From Pine View Farm

In and out.

In and out.

In and out.

Worse than the cat.

Anybody want a dog? Or two or three?

Free shipping.

Updates here.

The Republican Party has turned into Frank Burns.

When you create a web account or buy something on-line, you may be helping un-confuse a computer. The local rag had a little story on Captcha today, and included a tidbit on the newest feature. Captcha is the program that displays those words you have to decode to go to the next step of your registration or purchase or whatever:

So to solve two problems at once, he (Louis von Ahn, the creator of Captcha–ed.) proposed using CAPTCHA to help with the book digitization, asking people to decipher words that had stumped the computers. He published his idea in last week’s issue of the journal Science. Already dozens of firms have signed on, he said.

“Whenever anyone is buying tickets on Ticketmaster,” he said, “They’re not only stopping scalpers, they’re also telling us what the words are saying in something that’s been scanned and [is] being digitized.”

(My two or three old-timers will remember that I used something similar for a while. They hated it. The comment plug-in I use now seems to do the job quite well, without all the hatred.)

Smart dog (emphasis added):

Police said (Officer) Bingnear gave chase, jumping over a fence and finally catching the subject in a yard on the first block of Shadow Lane — the residence of the 17-year-old’s girlfriend, Samantha Rutter, 19.

As the officer was attempting to take the youth into custody, Rutter allegedly brought out a pit bull and began yelling at the officer to leave her boyfriend alone. Rutter then told the dog to attack and bite the officer, but the dog did not comply, Crowell said.

Tomorrow, Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Philadelphia, Pa., 6 p.

Come discuss a government that got it right.

As I passed a sign today (Joe Blow, Attorney at Law) I wondered, “What other kind of attorneys are there.” Then I realized I’m one of the others; I’m an “attorney in fact.”

And what other kinds of attorneys are there?

March of the Mercenary News:

U.S. prosecutors have sent letters to six Blackwater security guards involved in a Baghdad shooting last year in a move that could lead to groundbreaking criminal indictments, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.

Bodyguards from U.S. security firm Blackwater Worldwide opened fire in a traffic jam last September, killing 17 Iraqi civilians while escorting a convoy of U.S. diplomats through the capital under a contract with the State Department.

. . . so I hope I’m never this desperate for money:

Copper thieves cut live wires behind the Fairfax Shopping Center early Friday morning, knocking out power to six stores and forcing them to close for most of the day.

While stealing copper from junkyards and abandoned buildings has been going on for some time, the cutting of wires carrying electricity is a trend that Delmarva Power officials began seeing a little more than a year ago, and are now seeing on an almost weekly basis, spokeswoman Bridget Shelton said.

I’ve been distracted by Real Life the last few days, but I do want to recommend John Cole’s take down of those who are mongering war with Russia:

These people are simply insane. These lunatics are openly agitating for a war with Russia for… some shitty little inconsequential piece of land on Russia’s border. Imagine how the United States would react if someone decided to supply a hostile army in Mexico with advanced weaponry in the struggle over the breakaway Republic of Tijuana, and you get the idea. Not to mention, let’s revisit some basic facts . . .

In fact, he’s done a several excellent posts on this topic.

See you tomorrow.

This is just too much.

In the Grand Old Tradition.

Documentation here.

Via Kos.

Noz is visiting Israel.

His posts from his trip are fascinating. Check them out.

On the front page.

They say nonsense:

Commentary here.

And persons who don’t think about what they say usually don’t think about what they do.

Via Eschaton.

The Booman Tribune has a nice round-up.

Listen to this.

Sign up here:

The Booman pretty much sums it up. Shorter version: For much of the pundits, war good, peace bad:

It’s a frustrating part of our national political dialogue that people that supported the biggest foreign policy blunder since the escalation of the Vietnam War are consistently described as ’strong on national security.’ If you advocate the use of force, you are strong. If you oppose the use of force, you are weak. It should be obvious that this is not an accurate or helpful dichotomy. A better measure is whether your decisions contribute to the strengthening or weakening of America’s position in the world. Those that advocated war with Iraq wound up severely weakening the country militarily, economically, and morally. But no matter how many times we make this point, pundits continue to give more credit for toughness and seriousness on foreign and military affairs to the people that got this decision wrong on Iraq.

It’s 1984 all over again:

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labour. A hierarchical society is only possible and the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society of the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects. And its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.

Pfui.

Using the Russian attacks on Georgia as Exhibit A, Republican presidential candidate John McCain yesterday portrayed himself as better prepared to protect the national security in a dangerous world.

“Today, we are all Georgians,” McCain told several thousand people at the York Fairgrounds, recounting what he had said in a telephone conversation earlier in the day with the country’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, whom he has befriended during several visits.

Whereas, in the reality-based community, it’s pretty clear that the wingnut aggressiveness of the Republican party is a large factor in what’s going on in Georgia (well, both of them, but this is the Eurasian Georgia). Dan Froomkin summed it up yesterday:

Russia’s response to Georgia’s military push last week into the Russian-allied separatist province of South Ossetia has been, in the eyes of the Western world, shockingly brutal and wildly disproportionate. But hindsight suggests Bush has been playing with fire in that region for years now, and that an overpowering Russian response was a predictable outcome to continued provocation.

Follow the link to see the five pages of analysis that follows that summary.

From time to time I look at the stats for Pine View Farm. Sometimes, I amuse myself by doing whois lookups on the IP addresses (”whois” is built into Linux–just run it from the console and, badda-bing, there it is, the whois).

I get the most hits from Google-bots. Yahoo-bots are second. MSN-bots are a distant third or fourth. (John Dvorak recently delivered himself of the opinion that Google is number one because it works twice as hard as the other search engines. My stats bear him out.)

Comment spambots are next, but, thanks to my comment spam plug-in, you don’t have to see the results of their attempts to spam the comments.

And, as regards real actual posts, the one or two pictures I posted two years ago of Ursula Andress, one from Dr. No and one in a throw-away story about the anniversary of the bikini, prompted by an article in the local rag, are still the most popular hits.

(Oddly enough, a lot of those hits come from Guvmint computers with “mil.something-or-other” in the whois. I grew up 40 miles from the world’s largest naval base. I’m guessing sailors.)

Now, Ursula Andress was truly a beautiful lady and certainly an okay actress.

But, come on folks, if you want pictures of Ursula Andress, you can find far better ones elsewhere.

But I don’t think even Mike Nelson could help here. Bonddad (emphasis added):

1/3 of the all the mortgages originated in the last five years in the US are larger than the value of the homes they are tied to. According to the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds Report total mortgage debt outstanding in the first quarter of 2008 was $10.6 trillion and total mortgage debt outstanding in the 1Q 2003 was $6.222 trillion. So over the last 5 years we’ve see an increase of $4.3 trillion in mortgage debt. Let’s assume that 25% of that is home equity, leaving us with $3.321 trillion in first lien mortgages. That means $1.086 trillion of mortgages are more expensive than the properties they are tied to. That’s also roughly 10% of all mortgages in the US financial system.

Bonddad points out that the Secretary of the Treasury lies.

Then, again, he’s a Bushie, ain’t he? Sort of goes with the territory, doesn’t it?

The substantive analysis starts about 45 minutes into the broadcast.

There’s more to it than we are hearing from the tame press.

Meanwhile, warmongers are gathering.

The official website is up here. I haven’t done anything with it yet–that can wait until tomorrow.

It looks like I’m the first. I’ve never been on the cutting edge of anything–except a Swiss Army knife.

Any serious suggestions about how to make this happen well are appreciated.

Remember that the point of this thing is give persons of a reality-based liberal persuasion a chance to look at issues from a perspective informed by faith without anyone’s giving them funny looks because they profess a faith–and to allow those who may not have a religious perspective to join them without opprobium.

Non-serious or snarky suggestions will be deleted without acknowledgement.

The Gkrellm system monitor just sits over there minimized in the slit until I want to check on system performance:

Instead of starting it with “./gkrellm,” start it with “./gkrellm -w.” and it lands right in the slit.

Or enter the right command in the Fluxbox menu:

[exec] (gkrellm docked) {gkrellm -w}

Tomorrow, Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Philadelphia, Pa., USA, 6 p. m.

Come see the Rat Man.

. . . is usually unconscious.

By and large, persons don’t get up and say to themselves, “I’m going to do something hypocritical today.”

They just do it, while not realizing that their words and deeds in one area flatly contradict their words and deeds in another.

When I heard the news reports that Walter Brasch discusses below, I was so full of rage and incredulity that I wasn’t able to write about it. Fortunately, Mr. Brasch expresses his thoughts much more coherently than I could have expressed mine.

And he doesn’t even mention America’s concentration camps, waterboarding, and kangaroo courts. The Current Federal Administrator has about as much credibility on human rights as–oh, never mind:

At the new U.S. embassy in Beijing on the opening day of the Olympics, he said, “All people should have the freedom to say what they think.” Without even blinking, he also told the world, while directing his comments at the Chinese, “We strongly believe societies which allow the free expression of ideas tend to be the most prosperous and the most peaceful.”

The day before, in Tibet, he boldly said, “America stands in firm opposition to China’s detention of political dissidents and human rights advocates and religious activists.” He said he was speaking out “for a free press, freedom of assembly, and labor rights, not to antagonize China’s leaders but because trusting its people with greater freedom is the only way for China to develop its full potential.”

There was only one problem with the President’s comments. His actions the past seven years have proven he doesn’t believe what his speech writers told him to say.

In Charleston, W. Va., at a Bush speech on July 4, 2004, non-violent protestors were handcuffed and arrested.

In Pittsburgh, a retired steelworker was arrested for carrying a sign. In Michigan, it was a student. In Hamilton, N.J., it was the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq who asked the wrong question of Laura Bush.

Almost 2,000 peaceful protestors at the 2004 Republican convention in New York City were arrested and subjected to what can only be called “primitive” prison conditions for several days—until the courts threw out almost all of the arrest warrants.

Follow the link to see the full list of examples.