Xen and The Art of Free Speech

Aside from the laughable idea of “militantly” supporting anything with a blog post, Miguel simply noted that these people exist, have written a book, and will be doing the speaking-tour-thing near him. Does he agree with the contents? (shakes eight-ball) Signs point to Yes. Is he free to do so? Also yes. Are you free […]

Fool Me Once

For anyone who wants to handle dynamic DNS (either in conjunction with DHCPd or not) with Bind and absolutely hates the verbosity of nsupdate, here’s a shell script which handles the common-cases of adding and removing: Forward/reverse entries CNAMEs The command line arguments are -k (privkey) -a (action) -h (hostname) -i (ipaddr) -c (cname) -d […]

More of Thomas Sowell

I’m with Robert Love: end those damned agricultural subsidies, and lower the prices of food. After all, it’s not like the U.S. has a tragic history with over-farming and both economic and ecolological destruction, all following the one-two punch of “market-oriented” economic policies and a hitherto unprecedented heat wave. In that vein, here’s Mr. Sowell […]

Train Of The Damned

[I’ll probably end up delivering this onstage either tomorrow or next week.] It’s 9:28 PM Commuter train of the damned Slaving away for machines Which do our thinking for us Which is what this is all about… Evolution… It’s 9:32 PM Commuter train of the damned Soon to be boarding A motly crew of the […]

What You Do Not Know

(from, via, via, via, via) Please copy the flash animation to your site if you’re embedding this (right-click, “Save Target As…” or “Save Link as…”).

Truer Words

It’s pretty depressing how true this is: The American public may have articulated frustration with the course of events in Iraq, but this feeling is derived more from a frustration at being defeated than from any moral outrage over getting involved in a war that didn’t need to be fought in the first place. Scott […]

Germany Tries Rumsfeld

Glenn Greenwald had a post up a couple weeks ago decrying Germany for bringing charges against Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes. I think some points are required: If the German government wants to implicate itself in the prosecution of alleged war criminals, they are certainly able to do so. The fact that the crime did […]

Sanity Has Left The Building

It’s actually pretty amazing how crazy TV has gotten since I stopped watching it. Obviously, I can’t know for certain how crazy it is, since I don’t own one, but I read bloggers talk about ABC putting on shows about “how soon is the apocalypse,” and supposedly some CNN anchor was recycling bullshit from WorldNetDaily […]

Dying Democracy and Dehumanization

Last Wednesday night, I was calling friends to try and do a little street theater downtown Chicago, in the hopes of providing a particularly gritty infomercial and generating pressure on the Senate to not pass S.3930 (aka the “Just Confess to Something Act of 2006″). It appears I wasn’t the only one with the same […]

Ding

The second-biggest Shia spiritual leader (who, perfectly enough, I’ve never heard of) was quoted on NPR today from something he said last Friday (2006-09-22) as saying that there is no “conflict of civilizations”, only a “conflict of ignorance”. Which is as near to correct as any statement yet on the current West vs. Mid-East “blow […]

Oh. My. God.

Blackwater USA is currently attempting to market a clothing line. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who has ever actually seen Head Office all the way through. Allow me some reminiscing… [insert wavy flashback lines here] Jane Caldwell: Don’t fall for it, Jack. Jack Issel: Fall for what? Jane Caldwell: For the lie we […]

Suckered

Yep, I was fooled. No homoerotic missile-on-missile action. No death from above. The paranoid, cynical, haven’t-slept-in-a-week side of me thinks the stories were planted as part of a last-ditch effort to frighten the North Korean government into calling off the test (for technical reasons, naturally). Of course, that side of me also thought they were […]

Kabuki Dance

Friday, on the way home from work, I figured the U.S. would try to shoot down the North Korean missile test. The NPR story mentioned that possible outcome, and they wouldn’t do so unless one of their sources mentioned it. Further, since the sources for this story would come from the foreign policy establishment, AKA […]

Feel The Power

So according to the people at Protein Wisdom, the reason the U.S. is losing the war in Iraq (ironically enough the same people said the U.S. was winning until a fellow conservative clued them in to the fact it wasn’t) is the anti-war protesters. Aside from the obvious “stab-in-the-back” parallels, there’s a more constructive interpretation […]