Dept. of Utter Stupidity

From the Wired Online blog feed:

Congress thinks electric cars are too quiet and pose a threat to pedestrians and cyclists, not to mention all those people with iPods and cell phones surgically attached to their ears. Its solution? Have the Department of Transportation require hybrids and EVs to make more noise.
source

So, if a certain generic kind of vehicle might potentially threaten a few individuals because of choices that they freely made, the vehicles must be changed to overcome those personal choices. But if a different generic kind of vehicle is proven to be actively harming all of us, right now, it's business as usual and here's another subsidy and don't forget to top up your tank for the weekend. Bah.

There are Americans who are intelligent and concerned and capable of recognizing the truth even when makes their accountant uncomfortable, I know this because I have met them; but there sure as hell are none such in American politics.

Who needs horror movies?

From Hendrik Herzberger's article The Darksider in the "New Yorker" of 9/16 July:

[M]any of the details and incidents that Gellman and Becker document [in a four-part series in June in the "Washington Post"] are as new as they are appalling. More important, the pattern that emerges from the accumulated weight of the reporting is, as the lawyers say, dispositive... for the past six years, Dick Cheney, the occupant of what John Adams described as "the most insignificant office that the invention of man contrived," has been the most influential public official in the country, not necessarily excluding President Bush, and his influence has been entirely malign. He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy and ignorant President he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable "war on terror."

More than anyone else, including his mentor and departed co-conspirator, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country’s moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of "cruel," "inhuman," and "degrading" treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: "a no-brainer for me"), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, of course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself, launched under false pretenses, conducted with stupefying incompetence, and escalated long after public support for it had evaporated, at the cost of scores of thousands of lives, nearly half a trillion dollars, and the crippling of America’s armed forces, which no longer overawe and will take years to rebuild.

The stakes are lower in domestic affairs—if only because fewer lives are directly threatened—but here, too, Cheney’s influence has been invariably baleful. With an avalanche of examples, Gellman and Becker show how Cheney successfully pushed tax cuts for the very rich that went beyond what even the President, wanly clinging to the shards of "compassionate conservatism," and his economic advisers wanted. They show how Cheney’s stealthy domination of regulatory and environmental policy, driven by “unwavering ideological positions” and always exerted “for the benefit of business,” has resulted in the deterioration of air and water quality, the degradation and commercial exploitation of national parks and forests, the collapse of wild-salmon fisheries, and the curt abandonment of Bush’s 2000 campaign pledge to do something about greenhouse gases. [...]

Cheney, Gellman and Becker report, drew up and vetted a list of five appellate judges from which Bush drew his Supreme Court appointments. [...] The result is a Court majority that, last Thursday, ruled that conscious racial integration is the moral equivalent of conscious racial segregation. [...]

[L]ast week, Cheney provoked widespread hilarity by pleading executive privilege (in order to deny one set of documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee) while simultaneously maintaining that his office is not part of the executive branch (in order to deny another set to the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives). On Cheney’s version of the government organization chart, it seems, the location of the Office of the Vice-President is undisclosed. So are the powers that, in a kind of rolling, slow-motion coup d'état, he has gathered unto himself. The laughter will fade quickly; the current Administration, regrettably, will not. However more politically moribund it may become, its writ still has a year and a half to go. A few weeks ago, on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, the Vice-President issued threats of war with Iran. A "senior American diplomat" told the Times that Cheney’s speech had not been circulated broadly in the government before it was delivered, adding, "He kind of runs by his own rules." But, too often, his rules rule. The awful climax of "Cheney/Bush" may be yet to come.

Impeach the bastards now, while you still have the right to do so.

Very B.S.D.T.

And the punchline is: I can't even format the hard disk and start again. An error message appears, saying (and I quote at full length) Windows konnte die Formatierung nicht abschliessen. You will note the absence of explanations or reasons or suggestions or even ways to go about finding out what happened.

I am going to throw this fucking thing out of the window.

What enrages me most, as a pampered Mac user, is the utter opacity of Windows. "The operation failed." Whaddaya mean, you want to know why? You are not entitled to know that, you pathetic little (scornful sneer) user. If you were entitled to know why the operation failed, it would not have failed. Just because it's your computer does not mean that you have any say in what it does or doesn't or should or shouldn't do. So there.

And people voluntarily buy this stuff? Does not compute.

B.S.D.T.

The world needs a new emoticon: the exact opposite of the heart in "I heart NY". I propose the big stinking dog turd (imagine it as drawn by Keith Haring).

I big stinking dog turd Windows XP.

I've written before about the problems of getting things to work properly after reinstalling Windows XP. Well, tonight I cannot get the compiled application to run. It throws out an error number which doesn't exist (i.e. is not in the system documentation) and then quits. I can't even open it with the debugger to watch how and where it crashes. I would format the hard disk and start again, were I not afraid that it would take two weeks to get the system running again. Damn damn damn damn damn and damn.

Very big, and very stinky.

In happier news I'm listening to a recently-purchased CD, Em Minas ao Vivo which I'd recommend to all fans of Antonio Carlos Jobim. This is a live album recorded in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 1981. It's very simple, just Tom and his piano, miked up very close and personal as though he were singing just to you. There are no surprises here, you know every tune by heart; but damn he's good.

The web page linked above is worth reading (for Jobim fans) even if you aren't going to buy the CD.

A rare political post

From the Independent:

Within the first four hours of the ceasefire, Hamas and Islamic Jihad launched 11 Qassam rockets at the western Negev. But Mr Olmert said that Israel would display "patience and restraint" for a few more days. "The government of Israel will not miss this opportunity for calm," he promised. "Even though there are still violations of the ceasefire by the Palestinian side, I have instructed our defence officials not to respond, to show restraint, and to give this ceasefire a chance to take full effect." But his spokeswoman, Miri Eisin, stressed that if the attacks continued, Israel would respond.

Aha, now I understand you: a "ceasefire" means that I don't fight back when you attack me.

I don't know why this burns me so, I'm neither Jewish nor Israeli (nor Palestinian for that matter). I think it's a side-effect of my foolish attempt to make sense of the world by comparing that which I see to the words which are used to describe it.

Actually, I do know what annoys me: the presumption on the part of those intentionally misusing language ("liar" is such a loaded term) that I will be deceived by their cunning plan. It's an insult to my intelligence.

In other news my mother recovers apace (as it were), she walked to the end of the block and back yesterday, ten days after her hip replacement. I still find this whole process just astonishing.

In other, other news I've found a Christmas present for myself (from a book review in the Independent):

Cartledge ... vividly reconstructs [the Spartans'] finest hour, first examining mobilisation and preparation, and then the broiling August day when 300 of their finest, under the command of Leonidas, took up their positions at the Hot Gates ("Thermopylae" in Greek) and fought to the death against a numerically vastly superior Persian army under Xerxes.

The tale has been told before, of course, but, where Cartledge really scores is in his subsequent overview of how this crucial confrontation between East and West came to occupy a central place in the West's view of itself, from antiquity right through to modern times. An epilogue and three quite brilliant appendices (which might simply have formed additional chapters in the book) examine in particular the genius of Herodotus, Father of History and chief source for this period. Cartledge shows how Herodotus's invention of a new, would-be objective and fair-minded form of reportage has been so vital to the West and to its capacity, at its best, to tolerate and understand other cultures. It also suggests why certain other cultures are so poor at developing a similar tradition of tolerance.

Twenty-seven down, three to go.