adam.oliner.net

The only way to kill an idea is with a better idea.

Let’s take terrorism as an example. The idea is simple: effect social or political change by manipulating a community using violence or the threat of violence. That is, by using fear. Our government has taken up the notion that they might destroy this idea by killing people and blowing up buildings. Also by moving people around and by creating new buildings. This will fail.

The President has never described what victory in the War on Terror looks like, with any specificity. There won’t be a white flag, or some glittering dawn on which the terrorists of the world will throw up their hands and say, “Oh well, we gave violence a shot. Let’s try spreading our message with catchy pop lyrics.” The War will not end when bin Laden dies, nor when we kill Al Qaeda’s #2 for the umpteenth time (we’ve done that so many times it’s a joke). Ideas don’t die when their inventors or proponents do.

You would think, of all people, that Christians would understand the ineffectiveness of killing the central adherent to an ideology.

Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps the military will finally locate and kill Osama bin Laden, and instead of unifying Islamic extremists behind a globally recognized martyr, it will shatter their confidence and sense of purpose, rendering them impotent to terrify Americans. Perhaps we will manage to find and slaughter every last person who believes violence can effect social change, without a hint of irony or hypocrisy, and maybe we’ll manage to do so without creating any new terrorists. It could happen.

After all, we killed Jesus and totally nipped that Christianity thing in the bud.

The Daily WTF supplies programmers and system administrators with an amusing glimpse at the worst of their field. For me, it was a remote thing, another world in which incompetent people wrote distressingly stupid code. In the last few days, I seem to have stumbled into that world; a stranger in a stupid land.

You may have already noticed that some of my website photo galleries appear nuked. Emtpy. Here’s how a stupid person made that happen by being incompetent perhaps months previous: Gallery is the software that runs the galleries (whatever its faults, the name is appropriate). Each album is stored as a text file. Precisely, it’s a serialized php object. Whenever someone makes a change or a comment on the album, Gallery reads in the serialized object, adds the new data, and writes it back out to that file. Now, imagine the hard drive is full. A non-retarded coder would check that there was space on the volume before writing the file back out. Instead, Gallery writes until it runs out of space, then leaves the truncated file on disk. This truncated file cannot be read back in because it is corrupted, and appears to you and me as the empty galleries. Luckily, in their infinite wisdom, the authors of this software also write a backup copy of this serialized album data. They do this immediately after writing any changes to the primary file. Do you see where this is going? Gallery starts writing the primary, fails, and leaves the broken file on disk, then overwrites the backup file, also leaving it truncated and useless. Brilliant. I am trying to hack the serialized files directly; perhaps I can resurrect my Japan pictures, which apparently had thousands of hits before dying unceremoniously.

Then, of course, there’s the gem pictured on the right. After upgrading Mac OS X and restarting, I was presented with that dialogue. I believe it to be a window display bug rather than an actual blank prompt, but the point is I both did not know what the problem was, nor did I have any choice but to fix it. I could click on the question mark, yes, but such measures are a sign of weakness. Whatever I fixed, fixed it was.

On it went: The Bank of America website specifically recommended using Safari, but in practice did not function properly until I used Firefox, which they do not support. The Play It Again Sports website listed an address that did not map to a single location. This echoed similar problems Joel suffered, in which Google was provided incorrect longitude/latitude coordinates and sent him on a wild goose chase.

Then I caught a glimpse of the news on TV while lifting, and I remembered something. In fact, I remembered everything: Bush, Iraq, WMDs, Intelligent Design, Rick Santorum, unchecked genocide in the Sudan, tension over Iran driven by a collision of religious mythology and nuclear technology, Bin Laden threatening the US with impunity provided to him by the impotence of our President, thousands upon tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians and American troops while the media obsesses over a single white woman, pro-lifers being simultaneously pro-death penalty, and a thousand other insanities that have surrounded me my entire life. I wasn’t a stranger in a stupid land. It was my land. There were just a few moments there where I had managed to insulate myself, to pretend that reason and kindess prevailed, to not be saddened by a world that is only just becoming my responsibility.

There is so much talk of solutions. Politicians proclaim that they will create peace in the middle east. Bush insists that he will defeat terrorism. Nearly a hundred million people stood behind him, most with not the slightest idea what that meant or how it would be accomplished. The news has never, in my memory, done a serious analysis of the motivations of terrorists. Jealous of our freedom? That might be the most stupid thing of all. Because everyone talks about fixing things, but all they see, all they know, is a blank dialogue box with a button. “Fix.” It’s about time people started asking questions. We’ve gone too far without clicking on the question mark.

There you have it, folks: Bush authorized the NSA to conduct domestic spying. He ordered them to spy on you, for your own good. He says he will continue to do so as long as he is President. That’s not all, however, because he also accuses the press of endangering national security by reporting on this debacle after news of it leaked to people at the Times. It’s not illegal, he asserts, despite the fact that numerous NSA officials refused to participate because of… wait for it… legality concerns. Perhaps most intriguing of all is the President’s curious statement, “I’m also using constitutional authority vested in me as Commander-in-Chief.” Not as President; as Commander-in-Chief. Was martial law declared without our knowledge? All of this was done, so the President says, “to protect our people, our freedom, and our way of life.”

Instead of consulting your internal moral compass and asking whether, legality aside, Mr. Bush is behaving ethically, let’s instead discuss his claims from a logical perspective and see if we can’t find a disturbing rational hole through which one could pass the entirety of the Universe. I think we can all agree that the Founding Fathers would have considered governmental phonetaps without court approval to be in violation of the spirit of the Fourth Amendment. Even though the Founders never established a Right to Privacy, making a phone call to a friend is a situation in which a reasonable American would have an expectation of privacy. Again, however, let’s not focus on legality. Let’s not focus on the President’s mistaken impression that his oath was about protecting the American people rather than defending and upholding the Constitution. Those are all interesting topics, but, instead, let’s talk about who is endangering “our freedom” and “our way of life.”

Our American way of life includes being about to read any books we want, without wondering if Homeland Security is going to come knocking. Our American way of life includes the right to not be

Emack and Bolio’s has a flyer in their shop that invites lactards to attempt their hard yogurt. As it contains live cultures, they claimed, many lactose intolerant people can eat it without ill effect. For the record, with regard to my own reaction to the yogurt, it was very, very not good. So much for that.

Thanks to everyone for being good sports about my last post, especially Colleen. I’m being serious; your reactions were appropriate and well-stated. I knew I’d get some pulses up. My intention was to get a discussion started, and there’s nothing quite like inflammatory remarks for that job. One well-taken objection was related to the timing of my comments. People are still dying and I’m already speaking about the incident like it was an idiotic error instead of a massive disaster. Like it was history instead of people. This is a fair criticism.

When you are training a dog, you are supposed to reprimand them only if you catch them misbehaving red-handed. If the dog crapped on the carpet, and you only discover this hours later, hitting them or yelling serves no purpose. The dog can’t make the connection. People are the same. Bush placed counterterrorism as a low priority when he first took office, despite repeated warnings. Terrorists attacked on 9/11 and thousands died. Months later, when the 9/11 Commission released their report indicating how badly prepared we were, people said, “Oh.” And then they re-elected Bush. Now we have Katrina, and there will eventually be a bipartisan independent investigation that will conclude that our government once again failed spectacularly. It will come too late for anyone to learn anything. People have the memory of dogs.

After the Holocaust, we said, “Never again.” There is a genocide happening, right now, in the Sudan, but we’re too busy fighting the enemy-of-the-day in Iraq. People forgot. After Vietnam, we said, “Hey, guerrilla warfare on someone else’s land without the support of the indigenous people is impossible, even for a superpower.” Now, we’re fighting an urban guerrilla war in Iraq, against the indigenous people. People forgot. There was flagrant abuse of human rights in the Abu Gharib prison on Bush’s watch, in response to which he punished some low-level grunts. Now blame for Katrina’s high death toll is falling on the director of FEMA, when it once again belongs much higher up. People are forgetting that this is not the first time Bush has led incompetently and failed to keep our homeland secure.

Bush created the situation in the Gulf Coast that has led to so much death. By shipping out National Guard troops, by consequently shipping out thousands of emergency services personnel, by cutting funding for the levees, by directing all of our resources toward fighting terrorism when that was never the biggest threat to homeland security. So now, before New Orleans is dry again, is the time to reprimand the Bush administration and everyone who failed to recognize how obvious this disaster was. Now is the time to say, “Bad dog. Very, very bad.”

That is the sound of someone completely missing the point. Of an idea or concept escaping someone’s grasp. Of ignorance. Some examples are in order. Let’s start in the place where plenty of wooshing goes on: the White House.

Put yourself in the shoes of the average Afghani. You are a sheep herder who has about $700 to spend per year. You don’t have a telephone or a television, and you expect to die before you turn 45. According to your country’s constitution, not a single law may be “contrary to Islam”. You, yourself, are a muslim. For more than a year, the Americans have been offering a $25,000,000 reward for Osama Bin Laden, seen by many as a soldier of Islam. You know where he is but have not turned him in, even though the reward is more than you would make in 830 lifetimes, working from the day you were born. Suddenly, the Americans decide that they will increase the reward to $50 million. Do you: (a) change your mind and turn him in, (b) remain loyal to Bin Laden, because he is a warrior of Islam and America is the Great Satan, or (c) realize that this is a political stunt by the Bush administration rather than a genuine effort to catch Osama, laugh at their stupidity, and go back to herding your sheep. I don’t know whether the woosh goes to Bush or to the American public for not decrying the idiocy of that gesture.

During one of the Presidential debates, Kerry quoted the cost of the Iraq War at $200 billion. Pundits attacked him for so inaccurately quoting that number. In actuality, the costs were probably more like $150 billion, depending on how you counted. Of course, the point was simply that the war was outrageously expensive and poorly executed. Now, any reasonable count puts the cost above $200 billion, and Bush is likely to ask for another $80 billion. At this rate, we will spend $1.4 trillion over 10 years. Kerry is such an exaggerator! Woosh!

But let’s not lose focus. I was talking about people not quite understanding how reality works. I laughed out loud at this CNN poll, which declared that the nation is divided over whether Bush is a divider. Now, look, when you ask a question of the populace that can be answered by the results of the poll, it ceases to be an issue of opinion and becomes a statistical fact. The headline should have read, “Results Are In: Bush is a Divider”. But semantics aside, how can 49% of Americans believe that Bush is a uniter? This poll followed closely on the heels of a highly contested election, which came just four years after an even closer one! Repeatedly, polls have indicated that many people believe Bush divides this nation on important issues. Yet, despite overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, more than 1,000 people reached the conclusion that Bush unites us. Statistically, there are millions just like them. Woosh.

I know that some of this news is a bit stale, but I could hardly pass up these gems just because I’m slow. So, remember today’s lessons: (1) If bribing an impoverished man with $25 million doesn’t do the trick, perhaps you should try a different strategy, (2) instead of fluffing historic numbers, you may find it more fun to wildly extrapolate future ones, and (3) if someone calls to poll you about whether people agree on a particular subject, then ask the pollster, “What did the other people say?” Congratulations, you are now well on your way to living woosh-free.