Category: 2004 US Election

The New York Times > New York Region > About New York: Home From Iraq, and Without a Home:

Two months ago, she returned to Bronx circumstances that were no less difficult than when she had left them three years earlier; no yellow ribbons greeted her. Now, every day, she soldiers on to find a residence where the rent is not covered by in-kind payments of late-night bus rides to shelters and early-morning rousting. All the while, she keeps in mind the acronym she learned in the Army: Leadership. L is for loyalty; D for duty; R for respect; S for selfless service; H for honor; P for personal courage. “And I is my favorite,” she says. “It’s integrity.”
[ . . . ]
A relationship with another soldier ended after she became pregnant, and in early 2003 she flew to the California home of some friends from the military – the Bronx was not an option, she says – to give birth in March of that year. A few weeks later, she did the hardest thing she has ever had to do: she left Shylah with her California friends and returned to Germany to complete her service.
[ . . . ]
A war veteran wearing a backpack, pushing a stroller and carrying a baby stayed in another strange hotel room last night, mostly because the city of her birth does not know what to do with her. Welcome home.

As bad as it is, the single young mother in this piece seems to be doing the best she can. I wish the same could be said of her family (who turns their own daughter and granddaughter out in the street?) and the father of the child (he evidently didn’t get the same training in Loyalty, Honor, and Integrity).

The story notes that many veterans have problems re-integrating into society: for young men, it’s bad enough, but I have a harder time with young women and children on the streets. Shame that veterans are hard to come by in the current political regime: perhaps there would more assistance, even leadership, forthcoming.

TeledyN: The Right Heroes

Gary points out that not all the images of American dead arriving at Dover AFB are of Iraqi war victims: some of the images date back to the Columbia accident. (I don’t differentiate between them too much: if I had to, those from Iraq who went off to do their nation’s bidding, knowing they were going into harm’s way, would edge out the astronauts: the shuttle crew would be more confident of their return, barring accidents).

Does it make any sense that, until the surreptiously taken photo that appeared in the weekend papers, the only images we had been shown were of the “contractors'” disfigured corpses being paraded around?

While I agree with the notion I read earlier today — that the Normandy invasion might not have been as well-supported, had images of American GIs floating off the beaches been distributed — I think it’s important to acknowledge the sacrifice and honor those who literally gave all they had. Only then can we decide if their sacrifice is worth it.

Somehow, this seems to tie into my suspicion that the armchair generals in charge of this misadventure think this is no more serious than a game of Risk.

I took another look at advertising services in Rendezvous and found that someone had written an init script for UNIX/Linux systems.

It launches the mDNSResponder service and mDNSPublish, which is OK if you only have one service. I decided to break them apart since I may have more than one. So below the fold, you’ll find an init script for mDNSResponder. As I figure out how to, I’ll work up one that reads some kind of config file and launches multiple services (sounds like a trivial think to do with awk, actually).
Continue reading “rendezvous/zeroconf in UNIX”

I am fooling around with my Google AdSense ads to see if there’s any hope for this as a way of defraying the costs of this website. I have hoped it would at least cover the cable bill but at less than 5o cents a day, it’s not even close.

On the other hand:
Nicest of the Damned: Nick Denton: “No one’s going to get rich off blogging”:

I’ve been making enough money off roughly 1,000 page views a day to more than cover a car payment

I must be doing something wrong (too many PSAs, I expect).

One thing I have noticed is how the targeting brings up the damnedest things: I regularly see things from the Republican National Committee or other like-minded groups. Is it just bad targeting or is this site so bad, it may drive people to the other side in horror or disgust?

<shudder>

AxisofLogic/ Iraq:

[Ahmed] Chalabi, longtime exile leader, has never had a power base within Iraq. He is a smooth operator, convicted of embezzling millions from the Petra Bank of Jordan — sentenced in absentia to 22 years of hard labor — but championed by the neoconservatives of Washington. They had lined up Chalabi to be their man in Baghdad years before the conquest of Iraq. [ . . . ] After the war, Chalabi proudly boasted of providing misleading intelligence to the U.S. government that was indispensable in spurring the invasion. He remains on the Pentagon’s payroll — $340,000 a month — not counting the $40 million that he’s received at the insistence of the Republican-dominated Congress over the past decade. He is a focal point of mistrust on all sides within Iraq.

$340,000 a month? For what? He sold the warheads a bill of goods, a fact they seem reluctant to admit, leading to the deaths of more than 500 US servicemen, continues to rake in a tremendous amount of money (in salary and contracts), and is supposed to take over the country, no matter what the people who live there might want.

This is liberation?

32 mentions of the Saudis promising to fine tune oil prices in favor of a Bush re-election campaign vs 1,480 mentions of Jessica Simpson being featured as a VH1 Diva.

By all accounts, the US has been compromised, sold out, by the Bush dynasty and it’s allegiance to the House of Saud.

And it gets less — a lot less — press attention than a C-list starlet hosting a cable TV show.

Doug’s Dynamic Drivel: page 23 sentence 5 meme:

* Grab the nearest book
* Open the book to page 23
* Find the fifth sentence
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions

The difficulty is that many of them are awfully dark.
A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson

dmoz has birthed a search engine. Bootstrapped by the open directory project, the mozdex project offers a search engine that exposes its results.

John & Belle Have A Blog: I Know You Think You Can’t Resist Her, But I’m Telling You Mister, Don’t You Mess Around With My Little Sister

and I thought Civil War re-enactments were bizarre.

LittleGreenFootballs or Late German Fascists? (the LGF quiz):

I was inspired to build this quiz when I noticed that comments on Littlegreenfootballs.com (a popular warblog) tended to be indistinguishable in tone and content from the writings of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and the other architects of the “final solution.”

I sincerely doubt the folks who comment on LGF have read the writers mentioned: that indicates the depth of thought in the works of the Nazis.

I never read LFG and have never felt compelled to read Mein Kampf but I still got 85% of these right, mostly by using style and structure as my guide.

These are not mainstream folks (at least I hope not) but they are uncritical supporters of the administration: if they have any gripes, it’s that the administration hasn’t gone far enough.