clever fiscal delaying tactic. So Kerry is made to seem imprecise or as exaggerating, when in fact he was referring to the reality. Bush made representation trump reality.
Edward Said in his Orientalism shows the ways in which Western travelers and writers have often invented a representation of the Middle East that then gets substituted for Middle Eastern realities so powerfully that the realities can no longer even be seen by Westerners. Said cites travel accounts by eyewitnesses who report falsehoods that had already entered the literature. So these travelers let the representations over-rule what their own eyes saw.
Ok, Dan, you think, that’s great but can you prove it? Can you prove anything? And when does this ridiculously long post end?
I’ll be done soon. It’s been four horrible years, for God’s sake! Fortunately, I have collected some useful evidence. Dr. Rashid Khalidi visited Macalester in the fall of 2003, and I managed to snag him for an interview for the Mac Weekly. This interview, for me, answered many of the key questions. Did Iraq have to go so wrong? Did the neocons fabricate intelligence data to justify the war? Is there a connection between Douglas Feith and the settlers? It’s all there…
DF: You said in your talk regarding Iraq that “there are much worse days to come.” What leads you to this?
RK: Several things. The first is that the Administration purposely had too few soldiers for the post-war, leading directly to a chaotic situation which resulted in the destruction of the organs of state. The occupation thereafter took a number of decisions which alienated the entirety of the armed forces, and the Baathist technocrats, without whom it would be almost impossible to run a modern state in Iraq….
DF: What do you believe are the central principles of neo-conservativism? Do you believe it carries an outer moral ideology for mass consumption, and an elite truth for the few?
RK: Yeah, Seymour Hersh in his articles in the New Yorker about these people has argued that these are people who studied under Leo Strauss or under disciples of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, people like Wolfowitz himself, [Pentagon policymaker] Abram Shulsky and others, and that they came away with a sort of neo-Platonic view of a higher truth which they themselves had access, as distinguished from whatever it is you tell the masses to get them to go along.
There is a certain element of contempt in their attitude towards people, in the way in which they shamelessly manipulated falsehoods about Iraq, through Chalabi….
DF: A Frontline interview with Richard Perle was published with the documentary “Truth, War and Consequences.” He talked about the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which reviewed intelligence on Iraq prior to the war. Perle said the office was staffed by David Wurmser, another author of the Clean Break document. Perle says that the office “began to find links that nobody else had previously understood or recorded in a useful way.” Were the neo-cons turning their ideology into intelligence data, and putting that into the government?
RK: I can give you a short answer to that which is yes. Insofar as at least two of the key arguments that they adduced, the one having to do the connection between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, and the one having to do with unconventional weapons programs in Iraq, it is clear that the links or the things they had claimed to have found were non-existent. The wish was fathered to the reality. What they wanted was what they found.
It was not just the Office of Special Plans, or whatever. There are a lot of institutions in Washington that were devoted to putting this view forward. Among them, other parts of the bureaucracy, and the vice president’s national security staff….
We now know this stuff, with a few exceptions, to be completely and utterly false, just manufactured disinformation designed to direct the United States in a certain direction. Whether the neo-cons knew this or not is another question, but I believe Chalabi’s people knew it. I would be surprised if some of them didn’t know it.
And now, the presidential campaign. Early on, I was all over the place, distrustful of the candidates. I felt that the ‘Washington candidates’ like Kerry were compromised by the war. I wanted someone to wake this slumbering country, and somehow Howard Dean succeeded brilliantly in getting attention and articulating opposition to the war. I went to Iowa to check out the process there. I wrote a story about going to the unofficial kickoff of the Iowa caucus race, the Jefferson-Jackson dinner. Outside the hall, Howard Dean shook my hand, but didn’t look me in the eye. Most of the candidates spoke there, and I found Dean’s readiness to holler “You have the power,” amping up his huge section of the crowd, to be somewhat distasteful if not outright demagoguery.
In Iowa, all the candidates met a friendly audience, because they all spoke to the better side of America, and they each went for one of Bush’s exposed quarters. Such a spectacle as this veered into heights of drama so that for those moments, these folks under hardship and war could let each other know they still had friends in Washington, and they were part of a project bigger than themselves.
My admiration for the Dean campaign became a confidence in a stable new coalition, but Dean’s theatrics fit poorly at key moments. My perceptions of Edwards and Kerry as trustworthy and experienced leaders was boosted by Peter’s and Andrew’s thoughtful support. The basic trust of our southern neighbors gave me hope in these bleak days that America isn’t totally in disarray. Their support of each other led me to believe that the majority of the country—which never voted for Bush, or anyone—might still be reached in the wilderness.
I shied away from thinking about the Democratic race after that, but of course the process heated up and Dean faded after the summer. John Kerry, the frontrunner, found himself hamstrung by his Iraq position, so how could he find a way out of the bind and discredit the Bush administration?
Finally, when Kerry came to Macalester and I helped cover it for the Weekly, I had the opportunity to ask him a question as he was shaking hands on the way out. I asked, “Senator Kerry, do you believe that the intelligence distortions on Iraq should be treated as a criminal matter akin to the Iran-Contra affair? Do you believe that the investigation should be a criminal matter?”
Kerry said to me, “I have no evidence yet that it should be, but I think that we need a much more rapid and thorough investigation than the administration is currently pursuing. I think that this idea of doing it by 2005 is a complete election gimmick. It ought to be done in a matter of months, and that will determine what ought to be done.”
A classically hedged answer from Kerry, which wasn’t a surprise. However, I would say it was the wrong answer. His campaign could have challenged the “flip-flopper on the war” idea by telling the American people how the administration fabricated the WMD and terror intelligence on Iraq, and tricked well-meaning legislators like Edwards and himself into supporting the war with it. But Kerry’s people never concretely made it a part of the campaign, although late in the game Kerry finally said that Bush had “played games with intelligence.” People love a spy thriller: Kerry should have laid out how Chalabi and the gang faked it. Bush and the whole administration would have been better discredited. A real pity, a pity. But you can’t say I didn’t try.
Ok, well this has become more a ramble on the usual political topics than a digestion of what the subjective experience of living under this government has been like. Looking back on it, I have some regrets. I have a serious problem with trusting people and even being willing to spend time with them. Most days it was just chickenshit reluctance, but sometimes my political obsessions and paranoia got the better of me, even before I found out that all these military and government guys were looking at my website.
With regards to running this website, it has been an interesting experience. It has brought the CIA and Department of Homeland Security straight into my bedroom, but its also showed me how profoundly interconnected the Internet makes us. How else, besides lunch at Macalester, can you run into so many random people from so many different countries?
I can’t say that every decision I’ve made has been worth it. I know I didn’t do the most I could to challenge the war; I spent a lot of time in a muted, black and fearful moods. Not like the soft weight of clinical depression, this was a kind of burning flame I could see when I closed my eyes. I knew that the bastards were smashing the heritage of all human civilization when they invaded Iraq without protecting our first Artifacts.
As someone who refuses to believe in God, I have only the continuous stream of history to supply a foundation of meaning in our lives. That’s why I’ve found it so difficult to come to terms with the idea that these guys just didn’t give a damn. I am still terrified of the political forces they’ve unleashed.
One last thing that I haven't yet written about online: what it meant for me to visit the World Trade Center site in Manhattan. I will say that it simply makes it easier to think about once the icons become fixed in your concrete reality, instead of the fluid, alternately fixated and amnesiac media sea that we float in. Once the place is tied down in your own experience, it is much easier to understand. Power became easier to understand from we saw later: a young guy reading the Bill of Rights in a park got arrested right in front of us.
(This is the third-to-last picture I took in New York, during the protests outside Bush's speech. Click for larger version)
I remember standing on the stoop outside Wallace a few days before spring break in 2003. They had just clipped the fences between Kuwait and Iraq. This was a time of sociological anomie, I said to Alison and Dan Schned. There are no social norms here. In a way, it was a kind of freedom, and we treated it as such. We are still stuck in that anomie, even when Kerry wins tomorrow, as I’ve guaranteed myself he will.
Fortunately, I still have some glimmering bits of optimism left. When the sun rises on November Third, it will be a whole new world. I feel that I’ve gotten through the worst times now, and maybe, just maybe, the four-year malaise will finally be crushed by the evidence that my people have not yet abandoned hope.
Why have I been silent for a while here? It is not that I'm being lazy out in the Real World. Between four classes, a radio show, editing the newspaper and all the election stuff, it's really hard for me to get onto here and give you all something new to look at.
In no small part because I had a conversation with Michael Ledeen on Friday during Macalester's International Roundtable conference. I feel like my unbalanced little moral universe has totally spun off its bearings. Yet I now understand the neoconservative mindset much better than before. This is not comforting nor relaxing information to find out about. So I haven't been sure what to say about it yet. We will have something in the Mac Weekly about it later this week.
Still, the website gets hits from all over, and the nature of these global information networks still amazes me. And yet again, the government and the military are all over my shit.
I finally got around to looking at the HongPong.com access log, and I found that traffic is quite high right now, higher than my sputtering efforts here probably deserve.
So I have not looked at the site's traffic patterns for awhile. In the last week, there have been an average 356 requests for pages a day. That's not too bad. Traffic has tapered off a bit during September, but there is a lot of variability any given day, from 200 to 500 hits.
Somewhere among these visits came the Central Intelligence Agency, although apparently they were on a Google search for 'tower bridge terrorism.' I just ran this search and found an old post about my London trip up on the third results page, above MSNBC and National Review stories.
I wonder if the CIA's visit was just a spider logging information about terrorism. That wouldn't surprise me any more than CENTCOM's visit to my Iraq page this summer.
The Department of Homeland Security came by looking for "unedited iraqi prison photos and videos." I don't have those. But I feel safer already.
Someone from the State Department came in on Google via searching for "Dan Senor CPA Israel neo-con" and I didn't disappoint them! (that's the second time I've gotten a search critical of neoconservatives from the State Department!)
There also seems to be an uptick in the number of visitors from Israel, including the Tel Aviv University and Weizmann Institute of Science, as well as the mysterious barak.net.il.
A Palestinian newspaper searching for information about radio transmitters found something totally irrelevant here. This would mark the first connection to my site from the West Bank that I've detected. So the site projects some sort of minute, momentary effect on the situation. That's pretty sweet.
Other strange visitors include mail3.JohnKerry.com, a Russian dating site called your-ideal.com, a couple hits from Brandeis and Stanford. There are quite a few folks from the Netherlands and Pakistan this time, as well. I won't get into the country list now.
I got a couple hits from Army computers who came in on Google searched for "helicopter video kills" and "video of riot control," both of which connected with old stories. The Air Force and Navy have also been visiting on similar Google searches.
Another hit came over something called nipr.mil, described as
Nipr.mil is not a single domain a but a hush-hush web proxy that acts as a gateway for hundreds of U.S. military domains in order to hide their identities. It was established by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) in response to a memorandum (CM-5 1099, INFOCOM) issued in March 1999 by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling for "actions to be taken to increase the readiness posture for Information Warfare." "Uncontrolled Internet connections," the document says, "pose a significant and unacceptable threat to all Department of Defense information systems and operations.
Ok, good the information warfare people are here. Nice. Another Army hit came from a Google search for 'tactical humint team team leader' where surprisingly enough, I am on the first results page due to a blockquote in a story about Army deserters. Great, now some computer thinks my site has sympathy for deserters. I wonder how many bad juju points I get for that.
The prize for funniest scary government computer name goes to:
moses.radium.ncsc.mil
More interested government agencies these days include:
I just found this list that someone made about Big Brother computers watching them. It's roughly like that around here! Hurray Tech!!
Ok, I have tackled a major problem with the site, and finally closed the many old comment threads that were collecting incredible amounts of spam. Now no one can comment on anything older than 30 days. For those of you looking for a quick MySQL command to shut your old MovableType threads, go no further than:
update mt_entry set entry_allow_comments = 2 where
TO_DAYS(NOW()) - TO_DAYS(entry_created_on) >= 30;
This helpful information came from burningbird.net and 'a crank's progress.'
You probably don't notice these spams much, because they tend to get attached to the old stories. A poor old Edward Said quote, for example, got yet another one hooked to it today, making it a total of 46 over many months.
Some of them are really pretty funny. For example, "Ryan Thayer" said about a month ago on Said:
Back when I was a boy, it was 40 miles to everywhere, uphill both ways and it was always snowing.
prozac online "I have a friend who just got back from the Soviet Union, and told me the people there are hungry for information about the West. He was asked about many things, but I will give you two examples that are very revealing about life in the Soviet Union. The first question he was asked was if we had exploding television sets. You see, they have a problem with the picture tubes on color television sets, and many are exploding. They assumed we must be having problems with them too. The other question he was asked often was why the CIA had killed Samantha Smith, the little girl who visited the Soviet Union a few years ago; their propaganda is very effective.
-- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976
"Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 100
prozac
Think of it the open threads as sticky fibers, drifting through the electronic ether, and automated spam robots track them and continually affix worthless garbage. Unfortunately, now the site is saddled with thousands of garbage messages, many of them obscene. They are there to boost the spammer-site's rank on Google, when Google indexes my comments.
I feel bad that I let the problem go on for so long, but there is one cynical reason I let it continue. The 'artificial stimulation through spam' on the old comments makes Google think my site is more well-connected than it really is, and hence my ranking on search results rises. The spam gives a padding of links, awful as they might be. But do I want my site associated with Cialis? No, not really.
But when looking around for a way to quickly close all the old threads at once, I happened upon this rather threatening missive from one Adam Kalsey:
The arms race against comment spammers has been stepped up a notch. I received a flurry of spam that linked to entries on other blogs. Curious to see what that was all about, I clicked on one of the links, fully expecting to be redirected to porn or an online casino. I was surprised to see a discussion of patent law; this comment spam linked to a legitimate site.
The comment that I received was certainly spam — other than the odd link, it was the typical formula: the name was “online casinos,” fake generic email address, and a vapid comment. Certainly a Stanford law professor hadn’t actually sent the spam. There was another reason this spammer was promoting someone else’s blog entry.The blog entry in question was full of comment spam. In the last 3 months, this entry had accumulated thousands of spam links in the comments.
It appears the spammers have a new tactic in increasing their PageRank. They find a site that doesn’t delete comment spam and fill it with links. Then they boost the PR of that site by spamming it in blog comments. Once the spam-friendly’s site has in increased Google ranking, all those spammed links in their comments will get a boost in rank as well.
It’s rather clever, actually.
I’m leaving out a link to the spam-ridden blog entry on purpose. I don’t want to give the spammers the link they want. If you want to see the page in question, find Elizabeth Rader’s March 1, 2004 entry called “All rights reserved in Birth Control for Flatworms” on cyberlaw.stanford.edu.
If you are a site that is apathetic toward link spam, it is now time to choose a side. If you continue your apathy and allow comment spam links to linger on your site you are helping the spammers. Spam friendly sites will now be placed on the list of blacklisted domains that are not allowed to post comments on this site.
In the war on spam if you are not for us; if you choose to look the other way and allow spammers to use your site; if you feel that keeping your site free from spam is too much trouble — you are against us.
I didn't realize that the battle over my comment threads meant life and death to other people. I can understand where he's coming from, I just don't take this stuff so seriously.
It would take me hours to go through and strip the garbage off these old threads. Is the flora of false messages just a natural part of the Internet, albeit an obnoxious one, that still serves to organically drag the site further into the network, or is it just me losing a war with a bunch of unscrupulous shitheads?
I have set up MovableType on the new machine, and it's humming along nicely. I'm quite relieved to stop web serving from this computer and move it onto another server.
Once again, big ups to Dan Schned for finding this machine. Gotta keep plugging now... Please let me know if you find missing files, but I know there's still a big batch of them.
Now all functions should be quite a bit faster, including searches. Hurray!!
In a very fortunate turn, the Linux kernel compiling, bootloadery and installation all went off with only a few hitches, so now we are good to go with....
Bumm Bumm Bummmm...
That's right folks, Tarfin is a Dell Dimension 4400, a Pentium 4 operating at 1.60 gigahertz. The operating system is Gentoo Linux, development branch with the Linux 2.6.8-gentoo-r1 kernel.
The basic plan is to get PHP, MySQL and Apache 2 going, and we should be ready to roll. My associates are looking at which new types of content management/portal software we should use...
For those of you keeping score, you might recall that the much slower server was also called Tarfin. Well, for historical reasons, I am sticking with the name until I get a good fast server going. Which evidently happened this morning. YAY!
Ok, ok, ok... right now I am in front of the computer rather than getting social on my last Friday before the big trip east. Lame?? Yeah.... but I have a lot of stuff to do, and little time to do it in.
Essentially everything hinges on getting the Indian plumbing fixture catalog done before the end of the weekend, and there's about 300 images left to be placed, one way or another. That should take much of the weekend.
However, in a positive turn, I was ultimately able to procure the Dell Pentium 4 desktop machine that Dan Schned's brother had replaced with a shiny new Apple iBook G4. (There are a lot of Apple converts among the Schneds lately.)
This will cost me some money, however, as the cash is ultimately for Dan's new Apple laptop he's trying to get on Saturday. This Dell will cost me $80 to $100, depending on how reliable the hardware turns out to be. I already had to yank out the busted CD-RW drive because it was made by some horrible Taiwanese manufacturer called "Lite-On It Corp." However, another drive that I swapped in worked all right.
The aim of this flurry of technical activity is to get a new web server set up. After having installed Gentoo Linux on a crappy Pentium 2 borrowed from my upstairs neighbor Eric, I've decided that Gentoo is damn sweet, and the best thing to set up a good server on.
Now that we have a Pentium 4 @ 1.6 GHz, the Plot Can Advance.
But in truth, I can't spend all weekend fiddling with this machine, no matter how appealing to my geek tendencies it might be. Instead the everlasting plumbing catalog must be finished.
However, I might spend a good chunk of Saturday helping Nick Petersen move to his new digs in Minneapolis, on Huron Avenue by Interstate 94. BEATS THE HELL OUT OF WOODBURY, THAT'S FER SHERRR!
I want to post this satellite photograph of the enormous holy cemetery where the Marines have been ordered to crush the Iraqi fighters. This diagram, perhaps a little out of date, still shows how we are basically rushing the holy site... to prove what? What does it gain the United States of America to wipe out those guys, sitting, waiting around the all-important shrine of Ali. Is this some kind of windup for the big pitch into the apocalypse? Are the waves of bombers shocking and aweing like they were supposed to?
The al-Sadr / all-Shi'ite freakout continues as the Iranians get missiles and the aerial bombardment of ancient places escalates. How much can get crushed?? How quickly??
In this context I will place the appearance of the G. W. Bush in my hometown of Hudson about 12 hours from now. What will happen? Who knows? In any case, I will regard that spot as the place where this cruising hallucination of a government planted its flag in my space. Then an appearance at the Xcel Center.
Saw Norm Coleman on the Daily Show. Stewart was shocked, shocked that Norm was a nice Jewish Democrat from Brooklyn at some point. Coleman sported a nearly identical outfit to Stewart, which spurred a whole weird episode.
Anyhow I will round up quickly the main bits. See the anguished Iraqi blogs Baghdad Burning:
300+ dead in a matter of days in Najaf and Al Sadir City. Of course, they are all being called ‘insurgents’. The woman on tv wrapped in the abaya, lying sprawled in the middle of the street must have been one of them too. Several explosions rocked Baghdad today- some government employees were told not to go to work tomorrow.Raed in the Middle:So is this a part of the reconstruction effort promised to the Shi’a in the south of the country? Najaf is considered the holiest city in Iraq. It is visited by Shi’a from all over the world, and yet, during the last two days, it has seen a rain of bombs and shells from none other than the ‘saviors’ of the oppressed Shi’a- the Americans. So is this the ‘Sunni Triangle’ too? It’s déjà vu- corpses in the streets, people mourning their dead and dying and buildings up in flames. The images flash by on the television screen and it’s Falluja all over again. Twenty years from now who will be blamed for the mass graves being dug today?
We’re waiting again for some sort of condemnation. I, personally, never had faith in the American selected proxy government currently pretending to be in power- but for some reason, I keep thinking that any day now- any moment- one of the Puppets, Allawi for example, will make an appearance on television and condemn all the killing. One of them will get in front of a camera and announce his resignation or at the very least, his utter disgust, at the bombing, the burning and the killing of hundreds of Iraqis and call for an end to it… it’s a foolish hope, I know.
Raed also contributed to the Iraqi casualty database.
As I said once before, don’t tell someone to go to hell, unless u can really send him there.What are we gaining?
We, Americans and Arabs, what did we gain after all of those years of the war on terror?Thousands of bodies, and more hate.
What did we, Iraqis, gain after months of occupation and destruction?
A silly selected government? With a CIA agent as our PM and a Sheikh of a tribe as our president?Our fat Sheikh speaks English in his conferences…
What a great president…
Please, tell him that he is the president of Iraq, an Arabic country, even if he was taking his salary from what’s his name… bremer.When is this comedy play going to finish
I am not amused.
Then says Fred Kaplan: No Way Out:
No solutions in sightThis whole matter with the Pakistani Khan Al-Qaeda e-mail prisoner's name getting leaked by someone, and Condi saying such odd things about it, is just another example of this Administration's tendency to throw out very important information in an effort to gain some odd degree of spin that barely even helps their horrible situation. Juan Cole is trying to figure out how the terror alert might have led to the Khan leak, exactly. I don't know where to pass judgment, it's too messed up.
This is a terribly grim thing to say, but there might be no solution to the problem of Iraq. There might be nothing we can do to build a path to a stable, secure, let alone democratic regime. And there's no way we can just pull out without plunging the country, the region, and possibly beyond into still deeper disaster.Much as the Bush administration hoped otherwise, the fighting didn't stop—or so much as turn a corner—after sovereignty passed from the Coalition Provisional Authority to the new government of Iraq. Prime Minister Iyad Allawi made a fine speech on the occasion about dealing with the insurgency, especially the need to isolate the foreign jihadists from the homegrown rebels who simply don't like being occupied. But the distinction has turned out to be muddy, and it will remain so until Allawi demonstrates he deserves their loyalty—that is, until he proves that he's independent from his American benefactors and competent at restoring basic services.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military—the only force in Iraq remotely capable of keeping the country from falling apart—finds itself in a maddening situation where tactical victories yield strategic setbacks. The Marines could readily defeat the insurgents in Najaf, but only at the great risk of inflaming Shiites—and sparking still larger insurgencies—elsewhere. In the Sadr City section of Baghdad, as U.S. commanders acknowledge, practically every resident is an insurgent.
Know your ayatollahs. Quickly.
The Ancient city of Samarra. A Hotbed of violence. Really!?! That's what happens when you bomb a place.
For some reason this place is considered related to my site. It reminds me of mine but I don't understand the reason.
Paul commented that
That isn't what I meant to convey. The outlet in question was up on the pole in the alley. The puppy didn't do it. The actual term for the fried thing is the 'line tap,' I think, inside the box on the telephone that the cable connects to. And Comcast fixed it for free, because we pay them plenty as it is, so they better fix their own boxes when they get messed up.
So I'm paying Comcast to fix your puppy chewed outlet? Sheesh.Oh wait. I don't have Comcast.
Whatever. They're all the same.
Paul would be one of the people I took a class with this summer. He sports the blog Bush-haters.blogspot.com. Big ups to him for stopping by. Next time I'll clarify that we don't have too much electronic puppy sabotage going around here... at least so far.
Well, the site was down for much of the weekend, unfortunately, as something went fuzzy on Saturday afternoon, while I was in Utah. The Comcast guy came at about 9 this morning, and after all these rounds of repairs I was able to tell him a thing or two about the hookup here. There are crazy voltage problems somewhere along the line, between the outside of the house and the closet, that changed the signal voltage really negative, while now it's really positive.
Fortunately the problem was outside. In other news the upstairs people Eric and Kirsten have a new puppy named Mia or Mya. It is a fuzzy golden retriever a few weeks old and Eric let her out right as the cable guy was going outside and the puppy jumped at the cable guy and ran all over the place—including darting under the edge of the fence and into the alley. But she looped around the car and came back, moving in circles as the retrievers tend to do. Also teething a lot.
So in this instance, Comcast came first thing in the morning after I called and fixed it right away. Kudos to that! The problem was a crumbled jack, or something...
I will tell some tales of the wedding in Utah later...
Mordred has posted something about Donald Trump this morning so I suggest ya check it. Again I'll note that he's going to have a top link on the side here, but I haven't had the time to change my templates yet, and I guess I won't until I get back.
The wild documentary "Outfoxed" that even Kerry is mentioning finally arrived at my house yesterday and I haven't had time to watch it yet. It sounds awesome though.
Well well, it took one hell of a long time, but my summer video project is finally finished. I decided to call it 'Between the Lines' because that's where I'm always looking, true?
In the University lab right now, I am burning a total of four DVD copies. Turns out the first two that I made last night have a couple glitches in the menus that i didn't catch. I would also like to note that Apple's DVD Studio Pro, while a fairly powerful and intuitive program, is really annoying because it seems to always want to render (in this case called 'compiling' menus and 'muxing' tracks) every time I want to burn a copy. In other words, it is rendering out the whole thing, and then throwing it away every time. What the hell? It wastes like 20 minutes a disc.
On the other hand I may have been using the wrong command, 'Build' instead of 'Build/Format.' Right now it's doing the latter, so my hopes are higher.
So I am getting picked up at 3:30 today to fly out to Utah for my cousins' wedding. As I wait for the discs to burn, let me share some quick headlines that have been sitting around. I have a stack of about 30 links to post up. In the meantime here's a smaller collection of older tidbits:
Times feature on a woman who educates naive county officials on the madness of electronic ballot systems. What can I say? These things scare the hell out of me and I try not to think about it. Some terrorist plotting to disrupt the election? Who cares, we've got electronic machines that can eat votes by what, the millions?
In Iraq
The Times has switched its little "Iraq news theme" motif to "THE REACH OF WAR: THREATS AND RESPONSES" with scary looking narrow type. Hey, they gotta be selling papers....
This cemetary fighting in Najaf is some seriously creepy stuff. Can you imagine the chills on their spines as the Marines go into this ancient collection of Shi'ite graves? This type of situation is so incredibly combustible I don't even know what to say. And Robert Fisk (or was it Juan Cole?) said that the governor of the province is some unemployed old Iraqi they dragged out of Michigan. However, I think that the anger Iraqis feel about violating the sanctity of the cemetary is perhaps directed as much to Muqtada al -Sadr's guys that hunkered down there. I mean, it's not exactly a standard insurrection tactic. Then again, if you were a fanatical pre-millennialist you might want to bring about a more mythic Mahdi Army by fighting among the dead spirits. Or something like that. Like I said, chills on the neck.
A National Guardsman was ordered to look the other way at torturous conditions in an Iraqi detention center. Down the slippery slope...
Newsweek on Fallujah: "We Pray the Insurgents Will Achieve Victory."
Al Jazeera shut down in Iraq again?grouchy ministers. So is Jazeera just a Jihadi PR device? (I don't buy that; Control Room really put the idea away)
Elsewhere
Alternet on the vast right-wing Scaife conspiracy and more specifically his grudge against Teresa Heinz-Kerry.
"Afghanistan's Transition: Decentralization or Civil War?" on EurasiaNet. Indeed.
BAGnewsNotes has the best regular collection of parody images. Laughs every day.
Kerry has an interview in the Army newspaper Stars & Stripes, and it's really a pretty gutsy one. Nice work on both sides. But does this stuff, particularly about the global military base arrangement, mean Kerry is just going to play the military-industrial game yet again? (in fairness, Kerry is not a huge military pork enthusiast) He knows the jargon pretty well.
I found this random weird online science fiction story via a BlogAd. Just for something different.
Ok, so right now I am sitting in the computer lab at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities West Bank, where I took an electronic arts class. My video is rendering for what I hope will be the final time.
The process of making a DVD entails generating a huge MPEG-2 video file that DVD Studio Pro burns onto DVD-Rs. This process works best when the computer processes the whole video stream twice?or two-pass variable bit-rate encoding. It just started the second pass about 10 minutes ago.
In a delightful turn of events, the DVD recording of John Kerry's appearance at Macalester that I ordered from C-SPAN in the middle of last month finally showed up this morning. I brought it straight into the lab here and extracted my 15 seconds of C-SPAN fame for the project. This would be "Fair Use" if such a thing still exists.
Having just written about DVD decryption for my journalism law class, it was interesting to try the process again. The tools are easier than ever to find. The indispensible VersionTracker readily lists several programs that will hack DVD copyright protections for you, a gutsy step considering that not too long ago, those who linked to DeCSS got their butts kicked in court.
So in other words, to get DVD footage into a personal project on the Mac, it is basically a two-step process. First, extract the chapters you need with DVD2oneX, which works even if you haven't registered (and don't forget to get the audio as well). This will produce a decrypted .VOB file inside a VIDEO_TS folder on your hard drive. Then use the freeware MPEG Streamclip to turn the .VOB file into whatever format you need, in my case a digital video stream.
It took quite a bit of fiddling to find the programs and get it working, but the results are undeniable. Now I've really got the kicker for the end of my disc. Hurry up and render now!!!!!!
In other grand news,
HongPong.com has another blog... bumm bumm bumm...
That dark denizen of Wild Canyon, Mordred himself, i.e. Nick Petersen, is going to shower us with his irregularly formed thoughts on an intermittent basis. Or else he will take us to David Brooks-like heights of flowery mescal divinations.
The new blog is located at http://www.hongpong.com/mordred, and I will be setting up some new menus and update boxes so that Nick's latest is excerpted on the front page.
Nick also has a posting account to this page, as well, so he may yet add some wisdom to the front page, if he so chooses. And Nick has just informed me that his associate Leroy Babolian is about to make his first post.
Further down the road, I have secured the donation of one aged Dell Pentium 4/1.1GHz machine to act as a Linux server once I return from a family wedding after this weekend. We will probably institute something like TikiWiki, Scoop or PHP-Nuke for our global plot to thwart control of everything.
I will be gone from Wednesday to Sunday, up in the mountains above Salt Lake City, participating in a most modern ceremony. Should be fun.
Heh, I just ran my server logs for the first time in ages. Seems that my May-June logs went down the memory hole somewhere, which is too bad... The results for the past few weeks have been spectacular, despite my incredible laziness in keeping the site up.
Military surfers took their fiercest interest yet, as I got hits from korea.army.mil, as well as nipr.mil, a mysterious firewall developed by the DoD, as detailed in this blog. andrews.af.mil and eglin.af.mil, maxwell.af.mil, Andrews, Eglin and Maxwell Air Force bases I would presume, also stopped by. gate5-sandiego.nmci.navy.mil, the Navy Marine Corps Intranet, also came thru to the site. blackhawk.goodfellow.af.mil is the most badass sounding. Multiple mach blog surfing??
It looks like all three branches of the federal government, the Australian defense department and several bits of the military think that HongPong.com is just fantastic!! Considering I'm so lazy, that's one hell of an impact.
From further afield in the .mil we get even more interesting entries:
walker-cache.korea.army.mil
gateway5.osd.mil - Office of Secretary of Defense??!?!?
iern.disa.mil Defense Intelligence Services Agency
And the granddaddy hit of hits:
cache1.iraq.centcom.mil
Ladies and gentlemen, CENTCOM was here. Thank you.
denver-254.blm.gov - Bureau of Land Management?!
gov.calgary.ab.ca - Government of Calgary
housegate4.house.gov - The House is in the house.
gk-central-100.usps.gov - Post Office too. What agency isn't hanging out here?!?
gtwy.uscourts.gov - Ahh, the federal courts.
defence.gov.au - And the fine Australian defense department.
nhtsa.dot.gov - The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (they are watching my driving!)
ssa.gov - Social Security Administration
sherman.state.gov - State Department!!
I would like to pull a couple lines from my server logs.... evidence of a technological victory, if not a moral one. The entire contents of my Iraq page was downloaded by the CENTCOM Iraq computer...
[IP deleted] - - [15/Jul/2004:18:16:34 -0500] "GET /hp-archives/topics/iraq/index.html HTTP/1.1" 200 688128 "http://www.hongpong.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
Meanwhile, we determine that the person at the State Department ran a search for "Chalabi" and "Zell" back in April!
[IP deleted] - - [23/Apr/2004:14:25:19 -0500] "GET /hp-archives/000104.html HTTP/1.0" 200 11699 "http://www.google.com/search?q=chalabi+zell&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&start=10&sa=N" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
This is quite surprising, and I'm not sure how to feel about it. On the whole, I feel I've been brutally as honest as I could have been. I am glad that they got the page and looked at it... or didn't. Who knows? I have removed the IP numbers, despite their public nature, as I wouldn't want to anger the ECHELON system too much today.
As long as everyone is paying attention, I should quickly point out that Kat has an ethereal nightvision picture on the apparently rabbit-run blog fury & frost, itself a side project of Kat's sister at Glucose who helped develop the weather popup menu WeatherPop.
Here's to my growing community of national security readers!! Huzzah! If I'm not a particle in the grand conspiracy yet, at least I may influence some other particles...
Well, it has been a week of scarce updates, because I am in the midst of looking for jobs in the Twin Cities, a somewhat scarce proposition these days.
I was batting around the idea of perhaps starting a political Wiki project using the TikiWiki software I installed, but no sooner had I fired it up than I found one of my favorite sites, the DailyKos, had started their own Wiki, the dkosopedia. The interesting thing about Wikis is they promote a sort of merging, such that there is only one wikipedia, and only one disinfopedia on the Internet, although Wikis for, say, Linux support are also become more frequently used.
I entered some stuff into the dkosopedia, and I've been generally impressed by the progress they have made, as well as the lack of disagreement among writers so far. I put stuff on the Department of Defense and Minnesota, early forms such as they are.
So the dkosopedia would serve nicely in place of any attempted wiki project of my own so far. Some people I know have been batting around other ideas.
I'll throw this in before I wander off to do the job apps... good old John Dean observes the significance of Bush hiring a personal lawyer from outside the government on the Valerie Plame case. It doesn't look good for Bush at all on this count.
Crucial new humor comes from the Bush/ZombieReagan '04 campaign, rapidly evolving. My favorite poster: "Bush is safe. I only eat brains." Honestly, this precanned celebrity necro-worship is very boring, but at least it's only reached .6 PrincessDiDeaths in terms of syrupy wretchedness.
On the flip side I will offer Antiwar.com libertarian Justin Raimondo's praise of Reagan as someone who was smart enough to leave Lebanon and probably wouldn't have believed in the Patriot Act.
My favorite site the Agonist has switched to a Scoop engine like I used to have for their news digestion. Advance! Technology! As for other sites, gotta love Jesus' General
A little older news: the Americans have issued an arrest warrant for Ahmed Chalabi's aide Francis Brooke. Hurray. And the hunt for who leaked to Iran.
This was published a few days ago on Capitol hill Blue. I would take it with an enormous grain of salt, more as a reflection of the mood than actual journalism: "Bush's erratic behavior worries White House aides:"
President George W. Bush’s increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader’s state of mind.Probably satire, but damn accurate!In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as “enemies of the state.”
Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home.
“It reminds me of the Nixon days,” says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. “Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That’s the mood over there.”
In interviews with a number of White House staffers who were willing to talk off the record, a picture of an administration under siege has emerged, led by a man who declares his decisions to be “God’s will” and then tells aides to “fuck over” anyone they consider to be an opponent of the administration.
[.....]
God may also be the reason Attorney General John Ashcroft, the administration’s lightning rod because of his questionable actions that critics argue threatens freedoms granted by the Constitution, remains part of the power elite. West Wing staffers call Bush and Ashcroft “the Blues Brothers” because “they’re on a mission from God.”“The Attorney General is tight with the President because of religion,” says one aide. “They both believe any action is justifiable in the name of God.”
But the President who says he rules at the behest of God can also tongue-lash those he perceives as disloyal, calling them “fucking assholes” in front of other staff, berating one cabinet official in front of others and labeling anyone who disagrees with him “unpatriotic” or “anti-American.”
This week i have to try to find another job since I can't get enough hours randomly making websites to get by. There are some leads out there, but who knows? At least there's finally been a bump in the number of jobs available around here.
The new server I've dubbed tarfin, after a character I made up in an old story, is kind of a pokey beast, again an old Compaq PII/266. I am not sure if it is suitable for advanced php or Perl projects. Someone told me that 266s like these are sold for around $35, so that's the kind of power we're talking about. But there is a possibility of getting a better one, if I can find another job.
The Linux project has borne some results and led to new internet possibilities. In the software packages that Gentoo's software manager, portage, makes available, I found TikiWiki, a fairly advanced web system that would let me run multiple blogs, forums, a good links directory, and the all-important (and thus far very lacking) image galleries. However, the TikiWiki system is really oriented around Wikis, which are like a sort of digital whiteboard, with their own syntax that's much easier than HTML. "Wikiwiki" is the word for fast in Hawaiian, and wikis facilitate the rapid, collective collection and organization of information, including tables, hyperlinks, and pictures, in a very public and revolutionary way.
As a test, I installed in on the desktop computer, and you can interact with the test installation at http://tiki.hongpong.com . (Incidentally this whole thing showed me how to set up subdomains at the flick of a config file under hongpong.com... there's a lot that could be done with that.) I have set it up so that people don't even have to give it their real email address. Just register in two seconds and you're set.
The Wiki feature is quite easy to use. You can put stuff on any page you open up or create. Just press the edit tab, and hit "Wiki quick help" inside the edit window for the all-important wiki syntax. To get around the site, note that the :: double colon symbols are actually buttons you press to open up sub-menus. This software has so many nice features, and it's totally Free. It is the product of a serious, sustained community development and documentation effort.
If you want to see some excellent wikis, I highly recommend the great free internet encyclopedia Wikipedia as well as the funky Disinfopedia, which is:
a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests.Wikis: extensible and public. Yes.
So again, the ultimate result of this whole new thing will be something unique and totally different from hongpong.com... to another internet domain????????
I saw Eyedea & Abilities with Dan Schned and Jitla last night. That was an excellent show, and it let out just as the T-Wolves beat the Lakers. We went storming around the packed downtown bars, and it was really one hell of a time.
Today, inside during this endless rain, I am bringing together the elements of the new server "tarfin", poking around, adding mod_perl to Apache2 (a slightly tricky proposition) and helping move some furniture around for people, and cleaning the room a little bit.
Oddly enough in the last 3 days two people have each given me CRT monitors—three, if you include the one that Eric let me use with the Compaq—and now I am in a world of Cathode Ray riches.
Then again, we should take a reality check here and look at a recent piece in the Times:
Studies show that gregarious, well-connected people actually lost friends, and experienced symptoms of loneliness and depression, after joining discussion groups and other activities. People who communicated with disembodied strangers online found the experience empty and emotionally frustrating but were nonetheless seduced by the novelty of the new medium. As Prof. Robert Kraut, a Carnegie Mellon researcher, told me recently, such people allowed low-quality relationships developed in virtual reality to replace higher-quality relationships in the real world.Wisconsin's senator Russ Feingold has put together an advertising campaign on the blogs. My dad recently sent me a Feingold 2004 bumper sticker, which has a certain geographic symmetry across the car bumper from my Wellstone! sticker.
........
Marcus is a child of the Net, where everyone has a pseudonym, telling a story makes it true, and adolescents create older, cooler, more socially powerful selves any time they wish. The ability to slip easily into a new, false self is tailor-made for emotionally fragile adolescents, who can consider a bout of acne or a few excess pounds an unbearable tragedy.But teenagers who spend much of their lives hunched over computer screens miss the socializing, the real-world experience that would allow them to leave adolescence behind and grow into adulthood. These vital experiences, like much else, are simply not available in a virtual form.
For those of you deeply saddened by the lack of news tidbits, well, I have been keeping looser tabs on the news than usual, but I have been saving a lot of news bookmarks, and you can expect that things will be parsed again more closely this coming week.
It took a great deal of hacking around and starting over from scratch a couple times, but the old beast of a Compaq is finally up, running, and correctly talking to its ethernet card. Now I am updating Gentoo with the slick command
emerge sync
which you have to admit sounds nice. Then Apache2 and Php will get on there. it will be nice. Then it will be the new Hongpong.com, if the perl execution is fast enough.
Emmerich's disaster movie 'The Day After Tomorrow' has opened today at the Grandview next door. There are people, I think from MoveOn.org, hanging around talking with people.
Sometimes I ask people coming out of the movies what they think. And sometimes as we chillin on the front porch we overhear their opinions anyway. This one may be interesting.
In news of the server, Jess gave me some old floppy disks and I am making the boot disk necessary right now. The Linux box may be ready to roll tomorrow. Unfortunately, I have to erase the whole HD in order to get the stupid Compaq diagnostic partition on there. Ugh. Stay tuned on that.
My upstairs neighbor Eric let me take an old Compaq Pentium II for this project. The older one worked, but it was incredibly slow. The Compaq, a Deskpro 4000MMX @ 220 MHz, handles Linux a lot faster than the Pentium I.
Unfortunately Compaq was a crappy company that put very important BIOS and boot stuff on a weird little hard drive partition instead of the motherboard, like any sane PC manufacturer. I erased said partition and then installed Linux, but the damn thing won't boot up. Fortunately I found the floppy boot disks to replace it (or else this one). Such is the PC world—bad operating systems and bad hardware setups. The plot continues...
The Gentoo kernel has finished compiling. It took more than an hour. Now, to install the Gentoo distro filez....
Updates:
Now I am thinking about getting Perl, PHP and Apache v.2 onto this beast, which is slow as hell at compiling just about anything. This site has info about PHP and Apache2.
After talking with Paulo last night, I decided to try to install Gentoo Linux on the old Pentium I/200 MHz machine that Alana gave me. After some finagling, the Ethernet card finally started working, which was the main problem when I tried to install Slackware last time.
Now I can ping to my heart's content!
If this works, I will be moving hongpong.com over to the little old machine shortly. That will get the server stuff off my computer, a great relief.
Ok then, here is the bizarre spam that fills up old stories. They started posting this garbage on my birthday!!
On the other hand, maybe it is all a joke played on me...
So here is the spam, preserved for all time, but stripped of its links. My favorite:
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What can I say? It's weird.
UPDATE:Seems that this thread really attracts the spam. I will leave the barnacles as a record of techno garbage, but close the thread...
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Since I've been off on my little Civ III vacation, the site got a few comments. Unfortunately, these days there are computer spiders that go all over blogs like mine to place advertisements for sex and drugs in old comment threads. These spam ads are inserted not so that people see them immediately, but so that search engines like Google will associate the search term of, say, 'phentermine,' with the shady website selling prescription drugs.
I delete these annoying messages but they keep coming. I have a partial solution: ban the IP number that they come from. Unfortunately, these guys must have multiple computers or proxies. It is annoying, but fortunately there are only about 2 or 3 a week.
The other solution is to turn off the commenting of old posts, since most of the spam is hidden there. However, that would prevent people from adding useful comments to old posts.
I take nice photos from baghdad everyday !I sent an email to Asmar last night, and indeed, here is a link to "Picture of Baghdad." It's pretty cool.
please link to my blog !
http://baghdad-pictures.blogspot.com/
it is so nice ! but nobody visits it
please link to it NOW !
Posted by: asmar ahmad at May 20, 2004 01:46 PM
Right now there is a photo of a classic ancient ziggurat and various other Babylonian things of Iraq, along with photos of Baghdad, American occupation troops, shrines and mosques, "flowers from our garden," neighborhoods, a column of smoke from the assassination of the IGC leader, a woman named Faiza in a shop, and an awesome minaret in the ancient city of Samarra that looks like the tower of Babel.
There are some pictures from Baghdad in the 1980s, along with snaps of various Baghdad buildings, and the . There are also photos by Faiza and Raed "in the middle" Jarrar.
I just ran my web server logs and yet again the numbers show that the site is still fairly popular and still catching hits from military (.mil) computers, as well. (specifically Navy computers!)
The current list of different countries includes the Netherlands, Canada, Japan, UK, France, Australia, Poland, Sweden, Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland, Turkey, Macedonia, Portugal, Hungary, Belgium, Argentina, Italy, Austria, South Africa, Singapore, Mexico, Spain, Ukraine, Brazil, Sri Lanka, Israel, Czech Republic, Denmark, Russia, Thailand, Lithuania, Seychelles and Hong Kong.
Right here you can see the full access report, now including referrers.
Not all of these different countries appeared since the last log analysis. However traffic is still high, and April 23rd was my busiest day so far, with 547 page requests. The Googlebot really likes to visit, as well.
Now that the referrers are being listed, billmon.org, where I leave comments sometimes, as well as Technorati provide a lot of incoming hits. Technorati is a somewhat arrogant kind of rate-yourself sort of enterprise that I decided to get a listing on. Through the Technorati service, I can see that my site is listed on at least 19 other sites on the Internet, a much higher number than I thought. Primarily the sites list me on the 'blogroll' as a DailyKos blogger, and they tend to call me 'Hong Pong.' Oh well... network effects on the increase!
Thank you to everyone who continues visiting! I'll keep trying to improve the functions and features of the site, and I hope everyone likes that the front page now loads much more quickly!
This should help everyone. i am reducing the size of this lengthy front page and my much beloved Danview banner image. I am also going to throw in some nifty info boxes... it will be nice. Maybe.
Also there will finally be a page for images. Hurrah!
From now on I will make entries branch off into the "continue reading" fork at a much shorter length. That helps keep things much neater in front, and will be helped by the new additions. That will also encourage the typical visitors to look at a wider breadth of things...
I have also made some good strides cleaning up my bedroom. Alison has worked very hard to make the house immaculate for the final slide into finals. Even though my room is still challenging and hostile at least its kind of coming together......... Really it is.
I hope everyone voted in the MCSG elections today. That's the nice thing about Macalester: you get to vote to oppose forms of domination like capitalism and heteronormativity.* I would like to see St. Thomas and St. Kate's dare to offer such a resolution...
I have made some serious changes in the inner workings of the site, as some may have noticed. Now, when you go to an archive entry like the classic "Battle for Mesopotamia," there are 'breadcrumbs' that lead you back up the hierarchy of days / months / years, although I haven't developed a year index yet.
Also, the URLs for archive entries are now different, such that each entry is down inside nested year, month and day folders, while the actual entry has its title in the URL, such as http://www.hongpong.com/hp-archives/2003/03/26/the_battle_for_mesop.html . I have a nice little yellow box that tells which topics have been deemed relevant to the post.
I have made index pages for each category work a little better, and there are now month archives, but there is a strange glitch in there that I haven't fixed (with the blue "posted XY date" bit appearing intermittently).
I have also improved the master archive listings, but they are not quite as good as I would like.
For now, I am leaving all the old log entries' HTML files in place, so that search engines and people who (anyone?) might have linked here will still be able to access it. However these pages can no longer be reached from the site normally.
So in other words, it is still progressing, even though what I changed this week was really the nut of what seemed incomplete to me. Also the About Me page is nice but relatively uninformative and pointless. I would really appreciate any suggestions, so email or instant message me with your ideas.
I am also hoping to get some kind of aesthetically pleasing photo / image gallery system that actually integrates with the site working, but I haven't found good stuff to do it with yet.
I am also planning to put together a little floating box at the top of the front page with my key links for following the news, and highlighting various special features on the site that have vanished into the archives.
Here is a nice site with really excellent layout and a lot of tips: Bryan Bell. He has a link today to a huge batch of great OS X icons representing all different types of Mac hardware. Time to get a 512K hard drive icon.
*Yes, the computer's spell checker does not understand what 'heteronormativity' is.
I have not checked the web traffic level here in quite some time. I have known this site to have high traffic at times, especially after I put up my protest pictures back in the day, and got links from several places.
However, I haven't run an analysis on the numbers since this version of the site started in January. My logfiles may have a chunk missing around March 12, although there were technical problems when I went to London that knocked HongPong.com off for a while. It wouldn't be a surprise that traffic fell when I went on break, in any case.
date #pages #reqs Mbytes Mar/29/04 91 180 4.77 Mar/30/04 258 317 6.15 Mar/31/04 66 155 4.04 Apr/ 1/04 196 524 15.08 Apr/ 2/04 248 428 15.43
I have published the web traffic analysis produced by the fine free tool Analog. I used to use third-party counters but then I got tired of their whole method. Although there is nothing particularly wrong with them, I prefer to do it myself.
The report shows that there have been at least a few hits from all over the place, including Turkey, Israel, Japan, Hong Kong and Mexico. Also the most popular day was March 30, followed by April 2nd. (I have filtered out log entries from accessing at my own computer as well as the one I use at work)
I did not have referrer logging turned on, which is key to determining which sites the traffic comes from. I have turned it on now. I suspect most of those hits came from DailyKos postings I made, considering that the biggest waves in years past have usually come from a link in other forum comments.
It is a promising graph right now, but as you can see it has tapered off for a few days. Time to engineer some hits. w00p w00p!
Also you might care to note that both military and government computers have been here. That's interesting.
#pages %pages #reqs %reqs Mbytes %bytes domain
1318 44.77% 2272 35.76% 47.02 32.61% .com (Commercial)
594 20.18% 1299 20.44% 36.28 25.16% [unresolved numerical addresses]
327 11.11% 1082 17.03% 27.24 18.89% .net (Networks)
159 5.40% 826 13.00% 13.60 9.43% .edu (US Higher Education)
338 11.48% 347 5.46% 4.29 2.97% .org (Non Profit Making Organizations)
11 0.37% 53 0.83% 3.10 2.15% .nl (Netherlands)
68 2.31% 75 1.18% 1.87 1.30% .jp (Japan)
2 0.07% 24 0.38% 1.50 1.04% .fr (France)
32 1.09% 33 0.52% 1.41 0.98% .pl (Poland)
11 0.37% 45 0.71% 1.34 0.93% .ca (Canada)
7 0.24% 38 0.60% 1.27 0.88% .au (Australia)
15 0.51% 49 0.77% 1.04 0.72% .uk (United Kingdom)
2 0.07% 15 0.24% 0.64 0.44% .de (Germany)
13 0.44% 48 0.76% 0.60 0.41% .nz (New Zealand)
6 0.20% 27 0.42% 0.59 0.41% .mil (US Military)
3 0.10% 8 0.13% 0.39 0.27% .pt (Portugal)
4 0.14% 16 0.25% 0.28 0.20% .se (Sweden)
3 0.10% 16 0.25% 0.28 0.20% .ch (Switzerland)
5 0.17% 13 0.20% 0.25 0.18% .hu (Hungary)
2 0.07% 2 0.03% 0.17 0.12% .mx (Mexico)
2 0.07% 5 0.08% 0.15 0.11% .tr (Turkey)
3 0.10% 14 0.22% 0.15 0.10% .gov (US Government)
3 0.10% 9 0.14% 0.15 0.10% .sg (Singapore)
3 0.10% 13 0.20% 0.15 0.10% .us (United States)
1 0.03% 1 0.02% 0.13 0.09% .it (Italy)
1 0.03% 1 0.02% 0.09 0.07% .lk (Sri Lanka)
1 0.03% 1 0.02% 0.05 0.04% .cz (Czech Republic)
3 0.10% 9 0.14% 0.05 0.03% .be (Belgium)
1 0.03% 4 0.06% 0.03 0.02% .il (Israel)
1 0.03% 4 0.06% 0.02 0.01% .lt (Lithuania)
1 0.03% 1 0.02% 0.02 0.01% .hk (Hong Kong)
3 0.10% 3 0.05% 0.01 0.01% .sc (Seychelles)
A special thanks to the friends who've been coming since 2000, and to everyone else who finds my strange little project interesting.
I am going into the time of massive final projects now, so very soon I will not have much time at all to improve the functions of the site. If anyone has suggestions please let me know via comments below or email! Thanks again!!
HongPong.com traffic report (full)
Unfortunately, the evil programs roaming the Internet, spreading pointless, obscene garbage, have finally found my site and inserted about a dozen comments advertising penis pills and that sort of garbage into old stories.
Fortunately, there weren't too many, and I was able to delete them and ban the four IP numbers they were coming from. Is more garbage on the way? Certainly.
Sorry about the lack of updates since I rolled in from O'Hare at 11:55 PM on Friday. Comcast gave our cable modem a new IP number on Thursday which caused HongPong.com to get disconnected.
It should be working now, but it's a very annoying problem. Comcast has rather pokey DNS servers, so even when I fix my number, it still takes them forever to update their system. Right now I am using the University of Minnesota's fine Domain Name Server at IP 128.101.101.101 to get at my own damn site!
If you ever want to use a different DNS server than your Internet Service Provider's, go to your network control panel or network system preferences and set "DNS server" to 128.101.101.101. Dang nabbit!
I've been wrapping up all kinds of things before break. This is shaping up to be a fantastic trip. Here are some scattered results of today:
After class today I helped Dan Schned work on the material he is putting together for the Hiawatha Line program, where he interns this semester. He has very exciting giant orthographic aerial photo composites of the Minneapolis-Bloomington route and all sorts of info on the planned corridor developments. I really like to see all these new development plans up close. If it works, then Minneapolis will start to grow up again, not further out.
Unfortunately, they were on schedule to open most of the light rail line in April, but the transit strike prevents drivers from training and the cars from being tested sufficiently. This really makes it hard for the LRT people to keep anything going.
With some time to waste this afternoon, I drove into Minneapolis to look at the rail line, along with a potential extension into the U of M. Both these places would benefit greatly from improved access. I went up to see the VA Hospital stop, as well. I'm not sure if people will enjoy riding in the big tunnel under the airport, though.
This evening, David has been over here adjusting his great artwork for the living room. Now he's adding colored chalk on some of the characters. I will post a photo of this when it's finally completed.
Arun is truly an iconic mack daddy of our times. That is all I can say.
I haven't done much reading about what the hell to do in London. Brits have advised me to ask at the pub.
Also I may try to go somewhere else for a day like Paris or Amsterdam. Wouldn't that be nice?
Sadly I won't have a digital camera to document things. I'll get a PhotoCD made, though.
I am probably going to stay up really late again tonight to adjust myself towards London time--I mean GMT.
Everything got pretty risky there for a little while, and many bits of the system were fouled up, including important Perl files. I decided to install OS X fresh on the machine, and in turn rebuild all the site's MySQL hookups, Perl modules and everything. Fortunately it somehow only took about 90 minutes to do all this. Is it flawless? I'm not sure, but it should work.
On Friday I am flying off to England. How sweet.
There has been a ton of news lately about the spoofed Iraq intelligence I love so dearly. Finally, Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski (Ret) has written her definitive expose on what she witnessed in the Pentagon and around the Office of Special Plans. Everything here reinforced what I have been saying all along. I am really happy that the Kwiatkowski is living up to the exacting standards of personal integrity that all armed services people should strive for, and not enough have in this time of lies.
I have heard about her story for quite some time, and she has been referred to in a few stories I've linked to. A key passage from "The Lie Factory" which Senator Kennedy recently repeated on the Senate floor:
"It wasn't intelligence-it was propaganda," Kwiatkowski says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials-including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February-that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.
This is some weird stuff. I found a whole bunch of system files with lots of garbage. This would affect compiling programs, which could explain why the compiler's been weird all along. Compiler said:
/usr/include/mach/exception_types.h:61:39: invalid suffix "s" on integer constant
/usr/include/mach/exception_types.h:61: error: stray '\10' in program
/usr/include/mach/exception_types.h:61:47: invalid suffix "R" on integer constant
/usr/include/mach/exception_types.h:61: error: stray '\352' in program
Meanwhile inside exception_types.h:
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000ÜìÇ â?? ìÑôô0213ÜìÑõúâ?¡©ÜìÑôô¬©
makÜìÑôôCASIOÜìÑôô0112ÜìÑõúâ?¡©ÜìÑ
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02020006.JPGÜìâ??ìÑõúâ?¤•ÇJPEGÜìâ?¥ìÑììÑñíìòìÑõúùù-ÜÜÜ
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02020006.JPGÜìÇ Â¶â?ìÇ Â¶€ìÇ Â¶â?¹ìÑıíÅâ? appl scnrRGB XYZ ” acspAPPL appl Ë?÷ ”-appl rXYZ gXYZ bXYZ 0 wtpt D chad X ,rTRC Ñ gTRC Ñ bTRC Ñ desc î =cprt ‘ @dscm Ë?XYZ tK >
ÀXYZ Zs ¨¶ &XYZ ( W â?3XYZ ÛR Å?sf32 B ï¬Ë?Ë?Û& í ËëË?Ë?Ë?¢Ë?Ë?Ë£ â?¹ ¿lcurv 3 desc Camera RGB
Profile Camera RGB Profile text Copyright 2003 Apple Computer Inc., all rights reserved.mluc
Things inside /usr/include/mach are the "hooks" for compiled programs to "include" to talk to the computer correctly. If garbled, they won't work. This means I may have to go scanning the directory system to see if it is writing garbage all over. Ohhh dear. Site may go down tonight for checking this stuff.
There are also some indicators (CASIO, JPEG) that this stuff is related to the digital camera. There were some strange buffer overflows when the camera's image card was attached to my computer, so were things being written all over the drive? How alarming.
I am eagerly looking forward to spring break this year. For the first time, I'll fly over the big pond to Europe and hang out with Nick Petersen in London for a week. That's this Friday.
During that time I'll leave the site turned on, and I'll probably find some time to post back to here, but it can't be frequent.
This week, I have several mid-term exams and a giant group paper to contend with, so I can't spend a great deal of time writing here.
On the plus side, I realized that the Apache server which comes with OS X has a built-in Perl module (mod_perl), but deactivated. The Perl module runs the site's Perl code much more quickly than a server without the module. To turn it on I just had to enable it in the configuration files and restart the server. *Bingo*, just like that my site's dynamic stuff runs about 3x-4x faster. It was really necessary, and I only put it off because I was too busy and I thought I would have to go through the mess of recompiling Apache. So far I am using Apple's default Apache server with no problems.
This week I am experimenting with a slick program called ecto which allows me to write entries without using a web browser.
As far as the news is concerned, those new Bush ads are just so marvellous I don't really need to add anything. But imagine if Lincoln or FDR had tried to exploit similar images. This site is run by a legal professor with a spectacular sense of humor. (via the DKos)
The NY Times is running a huge Kerry op-ed blitz today. Maureen Dowd is clearly sugar-coating a nice image of a candidate with rich interests. A DLC totem suggests that "reform" should be Kerry's word of the campaign. A Clinton-Gore poll guru says that Kerry can take Bush on all kinds of issues.
For now, however, only 40 percent of voters think the country is headed in the right direction. According to nearly all public polls, Mr. Kerry is the preferred choice for president, and that prospect may well keep Mr. Kerry from focusing on the larger choice before America. That would be a shame, because voters would respond to such a challenge.The choice is between an America inspired by John F. Kennedy and one shaped by Ronald Reagan. When the alternatives are framed this way, Americans choose the Kennedy vision by a striking 53 percent to 41 percent. It brings increased support for Democrats among voters from across the political spectrum — in small towns and rural areas, in older blue-collar communities, among low-wage and unmarried women as well as young voters and women with a college degree.
Rather than simply criticizing specific policies of the Bush administration, Mr. Kerry should emphasize the worldview it represents. Mr. Bush favors tax cuts for business and the wealthy as the best way to bring about prosperity. He heralds individualism as the key to a healthy community. In his tenure America has retreated at home before our shared problems, but advanced alone abroad. If Mr. Kerry challenges this worldview, Mr. Bush will be forced to defend it.
For more election news, Electablog is pretty darn good.
There is some weird stuff going on in Afghanistan, as the long-awaited Spring Offensive between the allies and the Taliboid forces (al-Qaeda types, probably ISI people, who knows?) springs into action. Bin Laden may have narrowly avoided a Pakistani raid. US snipers killed a bunch of "suspected Taliban."
I never thought the Republicans were 31337 hax0rs, but apparently they can steal filez and r00t a judicial computer system better than anyone thought. Their head judicial aide apparently helped steal around 4,670 secret Democratic documents. As the trolls on Fox News have been commanded to point out, many memos indicated the D's were working with outside groups to keep conservatives off judicial panels for specific cases, a hoorrrible, oh so hoorrible, infringement of judicial power. Or something like that.
I don't quite understand what D's were legitimately doing, except considering impact the judges will have on cases!!! Bad Democrats! Thinking about the effect of judges!! Bad!
Kerry beats Bush by a few points, 49-43, in Florida!!! Time to purge the voter rolls again!
Many Palestinians killed, including 4 children, in massive Gaza raids supposedly designed to draw militants out. What the hell is the point? Apparently Sharon's credibility with the abused Israeli public is at a new low, so this, like many Sharon initiatives, probably has a wag-the-dog logic to it. There is also word that the Israelis may have been asked by the Bush administration to avoid withdrawing from Gaza before the elections because of the potential instability. Uhm, Israeli occupation ==Bush political power? What? This is worth following.
Finally, at long, long last, the pervasive sense of the everlasting nightmare has softened. Yet now we have VP speculations. Bill Richardson or John Edwards seem good right now. Alison caught the McLaughlin Group this morning and McLaughlin predicted that the search for VP would go for ethnic, not regional, balance. We could do worse than Richardson, a popular southwestern Hispanic governor with tons of executive and international experience. Or on SNL, the skilled Darrell Hammond as Clinton put forth his own VP candidacy. He asked how awesome it would be to have him around again with even less responsibility. He said could put the Vice back in Vice President, although Cheney's done pretty well by that measure.
Ok, so now I will say it. My optimism about the outcome of the election and the future of the country has finally shot above 50%.
The glass is indeed half full.
The word is that Richard Perle got tossed on his butt from the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, supposedly for calling for the firing of the Pentagon's in-house spy agency's chief. The agency, the DIA or Defense Intelligence Agency, is somewhat more towards the "rational" side of intelligence gathering. That is, they were not the ones principally responsible for silly WMD intelligence. Yet Perle blames them for messing it up.
Too much for Rummy, finally at long last.
Pat Buchanan predicted on the McLaughlin group on Sunday morning that he would not be the last kicked out before the election. Ahh Pat.
Aside from that I should explain why I often miss posting Wednesdays on the site. The problem is that I have creative writing from 7 to 10, and of course last week I had to cover the Kerry rally and write the story, which took hours.
Midterms are right in my face here. It's going to be a hella lot of work. I covered the caucus story this week. it was altogether messy but interesting, as Kucinich overwhelmingly won our precinct, and we found out Edwards was dropping out while filling out ballots.
I am going to visit NickP in London in a week!! This is so damn cool, I've never been across the big ocean. Really. (Cheng has just gone the other way to Tokyo. He may make contact one of these days)
Thats about all I have the energy left about right now. Night.
Right now my computer is compiling special image processing software called ImageMagick, which allows my MovableType website engine to generate thumbnails of pictures that I would put in an online gallery. Galleries, it still seems, are not foolproof to set up in MT. The compiler is bitching out right now... fortunately this site offers some help.
Additionally I am planning to add an instant website style switcher, so that you can change colors and text at the touch of a button.
One particular website with a nice gallery setup is AdamPolselli.com. This site also features an instant switcher (at top of right-hand bar) much like I would use.
Another good gallery is "Rob T"'s photo gallery of his military service in the USAF over Iraq and Afghanistan. I think the larger site containing Rob's pics works very differently than mine ever would, but it's still a good setup (and an incredible array of pictures).
The damn compiler is still complaining about something obscure. Arggh! (I may have to install FINK)
Warning: /System/Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/libperl.a not found
If you're going to build a static perl binary, make sure perl is installed
otherwise ignore this warning
Writing Makefile.aperl for Image::Magick
make -f Makefile.aperl PerlMagick
.......
"-I/System/Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE" perlmain.c
make[3]: *** No rule to make target `/System/Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/libperl.a', needed by `PerlMagick'. Stop.
make[2]: *** [PerlMagick] Error 2
make[1]: *** [PerlMagick/PerlMagick] Error 2
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
I fixed the links on the right-hand side. They're now mostly the same as the old HongPong.com. Now that they're there, I'll go on to make some modifications. I have also been digging up more information on how to modify MovableType in various ways, so that I can have a nice image gallery and improved archive organization, as well as possibly some dynamic RSS (news push) content. It's been quite a week.
While looking around at some blogs considered the most well-designed, I see that a little attention to the delicate structure of style sheets can go a long way. Also there are some very well-designed galleries out there. There are news feed type setups. This is a journalist who has been around Iraq some-and evidently uses the same software as me. here is a small community blog of law students. I thought this site had a simple, attractive gallery setup. (Japanese Apple store is very cool)
The site Etherfarm has a very good gallery but also seems pretentious.
(sing along hour: I was wasting awaaaayyy)
I fixed up the bar at right so that you can see posts listed by their categories, as well as the "master archive" page. A lot more could be done to make the individual archives more well-organized. That's in progress.
You can see all the posts dropped into categories. To clarify how all this stuff works, when I make a post entry, I choose the category I'd like it in. A crucial advantage of this software--compared with the old system--is that I can place a single post under multiple categories, like Minnesota and Music or Neo-Cons and Iraq. The problem is that most of my old posts don't have more than one category entered, and the interface to add another category onto a post is quite cumbersome. (So a post referencing Iraq and Neo-Cons might only be listed under Iraq) It would almost be faster to do it by talking to the database directly. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or observations about how I should set up the archives.
The good news is that last night I finally set some time aside to extract all the postings from the old HongPong.com and drop them into this new system, MovableType.
For those interested in the technicalities of it, I had the whole Scoop database as a giant XML file, with all the headlines, dates and encoded HTML. I needed to figure out how to use a technology called XLST to convert the XML into HTML, and from there copy it into MovableType. That took a while, but it worked. I also added some plug-ins, including the much-needed photo album plugins.
The old junker computer still isn't working and I think I'll have to ditch it.
So now all the old postings from the HongPong.com of yore are available. Coming soon, the huge library of protest photos and other such images. Also, I may have to fish out the older Thwart.net archives and add those, too. Soon there will be category listings on the right hand side, and some richer images.
To look at the HongPong.com archives, use the links at right.
I got a cheap CompUSA PCI Ethernet card for the potential server. Unfortunately, there is some kind of hellish problem which prevents the card from getting an IRQ number correctly. This is not my area of expertise and it is God damned annoying. I've got 14 days to get it working, before the card would have to be returned. It seems to be an issue with BIOS settings, a problem particularly since the BIOS is 8 years old. I may have to get a BIOS upgrade or something. Perhaps what I need is a PC guru...
It seems that Comcast Internet access throughout the neighborhood has been made quite flaky by the snowstorms last night. Andy over at Shadow Falls tells us that theirs is messed up too. (still flurries coming down) The Internet keeps coming up and down. Damn, this is annoying!!!!
I am sad to say that this old computer is not going to work, because it has some kind of horrible technology called an "ISA plug-n-play network card" Linux has a hell of a time using the device. It is theoretically possible to get these things going but it would be pretty ugly, and the very old BIOS also seems bad. This is the problem with PCs, the commodity parts aren't good. Granted, this junker was very old and messed up to begin, but I like to recycle such things if I get ahold of them. Maybe a PCI Ethernet card could fit in it. Those are cheap.
Also the weird IBM monitor quietly makes sparking noises every few seconds.
The problem is that whenever we get harsh weather the cable modem connection seems to get dropped. It's happened several times in the last few days. Cheng says that his has been dropping in Lake Elmo too.
Just now I got the chunky old PC's Slackware Linux installation to boot up correctly. Hooray, I thought it might be impossible!! (Dumb LILO settings)
Alana has an old generic PC that she's letting me erase and install Linux onto. It is a 200 MHz Pentium I which had Windows 95 on it, but didn't even boot. I just tried to get Slackware Linux running on it. It installs, but doesn't seem to start up correctly. Also it has very old BIOS on it, which might make it impossible for Linux to boot unless I hazard an upgrade. These sorts of things are mostly alien to me, from a lifetime of avoiding fiddling with PCs. Heck, it might not even be Y2K compatible. But if it works, it will be a good enough server.
I found some good-looking software called MTPhotoGallery, which will let arrange the picture galleries nicely. That can probably be installed tomorrow. In the meantime this is Lucy and the Severances enjoying a very chilly night's pucho. It was so cold that the couch fabric crunched when Lucy hopped on it. (I did a little Photoshop pokin' to emphasize the yellow hat)
On this early snowy Friday morning I have finally decided to start HongPong.com again, now that I can devote some attention to it, and some key software is finally en route. This is the fifth redesign of HongPong.com, by my count. I will have to recount here the many tribulations and evolutions my websites have had since the old days...
I have new server software called MovableType, which replaces the old system, Scoop. My big goals this time:
To the amorphous blob representing the audience of this site, everyone that has ever swung through here a couple times, or has been with me for the long ride, thanks for coming around. Your support has always been appreciated!
In an effort to fill up more space on the page I will describe this new system I'm setting up, and why it's better. The old Scoop system which was my site until last November had some things that never worked out well. The layout was made of complicated tables and a lot of bad FONT tags, plus everything pieced together with tough Perl code. And it required Apache with a special Perl module which took a lot of memory and slowed my computer. Besides that, it was not very searchable and I couldn't make up categories as I went along, so I wouldn't write about things that didnt go in categories. The headline was too way too big, which made me avoid putting things down more often. Overall a lot of flaws pile up.
I would like to point out that forcing people to register just to make comments is very annoying and I will never do that garbage again. Again, a Scoop problem.
So now there is this new software which is widely used in blogs all over the place called MovableType, and it is nice and flexible. There are plenty of plug-ins and anyone can say anything without bother.
this software is pretty sophisticated but it doesn't require the computer to process Perl every time someone visits. All the pages are generated HTML. Comments may not work too fast.
Now I've made some nice background images for texture but it looks like its maybe a little bit too patchy just yet.
I am putting together what is finally by my reckoning the fifth version of HongPong.com. This one will be more fluid and entertaining than before. The software, including updating my Perl system, took only about an hour and a half. Time for bed. Customizations tomorrow!!
I am making some progress on this new website idea but it has been slow going with finals. Fortunately that ends Wednesday. Unfortunately I have a TERM PAPER about THE WAR that has been rather disrupted. And it's also due Wednesday.
Here is a screenshot chunk of what I've put together for HongPong.com so far. This information will be strung together and turned into nice chunks of HTML information. I just found out how to import the WHOLE old HongPong.com right into it, but it will be tricky. These notes haven't been filled in for the most part, but pieces are getting added as I come across them. Think of it as sort of a topical filing cabinet with links and groups. Or something... It hasn't totally come together, that's for sure. And hurray, the Neo-cons will all be bright red!
So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sacking of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives – a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq – were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment were set ablaze.Amid the ashes of Iraqi history, I found a file blowing in the wind outside: pages of handwritten letters between the court of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who started the Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia, and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad. And the Americans did nothing.... I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history.
But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?
When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning – there were flames 100 feet high bursting from the windows – I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that "this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire". I gave the map location, the precise name – in Arabic and English – I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn't an American at the scene – and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.
But what is the next move for Saddam? Even in a cell the man still has a power, in no small part the ability, and the will, to tell all about how the Reagan administration helped him with all those well-demonized episodes of genocide and mayhem. There is that. But there is also Osama bin Laden about, and he's no bit player right now. As they cheered everywhere from FOX News to the foxholes to the streets of Iraq, I posted this comment about everyone's favorite evildoer. Yes, Saddam's capture helps things come together, perhaps. But who else benefits?
Also I am already putting together a sort of node-type database with some software that I just got. It has a ton of potential for online information, but I'm not sure what will come of it.
One of the more famous blogs, DailyKos, switched from regular blog software to Scoop, the program which ran my site. In this way I was sort of a pioneer for adapting Scoop to bloggery, though of course little came of it.
Besides the technical stuff, things are pretty good at school. It is very different living off campus now. On the one hand, moving out of the tiny Dupre Hall single, only about 7 feet wide, into a nice duplex-apartment with The Norman feels marvelous. But this has to be balanced with all the extra cold between classes and home. Perhaps its a symptom of getting older but this year we focus on classes a lot more. Eh.. Tis worth it...
Also there are several people who I've failed to catch up with on e-mail. Rest assured it is not because I hate you, I've just been too busy to keep up with things.
This semester the most useful thing I've done (for the Mac Weekly) is interview Rashid Khalidi, a professor at Columbia and director of their Middle East Institute. Yet the interview itself is just the thing which rags on me, because he laid out all too clearly how bad things are becoming. These excerpts below are interesting, but be sure to read the whole thing:
That lays out where we are at today in this grand unpredictable flame of ours. It's just as well, in the sense that we are all learning plenty about human nature, answering otherwise hypothetical questions. To an atheist, religious warfare makes a hell of a problem to understand. Atheists in the foxhole? Even one of the godless can recognize when things have truly gone to Hell.
They just shot down a Chinook outsite Fallujah, fully loaded with soldiers about to cycle home for a break. Unbelievable how the principal lie of the war unfolds into all this tragedy.
There is an Atmosphere lyric I go by these days (from "The Wind").
"It is not certain. Proceed with caution. Fear is no longer an option."
There is the thing we are all counting on: that it's going to improve. Yes, yes it will, I have a feeling that around a year from now there will be a burden lifted from our tired shoulders. Its still a democracy, even if a wild one. Thumbs up, kiddos!
Well the site's been off for about a week. Last Thursday some geniuses from Comcast were doing stuff in the alley and there was a bunch of static, and then our TV signal was fuzzy and the cable modem wouldn't connect. So I'm assuming it was because of those guys... Yesterday they come and fix it by installing a new line into my house and it's all fine... There's a Comcast double-header at my house today, as they are going to install a real phone line. My cell phone doesn't work so hot at the house, so this is nice. I will post my phone number later. My job is going really well, and hm, I should get back to work now. :)
Final exam time is wrapping up here at Macalester, and people are either stressed to their limits or finished. It's been a hell of a semester and no one has yet sized up what really happened. That could take a while...
I'm living in a sweet apartment this summer and next year, on Grand Ave. I'm going to move in over this weekend of the 10th-12th, and we are getting cable modem service installed the 13th hopefully. So the site might be off for a couple days, but it wil return. Hopefully there should be some video goodies online next week. I've had zero time to keep up with it, but that will change. Now to get through this last work...
I will be cut off from my phone number on Monday, so the only way to reach me will be by A) email B) stopping by 1834 Grand Ave., adjacent to the Grandview movie theater by Grand & Fairview Aves. I'm probably getting a cell phone this weekend, but who knows what's going to happen...
Ok, it only took three months, but I have finally gotten it together to redo hongpong.com to permit people to get involved. So you can get registered and submit stuff...
There is something wrong. There is a war about to go underway which will kill thousands without just cause. People must object to the unilateral, hasty, and unjustified conflict. We have to get the word out and the Internet is an exceedingly valuable tool for this. There should be several news and opinion links a day as we go forward into what Thomas Friedman is already calling "World War III."
Of course not everyone agrees right now, and I want to get all perspectives published, so if you feel religious genocide or seizing the oilfields is yet again the answer, or lots of Communism, please send in your news and views. Pro-war stuff and indeed pro-war people are welcome here.
When submitting stories, the site software can automatically generate hyperlinks and HTML for you, so you don't need to know how to code. Just select "Auto Format" from the (HTML Format) popup menu. ( More about auto-format)
Dan -- March 9 2003.
