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On the remark that “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”:

“Mrs. Palin needs to be reminded that Jesus Christ was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate was a governor.” [source]

Firedoglake » GOP Thinks Organizing In Your Community Is Worthless :

without community organizers like Martin Luther King, Jr., we’d all still be dealing with separate water fountains for coloreds and Jim Crow Laws. And I mean the old ones, not the new poll tax crap that Hans Von Spakovsky keeps trying to sneak in through the sewers.

Oh, and ladies? No community organizers means that your voice doesn’t count for shit. No vote for you!

Lost your job and you need a hand with the utility bills or some food from the local church pantry? Suck it up, America, because the folks who used to extend a hand to those in need don’t count in Republican land. That “do unto others” crap has to stop, and Jesus was clearly just a rabble-rousing, do-gooder. Loaves, fishes, feeding the multitudes? Hogwash.

Your neighborhood watch program, to help supplement the police force whose budget keeps getting cut under the Bush Administration? Well, you don’t deserve a safe neighborhood and your efforts are useless anyway.

Cleaning up a local riverbed or a walking trail with your kid’s scout troop? Republicans think you are a loser.

Working with a job training or literacy program to help folks move from welfare to work? Republicans think your efforts deserve ridicule. Promoting a spay and neuter program at your local animal shelter? Republicans are laughing at you. Volunteer at your church pantry to help the least of these? Republicans are mocking you.

Talking Points Memo | How The Obama Camp Should Respond:

Just as John McCain bought his ad time for right after Obama’s speech last night, they should get their own for right after Palin.

And here’s the ad: A one-minute spot featuring Hillary Clinton herself, talking to the camera and laying into Palin on the issues, her complete lack of qualifications, and the temerity of the McCain campaign to think they could get away with this. Then she urges anyone watching who might have supported her to get out there and support Barack Obama.

Then it closes simply with Obama walking on to the set to shake Hillary’s hand: “I’m Barack Obama, and I approved this message.”

That could be what we call a “crusher.”

What do you call nostalgia for a past that never existed? In 1984, they simply swept the unwanted bits into the memory hole and didn’t replace them.

TBogg » Losing my religion :

Not wishing to see Rod [Dreher] make a fool of himself, which is like asking him to not pray or breathe, reader JPL sums up Dreher’s entire life in just a few acid-etched paragraphs:.

Rod, you’re the living embodiment of the old phrase “there’s a sucker born every minute.” Look, regardless of this woman’s qualities, many of which do truly seem to be fine, she isn’t the President. And, before Cheney, VP’s didn’t get to do a hell of a lot. It’s still McCain at the top of the ticket, and everything that was wrong with him before remains wrong with him now. More war, more tax cuts, more support for the rich and powerful, more torture, more unilateral international relations, more Bush. He’ll just have an attractive woman near him who shares your values, and who, given his treatment of women in the past, he will completely ignore. Your best hope is that he drops dead, leaving her in charge. And then you’ll discover that all those nifty Alaskan values don’t get you very far in the rough and tumble of global politics..

(It’s worth noting, I lived in Alaska for years, and though I hate stereotyping, most Alaskans were the most short-sighted, backward people I’ve ever lived among. And I’ve lived in 8 countries.).

But there you are, bursting with eagerness to pull that lever for the Republicans again. And two years in, when things have gotten even worse, you’ll do just what you did with Bush…just what you did with Catholicism. After singing their praises endlessly, you’ll turn on them, with surly descriptions of how they fooled you, and how could you have known?.

Except that millions of people did know. They don’t fool you…you keep fooling yourself. You’re so desperate for the world to be the way you think it should be, the world you’ll feel safe in, that you just can’t accept that it isn’t now, and it’s never going to be that world again. Hell, I doubt it ever was, except in your own fevered fantasies. But you’ll blame it on someone else, switch teams again, and wait for the next wunderkind to show up and promise a blissful return to traditional Christian values and a bucolic life on the farm..

It’s a good thing you’re happily married. As a single man, it would be hard to imagine how any even vaguely clever gold-digger wouldn’t take you for all you’re worth in a few months. I think you should consider renaming your genre from Crunchy Con to Gushingly Gullible..

If it didn’t mean the continued ruin of our nation, and the future of my children, it would be almost endearing. As it is, it just seems sad how traditional Conservatives will keep selling this country right down the gutter for the smallest possibility that their values will once again dominate the public discourse.

Ouch. That’s gonna leave a stigmata…

Did he miss anything? I don’t think so.

The folks on the ship had no idea. I’m guessing the PR staff at Maersk could do something with this . . .

Owing to the generosity of Jack Shedd, I bought my own copy of this:

“The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” (Betty Edwards)

which means the procrastination that allows me to avoid doing the exercises in the library copies no longer works. It’s not going anywhere. So I assembled the materials it calls for last weekend and worked through the pre-education exercise:

• a self-portrait
• a drawing from memory
• a drawing of whichever hand you don’t use to draw with.

Came out better than I expected (and no, I’m not sharing them — yet).

So here’s yesterday in hits (yikes!).

Once you strain out the multiple hits per page, it’s still quite a bit of new traffic . . . .

And today is looking similar, and it’s only 11AM:

42143 /var/log/httpd/httpd-access.log

I was kinda hoping I would get referring URLs with these redirects. Who the %^&* still uses the Distributed BB hack, anyway?

87.245.133.128 - - [24/Jul/2008:12:43:42 -0700] "GET /dbb.php?http://www.boingboing.net/2005/12/30/ignoring-uk-ban-blog.html HTTP/1.1" 302 - "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"

Imagine the trial, let alone a guilty verdict and a hanging. It’s unpossible . . .

The dean of Massachusetts School of Law at Andover is planning a September conference to map out war crimes prosecutions, and the targets are President Bush and other administration officials.

The dean, Lawrence Velvel, says in a statement that “plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth.”

Other possible defendants, he said, include federal judges and John Yoo, the former Justice Department official who wrote one of the so-called torture memos.

“We must insist on appropriate punishments,” he continued, “including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top German and Japanese war criminals in the 1940s.”

[From Law School Dean Calls Conference to Plan Bush War Crimes Prosecution | ABA Journal – Law News Now]

A 52-home community in Canada is heated entirely with solar energy:

Solar heating is a more exciting prospect than solar generation of electricity because heating is a much larger percentage of a home’s total energy use (60% for space heating, 20% for water heating, and 20% for appliances, lights, and other electrical loads).

[From Big Contrarian → Damn Canadians.]

Think about it. How much energy is used just to heat stuff up (water, mainly, but your living space as well in some parts of the world)? If you could capture the heat (insert Rub Goldberg-ian system of fresnel lenses, solar collector dishes, coils of pipe filled with solution that is used to store and transfer the heat) and tap into it as needed, how much electricity would we save? In many of the cold parts of the world, they get a lot of winter sunshine that could be collected and stored as heat, with no need for electricity (except perhaps to turn a pump to move the heat around: easily handled with a low voltage one powered by the same sunlight).

Excellent. Someone in MSFT’s networking group has put a cached list of sites participating in Distributed Boing Boing in their live.com results, meaning that requests for some users over there use my bandwidth to pull BB’s pages. And I seem to be on that list: requests for pages at BB.net that originate at MSFT go through me first.

65.55.110.117 - - [02/Jul/2008:19:45:20 -0700] "GET /dbb.php?http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/13/bionic-limbs.html HTTP/1.0" 200 23576 "http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=boing&form=QBHP" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
# whois 65.55.110
OrgName: Microsoft Corp
OrgID: MSFT
Address: One Microsoft Way
City: Redmond
StateProv: WA
PostalCode: 98052
Country: US
NetRange: 65.52.0.0 – 65.55.255.255

I talked with the author of DBB this week and he took the list down once the folks at SmartFilter figured it out, but evidently some people made copies of the list of sites. Bad network engineer, no biscuit.

Time to pull the plug on this, in a more comprehensive way than URL rewrites or redirects.

That ought to do it . . .

< ?php
header("Location: http://boingboing.net/\n\n");
exit;
?>