Yeah, I'm back. DC was good. It's an interesting town, lots of construction going on there. Boomtown. Things to report but not quite reportable yet, so I'll talk about something else...

Rolling back up I finally got a chance to listen to Blue Language in its entirety. There are a lot of old favorites from these quirky and intelligent songwriting friends of mine, but I was surprised at how well the more "sincere" songs came through. My favorite track is JH's The Confusion and Rebirth of my Soul, which is completely devoid of irony or even cleverness.

You can buy the whole double-CD for $14, which is a steal of a deal, considering you get that heartfelt wailing, plus anthems like Vagina Town, Schmemily (A Song That's Obviously Not About Emily) and the Burn the Town Down Blues.

So I'm back in action, drinking coffee and putting one foot in front of the other. More soon.

There's a fair amount of gammering going on around lately wrt Ann Coulter, partly because she recently was a featured speaker at the biggest "movement conservative" convention of the year and scoffed "I think our motto should be post-9-11, 'raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences," According to Max Blumenthal, who "infiltrated" CPAC to report on what went down.

His stuff was picked up eventually by the Huffington Post, which is probably why it was used as an example in the Glenn Greenwald post I linked to the other day about right wing cultism. The rational digestion.

And now the final arc of a Coulter Event, the parody:

Bill Maher, from Los Angeles, CA writes:
Ann, sweetcheeks – call me back, OK? Why is it we only hook up when you’re in LA, lonely, and zonked on Dexatrim? Anyway, I'm having a little bipartisan snugglefest tonight on my vibrating waterbed to break in my new hookah. Would love to have you. Can you hop the next red-eye to "La"?

Ann Coulter:
Bill, take it easy, please. This whole "friends" thing was hatched for book cross-marketing purposes, remember? Yes, I was a deadhead for many years, and yes, my 35-foot Eddie Bauer edition Airsteam was party central in concert parking lots from coast to coast. But come on. Weed? Everyone knows I was always an acid queen.

The rest is savage, a lot of it sexual, verging on misogynistic... but if you can stomach it, quite hilarious. The pathology is explored from all angles.

This is the work of an artiste, but crude at the same time. Many critiques of Coulter are inflected by/towards her sexuality. I think it's because politics is still dominated by men with issues with women, especially on that side. I mean, she's literally the most prominant conservative woman in the political mass psyche. Think about that. Creepy.

There's so much weirdness in politics, especially deep right wing politics, it's good fodder for the nerdly mind. Like what was on the other end of that "acid queen" link. Someone had fun making that. The truth is stranger than fiction, and it makes for great humor, list this:

Moon has been talking about saving the world with a tunnel to Russia. But astute AlterNet reader Mitch Kramer points out that his rival, power-hungry doomsday peddler Lyndon LaRouche, was talking about building his own world-saving tunnel to Russia shortly after 9/11, without a Neil Bush endorsement.

That, of course, is Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a vaguely fascist mass cult leader who gives a lot of money to politicians (generally Republicans) and owns the Washington Times, a conservative DC newspaper. He recently provlaimed himself the Massaiah on Capitol Hill. The truth is stranger than fiction.

And on that note, in case you've been in a hole all week, Dick Cheney shot a man.

Anyway, headed down to DC tomorrow, wheeling and dealing with Trellon. We're gonna by buying some drinks for friends Thursday night; email me if you wanna come. Back on Saturday for Frank and Laura's a-Typical Wedding Party. They got engaged and then married by the court. Shazam!

There's a fair amount of gammering going on around lately wrt Ann Coulter, partly because she recently was a featured speaker at the biggest "movement conservative" convention of the year and scoffed "I think our motto should be post-9-11, 'raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences," According to Max Blumenthal, who "infiltrated" CPAC to report on what went down.

His stuff was picked up eventually by the Huffington Post, which is probably why it was used as an example in the Glenn Greenwald post I linked to the other day about right wing cultism. The rational digestion.

And now the final arc of a Coulter Event, the parody:

Bill Maher, from Los Angeles, CA writes:
Ann, sweetcheeks – call me back, OK? Why is it we only hook up when you’re in LA, lonely, and zonked on Dexatrim? Anyway, I'm having a little bipartisan snugglefest tonight on my vibrating waterbed to break in my new hookah. Would love to have you. Can you hop the next red-eye to "La"?

Ann Coulter:
Bill, take it easy, please. This whole "friends" thing was hatched for book cross-marketing purposes, remember? Yes, I was a deadhead for many years, and yes, my 35-foot Eddie Bauer edition Airsteam was party central in concert parking lots from coast to coast. But come on. Weed? Everyone knows I was always an acid queen.

The rest is savage, a lot of it sexual, verging on misogynistic... but if you can stomach it, quite hilarious. The pathology is explored from all angles.

This is the work of an artiste, but crude at the same time. Many critiques of Coulter are inflected by/towards her sexuality. I think it's because politics is still dominated by men with issues with women, especially on that side. I mean, she's literally the most prominant conservative woman in the political mass psyche. Think about that. Creepy.

There's so much weirdness in politics, especially deep right wing politics, it's good fodder for the nerdly mind. Like what was on the other end of that "acid queen" link. Someone had fun making that. The truth is stranger than fiction, and it makes for great humor, list this:

Moon has been talking about saving the world with a tunnel to Russia. But astute AlterNet reader Mitch Kramer points out that his rival, power-hungry doomsday peddler Lyndon LaRouche, was talking about building his own world-saving tunnel to Russia shortly after 9/11, without a Neil Bush endorsement.

That, of course, is Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a vaguely fascist mass cult leader who gives a lot of money to politicians (generally Republicans) and owns the Washington Times, a conservative DC newspaper. He recently provlaimed himself the Massaiah on Capitol Hill. The truth is stranger than fiction.

And on that note, in case you've been in a hole all week, Dick Cheney shot a man.

Anyway, headed down to DC tomorrow, wheeling and dealing with Trellon. We're gonna by buying some drinks for friends Thursday night; email me if you wanna come. Back on Saturday for Frank and Laura's a-Typical Wedding Party. They got engaged and then married by the court. Shazam!

Gotta tell ya, I been watching this one, and it's exciting: Kinky Friedman for TX Gov. He's making all the right moves online. The cartoons are slick, and getting really good candidate media out online is a huge part of getting people you don't know engaged in your project.

I think there's an enormous potential for independent political actors who have a different idea of how and why to govern to make great gains in the next 20 years. I'm still a fan of taking over the Democratic party (and of burning down and rebuilding the GOP too), but to be honest the Democrats are fucking squares. I'm a freak-power man myself, and I don't ever really see myself having a comfortably home under that big tent. It's a big tent, but everyone in it of consequence is deeply (and beautifully) square. As the Hammer of Truth notes:

There’s going to come a time in American politics when we’re tired of ex-wrestlers, action heros, and writer/author/country singers and want staid guys in suits to lead us. Until then, and as long as the establishment politicians are fun-hating windbags who only stop legislating morality long enough to take a bribe or shoot their friends, Go Kinky!

Fuck yeah. Maybe once I'm old and networked enough, I'll head on back to Oregon and stomp it up. Rowdy bloggers running for office on the open source ticket. Frank already promised to work for me, so there's that. Could be fun.

Internet at home was hitting some snags: I could keep a persistant ssh connection to remote servers, which is pretty essential in my line of work.

Jeff Kramer, one of the Gurus at Polycot, reminded me how to get around this, which he'd done before back when I was at MFA. In the interest of not forgetting this again, here's the stuff:

sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.keepintvl=120
sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.keepidle=1500
sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.always_keepalive=1

Basically, this tightens up the "keepalive" command, which means my lappy will sent a couple bytes of data out to remote servers over TCP/IP saying "I'm still here... don't hang up on me" more often than before. Hopefully this will work like before and prevent the disruptions.

You'll want to issue those commands as root (best through sudo) and/or put them at the end of your /etc/rc file (prior to the "exit 0" line though) so they get issued on startup.

Thanks Jeff!

Walk the Line was really quite good! And not a bad choice for Valentines day either.

I actually thought it was a better film than most of those up for major awards, even though it comes up somewhat short of what you'd want from a Johnny Cash biopic. I agree with my man Shouter Dauter that it's more of a "tribute" film. In addition to compressing time and leaving out some of the better/wilder Cash exploits, they also radically simplified the religious and substance-abuse angles, but it's a movie. They needed to build a basic narrative, and following on the formula that Ray etched out -- great music, great actors, and a plot arc about a good man who has to kick his habbit to reach his full potential -- is a pretty logical choice.

I really have to give it up for Reece Whitherspoon, who I have an instinctual loathing of as a person (for no good reason, really), but who continually impresses me as an actress and manages to be downright attractive in character. That's talent.

The movie made me miss the South from last summer. Like, I got all excited when they showed Sun Records. It's a small place, you know; and I been there. That's always a little thrill. But it's more than that. It's the vibe of the whole thing, the South, from the bit at the beginning in Arkansas farm country through to the Carter family coming over in a pickup with Thanksgiving.

For a lot of us Northerners and urbanites, all the good essential bits of humanity that are a bound up in those cultural traditions and places are mixed up in ideas about Southern/rural racism and ignorance, which is in itself a form of ignorance, which is too bad.

Day got away from me. Happens to the best of us. Still, feel like I got a lot done.

As the collective methological knoweldge of the Open Source movement begins to permeate those who understand government and politics and things of that nature, I suspect we'll begin to see more and more stuff like this:

The real damage to our national security isn't in the too much disclosure of information. Al Qaeda doesn't have bureaucracies of analysts and spies probing for weaknesses in the American security system. The worst thing that could potentially happen is that the name of a captured jihadi is prematurely leaked before useful intelligence can be gained. Does anyone truly think that al Qaeda actually believed that e-mails and phone calls to the US weren't being monitored?

No, the HUGE problem, the elephant in the room, isn't leaks. Rather, it is in a complete lack of transparency. As we have seen again and again, secrecy prevents the full analysis of alternatives. It shuts down debate and prevents the qualification of sources. It is also the crutch of bad and/or nefarious management.

This is why Microsoft's products are routinely exploited by malicious software (viruses, spyware, etc) and high-quality open source products are not. Market-share is a factor, but the reality is there are simply way more holes in Windows than in Linux (or BSD, the open source core of MacOS X). There is no way for you to vet the Windows code, whereas every proposed patch and development to any active open source project will be reviewed and debated -- in public, I might add -- by experts in the field, with the opportunity for anyone at any time to suggest an improvement or fix.

The application of this simple revelation to Government is a little tricky, but the overrarching lesson is that Security Through Obscurity Is Not Dependable, and may in fact create vulnerability, not to mention being latently undemocratic.

The simple reality is that in the 21st-Century, Governments must go on-line in a real way which empoweres citizens to learn about, watchdog and interact with public servants and services. This will inevitably provide better governance, which is what citizens deserve and desire. The first political party to explain (perhaps demonstrate) and "own" this sort of initiative will make political hay.

Why do local credit unions routinely have better web services than the Social Security Administration?

Why isn't the Government providing secure, trusted, unified identity services?

Why isn't a unified federal budget available online with the ability to drill down from departmental appropriations to specific expendatures?

The truth is that people respond to real information as well as to propaganda and fearmongering. In the long run, one form of building political capital creates a strong civil society which can make collective desisions and support itself, and the other creates a latently facist Daddy State in which citizens are disempowered, afraid, and seek protection and patronage from their superiors in the statehouse.

Pick one.

As the collective methological knoweldge of the Open Source movement begins to permeate those who understand government and politics and things of that nature, I suspect we'll begin to see more and more stuff like this:

The real damage to our national security isn't in the too much disclosure of information. Al Qaeda doesn't have bureaucracies of analysts and spies probing for weaknesses in the American security system. The worst thing that could potentially happen is that the name of a captured jihadi is prematurely leaked before useful intelligence can be gained. Does anyone truly think that al Qaeda actually believed that e-mails and phone calls to the US weren't being monitored?

No, the HUGE problem, the elephant in the room, isn't leaks. Rather, it is in a complete lack of transparency. As we have seen again and again, secrecy prevents the full analysis of alternatives. It shuts down debate and prevents the qualification of sources. It is also the crutch of bad and/or nefarious management.

This is why Microsoft's products are routinely exploited by malicious software (viruses, spyware, etc) and high-quality open source products are not. Market-share is a factor, but the reality is there are simply way more holes in Windows than in Linux (or BSD, the open source core of MacOS X). There is no way for you to vet the Windows code, whereas every proposed patch and development to any active open source project will be reviewed and debated -- in public, I might add -- by experts in the field, with the opportunity for anyone at any time to suggest an improvement or fix.

The application of this simple revelation to Government is a little tricky, but the overrarching lesson is that Security Through Obscurity Is Not Dependable, and may in fact create vulnerability, not to mention being latently undemocratic.

The simple reality is that in the 21st-Century, Governments must go on-line in a real way which empoweres citizens to learn about, watchdog and interact with public servants and services. This will inevitably provide better governance, which is what citizens deserve and desire. The first political party to explain (perhaps demonstrate) and "own" this sort of initiative will make political hay.

Why do local credit unions routinely have better web services than the Social Security Administration?

Why isn't the Government providing secure, trusted, unified identity services?

Why isn't a unified federal budget available online with the ability to drill down from departmental appropriations to specific expendatures?

The truth is that people respond to real information as well as to propaganda and fearmongering. In the long run, one form of building political capital creates a strong civil society which can make collective desisions and support itself, and the other creates a latently facist Daddy State in which citizens are disempowered, afraid, and seek protection and patronage from their superiors in the statehouse.

Pick one.

I've been enjoying very much the blogging of Glenn Greenwald, who's got a very well-done post up looking at what's going on with the contemporary "Conservative" heads:

[P]eople like Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, Jonah Goldberg and Hugh Hewitt are not conservatives. They are authoritarian cultists. Their allegiance is not to any principles of government but to strong authority through a single leader.

They love them that Daddy State, yes they do. The post is around 2800 words, and they're good ones.

Update: Greenwalkd responds to some responses. One of the most interesting bits is the quote he found from Bill Kristol (who's sort of the consiglere of neoconservatism) saying that "Bush was the movement and the cause."