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Provided by management for your safety

You may well have noticed, that I can always find space to complain. And so, in that vein, I herewith complain about Yahoo! Mail and its repeated attempts to get me to provide secret questions and answers — “required” — so that if I forget my password then I may access my email. But, I won’t forget my password, because I’m a rather regular emailer — let’s say email user — and, thus, simply said, no thanks. As in no, thanks. And yet I was warned this evening that if I don’t provide, then I will lose access to my email. Mighty dire, hmm.

Nonetheless, the email service has been free, so as it becomes less so, then I can travel on. At least we still have a world, an ‘e-world’ at that (sorry), in which choices can be made. What if we didn’t? Taking that to the exterior world, what if we could no longer, as East Berliners especially were able to do before The Wall, vote with our feet? (as Hans-Hermann Hoppe remarked in one of his talks; it may have been Imperialism: Enemy of Freedom)

The aforementioned reminds me of a tagline? slogan? gracias? which I see repeatedly at work, in the bathroom no less, on the dispenser for disposable toilet seat covers: Provided by management for your safety. The implied is much in the vein of the too-abused “thanks for your patience” which makes the rounds as a deflection against complaint. So there, I’m complaining.

Kindling

May only blog once per week… but the habit, the spark returns. Specifically, I’m prompted today by correspondence between my post on DRM and what Sheldon Richman has noted regarding Kindle’s DRM.

While the following corollary may be fanciful, I wonder if the demise of paper currency, engineered toward a cashless society, helped by massive gov’t borrowing, goes hand-in-hand with the rise of such electronic ‘tethers’ to the point where books, as we know them, become as rare as paying in gold.

Notes toward beginning a story set in some future scriptorium.

Thumbnails not

Knot? Too much time spent trying to find a simple thumbnail generator in PHP, so setting aside the prettiness of auto-generated thumbnails, at least pictures are online. Some, for now. Vision Mtn refers to a recent trip to eastern Washington. Thanks to Francesca for the hospitality!

And déjà vu all over again, once more. Paring down, however, for the summer — rather than inflating how much time I spend online — I may only blog once per week, and get outside. There’s hiking and biking to be done. Beer gardens, and beer garden gnomes. Now if I can just get the cat on a leash…

DRM and me and you

That’s for Digital Rights Management. Rights, sure. The “right” to be constrained. If I buy a CD, I can only play it in 5 CD players or less? Nonsense. Yet when I buy a song from iTunes, said song cannot just be played on any and every iPod or computer that I may own. It must be “authorized” first, and then only within the allowable, allotted number of devices. Supposedly this is to stop piracy, and yet, again, all one need do is burn the protected .m4p files to an audio CD, then re-import them, and one has non-protected versions.

But, because I have too many of said songs to burn to one CD, do I want to go through burning several just so that I may own them outright? The Age of the Lessee has begun, where no one is truly any kind of owner anymore, merely one who rents and has rights apportioned as others deem. With the new “reality show” in Atlanta showcasing the latest in blast-walls-a-la-Baghdad, but tailored for fun, prepare for more psychological incrementalism in adjusting to your new habitat where your rights are cordoned, walled-off, and managed by everyone but you. Freedom is slavery, indeed.

My circular point being that I’m done buying songs from iTunes. Done. I’ve wasted too much time already trying to reclaim what I thought I owned… hacking Perl modules and the like. Pfft.

Medication reconciliation

In a statement welcoming Obama, AMA president Dr. Nancy Nielsen said the medical profession wants to “reduce unnecessary costs by focusing on quality improvements, such as developing best practices for care and improving medication reconciliation.”

Decipher that one. There aren’t already best practices established in one of the world’s oldest professions? Or what’s changed, or is supposed to change? I smell a big pharma rat.

Aside from this, Tolkien’s cosmology. Walls of the World, and a Sun which travels under the Earth every night…sounds a bit Egyptian. Perhaps the better of fantasy, over science fiction, is that more physical license is possible, let alone metaphysical. (See Book of Lost Tales, volume 4).

p.s. Interesting bit on idle rail cars. I see none around here (the train cruises along loudly but a block and a half away).

Liberty steaks and freedom fries

And other absurdities, but first, a character’s understanding of inflation’s benefit to the indebted rich:

As a commodity, money itself has a price. It is not a value-neutral medium, although it is a medium – of exchange. Because most people don’t buy money, but buy goods with money, they don’t see it as its own commodity. Think of it as a bridge. The bridge must exist, no? And therefore it has a cost. Think of it as a bond, but not a bond in the fiscal sense, but in the dental sense. OK…

Let’s say you borrowed $100, and your payments were to be made in installments of $1.

$100 loan. The price of a dollar is $1. 100 dollars to pay back.

$100 loan. The price of a dollar is $100. 1 dollar to pay back.

The denominated amount of the loan hasn’t changed. But now that a hundred dollar bill takes the place of a one dollar bill to equal the purchasing power of one dollar, the loan is gone in one payment, rather than in one hundred payments. Do you see?

I’m not sure that I do, but a good beginning to a story, perhaps. Back to absurdities such as “liberty steaks”, which hamburgers were called during World War I by the anti-German. Sounding familiar now as “freedom fries”*, eh? The politics here is not deep, though buried to be sure. I only learned of it today via part two, The New Absolutism, in Nisbet’s tripartite essay The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America (1988). More on that in a Goodreads review.

* Thus, no use of words which are of French origin. Forget hazard, language, and beef.

DIY database upgrade

You may have noticed the message “error establishing a database connection” — after upgrading MySQL the program didn’t restart, so after a reboot, voila. (Is that a noun, reboot? Aesthetic or no, usage is the key, sadly perhaps). But in order to reboot, I have to unplug the keyboard from the main computer and into the server, because it won’t start without a keyboard connection, and why have two keyboards… dullsville, you might say.

But, the ten-year old machine is hanging in there. And I must end with this article on boycotting Microsoft.

Hiker’s breakfast

Let’s lighten it up a bit (though not really, because I was full for hours, ha).

3 eggs, scrambled — paprika, olive oil, black pepper, sea salt.
4 strips bacon — Hempler’s, of course.
Chocolate pudding — yes, chocolate pudding.

Bike to Chuckanut area. Hike seven miles. Bike home. Ah, yes.

A store of books and things unknown, or things occult

Let us now praise local places, like used bookstores. I am most pleased that in the Internet Age people still want to read in print. (This harkens back to a previous post about the Kindle). Thus, cheers for what is in ink and not merely online, though, ironically, this is my longest post yet and I must admit to the sheer research potential of a free and ‘net-neutral’ internet.

There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act.  In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Group has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, of any other groups, and frequently does so.

I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records.  I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments.

I have objected, but in the past and recently, to a few of its policies (notably to its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European Power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wished to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.  –Carrol Quigley, Tragedy & Hope

I could not locate a copy at my favorite local bookstore today, but I’ll note that Carroll Quigley was Bill Clinton’s favorite professor at Georgetown.

Toward the end of the [1992 convention acceptance] speech Clinton mentioned that “as a teenager I heard John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship. And then, as a student at Georgetown, I heard that call clarified by a professor named Carroll Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest country in the history of the world because our people have always believed in two things: that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so.”

Knowing Clinton’s history, I won’t even take this at face value. (E.g., Mena and cocaine trafficking, for the curious.) As Namebase goes on to say,

Carroll Quigley was a conspiracy historian, but he was unusual in that he avoided criticism. Most of his conspiracy research concerned the role of the Rhodes-Milner Round Table Groups in Britain from 1891 through World War II. His major work, Tragedy and Hope (1966), contains scattered references to his twenty years of research in this area, but his detailed history of the Round Table was written in 1949. The major reason he avoided criticism is because his work wasn’t threatening to people in high places. Quigley’s research was too obscure, and too much had happened in the world since the events he described. Quigley was also an insider, so his criticisms of the groups he studied are subdued.

All of this leads me to the news item that Dubya and Bill are brothers, now. Were they ever not?… The back of an obscure book, In The Name of the ‘New World Order’, reads:

Conventional wisdom tells us that present-day events are the effects of earlier material causes, and that politicians have short-term strategies which are largely opportunistic.

Sold. The publisher of said book has an analysis of what he terms “Brothers of the Shadows” here.

In his book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace Gore Vidal suggests that the American public has been conditioned to respond to the word ‘conspiracy’ with a smirk and a chuckle. Conspiracy, in other words, is for the nuts and the loners, and is not to be taken seriously. In this way, he argues, through the media’s association of the concept of conspiracy with fringe or extreme elements, the real conspirators go unnoticed.

Dissects his country

Literally? Hahahahaha… really, folks, this article on the Portuguese novelist Lobo Antunes is revealing for its peripheral mention of how consumerism has taken over Portuguese society, rotting from the past. Portugal sounds like a ripe place for the European Union to come in — wait, it already did — and foster what Jacques Attali noted in 1990 as ‘consumer-citizenship’ to replace moribund national identity. Sounds like a recipe for supra-national control under the illusion of choice; for more see Attali’s Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order, a nervous defense of globalization (if France must give up its culture, well, then, let’s rationalize it as world-historical progress — one might say, of the Bilderberg variety).

Being ill, I have time to push this further along conspiratorial lines, noting also that in the same New Yorker issue is a bizarre short story, The Slows, by Gail Hareven. I don’t read much fiction in said magazine, but this is the most sci-fi-like story I can remember in it. Curious ending. I won’t spoil it further, except to dovetail with a David Rothscum report. (One can dovetail, I hope). Ah, I think old age will suit me fine.