I saw it for a second
caught glancingly in the corner of my eye
The four walls that enclose time
The four walls closing in
Behind the wheel
I pondered singularities
accepted my singularity
how you can be certain about certain things
though all of time is yet uncertain
This is my life
ending by hours, minutes, and seconds
this damnable ever-ticking clock
counting down through these years of loneliness
my fate, my doom
a curse upon my soul
unbroken, unbreakable

Infinity escapes my grasp
defying the limits of my words, my own thoughts
And I wonder about Love
and the electricity coursing through my nerves
the cascade of neurotransmitters
seeping through my soul
In that bleak unending moment
forever captured in my mind
could it have been?
And what does it matter, when
epochs and eons have passed
a trillion stars have died and have been reborn
and my own flickering light begins to fade

I see as clearly to the end
as to the beginning
in death as in life
alone and unforgiven
bereft of all grace
and forgotten

Courtesy of my cousin J™

(Happy Birthday, cuz!)

If you haven’t yet read His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, you should get cracking. The Golden Compass is coming out at the end of the year!

I am dismayed by this post about a brown-skinned professor who gets detained by the authorities simply because he leaves a bag full of discarded manuscripts to be recycled.

I am angered because I can relate. Despite the fact that I am highly-educated and a professional, that I am a full-blooded American who was born here, and that I love this country more than the fascist thugs and thieves who happen to be in charge right now, I am de facto still considered an outsider, and while I haven’t had the cops called on me yet, I’ve certainly had my share of stares and glances full of suspicion and fear.

And, although the writer of that post feels that this incident may not warrant mention because of the tragedy that occurred last Monday, it is strangely pertinent.

I don’t have any sympathy for what Seung-Hui Cho did, and I am grieved by the carnage he inflicted. But I can perhaps see where the seed of his alienation sprung from. In high-school he was mocked and bullied and made the object of racist taunts. “Go back to China,” they told him, despite the fact that he is Korean.

I suppose I should consider myself lucky that I grew up in a multicultural polyglot city, where I wasn’t the only brown-skinned kid around. On the other hand, this is kind of disheartening, because despite the fact that not everyone around me was white, people still said racist shit.

I recognize that most kids simply don’t know any better. While a lot of the shit that people say when they’re that age can be cruel and evil, it has a lot to do with context. Our identities begin to solidify during adolescence, and this is when it is crucial to fit in or else you become a pariah. Other kids will latch on to the barest of insecurities and ride you for it. Mine was not necessarily a happy childhood. I certainly could’ve been a lot worse, but it wasn’t what I would call great, either.

What is worse is that there are fucked-up people out there promulgating this idiotic myth that somehow Cho was attached to Islamic Jihad, just because he used the nom de guerre Ismail Ax. C’mon, you ignorant fucks. The guy is Korean. When was the last time you met a Korean Muslim? And I know you ignorant crackers can’t tell the difference between different Asian ethnic groups anyway. “Go back to China,” indeed.

And never mind the fact that he expounded quite explicitly on Jesus Christ and the Crucifixion, envisioning himself some sort of Christian martyr being stoned to death for being different. If anything, this guy was a Christian terrorist, on par with Eric Rudolph, Clayton Waagner, and David McMenemy. It sickens me to think that people defend this kind of bullshit just because they happen to have the same religion as these fuckwits.

I am reminded of the quiet anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s first game in the Major Leagues last week. ESPN ran all sorts of retrospectives, including people still alive from that era, and it really weirded me out. Just think, a couple of generations ago, the majority of people in this country assumed that you weren’t human if you weren’t white. That is some fucking weird shit. What is wrong with people?

And still, even as we immerse ourselves deep into the 21st century, ignorant ass-monkeys still expound disgusting philosophies about the racial superiority of white people, and they continue to see immigrants, specifically, black and brown-skinned immigrants, as less than human. To these throwbacks from the Dark Ages, I say, fuck you all, suck my dick, and say “hi” to Hitler for me when you get to Hell.

The 15th anniversary of the L.A. riots looms ahead, and as trite as it seems, I still remember Rodney King’s plea: “Can’t we all just get along?”

…that there is such a thing as context.

I’m a little late getting in on the whole Don Imus imbroglio regarding the Rutgers women’s basketball team, but, yeah, old-ass white men can’t say that kind of shit, and certainly not about women who aren’t hos.

Snoop Dogg defends rappers’ use of the term “ho” and contrasts it with Imus’ racist, misogynist use (courtesy of Jason Kottke):

It’s a completely different scenario. [Rappers] are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We’re talking about hos that’s in the ‘hood that ain’t doing shit, that’s trying to get a nigga for his money. These are two separate things. First of all, we ain’t no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them muthafuckas say we in the same league as him.

Or, to put it more simply, it’s OK to use the term “ho” when you are referring to an actual “ho” (and don’t tell me that hos don’t exist, y’all know who you are.) It’s not OK to use the term “ho” to slander an educated and athletic young woman in order to trivialize her accomplishments.

It’s been a long while since I’ve had to work seven days in a row. In of itself, that kind of schedule makes me cranky. Add to it the fact that this included two overnight calls, and that’s approximately 120 hours of work. Fun times.

I forget who to credit with this little known fact, but I think I’ve figured out why the hours of a resident are so insane. After all, back when modern medicine first started off, amphetamines were legal and easily obtainable, and apparently such illustrious figures in our own mythological pantheon such William Osler, Harvey Cushing, and Stanley Robbins were tweakers.

You’d think working 120 hours every week would be a piece of cake if you were taking speed, too.

Wow. Think about it. I’ve worked three weeks worth of work in seven days. By the end of this rotation, I’ll have worked the equivalent of 3 months!

But I’m not complaining. sarcasm

This whole life-and-death thing is strange. In the space of the last 30 hours or so, I’ve seen a man with metastatic cancer drown in his own blood, another man succumb to multiple infections and septic shock, and another man who has been in a persistent vegatative state for the past week become completely brain dead. Two of these three I dictated the death summary for. The last has become a moral quandry, because of the fact that despite being, for all intents and purposes except organ donation, completely dead, the family refuses to let us disconnect him from his IVs and from the ventilator.

We are effectively desecrating a corpse.

It’s kind of creepy.

If I got to choose what kind of death I’d like to experience, I think I’d prefer one that wasn’t catastrophic and all-of-the-sudden, and yet not too long and drawn out. The guys who come in walking-and-talking and then suddenly exsanguinating really get me down. On the other hand, I’m not a fan of those guys who sit on the wards for months on end slowly dying of cancer, losing organ function literally bit by bit.

Then it dawns on me. Despite the fact that life is pretty damn short, maybe guys my age shouldn’t be so fixated on death. This despite the MSM’s insistence that we bury our faces in it and—I don’t know—pray to God that we might be saved. Iraq. Virginia Tech. Anna Nicole Smith. Are we a culture of Death, or what?

But as to the praying to God thing, sorry, no dice, folks. We all gotta go sometime. Kicking and screaming ain’t gonna win you any prizes in the afterlife. If there even is an afterlife.

Why can’t we all just get along in this lifetime? (And I fully realize that anyone who suggests such a thing tends to get nailed to a piece of wood, or shot, or beaten with police batons.)

Too late, I cry, remembering time past, running through shadows
echoes of ten thousand lives criss-crossing, folding, twisting, bending
In their wake, I am forsaken
Amidst the jetsam and flotsam of plans gone awry
(and still somehow I made it to land,
even now I make plans and grand schemes
to sail forth from this benighted isle

Her name whispered by a brief gust of wind,
and somehow it sets the gears in my gerry-rigged mind all winding
spinning, gyring, tilting, grinding
taking my beat-down heart for a whirl

My heart, all patched-up and ragged
all tattered, sewn-together, threads loosed
blood leaking through it all sodden
with the infernal machines in my brain a-twitter
fading flailing falling into sleep
unnamed sorrows, regrets not acknowledged
ravage my heart
this troubled, dreamless sleep

I wake all-of-the-sudden to find that I am weeping
that memory of so-long ago,
of no-hope, no-chance, not even an inkling
and even though life has dragged me kicking-and-screaming
into the great beyond, beyond all belief
and though my quest runs true (to follow that star)
this string of time still pulls at my heart
this dull ache, this roar, the sweet soft rain
my sand castles melt into mud

The fires are out, the memories are ashen
and I tell myself, so long ago, that what-will-be will be
though sorrow rends and tears

I remember the aching darkness of autumn mourning
wishing that it were still a dream,
and in my bed, all covered and still
unmoving
I wished that I were stone
just still and cold, forever
until the world was no more
and still life kept kicking me in the head
and I prostrated myself upon the ground
offering up my soul to be freed from all this sorrow
and I was forsaken
No Gods dwell in that empty blue sky
No spirits live in those murk-filled, shadowy woods

I still remember,
a memory so quiet, so still
and as I grow older, and as I grow more weary, I wonder if I imagined it
my mind becoming worn before its time
dreaming up some fantasy and declaring it history

She held my hand but for a moment
and we ran like children across the street
and I remember that she smiled
and even now my heart aches
for losing something that I never had

Like a prisoner behind those cold, iron bars
Time keeps me jailed
keeps me railing against Fate
against Destiny
and yet what is Destiny but ten thousand random decisions
somehow approximating a straight line?

But I wonder what I would choose?
Though I never really did have a choice.

Like that memory, or that dream, burned into my brain
etched into the inside of my skull
it was all in her hands
and she chose to let me go
and so I was, and will be, forever lost.

I worry that my capacity to empathize with sadness and tragedy has been destroyed. Most the time at work, I’m forced to put on a mien of detachment and objectivity. If I took everything bad that happens at work to heart, I’m pretty sure I would’ve quit a long time ago. Or I’d have committed suicide.

In the three years that I have been doing what I’m doing, I’ve witnessed so many people suffering from so many awful, unfair, and excruciating experiences.

On one hand, you have the people who did it to themselves. Their condition was completely preventable once upon a time, but no one ever intervened effectively, and now they’re going to die. Is there any one to blame? Is there any point in assigning blame to a 21 year old guy who is severely brain injured and who will most likely never wake-up ever again? Even if he did it to himself?

On the other hand, there are the people who have been capriciously struck down by some terrible rare disease that no one knows how to take care of. One day you’re living your normal life, taking care of your kids. They you get back pain, and you find out it’s a cancer that can’t be removed surgically, and it doesn’t respond to chemotherapy, and now it’s in your lungs as well, and they can’t get you off the ventilator without killing you. And the horrible thing is that you’re awake and alert during all this time, with a breathing tube stuck down your throat, and you can still at least write messages to your daughter, your husband, your brother, and then here we are in our white coats talking detachedly about your inevitable demise.

Am I even human anymore? Have I lost my soul?

So when I hear that Cho Seung-Hui kills 32 students at Virginia Tech, I really just shrugged. So what’s new? People die all the time, usually for unfair reasons.

It was hard to empathize with those distant people when right next to me I had a guy who is younger than me with a destroyed liver from drinking two fifths (1.5 liters) of Jack Daniels every day, who had vomitted and shat out around 6 liters (that’s about 1-½ gallons!) of blood in less than two hours right in front of me. We may have saved his life this time, but he’s just going to die some day, and even if he quit drinking now, he probably wouldn’t survive long enough until he was eligibile for a liver transplant. And in the room next to him was the 21 year old kid who had shot himself up with crystal meth and ended up going into cardiac arrest. We got his heart started up again, and it looks like he’s probably going to be able to breathe on his own, but the soul has vacated the premises. He is not technically brain dead. He’s on his way to becoming another Terry Schiavo if we don’t convince his family to let him go.

And still I think about all the people who have killed themselves with drugs, and the worst, really, are alcohol and cigarettes. They are slow, painful ways to die, in the worst possible ways. Frankly, I’d rather die instantaneously. With heroin, you stop breathing. With meth or coke, you could have a heart attack or a stroke.

But alcohol will rot your liver, and it takes a long time to do it, too. You know what, technically, we consider drinking more than 2 drinks a day (hard liquor, beer, wine, whatever) a serious problem, and I’ve met so many people who just blow this off, who drive around town in the middle of the night “only slightly buzzed” (And for some reason, it’s always the drunks that survive the 70 mph head on crashes. The 9 year old and the 7½ month old, and their mom and their dad—even if you manage to extract their mangled bodies from the wreckage, they almost never make it to the hospital.) But slowly and surely, your liver will die, and all sorts of terrible things happen when your liver doesn’t work, and perhaps the only saving grace is that you tend to be completely out of it towards the end.

I have no idea if the end-stage liver patient has any inkling at all of the physical fact that they are suffering and dying. If they’re not sleeping, they’re not exactly all there, and they’ll rant and rave deliriously, and talk to people who aren’t there, or complain about rats and pigeons flickering across their visual fields. And in time, they bleed catastrophically. I remember the last time I was here, we had at least four or five people die awful, protracted, long and drawn-out deaths, despite heroic measures—jamming a balloon into their gullets to try and stop the bleeding, having the interventional radiologists try and stop the bleeding. We give them tons of blood products to support them and to try to stop the bleeding, and we try to keep their kidneys from failing.

It was all futile. All I learned was how to let someone who is going to die go without having to suffer needlessly, which, I guess, is a useful skill, but sometimes you feel like an agent of Death.

The cigarettes are probably even slower, unless you’re lucky and get metastatic lung cancer. Once this stuff spreads outside of the lungs, you can die pretty quickly. But if you get emphysema instead, then you can go for a long, long time, with a perpetual sense of not being able to catch your breath. Even with oxygen, you can only walk about 25 paces before you get winded. And the more you smoke, the worse and worse it gets. Seriously, nicotine is more addictive than crack. You’d be better off being a crack addict, because when it kills you, it’ll be quick.

But I can’t help but wonder why it is that April always seems to be a harbinger of tragedy?

I think of the L.A. riots in 1992, which started on April 29, 1992. This is undoubtedly one of the most formative events of my adolescence. Hopefully, this will be the closest I’ll ever be to a war zone.

Then there was the Oklahoma City bombing that happened on April 19, 1995. Why is it that we always seem to forget that the terrorists that have killed the most Americans are actually white and live in this country?

Then there was the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999, which, in reality, eerily resonated with me. How many of us felt outcast in our youth? That no one ever understood us? After surviving adolescence, you realize that it’s not a rare feeling.

In those by-gone days of innocence when you could say things, and people wouldn’t take you seriously about blowing-up things, even Bill Watterson recognizes that many of us really wanted to blow up our schools when we were kids.

But most of us never actually do it. There is still a difference between wishing and doing, no matter what the Thought Police say.

Then there are the less well-known but still significant stories that I remember.

On the last day of April in 1998, I was on the phone with brother who was watching TV, and he narrated me the drama of Daniel Jones, who parked his pickup truck on the carpool flyover leading from the south 110 to the west 105. As I spoke with my brother, Jones shot himself while being broadcast live, inciting a firestorm about lurid television coverage. Jones had HIV and was apparently being denied treatment by his HMO, and his last moments were a political screed against managed care.

Then there are these stories that really haunt me. Last April, there was a weirdly synchronous string of violence, particularly against children, in the Korean American community in L.A. The most horrific was the story of Dae Kwon Yun, who intended to kill himself and his two kids by setting his SUV on fire. At the last moment, Yun chickened out, but he left his two kids to be immolated, to the point where there was barely anything left of them once the fire was put out.

I’ve learned pretty much to stop asking why. Why life is unfair, and why it’s usually the innocents who suffer, or the people who don’t know any better. The corrupt and the cunning generally survive and continue to commit evil deeds.

I wonder if one day, when I’m not faced with death on a daily basis, I’ll regain my sense of proportion, and once again be able to face the sorrow of death with honesty and empathy. Right now, I’m too busy protecting myself to be able to help others get through their time of anguish.

It comes to nothing
in the first few trickling seconds of this new day
(cuz don’t you know that time is a river, you go with the flow)

I’m spinning, streaking, blinking
like a cosmonaut who comes untethered
streaming, screaming in re-entry
flaring out and bursting into flames
a shooting star for you to wish upon
(I’m coming home… this is my home…)

Wherefore does the wisdom of this era
wither like the pale petals of cherry blossoms?
in the gardens of this imperial capital
in the blinding heat of this oppressive cloud cover
this baking, sulfuric atmosphere
(there will come soft rains… to wash the shadow stains…
and cleanse this leukemic blight
this sterilizing star fury
unleashed upon this earth
Forgive us, Father, we know not what we do…)

What did we learn, as the threads of fate
spun, unraveled, twisted, scattered?
unwind like a failing watch
undone like a spool of cassette tape
wasted, tangled and warped

What message does Revere
carry through this dreary blear?
This aforementioned time
this calm before the revolution
(it will not be televised, it will not be blogged
it will not be captured on your webcam or your cel phone
it is not Wi-fi enabled or Bluetooth aware
it will not be QAed nor protocoled, not redacted for purposes of national security nor HIPAA compliant…)

The lawyers will be the first up against the wall
The politicians second
The CEOs and board of directors next
and then the marketers, then sales
the sycophants and the fellators
the thuggi and the ass-kissers

How you like this kind of justice, mutha-fucka?
and the rotting corpse of the Republic moulders
in the mosquito filled, malaria infested swamps
this hurricane-swept devastation
this City that is No More

We taste this sweet ichor
like blood red wine
this fine, final moment
undone, unfurled

This song of the 3,000 and still counting
forsaken in this desert land
and the women and children slaughtered like cattle
the blood upon the streets, the blood upon our hands
in the shadows of Babylon
in this Land between Two Rivers
and eye for an eye
and it doesn’t matter whose eye

This song of the 3,000 and still counting
as this generation is re-deployed and liquidated
meat through a grinder
with a goddamn monkey cranking that handle

Do you hear the voices singing?
The angry voice of Justice come crashing down upon your head?
Will you be lynched like a bandit in Coahuila y Tejas?
Or shot in the face by the VP?

We sing a song of unending war
the war of the 50 states
the white and the blue splattered with red
the blood of the innocents
while the guilty leer from their windows
laughing all the way to the bank
Death swings her scythe like a farmer reaping grain

In this time of forgotten dreams
in this day of “by any means”
and every man for himself
and in this hour of when Justice must be dealt!

Do you hear that clamor and that roar?
In the rockets red glare as the eagle soars
The barbarians are here now knocking at your door
The Vandals have come to sack the city
The Ostrogoths are crying for your blood

The darkness is cometh, the darkness draws near
this blind and sweltering darkness
like a dragon’s shadow hiding the light of the sun

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

All summer in a day,
in this sweet and blessed hour
the clouds will part, and this corrosive rain will end
no more shall be
the weight of the crushing sky
nor the suffocating heat that melts even lead
and we will glimpse the Sun
but for one hour
at 3pm Eastern Standard Time or 2pm Central
tune in to see the next episode
commercial-free in 1080i and THX surround sound where available

Be ready for it, o my brothers, o my sisters
when the curtain of the sanctuary shall be torn in two
and the earth shall quake, and the rocks shall be split

Verily, I tell you, the hour is coming, and is now here!

Steve Olson expresses outrage at the sorry state of the United States of America, asking ”When did America become a nation of frightened wimps?. I think he correctly pins it on the fact that we chose security over freedom, which is a fool’s bargain, because there is no such thing as security in this uncertain world.

But why the outrage now at this late hour, when the Constitution is already ripped to shreds? The Republic fell a while ago, and it’s only now that we’re realizing its rotting corpse is stinking up our backyard?

I’m even more disgusted that I already was.

You know when would’ve been a good time to be outraged about this? Probably when the Supreme Court decided that it knew better than the People of the United States and proclaimed a truly incompetent, corrupt, brain-dead ass-monkey as the Ruler of the Free World Or how about when our nation was attacked by cowardly bastards (whom, by the way, we happened to give a lot of money and weapons to during the Cold War)? That would’ve been a good time to stand up and not be afraid, but we lost that battle too. Another good time to fight to save the American Republic would’ve been when we invaded Iraq on some trumped-up charges about weapons of-mass-destruction which have long-ago been proven to be a complete lie. But we didn’t do that either.

Despite the fact that the administration has been lying to us from day one, it took the American public six years to figure out that they were being made fools of. (At least we actually did something about it, though.)

As they say, the shit is out of the cow. Good luck trying to stick it back in.

In any case, I’m still voting for Barack Obama anyway, even though I know the fix is in.

Despite the fact that I’ve been trapped in a world-building exercise for the past 18 years, I completely agree with M John Harrison’s assessment that world-building is unnecessary in order to tell a good story, and that world-building is the pinnacle of uselessness: you are creating a literal description of a world that doesn’t even exist.

I immediately think of Borges’ masterful short story ”Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” which described the madness inherent in invented an imaginary world, and the vast, purposeless scope of such an undertaking which spans generations.

And obviously, there is J.R.R. Tolkien’s Arda, which is in fact an act of universe-building. For most world-building nerds, this is probably the gold standard of worldbuilding. An otaku demands this level of detail, no matter how unnecessary. These are the people who obsess about the lack of continuity in Star Trek or Star Wars, who show up at comic-cons and gainsay the actual creators of various works of fiction. Think of Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons” (Oh, I’ve wasted my life.)

The ironic thing is that what makes The Lord of the Rings seem to have so much historical depth is precisely because Tolkien didn’t spell out the whole damn thing. You only get faint glimpses of ruined Gondolin and lost Númenor, of drowned Beleriand and the doom of the Noldor. The tale of Lúthien Tinúviel and Beren Erchamion and the story of Eärendil are mentioned only in brief, and are pretty much tangential to the story.

And Tolkien didn’t initially mean for The Hobbit (and by extension, The Lord of the Rings) to even be in the same world as The Silmarillion. It was just a good story he thought of one random day he got bored grading university test papers. Gildor Inglorion and Glorfindel were basically just names he randomly chose (and which continue to plague LotR otakus and continuity-nazis to this very day.) In many instances, he fit the mythology into the story and never really the other way around.

And I think what makes The Silmarillion interesting are the stories that Tolkien never finished writing, and which we get a better look at only by rifling through his notes which are now encompassed by the monolithic History of Middle Earth. I think the appeal in “The Fall of Gondolin” and The Children in Húrin lie in the fact that they’re good stories in and of themselves, and Tolkien didn’t necessarily have to invent the rest of Aman to make them so.

The bottom line is this: you may have an excellent and highly-detailed universe complete with a pantheon of gods and its own version of physics, but if your story sucks, no one will care and you’ve just pretty much wasted your life.

I found this a little bizarre. It’s on LXer, a Linux News site that tends to feature a lot of Linux zealotry and fanboyism.

But there is a project out there called Tux 500 trying to raise money so that they can have a car race in the Indy 500. Which is all fine and good. People are free to do what they want.

Any sort of exposure is can be helpful. I suppose.

But Linux is not some monolithic mega-corporation that has tons of money that they can just toss around like Microsoft or Oracle can. When these companies sponsor this kind of event, sure, they get a lot of eyes to see their company logo, but what exactly does this mean? Does seeing the Windows icon plastered all over the place really make you want to go out and buy a copy of Vista right now? Does seeing the Apple ensignia compel you to run to your local Apple store to line up now for your copy of Leopard?

Merely painting your logo on a car does not necessarily equal mindshare.

Good marketing is well-targeted and specific. You don’t see RedHat or Novell or any of the other big distros putting out TV ads because their money isn’t made from home users. In fact, I don’t see how you could possibly make money from home users, because they can download a distro for free off of the Net. What Linux companies target is the enterprise, and while random exposure could possibly catch the attention of some CIO out there who likes car racing, wouldn’t it be wiser for them to just go to the events and conferences where they can specifically target the CIOs who would be making OS and app decisions for their company? Getting a huge company to switch is likely to provide much more exposure than the twenty seconds that a blurry version of the Linux penguin will be flashed on the screen during the race.

Now the Open Source world has room for all kinds of people. There are the corporations out there interested in selling a good enterprise solution. There are the power users, the hackers, the crackers, the nerds, the masochists. There are the zealots and the fanboys. The guys who won’t settle for anything less than a free-as-in-speech OS. The folks who just want a decent desktop environment that lets you do all the things a Windows machine can do without all the blue-screens-of-death or all the Big-Brother pop-up dialog-boxes, and still cost nothing. The people who want Linux to take over the world. The demographic of Linux users probably cuts across all political ideologies, all religions, all nationalities, and so on.

But, c’mon. You can’t tell me that Free Software wasn’t built entirely on so-called Haight-Ashbury, Abbie Hoffman idealism (the turns of phrases utilized by a post addressing critics of the Tux 500 project.) Just read the freakin’ GPL. Meditate on the fact that without Richard Stallman, none of this would’ve ever have happened. Say what you will, but the ‘60's counter-culture has done much more to change the world than the Indy 500 ever will.

If you really want to give your money away to a cause that will allow you to continue using your computer without having to pony up $300 to Microsoft every five years or so (not adjusted for inflation), I think your money would be much better spent supporting the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Donate to Groklaw and stop MS from spreading their FUD.

If you’re really interested in making Linux a better desktop environment, help work on GNOME or KDE or XFCE.

The real draw to particular OS platforms are the apps it supports. If you want more apps worth running, why not participate in Google Summer of Code?

(For a more scathing criticism of the Tux 500 project, read ”and now for something completely stupid”)

There is a song in here somewhere caught in the convolutions of my heart the tortuous paths, the cliffdrops, the lonely summits the bitter abysses, this vast desert of ruin This wasteland of decay

My soul is scourged and flayed This longing that wraps around itself without a name, without a voice soft sweet melody that I can’t seem to recall I’m lost like a drunken fool in the wilderness chasing fairies and grasping at stars

Tasting perhaps moonlight, and the briny sea the wind whipping at me from all sides this torrent, this deluge, this tempest, it rages the lighthouse illuminates the sky for a brief moment with a blinding flash

Was love (as I like to imagine it is called) just like that a moment in time that soon passes and is forgotten the familiar darkness returns as I turn my back upon the sea draw my coat close and face the shadowy mountains the faint electric glow of the sodium lamps and the emptiness of a cheap motel room this emptiness swirling, gnawing upon itself biting at me, rasping and scraping like vermin, like termites, consuming my soul from the inside until I am only a dessicated shell that crumbles in ash

With each breath, I am anesthesized And the deep darkness of unconsciousness mercifully wraps me in forgetfulness only in this silence, this void am I whole not knowing or caring, senseless and still like a dead thing breathless and cold

Am I doomed to stare longingly across that trackless sea? in the dead of the night surrounded by the crashing of the waves on every side staring into the darkness vainly hoping for some sign, some glimmer, some trace a faint flicker of light on the horizon, growing brighter, coming closer and that song, that faint melody that I can’t rememeber and that voice, and maybe I would again know who I am, and what I was meant to be

(From my cousin J™)

This reminds me of the Simpson’s Halloween Episode where Homer turns a toaster into a time machine, causing all sorts of havoc with causality.

Tim O’Reilly replies to his critics regarding his proposed blogger’s code of conduct.

I agree with the gist of his message, which is that civility is important. Without it, there can be no real discussions. Once we get dragged down by the name-calling, the baseless accusations, the flaming, the trolling, and the invocation of Nazism, it’s over. Hence, Godwin’s Law.

Note that Godwin’s Law came into existence on Usenet. In many ways, network news was the precursor of blogging, and they figured out a lot of these issues way back when. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

And again, there really are potential legal liabilities with hosting a blog. Just consider slander and libel. You can say all you like about people owning what they wrote, but I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the fact that the blogger has the power to delete comments leads inexorably to the fact that the blogger has a duty to moderate his/her site. Sure, you can refuse to delete comments, no matter how offensive. But we must recognize that the blogger chooses to allow this. If something inflammatory and insulting is on your site, whether or not you wrote it, you still have a hand at allowing it to be visible.

You simply cannot abdicate your responsibility as moderator.

The Old New Thing discusses the different macros you have to set in order to ensure library compatibility in Windows.

It seems like a complicated mess, but it’s not like Linux and Mac OS X are really all that better. Except for one factor: most of the time, you actually have the source code.

While Windows has multiple flavors, some of which can share code, and some of which can’t, Linux has at least a hundred different distributions, all of them running different kernels with different versions of the C libraries and with different versions of different toolkits (GTK+ vs Qt, for example) This makes it pretty dicey to try and mix and match binaries from different distros.

Since Mac OS X comes solely from Apple, you would think that you wouldn’t have to deal with such messes, but the fact is if you want to use the latest open source tools, you end up screwing around with various distribution mechanisms: do you just compile from source yourself and link against the system defaults, do you install Fink, or do you install MacPorts (neé Darwinports)?

But the fact that you have the source means that you can always have the latest version of the latest app in the open source world. Compile it yourself (or with the help of Fink or MacPorts on Mac OS X, or whatever mechanism you use on your flavor of Linux) and it will tell you which libraries you may need to upgrade (although this path can still lead you to dependency hell) And if you don’t have the latest version of Gtk+ or Qt or GNOME or KDE or Perl or Ruby that the app needs, you can compile that too.

Yes, compiling is a lot more time consuming than simply clicking on an installer, but you’ll always know that the app your running is compatible with your system and it’s own idiosyncracies.

And the maintainer only has to maintain a single code base with the minimum of versioning macros. You can compile exactly the same app on the hundred different versions of Linux, or you can compile it on Mac OS X, or any flavor of BSD, or even Solaris, AIX, or HP-UX. Hell, you can even compile it on Windows if you use Cygwin.

Now I realize that most end-users couldn’t give a damn about this, but I still think having access to the source code is a big deal.

I stupidly drank some Vietnamese iced coffee about 3 hours ago, and I’m wired and jittery and all over the place. I have to wake up in less than 6 hours to get ready for work.

And here I am, tap, tap, tapping away at the keyboard, whiling my time away working on this blog.

Wonderful.

I can’t seem to figure out a good layout for this blog. I hate all the non-fluid designs they have out there, but it’s ridiculous to have a completely fluid design when I can maximize my browser window to 1680x1050. No one reads lines of text that are that long.

The ideal solution would be to have fluidity up to a point. I figure most people are viewing at 1024x768 or maybe 1280x960. With good CSS settings for whitespace, I figure that should be comfortable for most people.

I’m also trying to figure out what the best way to make the sidebar less busy would be. I kind of dig the Hemmingway theme that is running rampant across the internets, but I’m finding the stylesheets and the actual HTML somewhat opaque and not easy to futz with. I like the idea of putting all that crap in the footer. I’m almost considering a big Web 2.0 no-no: frames. (The very thought sends shivers up and down my spine. Frames are almost as reviled as bestiality and incest by most sane people.)

Another idea would be a dynamic sidebar, where the default would be completely collapsed, with maybe three or four words on the sidebar, but you could expand each one as you so desired.

I want something similarly uncluttered as today.maganda.org (not to be confused with Maganda Magazine, a literary magazine published by Filipino Americans at UC Berkeley. Apparently they don’t own the magandamagazine.org domain anymore, but they do have a Myspace profile. How very Web 2.0.)

Wow. Now I’m kind of bummed. Did they manage to save the archives that me, Julie, and Sarah worked on? [the first conception][the last working iteration] Ah well. I wonder if I can yank the content from the Wayback Machine? It’ll be a copyright nightmare, though.

Hey, does this count as flight-of-ideas?

Anyway. I’m still obsessing over Tolkien and Middle Earth these days. I am now totally enthralled by the First Age. I’ve always had a soft spot for the story of Beren and Lúthien, but I found Túrin Turambar someone I could relate to (not the incest part, just the part about how everything he does, no matter how well-intentioned, turns out to be a tremendous disaster) and I found the Fall of Gondolin especially moving.

And of course there is the Flight of Eärendil. Coming on the heels of finishing Final Fantasy XII, I like imagining that Vingelot was an airship, and Aman was a floating continent, like Bhujerba.

In fact, I’ve ended up stealing re-imagining the whole episode, where the ship is in fact a starship, although Eärendil is still looking for the Gods to save the world from total destruction. This time, he’s got the Trickster God with him. And instead of a Silmaril, they’ve got a gate that lets them travel through hyperspace. And it has occurred to me that it would be quite fitting that Círdan and Cid ought to be somehow related. (Círdan was not a name, but a title meaning Shipwright. His real name was apparently Nowë, which is disturbingly similar to Noah, famous for his ship.)

Naturally, Google ends up spitting out an article about how Vingelot may well have been a starship after all.

A ship then new they built for him of mithril and of elven-glass with shining prow: no shaven oar nor sail she bore on silver mast —Bilbo’s song about Eärendil from The Lord of the Rings

Thinking about Middle Earth, I then spot the obvious allusions found in The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin. The Quenya word for universe is Eä, and the first island created by Segoy in Earthsea is called Éa.

Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky. — from ”The Creation of Éa” in The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin

Then there is the story of the sinking of Soléa and the death of Queen Elfarran and King Morred (and for some reason I have the image of a sea gull in my mind—I am perhaps merely confusing the story with Eärendil and Elwing from The Silmarillion) which, while obviously based on the story of Atlantis, also seems to be a homage to the sinking of Númenor. (Just as the Kings of Númenor, and of Arnor and Gondor are descended from Eärendil and Elwing, the Kings of Havnor are descended from Morred and Elfarran.)

And I suddenly think of Earthsea as an alternate version of Arda, where perhaps the Númenorians were powerful enough to actually beat the Valar, and they end up turning Aman into the Dry Land.

It’s getting later and later, and I still can’t get to sleep.

The actual reason why I started writing was because of how I started thinking about the walls that I’ve managed to build around my soul.

No one can touch me. And I have no way of reaching out.

I can’t help but think of Masamune’s swords that are folded more than four million times, making them nearly indestructible.

This is the kind of convoluted defense that wraps around my heart.

I’m not even going to wonder where life it going to lead me. It’s coming at me fast enough as it is.

from my cousin J™

You scored as Hannibal Lecter. You are Hannibal Lecter. You dont need to eat human flesh to live, but do so because it just taste good. You are very intelligent, and enjoy using it to your advantage to keep people guessing. You arent a killing machine, but when you do decide to let loose, watch out! Dinner is served, with some fava beans, and a nice chianti! Hannibal Lecter 90% Michael Myers 80% Jigsaw 80% Pinhead 55% Jason Voorhees 45% Freddy Krueger 40% Leatherface 40% Buffalo Bill 30% Candyman 20% Captain Spaulding 15% Which Horror Killer are You? created with QuizFarm.com

This is one of the happiest songs I’ve ever heard about such a depressing topic:

Happy Ending

This is the way you left me, I’m not pretending. No hope, no love, no glory, no happy ending. This is the way that we love, like it’s forever, then live the rest of our life, but not together.

Wake up in the morning, stumble on my life Can’t get no love without sacrifice If anything should happen, I guess I wish you well A little bit of heaven, but a little bit of hell

This is the hardest story that I’ve ever told No hope, or love, or glory Happy endings gone forever more I… feel as if I feel as if I’m wastin’ And I’m… wastin’ everyday

This is the way you left me, I’m not pretending. No hope, no love, no glory, no Happy Ending. This is the way that we love, like it’s forever. Then live the rest of our life, but not together.

2 o’clock in the morning, something’s on my mind Can’t get no rest, keep walkin’ around If I pretend that nothin’ ever went wrong I can get to my sleep I can think that we just carried on

This is the hardest story that I’ve ever told No hope, or love, or glory Happy endings gone forever more I… feel as if I feel as if I’m wastin’ And I’m… wastin’ everyday

This is the way you left me, I’m not pretending. No hope, no love, no glory, no happy ending. This is the way that we love, like it’s forever. Then live the rest of our life, but not together.

A little bit of love, little bit of love little bit of love, little bit of love….

I… feel as if I feel as if I’m wastin’ And I’m… wastin’ everyday

This is the way you left me, I’m not pretending. No hope, no love, no glory, no happy ending. This is the way that we love, like it’s forever. To live the rest of our life, but not together.

Tim O’Reilly’s post about a blogger’s code of conduct has generated much discussion across the blogosphere and has actually been picked up by the MSM outlets such as the BBC and the New York Times.

What such a code is mostly about is who is responsible for the comments on one’s blog. While people’s different ideological philosophies regarding free speech inform how different blog owners run their site, the law is clearly not silent on the matter of speech, although, granted, there has yet to be a test case that has actually resulted in an actual judgement on the matter.

The creation of such a code is merely an attempt to pre-empt the courts from eventually completely deciding what’s what. I mean, eventually, someone is going to post a comment that will result in something actually criminal happening: murder, rape, or acts of terrorism. It’s really only a matter of time before words translate into actions, really. While the commenter may hide under the cover of (relative) anonymity, clearly the blogger would become an object of investigation. (And I say relative anonymity, because if a crime does occur, you know that law enforcement will eventually come banging at the door of the various ISPs involved, demanding server logs.)

In such a hypothetical court case, I can only imagine that the mere existence of a blogger’s code of conduct would be enough to influence the minds of the judge and jury, justly or unjustly. To the folks out there who would rather not codify such things: it’s too late, these things are codified.

Reiteration, consolidation, and discussion about the issues are all useful, but I find it somewhat annoying that people are talking about blogs as if there has never been any discussion at all about the duties and responsibilities of anyone engaging in discussion over the Internet, whether as a participant or as an administrator (see RFC 1855 which discusses Netiquette Guidelines.) This has pretty much been a topic of discussion since the beginning of those heady days that some might call the Eternal September.

And make no mistake, the fact that you have a blog with comments de facto makes you an administrator. I can’t see any other way to look at it. For one thing, your blogging platform will undoubtedly give you the power to delete comments, whether you wish to or not. This automatically makes it part of your duty to be a moderator. And while you can wholeheartedly choose to never delete comments, you’re nonetheless going to be the one responsible for making that decision. I think this is the crux of the idea that you are going to have to own not only your own words, but the words of the people commenting on your blog. Sure, you don’t own them in the sense of copyright or (perhaps) in the sense of legal liability (for example, would you be liable if someone left comments that were threatening to the president of the U.S.? No one knows for a fact. Yet.) But you can’t deny the fact that you can choose to approve or delete, and this puts a duty on you. It’s just like the role of an editor, really. You didn’t write it, but you’re responsible for allowing it to be displayed. Simple as that.

The other point of contention that is being discussed throughout the internets is who exactly is going to enforce this code? Again, these issues have already been talked about ad nauseam for the past decade and a half, and it’s clearly going to be enforced the way it’s always been: readers vote with their browser, admins vote with their mouse clicks and keypresses. There is no reason for anyone to tolerate speech that they don’t want to tolerate. If you don’t like it, just don’t look at it. On the flip side of the coin, if you own the blog, you get to decide what gets presented. It’s disingenous to pretend that blog owners don’t have a say regarding comments.

And there isn’t anything wrong about deciding to allowing everything and anything in your comments section. But recognize that you’re making the decision. You’re under no duress to leave comments open and unmoderated.

But, as I’ve said, one of these days, the courts are going to end up meddling in all of this. It’s better to discuss it now before someone gets killed or maimed, whether physically, mentally, or financially. Hyperbole? Maybe. But it would be stupid to say that the written word can’t affect the real world.

Oh, I wasted my life.

What disturbs me is that the average denizen of Myspace won’t get this because they were too young when Street Fighter first came out.

How much more interesting would life be if it had a video game soundtrack to it and you could shoot fireballs out of your hands?

From my cousin J™ (and what Myspace needs to do is open up their blog for public consumption like Vox does, if they really want to be relevant to the world and if they want some Google-juice)

The big internet meme today seems to be that Microsoft is dead, and to claim that a multibillion dollar company that is still making enormous profits is dead is no mean feat.

But I think that Graham has it right. MS is definitely operating in catch-up mode, and they really don’t have a good sense of what people want. I personally think that they killed themselves, by being too aggressive, too arrogant, too confrontational. This resulted in the string of anti-trust judgements that they eventually lost. And it wasn’t really the losing that did it. It was more the fact that they had to waste a lot of their time fighting these cases. Through these years locked up in the courtroom, little-to-no innovation came out of Redmond, and Google and Apple took advantage of the lack of opposition. MS also wasted time competing with other old-style tech and media companies, like Time-Warner/AOL, Disney, and Sony, to name a few supercorporations that seem to have lost the sense of what the purpose of business is for—to sell people things they actually want, and these companies have also declined in stature to a degree.

It seems to add credence to the idea that CEOs simply can’t relate to the common person. Their heads are too far in the clouds, spinning multibillion dollar deals and keeping the shareholders happy. What they’ve lost touch with is the product, the thing that actually makes them money. Instead of actually focusing on something that people want to buy, they just turn out iterations of things they’ve already made. This doesn’t even work well in the bulky, slow-paced field of something like the auto industry. Look at what’s happened to Ford, GM, Chrysler, by ignoring what people want—fuel economic cars—and instead churning out more of the same—monstrous SUVs that have no practical purpose whatsoever.

Lose the ability to innovate, and it’s over.

You can’t force people to like crappy stuff. You have to make something they’ll actually buy.

In Apple’s case, their ticket to success is obvious. The iPod is neither original nor superior, but it happened to arrive at the perfect time. While Zens and Archos Jukeboxes and Sansas and Zunes are targetted at the geek demographic with their multifarious functions and panels full of buttons, the iPod is made for the average person who can turn it on and play music on it and transfer music from their computer with ease. There are few things that are so brain-dead simple as using an iPod. It’s no exaggeration that it’s compared widely to the Sony Walkman.

You do one thing well, and you stick to it.

And simple means being able to pick a thing up and use it without having to even open up a user’s manual, much less read it.

Apple has mastered the idea of simplicity and elegance. These are the precise things you look for in luxury items. The reason why someone would buy a $60,000 car and not a $10,000 car, even though both of them will get you from point A to point B. And that’s Apple’s niche, really, all this time, all the way back to the very first Macintosh. They know what they make, and their clientele stays happy. Even when Apple was dying without Steve Jobs, they were still churning out computers. Not all of them were exactly the epitomé of simplicity and elegance, but they had enough hits to make up for the misses, and they managed to survive until Steve-o came back to town.

Sony was probably the only one who could’ve done something about the iPod, but they screwed it up years ago by enforcing copy-protection and DRM. Hence, the failure of Mini-Disc, and the laughable attempt at catching up with Apple with their ATRAC-based players. By being hostile to the customer and burdening them with things that they don’t want, they ended up losing a great deal of the market. The same thing can be said of the PS3, which is far too expensive for how little it provides. Then again, Sony seems to be in love with proprietary formats. It’s kind of funny how they never learned their lesson from losing the VHS/Betamax war.

But what exactly does Google sell, you might ask? After all, I use Google all the time, and have yet to pony-up any money to them directly, although granted, I’ve probably clicked on more than a few of their advertisers.

The thing is, Google is ubiquitous. People are half-seriously wondering if Google might be God. It can certainly perform the function of an oracle. Google has the ubiquity that radio and television has only ever dreamed of.

This ubiquity allows them the ability to command premiums for advertising space, and essentially that is the bulk of their business.

But the thing is, they know what their product is: most obviously it’s a search engine, but just as importantly, they sell trust. As long as we can trust Pagerank to work well and not get overthrown by SEOs and blog-spam, the trust we lend Google is pure gold. The moment anyone starts distrusting Google is the moment that their Empire will start their great fall. And because they know what their product is, they know that they have to do this one thing as best as possible. Everything else, as ephemeral and peripheral as it seems, is about search. Think about Gmail. They’re not really showing off a web-based e-mail client. They’re showing off what their search can do. Think about the reason why you probably off-loaded all your e-mail into Gmail—you wanted to be able to utilize their awesome search engine to index your stuff. And it works beautifully.

Look at Google Desktop. Again, the key functionality is search. Same thing with Google Maps, Google Earth. They exist to help you find things. This is the thing that Google is good at. And they’re doing it to the tune of millions of dollars a day.

You look at the vast multiheaded supercorporations, and it’s hard to see what they do well. We come back to Microsoft. You might say that they do OSes well, and certainly, that’s where much of their money is made. But do they really do OSes well? Consider that the 30 year old architecture known as UNIX still runs most of what we call the Internet, and that only foolish sysadmins would risk running anything else on mission-critical tasks. While MS apologists like to scoff at the fact that UNIX is ancient, I think the fact that it’s core is mostly unchanged is testament to the fact that it works so well. And consider that one of the more modern OSes out there—Mac OS X—is nonetheless based on UNIX.

Where Microsoft most definitely kills themselves is with Vista. For one thing, it’s nothing more than a catch-up gambit with Mac OS X, which has already had an 8 year head start (and more, if you consider it’s NeXT roots) There ain’t nothing new under the sun with Vista. It was already stale when it was released.

But the serious death-knell is all the intrusive DRM crap that most people don’t want. Who wants to upgrade and then not be able to view porn? This is probably the biggest reason why people downgrade back to XP—they don’t want to deal with draconian copyright protection garbage that might accidentally lock them out of their system. Who wants to buy something that will give you less features than what you already have?

What Microsoft does relatively well which has no real peer is productivity software. The ubiquity of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint is a testament to that, and really, if you look around, everything else are really just pale clones to this enduring office suite.

But the cores of these technologies have been pretty much unchanged since the GUI became the standard user interface for most computers. What exactly does Word 2007 do that Word 2.0 can’t? Besides being excessively bloated and chock-filled with features I don’t need and I don’t want, that is? (Thank God they killed Clippy.) Oh, I’m sure some power-user can point something out that I’ve overlooked, but frankly, all I really need word for is typing out simple documents, which, if you think about it, can really be simply addressed by markup like XHTML (which has the added advantage of being immediately available on the web for viewing.)

The only time I’ve seriously had to load up Word is whenever someone mails me a DOC file even though a PDF or even a plain text file would do.

I tend to do most of my writing in things like Emacs, TextEdit.app, the text area in Wordpress, or the text area in Gmail anyway, and while I used to be a big font junkie, that’s not really a serious loss, particularly since if I wanted to actually publish something in dead-tree format, I would use a DTP program.

People talk about innovation like it’s something magic and transcendant, but I think it’s really about having your finger on the pulse of the customer. The way the market works, people buy things they like, and you start putting things in your product that people don’t like, and even if it’s a little thing like DRM or Clippy, it’s enough to demonstrate that you don’t really have the customer’s best interest in mind. It’s not enough to aspire to feature creep, either. So what if your new product has 200 new things in it, if it’s not anything anyone will use.

You might argue that they don’t just want some of this stuff, they need it, and many use this argument for the reason why desktop OSes and word processing software persist, but realistically, there are very few things that you actually need besides food, shelter, and clothing, and even there, if you look at how those things are bought and sold, you can’t add features to these things that inconvenience and/or aggravate people. No one will buy it.

So yeah, like IBM before them, I’m sure Microsoft will be around for a long, long time, but then again, I won’t be surprised if they simply become the biggest software publisher for Mac OS X, either.

Uh, can you really be a hospital if you can’t perform a resuscitation? Or at least attempt one?

Barbara notes this disturbing story about a “hospital” that has to call 911 when a patient tanks.

Now, in truth, this “hospital” is one of those so-called “specialty hospitals.” There are apparently only 140 or so of them in the U.S., and the whole idea is that they are owned by specialists and are there for elective procedures (read “payments in cash only”)

So cardiologists will open hospitals devoted to catheterization, gastroenterologists will open hospitals that only take patients getting endoscopies, and orthopedic surgeons will open hospitals (like the one on the story) focused on spinal surgeries or maybe arthroscopies, or what not.

On one hand, it is a known fact that if you do one or two things, and do them often, and don’t waste time mucking around with other things, you get really good at those one or two things. A general surgeon who does ten million hernia repairs and nothing else gets really good at doing hernia repairs, but if you’re also doing Whipple procedures and hemicolectomies, you won’t be able to get as many hernia repairs done, and you simply won’t be as good.

On the other hand, there is something disturbing about opening up a hospital for the sole purpose of making money (because, since these are elective cases, they are by definition not emergencies.) While, yeah, we live in a capitalistic society, and all that bullshit, I’m not so sure that medical care doesn’t fall under the same rubric as fire prevention, police protection, or sewage. While we still pay taxes to provide for these services, it’s not like there are fire departments or sewage treatment plants out there competing for your business. Can you imagine directly hiring the police to “protect and to serve”? (Oh, wait a minute, maybe that’s a bad example…)

In any case, the existence of EMTALA makes it evident that at least some legislators believe that health care is in fact a right and not a privilege. (EMTALA is a law that covers any hospital that accepts payment from Medicare, making it illegal for them to refuse to treat patients, even if they can’t pay. The main goal of this law is to prevent the ugly practice of “dumping,” where for-profit hospitals used to literally throw people out and turf them to County or the nearest charity hospital, even if they were crashing or bleeding out. Some believe that “dumping” hasn’t really been quite eliminated, it’s just more surreptitious, that’s all.)

So I’m not a big fan of these specialty hospitals. The sad things about the U.S. is that we have the most advanced medical technology in the world, but most of us (even when insured!) end up getting treatment that is on par with many Third World nations. True, we physicians need to make a living, too, and working for free is not anyone’s idea of a good time, but at the same time, I don’t think people should have to make a decision as to whether they live or they die depending on how much money they have.

Randomly, I saw this diagram of a serotenergic neuron. Rageboy wonders about the similarities between LSD and SSRIs.

Well, LSD is a 5HT agonist (5HT is neurochemical shorthand for serotonin, also known as 5-hydroxytryptamine) In contrast, something like Prozac™ is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. What this means is that Prozac™ merely increases the amount of serotonin present in the synapse but does not directly activate the postsynaptic receptor. In the short run, this will increase the likelihood that the postsynaptic neuron will fire, just like LSD will, but eventually, both the postsynaptic and the presynaptic neuron sense that there’s a lot of serotonin in the synapse, so that the postsynaptic neuron will downregulate its receptors, and the presynaptic neuron will make less serotonin, and you will reach a new steady state where the neurons will fire less frequently, but when they do, they will do so with more potency.

Interestingly, it has recently been discovered that 5HT antagonists also help with depression.

On the other hand, repeated use of LSD will probably downregulate the postsynaptic receptors as well, but it won’t necessarily downregulate how much serotonin gets produced. If LSD is anything like MDMA, eventually you will nuke your serotonergic neurons, and that tends to be very bad.

I think I have a nice theory here, accounting for the different effects of SSRIs vs LSD, and several experiments have been performed in animals and in humans, but I really don’t know.

All I know is that I haven’t heard of anyone tripping out on Prozac™ yet.

In the wake of the debacle amongst the “A” listers in which a prominent female blogger is threatened with sexual abuse and death, I find that even the MSM (that’s mainstream media, not men having sex with men) ended up writing about it, specifically wondering whether or not we need a blogging code of conduct. Darleene muses about who would even enforce such a thing, but interestingly, we already have a code of conduct.

In the early days of the Internet, even before 1993 and the Eternal September, we had Netiquette, eventually codified in an actual RFC {What is an RFC?} by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the organization tasked with promoting Internet standards.

Netiquette is specifically covered by RFC 1855 {official plaintext version}, which was formalized in October 1995, and like much of Internet planning, was intended to remain future-proof. So while it doesn’t specifically mention blogs (mostly because the term “€œblog”€ didn’t exist until around 1999), it does address one-to-many communication, which is essentially what a blog is useful for.

And enforcement will be performed exactly like enforcement was performed on Usenet or in IRC—”by loud, vociferous debate, flaming and counter-flaming, and eventually by kicking and banning of select targets by those who have the power to do such things.

So you see, blogging has been and will continue to be subjected to the flame wars and pedantry that used to be confined to September, but which is now still eternal. Newbies, as always, lookout. It does remain to be seen what the next big one-to-many communication format will be.

On Slashdot, there is a post about Apple’s deal with EMI to release non-DRM’ed music in AAC format may change how music is distributed on-line. While the conclusions drawn by this article may be suspect, I think there are aspects that are worth considering.

First of all, AAC is a standardized format that was devised by multiple industry players such as Dolby, Fraunhofer, AT&T, Sony and Nokia, and so it’s not completely proprietary like Microsoft’s WMA format or Real Audio. Given the open standard, the creation of a GPL’ed encoder and decoder for AAC was less fraught with licensing issues than creating one for the MP3 format. (For a couple of years, the LAME project, now GPL’ed, was only a patch to the reference code from ISO, which had a restrictive license.)

Secondly, distribution of AACs does not require a licensing fee (although you do have to pay for distributing encoders and decoders)

Thirdly, there are some technical merits for adopting AAC. At lower bitrates (at which most music is encoded), AAC is definitely better than MP3, and at higher bitrates, they are pretty much on equal footing.

Fourthly, DRM-free AACs would allow third-parties to take advantage of the iPod’s dominance of the market.

I would love greater support for open formats like OGG and FLAC, too, but this is probably farther from the horizon.

I think that most people have at least some awareness of eating disorders, specifically bulimia and anorexia nervosa. Mostly because it’s pretty widespread. I’m sure that all of us know at least one person who is close to us who at one time in their life sufferred from one of these conditions. And I’m pretty sure that the reported incidence is far lower than the actual incidence.

My sister, a well-educated and intelligent woman, can now acknowledge that some of her behaviors with regards to food or to her body image have been unhealthy. Mostly, what woke her up was her roommate in freshman year in college, who purged on a regular basis. But even though she recognizes that American culture’s expectations about women’s appearances is pretty damaging to the cause of equal rights, it’s not an easy thing to buck.

Thankfully, people are starting to wake up a little. The starved, emaciated look is not very cute, and even the fashion industry is being forced to start noticing. But the disease burden is still pretty significant, and I don’t think I recognized the extent of this pandemic until I started seeing it every day.

Patients with anorexia nervosa and bulimia are among the sickest people I meet. I’ve seen a few who look worse than people suffering from AIDS or metastatic cancer. These patients (mostly women, but there are indeed a good number of men) aren’t just thin. Their muscle mass is atrophied. They have absolutely no subcutaneous fat. They really look like the wind could break them. But what is most appalling is the fact that they continue to claim that they’re OK, and even more heart-wrenching, some still think that they are too fat.

There is typically a degree of mental illness at work. While extrinsic forces such as cultural expectations and the fashion industry don’t help the situation, there is something intrinsic that cooperates, and perpetuates the behavior. People with eating disorders will band together. Some claim they are being discriminated against for being skinny and having a fast metabolism. There are even websites out there on how to fool your doctor into thinking you are getting better while still continuing to avoid food and/or binging-and-purging.

There are so very few similar diseases that occur in someone who is otherwise healthy, who is intelligent and has great potential, which can end up ruining their lives and/or even killing them. If you get leukemia or you are infected by HIV, you generally recognize that something is wrong with you, and you seek appropriate attention, and you can get cured, or at least controlled. But behavioral illnesses like substance abuse and depression do the same thing as eating disorders—they take some of the best and the brightest and stop them from ever contributing positively to society. We are starting to be able to control some depression, and there is a lot of money being pumped into trying to curb substance abuse (although results are variable), but eating disorders have yet to get the same amount of focus and attention.

I guess Alisa has it right. We health professionals aren’t being trained well enough to recognize this pervasive disease. I am somewhat disturbed by how few seemed to care about Alisa’s situation, and how many seemed to promote somewhat inaccurate information.

It is generally recognized that both anorexia nervosa and bulimia can cause electrolyte imbalances, the most rapidly fatal being hypokalemia—a deficiency in potassium—which can precipitate life-threatening arrhythmias—irregular heart beats that may require defibrillation. But starvation and binging/purging can also have permanent effects on the heart, leading to a persistent condition known as long QT syndrome where you are prone to developing life-threating arrhythmias. And in some cases (in particular with refeeding) you can end up with heart failure. There also seem to be permanent changes to the lungs at least on radiographic studies—changes that are akin to what you would get from smoking 4 packs of cigarettes a day (one cigarette every 20 minutes!) for 30 years. Why this happens is not well known, but if you’re throwing up all the time, it’s foreseeable that some of that vomit can end up going back down the wrong pipe and into your lungs, causing some damage.

And throwing up all the time will cause esophagitis. Esophagitis, left untreated, will cause Barrett’s esophagus. Barrett’s esophagus can lead to esophageal cancer, which is a disease with a pretty poor prognosis. If it can be removed (which is an option in only about 30-40% of patients with esophageal cancer), it would generally involve cutting out part of your esophagus and then reconnecting everything together so that you can eventually eat again. Generally, they would want to cut into your chest as well as your belly—it’s a big operation that is fraught with possible complications. And if you only get surgery, your chance of being alive in 5 years is about 5-20% percent. So generally, you would also get chemotherapy and radiation.

This is when the cancer is potentially curable. And a huge percentage of these patients eventually have recurrences. Meanwhile, the 60-70% of patients who have non-resectable disease are pretty much doomed, although they will do surgery/chemo/or radiation if you can’t swallow and/or breathe and are well enough to undergo some kind of procedure.

But esophagitis and even Barrett’s esophagus will regress—if you take your medications religiously and stop throwing up. So Barrett’s esophagus is not necessarily a death sentence.

But, yeah, we have yet to invent anything that will cure GERD. For many of us who have it, H₂ blockers like Zantac and Pepcid or proton-pump inhibitors like Prilosec can make it bearable, and keep us from running into any of the horrific complications listed above, but it probably won’t ever go away. Some people who have it bad enough may opt to get a fundoplication—surgeons can take your stomach and wrap it around the esophagus so that stomach acid can’t reflux out, but these are not fool-proof and can fail, and you have to be extremely careful about eating. Sometimes they also do a vagotomy, where they cut one of the nerves that help control your gut, so that it doesn’t stimulate your stomach to produce acid. But this does have its side-effects.

GERD and esophagitis can cause horrific substernal chest pain that may be easily mistaken for a heart attack. What is even worse and quite possibly fatal is the possibility of esophageal rupture, which is something I would be concerned about if you told me you just ate a big meal, threw up, then heard a pop, and now you’ve got excruciating chest pain.

But recovering from an eating disorder is a long, hard road that requires a lot of support. And it’s something that can come back time and again. I hope that Alysa can find a health care professional that is well-trained with dealing with eating disorders.

I just occurred to me the superficial similarities between the story of Túrin Turambar and the movie ”The Curse of the Golden Flower”. The most obvious similarity is the incest (Crown Prince Wan isn’t just porking his sister, he’s also doing his stepmother!) but the idea of curses and of gold also resonates. In the movie, the golden chrysanthemum becomes the doomed standard of Prince Jai, while in the story, the golden hoard of Glaurung becomes a curse to Thingol, king of Doriath.

There is also the idea of devotion to one’s mother. Many of the mishaps that befall Túrin are due to his desire to see his mother Morwen again, and Prince Jai’s failed rebellion is waged in an attempt to free his mother from the tyranny of his father. (I suppose echoes of Oedipus necessarily arise.)

There is unrequited love: the love of the elven princess Finduilas for Túrin compared to the Empress’ love of the Crown Prince.

And like all epic stories, there is treachery, suicide, and madness.

And in the end, the bad guys win. (Morgoth in The Children of Húrin, the Emperor in “The Curse of the Golden Flower” although he is not as clear-cut of an antagonist as Morgoth.) The key victims—Húrin, the Empress—get to live (and by key victim, I mean the person on which all the other tragedies in the story hinges)

But “The Curse of the Golden Flower” is not an original story, but is rather based on the play “Thunderstorm” by the acclaimed Chinese writer Cao Yu. The characters are not of imperial lineage, but rather are of the bourgoisie, but the essential plot is comparable, and the unintentional incest and resultant suicide is present.

I’m still slowly working my way through The Lost Tales by J.R.R. Tolkien and edited by his son Christopher. I found the story of the destruction of the great, hidden city of the Elves wonderfully moving—the story in The Lost Tales presents much more detail than the version in The Silmarillion and there are some interesting concepts that Tolkien later removed.

I’ve written about the fact that Tolkien wrote about airships in Middle Earth. In “The Fall of Gondolin”, it looks like the Dark Lord Melko used technology resembling familiar 20th/21st century war machines to attack the city of the Elves. There is a description of a contrivance that kind of sounds like a transport helicopter, disgorging battalions of Orcs from its belly. The dragons also sound kind of mechanical, radiating an unnatural, all-consuming heat, and I can’t help but wonder if the Japanese did not catch on to these details way back when, considering that manga and anime are replete with fantastic airships, and bizarre technologic creations that may never become reality. I immediately think of mecha, and transforming robots, and the like. In later drafts of these stories, dragons become organic creatures, and there are no allusions to things that may or may not be internal combustion engines.

Tolkien’s works can be read as a reaction against the dehumanization inherent in mass production and wholesale mechanized killing, which he witnessed first-hand during WWI, and which became even more magnified during WWII, what with Hitler’s systematic genocide that seems original to the industrial era, and the ferocity of his flying and crawling war machines. Better minds than mine have looked closely at how The Lord of the Rings has a lot to say about the evils of our mechanized exploitation of the environment.

Sadly, Tolkien may be a modern-day Cassandra or Laocoön, prophesying the fall of Western Civilization at the hands of the technology we created. (As much as he protests the allegorical reading of the Ring as a metaphor for nuclear power, this idea is nonetheless quite powerful, and as I am reminded by a bumper sticker, it seems that “Frodo failed. Bush has the Ring.”) The process invented by Henry Ford (who as you may know was a prominent Nazi sympathizer) is profoundly widespread, with mass production still successfully fueling the engines of capitalism, and we’ve even tried to apply these processes to service industries which were not long ago thought to be entirely the exclusive demesne of actual human beings. (When’s the last time you called customer service and didn’t have to deal with a machine?)

The advances in depersonalized mass killing have likewise been striking in the last hundred years. While the intercontinental ballistic missile is perhaps the most feared and most horrific piece of technology ever created thus far, the progress in other realms of wholesale slaughter is also impressive. Just like the invention of the transistor and then the microprocessor has allowed great strides in communication and information technology, so too has miniaturization revolutionized the ability for people to kill lots of other people. It is no longer considered surprising when a single person walks into a place of business with a very portable, very lethal piece of machinery that can easily kill nine or ten people before he/she runs out ammo and/or is killed by the SWAT team. Hand-held personal missile launchers are quite widespread and easy to get a hold of, as the current fiasco in Mesopotamia well demonstrates. And, God help us, the United States is trying to create tactical nukes so that a single soldier can go out into the field and create their own little mushroom clouds.

I say, never mind at looking at how we’re raping the environment—not that the environment isn’t important. But it sort of doesn’t matter if we succeed in wiping each other out via mutually-assured destruction. I can tell you that the environment will be the least of our worries if nuclear winter sets in.

But enough cheerfulness.

What I’m finding interesting about the Lost Tales and the entire History of Middle Earth series is that it creates a distinctly postmodern canon of Tolkien’s work. Despite the fact that Christopher Tolkien explicitly delineates what he considers canon and what he consider apocrypha, the very fact that these alternative drafts are published make them a sort of quasi-canon. Like real history, and real ethnography, the whole body of Tolkien’s published work (the History of Middle Earth included) has inconsistancies and contradictions. Mythologies—like the Bible or the Iliad, for example—frequently have alternative depictions, some in agreement, but others at variance. Even the simple fairy tales that we hear as children have conflicting provenances and contradictory themes, and Walt Disney’s reinterpretations are only one of several. This quality actually makes Middle Earth even more immersive. Reality varies according to what you read.

Which tangentially brings me back to this interesting quote that Kagro X brought up again in a post on the Daily Kos (this context of the post is not necessarily relevant to why it struck me today):

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” —Ron Suskind “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush” New York Times 2004 Oct 17

This is now my impression of post-modernism and post-colonialism. The most pervasive cultural products of our time are basically remixes. After all, look at all the Tolkien knock-offs and homages sitting in the Fantasy section of your book store. We’ve gotten to the point where we can remix reality in real-time and have it stick and carry scholarly wait. It used to be you had to wait until you were dead before people starting adding their own isogeses while deconstructing you and/or your work.

It’s not so much that we keep revising history. This has happened since history existed, because we all know that the winners write all the books. it’s the fact that no only can we re-write history as it’s happening, but we can, in fact, pre-write history.

Which is, as a matter of fact, kind of what Tolkien actually tried to set out in do.

OK, so maybe I’m just a touch melodramatic when I say that Windows’ reliance on the 8.3 naming convention makes me sad. And, yes, I do subscribe to the ”worse is better” school of software design, so I agree that you shouldn’t futz around and break something that already works pretty well 95% of the time.

But I do find it quaint that vestiges of CP/M still survive to the present day. It’s as if we’ve never left the 8-bit era of computing (those were the golden ages, I tell you.)

What I do find disturbing is the fact that you can’t safely abandon the 8.3 filename convention. Say I want to use only long filenames. Thanks to poor third-party developer practices, it’s never going to happen. As oldnewthing points out, there is a lot of crappy code out there that hard codes 8.3 filenames into their installers. And then there’s the thing with how the dynamic loader almost makes name collisions inevitable by allowing you to call the same library by both its short name and its long name as if they were different libraries, resulting in two copies of the library taking up space in memory, and possibly leading to some rather hard-to-detect bugs. This gives me the heebie-jeebies.

There’s nothing you can really do about the third-party developers. The only way would be if their code happens to be open-source, then you could fix it yourself by removing the hard-coded filenames and recompiling. But I think that, in this day and age, it should probably be the standard practice to just call libraries by their long file name and ditch the 8.3 filename convention altogether in any new code you’re writing. After all, most newbie end-users booting up XP on a clean install should have their hard drive formatted as NTFS, and anyone demented enough to still use FAT32 will have to take their own chances.

I think the reason why the 8.3 filename convention grates on me so much is the fact that I started off on an OS that allowed me to save files with descriptive names—as I mentioned before, CBM-DOS allowed 16 character names, which was plenty enough for me at the time. To be reduced to goobledygook like FVQURPMX.DOC didn’t sit too well with me in those days when I was still running MS-DOS 5 and Windows 3.11. It certainly made searching for old documents an adventure. I remember long filenames being one of the huge features that made Windows 95 a must-have for me. Hell, long filenames were one of the reasons why I braved the sources of the Linux 1.x kernel in the early ‘90’s.

Oh, I know that long filenames aren’t too nice if you’re stuck with using COMMAND.COM as your shell, but if you have something sane like Bash which allows tab-completion, or if you—horror of horrors—actually use the GUI, then it doesn’t matter at all. And sure, even now, the UNIX convention is to use program and directory names that are as short as possible. Look at the FHS. All the key directories still consist of only three characters. But it doesn’t hamper you from using longer directory names if you want to. Look at Mac OS X, for example, which uses verbose directory names like “Library” or “Applications”, all without significantly breaking compatibility with its BSD roots.

That said, yes I know Unix itself is pretty ancient. But its heterogeneity makes the development environment a lot more stringent. You’d never get away with doing non-portable things like hard-coding which directories you expect to exist on the filesystem. If your code relies on legacy things that have long since been thrown away, it’s just not going to compile, and you’re going to have to fix it if you want anyone to use your software.

I stumbled upon this blog entry on The Old New Thing which discusses the 8.3 filename convention on MS-DOS and Windows up to and including XP, which limits a filename to 8 characters with a 3 character extension.

Now I haven’t run Windows since 1998, although I’m forced to used it at work. While the filename limitation was effectively eliminated by Windows 95 and the introduction of VFAT for most casual users, as oldnewthing points out, it still has ramifications to programmers.

I find this sad.

My very first computer, a Commodore 64 purchased in the ‘80’s, could use up to 16 characters in the filename. The original incarnation of the filesystem for UNIX (now commonly referred to as s5fs) which existed in the ‘70’s could have 14 characters in the filename. The original Macintoshes with the Macintosh File System could have 255 characters (although this was in practice limited to 31 characters because of the limitations of the Finder)

And here we are in 2007, with programmers still having to deal with 8.3. Hah!

None of my own inner demons have anything directly to do with Nic’s blog post about how nice guys finish last, but the opening quote reminded me of the dead-end lifestyle I’ve been leading for the last decade or so.

Now that I’ve grown delirious with sleep, the thoughts that have spun through my head today have pretty much mellowed out, and I kind of don’t care anymore.

But I can’t help think about the probability that when a woman tells me I’m too nice, it’s just code for you’re too ugly and fat for me.

Whatever. There are more things to life than mere love, companionship, and good sex that you didn’t have to pay for.

I did find myself wallowing in loneliness today. Just a smidge. I’ve been trying to limit how many hours I spend mired in self-pity these days, and the medications help a little bit, so it’s not the big massive emotional sinkhole that it used to be.

Still, I can’t help but wonder why a certain someone never returns my calls.

You know things are bad when you aren’t even in the Friend Zone™ anymore.

It does kind of get me down that the only people who call me and leave voice messages are my mother and the credit card companies who are clamoring for my soul.

No one ever e-mails me anymore, either.

I’m just friendless, freakish, and hopeless.

OK, OK, things are not as bad as I make them out to be.

As most people understand, the name of the game is “you give a little, you get a little.” Ain’t no one gonna come knocking on my door if I don’t at least make some small gesture of welcome.

To put it another way, I can put much of the blame for ending up a hermit squarely on myself.

To paraphrase a former Secretary of War, the only way to make someone trustworthy is trust them, and I’m clearly not going to make any new friends if I expect everyone to betray me eventually.

It’s hard to ignore my motto which serves me incredibly well when I’m at work: “Hope for the best, but expect the worst.”

As Chuck Palahniuk once wrote, “If you worry about disaster all the time, that’s what you’re going to get….”

Ultimately, we end up back at square one. The existential question for the day becomes this: what exactly do I have to offer to anyone? As a friend, as an acquaintance, as an employee. Just as a person in general. For the longest time, I’ve told myself, deep in my heart, that I’ve got a lot to offer, it’s just that there’s this depression and this fear of betrayal that’s always getting in my way.

No matter how sad and pathetic I would be, in the inner sanctum of my soul, I would hang on to the hope that somewhere deep inside this morass of sadness and despair, there was actually a person who was worthwhile, and who would be fun to hang around with.

Well, as time goes by, and as my bad habits harden, I’m starting to give up on this hope. Eventually, what you do becomes who you are, no matter what the philosophers say, and I’m getting to the point where I will become this awful, useless person who does nothing but mope all day, who lacks the most rudimentary of social skills, who trusts absolutely no one, and who will remain friendless for all the rest of my days.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

The easy way out is to blame all of this on the malicious actions of people in my past.

But I know better.

The universe didn’t dick me. I dicked myself.

(In the off-chance that maybe one or two of my actual friends are reading this, none of this diatribe applies to you. I know that you’re busy, and that you’re not ignoring me, and I know that if I wasn’t such a lazy and thoughtless bastard, I could just give you a call maybe once in a while instead of whining about how no one ever calls me. But you know me, always looking at the dark side of life, and never the one to do anything about it.)

Joanne brings up a disturbing story concerning May Yuen, a Chinese American who joined the Army, who ended up killing herself.

The model-minority angle which emphasizes the extreme difficulty of many Asian Americans with countenancing failure is definitely important, and does definitely contribute to the reasons why Asian Americans commit suicide, and in some extreme cases, murder-suicides. I am immediately reminded about the tragically synchronous string of killings that struck the Korean American community in Los Angeles a year ago. There is a disturbing current involving cultures that tolerate physical and psychological abuse intertwined with the effects of experiencing racism, even if not overt.

The fear of failure, and the cultural pressure to achieve was most apparent to me in medical school, where many of the Asian Americans I knew were exactly in this kind of bind. A good enough number of them were not actually particularly interested in practicing medicine, but the drive to achieve pushed them along this pathway, and as many survivors of medical school and residency can attest, medicine is in someways akin to the Mafia—once you get in, you pretty much stay in.

The idea of having to do a job that gives you absolutely no pleasure for at least 10-15 years in order to repay your debts makes me physically ill, but this is in fact where some people seem to find themselves. In some ways, it seems to be the American Way™—everyone seems to pretty much hate their job. (Naturally, I am reminded of a Homer Simpson quote: “Kill my boss? Dare I live out the American Dream?”)

There is a part of me that is a little scornful—if one could only be true to one’s self, and fuck other people and their expectations, then you wouldn’t have to deal with this—but I suppose not everyone is that strong-willed and/or lucky. (And who am I to talk, considering I did go down the path of medicine, the key difference being that I actually like doing what I’m doing, and it is questionable whether I would have been good enough to do anything else.)

That being said, I am incredibly skeptical of anything coming out of the military’s PR department. After all, despite what the actual soldiers in Iraq are saying, the brass continue to claim that everything is all sunshine and roses, and that day by day we’re winning the War on Terror™, this despite the fact that the number of people dying in Iraq in a month increased in March.

The incidence of male soldiers raping female soldiers is sadly underreported, although Gary Trudeau does bring it up in Doonesbury. Given the military’s PR department’s disgraceful handling of Pat Tillman’s death, I can’t help but wonder if the military is not covering something up here.

And lastly, there is the disturbing fact that May Yuen likely had exercise-induced or maybe even mild, intermittent asthma, and that it sounds like her superiors didn’t give a rat’s ass and didn’t bother referring her to see an M.D. It is a sad fact that in this day and age—mostly because some old school M.D.s continue to foment outdated knowledge—people can needlessly die from an asthma exacerbation simply because they aren’t carrying albuterol with them.

Now I have had a brief exposure to health care system that takes care of the active military as well as the health care system that takes care of the veterans, and while I have seen some things that the private sector could learn a lesson from, there are other things that made the whole Walter Reed scandal not all that surprising. If you’re a spouse or dependent, it’s actually pretty decent access—far better than some of the private sector mechanisms that I’ve seen and/or have been subjected to—but if you’re active duty, you’ve got to jump through quite a few hoops to get evaluated by an M.D. Now how messed up would that be if that’s what killed May Yuen?

Wow. Just, wow.

Both Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, the two leading Republican candidates for President in 2008 don’t believe in the Magna Carta, and think that a king an executive should be able to do whatever they want to.

Never mind that the Magna Carta and the writ of habeas corpus have been cornerstones of Western Civilization™ since 1215.

We’re going all the way back to the Dark Ages, baby. Burning witches at the stake. Stoning heretics. Serfs. Slaves. The Black Plague. It’s on.

The thing that is most entertaining about this is that during the Dark Ages, it was the Arabs kept the intellectual and philosophical legacies of the Greeks and the Romans from mouldering in the grass, without whom Europe would’ve remained nothing but a howling wasteland populated by naked, illiterate savages. In such a world, the U.S. would’ve never have existed.

Which is essentially what Giuliani and Romney are saying. You take away habeas corpus and you’ve destroyed the Constitution, and without the Constitution, the U.S. doesn’t exist.

Why do the Republicans hate America?