Bush and DeLay wave goodbye to the dream

DeLay looks like Zorak in this pic.

Justice without DeLay

It strikes me that the Hammer going down for campaign finance violations is a little like Al Copone getting popped for tax evasion. I mean, what with all the sex trafficking and sweatshopping in Saipan:

From ABC News:
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After touring one garment plant, DeLay praised Saipan at the New Year's Eve party attended by top factory owners.

"You represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America," DeLay said at the time to his audience, which included Saipan officials and factory owners.
--------------------------------end quote

I love these new "conservatives" - they don't care what's going on in the shadows as long as the bottom line looks good and everybody's getting free golf trips and beachfront accomodations. DeLay, Abramoff and their cronies are the repellent crust on a rancid pie of holier-than-thou moral posturing and theocratic oligarchy. They don't just wrap themselves in the flag to hide the shit stains, they hide behind the Bible too. It's not enough to defile the country, they gotta drag Our Lord down into the bilge with them. Mr. DeLay had hoped that a divinely-engineered Schaivo-screen would save him from the docket - looks like it didn't work.

With any luck, soon DeLay, Frist and any number of these other modern-day Pharisees will be serving cushy terms in Club Fed, and in 2006 we can get back to some good old Democratic incompetence, which I'll take over sanctimonious GOP thuggery any day.

And what to make of this?

This story in the London Times points to a study that finds countries with a majority of religious citizens to be backward, illiterate cesspools of murder, suicide, drugs, abortion, and Micheal Bay movies (okay, I made that last one up).

This agrees with some statistics I saw earlier that Red states have higher rates of teen pregnancy than do Blue states.

Now, I'm not saying anything about your faith or whatever box you put your idea of God in - I'm just saying...

CNN.com - Playmate appeals to Supreme Court - Sep 27, 2005

CNN.com - Playmate appeals to Supreme Court - Sep 27, 2005

The only way this should be allowed to happen is if she's going to argue the case herself.

computers and music and how to make one with the other

If you know me at all, you know I've been engaged with electronic and computer music since I was a mere stripling, a fuzzy-lipped milquetoast with a Tascam four-track and a borrowed Korg Polysix
. My first actual computer composition, around 1985 or 1986, was done using a tone generator program on a Texas Instruments TI99/4a for some kind of school project. I'm sure it was crap - can't really remember it. Anything really involved was more likely done on a dedicated hardware sequencer with MIDI or CV and some keyboards. Of course now, computer-based composition tools come free in cereal boxes. Propellerhead's Reason is a full-blown production suite in a box for around US$400 and it runs on any recent Mac or PC. The only other thing you need to get moving is a cheap MIDI controller and, really, you don't even need that.

The technology is finally catching up to what people hear in their heads. It's also making it easier for dumbasses to make bad music. Lately, I've been reflecting on the tools now at my disposal, and how the relative ease of making computer-based tunes has taken some of the shine off actually doing it. It's a little like playing a video game, sometimes. Point, click, cut, paste, save, and it's fat beats all night long. I reckon the challenge is to start with an idea, a sound or image in your head, and then make the software do it. The tendency is often to let the software dictate what you do - you noodle and tweak until it sounds kind of cool, and then you save the mix and go get a beer.

I'm challenging myself lately to start on a guitar or piano and write actual music before I touch a computer. That's what can seperate you from the heard of mouse-clicking loop loaders. Write music that works on its own, then let the software make it better.

School's Out!

The Right Gov'na Sonny P, here in GA, has cancelled school on Monday and Tuesday of the coming week to conserve diesel fuel. Hey, Sonny - maybe it's time to condsider an alternative...

Boy, am I thinking about something...

Like, you wouldn't even believe it. It would, like, kill your head to know what was going on in here, all this psychic chatter and neuro-mastication. I mean, thinking...

Slashdot | Diebold Insider Comments on Voting System Flaw

As per the previous post from today, Slashdot discusses the Diebold vulnerabilites, as well as the fact that CEO Walden O'Dell is a big moneybag for the GOP and that, in 2003, he promised to "deliver" Ohio to the Bush campaign. But we can't vote on the Internet! Heavens no, it's not safe!

Reform urged to shore up voting system | ajc.com

The AJC is running a Washington Post story on the recommendations of a commission headed by Jimmy Carter and James Baker on how to increase public confidence in the American electoral process. You know, like how 'bout a reciept? Or a way to go online and login to my account at the Federal Election Commission and see my vote? Paper balloting is not really the issue, but I haven't seen a paper ballot since 2000. It's these electronic doohickeys that concern us all (well, except for the fine folks at Diebold who actually make the things - heck, they're even offering to store the data for us!)

Some rightist windbag back around the last election was poo-pooing the whole vote confirmation thing because, like, we don't get our reciepts at the ATM or the gas station. But we have the option, yes? And then, when I get home, I can login to the Bank of Whatever site and, like, see all my transactions, yes? See, THAT is why we don't take those reciepts.

Why am I writing like Yakov Smirnov today? In Soviet Russia, candidate votes for you!

Go to blackboxvoting.org for in-depth discussion of this topic.

Desk Set, or, I Welcome our Google Overlords

I'm watching the Tracy-Hepburn film Desk Set(1957), which concerns the installation of a new-fangled computer in the research department of a TV network. It's pretty amazing - runs natural language searches and everything. As dated as the depicted technology is, it's amazingly prescient in this age of librarians trying to make peace with the rise of Google and the idea that books and libraries are somehow obsolete because "everything's on the Internet." Having done a fair amount of research, I can say that knowledge of a subject combined with the power of the 'net can be pretty awesome. Boolean logic skills, creative keyword deployment (synonyms!), and resource evaluation - these are the tools that a good librarian brings to a information problem. I've watched kids go trolling for answers in Google only to come up empty-handed because they don't know search strategies - they don't know how to construct effective search strings using Boolean operators and wildcards. Google doesn't make you a researcher any more than Photoshop makes you a graphic designer or Reason makes you a producer.

So how much does Windows Vista look like OS X?

Quite a bit, it would appear. There's a discussion over at Macslash with a link to the article from whence this image came.

I have to say, now that I've been steeped in XP for a while, and having used Tiger since it came out, I would be glad to see some symbiotic feature adaptation - both OSs do certain things better (and Linux does certain other thing better than both of those, like being free as in beer. But I digress.) I wish XP had system-wide spellcheck and the ability to create PDF files from the print dialogue. I wish OS X had a start button or some similiar anchor point. I wish I could run OS X on cheap clone hardware (although some people are doing this now). I wish Windows had a UNIX underbelly and no registry. I wish I had a spider monkey trained to bring me coffee.

Most of all, I wish my celly had a beatbox on it.

President Bubble Boy

El Presidente has finally owned up to the abject failure of the fed'ral gummint to respond to NOLA's biblical smiting. Brownie has resigned, and not a moment too soon (though several moments too late). He did a heck of a job. Chertoff should share a cab with him.

Bushido says "I'm not going to defend the process going in, but I will defend the people on the front line of saving lives." I don't think anybody's questioning the efforts of the people on the ground - it's the continuing buffoonery at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave that people are worried about. It's the same thing with criticism of the war - "They're not supporting the troops!" Horseshit (sorry, Mom). This adminstration excels at refracting all dissent to some other, undeserving target, hoping to negate the critique. Well, It's not working any more - the press finally got its collective cajones back and started asking, in the immortal words of John Edwards, "Are you kidding me?!"

Time is reporting that one of Dubya's handlers had to make him a &%@^! DVD of the news coverage of Katrina so that our news-phobic Commander in Chief could undsertand the gravity of the situation. You see, our President doesn't watch the news or read the paper. The Leader of the Free World prefers to live in a little bubble, with his retinue of yes-people filtering reality for him. Yeah, yeah, liberal media blah blah shut it. He can watch FNN while reading the WSJ and the Weekly Standard for all I care. At the very least, the man should read and watch and think! instead of letting Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove feed him officially vetted newsbits while he works his glutes.

Adventures in cross-platform living: where's my music at?!

I have now been living in XP full time for a couple of weeks, after 12 years as a Mac die-hard, and I have to say that the toughest nut to crack was getting my iTunes library migrated. (I say XP "full time," but what that means is that the machine under my desk with my email on it is an XP box. I'm typing this on an iBook, there's a "sunflower" iMac down the hall, and a dual-proc G4 in my studio. So I haven't really turned in my robes. But back to this iTunes thing.)

I wanted to completely relocate all my iTunes music to the PC because of studio relocation. The G4 will be sans Internet for the foreseeable future. So, I just copied my iTunes Music directory over the network. Installed iTunes on the PC and told it to go get all my music. It found about 3.7GB out of 20GB. Turns out, a bunch of my AAC files were associated with [shudder] Windows Media Player! So, I went and re-associated the file type. Then, I started manually adding those files to my library when it hit me. The iTunes library is determined by a file called, natch, "iTunes Library." So I connected via Samba to the G4 and grabbed that file, copied it into my iTunes folder (in My Documents, not in Program Files) and, like cheese on wheat, there sat all my songs. Except that a bunch of them with long file names (thanks, FAT32!) had a bang (!) out beside them, indicating that the app couldn't find them. Those had to be re-added manually.

Pic of the Week

Scott, a fine friend from the weaklazyliar message board, posted this image that illustrates what we've all been going through...

Veep gets a taste of his own nasty medicine

It appears some people are not afriad to speak truth to power. Maybe he's read Dick Cheney's Rules of Decorum for the United States Senate, available wherever non-existent books are sold.

In the words of Li'l John, "What?!?"

In what must surely be a move to distract us all from the still-unfurling distaster in the Gulf (no, not the Persian Gulf, the one by Mexico), Double-Yoo tapped human cipher John Roberts to replace the late Wm. Rehnquist as Chief Justice. Now, John Boy ain't even been confirmed for the Court yet! What must Scalia et al be thinking of this? This is like working at a company for 20 years and getting passed over for CEO by the kid that just interviewed for the sales position.

Every day brings new evidence the Bush is either so supremely arrogant and disconnected that he thinks he can just bring on whatever craphound he wants to head FEMA (because that Brownie, he's doing a heck of a job!) or DHS or whatever, or he's just so danged stupid that he's really doing the best he can with what he has.

Why do I even bother? Here's the story from CNN...

Coincidence?

When I got home from playing a show with weaklazyliar last night (or this morning, rather) I saw that Chief Justice Rhenquist had passed away.

When I logged on this morning, I saw that I had 666 unread RSS feeds waiting. Coincidence?

So W gets a two-fer. Maybe if Pat gets busy, Bush can get the hat trick.

The picture says is all...

Fiddling while Rome burns. People in my family, people I love, voted for this cretin. Click the link.

Welcome to Hellmouth, LA

Now that New Orleans resembles something even the fine folks at Rockstar Games cound'ta come up with, the Feds have reacted like someone waking from a nap on a Saturday afternoon -

"Huh-wha? Riots? No food? Stranded babies? Uh, yeah. Hold on. Man, I was so asleep...let me get some shoes on. I'll be right over."

Cnn, Fox, The Weather Channel - they all knew to get down there ahead of time and get ready. Navy ships loaded down with food, water, helicopters and whatnot won't get there until Monday! A week later! Was this more of the current administration's pattern of wishful thinking?Aw, heck, it won't be so bad - that hurrycane'll greet us with candy and flowers...

I don't mean to be opportunistic, to exploit this devastating tragedy as an excuse to heap more derision onto Bush II and his band of miscreant robber barons, but they are really just continuing to play to type. Or maybe this all part of their grand plan to usher in the End Times.