Letter to the Editor
It's very disturbing that the leader of our country - and in the name of America - parades around the dead bodies of Saddam Hussein's sons. Let's even assume that they are truly evil men - does that sound like what the leader of a "civilized" country is supposed to do? I think not. It's more the kind of thing that terrorists themselves do.
The problem is that it sets an example that this kind of behavior is ok. It inspires the other terrorists in the world to do the same thing. It escalates the hate - especially the hate directed at Americans. And it puts us all in danger.
For example - I sure wouldn't want to be Bush's daughters because after you kill two sons of you enemy and parade their corpses around and brag about cutting off the bloodline - you just invited every terrorist nut out there to kill your kids and parade the corpses around. Of course - Bush doesn't think that far ahead. But Bush's kids will never be free to just live their lives in peace because Bush sacrificed their peace for a cheap publicity stunt.
Now that his daughters are voting age - make you wonder who they are going to vote for for president. Bet it ain't daddy!
Letter to the Editor
Despite renewed warnings about possible airline hijackings, the Transportation Security Administration has told federal air marshals that starting August 1st they will no longer be protecting any cross-country or international flights, The decision to drop coverage on flights that many are the highest risk of attack is to save the expense of staying overnight in hotels. Update training for marshals was also suspended. The reason - no money.
I sure hope that the rich are enjoying their tax cut because now we don't have any money to fly the rich around safely. They got their big tax cut - but at the price of putting our nation at risk. And Bush better pray no planes without marshals are hijacked because if they are it's going to look like he deliberately allowed it to happen.
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Bush says the he sees a "real threat" of another plane attack according to This Yahoo Story. The info for the letter came from This MSNBC Story. So - if Bush blows up another plane - you heard it hear first.
Bush is slipping in the polls. He needs some terrorism to boost his numbers. Too bad he shut down plans for his terrorism futures market - a pentagon project where people bet on future terrorism and assassinations. I think I could have made some $$$ on this one. And if it does happen - you heard it here first.
Seriously though - I send these letter to about 1200 newspapers and it makes me wonder if Bush is planning a terrorist attack and at the last minute they see one of my letters printed and decide - oh shit - we can't do it now - Perkel has already published it. I have this fantasy that by seeing what appears to be a setup and calling it before it happens that I am actually preventing it from happening.
Like in this case for example. We have a ruthless dictator for a president who stole the election and will stop at nothing to maintain power. He is falling in the polls because the country is going to hell and people are beginning to wake up a little from their denial and are saying "Oh FUCK!" So bush needs a distraction and terrorism is his theme.
Think abou this - which is worse? Here are the facts: We have a terrorism aleart that planes are about to be attacked. Bush is talking like it's a very credible threat. And at the same time they pull the sky marshals off the very planes that are the most prime targets for the attack. What does that tell you?
A) The entire administration is incredibly stupid.
B) This is a deliberate government sponsored terrorist event being set up.
Whichever one it is - it is bad new for America. But what scares me even more - where is the news media? Am I the only person that's figured this out? Is this a country of fucking morons? This is a country in really deep denial and we are in a lot of trouble.
IBM Deathstar Drive
My roommate Rojean lost her hard drive yesterday. Every time I oull a dead hard drive out of a system it's usually an IBM. The call it a "Deskstar" but I call the "Deathstar". I had about 6 of them fail at EFF and I get replacements and they fail too.
I have some laying around but why bother sending them back? IBM will just send me another defective drive. Last time I called them and asked if they would swap it for another model that works and they refused.
The bottom line is - IBM doesn't give a fuck about my data or if I ever get a good drive. They are more than willing to deny they have a design problem and to conceal their flaws - they are willing to put my data at risk. Not to mention the time it takes to replace the drive and restore the data.
So - you won't see me buying another IBM driive again!
Letter to the Editor
I'm not sure which is more disturbing - the fact that Saudi Arabia bankrolled the 9-11 attack - or that the Bush administration wants to conceal that Saudi Arabia was behind the attack by blacking out pages in the 9-11 report. 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, None were from Iraq. Did we go to war with the wrong country?
I was just thinking today about how cheap hard drive space is compared to what it used to be. In 1981 a 5 megabyte Pertec drive cost about $9500 or almost $2000 per megabyte. I just bought a 200 gigabye (200,000 megabytes) yesterday for $129 (after rebate) at Fry's. That's .0645 cents per meg. A little over 6/100 of a cent!
Now - a good piece of HP Bright white inkjet paper costs 2 cents a sheet which is the same cost as 31 megabytes of data. Who would have ever thought that a sheet of paper was worth as much as the storage of six of those old 5 meg drives.
I started this blog after I started hosting Larry Lessig's Web Site. Larry has a blog and it finally occurred to me that I need to blog myself. I've been rather slow about writing new content. Most of the new stuff I'm working on is on my Church of Reality web site. I'm hoping that with this blog I can document what I'm up to and get more stuff up on my site.
On thing I plan to do is get my letter to the Editor up here so that people can read them and comment on them.