[music | Pete Seeger - Talking Union]

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin

Your Government should fear you, not the other way around, here's how to protect yourselves.

I've had some comments on my forums stating users fear of our current administration, and there are certainly many who started taking their personal freedoms much more seriously during our last administration. In the last 10 years, we've been asked to give up, or have had taken away, many of our liberties which were taken for granted. It's time to take them back.

Obama has shown no signs of easing off of the policies of "Capture everything, analyze later" carried over from Clinton and Bush. If you send unencrypted traffic across the Internet, you need to expect it to be read. If you say something inflammatory, expect it double. Know that there is no "Right to Privacy" and never has been, you have the Fourth Amendment protecting you from unreasonable search and seizure, but is intercepting a phone call transiting public lines "seizure"? Is capturing an email on an Internet backbone and scanning it "Search"? Nope. Anything you broadcast can legally be captured and interpreted by others, anyone, not just Feds. It's best to keep your footprint small, and whatever they do get, make them WORK to read it. This applies whether "They" are credit card thieves, identity thieves, or Feds. None of these groups should be given a free key to your private data.

If encryption is made ubiquitous by users, those capturing your traffic won't even know where to begin to try to interpret any of it. If you encrypt your shopping list before you send it to your spouse, they can't tell an encrypted shopping list from an encrypted Flash Mob location. If EVERYONE encrypts, they need to treat all traffic equally, and all their snooping will be for naught.

For those on my forums concerned about such things, there are answers, mainly "Encrypt" and "Obfuscate". Below are several free tools to help you protect your online identity and prevent anyone from reading anything that you don't specifically permit. Of these, the one with the most up-front headache for the average user will be encrypted Email, and the one with the most in-line overhead will be protecting your browsing with TOR. Once GPG or PGP is configured, you don't really have to figure it out. TOR takes a bit more of a toll on your day-to-day, but if your anonymity is worth it at that moment, it's worth it.

I see where the rabid, anti-logic right gets their figures now. Since no one I discuss such things with will quote sources, I'm forced to make them up and quote as necessary.

In the following video, we see a prominent "Conservativedontyoudarecallmearepublicanimaconservativedammit" speaking about the murder of Dr. George Tiller in his own church. It should be noted that this particular prominent talking head called out Dr. Tiller more than 25 times on national TV as a murderer and said "[I]f I could get my hands on Tiller -- well, you know. Can't be vigilantes. Can't do that. It's just a figure of speech.". Sounds kind of like "If I could be in the basement of the white house with a truck full of fertilizer, well, you know, can't be vigilantes, wink wink nudge-the-fuck-nudge" to me.

In any case, the claim was made in the below video that Dr. George Tiller, prior to being gunned down in his own church, performed 60,000 abortions. Let us do a quick bit of napkin-math on that shall we? For the purpose of this argument, we will discount the time we know he was out of commission, after having been shot in '93 and his clinic blown up in '86 by Right Wing Not-Terrorists (according to some who believe it's damn near impossible for American Whites to be terrorists)...We'll assume he worked with a scalpel in his teeth out of an Airstream and maintained 5 days a week, 10 hours a day like a real trooper.

George Tiller was, at the time of his murder, 67 years old. In 1970/1971 he took over his fathers medical practice, all the while intending to go be a dermatologist somewhere. It was hearing about a woman dying during an illegal abortion that prompted him to maintain the family practice instead.

So let us take 38 years as a nice round number that he was "in the practice", I don't know when he started performing abortions however. Probably right around the time it became legal, but we'll assume it was 1971, Jan 1. That gives us 13,879 days to work with counting leap days and assuming a full 2009, which we know won't happen. If we discard Saturdays and Sundays over the course of the 38 year period which was cut short 1/3 into the 38th year, and assuming he immediately started performing abortions the minute Dad died, that gives us 98,800 hours to work within. So assuming 10 hours/day, we have one abortion every 1.64 hours, or like every 100 minutes.

That assumes this guy took no vacations, never rested, never filled out paperwork, never took a lunch break. That's 10 hours a day, nonstop, no vacations, for 38 straight years.

You're right Bill, the guy was fucking Mengele. Or, you're a liar, pick one:

I especially love the quote about the moron from the Daily Kos, with an ad (google ad no doubt) advertising an interview with Bill Ayers. Well, let's count the death toll. Bill Ayers, zero. huh. How "perfect" is that you bloated weasel.

[music | Combichrist - Get Your Body Beat (Amduscia Remix)]

I think I just gave myself diabeetus. For Natalie's birthday I took her to breakfast. I got as close to full-English as you can get in my town:

2 bacon
2 sausage links
2 pancakes (where's my pertaters)
2 bread, toast
baked beans
eggs (scrambled)

I thought I was going to die then...I wisely skipped lunch as I started baking cakes. For dinner, Mexican food. Chorizo burrito with lots of scotch-bonnet sauce because I'm an idiot and don't plan ahead.

Plan ahead for what? Oh the cake:

Read On

I've recently had to think about the mechanics of making idiot-proof backups on Linux and OSX. The specific machine I'm backing up is a Linux host with a 40GB drive. Historically only about 10% of the drive has been used, and the user has an IMAP mailbox, so all the mail is safe already.

The smallest USB drive I could get was an Iomega 250GB for like $60. Since the drive is 6x bigger than the drive that's being backed up, I've decided to make a multi-snapshot backup set using rsync. I have rsync propagating deletions, so this is in the event the user realizes that they've deleted something they needed, but it was like 2 weeks ago, they can go rooting for it.

The basic idea is to test that the drive is mounted correctly. Then to rotate all the snapshot directories one step, then mv the oldest snapshot into position to receive the new sync update. This way I'm never copying anything, and I'm never resync'ing the entire directory structure.

Then I pop a dialog with the results of rsync, or a dialog saying the drive isn't attached correctly.

Here's the script I'm using:

Read More

[music | Pigface - Alles Ist Mine (DJ? Acucrack remix)]

I've been looking forward to seeing The Coup again since 2006. They're probably best known for the unfortunately timed release of the Party Music LP . In 2006 they opened for Les Claypool and damn near stole the show for me. Unfortunately I haven't bought the Street Sweeper Social Club CD yet, so I knew pretty much none of their music except the couple tracks I had listened to once. This is much more rock-with-a-rapper than The Coup, and it lacks a lot of the funk that makes me love The Coup, but they're different bands. Street Sweeper was good, and Tom Morello is great. In addition to their own songs, they covered the Paper Planes by M.I.A. Also, Boots Riley is simply a blurry guy, and cannot be photographed. And since we're talking about sampling a sample of a Clash song, Why doesn't anyone cover Guns of Brixton?

I've seen Nine Inch Nails many, many times, and as always the show was great. This was a little different format to allow for Jane's Addiction's set, so the sets were kind of short, but NIN played a fast-paced set and fit in lots of material into the relatively short time they had. This was a much faster-paced show than in November, for instance, which had a lot more concept-type instrumentals. It's sad to think this might be the final tour, though I never buy that. It was quite a while between tours in the '90s for instance. We'll miss you Trent, until you come back around.

During the NIN set, Natalie started elbowing me to death, and said "HUMANWINE" and was pointing. So I started looking around and thought I saw a guy who looked like M@, and was looking around for Holly, but saw nothing. Turns out that Holly was about 4" off my port bow, and I was looking over her to look for her. If I'd noticed her I surely would have tapped her and let her know how much we loved watching them work, and how we plan to watch them again soon, as well as to ask to get a pic with her. Seriously, go see HUMANWINE. Funnest. Live. Show. Ever. As an example of how ridiculous it is that I was staring right at this girl and didn't notice her, see this tattoo evidence:

This was my first time seeing Jane's Addiction, and I couldn't have been happier with their set. We don't see enough absolute shredding guitar hero Rock Stars and I loved watching Dave Navarro tear these songs up. Sound-wise it was pretty bass-heavy, but they were loud and hard, and that's what I wanted. They closed the set with Stop! and acoustic Jane Says. They played most everything I'd wanted to hear and they played it loud. And with good lights, and fun outfits.

Here's my attempt at explaining myself on the quality of these photos. I suck. I think I forgot how to take pictures during the NIN set, which is super hard for me to take decent pictures of in the first place with so much strobing backlighting. The Jane's Addiction set turned out much better, though it's a bit of a Navarro-fest. What can I say, he's a very pretty man.

I also learned that digital zoom is sold by charlatans, to morons. I'd never tried using it before and it was a huge mistake. We were back far enough that it seemed like a good idea at the time, and the pics looked pretty reasonable on the camera as I took them, but man did it make them all pixellated. Live and learn I guess, here are some of the better ones from the night, more here:

Pictures

[music | Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Tower of Song] -- note: This isn't as much worth chasing down as it sounds, more just "fun".

¿Quien es mas Macho: Leonard Cohen, o Nick Cave?

Tonight's Leonard Cohen show will certainly have been the coolest show I go to this year. As people have been saying all tour, he just keeps going and going. This show clocked 3:15 including a 15 minute intermission. The arrangements were spot on, and at 74, he can run and skip around the stage better than I could. I am horrible at remembering sets, songs I know happened were:

Everybody Knows
Tower of Song
First We Take Manhattan
Boogie Street (Robinson)
A thousand Kisses Deep
Waiting for the Miracle
Democracy
Suzanne
Take this Waltz
Anthem
The Future
I'm your Man
Perfect Offering
Chelsea Hotel
Hallelujah
If It Be Your Will (Webb Sisters, awesomely)
Bird on a Wire?

Closing Time (laughs)
I Tried to Leave You (bigger laughs)

Fill in what I'm missing if you could, that would be swell.

Pictures and less than apt comparisons

Study this, there will be a quiz at the end of the week:

More from Schmoyoho with bonus Ron Paul

[music | DJ? Acucrack - Damage Control]

I guess we need to move to Londonderry now. Tupelo Music Hall was a pretty damn good little venue, except for the whole "having chairs" thing. The Tupelo Guy said at the beginning that this would be about the most energetic band you'd see at the venue, which is probably for the best, because honestly all you want to do is dance, but you just can't.

Luckily, we had 3 tickets, and one went unused, which is for the best, so we could move around a little, until the woman in front of me castrated me with the corner of her chair.

But really, the sound was good, the lighting was minimal and good, and the crowd really got into the show, so it was a blast. We also found that there's a BYOB policy, so lots of people showed up with coolers ready to go. I gather there's some cover charge for this, but it's easily worth the cover not to have to run to the bar, and obviously 6-pack + cover is way cheaper than 6 beers from a bar.

There was no one opening for them, so the Beat went on around 8:30 and we were back on the road by like 10:15, which is just amazingly early. They played all the Beat songs you'd want to hear and we got some General Public love.

I think I'll have to get the new record, which I honestly didn't know existed.

I just finished up reading a really good interview with Dave Wakeling from a couple of weeks ago. It does a good job of covering a lot of the drama around the dueling Beat incarnations that are currently touring, FYC, and IRS records nut-jobbery. Fascinating.

Here are a couple of the less crappy pictures I was able to get from Row J, the ears were the bane of my photo taking existence, but that's going out for you, they were fun, and people should have fun at shows, not worry about some moron 10 rows back with a camera:

There are a couple more pictures in the Flickr set

Do it now. My site begs of you.

Yeah, my wife's a web designer, what's your point?