Just the other day I was wondering… What America-hating minority do I belong to?

Well, it turns out:

I guess that’s Chomsky on the right, but can Michael Moore possibly be that thin in any cartoon?

Scorecard of claims versus facts on president Bush’s recent interview on Meet The Press.

I’m trying to teach myself about investing. And everyone keeps telling me I should look at The Motley Fool, so I got an account there.

Now, I’ve got a copy each of two of the Gardner brothers’ books on my nightstand, so I’m not unfamiliar with The Fools. I like their style and their no-BS approach. One of their commandments about investing is that you should have fun doing it, that you should emerge not only with wealth but with enjoyment.

But their web site sucks. It’s all ads. I signed up for all the free emailings allowable, just to see what happened, and I get at least two or three a day telling me to read something Really Important written by *gulp* Tom Gardner! Like, the Gardners are now the Wise advisors they sought so eagerly to eviscerate with Foolishness just a decade before. So you click on the link to the Really Important Thing, and it says, “Hey! Subscribe to Tom Gardner’s newsletter! It’s only $30 a year!” Every page is chock-full of blinking, flashing, and otherwise Annoying As All Fuck ads telling me that I should invest in Super Duper Mutual Fund. The irony of this that their first book was essentially a screed telling people not to invest in mutual funds, unless they’re indexed to the S&P 500.

So I’m bummed about that. My how the Foolish have Wised-up.

Anyway. If anyone has any good advice on a relatively high-yield DRP, please pass it along.

Once upon a time I used to be way, way into reading obscure and archaic texts and knowing things about them that other people didn’t. Like, when I was interested in Buddhism, I didn’t find a teacher or sangha or anything, I just went to Half Price Books and bought everything that looked impenetrable.

Well, last night I was at Half Price Books, trying to avoid anything that looked impenetrable, but I ended up buying a copy of Sun Tzu’s ‘Art Of War,’ one of the impenetrables I missed before.

Reading the introduction to this translation (The Denma Translation Group) helped me be excited about it, because they’ve tried to maintain a certain difficulty in comprehension. The book itself is not supposed to be an easy read, because you have to learn from it on different levels, all at the same time. Not just how to behave in certain battle situations, but also how to approach those situations so you’re not at a loss when you’re finally in them. To put it into easily-comprehended English would ruin the purpose.

The introduction also talks a great deal about ‘taking whole,’ which can be seen as a skillful way of winning without humiliating your foe, or as a way of subverting the situation to the point that everyone’s goal can be met without actual warfare.

All of this is borne out in the book itself, so far. And what’s really sad to me is how obviously all of it applies to the war in Iraq. Every couplet makes me think about how removed from wisdom the current administration really is. I try to shake the comparison and just read the text, but I can’t.

But the real reason I’m mentioning it here is because tonight I went and saw House Of Sand And Fog, the story of the intertwining lives of a two people disputing the ownership of a house. There is one small sliver of a moment during which these characters figure out how to ‘take whole’ the situation, but it passes quickly. This movie is sad and beautiful, and well worth seeing. But it’s also a harsh reminder of how easily we let opportunities for harmony pass through our fingers, and how we hold on to the rest, as if for dear life.

A wise man once told me that people can’t give you what you don’t ask for, and another one told me that you can have anything you want, if you only ask for it in an unselfish tone of voice.

So with that in mind, would someone please do me the honor of gifting me this house? I need a new place to live, and I promise to host lots and lots of parties, and everyone will be invited to come and share in your benevolence.

Please.

(I came upon this house because it was designed by the same people who renovated the Queen Anne Public School into condos. And I came upon the Queen Anne school condos because one of them is available for a one-year lease. If I thought I could afford $1000/month, I’d be moving in right now.)

Over on xoverboard, August Pollack has been talking about the whole banning-gay-marriages issue.

See, our boneheaded President has signed on to the idea of an amendment to the US Constitution, defining marriage as between a man and a woman. He’s obviously doing this to make his far-right-wing religious nut constituency happy, because a) there’s no other reason for something like this, and b) there’s no way it’ll ever actually happen.

But Pollack makes a good point:

Imagine, if you will, the idea of the Southern “Dixiecrats” of the 1960′s who fled to what is now the conservative base of the Republican Party leading a conservative movement to pass a constitutional amendment defining marriage as “solely between two people of similar race, necessary to preserve the sanctity of culture.” Had that passed, then in today’s world the idea of the “Party of Lincoln” having a shred of clout in modern society would be close to nil.

Democrats need to understand this, instead of embracing yet another mushy-middle “compromise” attempt. (which in Tom Daschle’s case usually means giving the GOP 95% of what they want)

Let the Southern/conservative Democrats know that Bush has drawn the line in the sand, and they have to choose which side they’re on. If Bush wants an amendment banning gay marriage, then the Democratic Party must make outright opposition to it part of their 2004 platform.

Why? Because if this amendment gets off the ground, the message needs to start now: Republicans are the party that banned gay rights. Republicans are the party that said gays aren’t equal to straight people.

If that happens, then decades from now, future Republicans will face a generation of apologizing for the sins of their predecessors. Because decades from now, Bush’s moral stance is going to look as dignified as Strom Thurmond’s.

The only real problem I have with what he’s saying is that Bush’s moral stance looks as dignified as Strom Thurmond’s now, without any benefit of hindsight.

The other part of it is that the gay marriage ban is the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that fools far too many people. Since Bush signed on to it (with no actual expectation of it actually happening), he (or, more accurately, the right-wing spin machine) gets to bitch and moan about godless liberals trying to undermine everything we hold dear. No matter what Democrats or progressives do, the GOP, and Bush in particular, will be the can-do-no-wrong hero of reactionary conservatives.

Democrats absolutely need to make this a line in the sand, but it also points out how Republicans pander to people who don’t know the difference between small government and arbitrarily banning marriages for some people at a federal level.

Illustrating how the world wide web ends up working, especially with google glue between the links:

I read a ‘blog called WorldChanging just about every day. It has an entry about how GIS systems are being used to present data in new and interesting ways.

One example is the work of CommEn Space, a Seattle-based company that does maps for various environmental groups. They’re making maps that show things like population density and growth in the region.

One of these environmental groups they work with is the Cascade Land Conservancy, which buys up properties all over Washington state, and keeps them in trust. It turns out that the CLC owns a connector property called Big Finn Hill, which is over on the eastside, near Juanita. Big Finn Hill connects St. Edwards State Park and another park called O. O. Denny.

O. O. Denny Park is named after the son of one of the founders of Seattle, Orion O. Denny. Can you imagine being named Orion? Anyway, this leads me to a web site called HistoryLink, which is an online history of Seattle and King County, with lots and lots of really good stuff.

And from there, I end up at VR Seattle, which contains a whole bunch of Quicktime panoramas of some of my favorite places in Seattle. From one of the VR Seattle sections, I learn about:

The Fin Project, an art work made using dive plane fins from decomissioned nuclear submarines. Not to be confused with Big Finn Hill. I’ve been to the park where this is located, but it’s a pretty big park, so I never made it to the Fin Project. I’ll have to make time to see it.

But why even go outside? Seattle’s on the internet.

Geekstuff:

Fired up my linux box tonight for the first time in a while. Everything seemed to be going OK, until I got to the Gnome desktop and tried to actually do stuff. It would sit there, hung, the hard drive grinding away like crazy. I figured it was related to swap not working.

I was right. The /dev/path for the root and swap partitions had gotten reversed in /etc/fstab! How does stuff like this happen? I guess gentoo is smart enough to figure out that there’s no filesystem on a swap partition, so it found the root one on its own. But how did fstab get switched around like that? The world may never know.

One of the things I love about linux is that you have these cryptic file names like ‘fstab,’ which stands for File System TABle. But you know some guy somewhere had to decide that ‘fstab’ was a cooler name than ‘filesystemtable,’ and you get to make up a little story in your head about who this guy was and how he made that decision. Which is exactly why I’ll never be a unix system administrator.

Email problem fixed.

Try again… now!

I hate insomnia. There’s not enough time in the day for how much I hate insomnia. Heh.

Anyway. I left a comment on one of Tej’s ‘blog entries, about how important figures from history and the present seem to end up in advertising. It reminded me of the time that I was driving through San Fransisco, and there was this huge billboard with the smiling face of the Dalai Lama radiating a city-wide Buddhafield of beauty and good humor. I was impressed with it, until I got closer and realized it was an Apple ad, and it said ‘Think Different’ in the corner.

I’m a fan of Apple, and I’m a fan of the Dalai Lama, but I’m not a fan of Apple using the Dalai Lama to sell consumer electronics.

But be that as it may… All this happened when I was going to MacWorld, which is like Mecca for fans of Apple. And there at the Moscone Center, where MacWorld is held, were huge banners featuring the images of various Culturally Important People as part of the ‘Think Different’ campaign, including the Dalai Lama. I thought, “It would be cool to have that banner… I could put something over the Apple branding and have a ten foot tall banner of the Dalai Lama’s face.”

Then it occurred to me: Where would I hang it? I was staying with some friends in a punk warehouse collective in Oakland while MacWorld was going on, and I tried to imagine how much of the warehouse would be occupied by such a banner. It would fill the entire wall! If I could get ahold of this thing I could give it to my hosts as a gift.

But then, think about it: You’re an urban punk in Oakland. Do you really want the smiling face of the Dalai Lama beaming down on you while you get stoned and complain about the Way Things Are? Wouldn’t you learn to resent the image of the most peaceful man on the planet? You’d get a paint ball gun just to shoot it. Or worse.

So I gave up on the idea, but I still wonder what becomes of those banners and signs from trade shows. Is there some ultra-bizarro graveyard of discarded jumbo corporate logos?