mushinnoshin

I haven’t blogged much about the goings on in government lately, so we’ll do a quick catch-up / rundown of a few things.

• Senator Burris — I don’t really have a problem with this. Sure, the process was tainted, but maybe in a way that benefits us. With Blago being in the situation he’s in, the need to set up his defense put him in a position of having no choice but to appoint someone who was squeaky-clean and well regarded. Of course the pick had to be someone who would actually accept it, which means someone who knows they aren’t slick enough a politician to win the seat otherwise. So in the end I think we’re getting a decent and honest public servant, maybe even the sort of person we wish they all could be. Even if he doesn’t seem to be the sharpest crayon in the box, at least from what I’ve seen.
• On the subject of pending Senators, I’m ambivalent on the Caroline Kennedy thing. Yeah, I don’t much like seeing an aristocrat glide into the seat banking on a family name, and if there’s an obvious and deserving choice who’s getting screwed out of it, then that’s no good. But so far I’ve not heard of this person, and it seems like the choice may be between coronating a Kennedy or coronating a Cuomo. So, meh.
• And then there’s Al — yeah, I’m pretty happy that it looks like Franken’s going to get his seat. This isn’t even a partisan thing so much as an I just like Al Franken thing. I don’t agree with him on everything, and I don’t think I’d ever vote him into any executive position, but as one voice out of a hundred, I think he can make some meaningful contributions.
• Drilling down to the state, how ’bout that Williams-Odom-Naifeh coup in the Tennesse House, eh? The entertainment value alone of watching the hard-right troglodytes from Mumpower to Hobbs melting down made it a grand old time. I do agree with Roger that this isn’t really a step forward for progressives, but I disagree with Roger that it’s a bad thing for progressives. It’s just maintaining the status quo. But, given how hard the goopers seem to want to beat us back to the 50s — the 1850s, that is — status quo is probably the best we can hope for. And I said this elsewhere as a joke, but I think it’s sorta true — if Kent Williams is a “Republican in Name Only”, then the GOP never had anything more than a “Majority in Name Only”. So what we have now — a House run by a moderate Republican with the support of a relatively conservative bunch of backwater Democrats — really is actually a pretty good reflection of how this state thinks — for better or worse.
• Locally of course all the buzz is about the Whites English Only abomination, which I’ve written a bit about previously. I won’t run down the pro/con laundry list since I think anyone reading me is almost assuredly firmly locked on one side or the other. I may whip up something separate on the broader question of the xenophobia behind this thing, but for now suffice it to say, get out Thursday and vote down this monstrosity. Unless you’re for it, in which case you need to get to the polls on Friday :)

Meanwhile, where are we partying Tuesday?

Well, it’s just you and me. I’m sittin’ here with a bum leg, nursing it with a bit of the cran-grape and vodka, ought to go to sleep but can’t, and here we are.

I guess there’s nothing here but the static. And perhaps the flicker of passing signals from other lands our antenna catches when the wind hits just right.

I think I want a sham-wow. And a slanket. Oooh, and something Chia. Help Me! Mr. Popeil! I want it!

Wait, maybe I’m confusing my shamwows and shamans. Which one is the towel that soaks up all your bad karma and sends you off on cool vision quests?

Well it seems that Mr. Crafton’s xenophobic crusade has led our humble neighborhood to get a plug of sorts in the New York Times. Via the 16th District listserv we read:

On a recent weekend, volunteers for a coalition called Nashville for All of Us, which opposes the proposal, knocked on doors and distributed campaign literature in Woodbine, a heavily Hispanic neighborhood.

Melissa Gordon, 29, a graduate student, and Laura Barnett, 24, a recent college graduate, rang the doorbell at David Morales’s ranch-style house. Mr. Morales, a Mexican immigrant and language translator, told them he already knew about the proposal and planned to vote against it.

“It’s part of a larger problem of people not understanding immigrants: their habits, their languages, their barbecues in the front yard,” he said. “It’s more than just fear about jobs. It’s fear about a whole way of life.”

Well, I wish it were under better circumstances, but still it’s nice to be mentioned. I would of course be more than happy to see our burgh take a place on stage if we can be part of sending this hateful nonsense to the dustbin of history where it belongs.

If we do, I then further vote that just for Mr. Crafton we need to reinstate an old-school city banishment. Let’s tie this embarrassment naked and blindfolded to a donkey and send him off to piss on some other city’s time, money, and reputation.

I know I give Ron Paul a lot of shit over his backwards approach to social issues — his homophobia, his desire to have the government enforce a Christian interpretation of personhood, and his willingness to coddle and associate with outright racists, whether he be a racist himself or not — but make no mistake, it is to some extent at least because I’m hardest on the ones I love.

Because while he’s no Ghandi, sometimes he’s the closest we’ve got:

As an opponent of all violence, I am appalled by the practice of lobbing homemade rockets into Israel from Gaza. I am only grateful that, because of the primitive nature of these weapons, there have been so few casualties among innocent Israelis. But I am also appalled by the long-standing Israeli blockade of Gaza – a cruel act of war – and the tremendous loss of life that has resulted from the latest Israeli attack that started last month.

There are now an estimated 700 dead Palestinians, most of whom are civilians. Many innocent children are among the dead. While the shooting of rockets into Israel is inexcusable, the violent actions of some people in Gaza does not justify killing Palestinians on this scale. Such collective punishment is immoral. At the very least, the U.S. Congress should not be loudly proclaiming its support for the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza.

Unfortunately, there are no cheap and easy answers to this conflict. There *is* an answer, but it’s a difficult one which will require a revolutionary upheaval in the way that both the left and the right approach our definition of property and our relationships between the individual, the society, and the earth.

It’s tempting to blame religion for this ancient conflict, but that’s giving religion too much credit. Religion is the glue that binds the opposing factions to be sure, and it is the tool their leaders use to motivate action against the enemy — but it is not the why of the fight. As suggested by Malthus, this, like all war, and indeed all politics, is at its core a struggle for control of our natural resources.

In many ways, the struggle between Israel and Palestine could be seen as emblematic of the root bug in our whole damn system. Solve this one — by recognizing that all of the earth belongs to all of the people, that true property can only extend from what one does, not where one stands, and by reorganizing all of our human institutions around these principles — and we solve not just this conflict, but the vast majority of what plagues us the world over.

Mike tagged me for the seven deadly sins random things meme. Right-o, lets see what we come up with.

1. I’ve been known to sometimes (and by sometimes, I mean often) go *weeks* without really talking to anyone, beyond the unavoidable “transactional” speech needed sometimes with a cashier, etc. Weirder, this generally doesn’t bother me, except when I reflect on how weird this makes me.
2. Mike and the other guys from work already know about this, but — I have a weird thing about my lunch schedule. See, if left to my own devices, I would probably eat the same thing almost every day. Which is probably bad for my soul at least, if not for my health. So, to ensure some degree of relatively even distribution, I adhere to a well defined rotation schedule. We’ll start with Tuesday: sub/sandwich shops, rotate weekly between Blimpie’s, Subway, Quiznos, Jimmy John’s, Jersey Mike’s, Lenny’s, Schlotzsky’s, and Which Which. Wednesday is burito day, with turns taken by Moe’s, Baja Fresh, and Blue Coast. Thursday we go for cafe/deli sandwiches between Bread & Co, Jason’s Deli, Panera, Wolfgang Puck’s, Atlanta Bread Co, and McAllister’s, and Friday is for Asia and the Mediterranean — Royal Thai, Miss Saigon, PF Chang’s, and the Greek Cafe. Back to Monday, that’s cheap day — Subway every week, except for when it’s Subway’s turn on Tuesday, giving me one week at Wendy’s every two months. I’m not psycho-inflexible about all this mind you, I’ll change it up for the occasional social invite or free meal or whatever, but this is my default schedule.
3. Many eons ago I performed in a somewhat successful play called “The Brady Show From Hell”, in which we took real episodes of the Brady Bunch and performed them on stage re-written basically as a variation on The Aristocrats. I was “Alice” in this incestuous try-sexual family of drug addicts and fecal fetishists, the androgynous dominatrix maid who offset her fishnets with combat boots. She didn’t mind cleaning up after the orgies so long as the family members were all good little slaves during. It was, of course, a comedy.
4. I wrote my own word processor when I was in 6th or 7th grade or so. OK, well, it was planned to be a word processor, but it really never got farther than a notepad-esque text editor. And being written in BASIC on an Apple IIe, it was slow as hell, almost unusably so. Still I was thinking big — I had this crazy plan to output everything in the high-resolution graphics mode, drawing the text so I could show fonts and such on the screen. I wonder if anyone ever ran with that?
5. I never was much of one for political norms. I was selected to go to Boys State around 10th grade or so, where I ran for Senator on an anarchist platform pledging that if elected, I would do absolutely nothing. I didn’t win. [Oh! But I did take second I think in the talent show. Played an old improv in A minor, and stuck a pack of burning incense where a candelabra might sit. I'm trying to resist a cheap Sarah Pain flute joke here. ]
6. I played a mean tuba back in junior high.
7. I was quite obese through most of my youth. I don’t mean chubby or husky or big-boned, I mean my 6th grade self probably had sixty pounds on the adult me. Needless to say my sense of self-esteem never fully recovered from it, despite having stayed mostly thin to average for not quite twenty years now since. Being the perpetual butt of the joke at lunch time in particular has left me still generally uncomfortable eating around other people. Not enough to keep me from doing so, but enough to set all my neuroses firing when I do.

Oh, right, now I’m supposed to tag. Hmm, dunno. Most of the people who I figure would do this thing probably already have. Well, let’s try Logan.

After stumbling to the computer this morning, as coffee medicated a mild hangover from a kickass shindig the agonyzer hosted with his partners in crime to celebrate their success in a damn fine production of A Christmas Carol — my firefox went batshit and commandeered my morning.

Long story short, over the course of maybe a half to a dozen page loads, the thing just ground to a halt. It wouldn’t respond within the page or in the menus. It acted like took control of X, or at least of KDE, by seeming not to let you switch to a different window, but it was actually just slow, and once switched, you could move between all the *other* windows and terminals with ease. One thing it did leave me was the ability to close the program from the corner ‘X’, and it closed quickly and cleanly. I’d relaunch — no alerts, it was a clean close and didn’t believe itself to have crashed — and as the tabs from the previous session opened, it crawled to the same condition.

Repeat several times, closing out all but the standard dozen or so tabs I keep open 24-7, which I know aren’t likely to have any out of control scripting — no change. No change in safe mode, or after using safe mode launch to restore some program defaults. Try an apt-get upgrade (think “Windows Update”) on the system (running debian testing on a pretty old amd xp-1700), and a dist-upgrade (think “Windows Service Pack”). These installed a new enough firefox that I had to upgrade some plugins. Finally an install –reinstall on firefox, err, iceweasel. Rebooted after each of the last three. All without making a lick of difference.

Exasperated, I closed all the aforementioned always-open tabs, restarted one last time — and everything worked like a champ. Of course I immediately reopened all the same standard tabs, without a hitch.

So it doesn’t seem to have been the pages, but something with the browser’s cache of information about and controlling one or more of the tabs and their content.

As far as the awesomeness goes — well it *was* pretty impressive how consistently firefox reproduced my session tabs, through all those ups and downs and upgrades and even the reinstall. Even if it did suck that it had to reproduce whatever the hell was wrong in the process.