Brains, Seeing Red!

Bush Edits Jefferson

( He edited out the religion! )

McCain Campaign Concedes That Obama Is A Patriotic American

( “Concedes?” )

The Stimulus Was For Porn!

( 32% of new subscribers admitted... )

Hilzoy on Helms' Hagiography

( There's a reason we think the right is bigoted and mean-spirited. )

Penn & Teller call Bullshit in the War on Porn

( A great rant! )

Rush Limbaugh and The Politics of Revenge

Ezra Klein has an article about the New York Time's recent puff piece on Rush Limbaugh, in which he mostly excoriates the Times for succeeding in somehow turning the intellectual love child of Jesse Helms and Leona Helmsley into a loveable kind of guy, but along the way he says something rather profound. He quotes Limbaugh's "Presidential Platform:"

1. Open the continental shelf to drilling. Ditto the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
2. Establish a 17 percent flat tax.
3. Privatize Social Security.
4. Give parents school vouchers to break the monopoly of public education.
5. Revoke Jimmy Carter's passport while he is out of the country.
6. Abandon all government policies based on the hoax of man-made global warming.

Ezra then goes on to point that half of Limbaugh's points are "pure resentment politics." Drilling will do almost nothing to the price of oil, but it'll piss off liberals. Abandoning any governmental policies based on the premise of anthropogenic global warming might actually hurt us all, but who cares, it'll piss off the liberals! And why revoke Carter's passport except that it'll piss off the liberals!

Ezra also makes the point that Limbaugh says things Fox would never say. There's a bright line past which right wingerism seems so stupid that even high-minded self-described conservatives can't take it seriously anymore, and so we don't listen to it.

The problem with this is simple: Limbaugh is far on the other side of that line, comfortably out of earshot, and yet he's still the most listened-to talk show host in America. You and I learn about the libertarian line reading Hit and Run and the neocon line reading The Corner, and get our analysis of the economic stupidity of both McCain and the Democrats from Brad DeLong.

But most conservatives learn their conservatism from Rush Limbaugh.

Camping, Day 3: Murhut Falls

Marhut Falls

Yamaraashi-chan gets out her day clothes.

Scrambled eggs and toast

There's no water at this campsite, so I've been running water through the PUR pump filter into our five-gallon jug, and I now know what it takes to fill five gallons teaspoon by teaspoon: it takes about an hour. Even with the river, water is pretty dear out here. I did that this morning, as I was the first to wake up and I wanted my coffee.

Kouryou-chan wanted to spend all of her time in my lap, more for her own obnoxious entertainment than for comfort, but she was very helpful making the toast over the fire. As learning experiences, Omaha and I have bought both of the girls pen knives and let them work with the fire because, quite frankly, I have no interest in raising my kids in Pierson's Puppeteer-like soft-room captivity. The world has sharp corners.

Note to self: the camp axe needs sharpening, and the cheap rubber blade cover is dead, so I should by a decent leather one.

I did the dishes while Omaha had the girls make lunches of chicken salad sandwiches. I taught the ladies how to use a camper's can key. Yamaraashi-chan mastered it right away.

Omaha on Murhut Ridge

We drove to Murhut Falls, pictured above. I've learned a lot about panos, including less is more when it comes to frame count. You can never have too many frames in the beginning, but picking the right ones out of the collection is just as important as having them in the first place.

Family at Murhut Falls

We walked up the ridge, passing a herd of YMCA kids coming back the other way. When we got to the top of the ridge, we climbed down a treacherous rockway to the bottom of the falls, where I took the upper left photo. We ate lunch.

Kouryou-chan's ankle was bugging her on the way back. We worried that she had strained it in ballet, so when we got back Omaha wrapped it in an ACE bandage.

Omaha confessed to enjoying the peaceful afternoon, but was a little frustrated that with all this nature the kids and I were engaged in reading our books. She likes the outdoors more than I do, I think; I find the solitude relaxing and the exercise an extra benefit, but she's more the other way around.

Omaha decided to take a walk and disappeared for a while up the road attached to the campsite. This make Kouryou-chan freak out a bit, and we chose to do an orbit of the campsite. Soon, her ankle hurt enough that I was carrying her, but finally we all found ourselves back at the campsite, Omaha included.

One thing Omaha and I have learned is that Kouryou-chan has a very definite hunger clock and resetting it with even a little food will result in "I'm not hungry" at mealtimes. So we declined her begging for Gorp or string cheese while we made dinner.

Dinner was Omaha's Mac & Cheese; hers is made on a stovetop, while I bake mine, and the kids like both much more than Kraft, blessed be. After that we did fire-baked apples dipped in brown sugar and cinnamon, a game of Gimme The Brain, and bedtime.

The Day With No News

I don't recall where I got this from, but I loved it the first time I saw it. If you're a Koyaanisqatsi fan (we know who we are!), this (very short) video is for you. The Day With No News:

I am so geeky: ThinkSaber!

Okay, so tonight I did the geekiest thing I've done in a long time. I owed it to myself after being good and not wasting my time with bad anime or trashy "skiffy" romance novels but instead actually writing five hundred words in Cat In-Law Apartment, so I sat down and hacked some SDL, PyGame and some Linux kernel stuff.

First, I got the Linux kernel's hard-drive active protection system working. HDAPS is available on all late-model IBM Thinkpads, of which mine is one. I don't actually use it for hard-drive protection, as that's a proprietary Windozy thing, apparently, but it has other uses.

I haven't written game code since 1989 or so (no, that's not a typo, and get off my lawn!) so I studied the ins and outs of the SDL event layer, the joystick driver, and the sound file, and within about two hours I had the Linux equivalent of MacSaber.

W0oT! It turns on with the classic lightsaber startup sound, then idles in a low, menacing hum. Swing it and you get various "swing" sounds, come to a stop and it strikes or, if you stop fast enough, hits with a crackling burst. Hit ^C and you get the "vwoop" sound of the saber going off.

This is probably not terribly good for the poor machine, but what fun! Why should Mac geeks get all the fun?

My accelerometer numbers are all way off and I need to fix the event loop to stop the currently playing noise so multiple sounds won't overlap as they do now (except the idle sound, which you kinda want going all the time), but the prototype is completely in the bag.

By the way, this is written entirely with the SDL toolkit, so it's portable across Mac, Windows, and Linux. It uses only the first two axes of rotation, but it really doesn't need the third that Macs provide. (Lenovo makes a strong case that the third axis is unnecessary). Since I don't have a Mac, I have no idea what the device id is for the accelerometer; right now, it's relying on the device identifier 'HDAPS joystick' to find the right device, which isn't portable outside Thinkpads.

Download it: thinksaber.py, version 0.01α. It's really crude. You Have Been Warned. If you do get it running, please hold your Thinkpad firmly while experimenting. Don't do this in front of your SO unless you want to be giggled at.

Requirements: A thinkpad running Linux with the tp_smapi module loaded and hdaps enabled (I believe this is already done on those all-you-can-eat distros like Fedora and Ubuntu), plus SDL, SDL joystick, SDL mixer, and PyGame (It is entirely possible that if you have any games on your system, all of these are already present). You'll also need the sound files. To get the sound files, you'll have to download MacSaber's ZIP file and unpack it. Sound files should go in the same directory as the program, and then "just" (after all that, yeah) run:

python thinksaber.py

... and be a Thinkpad Jedi.