At some point we will know just how wrong President Bush and his advisors were about the threat that Iraq posed to America; we will learn whether our leaders were lying or mistaken, well-intentioned or duplicitous. Whatever their motives, though, it increasingly looks like Bush spurred America to war with falsehoods, that much of the information the administration offered the public as a justification for a war that has so far killed more than 100 Americans, 30 Britons and several thousand Iraqis was not true.
Americans, though, don’t seem to care.
Polls taken recently indicate that most Americans are either unconcerned at the apparent collapse of the rationale behind a war that’s still killing their compatriots, or ignorant of the whole situation. Before the Iraq war, a Knight Ridder poll showed that nearly half of Americans surveyed believed, erroneously, that there were Iraqis among the Sept. 11 hijackers. During the war, a Los Angeles Times poll showed that 59 percent of respondents were convinced, despite all available evidence, that Saddam was either partly or mostly responsible for Sept. 11. Now that America’s failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is becoming an increasingly contentious political issue, a third of respondents in a University of Maryland poll believed that the weapons already have been uncovered. A fifth of those polled think Iraq actually used such weapons in the war. – Michelle Goldberg, Salon
Memo to Sylvain Parent, Brett Wortham, Timothy Byrne, Ian Wright, Al Haigh, and other Fellows and Regulars: Could you please look up your countries’ laws on work visas and see how difficult it would be for a quality specialist in the meat industry to get one (along with a job, of course; I’ll take anything related, of course)? I don’t think I want to wait until next November. I weep for my country’s future.
Oh, boy, it’s one of those “there ain’t jack shit days”. I don’t even have enough in reserve for a good Tuesday Mailbag. Gotta find something, anything…
AP Wire: Hamas and other militant groups are on the verge of agreeing to halt attacks on Israelis, Palestinian officials said Monday,…oh, this is too good to be true…while Israel warned it may not accept what it considers a tactical cease-fire meant to give the militias time to regroup for more violence. Told you so.
Hewitt blowing donkeys at Wimbledon? No matter how much schadenfreude you can muster for a defending champ taking it up the ass in the first round from a guy in his first GS tournament, it’s still men’s tennis.
Hilary Rosen as a CNBC commentator? It’s CNBC; they deserve each other.
Angelina Jolie as Catherine the Great? All I want to know is, who’s playing the horse?
Apple maniacs drooling into their skivvies for the new G5s? Well, with those specs, I’m drooling in my skivvies over the new G5s. Cheese grater case or not.
Harry Fucking Potter? Oh, please, you all know my feelings about how J. K. Rowling should be put on the “slow and suffer tremendously” type of death plan. And speaking of death, it’s Sirius, whoever that is. Fuck you if you bought that piece of shit and haven’t read it yet.
USA Today probably having Tenacious Z as a cover story today, as the Observer’s reporting? I think everyone knows by now how much I don’t care about Tenacious Z, so I’m not paying attention. In fact, this was thrown in here to see if YOU’RE paying attention.
The movement to get Dave Gagnon a column again? I’m in favor, even though he occasionally treats me like shit in his mails. Talent wins out over personal prejudice.
Oh, here’s something…
SUPREME IDIOCY
And so the Supreme Court, those (in the words of the great P. J. O’Rourke) nine dips in black muumuus, did it yet again. The people who brought you Gore v. Bush have now given the Thumbs Up to the Children’s Internet Protection Act, one of the more abominable right-wing acts of moral feel-good to come down the technical pike. Essentially, what the law says is that libraries cannot have any sort of federal funding (which a lot of libraries need in order to stay open) if they don’t install filtering software on the library’s Internet-accessible systems, ostensibly to keep kiddies out of the XXX cesspit. The vote was decided the exact way you thought it’d be: the conservative flakes on the “yes” side (Rehnquist, Scalia, O’Connor, Thomas), the commie pinkos on the “no” side (Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg), and Kennedy and Breyer doing their usual “well, it’s not really cool but the intentions are good so we’re voting in favor” routine.
I think you can figure out by now that I regard the linkage of federal funding for libraries to use of censorware repulsive in the extreme. It’s demeaning, it’s ridiculous, and it doesn’t work. This whole law is a moral sop to the Luddites among conservatives who don’t and won’t understand that the Internet is beyond the control of anyone. It’s almost as bad as those two industry toadys Lamar Smith and Howard Berman wanting to give the FBI responsibility to go after file sharers, and Orrin Hatch’s “destroy file sharing computers” remark from last week (despite the fact that Hatch himself was shown to be a software pirate, using illicit software to power his website).
Since I haven’t talked about this in a while, it’ll be good to revisit this topic in a short rant. Here’s the facts:
1) The types of Internet filtering that are being mandated don’t work. False positives (sites blocked that shouldn’t be) are the biggest issue here, with scads of sites being blocked that shouldn’t be. This includes the site you’re reading now, which can be blocked by various pieces of censorware for “inappropriate content” (everything from “you shouldn’t be reading a wrestling site when this computer is here for school purposes” to my liberal use of the word “f*ck”). Miscategorization is rampant due to the fact that censorware vendors use automated spiders to troll the Web, and sites are blocked without a single human being seeing them (any censorware vendor that says that a human does see all those sites before they’re blocked is lying; it’s logistically impossible). Sites get blocked because, once upon a time, it had the same IP address as a porn site, and the list never got updated or edited. Free webservers get blocked as a matter of course by censorware because it’s too difficult to block the individual pages that might offend.
Just to cite one popular example, a Republican politician whose position paper tech issues, posted on his website, stated that he was in favor of filtering software found out during the 2000 campaign that his website was being blocked by filtering software for no good reason. He not only removed his statement in favor of filtering, but actually researched the issue further and found out what exactly was going on with this. He ended up becoming involved in this suit, and on the same side as the ACLU. That’ll get his neocon membership card revoked for life.
1a) Also, censorware does a horrid job at keeping out bad stuff, mostly because of the fact that there’s no good algorithm to judge the obscenity of pictures (if humans can’t do it, computers sure as hell can’t). False negative rates for some software packages are nearly 50%. If Little Johnny is really interested in seeing tits, Little Johnny will see tits because the censorware won’t block every site that has tits out.
2) Censorware is proprietary software. The site-block lists are encoded, and not easily editable, if at all. The only good thing is that cracking censorware encoding is one of the few “bad acts” specifically exempted under the truly repulsive DMCA, courtesy of Seth Finkelstein’s lobbying efforts in that area.
2a) Censorware vendors, courtesy of the fact that their lists are encoded, are able to push a specific socio-political agenda into their software, and that agenda is pure hardcore right-wing. Censorware is notorious for blocking out gay (non-porn) sites, women’s rights sites, abortion and contraception information sites, human rights sites, etc. This has been borne out by repeated experiments. My favorite one is the one that Bennett Hazleton of did. He created stand-alone web pages featuring direct quotes from some popular right-wing sites, including Dr. Laura, and then blew the whistle on his sites to censorware vendors. All of the censorware vendors contacted blocked out the created sites as hate speech. But when informed about where the quotes came from, the censorware vendors went mute. They sure as hell didn’t block the sites the quotes came from. Read more about that one here.
3) Under the law, adults are treated like children. We are being told what we can or cannot access based on the judgment of an unknown third party instead of having our own judgment trusted. Just because Little Janie might access some porn through her meanderings doesn’t mean that we are all Little Janie. And, frankly, if your kids are going to the library to get porn, you might want to look at what kind of parenting job you’re doing. I swear that parents should be able to be taken into court for f*cking up their kids’ heads, especially when it comes to sex.
3a) The law does leave the option open of asking you to go up to the librarian and asking him/her to turn the filter off. This can be quite embarassing if you have the wrong sort of librarian, who’s not up to snuff on this whole “Internet thing”. And God help you if you do it for your kid so he/she can research a paper, and you’re in the wrong sort of community.
4) Censorware blocks search engines, especially ones like Google who do page caching. That’s because they can get around the block lists. Good luck finding anything if you don’t know where you’re going.
5) In a large number of circumstances, a library will have a book on its shelf that censorware will prevent reading in electronic form due to “adult content”.
If you want to nuke censorware and you’re running 2000 or XP (and have an always-on connection), go to the Peacefire link above. Bennett has got a great little way around censorware using OpenServer and ActivePerl, turning your home system into a censor-beating proxy.
Speaking of beating, since there’s nothing to pimp today, let’s go right to our weekly two hours of collective masochism…
THE SHORT FORM
Match Results:
Test and Christian over Booker T and Big Sump Pump (Pinfall, Test pins Steiner, big boot): Let’s see, wait for those few precious seconds when Booker and Christian might be in the ring together, or make dinner? Dinner wins.
Maven over Chris Harvard (Pinfall, bridge rollup): What the hell was this all about? When Long’s promo is longer than the match, something’s incredibly wrong with “Creative”. Jesus, give the kids a little of Trip’s promo time, okay? Let them run with it. Maven proved himself by hanging with Orton last week, without too many botches. Nowinski’s always proven it. What the hell is it going to hurt?
Buh Buh Ray and D-Von Dudley over Chris Jericho and Lance Storm (Pinfall, D-Von pins Storm, 3-D): Last week, when reading how everyone was having conniptions over the Austin “Boring” sketch, all I could do was giggle at those clueless nellies. Storm’s made a career out of playing the anti-charismatic figure, I thought. This is just a good, effective, and quick set-up to get him elevated to upper-mid-card, and one that he’d be able to go to town with. He’ll be rewarded at MSG for this, I thought, when they’ll start a high-level ramp-up for him, possibly a beat-down of Austin. His reward was 1) a tag match 2) with Jericho, who’d overshadow almost everyone on the roster 3) against the Dudleys 4) where he took the pin.
I am not giggling now.
Rene Dupree and Sylvain Grenier over Novocaine Helms and…oh, Jesus, Sergeant Slaughter, Tag Titles Match (?) (Pinfall, Dupree pins Slaughter, Greco-Roman Title Belt Shot): I am REALLY not giggling now. Can someone tell me whose bright idea this was? Of course, we are in the city that defines shallow patriotism, Noo Yawk, so I guess it was appropriate to pander to surface instincts. I just feel that WWE owes an apology to people who actually do love their country deeply enough to be sickened by propaganda like this.
Shawn Michaels and Kevin Nash over Ric Flair and Randy Orton (Pinfall, Michaels pins Flair, superkick): How can a match with so many high-powered performers seem so inconsequential? I just couldn’t pay attention to the match. Nothing gave me any reason to pay attention. This was supposed to be Randy Orton’s coming-out party and showcase, but there was more advancement of his character in the promo beatdown of Foley afterward. The whole match, I guess, was designed to play second-fiddle to Trip/Kane, and something with this much mark-quee power doesn’t deserve that treatment.
Bill Goldberg over Rodney Mack, White Boy Challenge (Pinfall, the usual): Ah, yes, revive the angle only to kill it once and for all, the wrestling equivalent of “Wake up, it’s time for your sleeping pill.” Well, it had to happen sooner or later. It could have been worse, though. Quoth the Ravin’ Cajun prior to this match:
I’m kinda nervous now. I just realized it’s 10:30 PM EST and we have yet to reveal Evolution’s 4th member.
We also have yet to see Goldberg.
I hope it’s just a coincidence. But if it isn’t… there’s gonna need to be a new term for Ugly.
Fortunately, ugliness was forestalled…well, in this instance. The rest of the show makes up the “ugly” factor quite nicely. And speaking of ugly…
Trip over Kane, Title Versus Mask Match (Pinfall, Pedigree): God, that was one atrocious teasy-weasy job with the unmasking at the end. It went along perfectly well with a poorly-choreographed match, though. They’re both capable of a lot more, and we’ve seen that in the past.
Angle Developments:
Everybody Comes To MSG: Never mind the old “national anthem” routine that every foreign heel tag team has used since time immemorial (and, to be fair, Da Meltz did warn us that they’d start using this bullshit routine tonight). Those voices…oh, dear God. La Marseillaise is one of the best national anthems on Earth, a f*ck of a lot better than some half-assed poem set to an old English drinking song like some countries accept as an anthem. It doesn’t deserve this, even from Canadian heels. Every time I hear this, I know I’m going to have to keep watching that scene from Casablanca on repeated loops in order to restore the dignity that it deserves.
This Is Your Ass-Kissing, Mick Foley: If the intro to the tag match reminded me of a film from 1942, the whole Mick Foley Experience reminded me of a film from one year earlier: Pride of the Yankees, and Gary Cooper speaking to the assembled crowd. Except for the fact that Foley’s not Coop, and he isn’t dying of Cactus Jack’s Disease. The whole routine was mawkish and maudlin. The guy is going out on a book tour. He is not being sent off to die in some trench in Flanders Field. He’s going to be back the next time WWE needs ratings and can be fit into his schedule.
And we’ll welcome him back with open arms, because he is the living reminder that things weren’t as bad as they are now. He hasn’t been tainted like Austin and Flex have with the mess that WWE’s made over the past two years. He’s virginal and pure in that regard. And the WWE’s suffering from a distinct lack of virgins at this time.
Frosty the Snowman indeed.
Scarred For Life: In regards to Kane’s face…actually, that doesn’t look too bad. What’s there doesn’t look like the aftermath of someone who’s been burned so badly that he’s had to wear a mask since childhood. Looks like a slight bit of disfiguration and some…well, soot. Okay, let’s be honest, it was a bad makeup job. As Slick Rick puts it: Looks like Glen got really drunk and got into Jeff Hardy’s old makeup bag. Does it elicit fear in me? No. But, then again, it wouldn’t. I’ve seen a lot worse than that. Would it elicit fear in the audience? Highly doubtful. So, therefore, the “titanic” impact was slightly above that of a wet fart. In other words, typical WWE.
Oh, one more thing. I caught a bit of the New TNN First Man’s Channel Animation Special and was laughing my ass off over all of the blank-outs they did on the mic identifiers, the ones that had the Spike TV logo plastered on them prior to Mistah Lee’s actions. This has to be one of the biggest screwings of poochdom that any television network has ever accomplished. And the fact that it came from Spike Lee, of all irrelevant people, makes it even more delicious. Remember, kids, there’s nothing more fun that a mega-rich multinational falling on its own face.
And that’s where I’ll leave you until tomorrow. Enjoy.
