"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

We Don't Need To Escalate

Well, it's on now. Bush will double-down more troops. Nancy will go all-in to beat it back, but Bush will veto and the House and Senate don't have 2/3rds majority to come over the top. Maybe in the time it takes to do this, more Republicans will flip, but it still seems unlikely that this can be effectively fought with procedure.

After all, Bush already started the escalation, sending more troops yesterday as a matter of fact. He's the decider!

I don't know what to make of this. It's kind of chilling that the President can keep surging forward even though everyone knows it's not really going to work out. It seems like a pretty big failure that there's no check or balance here, because this is moronic and (considering that people are dying) also somewhat monstrous.

The other spooky thing is sending those aircraft carriers, putting a Navy man in charge, and talking up the Patriot missile batteries (which are no real use against IEDs). That all points to Iran. But he wouldn't be stupid enough to try that, would he? Would he? Could we stop him if he was?

Not a fun line of thought to consider.

UPDATE: Shitters. I'm starting to get a very bad feeling about all this. It's very very Nixon part deux, but kinda worse in some ways.

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Dirty Hippies

There's a lot of political talk about dirty hippies, the phantom which animates so much of our power elite. The reasons for this must be dark and deeply psychological, but I really don't care. This is a generational fight I have no interest in wasting cycles on.

On my Jetblue flight back, VH1 Classic had a bit about the 60s and drugs, and they had some old footage of Kesey, both the Paul Newman-looking Acid Test version and the more familiar Pleasant Hill farmer. That guy was the MF man, and it's a shame their whole scene got busted down on so hard.

So yeah, hippies are annoying I know. I don't want to talk about crystal healing either. But, on the other hand, Florida Gator fans are annoying too. So maybe it's just people and not just hippies who are annoying.

Anyway, I'm back in California. Just another freak in the freak kingdom.

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Food fight part 2

Cleaning Up After A Food Fight

The problem with flamewars is that everyone gets burned. As they say, fighting on the internet is for retards. Yet sometimes you still get into it. I did. I'm going to post a diary on MyDD that's about the issues at hand, but I figured that in the spirit of getting back to my autobio blog roots, I might as well write the whole thing up for y'all.

Gadgetry

Apple TV looks interesting and surprisingly affordable. I'd like to see what success early adopters have in hacking it up, because if I can SSH into this thing and trick it out I'll probably buy one. If it can be a media center and a solid network hub/firewall, I'll drop $300 to have a purpose-built device as that's a good pricepoint vs me building my own.

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