Was I ahead of my time with this back in 1999?
Thanks Terry -- I've given myself a quick Google education on Buckley vs. Valeo. I guess Mark's comment was pretty much on the nose: there may be no way to stop U.S. elections from being a fund-raising circus until/unless the fundamental composition of the Supreme Court changes. This article was an interesting read. I wonder if there's a way around the "no spending cap" decision by strengthening FCC "equal time" (or "cheap time") rules.
I realize passing that kind of regulation doesn't seem likely in the current U.S. political climate, even if the Supreme Court would let the legislation alone. Maybe we're really stuck with politics dominated by capital until the capital collapses the lifestyles of enough people or some Cory Doctorow-like mechanism materializes to make the capital collapse itself.
#27: Mark, do you have any cites to reports of a Supreme Court decision that affirm what you mentioned? (I'm not doubting that they made such a ruling, I just don't remember it.)
Subject-verb agreement, time/location pressure.... I hope the basic thrust of my #24 still gets through.
#23: Maybe we can't, because we're not that country, now.
Most of our legislature is owned by campaign contributors (who, in too many cases, such as Max Baucus, are insurance companies). Our newspaper and tv press (which, in the past, was able to exert pressure on the legislature) no longer function independently of the financial interests of the owners.
As far as I can see, the lever to effect health care reform in the U.S. is to effect election campaign reform. Pressing for caps on campaign funds might be a start toward this. Right now, candidates of conscience are forced to play "top dollar" games. Sometimes massive small financial contributions by individuals can counter the propaganda and disinformation spread by large corporations. But mostly, with our current Congress -- it doesn't.
We can try scaring "bought" Congress members into voting for the public interest with massive boycott threats. (And that may be the only option left to us in the immediate future.) But what we really need is an electoral campaign system that allows decent public-spirited candidates to compete with power seekers on a level playing field.
Right now, it seems to me that too much of the health care debate is right where the Republicans want it -- expending time and resources on answering obfuscatory lies. Instead, we need to remove the liars from power.
In reality I do have a small suspicion that something will get passed. It won't be great, it'll suck up to the insurance companies to no end, but it'll do a small bit of good in expanding access to health care. And we can work from there.
An alternative point of view expressed here by Atrios seems to me to have a higher reality quotient:
"Given the way things work in that stupid town, we get one big bite at the apple. An "ok" bill lets the insurance company skimmers keep stealing their share for doing nothing useful other than denying people care. Maybe it means they get to do this a bit less aggressively than they do now, and maybe it means some more people get somewhat better health care, but it also leaves the skimmers in place."
Just a peripheral observation: I still read and buy F&SF. I'm not an aspiring applicant to publication in it (at least not in the immediately foreseeable future). Gordon manages to find and publish some short fiction that I can make myself read -- and I'm particularly grateful to him for introducing me to Matt Hughes, who is now my favorite fantasy (or "science fantasy") writer. I also appreciated Gordon's willingness to experiment with re-introduction of the concept of serialized novels, last year, in F&SF with Terry Bisson's PLANET OF MYSTERY.
This says nothing about the wisdom (or lack of wisdom) being demonstrated in implementing the current F&SF writers workshop project, but I wanted to enter testimony on the record that as far as I'm concerned, Gordon Van Gelder is a good editor who produces a readable s-f magazine. I wish we had more like him.
http://www.jetpackinternational.com/
#662: If you include G&G songs, my favorites are (short) "Grateful Dawg" and (long) "Arabia." The first time I heard "Grateful Dawg" I instantly imagined it as part of a G&G soundtrack recorded for "Lyonesse: The Movie." (It would be played under Shimrod's coin-trick scene before King Casimir, early in the novel.)
I also envisioned Garcia and Grisman doing cameo scenes in the movie as wizards; but all we actually got was a walk-on of Garcia as a street tramp in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." (And this welcome to the Great World Circus.
The refrain in "Grateful Dawg" is kind of a reworked, acoustic version of Jerry Garcia's solo break from "Estimated Prophet." After the mandolin's jazzy solo, the guitar makes an assertion of the EP melody. The mandolin then comes in and echoes it before going off on another jazz jaunt. In this transplanted acoustic version, that little instrumental passage from EP transforms itself from the Finnish Cave/"light my way home" motif to something gentle and joyful (and a little bit persnickety).
"Arabia" is a really long and colorful piece that fleshes out the potential the Dead introduced in "Alhambra" -- a Spanish guitar instrumental that they used to perform as a tail/encore to "Alligator->Caution." "Arabia" is kind of a jazzy "In a Persian Market" spiced with flamenco.
This stuff would, imho, really be a great score to accompany the movie made from the Vance trilogy. But I guess we'll only ever see that if we get transported to a parallel Earth -- or Neil Gaiman wakes up in a fey mood one morning, with Hollywood producers nagging him for a colossal fantasy idea.
Albatross: here are some thoughts on shows in the current Dead tour with song links.
The albums Workingman's Dead and American Beauty from the late '60s are kind of another experience. Many people love those without being into the live performances.
Lots more show reports and links to streams of complete shows on their current tour are here.
Oh. I guess that link is old news to everyone here. I didn't see the link referenced directly in the thread. Sorry.
It looks like Patrick called this -- and Amazon is in the process of retracting and blaming it on an unspecified glitch in their systems.
More Conficker news, including links to some new removal tools.
Dell communications drivers (such as the modem driver) are sometimes hidden in the Dell Chipset or System Software package. My email is on my website. Feel free to contact me with the model number, OS version and peripheral drivers you're missing, and I'll see if I can find them for you. (I've been through this with Dell for years in various IT support situations.)
I looked at the cartoon as a standalone unit and saw Uncle Sam as a figure that in league with Goldman Sachs type bears (or Ben Bernanke)-- rather than as a figure who was specifically menacing the citizens by threatening to collect taxes. I saw "Keeping Your Nest Egg safe from Uncle Sam" as "Sam seems to be enthusiastically planning to give your nest egg to the bears."
In the text, Slacktivist explains that the editorial is about the "menace" of collecting taxes, so that evil Uncle Sam represents the threat of collecting income tax, period. But that's not what I saw just looking at the picture (which he criticizes as as a potentially destructive propaganda element when divorced from the editorial).
Maybe my seeing Sam as evilly-in-league with Bernanke-like bears was an atypical subjective impression -- formed from reading too many blog posts about how the bailout money is being spent.
Time for your every-so-often reminder that Slacktivist is the greatest blogger alive.
Not necessarily for me. There are good points in that piece about how citizens of a democracy can't afford to give up trying to work with the government to improve the common good.
However, after the way the government has behaved during past 8 years, I don't share Slacktivist's aesthetic objection to the cartoonist's decision to depict Uncle Sam as a greedy, unprincipled character (to make the point that the U.S. government has, for eight years, committed unwise (if not reprehensible) acts, claiming that its motivation was to serve the people).
Sinfest occasionally issues editorial cartoons in the same vein. This one shows a deadpan depiction of Uncle Sam rather than a shifty, greedy-looking one. But some people might consider the Uncle Sam in the Sinfest cartoons to be a deadlier, more reprehensible, character than the one in picture that Slacktivist is complaining about. (It has no accompanying textual editorial statement.) Are we going to suggest that Tatsuya Ishida is a destructive, anti-democratic force, or let him off the hook, because his Sam doesn't have the greedy, scheming expression on his face?
I haven't had much luck with the U.S. Housecall. It sometimes takes forever to run. The European version may be more robust than the U.S. one. (I haven't tried this in awhile, but it used to be.)
If you're able to download and install Antivir, I've found that it's a pretty good complement to the free Malware Bytes Anti-Malware. (It mostly removes more traditional viruses rather than web hijackers, but it does detect and remove some of them and includes free real-time protection. (My German isn't good enough to figure out whether they guard against Antivirus/2009 yet. (They weren't stopping it several months ago.)
Also this (which I just remembered): From a good computer, you can download the PSTools package. The PsKill and PsService programs in that package can sometimes detect and kill processes that the Windows Task Manager doesn't see.
Lenny: Where do I enter that string?
The DIR command's run from a command line session.
Use Start->Run and enter cmd /k (if it will let you). If the command prompt opens, then enter the DIR command from the root directory of the infected partition.
DIR /AH \Windows\System32
DIR /AH \documents and settings\username\Local Settings\Temp
DIR /AH \Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data
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|---|---|
| 2009 | 17 |
| 2008 | 39 |
| 2007 | 33 |
| 2006 | 94 |
| 2005 | 88 |
| 2004 | 69 |
| 2003 | 25 |
| 2002 | 6 |
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