December 2006 Archives

Been spending some time listening to new music over my vacation, and stumbled into a treasure trove of Nerdcore. I'm totally smitten with MC Router and MC Plus +.

There's an awesome amount of free music to be had out there, like at Rhyme Torrents or Drown Radio (site of nerdcore artist Doctor Popular), or nerdcorehiphop.org.

Who'd have thought that the worlds of Computer Science and Gangsta Rap would merge so awesomely.

"Hey you got your algorithm in my bling!"
"Hey you got your bling in my algorithm!"

Oh what sweet white nerdy tastiness.

But I was able to walk around my street in shorts and bare feet this morning while walking the dog and I have the spring onions and daffodils sprouting in the backyard.

There's no end in sight for the unseasonably warm weather either.

I've always liked winter, the eye-watering snap of the cold air, the crunch of the ground under my feet when I walk across it, even the way the dry air makes my lungs slightly ache during a deep freeze. I stand still and quiet out in the swirling snowstorm to surround myself with the hushed brightness, a soft blanket of diamonds falling from the sky, sledding down the big hills on our giant yellow plastic disc, falling into the deep banks and getting buried by my kids.

Winter is a good excuse to build a roaring fire and make Irish coffee to sip while sitting snug under a blanket and read a book. It feels like a waste to build a fire when it's 40 degrees outside.

People keep telling me that I lucky there's no snow and I should be grateful for the warm weather. If I wanted warm weather I would move South and live in Georgia or Florida. I want my kids to know snow, to live in it, chase it, to really feel the changing of the seasons in their bones; a primal clock that teaches them about the passage of time.

This weather we have now does nothing but frustrate me.

So I'm on vacation right now, for the next week. I actually took vacation from Friday of last week but I've been too busy (on my vacation) to even get in front of my computer. Go figure...

I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and I will try to get back here with more news and posts in the next day or two.

In 2004, police and sheriff deputies in Georgia were called to Frederick Williams' house because he was having a seizure. The police arrived before the ambulance, and they arrested him. They proceed to taser him over and over again ordering him to stop resisting while he's being held down by many officers until he dies. There's a video of the incident where you can hear him pleading for his life while they kill him.

You can read the summary and see the video here. I watched the video, and one of the most disgusting things about the video is how all of the officers stand around and leer when he's first brought in being tasered. They're enjoying this man's torture.

Wizbang has more information about the incident as well as the fact that the DA chose not to charge any of the deputies in the case. Read that article here.

Better yet, read what police officers and their sadistic groupies have to say over at the forums on Officer.com:

Absolutely he deserved it. He struggled and he wouldn't comply. If you do that, there's a good chance you'll get tased.

Boohoo, he was black. He could have just as easily been white.

Or

You resist, you get tased, cuffed or not. What else should the officers have done? There were many officers present, and if that many officers could not get sufficient control of a combative suspect, there is a problem there that handcuffs will not solve. Step it up a level on the use on force continuum....presence didnt work, verbal didnt work, soft hands didnt work, whats next? Less lethal weapons. IMO, those officers were justified 100%....

Nothing did happen to the police officers involved, though one news story highlights that after the incident, the cop who administered the shocks was fired, but not for this. Instead he was fired for shooting the neighbor's dog.

Maybe it didn't listen well to commands either.

A journalist for the New Republic wrote an article critical of Michael Crichton not long ago, so instead of responding like an adult Crichton wrote the journalist into his latest book as the raper of infant boys.

Thanks heavens Michael Crowley, the journalist in question, had a good sense of humor about the whole thing.

Good going Crichton. Instead of making a cogent rebuttal that stimulated thought you've shown yourself to be a giant ass and a giant cock all at the same time.

You ever wonder if Mrs. Butterworth and Aunt Jemima hooked up in college?

I can't say it much better than the Agitator did. Apparently they were worried that during the drug raid at his house he might flush the evidence.

Who knows, maybe they were administering a drug test...

The best part is the the quote from the article that states:

"Even if a raid doesn't turn up anything, presence and show of force sends a hard message to the neighborhood that gang and drug activity will not be tolerated."

GOOD! We don't want people thinking they have a right to privacy or freedom from unreasonable search. We want them fearing that the police could come in and beat them or make them piss themselves or otherwise humiliate and abuse them.

Seriously, it's despicable, disgusting, and horrible that in today's world we have people who are willing to accept the worst kinds of behavior from our police in the name of some "War on Drugs" or "War on Terror". Where are the conservatives calling out for a fundamental return to people's ability to be safe from this kind of abuse? Where are the conservatives who would have seen a photo like this from some place like East Germany or the Soviet Union and pointed and said "That's what's wrong with their thinking that the State is always right and the people have no liberties"? Where are the conservatives who really believed that to be conservative meant to be conservative on the role of government in people's lives not use the government to push their morally uptight socially repressive views on the rest of us.

How can it be wrong for a country like Belarus to throw its people in jail and abuse them while we let our cops run roughshod over the people in whole neighborhoods, locking up 1 in 6 Americans and subjecting them to all manner of abuse at the hands of the people that are ostensibly supposed to be protecting us?

-- UPDATE 1: Justin Cook, the photographer of the picture I had above contacted me and asked me to pull the picture. In part because he he said that my analysis of what was going on was underinformed (it was) and also because he didn't have written permission from the mother of the child in the picture to publish the photo. Based on those two facts and more out of how I know I would feel if a picture like that of one of my kids was being posted on the internet I took down the picture. I have more information about the raid that lead to the picture in the first place from Justin, and I'll post more about it in a bit.

After Hamas was elected in Palestine as the new government the US cut off funding and decried it as a terrorist organization (a move which I supported, by the way) and some people criticized us for reacting that way.

News came from the Gaza Strip today that Hamas gunmen sprayed the car carrying the three children of a rival Palestinian faction while they were on their way to school. The children were ten, eight, and six.

I recognize that the actions of a few don't necessarily represent the movement as a whole, and I also will not sit here and glibly claim that it's because the actors involved were Muslim that they acted this way. There's plenty of hatred and violence in all sects that drives people to act in despicable ways.

But I know these actions are not beyond the normal MO of Hamas, or Fatah for that matter, and while Hamas now claims it had no responsibility for the crime, they're most certainly the perpetrators.

The fact that they will not turn the person over to a civilized criminal court, but instead perpetuate the cycle of violence does not bode well for the future of Palestine or our relations with them.

Ever ready to promote efficiency at work our bosses at the client's location gave us this to save on trips away from coding. Just mind which way you pull the handle:

I've been reading Reddit for a while and every day there seems to be a new story about some article from Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris.

This rising militant atheism is getting annoying. I'll admit up front that I'm a Christian and I believe in Jesus, but I don't believe it's my calling to bludgeon others into accepting my faith. I am upset by religious bigots of all creed, especially people like Fred Phelps, Jimmy Swaggart, our President, and so on.

And I'm certainly in favor of exposing people in authority attempting to use their power to force their faith on people. I decried the attempts by the Kansas Board of Education to redefine science to allow for creationism. I cheered when the judge here in Harrisburg struck down the Dover School Board's order to teach creationism and I cheered louder when the members of the school board were voted out of office for trying to force creationism on students...but please...stop with the obnoxious atheism.

If people are assholes for trying to force their religion on others, they're still assholes when they're trying to force their denial of God on people. Or when they mock people for believing. As you may have heard, James Kim was found dead in the snow a mile from his family after attempting to go for help when they got stuck. The outpouring of grief for him was amazing. A lot of people offered prayer. This dickhead offered mockery of people's prayer. The author stated:

I guess the imaginary god people keep "praying" to didn't care enough to save Mr. Kim's life.

That's despicable. RealityBased, whomever you are, you're no better than the people you suppose yourself better than because you're an atheist.

Please, everyone, stop the damn bickering and preaching.

And can I just say for a moment that I am amused by the irony that many people who cling so desperately to their atheism reached via logical fallacy believing that it somehow makes them better than others hold atheism as their faith. We all have our creeds, be them Christian, Buddhist, or Atheist.

For as long as I've known my wife I've known her to be a maker of words. Neologism and portmanteau fly freely. Usually I'll find the words my wife says end up on the Merriam-Webster list of "Top Ten Favorite Words Not In The Dictionary", for example, slickery, smushables, confuzzled, fahoodled and so on.

It's apparent to me now that my son has inherited his mother's ability to bend the language into whatever shape he desires. He recently coined the term:

firerhea - I don't think I need to explain this condition, because we've all had it at least once.

nose meat - This afternoon my wife was cleaning out the cavernous warehouse for snot that is my son's nose. When she pulled out an impressively large block of snot, Owen giggled and said "That's nose meat!" So there you have it. Fresh from my son's nose to your family's dinner table, only the freshest nose meat!

I love acoustic guitar music, so this really caught my eye:

The guy's name is Erik Mongrain and you can find his MySpace page here and his regular webpage here.

This is one of those videos that I just watch over and over again.