Meet Montgomery Pontevedra Samadi Poza, doing his best Mister Sleepyhead act here.
We don’t have him with us yet; we’ll be picking him up on August 16th. But he’s ours now.
Read all about Ponta and his continuing adventures at Shiba Me ( http://shiba.me/ ). He’s also now on Twitter.
The U.S.’s credit rating has been downgraded, with S&P citing political infighting and poor debt handling. Most significantly, this would not have happened if the Republicans had not taken the U.S. economy hostage, taking us intentionally to the very brink in a manner that assured it would end like this.
Once again, let us not forget who brought us here. Ten years ago, we were in surplus territory. Despite claims by Tea Partiers and conservatives in general that this is all the fault of Obama and the Dems, it was the Bush tax cuts, the two massive wars, the general mismanagement and the Great Recession which brought us to this point. And as weak as Obama and the Dems have been, it has been the Republicans who have been the primary force which continues to take us in the wrong direction.
They will undoubtedly react by becoming even more recalcitrant and hostile. The idiots.
Not that the downgrade is fully reasonable. But it has happened, and conservatives brought us here.
If the American people react to this by electing any more Republicans into office, they are the worst idiots imaginable. Seriously.
And no, I am not returning to blogging full-time. I noted that I would return occasionally when the mood hit me–it simply happened that a story like this broke the day after I said I’d be stopping. Figures.
Whew.
Nine years. 4610 posts, or an average of about 4 posts every three days. A little over five of those years with non-stop posting, at least one post per day.
I first wrote a post on August 5th, 2002, back before I found out about blogging software; I was pissed at Bush’s mad rush to war in Iraq and his abuse of the “War on Terror” to get whatever he wanted, and wanted to vent. I had heard about blogs, and so created one the only way I knew how–by hand, just banging out some HTML that could hold my writing. Looking back on it, the post was a bit more extremist than my current style (I was venting more than anything else, writing even less to any audience at the time, and knew less then than I do now), but the reason for writing was very similar to what it is today. Of course, I wrote about a lot more than just politics: my life in Japan, computer stuff, odds and ends, philosophical musings, funny stuff I stumbled upon. It has also turned out to be a fair diary, reminding me of what was happening in my life at various times.
In the spring of 2003, I started writing fairly regularly, and in August made it a daily routine out of a desire to practice some self-discipline, in addition to it being a personal form of catharsis. I was surprised when I started getting a whole bunch of visitors. Within a year of regular blogging, I was recording 10,000 unique-IP visitors per month (who knows how many that actually represented; some users have rotating IP addresses, though the stats software I use also does not seem to count RSS readers). That peaked in 2007 to over 50,000 unique-IP visitors per month, a number which fell dramatically when I was forced by my web host to switch from Movable Type to WordPress, thus breaking links. Granted, a whole lot of those visits were to my Eyelid Twitching post (currently at 2,165 comments), but still, the reaction to the blog in general has overwhelmed me over the years.
After all this time, blogging is almost more of a habit than anything else. I get up in the morning, read the news, and blog on something. I have kept blogging despite the sometimes hopeless feeling I get from the headlong rush of politicians to do increasingly more insane crap, and despite the repetition involved in pointing out the lies spewed out in the media and in political circles. Plus, blogs are a dime a dozen now, and whatever I write is written about by hordes of others, many with depth, knowledge, insight, and style far better than I can achieve. Increasingly, this feels more like banging my head against a wall than anything else, to less and less purpose. You may have noticed my posting habits dropping from 5 days a week to four, and now to three.
Moreover, it has come to the point where I simply have other things I want to do. The deciding factor is the new Shiba puppy Sachi and I will be getting in the next few weeks. I also want to delve more into PHP and C++, and wouldn’t mind doing some non-commentary stuff, perhaps some creative writing for a change.
As a result, I have decided to stop regular posting to this site. I’m keeping the blog open, and will drop a post now and then when the feeling strikes me (probably at least two or three times a month), but I will actually make a conscious effort not to blog here out of habit.
If you’re a regular visitor to this site, and (for whatever reason I cannot fathom) really want to know when I post something, then you might want to use the RSS feed to alert you to new posts.
In the meantime, I will be opening a new blog: Shiba Me!, where I will abandon politics and commentary for warmer and fuzzier subjects. If you like puppies, are interested in the Shiba Inu breed, or would like to see the progress of a first-time (as an adult) dog owner trying to train one of the hardest breeds to train, then you may want to drop by. I have a “Welcome” post up, and will be posting as we visit the breeders over the next week, but won’t start regular blogging until we get the puppy, whereupon I’ll further redesign the site.
If you read Japanese, by the way, then a visit to Sachi’s Poza Room site is in order. Despite the header, it’s not just necessarily for women’s health, and you may find it interesting.
I spent 11 hours today at hospitals (checkups and follow-up on the leg) and then working non-stop at school, so I didn’t have a moment to do the day justice. Sachi and I first met on August 5, 2006, so this was the 5th anniversary of that day.
When I got home at 8:45 pm, though, Sachi was prepared. She made a spectacular dinner (more so than her usual great dinners). First, an anise-flavored potage soup, with garlic bread and salad on the side, with a dish of pineapple and cream cheese wrapped in prosciutto.
Then a meat course with dark chicken meat and a nice marbled steak, flavored with a new ruby-colored rock salt that has just a touch of Indian Kala Namak seasoning–a volcanic salt with enough sulfur to give it a egg taste, but tastes really good on lots of stuff–especially steak.
All washed down with some Californian red wine. Really good. Gochisou sama.
In July, we built our second computer in the college’s Computer Making Club, and it works just fine. Core i5 2400 CPU, ASRock H67M mobo, 8 GB 1333 DDR3 RAM, 1 TB HDD, Blu-Ray reader. Not bad–the most powerful rig in the school, and it cost ¥50,000 (the semester budget for the club). Using last semester’s (the one interrupted by the earthquake) funds not spent on a whole computer, we could buy 3 Full-HD monitors and an SSD with the spare change. Maybe next semester we’ll trying SSD caching on a Z68 mobo.
Today, students from last semester’s club wanted my help building two computers for their friends. They bought roughly the same equipment as I listed above, but they really wanted smaller cases. We got all the parts, in duplicate, and spent much of today building the computers–I worked on one while the students copied my moves on the others.
We finished, and then did a test start–and nothing. Dead. No power, no lights, no fan movement, nada. We checked and re-checked the wiring, then checked it again. Everything was OK. Tried different cables. Tried both computers. Tried alternate arrangements for the power switch connectors, even tried using a paper clip on the leads. Nothing. I brought the club’s new rig, the one built in July, and ran that rig’s power supply wiring to one of the new mobos–nothing. We must have tried a dozen different things and nothing worked. For all we could see, we had two computers, both completely DOA.
Which didn’t make sense–two different computers dead in the exact same way? One rig having a dead part I could understand, but two different ones, having the exact same fault? I began to suspect that the students were sold defective parts–but that didn’t sound right, either. Even a dishonest distributor would not sell one person the same defective part twice.
We checked the instructions–but one of my main gripes about the computer world is that documentation sucks. As it did with this case–it said very little at all. Really fracking annoying.
Salvation came from a half hour of Googling the case, then the mobo–and I found someone who had the same problem and solved it by removing the motherboard from the case. Wires attached, just lift it from the case mount, and it worked, so the post went. So we tried that.
It worked.
From there, it was a simple matter of working backwards. If we set the motherboard down in the case, unscrewed, would it work? Yes. How about if we added this one screw? Yep, still works. Another one added, in that hole? Works. How about adding one more screw, here? Bango, no power.
After looking into it later, it seemed that a lack of insulation and the way the board was set up caused the mobo to be “grounded out,” whatever that means. This case was apparently designed so poorly–and did not include fiber washers–that in any case of this design, screwing the mobo in place on one side causes a ground-out. What’s more, they included a rubber “bump” which could insulate the board and didn’t mention what it was for. It’s listed in the parts, but no mention of how or why or when or where it is used. Seems to me that if your design so regularly causes power loss via “grounding out” and you know this well enough to add a part to deal with it, then you goddamn fracking better well mention it before your customers spend hours figuring it out, or worse, spend days ordering new parts.
So, because the case maker screwed up the design and failed to note it in the instructions, we spent two hours agonizing over the whole thing. Major pain in the ass. Sometimes you just want to find the corporate offices and kick these idiots.
Once we figured this out, it went like a breeze, although the BIOS showed a core CPU temp starting at 40°C and climbing to 55° or so, just in the BIOS. I read some posts saying this was relatively normal, and both rigs had the same readings, so I let it go but warned them to install the hardware monitors and keep an eye on the temps.
Not too shabby a day, but I could have done without the useless anxiety and frustration. All part of the DIY experience, I guess.
I just want to bring up a little bit of history here. Back in 2000, when we were looking at surpluses, Republicans hated the idea. They were nearly apoplectic at the thought of government taking in more than it spent within a limited time frame. They used the catchphrase, “It’s your money,” as if the people were being robbed or something. It was as if the debt did not exist, and did not need to be paid off, so if the government had a surplus, that meant that taxes were too high.
Clinton and Gore proposed paying off the debt (by 2013!), extending the solvency of Social Security, and even establishing a reserve in case emergency funds were needed. Yes, the economic downturn at the turn of the century would have muted this, but had Gore been in office, the economy would have been much better. No huge tax cuts for the wealthy, no Iraq War, and, even if 9/11 had gotten past the counter-terrorism structure that Bush disassembled, the war in Afghanistan would have been shorter and far less costly. We might have maintained surpluses and actually gotten some debt reduction (though we probably would not have paid off the whole debt by 2013, especially with Republicans whining about surpluses and pushing for tax cuts); we certainly would have had a far healthier economy, back in 2001 and later on as well, no question about that whatsoever.
Republicans rejected the idea of paying off debts. They wanted to erase the surplus with tax cuts–which they did, and then some. Then 9/11 hit, and they added the burden of two massively expensive land wars in Asia. Over the years, they piled on more tax cuts, more unpaid-for entitlements, and precisely the kind of wasteful pork-barrel spending they always accused Democrats of, even worse than the Democrats actually carried out themselves. They drove the economy into a deep ditch, and then tried to pile all the blame on the next Democrat who took office, as if nothing untoward had happened in the previous eight years and the debt crisis had somehow how magically materialized the moment Obama stepped into the Oval Office.
Amazing how history can hinge on even the smallest of things. There is one graphic designer somewhere in Florida who slapped together the butterfly ballot for Palm Beach County for the 2000 elections. Had that person not made a simple design error, Gore would not have lost thousands of votes to Buchanan (and to Gore-Buchanan cross-votes), and the course of American history would have been changed to an astonishing extent.
And to think that in the 2000 elections, people bemoaned the idea that there was little or no difference between Gore and Bush.
The computer is now made and running smoothly. The specs:
As you can see, I did not go whole hog. No discrete video card (I don’t do gaming), no high-speed DRAM (I toyed with going for 1600 MHz, but ultimately decided not to). Nevertheless, it is, if I may say, a nice little rig.
I had a scare with the CPU slot. Somehow, one of the pins got bent. I don’t know if this would be enough to make the whole rig not work, but I did not want to gamble. I carefully photographed it and got to understand exactly how it was bent (down and to the left), then used a pin (I know, conductive, but it was the only thing small enough) to caaaarefully coax it back into place. If you know how small and delicate those things are, then you know how nerve-wracking that was. However, I did it, and it worked in the end. (Or else it never mattered.)
So I put the CPU in, and snapped the RAM into the slots. Then came the CPU cooler / heatsink. If you read the blog recently, you’ll know about my little misadventure with Dospara and Cooler Master; when the non-mismade part was delivered, I was able to start working on it. Usually cooler fans use those four damned pins which are hard to snap in. The first two go in OK, but the third is hard and the fourth is damned hard, and sometimes it’s not easy to discern if the pins are in right. The Cooler Master setup I got has a plate you attach to the back first, with bolts on the top of the motherboard making it easy to attach the fan up top; I like that arrangement much better.
I did not use the thermal grease included with the CPU cooler, instead going with some Arctic Silver MX-4, which was recommended. The Cooler Master plate-and-bolt attachment makes it better for applying the thermal grease as well–if you use the pins and have trouble, then there’s more chance you will detach the fan and ruin the grease application.
So the motherboard was then set; installing it in the case was not too hard, but, as usual, they did not give enough of the bolts the motherboard is seated upon. (Why do they always chintz on that?) In this case, a few screw holes were not properly made so that I couldn’t screw the bolts in all the way anyway. However, the board can be secured well enough even with a few points left unsecured.
Then came the drives. The case, a Gigabyte GZ-X5, has the nice locking clamps for the internal drive bays, so you don’t have to use screws. That’s a nice feature; just slide a drive into place, put the clamp on and turn a lever. Cool.
I hate how most cases handle the front panel and bezels, making them very difficult to detach, and having nothing in the instructions on how to do that. It usually involves reaching into inside recesses and tripping things you can’t see or grip very well; if you don’t know how to do it, you likely won’t guess, and most cases have sharp edges inside that make it dangerous even for those who do know how to do it. With the front bezels, it’s usually the case of pushing them outward until it feels like they’ll break. I slashed my pinky finger trying to get one of the 3.5“ bezels out so I could install the USB 3 front panel (with the SSD holder included). The optical drive slid in, no problems, but the hard drive bay walls were a tad too narrow and putting in the HDDs was a little difficult.
With the motherboard and drives in place, next come the cables. The motherboard came with 4 SATA3 cables (which work OK with the SATAII devices as well), so I had just the number I needed. The case has a 500W built-in power supply, and nice cables; hooking up to power was not a problem.
The cables for the case buttons and power were, as usual, tough to get in. The instructions are also, as usual, vague and unhelpful–for example, thinking I was following instructions, I put the case power-button connector switch on backwards. Is ”G“ (”ground,“ I assumed) the same as the minus polarity? So I had thought, but whatever, I switched it and it works.
Then there was the usual cable-securing, making sure the cables would not rest against parts or interfere with the fans, tying them off as best I could to keep them out of the way. I put the sides of the case back on–the side opposite the motherboard just fit, with the prongs from the heat sink actually touching the case, though not exerting any pressure. Could not have fit that any tighter.
So, I plugged in the power, monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and let ‘er rip. Worked perfectly. I installed the OS, still fine, so I went ahead and tried some more software.
Now, at this point, I was curious about the SSD caching–I did not, after all, see the SSD appear in the drive menu. I could see the drive in the Device manager, which reported that it was ”working properly,“ and I found a dialog box that said that disk caching was on, but it turned out that that was not SSD caching. I figured it out when I could not see my second HDD, and discovered that drives had to be initialized before they could be used. I am used to (a) external drives being pre-formatted, and (b) the Mac telling me this when it detects new drives, even when not formatted, and so hadn’t noticed.
This is when I figured out that I had not set things up right for the SSD caching. The BIOS needs to be set up for RAID, which should be done before the OS is installed. Argh. I would have to reinstall everything, starting over again. I tried switching to RAID and restarting, but it didn’t work. Then I found a page that suggested changing the registry–just two small changes from 3s to 0s–would allow RAID to be activated without reinstalling. I tried it, and it worked. After downloading the software from Intel (references to what software was needed were vague, and going through the zoo of versions on Intel’s site was confusing, but I found it), I was able to set up the cache. It works great–it actually worked better than ASRock’s demo, cutting my startup time from about 45 seconds to about half that. Startup is now almost like coming out of sleep mode.
I also tried overclocking, and am still working it up. I started with nothing, testing the CPU temps and voltage, researching what limits are (most say about 70°C and 1.5V), and then seeing how things ran (in case I did not apply the thermal grease correctly). It stayed under 35°C, so all seemed well. Then I set the overclock for 4 GHz (from the standard 3.3 GHz), where it has been running for a few days; temps not over 40°C; so far, so good. Next step will be 4.2 GHz. I understand that people usually find that 4.4 or 4.6 is a stable limit.
Not that the computer isn’t already fast enough for my current needs. Apps pop open with almost no wait time. However, I plan to do some image & video editing as well as some other CPU-intensive work in the future, so would like to see where I can take it. It will also be nice to have maxing-out capabilities in four years’ time when the hardware is older and a slower setup would be rendered useless.
The Blu-Ray drive works quite well. It takes about 1 minute per gigabyte, or about 24 minutes for a full disc. Considering that one disc holds the same as 6 DVDs (or about 35 CDs), it’s a nice way to back up files.
I have found a few problems with transferring files between the PC and my Macs. As usual, Windows is the problem point, but I was able to set things up anyway. WiFi transfers are too slow for big files, so I have been using USB flash memory or my external hard drives. However, there is a problem with supported file systems. FAT won’t support files over 4GB, but the Mac’s usual file system can’t be read by Windows. I discovered one new to the Mac–ExFAT, which supports files over 4GB and can be read by both OS’s. The Mac can read ExFAT formatted by the PC, but Windows doesn’t seem to see the Mac format (predictably).
So, for the future, Linux and then Hackintosh will get attempted, we’ll see how those work. But for now, I am getting reacquainted with Windows full-time (or mostly full-time), and rediscovering the pains it still presents. For example, why no ability to see folder sizes in list form? You have to hold your cursor over the folder icon, making it extremely difficult to figure out what’s causing the disk to fill up. You can get a utility like Folder Size for that, but seriously, it is such an obvious oversight in Windows, it is staggering that they haven’t addressed that yet. On the other hand, Windows 7 has a halfway-decent magnifying utility, and I must admit that the Aero Flip 3D feature is fun–though not as quick or as functional as the Mac’s Exposé.
Anyway, the whole thing is fun (more than it is frustrating) and educational. Saving a few bucks from what you would pay for a pre-made computer is almost beside the point.
About a month or so ago, the immediate neighborhood changed: we got next-door neighbors.
When we first saw the land our house is built on, it was just a foundation, one of two which were being built on land vacated by an older, larger house. The one next to ours had been spoken for from much earlier on. Ours was finished first, however, and we moved in in mid-April.
For the following few months, the noise was pretty bad. On the one hand, the house next to ours was under construction, which meant buzz-saw and hammering wake-up alarms at 8 a.m. daily, including weekends. On the other hand, there was the incessant buzzing from the parking lot for the fitness center next door. It’s a member’s-only lot controlled by a ticket machine like in a pay lot, and every time someone left (which was constantly) a loud buzzer would sound. I noticed it when we first saw the finished house, but accepted it when it was suggested that it wasn’t that bad. Well, it was, and annoyed me quite a bit for some time.
When the new family moved in, the construction sounds died down, eventually. They were replaced by squealing kids sounds–they have three young children–but those are usually later in the day, and not too frequent. Besides, especially in this area of Tokyo, you’re going to hear kids whether you like it or not.
Something I noticed a few days ago, however, was that I had, at some point, stopped noticing the parking lot buzzer. That pleased me, as I had thought I would not be able to get used to it. Well, it turns out I hadn’t: the buzzer is no longer used. I simply hadn’t noticed when it stopped. My guess is that it happened when Sachi and I were in Nagano for her father’s funeral.
It then struck me as to why the buzzer stopped–it happened very soon after the new family moved in. Which makes sense: the buzzer was much closer to their place, and must have bugged them even more. Their family room was practically just ten or fifteen feet away from the machine; if it bothered me with double-paned glass windows shut from about four times the distance, it must have been driven them nuts over there. I haven’t asked, but would bet good money on the idea that they complained to the fitness center. I had thought of doing that myself, but had figured that it was required, some safety regulation or something, and they would likely not turn off an annoyance to me in the face of possible liability should there be an accident. Turns out I was wrong.
However, it seems that there cannot be a period without some neighborhood fixture causing noise. Just a week or so ago, starting at 7:00 am, we started hearing a frequent low-frequency noise–something like a cell phone set to vibrate, on a hard surface nearby. But it kept going, and going, and going–for hours. Turns out there’s a dry-cleaner’s about 50m away, and they have some new machine inside which makes that sound. Or, that is, an industrial-level steam-pressing-like sound which, from 50 meters away with windows shut tight, sounds like a cell phone vibrating.
Japan has very different zoning laws than the U.S., and most places you can see a much wider variety of buildings. That’s why, when walking down a single block, you could see a medium-sized apartment building, an old, run-down house, a small shop, a large residence, a small-business factory, a parking lot, and a convenience store, all in a line. Oh, there is zoning, and there are rules, but many areas are much more an eclectic mix than you might expect.
You might also have heard of the concept of wa, explained as the neighborhood peace where everyone is sensitive to any disturbance or noise that might disrupt things. Well, if it exists, it sure doesn’t seem to be set on “automatic,” at least not around here. We’ll have to talk to them–at the very least ask them not to start at 7:00 in the morning.
About five and a half years ago, I was leaving my apartment, rounding the corner leading to the stairwell when I slipped. I fell, but my foot remained level, wrenching it so that extreme pressure was put on my fifth metatarsal, which snapped cleanly. It took almost 9 months to completely recover, and for about three months, I lived on crutches–a pain even if you have a decent set.
Well, three and a half weeks ago, I slipped and fell at work, placing stress on the same bone. I thought I heard something, though not the definite crack I heard when I broke the bone cleanly. The foot hurt like heck, but was not ballooning up like the break had, so I prayed it was a sprain and went off to class. After an hour, the pain and swelling was enough to convince me that a hospital visit was definitely better sooner than later, so I cut the class short (it was the last class on Friday, so a tiny bit of luck there) and took a taxi to the closest emergency room.
Sure enough, this one was a hairline fracture. I didn’t need a full cast, but they made one of those half-cast things that they activate with warm water so the material hardens and makes something that can be bandaged onto your foot to keep it immobile. So it was back to crutches, and I switched back to riding my scooter to work.
The scooter was a godsend, as it was years ago. The crutches I got this time were terrible, the handles hard bare wood with no padding, just murder on my hands. Now, imagine going to the station–the south side, as the side closest to me has no escalator or stairs–a 15-minute walk even when healthy, on crutches the whole way. Then a similar walk from the station to work at the other end. Then repeat that on the way home. No. Fracking. Way.
Hell, when the typhoon hit recently, I had to abandon the scooter for one day, and that was bad enough. Even taking a taxi from and to stations, I still had to navigate the stations, and nearly fell several times because of the effect of the slippery floors on the rubber pads on the crutches. In one station, I had to ask a guy working there where the elevator to the street was–and he sent me to the wrong one, which was a long, painful crutch ride to an elevator that deposited me to a place I knew–smack between a very lengthy hallway between stations. I could have killed the guy. The pain was excruciating by the time I got to the street.
On the scooter, I just hop out my door, ride the thing to work, and hop in the door. No problem.
Things got worse, however; my first day back to work, I tried to navigate a small space, lost my balance, and fell over backwards–spraining my left wrist. The one I needed to use the crutches. Well, that was fun. Back to the emergency room, nice to find I had no breaks, but still, I now had a fractured foot and a sprained wrist, and had to get around on one crutch.
It was not a fun few weeks.
Worse, it put off the puppy search Sachi and I had planned for so long. I wanted very badly to get the puppy at the very start of a vacation period so I could be there full-time for as long as possible while the pup was small. But a fractured metatarsal means no driving, and we’re not getting the puppy from a pet store–we are set on checking out breeders and finding a puppy from a good one.
Just this week, I was able to mostly abandon the crutch, which was an improvement. Previously, I had to use my ass to go up and down the stairs–sit down and push myself up or down one step at a time, whilst moving the crutches up or down every three or four steps. Now, I am using the heel of my right foot instead and so can get around without crutches most of the time, and hopefully can start using the full foot soon. I should be good enough to drive by this weekend, and we’ll check out a few breeders with a rental before we go to Sachi’s hometown for O-Bon.
Wow, I had no idea we were raising the debt ceiling by so much. From the Irish Times:
$900 trillion. Well, it’s in print, so it must be true!
I love this. A Yale law professor has pointed out an obscure law that allows the president to mint as much money as he likes, so long as it is in the form of platinum coins. Obama, therefore, could, if he so wanted, order the minting of two $1 trillion coins, deposit them in the Federal Reserve, and use them to pay debts. Ironically, it would not even cause inflation, though it could cause a loss in investor confidence and prompt foreign governments to devalue the dollar.
Balkin’s post takes the form of an imaginary discussion between Obama, Biden, Reid, and Geithner. It’s fun to read.
However, Obama probably won’t do it. I have a feeling that he will absolutely try for a compromise first, even if it’s a cave; but if Republicans are so stupid or inept that a default would be imminent, I have the feeling that Obama would probably invoke the Fourteenth Amendment sooner than make the coins or “sell” federal land. He would likely do it as a backstop measure to temporarily set back the default until a deal can be reached. This seems likely to me because Obama appears to be almost unreasonably intent on making deals rather than doing the smart thing or the right thing unilaterally.
Still, it’s nice to imagine the platinum coin move. It reminds me of the fictional move in that one episode of The West Wing where Josh figures out that the president can side-step a Republican strip-mining amendment to an essential banking bill by using the Antiquities Act to declare the site a national park. (In actuality, that act allows him to create national monuments, not parks, but the effect would be the same.)
Jeffrey Rosen writes:
As Matthew Zeitlin has argued in TNR, if Obama invoked the Fourteenth Amendment to raise the debt ceiling unilaterally, the most likely outcome is that the Supreme Court would refuse to hear the case. The conservative justices have long required clear evidence of legal “standing” before opening the courthouse door—something they showed in their recent 5-4 decision rejecting a taxpayer’s challenge to an Arizona school vouchers program—and it’s hard to imagine who could establish enough of a legal injury to establish standing in this case.
I think he misreads the right-wingers on the court. They are, like their brethren in Congress and elsewhere, not about consistency. They are about ideology. For example, when it comes to the Ninth Amendment, Scalia and Thomas consider it irrelevant, a deprecated piece of constitutional flotsam, if it ever meant anything at all. The Second Amendment, on the other hand, was all about individual gun rights and had nothing to do with the militia, and is not at all outdated or irrelevant in today’s society. The truth is reversed; the Ninth is fully alive and relevant, while the Second is outdated; in fact, gun ownership rights best derive from the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments.
The only consistency for right-wingers like the Big Four on the court today is ideological, not legal or logical. They pretend that the Ninth Amendment doesn’t exist because it would open up Pandora’s box to all sorts of civil rights they disagree with, like the right to privacy. The same ideological fervor allows them to rule that there is no separation of church and state simply because the principle has been violated so often–as if breaking a law means it doesn’t exist any more. In which case, theft would be legal today–if they were consistent.
I think they would quite easily manufacture whatever kind of legal injury they might desire in order to create standing, or else simply ignore legal standing altogether and claim that the nation’s best interests demand they address the issue. If they wanted to. They might not–they might find legal standing a convenient way to ignore the case, or they might take it and decide, as Rosen also argues, to uphold expanded executive powers, or to allow Obama to take the blame for the debt.
I’m just saying they they won’t be ruled by any need for consistency–they will do exactly what they want, when they want, for any reason they want. That’s their pattern.
With far too many right-wingers today, reality is defined by little more than what they want it to be at any given moment.
Stewart, as usual, has unlimited fertile soil when conservatives cry about how victimized they are by the left (note: 15-second ad plays at head of video):
Special fun is where they make the claims that Christians are so victimized, they are the last group anyone can discriminate against.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiighhhht.
Because there are so many Muslims and Atheists in Congress. Or serving as governors. Or historically as president. The truth is, if you’re not Christian, your chances of getting elected to any state or national office is slim to none. Being a Christian is a pre-requisite in almost any political office, despite that being unconstitutional.
Seriously, a few department stores run ads using the word “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” and suddenly, Christians are the most victimized group ever. Someone brings a lawsuit to point out how Christianity is unconstitutionally pervading in yet another corner of government, and Christianity is somehow the victim of relentless persecution (despite the fact that these lawsuits usually fail).
It’s like the Florida woman who, in 2005, when Republicans dominated the White House, both houses of Congress, and the national media, complained that she was “under-represented” because the quotes printed on her coffee cups disagreed with her more often than not. It’s like Republicans at the same time whining that they only got 98% of judicial nominees passed, when that far exceeded what any modern administration ever hoped for. It’s like Richie Rich complaining that his allowance of $990,000 dollars a week is a slap in the face because it used to be an even million. If they’re not allowed everything they want–not 99%, that’s not enough, it has to be the whole thing–then they cannot help but cry in agony like spoiled children over how abused, oppressed, and underprivileged they are.
I feel so sorry for their pain and grief. It must be intolerable.
Today, Boehner delayed the debt-ceiling/budget vote, likely because he can’t get enough GOP votes to pass it.
There seem to be three possibilities: (1) he doesn’t get the votes, makes a deal with the Dems even less to his liking but all Dems will agree and enough Republicans will go along to pass it; (2) he sways enough Republicans to get the votes; or, (3) he waits until the last second before the ceiling will expire, then pushes through a thoroughly Republican plan that Obama will have to either accept or else the national economy will be crushed.
Why do I suspect that (3) is most likely? Certainly, (1) seems impossible.
I hope I am wrong. But then, right now, I am at the stage where all of the plans look stupid–with Democrats suggesting deep cuts with no Bush tax repeal for the wealthy, I am seeing even the best-case scenario being one where this passes and I have to wait for the media to realize that this was another of Obama’s things where it looked like he caved but actually got more of what he wanted than the other side did. Frankly, I don’t see it, though.
Many have said it (including myself), and it is true: offer a reasonable plan for accessing media, and people won’t pirate so much.
Too bad by-mail or online media services in Japan are not even close to being like Netflix. I looked into them recently, and only found limited, overpriced by-mail services–essentially charging more than video rental shops for a set number of videos (usually something like four or eight) per month.
Glenn Beck, in a stomach-churning segment (when aren’t they?), comments on the Norway terror attack by Anders Behring Breivik.
In a short period of time, he equates the children killed in the attacks as a kind of “Hitler Youth” and manages to essential agree with the killer’s ideology–in fact, he boasts that he was sending out the same message himself, last fall.
As the thing started to unfold, and then there was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler Youth or whatever — I mean, who does a camp for kids that’s all about politics? Disturbing. But anyway, so there’s this political camp, and some crazy man goes and starts shooting kids. …
… Last fall, I said that Europe is going to go into financial trouble, and it’s also going to go into problems with radical Islam, because the cities are going to be overrun … they [Muslims] are squeezing the neck of Europe. And that’s what Geert Wilders has been saying: that political correctness and multiculturalism is killing Europe, and he’s right. And, if you look at multiculturalism and you’re still for it, well, you’d better look whose company you’re in.“
Essentially, after smearing the victims as if they were the product of some kind of nefarious communist/fascist brainwashing operation (many have pointed out that Beck’s own 9/12 Project hosts similar political camps for youth), he then goes off on saying that Europe is being destroyed by Muslims using Europe’s own political correctness and multiculturalism as the means of doing so.
That is pretty much exactly what Breivik (who also references Geert Wilders repeatedly) wrote, many times over, in his manifesto:
While formal protection of free speech is important, social and informal censorship are equally challenging. At the end of the day, we will also have to shed the straightjackets of multiculturalism and Political Correctness if our democratic system is to survive Islamic challenges as well as other attacks on our freedoms. …
Multiculturalism (cultural Marxism/political correctness), as you might know, is the root cause of the ongoing Islamisation of Europe which has resulted in the ongoing Islamic colonisation of Europe through demographic warfare (facilitated by our own leaders). …
One of the foundational problems in Europe today is that the multiculturalists and the suicidal humanists lie to everyone to preserve comfortable illusions. Political correctness is a mandatory lie in European societies. …
There must be at least one major media company that has the courage to operate outside the boundaries of political correctness and is bold enough to tell people the truth about multiculturalism, the ongoing Islamisation and the individuals responsible.
Is Glenn Beck blind to whose company he is in?
To be honest, I am not sure exactly what Beck is proud of here. He seems to be taking credit for predicting that multiculturalism and Islam would be problems in Europe–but those issues are not the problem in Norway right now. Muslims did not bomb Oslo’s Government Building. Multiculturalism did not gun down dozens of men, women, children. Nor were they even the proximate cause.
The only one responsible was someone who would have felt very much at home in Glenn Beck’s audience. The killer was someone who believed what Beck himself is spewing.
Via the NY Times, from the CBO:
Bush wasted more on his two wars alone than Obama’s net spending increases combined.
His tax cuts, mostly for the rich, squandered even more than that.
Not to mention that this chart does not even show the fiscal impact of the economic states each president oversaw; Bush’s recession has cost us a great deal more than is shown here; he doubled unemployment just before Obama came into office, and presided over the loss of millions of jobs. Obama at least halted the plummet, limited half by his own unwillingness to do what was needed and half by Republicans kicking, screaming, and dragging the country away from any solid recovery effort.
Yes, Bush was in office for eight years, and Obama is running at the two-and-a-half year mark. However, it is also worth nothing that Obama was forced to make most of his new spending because of the disastrous economy Bush burdened him with–otherwise Obama would have only increased spending by a few hundred billion.
Even so, were Obama to continue to spend as he has (and there is no indication that he will), he would still not spend as much as Bush did over an 8-year period.
Now, the debt did explode–but under Bush. It’s like the night shift guy set the building on fire at 7:30 a.m. and handed the building over to the morning shift guy at eight, and then tried to make everyone believe the other guy started the fire.
Not that any of this is a surprise, but unless it gets pointed out every once in a while, the lie that is so often repeated will go unchallenged and everyone will “know” that Obama got us into this mess, and thus buy more into the myth that tax cuts and land wars in Asia did not do the most damage.
When news of the terrible attacks in Norway came out, the inevitable discussions popped up on the right-wing discussion boards: it was obviously a Muslim terrorist, the kind enabled by stupid liberals and their multiculturalism–and certainly not a white guy:
Norway had recently charged a mullah for terrorism. This is payback. Maybe now the Scandinavian countries will stop their coddling of muslims.
Or, maybe they’ll be like Spain a few years back, and vote in a government that will give them more concessions.
Multiple Choice question Class:
Who did the Norwegian Bombing?a) Islamic Extremists?
b) Disenfranchised American White Middle Class Males?
c) The Amish?
d) Christian Nuns?
e) Liberal enablers?From Islam………… with love. (sarcasm) Maybe NOW they will round up those Muslim Bastards and send them back to Africa and Asia.
How’s that multiculturalism feel?
By definition, if you need to “go back in time” 16 years to find a white guy bomb-terrorist, they’re no longer a statistically significant threat. But moslems are.
They immediately started long discussions about how this exemplified how violent, intolerant, and soulless Islam is, how liberals allowed this to happen by embracing “peaceful” Islam, and how groups responsible for acts like this should be treated:
History will repeat itself when dark forces must be obliterated once again. People that have no stomach for this including liberals, get out of the way!
well Americans did forget 9/11 and decided to give Obama a chance
The Western World needs to do three things. They are difficult, but not impossible. They will be met with resistance, but they need to be done.
- Neutralize all imams, who are the sole source of moslem vitriol.
- Reduce the mosques to dust.
- Deport all moslem believers to their countries of origin.
I try to stay above the fray on most matters of high tension, but with today’s atrocity enough is enough. The West had better realize what it’s faced with and act before it’s too late. They’re coming and we have no plan nor backbone to stop it. sd
I agree. We need to find out who did this and execute them publicly. the next time there is an honor killing the men involved need to be castrated and then hung in public right in the middle of “rag town.” They must be harshly informed that they are no longer in a world that they have already ruined and that we are not going to stand by and let them destroy ours. We will not let it happen even if it means that we must eliminate or deport every last muslim in this country. It is time to lock and load and play cowboys and muslims!!!!! Don’t tell me how islam is a religion of peace. The only peace you will get from me is a piece of land to bury you in.
Even when reports started coming in that the people killed on Utoya Island were attending a Labor Party camp on an island, that the victims were leftists, the tone did not change–it perhaps even strengthened, with screeds against liberals and multiculturalism, irony that liberals suffered because of their own misguided tolerance, with more invective about what to do about the entire group identified with the terrorsist or terrorists behind all of it:
Muammar Khaddafi has already threatened to take the war to Europe. Islamic shock troops and fifth columnists have been in place throughout Europe for years. To the white people of Europe: You can run, but you can’t hide. So man up and kick these invaders out. No mercy. Because they shall surely show none to you.
Weren’t those the “Obama Youth” types at camp. These were kids that wholeheartely embraced the multicutural myth of appeasing Islam. Their leaders allow thousands of Muslims into their homeland every year, preaching diversity and tolerance. Wasn’t Norway the place that found that 100% of all forceable rapes were committed in their country last year (like 1356 of 136) were linked to Muslims? The same ideology that panders, like here in the US, will get you killed. Why are Liberals so f-ing stupid?
Muslims are no longer welcome in Amercia…
Bastards. Typical Islamic tactics. They like to fight unarmed kids and women. Bastards.
These bastards hsould NEVER have been “welcomed” in any western nation. They are modern day NAZIs.
As Stewie would say, How’s that multiculturalism working for you? Huh? Pretty good? Huh?
Then the reports came out: the perpetrator of the attacks was not a Muslim, nor a liberal–he was a gun-toting right-wing fundamentalist Christian who hated Muslims and multiculturalism:
He was described as a gun-loving, highly religious Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threat of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration to the cultural and patriotic values of his country.
“We are not sure whether he was alone or had help,” a police official, Roger Andresen, said at a televised news conference. “What we know is that he is right-wing and a Christian fundamentalist.”
In short, he was ideologically identical to these people who had been expounding on ways to punish the entire community the perpetrator had come from.
Oops.
News of this instantly turned the discussion on the same boards to worries about how liberals would take advantage of news like this, and that the liberal media would have a field day, epitomized by this cluelessly ironic expression of disgust with how the tragedy would be abused by the left wing to forward their ideological agendas:
Liberals love tragedies like these to exploit for their own political gain..they have NO soul
Yes. It would be horrific if someone took this news and used it as an example of how their political ideology is therefore supported.
Needless to say, from that point forward, there were no more posts about how the larger group the suspect belonged to should be punished in radical ways. Instead, people started to point out how this was a lone nut who had no connection to his community and so should be divorced from it–or even that he was an Arab sympathizer who was trying to weaken the conservative Christian community from within. Some even began to spin even this as somehow related to liberals:
The European right has more in common with the American left than it does with us.
very true… European “conservatives” also tend to resemble what we’d label democrats.
For those looking for false equivalencies, the liberal equivalent to the Free Republic boards would be the Democratic Underground or DailyKos; their reactions were far less vitriolic and political. A few supposed about Islamic or right-wing suspects, but for the most part there was worry over the casualties and what this would mean for Norway’s future.
And yes, I know the Freepers are extremists–but it gives a good insight into the right-wing echo chamber. What is said there is, in many ways, the uninhibited heart and soul of right-wing America.
E! Online has apparently just fallen off the file-sharing turnip truck, where it apparently was born yesterday.
They are acting like something new and unthinkable has just happened for the first time. Under the headline, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Computer Virus? Could Happen!” they report:
Antivirus software maker PC Tools has uncovered a phishing scam lurking within BitTorrent, where massive files (like the ones containing feature-length films) are transferred via smaller chunks to make them easier for computers to handle.
According to PC Tools publicity rep Curtis Sparrer, a result claiming to have located a free download of the final Harry Potter film will actually prompt you to visit another site so that you can obtain the required password “to stop automated leeching and detection.”
After you’ve saved what looks to be a legitimate file, the virus purveyors will have access to your hard drive. And, to add insult to injury, there’s no movie.
They located one? No, they uncovered one! Wow, that must have been hard!
Obviously, this is not a “virus,” as the headline claims, and any idiot who reads comments or has been sharing files for more than one day knows all about “password protected” downloads, just like they know about the multitude of fake torrents that litter the filesharing landscape. It’s hardly new–in fact, it’s older than BitTorrent itself. They also skip over a whole bunch of steps between visiting a web site and them having control over your hard drive, but I found it on another “news” report which gave more detail–on the malicious site, you have to go through a whole bunch of steps which includes installing a file on your hard drive and, I presume, giving it access–in other words, a trojan. Again, not a virus.
Looking at all the reports out there, most call this “new,” or the “latest” threat. I imagine the people who have downloaded movies and other files for any length of time must be laughing at the naivete of these “n00b” statements. It’s kind of like saying that if you travel to a big city, you should not stop and chat with the aggressive panhandlers, give them all the cash in your wallet, and provide them with your home address and times you’ll be out so they can “return the money” once things start going well for them. After all, that’s the latest new scam on the streets! Imagine New Yorkers rolling their eyes–or almost anyone, as you’d have to be light-years beyond bumpkinhood to not see that as obvious.
I suppose that this is just what happens in a mostly tech-illiterate media when an antivirus software maker issues yet another press release to stimulate sales.
Heat wave breaks records of both temperature and duration
Make no mistake: This blistering heat wave now gripping much of the country remains remarkable both for its intensity and duration.
“With the number of days of extreme heat and humidity of the current heat wave, it may be more significant and impact a larger area than the deadly 1995 heat wave,” according to AccuWeather meteorologist Jim Andrews. Chicago was “ground zero” in the 1995 heat wave, he says, where the death toll was 750 over the four-day episode.
So, tell me–is Fox News putting Al Gore’s book out on the pavement today?
Didn’t think so.