Social

My local paper kindly reminds me that tomorrow’s moon rise begins the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and that the associated fasting and prayers begin on Wednesday. Recently, I was talking to my neighbor, the very kind, interesting and extremely conservative Glenn Beck viewer. While we were talking, he brought up Muslims and his fear that they were trying to take over the country (apparently, religious appropriation of a country is only okay if it’s Christian - but that’s another story). According to my neighbor, no religious Muslim could ever possibly be up to any good. I don’t explicitly recall him calling Islam a false religion, but he very much believed that you couldn’t trust “them,” that they were all radicalized and out to destroy “our” way of life. ...

Presumably, most people have now heard that Arizona has passed a new law respecting immigration enforcement. Reactions, as one might expect, are mixed depending on one’s thoughts on immigration, and more specifically, the potential for illegal immigration. Mexico has issued a travel warning for its citizens, advising them not to visit the state. Various AZ mayors have decried the law. Some right wingers love it, while others hate it, and of course George Will is still an asshole. And finally, even though the law doesn’t go into effect for another three months or so, we can already see what the future will be like for Hispanics in Arizona. ...

Old bit of folk wisdom that has served me well over the years: never wrestle a pig; you both get dirty and the pig enjoys it. Keeping that in mind has kept me out of all sorts of trouble over the years. The only problem? I’m apparently the pig in debates about the new health reform law 🙂

So maybe in my last post, I was a bit hard on Louisiana because it’s the state I’ve left. It’s not like we don’t have our own wackos in NC. Two examples: One of NC’s representatives, Patrick McHenry (R) has proposed that we put Reagan’s face on the $50 bill. Maybe for his work on voodootinkle on trickle down economics? Although there is some appropriate irony to giving Reagan the $50… it’s a bill that most people don’t use. Personally, I’m not rich enough to deal in $50s, $20s maybe. Hey, if we’re redesigning money, why don’t we give more important presidents more prominent spots. Jefferson definitely outranks Reagan and he’s on the never used $2 bill. What about Madison? The dude practically wrote the Constitution. Shouldn’t those of who don’t use $5,000 bills get a chance to see him? And closer to home, the newly minted republican majority on the Wake county school board has succeeded in rolling back a nationally recognized program to improve educational outcomes by ensuring socio-economic diversity. Sure, I was bussed in elementary school. It wasn’t the most enjoyable experience of my life, but at the same time, I think that it was good for me as a person to be exposed to other socio-economic groups at school. Moreover, the program in Wake has demonstrated that it reduces the achievement gap between poor/minority students and rich/white students. That’s gotta be worth a little time on the bus. Music for the evening: Danger Mouse’s and Sparklehorse’s Dark Night of the Soul and Titus Andronicus’s The Airing of Grievances. They seem to capture the mood.

Every once in a while, something from Louisiana will catch the national attention, or at least the political bits that I care about, and I’m once again reminded of why I’m happy to have left. The latest? Apparently, the Bossier Parish sheriff is creating himself a militia. No really. It’s called “Operation Exodus,” which according to the sheriff’s press release is an allusion to the biblical Book of Exodus. I’m not certain if that worries me or makes me happy that it’s not a reference to secession. I think I’ll go with worry since it’s a biblical reference to secession. ...

Speaking of Festivus, I should note a recent sighting of a genuine Festivus miracle… they still had a quart of Maple View Farms eggnog at the grocery store! Er, actually, a better Festivus miracle is that today the senate democratic caucus reached the 60 votes needed for their final cloture vote and will vote on healthcare reform tomorrow. FWIW, the vote could have been held today, but Vitter (R-LA) objected. The bill also could have been held up until 8pm tomorrow, but republicans couldn’t quite bring themselves to wait that long to get out of town. So instead, the vote (needing only 50 ayes plus Biden) will happen at 7am tomorrow morning. ...

In the most awesome [1] display of legislative ineptitude since they presented a budget with no numbers on April Fool’s Day, the republicans have released their plan for health care reform. Now, keep in mind that as scored by the CBO, the democratic plan will increase coverage from 83% to 96% of the legal population in the U.S. by 2019 and will reduce the deficit by $104 billion over the same ten years. Of course, the republican plan was going to be “much better.” And was it? Not so much. Under the republican plan, coverage will increase from, wait for it, drum roll please 83% to a whopping, um, 83% by 2019. Well, hey, at least it’ll do more to improve the deficit, right? Well, not exactly. According to the CBO’s initial analysis, there would be a $68 billion dollar reduction in the deficit over the next ten years. ...

A while back I mentioned that K, some associates and I had started up a new non-profit. Things are going reasonably well. People have been more supportive than I had thought. We’ve had about 70 patients so far and we’ve got the systems set up so that patients entered into the database post up to Twitter, along with any Facebook updates. One thing that I have noticed in working with the others on the non-profit is that learning styles and communication styles seem to be closely related. You can divide learning styles (among other ways) into verbal vs visual learners. Verbal learners prefer to hear things explained to them. whereas visual learners prefer things to be written down. Based on some of our recent experiences, I think that this plays into communication styles. And it’s communication styles which are (occasionally) biting us. ...

I’m not a big baseball fan. For that matter, there are few ball sports that interest me. But, this is important. If you recall, a few years ago (2004), there was a big furor over steroids in baseball. The government searched BALCO and found evidence of rampant steroid use by baseball players. Now I hadn’t been paying attention to this, but there has been an ongoing legal dispute over that search and how it was conducted. ...

In computer security, one of the most difficult and annoying problems is the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The idea behind a DDoS attack is straight forward: the attacker tries to prevent legitimate use of the service by using a large number of other computers. Usually these other computers have been compromised (hacked) and are following the commands of the attacker. Such computers are usually called “zombies.” There are a number of ways to conduct a DDoS attack, but they are typically variations on the following theme. The attacker instructs the zombies to request access to the service. But the zombies have no intention of actually using the service, instead, they often forge network traffic so that it’s impossible to tell who is making the request. Because the zombies don’t want to use the service, they can make thousands of requests without slowing down. The poor computer hosting the service then sees tens of thousands of requests for access, tries to fulfill the requests and eventually becomes overloaded and dies. The zombies win. ...