pure madness

the media and the politicians in washington, d.c. are having pure madness right now; that’s not to say that they weren’t loons all along, but it is just more obvious now. first of all, the media is saying hillary clinton is practically guaranteed the democratic nomination for president in 2008. real democrats oppose her, however. there are polls that show her far ahead of any other potential nominee among the millions of people who happen to be registered as democrats, but really, who cares about the opinions of the unwashed masses? the unwashed masses are simply the media’s brainwashing victims who repeat back the talking points they heard on tv. of course they say they would support hillary clinton as the front-runner, because they heard on tv that she would be the front-runner, and these people are all sheeple, bandwagon-jumper-onners who lack any real opinions of their own. the “news” media are basically a bunch of hacks, lunatics, idiots, and the rare occasional actual good reporter. now, do we real democrats believe any of the nasty conspiracy theories about the clintons, or have anything against them because of their personal lives, or stuff like that? hells no! the only beefs we have with the clintons are 1) their right-wing, anti-progressive policies (e.g. welfare “reform”, censorship, pro-iraq-war, pro-patriot-act, anti-flag-burning, anti-palestinian) 2) their strange bedfellows like bill clinton’s former top adviser dick morris or hillary’s new buddy rupert murdoch (both men are pure dagnasty evil) 3) their negative baggage that makes them very unpopular with certain voters we would like to win over. overall, if you compare hillary clinton to other washington politicians, she is definitely on the liberal side of the spectrum, though by no means a radical or anything remotely out of the centrist mind trap. on the majority of issues, she actually has the right positions, but of course, progressives and real democrats like to have people who represent as much of their beliefs as possible, and on several major issues, she has abandoned her own party’s base and embraced the views of the ruling party. while this is an unfortunate development, it does not mean that she is beyond repair and that we should get rid of her; it just means we should probably wait longer and see what happens. sometimes it takes a while for politicians to develop the courage to take the right stands on important issues, if they think it might make them less popular or “electable”. while i usually agree with most of the things posted in the comments on huffingtonpost.com blog entries, and i certainly sympathize with the people who are vehement in their hatred of hillary clinton as a neocon sellout, i also sympathize with her side of the story too, having to act very carefully about what she says. i think the media often tends to bully politicians into taking ridiculous positions, by how they portray issues and brainwash the public to manipulate everyone and thereby change the results of public opinion polls. the media probably helped brainwash congress into approving the war in iraq, and they have had a similar role brainwashing congress into accepting the nsa spying on american citizens. first the media brainwashes the public, and then politicians have to do what the public wants, even though the public are mostly sheep/idiots. individually, of course, people are much more intelligent, but, taken as a large group, the intelligence level decreases, due to group psychology and the herd mentality. anyway, my point is, while hillary clinton is nowhere near perfect, and just barely acceptable, if that, i will probably vote for her anyway, since at least she isn’t as awful as joe lieberman (ugh!).

and some more of this pure madness is with regard to the senate confirming general michael hayden as cia director, and failing to do anything about the nsa wiretapping scandal, such as impeaching the president (or at least censuring him like russ feingold modestly proposed). so, congress has nothing against having the government spy on us. but then, when some moron who works at veterans affairs brings the personal info of 26 million veterans home and then gets it stolen from his house, suddenly congress cares about our privacy all of a sudden? fucking hypocrites. they think it is perfectly fine for the government to spy on everyone, but for some two-bit house thief to have access to the same data the government has, suddenly that’s a huge danger to the public safety. well excuse me uncle sam, but if you cannot secure your fucking computer networks to keep your data from falling into the wrong hands, maybe you shouldn’t be spying on all of us and keeping all of the data in your crappy insecure networks. i know of countless ways to hack the shit out of a computer and get all its data; there are a million ways to do it and there is no way in hell you clowns can protect against all of them so you might as well not collect the damn data in the first place. if you really want good i.t. security for your networks... well... you would have to monitor everything that anybody does at a computer, with video cameras. and it would be quite hard to have good security on microsoft windows-based systems; it is so complicated, and good security in microsoft windows requires the user’s active and positive cooperation with security software such as antivirus, antispyware, antitrojan, antiworm, and firewall programs, along with a proactive stance against dangerous activities like opening email attachments and downloading software. in unix-based operating systems, things are much different, and it is probably easier to have security, but if the entire government switched to some unix-based operating system like linux, freebsd, or mac os x, there would surely be great interest by hackers and the people who write spyware and viruses and trojans and worms. in any event, it is necessary that the computer users are all trustworthy individuals who are not enemy spies or criminals from organized crime or disgruntled misanthropes. no computer with classified or highly sensitive information should ever be connected to the internet, nor should any of these computers have usb enabled. disabling usb means no usb thumb drives can work; also, the computers need to have the cases physically locked shut to prevent people from messing around inside. the rom bios needs to be password-protected. the boot order must be hard drive first, and not allow for booting from a floppy or a cd or anything else. the operating system must be password-protected, and not allow for pressing f8 to bring up a menu, or for safe mode or anything like that. the “administrator” account should be renamed, have a really hard-to-guess password, and be disabled. and only very high-ranking i.t. personnel should have administrative access to any of the computers. all computers would have to have automatic updates enabled and to do everything automatically without asking the user anything. these are just the minimal security requirements; surely there is some weak point i did not think of, and any such weak points would also have to be addressed. and since that is so impossible, and it is only a matter of time before the nsa’s data leaks out like the veterans affairs data did, the government ought to mind its own fucking business.

but congress has reached new heights of insanity and depravity. democratic congressman william jefferson of louisiana is under investigation for corruption and taking bribes in exchange for official acts. the fbi raided his office lawfully after obtaining a warrant from a judge. and now the speaker of the house, the republican dennis hastert, and house democratic leader nancy pelosi, along with house judiciary committee chairman james sensenbrenner, these and other congressional leadership types from both parties are all singing the same tune, the same tune of being completely fucking out of touch with america and thinking they are above the damn law. news flash to congress: you are not above the law! if you commit a crime, you can go to jail. if a judge issues a warrant, they can search your office. this is how law and order works. you dipshits are supposed to understand this! and now you are all presenting yourselves as anti-corruption crusaders? yeah fucking right. i know the real reason congressional leadership wants to cover william jefferson’s ass. guess what: they know they are next. that’s right: the justice department is doing a massive investigation into criminal activity by lobbyists and members of congress, and jack abramoff, tom delay, bob ney, duke cunningham, and william jefferson are just the tip of the iceberg. congress has got to establish some kind of court ruling or precedent or tradition that says that it is above the law and the justice department doesn’t get to go around looking through congressional offices for evidence of criminal activity. now, certainly, there ought to be separation of powers, and the legislative branch has been weakened lately and the executive strengthened, in the 6 years of bush ii. but the legislative branch’s decline was its own doing; republican committee chairmen chose not to do any oversight or investigations into the bush administration. they allowed the executive branch to claim absolute power, to turn the president into a king. but now, when the legislators personally feel threatened, because they are afraid of being implicated in a massive corruption probe, they suddenly find their constitutions and remember the importance of separation of powers? what hypocrisy! and such me-tooism! instead of telling bush he isn’t above the law by censuring or impeaching him, they are asking the justice department to make them above the law just like president bush! well guess what suckers? you can’t have that many people all be above the law at once! you’ll have chaos! there is no way anyone should even consider letting congress be above the law. congress is only above the law in one sense, which does make sense to be preserved: people in congress can say whatever they want on the floor of the house or senate, and not be held responsible for any criminal or civil penalties for doing so. people in congress don’t have to be worrying about lawsuits if they say something that isn’t true about someone else. now, i think this particular protection makes sense. but, no protection for taking bribes makes sense, nor should congressional offices be off-limits to the fbi. making something off-limits to law enforcement is asking for trouble, almost guaranteeing that they will be hotbeds for illegal activity. just check out this quote from msnbc.com: “there is nothing unusual or illegal about a defense contractor with an open checkbook for campaign fund-raisers and seats to fill on a corporate jet.” you know what? MAYBE THERE SHOULD BE. you know my solution to this kind of corruption? shoot everyone involved in the head at point blank range. problem solved. our judicial system is too damn slow, just look how long it took to get ken lay and jeff skilling convicted. who needs evidence, anyway? let’s just give guns to the news reporters who know who the corrupt people are, and let them kill whoever they want without any punishment, and i guarantee you that very quickly, things would be a helluva lot less corrupt in our nation’s capital. let’s have a coup d’etat in THIS country, and show our dear leaders what they have been doing to all the other countries of the world. maybe a military dictator might be the only way to wake people in this country up and make them realize that something is horribly wrong, since most people seem to bury their heads in the sand and pretend our democracy is somehow functional or actually represents the common people somehow instead of just corrupt special interests. and let’s thank great britain for being complicit in our war crimes for so many years (for example, try and guess what happened to the original inhabitants of diego garcia). and if you think THAT’S bad, guess what happened to the people who lived on the island of bikini atoll? you don’t wanna know, but it has something to do with the biggest nuclear bomb ever detonated. it seems like you can do pretty much anything to pacific islanders and get away with it... too few of them to fight back.

and guess what some of our beloved soldiers, our troops, the ones we all support so much, did? they shot and killed about 24 innocent iraqis in some small town in iraq last year, in cold blood. and the whole thing is well-documented and our own government is actually acknowledging it took place, and it’s worse than abu gharaib. these marines who killed the innocent civilians... these are not troops that i support. i do not support the troops. i support the civilians, the ones who are unarmed. i support the human rights of civilians not to be shot and killed arbitrarily, or blown up by bombs, or beheaded. are there any troops i support? probably. i think so. but only if they follow the “rules of engagement” to the letter, and hold their fire against innocent civilians. and i think most soldiers on the ground probably do not go around killing innocent civilians. airplane pilots, on the other hand... they can drop bombs and shoot missiles, impersonally sending bombs from far away. i do not support their butchery. they are simply told to shoot various “targets”, without knowing who or what is there, and expected to obey orders, which they do. and what is the result? innocent civilians die from this, quite often. it is usually called “collateral damage” or some other misnomer that hides the nature of this brutal massacre. still, we cannot really hold the pilots themselves responsible, since they would face quite harsh punishment if they refused to follow orders. in the end, the civilian leadership of the military is responsible; they are the ones who have committed war crimes. the military itself are simply the hapless pawns of the civilian leadership and don rumsfeld, although this does not absolve the military of all of its crimes. but how can we judge whether this was simply individuals committing war crimes, or an entire institution? who is really to blame? the idea of holding an institution itself responsible is ridiculous, because an institution such as the united states military is simply a set of individual human beings, along with various other things that are part of the institution. but really, certain people in this institution of the military are responsible for the bad things, and other people are honorably trying to do their job as best they can. most of the soldiers are good people. but they are in a bad situation, it makes them desperate and feel in danger, and this can make good people go bad, and commit atrocities. we must really examine this phenomenon more closely in order to establish who is truly guilty of these crimes, and what the chain of causality that led to them is. it is an encouraging sign that the u.s. government will be prosecuting those soldiers who took part in this particular massacre that is in the news. but how many other massacres were there that we didn’t hear about? and who created the conditions that led to this massacre occuring in the first place? this is the real madness. for most of our troops, i still think we should give them the benefit of the doubt, and treat them as heroes, for theirs is a thankless task, fighting a losing war in a dangerous and chaotic nation. but as we do this, we must never forget that among our military there are those who have spilt the blood of the innocent on purpose and not been punished. that is why honoring them as heroes is even more important. it may spur some of them who have guilty consciences to confess their crimes, after thinking about how they are undeserving of all of the praise. and for the ones who did nothing wrong, this will help their emotional stability after all of the traumatic experiences of war. we ought to appreciate those who did their job right, to send a message to those who did it wrong. and we should also show our support for the innocent civilians of the countries we invade, the ones who die because of the misguided bloodlust of a small percentage of our soldiers. one way to show our support for them would be to ban depleted uranium from being used in war. because the use of depleted uranium munitions is, quite simply, yet another example of pure madness, and it is a crime against humanity. it gives people cancer and other diseases, polluting the environment for many years with dangerous radioactive toxins. unfortunately, the politicians in washington don’t seem to care about this issue, and they accept the pentagon lies about depleted uranium being safe. craziness. all i know is, as strange as it may sound, alberto gonzales, bush’s attorney general who wrote the pro-torture memo, is now suddenly a hero in my book, because he is standing on principle in saying that congress is not above the law, and if congress succeeds in making itself above the law, he has pledged to resign in protest, along with his deputy attorney general and the fbi director. alberto gonzalez may not usually be on the right side of the issues, but on this one he is truly standing up for what is right, so he ought to be praised for belatedly finding the light. if me praising alberto gonzales is not madness, i don’t know what is.

hooray for my cousin

wow... my cousin sîan héder made a film called mother last year, that i saw, a very good short film, and not only has it gotten first place in a film festival in florida, and gotten into the cannes film festival, and gotten into the la times as a news item (as well as the boston globe), but now her film has come in #3 at the cannes film festival! kick ass! right now i'm visiting her parents, my aunt and uncle, who are famous artists in cambridge, massachusetts; they just told me about it. and her sister thyra, another cousin of mine, is graduating brown university tomorrow. so things seem kind of hectic for my aunt and uncle and those cousins, i guess. i was playing with my aunt and uncle's pet turtle, alfie, who is a female turtle about 12 years old, i think. i took alfie out of her aquarium and let her walk around inside, and also outside in the grass, but i always supervised to make sure she didn't run away. luckily turtles are slow so it was not much of a risk. now the turtle seems very tired from all the exercise from running around outside; apparently they hardly ever take it out of the aquarium. i am not a big turtle expert but i feel bad for alfie because i may have exhausted the poor beast and made her tired. i was at harvard yard earlier today and it was quite nice there, although the performance artists that live in the streets and are begging for money are kind of annoying but also interesting. like this one girl was all covered in silver paint and pretending to be a statue, and had a jar out to collect tips. and there was this family with a sign out saying they were homeless, and they had a dog and a cat sitting there with them, and the sign said they also need food for their pets. right now i'm using an apple macintosh ibook notebook that used to belong to my cousin thyra but she got a newer better mac and gave this to her parents... it is kind of hard to use these mac computers for someone like me who is not used to it, but i installed mozilla firefox with a bunch of extensions, so at least i have a decent web browser to post this blog entry from. i hope my aunt and uncle and whoever uses this computer try out firefox because it's really nice. the computer also has an old version of safari and internet explorer for the mac, but since it has os x 1.2, it is kind of out of date. at least it can run the latest version of firefox though; that's a mercy. my aunt and uncle are real big on cooking great food, we had this big salmon thing the first night, and last night we had jamaican jerk chicken and these wonderful sausages. cambridge is a nice place, it is too bad i was rejected by both colleges here, but luckily cornell still took me. anyway, buh-bye.

idiots

wow, it seems like the government is full of idiots. the senate intelligence committe just voted 12-3 in favor of bush’s nominee for cia director, michael hayden. this comes after these same people openly criticized hayden prior to his nomination and said he would be the wrong choice. hypocrisy anyone? ok, so people are entitled to change their minds... so what? this dude was responsible for the program to wiretap phone calls people make with other people overseas, meaning the government actually listens to what you say sometimes if you call the wrong people overseas. and the much bigger, wider telephone surveillance program he did at the nsa was one where they didn’t really listen to what you said, they just knew who called who at what number and when the call started and ended. this much bigger program is the one that is meant to monitor ALL phone calls in the united states, using “data mining” to look for “suspicious calling patterns”, and this is the one that the qwest phone company turned down, while verizon, bellsouth, and at&t all said yes. since my phone company is verizon, i am pretty pissed off. this is supposed to be a free country, and we have the bill of rights, yet the clowns in the senate flip-flop, and after dissing general hayden and saying he’s the wrong guy for the job, now they suddenly think he is awesome. wtf? at least 3 senators on the committee managed to remember to bring their brains inside their heads, including the only senator i actually trust to do the right thing consistently, russ feingold of wisconsin. russ feingold is that rare type of politician who actually means what he says and consistently stands up for what is right and opposes what is wrong instead of looking at polls and being a flip-flopping pansy like over 90% of the politicians in washington. the rest of them are mostly idiots.

speaking of idiotic politicians in washington, there is this corrupt democratic congressman from louisiana named william jefferson (without the clinton at the end). he took bribes and stashed the cash in his freezer. what a friggen moron! that dude is gonna go to jail, so the democratic leadership had best not defend him, or else their whole campaign of openness, honesty, and anti-corruption is going to look a little shabby come november. and yesterday i was watching the idiots in congress debate a bill that would keep us from giving any aid to the palestinian authority as long as it is run by hamas (with a few silly exceptions that don’t mean anything). the chief person arguing for it is a guy i like to call “dracula”, namely congressman tom lantos of california. tom lantos is the ranking member on the house international relations committee, but what really gets me about him is that he is hungarian and has a strong hungarian accent. i am half hungarian and have many hungarian family members with strong accents, but i have always sort of thought of them as sounding like dracula, but nobody sounds more like dracula than tom lantos. the other person in the house i have a nickname for is “dr. evil”, a.k.a. bill thomas, chairman of the ways and means committee. that is because when he talks, he sounds exactly like dr. evil from the austin powers movies (although he does look completely different). oddly enough, they are both from california. anyway, this bill that dracula and his colleagues were arguing in favor of was really really dumb. see, there are these people called “muslims”, and they “dislike” this country called “the united states of america”, because of its “foreign policy”. if “the united states of america” had better “foreign policy”, the “muslims” might not “dislike” it anymore. but does dracula care? no, he and his friends are all supporting this bill that would make it illegal for the united states to help pay the salaries of people who work for the palestinian authority. the palestinian economy depends on the salaries of these public sector employees being paid (many of them are nice, harmless people such as elementary school teachers and doctors and nurses). the palestinian territories are much poorer than israel, which is a wealthy country. if we want muslims to stop hating us, we have to show that we care about them and don’t want to dominate them with imperialism. helping out the palestinians would be a nice way to do this, and another nice way would be to withdraw our troops from iraq and instead of spending so much money on the military occupation, we would just give all those billions directly to the iraqi government and to non-governmental organizations to spend on rebuilding the country. and we should stop being assholes to the iranians, who just want nuclear power plants, not nuclear bombs. they say they just want nuclear power and not bombs, and if we do not believe them, why do we not simply allow them to make power plants but use weapons inspectors to make sure they are not building the bombs? instead we want to prevent them from making nuclear power plants in the first place, or prevent them from enriching any uranium. back when the shah was in charge of iran, the united states government supported giving them nuclear power and having them enrich uranium. and we are helping india out with this, even when india never signed a non-proliferation treaty and iran did, and even though india has nukes and iran doesn’t! we are such hypocrites! this is a main reason for muslims to dislike us, because we are discriminating against iran due to its islamic government. iran has a much better human rights record than saudi arabia, but you never hear us criticize the saudis for executing innocent people; they are our allies with all the oil, so we let them do whatever the fuck they want. most of the 9/11 hijackers were from saudi arabia, yet the saudis never let us question their friends or family... and yet we are friends with the saudis and enemies of the iranians, when the iranians have not done anything bad to us since the iranian hostage crisis over 25 yeas ago! and why do we like general pervez musharraf in pakistan so much, when he is a fascist dictator? what about a. q. khan giving pakistani nuclear secrets to iran, libya, and north korea? why do we turn a blind eye to the fact that osama bin laden is alive and well and lives in pakistan? and what is the deal with our puppet leader in afghanistan, hamid karzai? he was once a part of the taliban, but he is an opportunist who changed sides when he saw which side his bread was buttered on. we need to stop trying to build an empire in the middle east with these rogues, and treat the countries there in a more consistent, less discriminatory manner. if we had a more compassionate, less imperialist, less idiotic foreign policy, we might be able to have some more success in stopping all this anti-americanism and terrorism.

but one thing i am thankful for is the re-election of mayor ray nagin in new orleans. he is one guy who will tell it like it is and not fuck around with bullshit like the other politicians. he was running against the brother of a senator and son of a former mayor, the lieutenant governor of louisiana, mitch landreiu. enough with the cronyism and family political dynasties! i have had enough of the adamses, the roosevelts, the kennedies, the bushes, the clintons, and all the other families that aspire to be american royalty. one president john adams was enough. two president roosevelts were enough. jfk and rfk were enough. the first bush was enough. bill clinton was enough. just say no to political dynasties! they are un-american. but ray nagin is the quintessential american, with his folksy dialect and no-nonsense attitude. he is the man who can rebuild the Chocolate City! his phone call to that radio station during hurricane katrina was, quite literally, a Real Wake-Up Call (cuz it really was a call, since it was a phone call). now earlier i was talking about idiots, and yes it is probably true that ray nagin is an idiot, but he is a good idiot, the kind who actually cares.

and one last idiotic thing about the middle east... our idiotic prez-o-dent is endorsing the israeli prime minister ehud olmert’s proposal to unilaterally draw the borders between israel and palestine. wow is that ever dumb. i mean, hello? that is not going to get us any brownie points with the people who are waiting for their 72 virgins in heaven after they achieve martyrdom. i mean, come on... there is a big fight, i wouldn’t call it a civil war, between the palestinian factions of fatah and hamas, but both of them have their armed wings that engage in terrorist activity. even fatah, the beloved fatah of yasser arafat and mahmoud abbas, has terrorists in it: the al aqsa martyrs brigade, to be precise. but we negotiated with them! we are still willing to talk to mahmoud abbas, even though he has terrorists under his command. so why not talk to hamas? i mean, yes, hamas does do terrorism and it does want to destroy israel, but isn’t that even more of a reason to talk to those bastards, to try and talk some sense into their crazy little heads? if we ostracize them, they will just get nuttier and nuttier, and hate us even more. if we want them to stop doing terrorism and recognize israel, why don’t we tell it to their face instead of telling them what to do from washington, d.c. and we have to recognize what terrorism really is. terrorism is not an ideology or a group of people. terrorism is a military tactic used in unconventional war. terrorists are not criminals in the law-and-order sense, although they could be considered war criminals perhaps. really what they are is soldiers in a war against us. and their tactic is to attack easy targets that are not defended, rather than well-defended military installations, and to use bombs and the element of surprise to their advantage in this war. but we must not confuse the issue of what terrorism is; it is a military tactic, and a very good one, but often it violates international law. really we are fighting a war against islamic extremists. but some of what we do in this war could probably be called “terrorism”, depending on how you define the word, which is why we should not refer to terrorism in the first place. it is better to think of hamas as an army fighting a war against israel, rather than a bunch of terrorists; terrorism is just the tactic that the army of hamas uses against the army of israel in the war the 2 armies are fighting. the army of israel uses tactics like collective punishment, but we do not call them terrorists, so why use this term in the first place, when it simply leads to confusion? if we regard this as a military conflict, then of course the leaders can meet and negotiate a peace treaty, just like robert e. lee met with ulysses s. grant to negotiate a peace treaty when their armies were fighting. let us not complicate the issue with irrelevant terms like “terrorism”. we can denounce their terrorist military tactics as violating international law, and call them war criminals, but there is no 3rd option besides law enforcement problem and military conflict. the u.s. government is trying to portray terrorism as something that is neither a law enforcement problem (so no due process or trials for terrorists) nor a military conflict (so no geneva convention for enemy combatants), but something else entirely (so terrorists have neither the protections afforded criminals nor those afforded captured enemy soldiers). this hypocrisy must end, and unless we choose the ridiculous option of calling them criminals, we must recognize them as enemy soldiers under international law. and, as enemy soldiers, once we capture them, we can keep them imprisoned until the war against them is over, without putting them on trial; all we have to do is afford them geneva convention protections while they are imprisoned. this doctrine of declaring them to be enemy soldiers could also be helpful to israel, since it could simply achieve military victory against hamas and then demand an unconditional surrender. this would be just like robert e. lee and ulysses s. grant, who was sometimes referred to as u. s. grant, with the u. s. standing for unconditional surrender, since this is what general grant demanded of the confederacy. such an unconditional surrender at the end of world war i could have possibly avoided the indignations that germany suffered that led to adolf hitler coming to power and world war ii occurring. anyway, that is all for today. adios!

the cia: evil conspiracy or heroic defenders of freedom?

i came across an interesting site run by the cia, which is mainly full of declassified articles about the history of the agency. it has some very fascinating reading on it, and i highly recommend it to anyone who is a conspiracy theorist or wants to find out more about the cia (short for central intelligence agency). i found out about all sorts of things, like the history of how the cia was created, and the very fascinating history of the cia bungling public relations and fanning the flames of conspiracy theorists throughout its history. if you study the history of the ufo controversy and cia involvement, you will see that the cia constantly lied and covered up the existence of the secret u2 spy plane program in the late 1950s, for example. another defining moment in the history of the cia was the coup it organized against the democratically elected leader of iran in 1953 that put the shah in power. the cia also horribly mishandled the public relations when a rogue district attorney in new orleans prosecuted an innocent businessman for conspiring to kill president john f. kennedy with cia assistance, based on faulty information from an italian communist newspaper; this ended up being the basis for oliver stone’s movie jfk. all of these great mistakes are chronicled in great detail in various articles on that site, which is where i found out about them. it is all quite interesting and illuminating. it seems the central intelligence agency does not make any great claims at infallibility; indeed, it is publicly admitting to all of these great mistakes, on its own website. it is rather ironic then, because a skeptic might ask, if the cia has lied so much in the past, why on earth would anyone trust it now? obviously, the answer is quite simple: most of the stuff in these articles happened long ago and can easily be fact-checked from other independent sources. the portrait these articles paint of the cia is not a very flattering one; the cia seems to have been plagued by incompetence and people doing their own thing without oversight, ever since it was founded, although in the 1970s, when congress began its oversight, things did improve somewhat. there is an article on how the cia consistently got it right on vietnam throughout the vietnam war, but how the closed-minded kennedy and johnson administrations refused to admit things were going wrong. more recently, some in the cia tried to undermine the bush administration and get john kerry elected president, according to the neocons at the weekly standard, but unfortunately the cia fucked up, like usual. all in all, the cia is a maze of contradictions. both accountable and secretive, according to president bush. both incompetent and brilliantly effective at times. both good and evil. but, it is undoubtedly a very complex organization. however, the history of the organization shows quite clearly its true nature. since its inception, the cia has been fighting a constant struggle to assert itself, to demonstrate its importance, to maintain its secrecy, and to defend its reputation. on all of these counts it has had many failures that are publicly known. but, its successes are things that are not known to the public. things that are secret, that worked... these are its true secrets. the cia always says that it wants to protect “sources and methods” by keeping various things classified, but what is ironic is, this stance makes the cia all too willing to discuss its myriad of failures since it was founded in 1947, yet they are obliged to keep their successes private. i imagine this must be quite annoying for them, which is probably why they have this website in the first place. but does that website really enhance their reputation, or just make them look even more incompetent? all signs point to incompetent. but at least the cia is openly willing to admit to its many faults, and does not deny any of them. so, i do believe the information on that site is accurate, because it would not make any sense at all for them to portray themselves in such a degrading manner if it were untrue. i just think, the whole enterprise seems rather pathetic, as a whole. but it was interesting to read that just 3 years into his presidency, george washington was spending 12% of the national budget on secret intelligence matters. there was really no oversight of intelligence matters until the 1970s, which marks almost 200 years of spooks holding free reign. but several articles discuss u.s. intelligence matters at the time of world war i, when it seems the united states intelligence services were in quite a disarray, understaffed and marred by infighting, and relying on a nationwide organization of self-appointed ultra-patriotic civilian spies who took the law into their own hands, with both comic and tragic consequences as their system of vigilante justice failed. this civilian organization was loosely affiliated with the justice department, while the justice department’s fbi and the treasury department’s secret service fought endless battles for power and prestige and for the support of president woodrow wilson. i think the fbi had a different name back then, i forget what it was. and there was a quite interesting article about a secret contact with high-ranking nazi official heinrich himmler during world war ii. if that had been handled properly, there is a possibility that we could have avoided the cold war by allying with the remnants of the nazis after a coup d’etat organized by himmler against hitler, and together going to war against the soviet union and defeating communism once and for all. but, this would have obviously had tragic consequences, since himmler was a war criminal, and this would have perpetuated the holocaust. a more likely scenario about what would happen if himmler tried to organize a coup against hitler is, himmler would have been found out and executed, but this would have caused major disarray and led to germany getting defeated earlier, and this could have saved many lives on both sides. but as the article astutely points out, it is impossible to really know what would have happened, and perhaps it was for the best that we chose to ignore himmler and maintained our alliance with the russians until the end of the war. in any event, i think the cia today is not doing well, especially after the fiasco of porter goss’s tenure, and it will probably be quite some time before they are able to get many people of the caliber of john walker lindh working for them. i mean, how easy was it for john walker lindh to just go off and join the taliban? and the cia can’t get any agents to join al qaeda? and the cia doesn’t have any clue about what is going on in iran nowadays or if it is pursuing nukes? i know this is easy for me to say and hindsight is 20/20 and i am monday-morning-quarterbacking, but seriously... come on. the cia is incompetent. they need to be fixed, so they can actually do what they are meant to do. and as for coups, i think the cia has become outdated and useless, and the u.s. government has increasingly turned to newer groups like the national endowment for democracy in order to carry out revolutions abroad. after george tenet’s famous “slam dunk”, the cia is pretty much a joke. they have become irrelevant, and all the real action is being done by other groups that are not accountable to congress. you know, ones like the national security agency, or the ones inside the defense department, or the shadowy foundations like the national endowment for democracy, or the new office of the director of national intelligence (dni). if the cia is to survive, it has to prove its worth, or else these other organizations will sideline it even more, until it becomes as irrelevant as fema and congress decides to scrap it entirely.

a new test

well... i have a new test of my a+ certified computer technician abilities. yes, i passed the official tests necessary to get certified, but now i have a real computer problem to fix. a computer that doesn’t work, that has strange errors, and crashes pretty regularly, for no apparent reason, when i’m in the middle of something. there, i gave it away. yeah, it’s my computer. my computer is broken. and, if i am anywhere near as good at fixing computers as i claim to be and as my a+ certification ought to indicate, i sure as hell ought to be able to fix my own damn computer when it has a problem like this. so, i gotta fix my computer. now, the most recent time it crashed, i actually got an error message, unlike before. it said “bad_pool_caller”. usually the error message at windows xp stop screens that i have seen is “irql_not_less_or_equal”. so this is something new, something i never saw before. now there are strange noises that come from the computer every time i turn it on or restart, a sort of clunking noise, which, from my studies, probably indicates that the hard drive is fucked up and might suddenly stop working at any time. so, i should back up all my data. and my research online seems to indicate this particular bad_pool_caller error is often associated with bad memory, but it could also be caused by bad drivers or bad hardware. for the time being, i am re-enabling the error reporting service and automatic rebooting so that the next time an error like this occurs, it automatically reboots and then sends all the information to microsoft. that will allow me to see if they know what the problem is. now maybe this is something serious, and maybe i don’t have that much time, and maybe the hard drive is about to crap out for good... but i really don’t want to have to deal with this stupid problem, i have other shit to worry about. i suppose besides that i should probably get this program called memtest86 and use it in dos mode to test all of my computer’s memory. finally my dual-boot setup between dos and windows xp will be useful! that’s right, i have a dual-boot setup between ms-dos 7.10 and windows xp professional, using the windows nt boot menu system that comes with xp. the dos boot sector is in... get this... a file called bootsect.dos. wow. how original. plus i have other important files for dos, like io.sys, msdos.sys, command.com, etc. and i have the nt boot files like ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini. so, i have 2 operating systems... on a single hard drive partition! they said that it can’t be done, but i did it. a single fat32 partition, 80 gigabytes, supports both windows xp professional and ms-dos 7.10. of course i couldn’t format it using my bootable windows xp installation cd... it can only format a drive fat32 if the drive is 32 gigabytes or less. for larger drives... you have to format from dos. there is no other way, unless you have some fancy-ass expensive utility like partition magic or paragon partition manager. or i suppose you could probably do it for free from linux, but that is a crazy idea, because i don’t know linux, i know dos, and i can do it from dos, easy. so, that’s how i formatted the drive, from dos. i actually used free fdisk 1.3.0 beta to format it, back in december. you can find it on the internet, if you are an expert at finding stuff on the internet. free fdisk 1.3.0 beta is awesome. well actually, i just used that to partition it as fat32, technically. to format it, i actually used microsoft’s format.com utility from ms-dos 7.10. and of course the ms-dos 7.10 i refer to comes as a part of windows 98 second edition. it comes with a few earlier versions of windows, like windows 95 oem service release 2, and windows 98 original release, but windows 98 second edition has the best versions of all the files. now the ms-dos 7.10 i use is actually not entirely the one from windows 98 second edition, because it has many files replaced with alternative ones from other sources (in dos most commands are .exe or .com files, so if you know how to search the internet like a pro you can find the best ones for each command). on richmcgrew.com you can find a disk i made that has the special custom bastardized version of ms-dos 7.10 that has most of the files replaced with alternative ones from other sources, and it is based on the custom bastardized version of ms-dos 7.10 made by wengier and roy at the china dos union. basically they took several files from ms-dos 7.10 that comes with windows 98 second edition, and they somehow edited out all of the stuff that was unnecessary, and made the files as small as possible. so there are smaller versions of io.sys, command.com, and himem.sys, for example. they also did it for a bunch of other less important files too but those are the three most important ones they screwed around with. their bastardized, slimmed down versions of the files are much better than the originals, especially if you want to be running dos programs and have a lot of conventional memory free, or if you want to make a boot disk and save space by using small files. anyway, i kinda got off on a tangent there, but my point is, i am dual-booting between wengier and roy’s slimmed down version of ms-dos 7.10, and microsoft windows xp professional with service pack 2, and they are both on the same 80 gigabyte fat32 drive. the point of all this is, if windows crashes and stops working, i know i can count on dos as a backup, and be able to back up all my files safely from dos. it is basically convenience for someone like me who has a mystical appreciation for things like dos that are so retro and out of fashion that they only seem cool to someone as insane as me. and that is why my hard drive is fat32, because the default for windows xp, ntfs, is quite a bitch to get working under dos. there are ways to get ntfs working under dos, yes, but they are quite a chore, and a lot more iffy than fat32. 2 such utilities are sysinternals/winternals ntfsdos and datapol ntfs4dos. i wouldn’t trust either of them on a bet. the ntfs filesystem is very complicated and its details are kept hidden by microsoft so other software developers can’t take advantage of it, and it is really just a big complicated proprietary mess, and in case anything goes wrong, the only people who have a clue would be microsoft. fat32 on the other hand is very simple and straightforward and a lot easier for software developers to write software to directly interface with. it doesn’t have the bloat or secrecy of ntfs streams, file permissions, compression, encryption, or raid array support, which are all “features” of ntfs. but it’s funny... with some things, the more features it has, the less you trust it. and none of those features are things i would ever need or have any interest in, so for me, the simplicity of fat32 is superior in every respect. microsoft can crow about how ntfs is superior all they want, but if my computer ever has serious problems and windows stops working, i want a system that will at least let me have full read-write access from dos without any major headaches. so for the time being, i will just wait for this problem to happen again, and see if it happens differently the next time. i know that is a foolish approach, but i would like to observe the incubation period of this particular problem a bit longer so i can see exactly what i am dealing with. otherwise, it would be difficult for me to learn much experimentally. another thing i have suspicion about is the motherboard (besides the memory and the hard disk). the motherboard is a very suspicious component because it is actually a whole lot of moderately suspicious components all integrated together onto one giant circuit board. if just one of them goes wrong, the whole thing can be fucked up. so just based on size and complexity alone, the motherboard beats out any add-on card, except perhaps a video card. video cards are another sort of suspicious entity that you have to beware of, because they process a lot more data than other add-on cards, and are absolutely vital since they are in use all the time; modern video cards generate a lot of heat and often they actually need fans to keep cool, which means there is plenty of likelihood of failure. another thing that can really fuck a computer up is stuff you connect to it, like a big giant monitor or a huge subwoofer for a surround sound system. those types of things can zap the hell out of computers with big surges of electricity when you turn them on, because sometimes monitors or big subwoofer boxes have a lot of electricity inside them just waiting to attack any computer they get connected to. subwoofers also sometimes burn themselves out, creating some smoke and a burning smell, but usually there aren’t any flames... that happened to me once. the subwoofer i have now is the same model as the one that went up in smoke. and my parents’ computer has an evil monitor. mainly the monitor is evil because it is old, but it also zapped the hell out of this one video card, a trident pci card that had 8 megabytes of video ram. ever since that infamous zapping, that monitor has behaved itself, and the zapping incident was understandable, because the monitor had been sitting outside in the sun on a hot summer day, and then brought inside and hooked up to a computer. i am not exactly sure of the electrodynamics of it, but somehow, sitting in the hot sun and then being brought into an air-conditioned house does certain things to a monitor that make it just want to zap the hell out of whatever you hook it up to. electricity doesn’t really make much sense to me, actually... i never studied electrical engineering and i don’t know much physics. my college education in computers was all about software, and practically ignored hardware. the class for a+ certification and the books on it have covered a few basics about electricity, but it still seems like something too complicated for me to grasp fully; i am aware that many phenomena exist that are beyond my understanding, given my lack of education in this topic. so when one of these phenomena occurs, such as the monitor zapping a video card, it baffles me as to why that would happen. the photoelectric effect? an endothermic reaction? the earth’s magnetic field? electromagnetic induction? who the fuck knows? all i know is, electricity is pretty fucking complicated, and although we all take it for granted, most of us have no idea how it works, the resistors and capacitors and transistors and diodes and transformers and ac-dc and voltage and power and current. or how about a motor or a generator or an electromagnet or a light bulb. did you know that light and electromagnetic radiation are synonyms? why the fuck is that true? i have no clue. i don’t see any connection between light, electricity, and magnets. and what is the electromagnetic force, and why are there exactly 4 forces (gravity, electromagnetic, strong, and weak)? none of this shit makes any sense. so anyway, i am going to try and figure out what is going on here, despite the fact that i don’t understand electricity. what i do know is, too much electricity will fry a circuit and it will burn and there will be smoke and it will smell bad. but is that too much current, or voltage, or power, or what? i just say too much electricity. then at least i have everything covered. zappy zap zap zap zap. and if a spark is a form of electricity (static?) then why is a gun not considered an electric circuit? the gun sets off a spark to explode the gunpowder, producing a gaseous explosion that sends the bullet out of the chamber at high speed. isn’t the spark a form of electricity, and therefore a circuit? i know when people talk about lightning rods going into the ground they talk about completing the circuit, and a spark is the same thing as lightning except smaller (less big!). but in either case it can start fire. so why is light electromagnetic radiation, instead of fire, or sound, or heat, or something? seems kind of arbitrary to me, but i know there is some deeper sort of connection between light, electricity, and magnets that somehow justifies it. i just don’t know what that connection is, because my understanding of these concepts is about the same level as an unfrozen caveman from 10,000 years ago (fire bad! big light shoot from sky, make loud noise, start fire! what is machine? how it work? me not know.). i hope i can still fix computers. i should probably study this stuff.