perfidy

Just took the Dante's Inferno test, and apparently I am banished to the 2nd level of hell. I thought for sure I would end up in the third, but I guess you really never do know.

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!

Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Take the Dante's Divine Comedy Inferno Test

Interestingly, the score for the test don't match up with Dante's conception of the relative severity of the different categories of sin. I can see how a modern test designer would de-emphasize the damnative power of heretical thinking - but treachery, surely, is still serious. It would be interesting to see a test that more closely matches Dante's vision. Could even be useful... 
 

CNN is reporting that Gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon has dropped out of the California race. Though support for the recall has diminished somewhat, this will certainly increase Arnold's chances of taking the race. It will also increase the chances that racist Cruz Bustamante will not win. Cruz was caught saying the "N" word (nigger) at a political gathering not too far back, and has connections with MEChA, the racist Mexican group.

I see via fark that America's greatest paranoid schitzophrenic non-jazz musician Wesley Willis, has died.

I remember the first time I heard "Rock and Roll McDonald's." It was an epiphanic experience. Long may he rock.

Be a Pepper. Drink Dr. Pepper.

In the wake of all the Windows computer viruses around this week, I have a question.

Recently, the news, and therefore the public, are starting to catch on to the fact that these viruses that go around are WINDOWS viruses, and sometime soon people are going to start casually looking around for something else. What viable, practical, convenient alternatives exist for the home computer user (e.g., me) who doesn't want to use Windows as their primary OS? Given the state of affairs as they are now, who is prepared to receive these legions of marginally competent casual users with open arms? I don't know the answer to this question, and it kind of pisses me off. Anybody out there have an idea? And don't say:

• Mac. I don't have two grand.
• Linux. Be serious. See below.

Here's my problem. I'm the proud owner of a free (as in beer) white-box PC that I received as a wedding present after I cracked the motherboard on my old computer. It's a fine machine, fast enough and with ample memory, and for most things Windows XP does the job just fine.

However. Last week my PC was infected with the Blaster virus seconds after connecting to the inter-web via a 3.3Kb/s dialup connection (that's one efficient virus!). Since I run XP, Blaster crashed my computer every 60 seconds, making it impossible to locate and download new virus definitions and the OS patch. Not that I could have done anything anyway, because Windows Update chokes on my molasses-slow connection speed anyway.

Seriously. I'd be better off putting emails from home in a damn envelope.

But I digress. The point is, I had to use my work connection to download the necessary patches and applications so I could fix my ailing machine. This situation is pretty ridiculous. Moreover, although Windows XP is in my experience a friendly and useful operating system, there are some ridiculous bugs. For example, I can't play a CD and surf the internet at the same time without the sound cutting up into "o-oh-th-e-sh---ark----ba-be---ha--su---te-eeth--de-ear--a-a-a-n-d-he---sh-oo--oows--them..." and so on." Print jobs occasionally get lost or hang the computer for no reason that we or the good people at Hewlett Packard can discern. And finally, when I am burning (gasp!!) a CD, I might as well go on vacation, because due to some weird memory allocation problem I can't find or fix, my plenty-o-ram machine binds up worse than a man who's just eaten a 64 ounce steak.

Why don't I fix all this? I tried. Why don't I get rid of Windows and join the wondrous world of Open Source? Well, Here's the rub.

I am also running Red Hat Linux on the same machine via dual boot. If I could, I would GLADLY make the switch completely and use Linux for most of my needs, employing WINE when necessary for file compatibility. Trouble is, I can't. First, there's the file compatibility issue. The wife needs a Windows machine for reasons I can't go into here. Suffice to say, seamless file compatibility is paramount.

Moreover, my Frankenstein machine is made of parts I don't know the names or model numbers of, and in some cases can't find out. As a consequence, the following things do not work well or at all under Linux: print drivers; display drivers; sound card drivers; modem drivers; half the embedded applications that come with Red Hat; StarOffice; and worst of all, automount. Irritatingly, all this bullshit is being thrown at me by one of the leading commercial Linux distributions, one which is supposedly strong in the file-driver/ease-of-use department. Seriously guys, if you can't do better than this for the marginal user, give up and stick to giving hard-ons to geeks.

So, after three months of wrestling with hardware requirements, configurations, and disk partitioning, what I've got is: a Windows box that's pretty good but crashy and that can't play a CD and browse the internet at the same time; and a Linux box with a snazzy Bluecurve interface, that can't do a DAMN thing. And since my computer is a Frankenstein box and I'm not exactly a Unix wonk with time on my hands, I can't do much to fix it. Right now, I need the computer to be a tool, not a project.

Furthermore, as I said, I don't have $1700 to $3000 to drop on a Macintosh, besides which I don't like the interface so there.

So, speaking as a well-informed and competent computer user on behalf of all the lesser-informed computer users out there, including those average users who don't even know what a process is, much less how to kill one, what serious alternatives exist to Microsoft Windows?

According to spacedaily.com, the Chinese could become the third nation with a manned space program as early as October 10th of this year. The Shenzhou-5 could carry two, but more likely one Chinkonaut into orbit. The mission could be as long as a week, which would be far longer than the first orbital missions of the USSR and America, each of which lasted only hours.

Maybe, maybe, this will light a fire under someone's ass. 
 

...well, that's not exactly true.

Congratulations to the Saugus, MA little league team, who have made it to the US Championship game in the Little League World Series.

Despite the perhaps-deserved long-view theorizing and cranky little-league bashing that one hears, it's awesome, just awesome, to see a bunch of kids from up the road play so well under so much pressure. The crying, joyous parents is just icing on the cake.

Good luck, kids. (I'd like to say,) If you win the series, dinner's on me at Kowloon out on Route 1*, (but I can't.)

*Disclaimer. If you win the series, dinner is NOT on me, but I'll sure be happy for you.

By way of Winds of Change comes this fascinating First Things article by Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik.

At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick weighs in on the Establishment Clause. Interestingly, she comes to the same basic conclusions as Buckethead, though from a different line of argument and with a different conclusion.

My defense of the TC was part of my view that there is a larger animus against Christianity. Which is why I mentioned the Catholic issue with the federal judicial appointments. The left likes to think that those with religious beliefs, sincerely held, are the far right wing. They are not, not by far.

In the comments to a prior post, Bridgit said this case involved one "southern white protestant" view. That is disingenuous, because how many black southern protestants, or Korean DC area protestants, or Martian Jews for that matter would agree with the views expressed by the TC? Again, this is (a very mild version of) the contempt that is generally cast on Christianity. Christianity is not the quaint and curious folk ways of backwoods crackers.

The Judicial appointments debate involved a Roman Catholic view under the microscope, but I think that the motivations were similar. The left would not merely like to exclude religion from the public arena, they have it in for Christianity and pretty much everything traditional. Everytime some 99.44% Christian community somewhere in the midwest puts up a nativity scene, someone, of a certain political group, sues the city. Kwanzaa decorations and the whole panarama of other faith's symbols do not get the same attention.

Now, I am a conservative. Not in the European sense, which is reactionary and monarchist, etc. I love and look forward to technological change. I feel that reform is possible, and given sufficient forethought, desirable. The beliefs that I feel are worthy of conserving are the revolutionary ideals of the founding generation, as amended by the Union's position in the civil war. But there are other things worthy of conserving. We should not throw out religion because a small fraction of our population is anticlerical, and feels that Christianity is the opiate of the masses, ie, the stupid.

The founding fathers felt that religion was essential for the survival of the republic. They were right about so many things that I am wary of saying, "Oh they were just kidding about that one." Whitaker Chambers (and for that matter Solzhenitsyn) felt that religion was in opposition to modernity. They felt that Communism (which I think we can all agree was very, very bad) was not something different from the liberal west, but rather the purification of it, the assumptions of modernity taken to their logical extremes. Chambers feared that the liberal west would lose to the powerful faith of Communism, or that it would lose its soul in the process of winning.

We should not be so quick to exclude religion from the public arena. Tolerance does not require that we banish all representations of the majority faith of this nation. It should not require the cultural cover of a picture of Confucius to have a picture of Moses. The founders feared the tyranny of the majority, and guarded against it. But Toqueville was right to fear the tyranny of the minority. And that is what I see growing in this country. 

Somehow, I imagined that our cybernetic future wouldn't begin with powered armor for the elderly.