And now: a letter, a hotel registration book, and a series of photographs, which could add up to divorce, premature retirement, and possible criminal proceedings for a company director in Bromsgrove.  He’s a freemason, and a conservative M.P., so that’s 3,000 pounds please Mr. S… thank you… to stop us from revealing:
Your name
The name of the three other people involved,
The youth organization to which they belonged,
and The shop where you bought the equipment!

Blackmail! from Monty Python’s Flying Circus

OK, So Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in the Senate knew about the torture going back to 2002. The CIA’s making a point of leaking that information so we know about this. Can I ask a question?

What could Nancy Pelosi or other Democrats have done back when Bush was in charge?

» Continue reading “The Point of Bushie and CIA Briefing Congress on Torture: Blackmail.”

OK, if we take the version of the Great Depression currently being shilled by Mitch McConnell and company, let’s look through it a bit.

FDR and the Democrats came up with the New Deal and engaged in Government Spending (TM) to build dams, roads, various types of infrastructure and so on to get people working.

But Government Spending doesn’t work!!! They languished in the Great Depression until the end of the ’30s. (Let’s ignore those inconvenient graphs of employment rates and GDP and such that disprove this.)

See, what really got us out of the Great Depression was World War II. See, the whole nation got together, sent soldiers and such overseas, and we built a whole bunch of guns, bullets, bombs, airplanes, tanks, ships, food, supplies, etc. etc. etc. so we could blow our enemies to tiny bits more efficiently.

How did we pay for all those soldiers and weapons and supplies and such so we could blow Bad Guys to smithereens?

Oh yeah, GOVERNMENT SPENDING!

But I thought government spending didn’t work…

President Barack Obama.  Damn, it feels good to say those words together.  After eight years of Bush running this country into the ground with that insufferable smirk, it’s good to have a smart president, who actually has a conscience, for a change.  Hell, it’s good just to have a president who knows how to speak English.

What?  I gave him Democratic Milquetoast of the week a few weeks ago, now I’m giving him the Badass of the week award.  What’s up with that?  Well, let’s just say it has something to do with the things he’s done on the first day of his presidency.

» Continue reading “Democratic Badass of the Week: Barack Obama”

I know, I’m slow on the draw, but since in my review, I mentioned my wish for an x86-64 version of Linux Mint 6, I thought it would be a good idea to mention that Linux Mint has released its first release candidate ISO image of Felicia for x86-64.

Do bear in mind that the folks at Linux Mint don’t consider this release ready for prime time, yet, but if you feel like experiementing, knock yourself out!

Download Linux Mint 6 for x86-64 here…

Just four more days…  Bush made his farewell speech last night.  As expected, it was a waste of precious oxygen.  Now he and his staff are packing up and emptying the White House, and Bush will be spending his weekend at Camp David before he cedes power.  Obama is now staying in the Blair House – Bush could spite him by not letting him move there earlier, but he couldn’t override tradition.

Now it’s almost over.  Obama’s already President in just about every way except the formality.  Clinton’s in as Secretary of State, Holder’s about to be in as Attorney General.  There will be some hiccups as the rest of Obama’s Cabinet gets confirmed (Geithner’s especially likely to get a hard time in the Senate, thanks to his little tax whoopsie.)

But our long national nightmare is almost over!

I originally posted this on Democratic Underground:

Everybody’s complaining about Obama’s proposals on the economic stimulus package. Nate Silver isn’t really complaining – again, he’s bringing out his knowledge of game-theory to show that Obama’s again playing chess instead of checkers, or alternatively, playing tight-aggressive poker at a table full of fish. » Continue reading “Nate Silver: Obama’s Price is Right Strategy”

That was a good speech from President Elect Obama today.  It looked like the Senate was wasting too much time on petty pie-fights about Burris and such, and quite frankly, we don’t have much time for that.  Maybe Obama’s very public pressure from the bully-pulpit for a stimulus package will light a fire under people like Harry Reid, and put enough pressure on even the Republicans to ensure that they won’t fight too hard and make sure that we have some stimulus in a few weeks.

Also, I’m encouraged to hear that it will be Obama and his new Treasury Secretary Geithner instead of Bush and Paulson who will be managing and doling out the second half of the $700 beeeelion dollar bank bailout that was passed a few weeks ago.  That’s what, $350 beeeelion?  A decent chunk of change.  Dole that kind of money out with the adults in charge, and add the new stimulus package to that as well, and we’ve actually got some real money to jump-start the economy.  The economy is really, really bad right now – if we don’t have some serious .gov help, we are looking at the second Great Depression.

I do have one gripe about the stimulus package, one which Nancy Pelosi and several other Democrats in Congress share.  It’s too much money going to tax cuts, and not enough to direct stimulus.  I’ve got news.  Supply-side voodoo economics is dead, and cutting taxes isn’t going to do enough to pull our economy out of this funk.  The money would be better spent on Keynesian-style economic stimulus – roads, bridges, broadband telco infrastructure, fixing schools, backing loans for small businesses, etc. etc. etc.  That’s how we pull out of this funk.  Actually, if you ask me, we should be raising taxes for the ultra-rich.  Not for the middle-class or poorer.  Just the kinds of folks that are well-off enough to afford vehicles with spiral staircases.  They need to be paying more, and frankly, if you take ideology out of the argument, and base your decisions on who to tax on finding the source of tax-dollars that will bring in the most revenue, you want to raise taxes on the wealthy.  The only reason this isn’t done is because the ultra-rich can pay for really good lobbyists.

I’ve spent a bit of time putting this site together, and I’ve learned a few things. I’ve learned a little bit more about the LAMP stack – while I know a decent amount about Linux, I could always use a little more knowledge on Apache, MySQL and PHP.

On top of the technical knowledge, I got a tour of everything from web hosting to analyzing web statistics to advertising.  It’s certainly been a learning experience, and hopefully I get some mileage from it.

» Continue reading “On building sites, making them interesting, and fending off spammers.”

It does help to get a few the the more interesting stories in one place, so let me give you your extra-brief Linux News Roundup!

I know, I’ve been scooped on these.  What can I tell you?  I’m not a professional reporter.  Still, enjoy…

• The Future of Compiz is in question. Kristian Lyngstol makes some observations on the direction of Compiz.  Because of lack of leadership, Compiz has stagnated, and unless a new direction is establshed, Compiz may lose all of its developers as development effort scatters.
• Linux kernel 2.6.28 is out. The biggest new features are the GEM, a GPU memory manager that promises to give a significant improvement in graphics peformance, ext4, a new filesystem that is backwards-compatible with the venerable ext3, but adds support for bigger filesystems and files as well as support for new features like extents and faster fscks.  Ars Technica has a first look at the new kernel.
• AMD released specifications, as well as sample and example code for programming the ATI R600/700 GPUs. It’s nothing for end users yet, but it’s everything that developers need for getting those GPUs to do things like 3-D rendering and acceleration.  It’s quite significant in that it’s everything required to get those GPUs fully supported using open-source drivers in Linux.  Hopefully, before long, those drivers will be implemented in X.org and the Linux kernel.
• Andrew Min tells us Why Games are the Key to Linux Adoption. More precisely, the lack of modern and popular games on Linux is holding us back.  We have everything else – friendly desktops and applications, office suites, development, and so on.  And Linux is perfectly capable of running modern games on modern hardware.  It’s just that hardly anyone ports Windows games to Linux.  And that holds us back because users want their games.  WINE has closed the gap slightly, but its never going to be perfect, and there will always be a large number of games that break when it is used.  Maybe if Red Hat and Canonical spent a some money and funded some development teams to port and maintain a few popular games.  They don’t have to be open source.  They just have to work in Linux without too much hassle.  As Min mentioned, gamers are adventurous folks who do things like building their own systems.  Get them to adopt Linux, and you could start some decent momentum.

Best wishes and Happy New Year to everyone! May 2009 be a better time for all of us!