dannyman.toldme.com

If you have any curiosity about the box-cutter kid, I recommend this excellent AP item.

The kid attends a Quaker college, which has inculcated him with an ethic of civil disobedience. After he snuck these items on to the planes, he sent e-mail to TSA:

The e-mail provided details of where the plastic bags were hidden — right down to the exact dates and flight numbers — and even provided Heatwole’s name and telephone number.

“The e-mail author also stated that he was aware his actions were against the law and that he was aware of the potential consequences for his actions, and that his actions were an ‘act of civil disobedience with the aim of improving public safety for the air-traveling public.'”

In a mere five weeks his information was forwarded to the FBI, when Southwest Airlines discovered the contraband. Remember September 11, when we missed the impending attack because our national law enforcement bureaucracies failed to share information? Thank goodness we created more new bureaucracies that don’t share information!

The government’s response?

Deputy TSA Administrator Stephen McHale: “Amateur testing of our systems do not show us in any way our flaws. We know where the vulnerabilities are and we are testing them … This does not help.”

If they know where the vulnerabilities are, why does it take them five weeks to figure out that an “amateur” has gamed the system? It would seem that what is not helpful is that a bright college student can so easily embarrass our “security.”

/danny

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Overhead on WBEZ, during their pledge drive, just now:

“Maybe you’re driving the kids home from school and you’re sitting in the mini-van, just pull out your cell phone and call in your pledge of support!”

Because if you’re trying to pilot a mini-van around a school, with excited kids in the back, through rush-hour traffic, this is an ideal time to dig into your purse to find your credit card number to read off over the phone.

/danny

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From: Danny Howard <dannyman@toldme.com>
To: baylisa-chat
Subject: Re: misquotes & sidesteps (and hiding behind podiums)

[A response to some random flame-fest.]

If I may misquote here:

Friends, colleagues, SysAdmins, lend me your eyes;
I come to bury this thread, not to praise it.
The sniping that we post gets archived;
The good oft trimmed from attribution;
So let it be with LISA. Danny, unemployed;
Tells you that LISA hath noble purpose;
‘Tis so, we should be nice to each other;
With fortune shall LISA answer for it
Here, by your involvement and the rest —
For the poster is an honorable man;
So are we all, honorable men —
And women — here, to help each other;
In our professional capacities.
We ought to say of one another, that;
“You are my friend, faithful and just to me,”
And I say each of us is ambitious;
And each member an honorable man —
Or woman — who hath paid their annual
Dues, and thus does LISA’s coffer fill:
Does this LISA seem professional?
When the poor have cried for advice, some
hath flamed: Our trade should be made of
Sterner stuff. Yet we are professionals;
Each of us honorable men — and women.
I write not to insult the poster’s skill,
But here I am to post what I do know.
You all do love your trade: not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to reply again;
Without flames — reserved for brutish beasts;
That we have not lost our reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in our shared careers, with LISA;
And I must pause ’til it come back to me.

My apologies to Mr. Shakespeare.

/danny

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They are emptying our dumpster. This is normally done on Thursday, except that they’ve missed the past few weeks due to the garbage haulers’ strike. The strike is now over and it would seem our dumpster in now emptied. Yay!

It has been too long without a camera, so as soon as I had a few dollars in the bank, I ordered a new one. My Canon S400 with a 128MB memory card should arrive tomorrow. I also have a number of 8×10 prints of some of my pictures on the way, which I have a modest ambition to frame and try to sell. I’ve also got my license nearly cleared out, the car is in the shop to fix up all its annoying quirks, not to mention the front brakes, and I’m hitting Boston next week so Yayoi can attend an international job fair and we can both explore this ancient American city together. Life aint all that bad.

Meanwhile, my aggregator project is coming along. If you have any interest in aggregators, combined with any interest in testing software that is being actively developed you are welcome to check out http://dannyman.toldme.com/scratch/toldme/?mode=myfeeds and provide some feedback.

Before I work on that more, I have to compose a cover letter for a gig in Luxembourg.

/danny

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Oct 12  Bahama Natives discover Columbus of Europe lost on their shores, 1492

Surprise is the key element.

I once parroted Monty Python at The Pizza Place. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

Jorge, a middle-aged man with wry wit and a little boy, who was waiting tables in California because of age discrimination in Mexico, reminded me that “The Indians do.”

I thought a moment, and offered that if the Indians had, they might still be around. He smiled and agreed.

Of course, in Mexico, the Indians are definitely still around. Unlike the English settlers, the Spanish came as conquerors. A mighty empire felled by a fairly small group of pale men, armed with little more than ambitious zeal and some mighty impressive technology. What they neglected to bring in their quest for gold was a supply of pale women.

So, in Mexico, most people are still Indian, even if most of them are also European. And they’re migrating North to fill the vacuum left by all the Indian blood that we have squeezed nearly dry from our own nation. In my heart, they are entirely welcome. Our Great American Melting Pot still tastes somewhat bland, and our friends from south of the border are bringing their hot sauce to help us out.

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Those who live in California ought to be grateful, in that when their government is seized in a coup d’etat, the replacement is not a military general, but a Hollywood actor who has played one. At least the rest of the government is still in the hands of Democrats.

Perhaps the classic Stallone-Snipes-Bullock movie “Demolition Man” may be more than just a great movie, but also prophecy. In this movie, Stallone plays a cop who gets framed for a crime, and cryogenically frozen until such a time as he can be reformed by society. He is thawed in to a future in which Los Angeles and San Diego have merged in to a single administrative region named San Angeles, sex is entirely virtual, and Arnold Schwarzenegger has served at least one term as president, thanks to the sixty-second amendment, which was passed specifically for him.

It turns out that in July, Orrin Hatch sponsored an amendment to the Constitution, stipulating that, “a person who is a citizen of the United States, who has been for 20 years a citizen of the United States, and who is otherwise eligible to the Office of President, is not ineligible to that Office by reason of not being a native born citizen of the United States.”

Those who live outside California ought to watch out, for they may be next; Schwarzenegger became a citizen in 1983. I think this might be a good time to invest in Taco Bell, as this was the only restaurant to have survived the Franchise Wars that took place while Stallone’s character was playing popsicle.

/danny

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Joe Conason points to a press conference in February, 2001, in which Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed no significant weapons of mass destruction:

“He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.”

I am happy to see the administration discredited, since a year and a half after he claimed that Iraq was not a threat, Colin Powell was in front of the U.N. with pictures explaining all the secret weapons Saddam had developed and was ready to deploy right away, and claiming that we have even more secret evidence that we can not share, but it is imperative to go to war now. Personally, I never bought the WMD argument – it sounded to me like the classic American strategy of creating the perception of an imminent enemy threat as a pretext for military aggression. I am unhappy that the administration damaged American credibility with this strategy.

On the other hand, I like to look at the larger statement, as Powell was addressing a question about sanctions:

“… the sanctions exist — not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein’s ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime’s ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction.“

I agree with the idea that we needed to invade Iraq to free the Iraqi people of their tyrant. Because, much more than other tyrants, we helped make him strong, and unlike other tyrants, we had seen fit to wage war against him, even if I did not agree with Desert Storm.

Wouldn’t it have been nice, if instead of making incredulous claims about WMD, which will likely fall flat, we had enough humility to admit that sanctions weren’t all that effective – that the Iraqi people were being hurt by sanctions, and whether Saddam was actually acquiring WMD or not, they were not an effective tool at keeping his hands off of imported materials? That would have been nice. Sure, the world would question our motives – America is in it for the oil, and to shore up domestic support for the President who seeks a distraction from a recession and his “War on Terror” – but we get that flak anyway. But … wouldn’t it have been nice if our justification for war was to free Arab people from the tyrant that we had helped to install, instead of our claims that the secular Arab tyrant was part and parcel of a wacko Muslim fundamentalist conspiracy typical of brown-skinned men with beards and turbans? I think Arabs might have appreciated the distinction.

I guess you could try and blame Powell’s insistence on a U.N. mandate for this dishonesty. I believe some conservative pundits have. If you go before the Security Council and say “we want to invade Iraq to rid that nation’s people of a bad man” the French, with their economic ties to the bad man, will laugh at you even harder than if your threaten them with fairy-tales about Anthrax and Dirty Bombs. Maybe we lied to the world in a futile attempt to get the U.N. on our side. Why would we do that? Because we weren’t confident in our ability to do such a large and protracted peace-keeping mission after the invasion? Because we were too cheap to shoulder the full financial burden of reconstruction? Given the strain that our military is under today, perhaps this was a laudible strategy, except that it failed.

Being an empire isn’t easy.

/danny

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Getting over a nastily sneezy cold. It’s raining outside but the weather was nice when I did my shopping today. I got deoderant at Walgreens and then browsed through the newest, largest Dollar Store among the handful already occupying the strip-mall at Howard and Western. They had a strict $1 price for each item, so there were no price tags, except for a few places where there were say, two for $1 or four for $1 items. Nevertheless, I overheard somebody ask an employee how much an item cost. They had some fairly nice things in there. I left the store with the impression of a garage sale gone full-out retail.

Then I checked out the clothing/shoe store next door, run by a taciturn Korean couple. I was the only customer there. I need some shoes, see? So, I looked in the back where they had the nice shoes, and it was all PIMP SHOES … exotic colors and textures, including snakeskin. Then there were pimp threads, and even more post-pimp gangsta-chic styles. Too bad I’m not feelin’ so pimpin’ but it is nice to know where I can go. I headed over to the Centrella on Touhy, stopping by Biewald’s used car lot, where I saw a maroon 1979 Buick LeSabre for a few grand. It looked nice from ten feet away – new tires, shiny chrome rims. Close up you could see some less-than-perfect paint touch-ups, and a minor ding here and there. All the same, it looked sharp. Pimpin’.

Over to Centrella for Orange Juice, bananas, sweet corn, peaches, and back home with my fruits and vegetables to work on The Next Big Thing on a broadband connection that doesn’t suck. That’s sweet. I’m interviewing with a company in Mountain View as well, and if things continue going well, they’ll fly me out in a few weeks. I’m feeling more and more motivated to slip back in to a slighty-more-stable techy lifestyle. This opens the very real possibility that I’ll find myself living in the Silicon Valley again, and I’ll have to shift from digging on dollar stores, Buicks, and the mom and pop grocery to finding new things to dig in my new home. If it is back to Mountain View I’ll at least have a grip on the neighborhood.

Oh, and today I received my latest unemployment check, and the back-dated claim for July, so now I can afford to get my license out of hock. Sweet!

Peace!
/danny

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Last night I was flipping channels and I caught the excellent war movie “Tora! Tora! Tora!” which was the code sent to Japanese fighters that their mission to bomb Pearl Harbor was to proceed as planned. This is a fantastic movie, which tells the story well from both sides. The Japanese soldiers and the American soldiers are portrayed with equal measures of humanity, in their respective languages. There is even a sense of humor, when one famous Japanese pilot responds to a subordinate that of course the new Zero is even better than the Messerschmitt – he has personally seen the latter in combat over London!

Most of the movie is the grueling preparations leading up to the attack – intercepted Japanese communications, confusion in the American chain of command, ambivalence about how the Japanese should handle America and Japanese commanders voicing their opinions on the wisdom of engaging the sleeping giant. There’s one guy the Japanese nick-named Gandhi as he meditated long and hard in seclusion upon the perfection of the planning for Pearl Harbor.

My favorite scene was just before the attack itself, where the Japanese pilots were heartened by the beautiful image of the morning sun exploding in to light rays from behind a cloud – like the flag of their empire – certainly a good sign! I’ve long been fond of sun rays poking out from clouds, but I’ve never thought to connect them with the Japanese Imperial Flag.

As they make Oahu the first plane they encounter is an older bi-plane, with a woman who is training a kid to fly in the cold morning conditions. They suddenly see squadrons of war planes rushing past them, look around in excitement, and realize that they are surrounded by a foreign armada. “Oh shit,” I could hear the woman thinking, as I wondered if the Japanese would take her down as their first, easiest kill.

In this first, infamous sneak-attack on American territory, the warriors charge proudly past the civilians, their bullets and bombs reserved for the bodies of soldiers and warships. All the same, the woman wasn’t taking any chances, she barrel-rolled away from the Zeros in to the empty air over her home town. This brought me a weird moment of vertigo, as civilian airplanes in the space over our cities were precisely the target of that second, infamous sneak-attack on American territory.

Two years and two weeks ago.

/danny

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An excerpt from an article on Salon.com:

In an interview with the Miami Herald, he seemed to endorse a moratorium on the death penalty, because there has been “a lot of discrimination and a lot of injustice,” and suggested cases be reviewed with DNA evidence. But when the reporters asked if he’d back a halt to executions, they noted, “Clark sat up straight. ‘Stop. Stop,’ he said. ‘I promised I wasn’t going to take a strong position.’”

In programmer speak, Clark threw an exception when presented with a case he was not yet programmed for. Something like:
ERROR: candidates.democratic.clark: deathPenalty.moratorium not yet defined

The other great catch-phrase from this article refers to the “top-down groundswell” behind Clark … if Howard Dean is from the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party, Wesley Clark is from the fully re-programmable wing of the democratic party that yields us charismatic automatons like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Joseph Lieberman. Clark may have the charisma of Clinton to pull it off against his charismatic, right-wing-programmed nemesis, George Bush. All the same, I have a lot of nostalgia for man versus machine … I’d just as soon send Dean in there against Bush and see him inexplicably flailed by Bush’s mighty buzz-saw pincers and lose a little bit more of my faith in America than to see him toppled by the mightier android.

But then I’d also like to just see Bush gone. At any rate, it’ll be interesting to see what Clark looks like a few revisions from now. It’s too bad he’s still in Alpha.

/danny

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Proof-reading for Yayoi:

man == people
man == person with penis
men == people with penises
Be careful if you are talking about one man, mankind, or penis people.

So, if I do end up teaching English overseas, I’ll at least be somewhat prepared. Gotta remember to look around for a TEFL Cert program. :)

/danny

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So, I’m going to recommend an article published on Salon.com, because not only did it cause me to laugh out loud, but because it also scored a place for John Kerry in my fortunes file:

The swagger of a president saying ‘Bring ’em on’ will never bring peace. Pride is no substitute for protecting our young men and women in uniform. Half the names on the Vietnam Memorial are there because of pride — because of a president who refused to admit he was wrong.

John Kerry

I heard George’s “bring ’em on” on the radio and it made me cringe, and hope that they were somehow targetting that for American consumption and that such dumb sentiment wouldn’t make its way into the Arab press, and into the minds of radicals looking for some hair-brained reason to “bring it on.”

Anyway, the laugh-out-loud funny comes from Al Franken. You can read the article at http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/09/03/franken_dean/.

In other groovy news, a recruiter is presenting me today for a local university job that I think I’m a good fit for. With any luck, September will make up for August, karmically.

At any rate, I was thinking this morning that for D. Howard, Howard Dean is an obvious choice.

Well, since I’m babbling, I’ll mention that I saw a really chilling story in the Tribune today. A former minister is scheduled to be executed in Florida for murdering two abortion doctors. Excellent quote found on Yahoo, from Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood: “It’s sad that people like Paul Hill would murder in the name of life.”

I’m no fan of the death penalty, but a clergyman who is unrepentant about murdering people is the sort of monster that makes the death penalty sort of make sense. He says he’d kill again, because God is on his side. There is no question that he is a menace to society.

But perhaps life in prison would give him plenty of time to think about things. I would think a pious, pro-life Christian like Jeb Bush, who is supposedly going to let the man be executed, would want to allow the man time to repent for his sins before he dies so he could get to Heaven. Oh well.

Then the part of me that is just plain angry at Paul Hill would rather he rot in solitary until his God calls him off of this world. A long life of solitude is more deserved than the free press for martyrdom. But then, maybe that’s what Jeb is thinking.

And the whole idea of Christians in America murdering so that they can become martyrs seems to dovetail with all the Muslim fanatics seeking to be martyred in the Middle East. What with our Energy Consumption, and the vast military and financial involvement in the region that that brings us, most visibly with Israel and Iraq these days, it is like we our cultures deserve each other.

/danny

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