Category Archives: Pedantry

Meatbread

Behold, gentlemen: the pinnacle of culinary art!

1 pkg frozen bread dough (3 per pack)
1 lb extra lean ground beef
1 roll sausage (hot or mild)
One 16 oz pkg. smoked sausage (hot or mild)
8 oz grated Mozzarella cheese
8 oz grated Cheddar cheese
1 lb chopped Velveeta cheese
One 3 oz jar stuffed olives, chopped
One 4 oz can of mushrooms
Small bunch onion tops, chopped
Small bunch parsley, chopped
1 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped bell pepper
2 stalks celery, chopped
3 tbs margarine

Cook ground beef until it is very brown, then drain. Sauté bell peppers, onions, celery, onion tops and parsley. Add to ground meat. Stir in half of the chopped Velveeta cheese and set aside.

Cut roll sausage in slices, brown, and put aside. Let cool and crumble. Roll out all three loaves onto floured surface. Spread melted margarine over dough.

Divide all ingredients into three parts and layer as follows:

ground meat mixture
roll sausage
smoked sausage
olives
mushrooms
Cheddar cheese
Mozzarella cheese
Velveeta cheese

Bring bread over, folding ends first. Bake 30-35 minutes if ready to bake. If not, bake at 350F for 10 minutes or until light brown, then freeze. Defrost. Bake another 20-25 minutes or until brown.

Anointed Ones

Why is it that the national front-runners aren’t winning post-debate polls, but scant days later the actual winners are barely on the radar any more? Last night, we once again saw Ron Paul, a paleo-conservative amongst neo-cons, trounce the other Republican candidates, with Governor Mike Huckabee polling in second place amongst debate viewers. I predict that national polls this weekend will still show Huckabee polling in the single digits nationally and Ron Paul somewhere below 5% with likely primary voters.

How does a candidate get 33% of the post-debate vote and then lose 90% of it by week’s end? Because most news outlets have already invested in the candidates of their choice. Debate coverage on CNN and MSNBC has been almost entirely about their anointed front-runners, Giuliani, McCain, and Romney. Even though he didn’t participate in the debate, Fred Thompson is receiving more press coverage today than Paul or Huckabee.

The result of this is that on a national basis (by which I mean outside of Iowa and New Hampshire), most Republicans just don’t know anything about Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter, Mike Huckabee, or Ron Paul. When receiving a cold call from Gallup or Zogby, why say you intend to vote for somebody whose name you barely know? They recognize Giuliani from the September 11, 2001 attacks, many remember John McCain from his 2000 run, Mitt Romney has received a ton of press because he’s tan, Mormon, and wealthy, and Fred Thompson is on television almost 24 hours a day on Law & Order. I strongly suspect that these four candidates are front-runners based almost solely upon their name recognition, as opposed to any actual qualifications or policy positions. People that have been watching the candidates perform side-by-side are in a better position to make an informed decision.

That decision has been pretty clear. If you’re for cutting taxes and smaller government, anybody in the field will suit those needs. If you’re for “ending the war with honor,” it looks like Mike Huckabee and John McCain made a strong showing. If you’re for ending the war promptly, Paul is your only bet. It looks like the Republican vote is pretty well split on that, with McCain and Huckabee splitting 33% of respondents and Paul standing alone with another 33%. The internally-conflicted pro-choice pro-gun-control pro-horrible-personal-life segment of the Republican party has split between Romney and Giuliani, with a small minority choosing Tancredo, Hunter, or Brownback.

I want to see more Huckabee and Paul coverage. Maybe they aren’t as exciting as Mitt Romney’s George Harrison tan, John McCain’s verbal gaffes, Fred Thompson’s eloquent assistant DAs, or Giuliani’s mountain of political baggage, but you aren’t going to catch any of those guys performing Freebird, are you?

The Rules

In the aftermath of a rather laughable Fox 11 News piece exposing a secretive hacker gang calling themselves “anonymous” last week, a few things have been grating on me a bit. The report itself was horribly flawed, but I’ll focus for the moment on public reaction to it.

A couple of points:

The Internet is not Fight Club. You are neither Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, nor V.
The Internet is not Fight Club. There are no rules 1 or 2. Rule 34 was a stupid, though funny, joke, and the rest of that stuff is backfill.
Nobody speaks for anonymous. Going on Youtube with a silly voice filter to spit out some manifesto is ridiculous.
Most of what I’ve actually seen anonymous do could only be described as “hacking” by the most ignorant of mass media talking heads. Shutting down a poorly-administered web forum with Gigaloader is not hacking. Neither is setting up a wget script through a TOR node. Ordering somebody a pizza online isn’t hacking. It’s pestering.
Anonymous is not invincible. Look at what happened when anonymous went up against a bunch of white nationalists in December and January. Those bigoted fools are still operating just fine. The blowback attacks didn’t cause any real problems either, but that’s the nature of an Internet Fight. Nobody’s going to become An Hero over such shenanigans.
You aren’t really anonymous. It may be difficult to track you down, but TCP leaves a trail. The rest of the world tolerates things like 4chan, 420chan, and such because they are essentially harmless. By this I mean that they are incapable of causing harm at a scale that is worth bothering with. Note that a couple of idiot FBI guys managed to nab that “NFL plot” guy, and that was the result of federal agents that were so incompetent as to think the threat was credible.

All of that being said, the drama that erupted over this report has been hilarious. The “victims” of anonymous in this may be some of the stupidest people I’ve been exposed to lately, and that’s saying a lot. If you want the Internet Bullies to stop, don’t show that it has affected you. Just curl up in a ball and wait for the bad men to stop kicking you. Going on television and making a fuss just makes you entertaining again.

Distribution of Blame

I read The Register because they put an insightful and irreverent spin on tech news. Occasionally they break into the realm of insightful and biting political observations that should not go unnoticed. This past Friday Thomas Greene wrote a great piece on the news media reaction to recent bomb scares in England. Please excuse the odd spelling and use of quaint terms like “rubbish.” They can’t help it, they’re from the wrong side of the Atlantic:

Yes, the Bushies asked for the war, and yes, Congress authorised it, but the mainstream news industry enabled it. They literally sold it. The Iraq war could not have been undertaken if the American press had the spine to do their jobs, and had tried to verify what the Administration was claiming. The press would soon have discovered that the White House’s story could not be verified. If American reporters had simply done what they’re paid to do, the front page headlines of America’s newspapers would have read: “No Credible Evidence of Bush WMD Claims”, instead of “Shock and Awe”.

I generally don’t like it when journalists make each other the subjects of withering critique, but generally that comes up in regards to coverage of meaningless aspects of political races or whatever Hollywood scandal is wasting airtime that week. On matters of serious policy matters (as opposed to frivolous policy matters), I’m much more inclined to lend my ear.

The conclusion of his look at how the British press mishandled the recent “explosive” devices found in London and Glasgow, and how the American press has handled international events since 9/11/2001 is that the news media is every bit as responsible for the current mess we’re in as George Bush and Tony Blair are. Greene takes it a step further: the journalists, media outlets, and politicians that have capitalized on and encouraged the pervasive fear of Islamic extremists groups are themselves terrorists.

Clearly he meant organizations like Fox News, NBC, CBS, and ABC, all of whom enthusiastically ginned up the casus belli, but I think it goes further than that. On the other end of the political media spectrum, there are many that have latched on to a broad theme of “The West Under Siege” that has a similar effect and similar motivations. Leftie/progressive bloggers, radio hosts, and even former sportscasters have been vigorously proclaiming that our civil liberties and representative democracy are in mortal peril. It’s a shame, but fear sells.

Barriers to Entry

The reason tigers jump through hoops is because their handlers have whips.

From time to time, I’ve harped on Morte’s blog, specifically the requirement that any commenter must have a TypeKey account. I have accounts on several web forums, my ISP account, my bank account, my Gravatar, my admin accounts for my personal gallery, my kid’s website, my kid’s website’s gallery, my sister’s website, my wiki, my office wiki, my office admin server, the ordering system for DSL circuits, the ticket system for DSL trouble reports, the list goes on and on. Do I want to sign up for Typekey to tell an old buddy that he’s on crack for reviewing a book he hasn’t read? No, not really.

Enter OpenID. What a lovely idea, a distributed identification system. I was going to reply to a comment on Wolfgang Baur’s livejournal and noticed that I needed to post anonymously, get a Livejournal account, or get an OpenID instead. The first option doesn’t really appeal to me, as I understand that the Internet isn’t really anonymous, so my comments may as well be associated with my online persona. The second option is basically the same as having to sign up for Typekey. Maybe it’ll let me commend on a couple of other Livejournal pages as well, but frankly that just doesn’t come up very often for me.

The OpenID option immediately struck me as a good idea, so I followed the “What is OpenID” link on Mr. Baur’s page. To be honest, I didn’t really want to know what OpenID was. I’d heard of the concept before, what I really wanted was an ID in that system, one that I could theoretically re-use in a variety of contexts and thus achieve some measure of efficiency in presenting myself on other people’s sites. What missing below?

That’s right, no “get an ID” option. Well, there’s a link to the OpenID site itself. Let’s give that a try.

This page is positively fertile with links. I count eight links in the main body of this page, and ten in the sidebar (not counting the Web100 image). The body links helpfully

tell me what a URI is and what “authentication” means (color me insulted)
refer me to the specifications for their authentication scheme
links me to the definition of “strong authentication” because putting an obscure technical term like “strong” in front of the previously-defined “authentication” is bound to lead to confusion
links me to the specifications
refers me to some kind of bounty system meant to encourage adoption of the OpenID system
links me to a Mailman mailing list
refers to something to do with medieval identification systems.

Whew. Having skimmed through looking for something like “sign me up” or “get an ID” or “register” or “log in” or “I want to be a part of this thing you’ve got here,” I’m utterly disappointed. The presence of links to definitions of basic Intarweb terminology indicates that the authors of this page assume I’m an idiot, yet the functionality of the site doesn’t accommodate this assumption.

Apparently I’m expected to read through the “How it works” documentation on the OpenID site (something the referring page at Livejournal has thoroughly discouraged me from doing), install something on my own webpage, and then things will magically work themselves out. In short, it was tl;dr, I remain uninvolved in the OpenID system, and Mr. Baur is short a comment on his site. What about instant gratification don’t these folks get? Give me a shiny button that calls upon me to participate, then give me instructions. If I want to know how the nuts and bolts of it work, I’d appreciate an informative link or two, but don’t give me a pile of homework just so I may have the privilege of posting a possibly-witty retort to some dude’s online ramblings. It’s a barrier to entry, an unnecessary hurdle.

In the interest of practicing what I preach, the comment mechanisms of this site are intentionally minimal. The IP banning, Hashcash, and Akismet antispam systems are all transparent to the commenter, and the requested screen name, email address, and URL are more-or-less standard fare. Very little spam leaks through my filters, though attempts at comment spam massively outweigh the number of actual comments.

Humble suggestions:

If you want visitors to comment on your site, let them
If you want people to participate in your swizzy social networking mechanisms, guide people towards participation. You may notice that successful sites like Youtube, Flickr, and Myspace all have very clear mechanisms for letting newcomers join in on the fun.
If you don’t want people to comment or participate, force them to wade through arcane procedures. This is why the clocks on VCRs were almost always flashing “12:00” and why most DVD players and such don’t even have clocks on the face anymore.

Buzzwords versus Precision

One of the many problems facing the public these days is insidious: the misuse of language to obscure meaning. Let’s take a look at an example, two phrases used by people with opposing views on the United States’ involvement in the insurgency / civil war / emerging caliphate in Iraq:

Redeploy / Cut & Run

The current war / occupation / police action in Iraq has become deeply unpopular, with a dwindling supply of heady triumphs and a steady stream of dismal news. Reports of bombings against military and civilian targets have become a disheartening echo of the media drumbeat that lead up to the invasion back in 2003. Increasingly public debate has shifted to the discussion of how American soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen are going to be removed from the combat area. As the combat area can be loosely described as “Iraq in its entirety,” we see the repeated use of euphemisms to describe the various plans.

To cut and run is literally when the crew of an entangled ship cuts loose any moorings or anchors that hold it fast in order to get clear of some imminent danger. Those who advocate remaining actively engaged in combat in Iraq have frequently labeled any opposition as a “cut and run” strategy. This plays upon the prideful view most Americans hold of our military. The image of our soldiers fleeing the battlefield is a strong motivating factor for many who lived through the turmoil of the Vietnam War, as well as those simply raised in a patriotic tradition that props up America’s general tendency to prevail in arms. We seem to place less value on soldiers that die on the losing side of a conflict, and fear consigning our recent war losses to such a status.

To redeploy is a pretty straightforward concept. We deployed our armed forced into Iraq (which is to say we invaded), and now many in the public arena would like to re-deploy them back out of Iraq (which is to say they’d like to un-invade it). Traditionally this would involve retreating, surrendering, and acknowledging the victory of the enemy. To acknowledge the victory of the enemy is to acknowledge defeat. Defeat doesn’t play well, so opponents to the continuation of the Iraq War like to call retreat redeployment.

In fairness, most plans that bear the label “redeployment” involve swapping out American men and women with guns with Iraqi men with guns, so that the Iraqi men can win or lose for themselves (spoiler: their victory isn’t really part of the redeployment plan). This will let the Iraqi national government lose without America having to lose. This is similar to what large companies do when they outsource profits for tax purposes or outsource liabilities for their shareholder reports.

Please call it what it is: retreat. We can retreat and let Iraqi national forces take up our positions, or we can retreat and let tribal or insurgent or Al Qaeda forces take up our positions, but we’re talking about retreat here. Learn to swallow the pill, folks; we don’t have the political will to win this fight, so we’re talking about losing it.

Presumably-competent commanders like David Petraeus say it will probably take 9-10 years to properly stomp out the insurgency in Iraq. We can spend a decade pulling this band-aid off, or we can get it over with quickly. The decision is ours, and we shouldn’t delude ourselves about it one way or the other.

Definitions: civil war, insurgency, occupation, police action, redeploy, retreat, surrender, denial

If you’ve got any favorite terms that are being misused or twisted sideways, I’d like to hear about it.

Spam Explosion

Anybody that has a website that permits both comments and search engine spiders has run into comment spammers. They don’t care about rel=”nofollow” attributes. They don’t care about the subject matter of your site. They just post their gibberish and URLs and get out of dodge. One of the mechanisms I use to reduce the amount of comment spam on the sites I maintain is Akismet, who have been kind enough to publish stats on the sheer volume of garbage being dumped onto our Internets these days (which, contrary to popular belief, is much like a dumptruck: you can pile all kinds of stuff onto it).

Their stats map pretty nicely to the raw volume of unsolicited bulk email that my benevolent employer sees. It’s nice to know that the spammers are keeping their minds open to both new and old vectors to defraud the public.

Never Forget

The Rebel alliance is made up of self-loathing Jedi who blame the Empire for every ill in the galaxy, and politicians suffering from power-envy, bitter that the galaxy’s only power can do what it likes without having to ask permission. The truth is that the Empire has behaved with enormous restraint since the Battle of Yavin. Remember.

Remember the gut-wrenching holos of weeping stormtroopers phoning their partners to say, “I love you,” before the station was destroyed. Remember those people leaping to their deaths from safety-pod hatches with no safety pods installed.

Remember the hundreds of droids buried alive.

Remember the smiling face of that beautiful girl who was in one of the detention cells.

Remember, and realize that the Empire has never retaliated for the destruction of the Death Star in anything like the way it could have.

So a few Rebels got locked without a trial in cell block 1138? Pass the Kleenex.

So some Gungan wedding receptions were shot up after they merrily fired their blasters in a sky full of Empirial shuttles? A shame, but maybe next time they should stick to confetti.

I love the Empire, yet the Empire is hated. The Empire is hated because it is what every galactic empire wants to be – rich, free, strong, open, optimistic.

Remember the Death Star. One of the greatest atrocities in human history was committed against the Empire. No, do more than remember. Never forget.

Told you so

To everybody who told me that Irving Lewis “Scooter” Libby may actually have to sweat it out in a jail cell until getting a last-day pardon from George W. Bush: neener neener neener. How horribly naive. I humbly suggest that a constitutional amendment may be appropriate, removing the Article II Reprieves and Pardons power. When was the last time a president used this for anything other than rewarding cronies or to cover his own criminal behavior?

Scooter Skates
Full text of Bush statement
Bush Frees ‘Scooter’ Libby

*quick edit to replace scary Dick Cheney image.

Why I Like the Second Tier

Clinton, Edwards, Giuliani, McCain, Obama, Romney. These are the names we can reasonably expect to remain on the presidential ballot in November of 2008. This is what political pundits tell us on television, on the radio, in magazines and in newspapers. This is what we’re told with sixteen months left before we asked as citizens to select our next chief executive. Well, phooey. Personally I like the folks that seem doomed to be remembered as also-rans.
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Burrowowl

Infrequently-updated geek ramblings