A new chapter in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has been posted at History is a Weapon. It’s about The 2000 Election and the “War on Terrorism”. You should read it.
Zinn excerpts Robert Bowman, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel who flew combat missions in Viet Nam, suggesting a novel foreign policy: “[W]e should do good instead of evil.” I suppose King George II would respond, “But that’s what we are doing, that’s what I’ve been saying all along, we’re the good guys here.” Bowman, though, is a Catholic bishop, so the good/evil split he emphasizes is the classical, simple dictionary definition; good is good, and evil is bad — not the what’s-good-for-General-Motors-is-good and what’s-bad-for-United-Fruit-is-evil crap that KGII means.
Here are a few nice bits from Bowman’s piece:
- Why do they hate us?
We are not hated because we practice democracy, freedom and human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations.
- What does “do good instead of evil” mean?
Instead of sending our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs so we can have the oil under their sand, we should send them to rebuild their infrastructure, supply clean water and feed starving children . . . Instead of training terrorists and death squads, we should close the School of the Americas. Instead of supporting insurrection, destabilization, assassination and terror around the world, we should abolish the CIA and give the money to relief agencies.
Crazy nut. Read Truth is, we’re terrorized because we’re hated — it’s short.
Republicans, apparently.
Ars reports research that implies a correlation between seratonin levels and empathetic judgement.
Does Prozac Nation care less about others?
I’ve always been happy to read that laziness in a programmer is a virtue. How much work is it really to open iTunes, make sure the Music library is selected, click File->Import, navigate to the desktop, select the folder that contains the songs I want to add, pick that folder, wait for the import to finish, switch back to the desktop, and finally drag that folder of songs into the trash?
Too much work for me. Just typing it all tires me out.
So here’s my first Automator workflow, saved as a Finder plugin.
You can download it
here.
Open it, then File->Save As Plugin…, name it, ‘Import into iTunes’, and now it’s just right-click on that folder of songs, then More->Automator->Import into iTunes.
Time for a snack.
Holy frack.
25% of Americans think that the sun revolves around the earth.
Dr. Arden L. Bement, Jr.,
Director, National Science Foundation,
“Blazing a Bold Trail for Education”
June 24, 2007
My first elisp function knows.
(defun eighty-columns ()
(interactive)
(set-frame-width (selected-frame) 80))
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c 8") 'eighty-columns)
Looks like us. See: Smart Brains Have Liberal Bias.
4 out of 4 leftists agree.
SOAstronauts, beware! The bullshit warriors are coming;
Service Oriented Architecture is your Ticket to Hell.
I attended a mandatory “corporate kickoff” event two weeks ago. These things always make me wonder.
The company sells software development components and tools. As part of one presentation, the history of software development was recounted;
- once upon a time, there was host-based computing; one big computer with lots of terminals attached; this was bad;
- client/server came along when every executive had a PC on his desk, and was better, but still bad;
- the interwebs came along, ushering in the age of the ASP (application service provider), and this was better, but still bad;
- browser-based applications came along, and though very much like ASP provided solutions, were somehow different enough to warrant new development (and new tools), and this was better, but still bad;
- until finally, we’ve reached the pinnacle of computing models, SOA (service-oriented architecture); this is the best ever, 100% good, not bad at all.
Each transition is sold as “what we know now,” as opposed to “what we knew back when we were selling you that old stuff that we’re now saying isn’t good enough anymore.” I understand churn like this is good for business (at least the business of selling software development tools). I wonder, though, if the people pushing this line believe it?
Could the admit, if they don’t believe it, that they don’t? That they realize they’re selling ideas pushed by marketing as technological breakthroughs? ‘Course not. That would be 100% bad for sales, not good at all.
If they do believe what they’re selling, what does this say about their judgment, their knowledge of history and the business they’re in? They don’t look stupid. I’m sure they’re not stupid.
Who’s buying? Who’s selling?
