Tolerating Tolerance =>
Today's message of tolerance comes to you from Soundgarden:

Cry, if you want to cry
If it helps you see
If it clears your eyes

Hate, if you want to hate
If it keeps you safe
If it makes you brave

Pray, if you want to pray
If you like to kneel
If you like to lay

Don't come over here
And piss on my gate
Save it just keep it
Off my wave

- soundgarden->superunknown->My Wave

Kind of sums it up for me. It's hard for me to tweak my brain into the mind set that allows the hubristic stance that all people should subscribe to my points of view. I arrived at my various viewpoints (if indeed I'm ever really finished conceptualizing an idea) through my particular and unique experiential path through timespace, and expect that others have done the same.

This is not to say that I'm a moral relativist. I believe in Right and Wrong™ and a reciprocal version of the "Golden Rule" (I reserve the right to ignore it if you have first; in fact I reserve the right to change my mind about anything without notice, given new data and/or an alternate interpretation). I just think that most aspects of life are not to be elevated to the level of a moral distinction but are, more mundanely, a matter of taste. And where taste is concerned, there is no overriding moral imperative to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, the saved from the damned. I like chocolate ice cream. Don't try and make it part of some moral crusade to save the landless farmers of Central America from exploitation by greedy transnational corporations. Good luck with your "consciousness raising" exercise, but if you harass me for my choice amongst 31 flavors, then you can, with all due respect for your tastes and opinions, fuck off.
jkb at 5:51 PM

Hmmmm, can't upload a new post that I just edited in TextPad, but I can type one by hand. Curoius.
jkb at 12:24 PM

My new friend from Maine, Regina Yount, gives a great recipe for soft pretzels. I'm salivating at the very thought of dipping them into cheese sauce or soup on a cool fall afternoon, which reminds me, it's time for the game!
jkb at 10:35 AM

No rest for the Wicked =>
So my daughter takes our son to church this morning, no doubt as part of some youth recruitment and indoctrination drive, leaving her unsaved agnostic parents at home with nothing to do and, thanks to daylight savings time, an extra hour to do it. Makes you wonder if God would have rested on the seventh day if there was a "Goddess" around ;)
jkb at 9:19 AM

Republic or Empire? =>
John Perry Barlow writes in a piece called "The American Republic is dead. Hail the American Empire. Or else", where upon he decries the recent congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq, which is named, in appropriately Orwellian fashion, the "Resolution Authorizing the President to Use Force, if Necessary, to End the Threat to World Peace from Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction," [emphasis added]. A quote:

I believe that the American Republic died in the U.S. Senate last Thursday morning and was buried yesterday morning in the East Room of the White House.

Nice thought, except he's a least six decades off, for the death of the American Republic was certainly a fait accompli during the reign, er presidency, of FDR, if not Woodrow Wilson or even Teddy Roosevelt. In this the American Century, this county has assumed the mantle of the fallen British and French empires, spiritually and economically exhausted from the carnage of WWI, defeated the German and Japanese empires in battle during WWII, and bankrupted the Soviet empire in an economic and strategic war of attrition that lasted for over half a century to emerge as the last empire of the Millennium. Regardless of how we choose our emperor (can you really argue that any recent president's election has been a truly "democratic" process?), this country's effect on the international community is no less imperial than those more accurately named empires that have proceed it. Another quote:

Despite the fact that we have been exposed to far worse during our history - whether by Bloody Old England, the Kaiser, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, Red China, or, hell, France on a bad day - we have never before declared war without being attacked nor have we extended an American President the right to do so at his pleasure.

While this statement is correct as far as it goes, it neglects the fact that we seem to get into plenty of mischief without the niceties of a declared war, or even a nebulous congressional authorization. Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Serbia, even Persian Gulf I, were all against enemies who did nothing to provoke us directly, but had the misfortune of having leaders or governments that were on the wrong side of American political or economic interests. Now include all the totalitarian dictators we propped-up or opposition figures we had killed in the name of national security. Sounds pretty imperial to me. Afghanistan was probably the most justifiable conflict since World War II, a rogue government who harbored an organization who has made numerous deadly attacks against US citizens and property both abroad and at home. Even so, the war on terrorism seems likely to degenerate into a shadowy state of low-intensity conflict that may smolder well into this century, not an emergency to be overcome with life returning to "normal" afterwards, but an ongoing policy of aggressive action in order to maintain the our economic and ideological supremacy in the world. Pax Americana? More like Imperium Americana.

So it's wonderful that Mr. Barlow has acknowledged the fact that the US, in deed if not in word, is an empire. In fact it's possibly the greatest in history in it's ability project it's power onto any set of coordinates on the map. It's a situation long noted and decried by intellectuals on the left, who see meddlesome American interests as a threat to peace and justice throughout the world, as well one fully embraced by those on the right for whom empire is a metaphor for a kind of moral and economic manifest destiny. "America, America, God shed his grace on thee", goes the old song, and to some this reflects their belief in our God-granted ascendancy to the position of the world's last remaining superpower. They would do well to remember that all previous Empires have fallen, and usually from the inside out, so that the barbarians at the gates are merely removing an already crumbling facade, hollowed out by a combination of narcissism, hubris and inflexibility.

A constant state of war means that, by definition, power must be further concentrated into a central authority to coordinate matters of national security, with every aspect of everyday life eventually evaluated on the basis of whether it helps or hinders the war effort. When the entire world, even citizens of this country, may be involved in shadowy plots to undermine our position in the world, the logic of power insists that everything, even the hollowed ideals of democracy, freedom and human rights, must be sacrificed to ensure the security of the state. It's nice that people are noticing that the freedom-for-security bait-and-switch is happening right now, hidden under a cloud of rhetorical ash cloud thicker than the dust from any falling skyscraper. My question is, what took them so long?

Postscript:
Our one saving grace is that, so far, no nation or way of life has been able to successfully resist the virus-like vector of our Imperial culture. If at some point the US shrinks into the background of history, it may be because we have succeed in that goal with has eluded all previous empires, the total economic and cultural assimilation of the world into the ultimate of empires. Of course, by then, we'll have to contend with Mars and other extra-Terrestrial settlements who, unconstrained by the inertia of Earth-bound history, and with cultures and peoples of their own, may yet preside over the humbling of imperial Earth. The end of history? Pax Solaria? More likely just the wheel of history on it's way through another revolution.
jkb at 6:17 PM

I'm getting pop-up ads all the time now for things that have little to do with what I'm viewing, which leads me to believe that I've downloaded some rogue piece of stinkware that spawns ads that it thinks is related to what I'm viewing, but is poorly written (or has no intention of being contextual, and is just shoveling ads at me). This is as annoying as that crap that made commercial links from random words on webpages in a really ugly yellow highlighter style after loading a Grokster update last year. If there was ever a candidate for "There oughta be a law" status it's this kind of rudeness.

I don't feel like going on a hunt through my registry for the offending code, so it looks like it's time to reload from the disk image once again (thank you Ghost).
jkb at 12:05 AM

Forget Ellen Feiss, give me Janie Porche! =>
Rogers Cadenhead gives us insight into the realm of microstardom worship in a piece Stalking Janie Porche:

Add my name to the list of creepy people stalking Apple's Switch celebrities. Janie Porche is so effusively perky in her ad that I googled to see if she's a real human or some kind of test-tube baby cultured in a secret lab at Apple.

Bottom line? Ellen (sexy dingbat stoner) Feiss is really no match for the ebulliently geeky Janie ("I saved Christmas") Porche.

[editor's note: After years of dealing with PCs, in fact after just spending the afternoon slaming my head against Windows XP's less than intuitive networking interface, I'm ready to make the switch myself. The only reason I'm not using one right now is because my daughter stole my G4 from me. But she's going to college soon, and then it will be mine, all mine! Muaah hah ha ha ha!!!].
jkb at 11:46 PM

"I Want to Believe" =>
With all the talk about the Chargers leaving town for L.A. and the miserable seasons they've had since their Super Bowl appearence a few year's back, it's been hard to root for the Bolts, or even to give a shit about them one way or the other. But this year, with some new blood and a coach who's had lot's of success getting to the playoffs (if not in the playoffs), hope is once again in style. With today's 35-34 victory over the Chief's, hope may yet become a justifiable expectation of success. Which is always dangerous. I've Been a Patriots and Red Sox fan since early childhood, so disappointment is an old, comforting friend.

Okay, that's enough football for now. (Did I mention that the 2003 Super Bowl is coming here? I'll be renting out my living room floor in 7'x4' chunks for $100/night. Alex Spanos has taught me well ;)
jkb at 10:50 PM

Statistical smell test =>
The good news: Global poverty has been decreasing markedly over the last two decades, especially in India and China, which account for over a third of the world's population. The bad news: With all the negative attention brought to bare on globalization and capitalism from an alarmist media intent on finding the dark cloud that accompanies every silver-lining, as well as concentrating on relative income inequality vs. absolute reduction in Third World poverty, it's not likely the news is going to get a lot of front-page press.

No matter, news of any kind is hard to suppress any more. At some point the facts on the ground will outweigh any ammount of statistical tomfoolery.
jkb at 9:03 PM

A Joke =>
Joke of uncertain attribution I saw on a private list:

Lost Balloon
A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He
reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon
further and shouts:

"Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?"

The man below says: "yes you're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet
above this field."

"You must work in Information Technology," says the balloonist.

"I do," replies the man. "How did you know?"

"Well" says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically
correct, but it's no use to anyone."

The man below says, "You must work in Management".

"I do" replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well", says the man, "you don't know where you are, or where you're
going, but you expect me to be able to help. You're in the same
position you were before we met, but now it's my fault."

;-)
jkb at 1:03 PM

Dinosaur Mummy =>
An extremely rare find from the Judith River Dinosaur Institute in Montana:

Leonardo is quite a spectacular specimen. In addition to possessing rare skin impressions and being one of only four existing brachylophosaurus specimens uncovered to date, he is the first fully articulated subadult ever found and is believed to have been about 3 or 4 years old when he died.

Along with Leo, you can check out his friends Elvis and Roberta as well.
jkb at 7:02 PM

Today's Notes =>
Just a couple of things for the end of the week:

* God I hate it when you're editing a post on Blogger's site, you go to an email to follow a link you want to include and it loads the page in the browser window that you're editing in, so that even when you hit the back button all your text is gone [note to self: always spawn a new window unless you're editing in another editor]. Arrrrgggghh!

* I just got my first piece of unsolicited feedback from a reader, and it was positive, so I got that going for me, which is nice.

* I finally, FINALLY, was able to register bordage.com, after having some guy in France register it but never using it then having a domain squatter grab it and try and sell it to me for hundreds of dollars. I could have kicked myself for not having done it in 1995. Then, not 8 hours later I get this email:

Are you perhaps interested in buying BORDAGE.COM ?
I'm selling the domain through cenion for $89.95.
If you are interested signup here:
http://www.cenion.com/transfer/1/e/?BORDAGE.COM

Buy something I already own? What an intriguing idea (sounds kinda like probate tax to me :). What I'm wondering is were they able to sniff out queries I made on NSI's whois search page, or was it just a message generated by a solicitation bot triggered when an old record expires and sent to a list of people with likely email addresses? At this point I was just so giddy I registered it for three years, just for the peace of mind factor.

* From my good friend Paul Grasshoff, here's a little montage of the various vegetative life-forms in his house. A quote:

Here is Nigel posing with Infiniti Belagio. I met Nigel in 1994, when he presented me with Rachel Weeks' new phone number when she left for college. For the past eight years he and I have had a special respiration arrangement. We've agreed that I will exhale carbon dioxide and he will exhale oxygen.

Splunge for me, and watch out for titanotheres!
jkb at 10:31 AM

JPL: Another example of 9/11 contagen? =>
I was searching Google for info about theoretical designs for fusion powered space craft, and when I followed a promising link to some JPL related site, I was met with the following cryptic message:

You are not authorized to view this page, or it is not available from your current location. If you believe you received this message in error, please contact EIS Operations at [help@some.domain] or call [555-5555] and report this error." [Numbers and addresses changed - no need to aggravate some poor sysadmin for someone else's policy.]

So, curiousity getting the better of me, I fire off an email to the helpdesk, asking why I was barred from the site. Here's the reply:

The page that you are trying to access is currently restricted to JPL-internal access only. The administrators of that site are working on having the content approved for external access. Unfortunately, at this time, there is no ETA on when that will occur.

Question: Is this site restricted because the government is worried that Al Qaeda will use this knowledge to create an inter-planetary vehicle that would enable them to construct a secret base on Neptune's moon Triton, from which they could shower us with thermonuclear devices, impervious to any countermeasures? Uh, Houston, we have a problem. (Sorry, just couldn't resist.)

Now I go back to find the page using the same search terms and can't find the offending pages. Coincedence? I think not. (well, okay, maybe.)
jkb at 11:05 PM

CNN online pole question:
"Should there be a tax on fattening foods to help Americans lose weight?"

Hmmm, judging how well cigarette, alcohol and gas taxes have worked to reduce consumption... Not that the facts will stop some people's willingness to use selective taxation or tax breaks as the be-all and end-all of collective behavior modification. Better to remove government subsidies of dairy products, arguably the worst kind of fatty foods, and stop shoving them down kids throats for thier dubious health benefits. Less is more, in this case.

A more cynical view would suggest that these proponents of "sin taxes" don't give a damn about people's health; on the contrary, they know that people's behavior won't change one bit, and count on this fact to ensure an unending revenue-stream into public coffers (damn, I was trying to be not so cynical today). Add the fat tax to the proposed CRT recycling tax, SUV tax, red meat tax, and reparations for the descendants of African American slaves, which is, after all, a tax on being white (or at least not being black), and suddenly the much maligned, slippery-slope claims of tobacco tax critics don't seem quite so far-fetched.

Maybe instead of a fat tax, we should have a fat people tax. I can hear the Milk Board stealing a page from the NRA playbook: "Fat doesn't make people obese, people eating fat makes people obese"

On second thought, maybe I should keep my fat mouth shut.
jkb at 2:59 PM

Just one of those days...

Too Much of a (good?) thing =>
Some days it seems like the world is headed down the road to oblivion. Or that's the impression you get if you watch broadcast or cable news. Take today for instance: Bush and his allies in congress and the media making the case for an invasion of Iraq... A psycho is on the loose, sniping random victims in the suburbs of Maryland... An American solder is killed in a terrorist attack off the coast of Kuwait... Pakistan test a new missile capable of delivering nuclear warheads into India... Bloodshed continues in the final round of voting in Indian-controlled Kashmir... A dock worker's strike and subsequent lockout continues in West-coast port cities, costing the economy an estimated one billion dollars a day... Every week, new "terrorist" cells are uncovered here and abroad... Ivory Coast descends into further violence after peace talk break down, and on it goes. You just sit there waiting for the next car-bomb to explode in Israel or for the Dow Jones to fall another 250 points.

"Shoot your television" never seemed like a more appropriate slogan.

It's not that things in the world aren't bad in the world. They are, they have been, they will be. War, poverty, crime, oppression, starvation, sectarian violence, economic uncertainty, political intrigue, environmental degradation, racism, sexism, nihilism - these images pour out of the television like psychic toxins, poisoning our conception of the world and it's people, leaving us to wonder, in all this insanity, what difference can I make against these seemingly intractable problems?

It can make you forget that there is real hope out there, that things are not quite as sordid and horrifying as the if-it-bleeds-it-leads news cycle would have you believe. The economy is sluggish, but unemployment is under 6% and growth is in positive territory. We hear about serial killers, school shootings and murder sprees, but yet the violent crime rates remain at ten-year lows. Poverty and overcrowding are major problems around the globe, but there has been slow-but-steady economic growth in most parts of the world in the past decades, and the UN forecasts that global population will max out at around 9 billion later this century (the third such downward revision that I can remember), then start a long decline to more moderate levels, certainly within our technical grasp to manage with ever increasing standards of living.

The problem is that television, window on the world for the majority of people in this country, is a sensational medium (in the more literal sense of the word). It's quite a bit easier and more compelling to frighten, enrage or titillate with shocking images and an ominous soundtrack than it is to impart a sense of rational optimism or the idea that, with enough hard work and determination, many if not most of the world's seemingly intractable problems are solvable, some even within our lifetimes.

Let's not forget that TV is not the world, just a particularly lurid slice of it, and that with all our advanced technology, bad news travels at the speed of light. The promise of the Internet, communications networks and the 24-hour news cycle was that we would have access to more and higher quality information than ever before. We just have to be careful to keep our heads clear of the fire-hose of negative images to avoid drowning in despair.
jkb at 1:18 PM

Brave New World(s) =>
From the BBC News: "Quaoar, as it has been dubbed, is about 1,280 kilometres across (800 miles) and is the biggest find in the Solar System since Pluto itself 72 years ago." More details from The Age, USA Today, a nice size comparison with Pluto and other Kuiper Belt objects from the Astronomy Picture of the Day site, and for the truly pointy-headed, the Yale paper called "Discovery of a bright Trans-Neptunian Object" Water water everywhere, but no fusion powered vehicles to get there (yet!).
jkb at 11:02 PM

"Ain't nothin' but a house party" =>
The J. Giles quote above probably dates me pretty well, but it's been a while since I've been able to party with abandon, with no greater care that what I was going to have for breakfast to cure the next day's hangover. He's some pictures of some kids (shit, chronologicly, they could probably be MY kids) having a good 'ol fashion house party, complete with 40's of Mickey's, "hot lesbians" and kitty #1. Just like when I was a kid. Well, except for the lesbians (at least as far as I knew, but come to think of it...)

Another pic from a LiveJournal website. Quote: "Bush down wit OPP"

Oi, kids today!
jkb at 3:57 PM

---

About me and this site =>
My name is John Bordage. I grew up in Maine, went to college in Boston, then moved to San Diego county, where I live with my wife, two kids, a cat, a roommate and his dog. I divide my attention between my family, my steady day-job as a carpenter, my freelance work as a tech consultant, playing drums in two bands, and staring at a computer screen for amusement and edification.

This site was developed using Dreamweaver 3, though the code was mostly writen by hand or cut-and-pasted from other examples. Work was done on both a Celron PC and a Mac G4, depending on which one my daughter was using at the moment.

Disclaimer =>
All opinions writen by me on this site are mine alone, and not those of my employer, my clients, my family, my bands, my mother, my pets, or any other person or entity that is not me. In fact, some of the opinions stated within are not even mine (sometimes I just like to say crap to see what it sounds like).

If you are easily offended, ill humored or just plain ignorant should avoid this whole affair, as I will probably say something to offend just about anyone at least once, unless of course you like to be annoyed, in which case read all you like, see what the fuck I care. Asshole.