War in the postseason

After reading the front pages of Robb’s weblog I’ve decided that his take on the war is much like mine. It seems to be pretty evenly divided – half the people I talk to think we shouldn’t be there and it is all upsetting and sad and wrong and a waste of human lives on both sides; the other half talk about it like it is a playoff game, complete with following yardage stats and cheering on big plays.

The Monster.com Effect

In cleaning out a mailbox I found an old link from Darin about the monster.com effect, John Robb’s supposition that increased information flow will allow informed consumers to keep prices down through competition while the same allows them to keep wage growth strong, leading to a shift where corporations make less via profits and individuals get more actual wealth. I’m not sure I buy it but I actually would like it if his scenario plays out this way.

Bush Says Dance

Democrat Underground did a parody on April 1st, Bush gives Iraqis 48 hours to dance in the streets. I wish this parody was, like, farther from the truth. Here is a sample paragraph, taken from a fake Bush monologue.

We have pursued the liberation of Iraq at great cost to America in terms of lives and treasure and as yet the Iraqi people have thus far refused to welcome us in the manner that Richard Perle and William Kristol have assured me that they would. We’ve shocked. We’ve awed. We’ve knocked down their buildings and blown up those little marketplaces that they shop in. We’ve even tried a decapitation. We done the things that all good liberators do and not only have these ungrateful people refused to overthrow Saddam they haven’t danced, they haven’t put any rose petals in the streets. Nothing. In fact they’ve even been shooting back at us and thus further delaying the hour of their liberation. I don’t know what else we could have done to win these people over but the time for patience is running out. I’m tired of trying to win the hearts and minds of people who refuse to see that a ten year occupation by the infidel is a good deal for them, for their children and for a sizable number of American corporations.

Debian and Crashes

Hmmm, I seem to be making headway understanding the instability of my Linux box. Now that I have Debian on there, when it crashed today it had something about a frame overrun in eth0 sitting on the desktop. Maybe when I was thinking all the issues were being caused by the hard drive, they were really the NIC? Dunno. I have another one I can put in this box and yank out the other if it seems like a reasonable thing to do.

Razor2 Errors

I still cannot for the life of me figure out why SpamAssassin won’t use the Razor2 stuff. It is there, I can see it and the chunk of code throwing the error saying that “Razor2::Client::Agent has not been loaded” only gets called if in fact it has been loaded. I’m reduced to running the spamassassin script in debug mode and stepping through to try to understand what the hell it is doing.

Trying out Debian

After a day of work, I’m getting back to business on the Linux box. I was getting too worried that the instability and disk corruptions were going to result in me losing a lot of work, so I put another different hard drive in the box. I didn’t wipe the old one and have it mounted so that I can copy things off of it, but it isn’t doing any serious work anymore. Eventually I might make the entirety of the old hard drive become the /tmp directory or something funky like that.

Since I had to reinstall from scratch I tried something different and went with Debian rather than the Red Hat I typically use. It’s taking a little getting used to, but overall seems fine. The only real issue I’m having is figuring out how to get SpamAssassin and Razor integrated again. Each is on the box and each works by itself, but the SA refuses to recognize that Razor is installed. I do have my spam stuff and my fetchmail and popfile and all that fun stuff up and running. That’s the beauty of redoing a convoluted configuration like I have – redoing takes a fraction of the time of doing it, because you
already know a lot of the gotchas.

Night Vision

Oh dear god, it begins. Rumsfeld has already began making overtures about how Syria is also the enemy since they are supplying the Iraqis with night-vision goggles. However, according to Reuters US general says unaware of Iraqi night-goggle use. Interestingly enough I saw this Reuters story in news.google.com and see that it has been picked up in Asia, but as yet no US news sources have carried it. Hmmm, that’s a little suspicious. Our leaders in the Bush regime are implicating other countries as enemies on shaky or fabricated evidence and the reportage is only carried outside the country. My hope against hope is that the information age defies all these old school attempts to conceal lies and partial truths. Perhaps these efforts to do Vietnam style massaging of the facts will fail when their are so many alternate sources of information. Then again, look how it has gone so far.

The Language of War

The PR war continues unabated. There are a number of PhD theses just waiting to be written about how this war is being represented to the American people. Six months ago, how often did you hear the word “regime” in an average week? Once, twice, never? That’s now a code word with “regime change” because, hey, who could support something as sinister sounding as a “regime?” Try this for an experiment: every time you talk about our current government, use the word regime and see how sinister it sounds. “Senior Bush regime officials say that the war might take all summer.” “The first 11 days of the war have brought back with a vengeance the deep splits that have long existed within the Bush regime and the Republican Party over policy toward Iraq.” I find myself in awe over and over again that such crude Public Relations 101 tactics have been so overwhelmingly effective on the American people, who are in general uncritical of what their government tells them.