Mad Analogy

Favourite packages for Ubuntu Intrepid

2008-11-16T12:52:00.000-08:00

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, the 8.10 release. I use "upgraded" in the general term because the distribution upgrade option has never worked for me – I did a clean install.

Add the Medibuntu repository.

then:

sudo apt-get install acidrip acroread acroread-plugins audacious azureus cabextract easytag ffmpeg flashplugin-nonfree gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse gtkpod-aac inkscape libdvdcss2 libdvdread3 libdvdread3 libxine1-ffmpeg meld mozilla-acroread mozilla-mplayer mozilla-plugin-vlc mplayer msttcorefonts openclipart-openoffice.org nfs-common nfs-kernel-server portmap rapidsvn skype smartmontools smbfs totem-xine unrar vlc vlc-plugin-esd w64codecs wine

Georgia: dump Saxby Chambliss on December 2

2008-11-12T23:50:00.000-08:00

Saxby Chambliss, chickenhawk extraordinaire, is in a runoff to keep his Senate seat in Georgia. Despite McCain carrying Georgia 52%-47%, Chambliss was unable to ride his white coattails to victory. People were pissed at him for voting for the Wall Street Giveaway, and they punished him just enough to force him into runoff against Jim Martin.

I'm voting for Jim Martin. He's the most progressive candidate Georgia has produced in a white, heterosexual male body since Jimmy Carter. His legislative record is solid, he's smart and hard working. I've voted for him many times over the years, and I'm happy to do so again.

But most importantly, Jim Martin is not Saxby Chambliss. In 2002 Chambliss won his Senate seat by sliming his opponent Max Cleland (a veteran who lost his limbs in Vietnam) as a terrorist sympathizer. He ran hand-in-hand with Governor Sonny Perdue whose platform of a "Confederate Flag for Georgia" helped propel them both to victory. It was shameful, and I'm still ashamed. It would be redundant to call out his record on voting for the Iraq war, voting for torture, voting for spying on US citizens, voting for retroactive immunity for the telecom companies who spied on Americans, and so on.

Georgia's Secretary of State has no information about the runoff election on her department's website or its Election 2008 website, so she obviously doesn't want people to vote – after all, turnout would be bad for the GOP. It's a shameful state of affairs, but if we "other folks" vote again, we can send Chambliss packing with the man he said he was "goin' to Washington DC to work for", George W. Bush. This time we can elect Jim Martin who will work for the citizens of the State of Georgia.

Vote December 2.

Asking more from family and friends on queer rights

2008-11-09T20:56:00.000-08:00

Following the election last Tuesday, I am very happy and hopeful about the future. Even though Proposition 8 passed in California, President Barack Obama will appoint liberal Supreme Court justices who will eventually give me full equality in the United States, maybe even in my lifetime. I have hope.

But in the meantime, it's going to be rough. Each step forward will be met with stiff opposition. Queers have long been convenient targets for political hate campaigns. This will get worse before it gets better. It already is.

Recently I've discovered that several long-time friends don't agree I should have equal rights, including the right to be married. Some of them have participated in campaigns specifically intended to take away my civil rights. By definition, these people are not my friends, and I will no longer encourage such behaviour with my continued association. These people will no longer be able to truthfully say "I have gay friends, but..." – not if they're referring to me.

I am also raising my expectations of my friends and family. In the past I simply asked friends and family to accept me and not say bad things in my presence. I didn't feel I had the right to ask them to volunteer for a cause, contribute money, or vote a certain way. Although I knew in some cases that they were opposed to my rights, I ignored it. I had very low self-esteem, and I just felt happy that people actually liked me: Internalized homophobia is powerful and insidious. Those days are past.

Now I will call on my friends and family to help advance my civil rights whenever I see fit. Since my friends and family love me as I love them, I expect they will be willing to help me. If friends and family are engaged in or supporting organizations that hold anti-gay agendas, it is my expectation that they work to improve those organizations from within. To be clear, I'm not unreasonable: I don't actually expect my friends and family to live up to my every expectation any more than I live up to theirs.

Queer issues will never be as important to most of my friends and family as they are to me. But now I'm not going to hesitate to ask for help, and if that turns out to be a problem, it will be short-lived. It will be fantastic if they choose to help, and it will be okay if they don't, but no friend will be allowed to work against my civil rights and remain my friend. This is called self-respect, and it starts now.

Obama's election: hope for an exiled gay American

2008-11-04T21:54:00.000-08:00

Living in Canada over the past four years it's been hard to admit I'm an American. Before the 2004 election people used to commiserate, saying "what a terrible government you Americans have to deal with." After 2004, the mood got ugly: we really did elect Bush that second time. The negative opinion of the US government was transferred onto its citizens. Since 2004 whenever I have admitted to being American I've watched welcoming smiles melt into frowns, and often had to listen to a tirade about Bush and the US government. I've had to agree with them, too.

After all, I had to leave the US in order to live with my husband, and you'd better believe I've resented it bitterly. With laws that treat me as something between an abomination and a criminal, a Supreme Court prepared to permanently relegate me to second-class citizenship, and a president that seemed intent on breaking every international law, violating every civil liberty and every standard of decent conduct, I could find little to defend about the US, and even less reason to want to.

I certainly hoped Obama would win. I contributed to his campaign, I made phone calls. But I never let myself really believe, because it would just hurt too much if he lost. The Supreme Court holds the key to deciding whether I'll be a second-class citizen in the US until the day I die, and if more Scalitos had been appointed it would have dashed my hopes for two generations. I held my breath.

Today Barack Obama pulled it off, and decisively, breaking the last barrier for African-Americans (which John McCain spoke of so eloquently and movingly in his concession speech). Obama even mentioned gay people as actual Americans in his acceptance speech. Today I have hope, and I can say I'm an American without embarrassment and without (excessive) anger and resentment. I see that the dream is alive in the United States, and I see reason to believe that one day I might be able to live there again, maybe even as an equal.

A lot more has to change for this to happen. Today, people in Arizona, California, and Florida voted to ban same-sex marriage; it passed in Arizona and Florida. The vote is very close in California, but one thing is certain: voters hold farm animals in higher esteem than their fellow citizens. We have a long way to go, but when I look at how far we've come in forty-five years, I have hope.

Congratulations to President-elect Barack Obama and to the people of the United States on turning this historic page. Congratulations to African-Americans who can say that they are now full participants in the society and democracy of the United States. Congratulations and thank you to everyone who worked, donated, and voted to make this happen. Someday it will make a difference for me, too.

Semantic web startup Twine hard to get wrapped up in

2008-10-27T22:15:00.000-07:00

Twine is [yet another] site that offers recommendations for webpages, stories and information based on things that you've read. I've seen demos that are amazing, that pull together disparate threads of data in new and surprising ways. It is powered by some sort of fantastic semantic juju that allows it to create recommendations and connections that simpler probabilistic analyses cannot. Sounds good right?

The problem is that it is just too. damned. much. work. You start with nothing, and have to enter your links, from scratch, one at a time. You don't get any immediate satisfaction. Unlike FriendFeed or SocialMedian, it doesn't just figure stuff out based on your other activity elsewhere on the web. It doesn't even attempt to figure out what you already like. So all of the heavy lifting is left up to the user, and there's no immediate payoff. The new user is left wondering just what the hell this site is supposed to do for them.

So although it probably has good technology, so far it's a failure. If they don't realize that everybody's not suddenly going to start posting everything in their little walled garden with a promise of getting payoff, maybe, someday, they'll be left behind by other sites who have given a great experience out of the gate to new users. Other sites – Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. – can add this semantic hooey to their own sites at their leisure. Sometimes technology really doesn't matter.

Greenspan gets a clue after the damage is done

2008-10-23T16:08:00.000-07:00

From Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation in today's New York Times:

Facing a firing line of questions from Washington lawmakers, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman once considered the infallible maestro of the financial system, admitted on Thursday that he “made a mistake” in trusting that free markets could regulate themselves without government oversight.

Whoopsie!

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact."

Oh no, he's *distressed*. Well, fuck me with a chainsaw, it sounds like the poor man is suffering! Everybody should be so concerned about Alan Greenspan's legacy while we pick up the ruins of our financial system and economy. I am not sad to see that irrational cult of personality come to such an ignominious end.

Central authentication is coming, and here's a good reason why

2008-10-23T02:53:00.000-07:00

Some interesting reading today on OpenID, Facebook Connect, and the dog's breakfast of authentication standards in the market:

Facebook Connect and OpenID Relationship Status: “It’s Complicated” – John McCrea of Plaxo

The authentication landscape appears to be coalescing. I think a lot of vendors will still want to have a "walled garden" ID scheme, but I'm inclined to think their customers will drag them kicking and screaming into a federated identity world.

I have a good reason to think so. People already use a dangerous form of single sign in: they use the same user ID and password across multiple sites. Some day soon an enterprising young script kiddie from Yemen is going to sit down and write a Distributed Identity Theft Attack that will plunder the databases of weak sites (like some forum that you don't even remember signing up for) to take possession of more valuable sites (like Facebook and LinkedIn) and then finally the holy grail (your email account, used to unlock everything else). Nobody, not even Bruce Schneier (by his own admission), has a different password for every site: at best, we have low, medium, and high-security passwords. But if you're using the same password everywhere, you're only as secure as the weakest site you visit, which means gold bars for the putative Yemeni banks.

Also, über-paranoid password complexity and periodic forced password change rules actually encourage people to use a password formula across different sites, and to change only the last character in a preset sequence. They're virtually assured to do so, because security training has taught people to never, under any circumstances, write down their passwords. So a dictionary attack will still work in most cases for the DITA outlined above – forty-seven variants isn't a lot to try, and most sites don't lock accounts for password failure.

So go change your online banking password right now, I'll wait. Don't forget PayPal, too. And Amazon, which holds your credit card info, as does iTunes.

So, we'll stumble along with our user ID (which is, often as not, the email address) and password (same everywhere) until the Russian Business Network strings together some Perl code and causes a smart-spam and bank fraud wave big enough to shake consumer confidence in the web. At the very least, consumers will learn not to trust websites with homegrown authentication. They'll pick one or two big-name vendors they trust.

Help stop constitutionalized bigotry in California

2008-10-16T20:23:00.000-07:00

California's Proposition 8 is intended to end same-sex marriage in California, which the California Supreme Court ruled constitutional in June. The California Assembly had previously passed a law to allow same-sex marriage, but Governor Schwarzenegger (it hurts to type that) vetoed it, saying that it was up to the supreme court to decide. Well, they did, and although Arnie said he'd campaign against Prop 8, he's done dick-all about it. I guess he's too busy to call a press conference.

Anyhow, the Mormons are pouring enormous sums of cash into the campaign for Prop 8, and although many high-profile celebs are donating to the fight to stop it, it isn't enough. I've given, and I'd like to ask you to give as well. Everybody deserves the right to marry the person they love, and shouldn't have to emigrate to do so, as I did. Equality can be maintained, but only at a cost. Please give now.

Just what is the freaking deal with Henry freaking James lately?

2008-10-06T22:36:00.000-07:00

Having just finished The Conversion by Joseph Olshan, I find that a plethora, a torrent, a veritable cornucopia of recent gay lit seems to revolve around Henry James, "The Master".

Well, three books anyhow, but three books mark a trend. The first I noticed was the most Jamesian (and by far the best), Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 novel The Line of Beauty. Chronicling upper-class life in Thatcher's Britain, Hollinghurst earned the Booker Prize. His first book The Swimming Pool Library was powerfully charged with social commentary, but The Line of Beauty was stunning, and all about the Henry James.

Next up: Edmund White's 2007 novel Hotel de Dream in which Henry James appears as the villain. A riveting semi-fictional tale of Stephen Crane's last days from his wife's point of view, it echoes some of the death themes White first explored in The Married Man, echoing Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky. Although I prefer White's biographical novels, particularly The Beautiful Room is Empty, this is my favourite of his historical fictions thus far.

And finally, back to Joseph Olshan's The Conversion. It is also part of a recent spate of young-gay-Italian-American-Jew-under-a-loggia fiction that is clogging summer bookshelves from Provincetown to Fire Island (but I digress). The Conversion is chock full of Jamesian references, ranging from explicit mentions to flaming manuscripts to the aforementioned loggias. But it surprised me with its layered subtlety and insightful parallels, and it kept me guessing until the end.

Apparently part of the maturity of gay fiction is the rediscovery of the canonical figures from the mainstream whose gay subtexts were so very circumspect. At the same time, gay fiction has entered the mainstream and exists less and less as a separate genre (just try finding a section in a bookstore anymore). Eighty-eight years after his death, Henry James seems to be the model for gay fiction to come. Or maybe some excitable queens are taking the whole "Master" thing just a little bit too close to heart.

Enjoli, for the woman that does it all

2008-09-29T21:03:00.000-07:00

Back in the heady days of the late 1970s, feminism morphed from a fringe movement to a popular crusade. Helen Reddy sang I Am Woman and women sang along. Support for the Equal Rights Amendment reached its high water mark, and Gloria Steinem was a rock star. Women were earning $.69 for each dollar earned by their male counterparts, and were demanding compensation for household work.

In that heady climate of 1978, marketers decided to tap into the image of the all-capable woman:

♪ I can put the wash on the line, feed the kids, get dressed, pass out the kisses and get to work by five to nine, 'cuz I'm a woman – Enjoli ♫

Charles of the Ritz creates Enjoli, the new 8-hour perfume for the 24 hour woman.

♪ I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never never never let you forget you're a man. 'cuz I'm a woman. Enjoli! ♫

The feminist revolution was repackaged as slavery: women are strong, subservient, hard-working sex kittens that smell great – for eight hours! Long-lasting perfume really is such an important issue: women work 20% more than men, and if they want to hold on to a man so they can raise the children, make the money, and serve him sexually, they have to smell the part: 24 hours a day.

Bailout failout and the fallout

2008-09-29T20:32:00.001-07:00

I had been anticipating the passage of the bailout by writing an[other] impassioned screed, a call to arms to punish representatives who voted away our future for a few extra points on the Dow. I have become so used to Congress bowing to corporatist rule that I never expected that it could be voted down, but it was. So let's take a moment to celebrate: for the moment, you've escaped an additional personal debt load of $2,300 that would have gone right into the balance sheets of companies that have well and truly wrecked our economy.

Now that the bill is dead (for the moment) a lot more details are coming out: it turns out that the "assurances" and "compromises" on the bill were window dressing. The full $700B would have committed immediately, the executive compensation measures were meaningless, and the oversight provisions were toothless. Basically, the bill got a lot longer last week, but it never got any better.

Very rich and well placed media figureheads, investors, and politicians are tut-tutting this sad state of affairs, saying "people just don't understand the magnitude of this issue." Oh, but darlings, we do understand. We understand far too well what happens when we spend far more than we take in for far too long, we understand bad investments and cutting our losses, and we're maybe starting to understand when we're being manipulated. And maybe, just maybe, we're starting to resist.

I wrote my congressmen every single day last week. I wrote them again today, and I'm going to keep up the pressure. My house representative, Hank Johnson (D-GA-7^th) voted against the bill so I sent him a nice campaign contribution as a thank-you note. If your representative voted for the bailout, you can ask for a change in the next vote, as there almost certainly will be one.

No bailout is big enough to solve the credit crunch

2008-09-28T02:29:00.000-07:00

Portraying the credit crunch as a strange anomaly that can be cured by writing a trillion-dollar cheque is extremely naïve and unrealistic.

The United States and its citizens are carrying an unprecedented and unsustainable debt load. Thanks to the neocon regime of the past twenty-eight years (yes, you too, Mr. "3^rd Way") which hobbled the government, and the klepto-corporatist administration still in office (and up for a third term) which raided the wealth of the nation to hand over to oil and military contractors (and now financial firms), the United States is so far overextended that the entire world is collectively cutting it off from further credit.

Just as banks are suddenly thinking, "hey waitasecond, maybe we shouldn't hand out credit cards like party favours", and "maybe we should check to see whether the collateral on a loan actually exists", investors and central banks of other nations are suddenly thinking, "hmmm, the United States has a seemingly infinite trade deficit and doesn't seem to produce anything of value but porn", "I wonder what, if anything, backs T-bills these days", and finally "It doesn't seem that the US military is going to be pushing anybody else around anytime soon."

The bailout is supposed to remove toxic mortgages from the balance sheets of large financial firms, and that is supposed to magically cause the credit to flow again. Wrong. What happened with the subprime loan mess is that it eventually woke everybody up to the fact that the US is at the end of its empire, and extending it credit no longer makes any sense. The US and its citizens can't afford any more debt, and they aren't going to be allowed any more. The party's over, the keg is all tapped out, and this hangover is going to be long and difficult, with vomiting, nausea, and no more drinks for a long, long time.

There's not enough money in the collective assets of the United States at this point to buy a hair-of-the-dog large enough to make a difference. The US has declining human capital in every measurable way, it has a tarnished reputation, and the valuable raw natural resources now lie chiefly in other countries. This bailout is just a parting shot, a payoff to the powers who bought and paid for this administration, and a fond final farewell snatch from the taxpayers who made the whole show possible.

A thoughtful letter on the bailout from Rep. David Obey (D-WI-7th)

2008-09-28T02:02:00.000-07:00

I wrote a note to Representative David Obey of the 7th district in Wisconsin. He wrote this very thoughtful and honest reply, which seemed refreshingly free of bullshit. Obviously he's going to vote for the bill, but he avoids the condescension, evasion, misdirection, and outright prevarication of shitheels like Isakson. Hopefully after Obama takes office in January we will see reversal of that indefensible bankruptcy bill and finally see some more meaningful reform. What the hell, maybe we'll get another New Deal. It's about time.

September 27, 2008

Dear Mr. LeDuc:

Thank you for contacting me about the President’s request for a massive $700 billion bailout of the financial markets.

As you might expect, I have heard from many, many people who are unhappy, fearful, and frustrated by what has been going on, and the vast majority are staunchly opposed to the President’s proposal for what is, in effect, a blank check. I am, too, and let me make it perfectly clear that I have no intention of giving this, or any other President, a blank check to do with as he wishes. We've seen that before when the President demanded that Congress give him a blank check for Iraq - with disastrous consequences.

We are currently paying a huge price for the fact that for over 20 years we’ve had massive deregulation of the financial sector of our economy and, at the same time, economic policies that have favored the top dogs at the expense of everybody else.

If you take all of the income growth that has occurred in this country in the last eight years and see who got it, over 95 percent of all of the income growth in the country went to the wealthiest 10 percent of families. That means 90 percent of American families – 9 out of 10 – were left to struggle to get a piece of just 4.7 percent of the total income growth that’s occurred in the last eight years.

As a result, people who, in real terms, have had their income frozen for nearly a decade have tried to keep their heads above water by borrowing. In fact, over the last eight years, mortgage debt alone has gone up by $7 trillion, almost seven times as much as the national debt that we hear so much about.

And with the umpire off the field because of the relentless drive for less regulation by the Reagan and Bush Administrations, and on occasion the Clinton Administration as well, many on Wall Street who were looking for a way to make a bigger buck than ever have made the problem worse.

I fought that pressure time and time again.

For example, I was one of 57 members in the House who opposed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which was enacted during the FDR Administration. Glass-Steagall was enacted to keep investment banking and community banking separate, because they didn't want the high-flying, risk-taking actions of investment bankers to infect the community banking system. It stood us in good stead for generations. During debate on the House Floor during the vote to repeal Glass-Steagall, I said that the bill was:

"consumer fraud masquerading as financial reform. There is nothing wrong with modernizing financial institutions. It is nice to see that my colleagues are going to try to set up one-stop shopping services for financial services. But returning 1999 to 1929 is not reform in my book.”

At this point, we don’t know what will be negotiated with the White House, but we do know that they have the Congress over a barrel because if we don't do something credit markets are likely to freeze up. It doesn't just mean that Wall Street is going to be crippled; the people who will be left holding the bag are American families. The impact on Wall Street will have trickle down consequences for every family in America, and if Main Street business can't get credit, there could be thousands of businesses that go under and we could have the worst economic mess since the Great Depression. So something has to be done.

As Franklin Roosevelt said in his inaugural address in 1932 when he was facing a similar collapse of the financial sector of the economy, "we need action and now." We must provide that action at the same time we make every effort to build in assurances that protect American taxpayers.

Middle income families have missed out on the production of wealth in recent years and taxpayers have been ripped off with giveaways to the wealthy and well-connected, paid for by ballooning the deficit and passing the costs onto future generations.

We’re looking for a number of changes to the Administration’s proposal to protect the taxpayer’s interest.

First, we are trying to ensure that the taxpayer will get the benefit of any recovery in the value of the assets the government would buy from financial institutions.

Second, we are trying to find a mechanism by which Wall Street can pay a significant share of the tab so taxpayers don't get stuck with the whole load.

Third, there needs to be an independent review board looking over the shoulder of the Fed as it makes financial decisions to blow the whistle if problems develop.

Fourth, there certainly should be limitations on compensation to the executives of the companies receiving federal aid and no golden parachutes.

Fifth, there needs to be a reinvigoration of oversight by regulatory agencies to prevent this from happening again.

And that’s just scratching the surface. There are a number of other things that need to be done, too.

I also hope we’ll see a change in the bankruptcy law passed, over my objection, by the last Congress, which did not take into account that some people are unable to make their mortgage payments or credit card payments simply because they’d either lost their jobs or had a health problem. Certainly we ought to be able to provide some sort of relief for people in that kind of situation, so that people on Main Street are getting the same sort of considerations as the big shots on Wall Street.

You should also know that, as I write this letter, Congress is considering legislation that I authored to try to help people on Main Street who are suffering because of this crisis. We're trying to make greater investments in the country's infrastructure by beefing up our sewer and water construction and highway and airport construction in order to create a good number of well paying private sector jobs. We also want to extend unemployment insurance to help address the fact that 600,000 Americans have lost their jobs this year. And we are also trying to provide some budget support for states so they do not wind up knocking poor children off health care rolls.

Please be assured that, as we move forward to confront this challenge, the needs of taxpayers, homeowners, and working Americans and their families will be uppermost in my mind.

Thank you again for taking the time to get in touch.

Sincerely,
David Obey
Your Congressman

Johnny Isakson lies about the bailout

2008-09-25T12:26:00.000-07:00

I just got this email reply today, 25 September 2008, from Johnny Isakson, senior senator from Georgia. The coward hasn't put it on his website, so here it is.

Dear Mr. LeDuc

Thank you for your letter regarding the economy, the financial markets and the proposal from the Treasury Secretary to the Congress.

We are in difficult financial times, and I am committed to protecting the savings and jobs of the people of Georgia by making sound decisions on both immediate actions as well as long-term actions.

First, our economic stress is rooted in the decline of the housing market. The cause of the decline was the funding of marginal credit mortgages (subprime) through the creation of mortgage-backed securities that were sold around the world. As the default and foreclosure rate on these mortgages increased, the value of the securities declined. As the values declined, the balance sheet of the financial institutions that bought them deteriorated. The market for these securities declined and ultimately evaporated, thus causing a liquidity problem for the financial institutions and a credit crisis for American consumers and small businesses.

In the immediate term, we must address the credit and liquidity crisis. In the long term, we must put in place the oversight and safeguards to ensure the transparency and accountability necessary to prevent this from happening again. The Treasury has proposed using up to $700 billion dollars to purchase, at a discount, these mortgage-backed securities. This would provide liquidity to the financial institutions and improve their balance sheets. The important question is this: "Is the taxpayer of Georgia protected?" If the Treasury properly discounts the securities to, say, 50 or 60 cents on the dollar, and holds the securities to maturity there should be little or no cost to the Treasury. More importantly, investors will return to the market and will compete with the Treasury to by these discounted securities and the market will be reestablished. I am working to ensure the safeguards necessary for maximum security for the taxpayer.

In the long term, we must bring transparency and accountability to Wall Street. While I am not a big government regulator, if the investment bankers on Wall Street were held to the same standards of transparency and accountability as our national banking system, this would not have happened. The security rating agencies such as Moody's and Standard and Poor also share some of the blame for the way they rated the subprime mortgage-backed securities, and they should be held accountable. I will work hard for the right reform of Wall Street.

The term bailout has been used a lot in this debate. Not a dollar of the $700 billion will go to the brokers who created the securities. Instead, they will go to the investors who bought them, and then only after they take a significant discount or loss. Properly executed, the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve believe this proposal will restore liquidity to the credit markets and return confidence in the financial system.

I will continue to work for the best interest of our economy and the safety of the savings of the citizens of Georgia.

Thank you again for contacting me. Please visit my webpage at http://isakson.senate.gov/

for more information on the issues important to you and to sign up for my e-newsletter by choosing Newsletter Subscription from the topic list.

Sincerely,
Johnny Isakson
United States Senator

For future correspondence with my office, please visit my web site at

http://isakson.senate.gov/contact.cfm.
You can also sign up for the
eNewsletter by choosing Newsletter Subscription from the topic list.

My reply:

I am in receipt of your condescending and misleading letter concerning the Wall Street bailout.

Don't try to confuse the issue with me, sonny. Tax money going into a private balance sheet is a bailout. Businesses making threats that if they don't get blood money they'll take down the economy is called a shakedown. If you vote for this bill, you'll be making a choice which side you're on: corporations instead of citizens. And there will be consequences.

Count on it.

Now don't make a liar of me. Let's make these bastards pay.

Not one god-damned red cent for Wall Street

2008-09-25T00:08:00.000-07:00

I'm just as deep in the stock market as anyone else is these days. After all, government policy has been urging employers to gut pension plans (remember guaranteed retirement benefits?) in favour of investment plans (with only a set contribution, but no guaranteed returns). So most of my retirement savings is tied up in the stock market, which is a risky gamble. I could lose it, but I wanted the big payoffs that stocks might provide, so I took a chance.

That's how the free market is supposed to work, right? Isn't that what Nobel-prize winner Milton Friedman said? Isn't that the ideology which has been ascendant in the US for the past twenty-eight years? If the banking industry isn't working miracles with all of those fantastic new financial instruments they've cooked up, and are in fact just building an elaborate confection that is collapsing on itself, why should we prop it up? It sounds like a huge proportion of the finance industry is doing things of no real economic value. They need a huge handout (plenty of which they'll pass back as "campaign contributions"), and if we give it they'll demand another huge handout in a year after they waste this one.

So fine, let my portfolio lose seventy-five percent of its value. Even ninety-five percent – we'll work it out. I'd rather spend a trillion dollars helping people in need than wasting it on more empty suits. Recessions are necessary: endlessly trying to apply the juice to extend a boom just makes the crash that much harder, and that's what we're seeing now. So let it go, and then we'll work out a more relevant (and possibly even less corrupt) financial system.

Bush said today the sky is falling so we've got to unlock the US Treasury with no questions asked and no accountability. He's the same guy that wanted to gut Social Security and put it all in the stock market! (Wow, too bad we didn't get to experience all of that great growth, huh?) First, we had to surrender all of our civil liberties because the terrorists were going to kill us all with box cutters. Second, we had to invade another country because they were going to nuke our balls. Now we're supposed to give an enormous birthday present to Wall Street because they blew our money on bear whores and cocaine. The man has no credibility. Fool me thrice: go fuck yourself.

Giving a huge payoff to this gang of crooks won't do a damned bit of good; it just encourages them to do it again. Write your senators and representative and tell them no. Maybe some regulation is in order. Maybe the banks need to be nationalized. Maybe mortgages need to be refinanced en masse. Maybe some depositors are going to lose their money (me included). So be it: when there is hell to pay, I'll pay it, but I won't pay one god-damned red cent in protection money.

Tropicana: How not to run a loyalty campaign

2008-09-24T21:14:00.000-07:00

Tropicana has a long-running loyalty campaign for their orange juice: you get 10 Aéroplan miles for each bottle of sugar-water you buy. They print a little code at the top of each carton, and you go to their website and enter the code to get your points. Sounds great, right?

The problem is that Tropicana can't seem to print the codes legibly. Every single time you try to enter a code, there's some problem or other: either the code is completely illegible, or the code isn't recognized, or a cosmic ray strikes their server, but whatever it is, you don't get your points. Furthermore, if you're trying gamely to puzzle out the code, the system locks you out, figuring you're trying to guess the code randomly. Check out these beauties:

Although I don't like to ascribe to malice what is more easily explained by negligence and sheer incompetence, this has been going on for years. I can't help but suspect at this point Tropicana's behaviour is willfully fraudulent: they print the offer on the carton to influence buyer behaviour, but they make it too irritating, difficult and time consuming to actually get the points. They could easily prove me wrong by fixing this problem, but something tells me they won't.

Anti-Harper stickers in Vancouver

2008-09-14T01:25:00.000-07:00

Seen on Davie Street in Vancouver tonight: little posters of Stephen Harper pasted to newspaper boxes and bus shelters.

I can't wait for the elections to be over – on both sides of the border.

Saturn's Children: an homage to Friday

2008-08-31T19:29:00.000-07:00

Charles Stross was a bit embarrassed about the cover to his new book Saturn's Children. Charlie's a stand-up guy: he cares about people, women specifically, and I think he was worried people would think he was a creepy lech. But this book is about a lonely sexbot, and the cover doesn't just stand on its own: the book is a tribute to Robert A. Heinlein's Friday, and so is the cover. The book has an engaging milieu and a somewhat bewildering set of characters (personality versioning is hard to keep track of) and Stross maintains the pace and keeps the story moving. It's a good read, and a nice departure from the usual strong-AI-ate-my-balls story lines. It's packed with obscure Heinlein references and in-jokes:

"Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff—or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations or comfort the dying—when you can get other people to do all that for you in exchange for a blow job?"
an inversion of a fatuous quote by Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love

Friday was one of my favourite Heinlein books: for a nerdy gay teenager, an oppressed bicurious gengineered courtesan spy was terribly compelling; plus she was black (covers lie), and she traveled the world in semiballistic missiles, tumbling into bed with various exciting characters of various genders. At the time young-adult fiction didn't really speak to gay kids; at that time gay fiction was exclusively boomers talking to their contemporaries about AIDS and Fire Island (not to say that I didn't devour those books, but they didn't mean as much to then as they do now). At the same time I was obsessed by comic books, particularly the New Mutants, teenagers who were hated and oppressed because their secret mutant powers manifested themselves at puberty. So for a science-fiction-obsessed gay boy, Friday presented a character with whom I could identify.

Cory Doctorow has spoken a great deal about why he chose to write Little Brother, a young adult novel about technology and totalitarianism. He read Heinlein when he was a boy: he explained that young people are very idealistic and looking for different ways of looking at the world. Friday did that for me, but I don't think of Saturn's Children as a young-adult book: it is more of a story-driven contemplation on the evolution of identity with technology. The references to Friday are creative and amusing, and the contrast between the two stories shows how the shape of the future has changed over the past twenty-five years. Saturn's Children is seemingly addressed to people of Charlie's (and my) generation.

Why I don't recommend the iPhone 3G

2008-08-26T19:01:00.000-07:00

^{backup battery}

I've had the iPhone 3G for a couple of weeks, and although I think it's revolutionary, fantastic, useful, blah-blah-blah, poor battery life is its fatal flaw. For most people, a phone is a phone first and foremost, and other uses are secondary. I know I'm tethered to the internet in general, and email in particular, but a phone has to function as a phone, or it fails. To function as a phone, it has to hold a charge for at least 24 hours under light usage, and the iPhone does not.

This is fixable through software. By being extremely careful about how I turn on 3G and WiFi functionality I can make it work reliably through the day without charging more than once. But I shouldn't have to exercise extreme caution and constantly massage settings to make sure the battery doesn't discharge in bare hours: it is a computer and it should take care of it for me. This is not the traveling salesman problem, it's easy: if the screen is off I'm not using it and I don't need the 3G network, so stop trying to nuke my balls.

I don't know when Apple is going to clean up this mess, but I hope it will be within a few months. Without this fix the iPhone cannot be successful, and I totally want the iPhone to succeed. I've helpfully supplied Apple with a bug report on this just in case they haven't read a newspaper, blog, or spoken to a single sentient being who's used the device. Those of us who have it are doing everything short of implanting a car battery to keep these things running: extra charging cables everywhere, car chargers, and even expensive portable battery packs. Without a fix, this is a failed phone.

Solutions to the iPhone 3G energy crisis

2008-08-21T00:20:00.000-07:00

I have the new iPhone 3G, and it is wonderful in so many ways: fast Internet, great mail integration, revolutionary app store, global reach of distribution, amazing polish... but. But.

This has been said a jazillion trillion quadrillion times already on every blog, tweet, IM, and stone engraving in the past forty days, but I've got to say it too: the iPhone 3G's battery performance sucks. It really, really does. Activating the 3G network means that the battery drains in a matter of hours, and even without it turned on it barely makes it through a 24-hour period without running out of juice. It is a power hog, 3G or no 3G, plain and simple. A single charging cable is not enough, because if you leave it at home, you'll need it at work, and vice-versa.

But I'm not just bitching, no, I'm a man of action, and I'm proposing real solutions for the energy crisis with the iPhone 3G. Below are my practical proposals for powering your iPhone 3G while you're on the go.

Miniature nuclear reactor

small hydroelectric facility

space-based solar array with
microwave power transmission

mule team and hand-wired dynamo

coal-burning steam turbine

diet Coke and Mentos

Yes, someday soon Apple will release a firmware update that lets you turn 3G on and off in less than eight steps. Heck, they might even go buck wild and have it automatically switch to 3G when the bandwidth is needed, and back to Edge when not. (Crazy talk, I know!) But until that fine day, use the handy hints above to keep your iPhone running during that extended period while you walk from your house to your car.

The fat of the land: berry season in BC

2008-08-20T20:59:00.000-07:00

It took me nine months to appreciate Vancouver. We arrived here just after the torrential rains which flushed tons of particulate matter into the water supply, prompting a boil water advisory, and just before the windstorms which blew down 40% of Stanley Park. Since it rained for five months after we arrived, it took some getting used to.

When it changed for me was August, when the blackberries came into season. Morning and afternoon I'd bury myself in a briar, stuffing my face with berries and picking a pailful to eat the rest of the day. After that, I saw the city differently: the rain didn't bother me so much, the laid-back nothing's-going-on nature of the city life didn't leave me anxious, and Toronto seemed a bit farther away. This year I've picked so many of them that we can't keep up, and we're freezing them for wintertime. They are sweet and moist, ripe and ready to eat, the kind that can't be transported because they turn to mush so quickly after picking.

Two or three times per week I've been picking up a 5kg flat of blueberries on my way home. I strap it to my bicycle rack and drag it up the hill, trailing berries that escape through the slats in the side when I go over a bump. It's unbelievable, but between the two of us we polish off those blueberries in 24 hours. They're so ripe, so fresh, so fat and juicy – the texture is completely different from those sold in supermarkets.

Louie is also excited when berry season comes around because blueberries are his favourite treat. Here he is demonstrating his ability to shake hands. He gets so excited that he sits, stands, shakes, lies down, and repeats his repertoire until given his due.

Berry season has passed its peak and we're sliding down the wrong side of August now, but we'll still have berries for a few more weeks. I'll be there in the ditch, picking my breakfast like a bear.

Skating circuit around downtown Vancouver

2008-08-18T22:24:00.000-07:00

This evening I did a circuit around downtown Vancouver on skates: 13km round trip from our place; it took me 75 minutes. The route is designed to avoid hills as much as possible: the only steep hill I couldn't avoid was the Main St. bridge.

I used the Google Distance Measurement Tool to create this map, but there was no way to save it.

Street-by-street summary

Seymour St, Helmcken St. (future greenway!), Richards St, Beach Crescent, Seawall, Carrall St Greenway (beeyoutious!), E. Cordova St. (baaad neighbourhood), Main St (gorgeous view from the bridge, which has a steep decline for inline skates), Waterfront Rd. (which goes under the SeaBus bridge, Canada Place and annex), dive through a parking garage to get to the Coal Harbour Seawalk. At this point you can stay on the seawall, although I use the side streets (Cardero St, Bayshore Dr, Denman St.) because the paving stones are a little too bumpy for my taste. This takes you to Stanley Park. You can go around the Stanley Park Seawall, which is beautiful (another 9km), but I chose to take the bike trail through the Georgia St pedestrian tunnel and along the shore of Lost Lagoon, and follow the path though the bike tunnel under Stanley Park Dr. to Second Beach. From Second Beach the bike path is very narrow and shared with pedestrians, so look out... but continue along the (beautiful) seawall until the end of Sunset Beach where you reach the Vancouver Aquatic Centre. From there, I recommend taking Beach Ave back to Beach Crescent – which is a full loop.