random($foo)

• The Misunderestimated Man – How Bush chose stupidity. (GWB is Bizzaro Bush)
  

  A fourth and final quality of Bush’s mind is that it does not think. The president can’t tolerate debate about issues. Offered an option, he makes up his mind quickly and never reconsiders. At an elementary school, a child once asked him whether it was hard to make decisions as president. “Most of the decisions come pretty easily for me, to be frank with you.” By leaping to conclusions based on what he “believes,” Bush avoids contemplating even the most obvious basic contradictions: between his policy of tax cuts and reducing the deficit; between his call for a humble foreign policy based on alliances and his unilateral assertion of American power; between his support for in-vitro fertilization (which destroys embryos) and his opposition to fetal stem-cell research (because it destroys embryos).

• Frontline: The Jesus Factor – Examining George W. Bush’s personal religious journey, its impact on his political career and presidency, and the growing influence of America’s evangelical Christians. — sobering…

  (notes: unsurprisingly he believes that non-Christians are going to hell. undoubtedly he thinks that he’s not going there… Being evangenical means never having to say your sorry? Only Christians have received faith-based funding… Hooray for taking advantage of blind-faith to justify all kinds of sausage-grinding activities. Didn’t he swear to uphold the Constitution?)

• Monkey Media Report (fast becoming a daily read) hits it right on the head:
  

  A wide variety of officials in the administration had advised Bush to apologize on Wednesday when he gave interviews to two Arab television channels and were puzzled when he did not, senior U.S. officials said. An apology had been recommended in the talking points Bush received from the State Department and elsewhere, the officials said. Senior administration aides then made a push overnight for him to say he was sorry during his news conference with Abdullah, the officials said.

  Yeah, you read that right. Ignoring the advice of his own administration, the President avoided a simple, direct “I’m sorry.” Is there a better definition of incompetence? But wait, the idiocy continues. Despite the latest round of stories claiming Bush has now said the words, what he really said [rm] was that he’d, ahem, told King Abdullah he was sorry. If you think the difference is trivial, well, you’ve got your head up your ass. Rest assured the lack of a direct “I’m sorry” is being noted with disgust all over the world.

• TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB – Seymour Hersh’s scathing write-up in the New Yorker. If you don’t read anything else about this whole mess (you’d probably need to be hiding under a rock … or in grad school to miss it).

I don’t think I know anyone who’s going to be voting for Bush in the fall, but if I did, I think I would have to urge them to think about what kind of person GWB and how his decisions have impacted our country in the world…

helmintholog: In what dungeon dimension:

Can the words As secretary of defense, I am accountable for them. I take full responsibility. not be followed by these. The president has therefore accepted my resignation.?

It seems an offence against grammar that they were not, as
if the meaning of the word had simply been abolished and when Rumsfeld
spoke of “responsibility” he was in fact using an Azerbaijani term for
boiled sweets, which just happened to be a homonym for the English word.

It reminds me of the time when a Soviet-ear poet was jailed for
seven years for foul crime of denying that freedom of speech existed in
the Soviet Union. Destroying the meaning of “democracy” seems to me
much less serious than destroying the meaning of “responsibility”.
Plenty of fairly decent societies have functioned without much
democracy. In the end, perhaps, democracy is largely a mechanism for
forcing the powerful to take responsibility. But no society is worth
defending – no society is even a society – where “responsibility” means
nothing at all…

Back to web/tech/geek links soon; need to wash the taste out of my mouth.

Someone on /. mentioned Microsoft was the largest company in the world and a bunch of people jumped all over that, berating him and saying that Microsoft was nowhere near the largest. Oh, I guess they’re right, seeing as they’re only #3 in market cap:

Company Name	Ticker	* Market Cap $	Last Close	52wk Range	* Shares Outst.
General Electric Company	GE	302,360.10	30.00	34.57-26.90	10,078.67
Exxon Mobil Corporation	XOM	282,857.16	43.25	44.24-34.90	6,540.05
Microsoft Corporation	MSFT	278,287.11	25.78	30.00-23.60	10,794.69
Pfizer Inc.	PFE	277,247.18	36.36	38.89-29.43	7,625.06

It is interesting comparing the tear sheets on these companies. Damn is it profitable being evil doing good business.

Also, admittedly, Walmart simply dwarfs everyone else w/ an employee count of 1.4M (of course, most being part-timers being paid close to minimum wage)

Saw an ad for the platform GWB ran for office on and thought I’d do a search. Looks like he ran on the same platform in 2000. The first paragraph from a George W. Bush for President 2000 Campaign Brochure:

I’m running for President because I want to help usher in the responsibility era, where people understand they are responsible for the choice they make and are held accountable for their action.

Very respectable intentions. Sadly the actions of the administration have made it abundantly clear that this is, well, a lie.

German authorities are on a roll, nabbing the Phatbot and Sasser worm authros (21 and 18yo’s respectively). It seems like these guys are better programmers than 99% of those coming out with Brick Science degrees. Shame they couldn’t find better things to do with their talents.

• Sasser Worm Analysis
• Phatbot Trojan Analysis – uses a WASTE-based botnet — wow

• Metroid Cubed – now this is stupendous
• Another script to set energy saver settings via pmset – good ideas; I have some code for setting wakeup timer events etc — when I get a chance I really should work on an integrate OS X power-manager scheduling in menubar tool

• F.A.A. Official Scrapped Tape of 9/11 Controllers’ Statements – wtf?!?!
  

  The taping began before noon on Sept. 11 at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, in Ronkonkoma, on Long Island, but it was later destroyed by an F.A.A. quality-assurance manager, who crushed the cassette in his hand, cut the tape into little pieces and dropped them in different trash cans around the building, according to a report made public today by the inspector general of the Transportation Department.

• A leash to shake the White House – abuse reports continue; form of flying media circus
• New Prison Images Emerge – digital cameras changing reporting? almost impossible to believe that all these photographs weren’t taken on purpose
• Le Monde has posted some hand-written letters home from Sergeant Ivan L. “Chip” Frederick II. – the military is trying to pin this on low-level soldiers — sorry, it needs to follow the chain of command (if they were taking orders, shouldn’t we know?); also, Rafe is right, ultimate responsibility leads to one person, and it’s not Rumsfeld. Related: no apology?
• Calpundit’s been following this (from breaking the contractor story at the beginning of the week)
• The Red Cross Accuses: “The Photos are Shocking, but Our Reports are Worse”
• Oh, remember that other war? Thousands of Afghani POWs brutally executed, CBC alleges US military complicity
• From reporter to relief worker in Afghanistan… – life after war
• Powell aides go public on rift with Bush – Chief of staff says secretary of state is fed up with apologising for the administration and is disdainful of ‘ideological’ hawks
• GQ: Casualty of War – Four years into an embattled Bush administration, Colin Powell is hard at work at something he’s never had to worry about before: salvaging his legacy.

(warning, incoherent ranting follows) For fun, lets see how this is being treated by the idealogues:

• O’Reilly Factor, May 3 (edited for clarity) – O’Reilly has a weak apologist stance — from a pure pragmatic standpoint, I don’t think it’s sunk in yet how many Americans are going to die because of this. From a moral standpoint, well, what can I say. It’s not like half the country and three quarters of the world hasn’t been screaming about this for years. A complete aversion to truth and principaled actions will lead nowhere good. (O’Reilly is currently going off on Rumsfeld. Is he forgetting that there’s someone that Rumsfeld directly reports to every single day? — oh yeah, the Bush Admin’s motto for personal responsibility: “The buck stop at the desk over there.”)
• Rush Limbaugh, May 4 – look, no two ways about it. This guy is a moron and a monster, as is everyone else who 1) believes that this behavior is justifiable or is 2) willing to ignore how significantly this affects our chances of success, or that blowing it off is going to make things better.
  

  CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked
  men —

  LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than
  what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin
  people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort,
  and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good
  time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking
  about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of
  emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?

• F.A.A. Official Scrapped Tape of 9/11 Controllers’ Statements – wtf?!?!
  

  The taping began before noon on Sept. 11 at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, in Ronkonkoma, on Long Island, but it was later destroyed by an F.A.A. quality-assurance manager, who crushed the cassette in his hand, cut the tape into little pieces and dropped them in different trash cans around the building, according to a report made public today by the inspector general of the Transportation Department.

• A leash to shake the White House – abuse reports continue; form of flying media circus
• New Prison Images Emerge – digital cameras changing reporting? almost impossible to believe that all these photographs weren’t taken on purpose
• Le Monde has posted some hand-written letters home from Sergeant Ivan L. “Chip” Frederick II. – the military is trying to pin this on low-level soldiers — sorry, it needs to follow the chain of command (if they were taking orders, shouldn’t we know?); also, Rafe is right, ultimate responsibility leads to one person, and it’s not Rumsfeld. Related: no apology?
• Calpundit’s been following this (from breaking the contractor story at the beginning of the week)
• The Red Cross Accuses: “The Photos are Shocking, but Our Reports are Worse”
• Oh, remember that other war? Thousands of Afghani POWs brutally executed, CBC alleges US military complicity
• From reporter to relief worker in Afghanistan… – life after war
• Powell aides go public on rift with Bush – Chief of staff says secretary of state is fed up with apologising for the administration and is disdainful of ‘ideological’ hawks
• GQ: Casualty of War – Four years into an embattled Bush administration, Colin Powell is hard at work at something he’s never had to worry about before: salvaging his legacy.

(warning, incoherent ranting follows) For fun, lets see how this is being treated by the idealogues:

• O’Reilly Factor, May 3 (edited for clarity) – O’Reilly has a weak apologist stance — from a pure pragmatic standpoint, I don’t think it’s sunk in yet how many Americans are going to die because of this. From a moral standpoint, well, what can I say. It’s not like half the country and three quarters of the world hasn’t been screaming about this for years. A complete aversion to truth and principaled actions will lead nowhere good. (O’Reilly is currently going off on Rumsfeld. Is he forgetting that there’s someone that Rumsfeld directly reports to every single day? — oh yeah, the Bush Admin’s motto for personal responsibility: “The buck stop at the desk over there.”)
• Rush Limbaugh, May 4 – look, no two ways about it. This guy is a moron and a monster, as is everyone else who 1) believes that this behavior is justifiable or is 2) willing to ignore how significantly this affects our chances of success, or that blowing it off is going to make things better.
  

  CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked
  men —

  LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than
  what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin
  people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort,
  and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good
  time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking
  about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of
  emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?

Washington Post: A Wretched New Picture Of America

Among the corrosive lies a nation at war tells itself is that the glory — the lofty goals announced beforehand, the victories, the liberation of the oppressed — belongs to the country as a whole; but the failure — the accidents, the uncounted civilian dead, the crimes and atrocities — is always exceptional. Noble goals flow naturally from a noble people; the occasional act of barbarity is always the work of individuals, unaccountable, confusing and indigestible to the national conscience.

(/me hangs head in shame)

Also, still waiting for Bush’s apology to the prisoners, Iraq, and the American public.

It seems the president is allergic not just to the words but to the concept of responsibility that underlies them. To apologize would be to admit he’d made a mistake. And mistakes are forbidden in the Bush White House.

• Rape Rooms: A Chronology – What Bush said as the Iraq prison scandal unfolded. — this set of Bushisms is less funny.

Washington Post: A Wretched New Picture Of America

Among the corrosive lies a nation at war tells itself is that the glory — the lofty goals announced beforehand, the victories, the liberation of the oppressed — belongs to the country as a whole; but the failure — the accidents, the uncounted civilian dead, the crimes and atrocities — is always exceptional. Noble goals flow naturally from a noble people; the occasional act of barbarity is always the work of individuals, unaccountable, confusing and indigestible to the national conscience.

(/me hangs head in shame)

Also, still waiting for Bush’s apology to the prisoners, Iraq, and the American public.

It seems the president is allergic not just to the words but to the concept of responsibility that underlies them. To apologize would be to admit he’d made a mistake. And mistakes are forbidden in the Bush White House.

• Rape Rooms: A Chronology – What Bush said as the Iraq prison scandal unfolded. — this set of Bushisms is less funny.