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April rambling #1: Beyond Foolishness

I’ve seen at least a half dozen invitations on Facebook in 2017 from people I know IRL who are already “friends”.

It’s sort of what Leslie, the assistant administrator of ABC Wednesday called Life at light speed. The line from “Feelin’ groovy” – “Slow down, you’re moving too fast” – comes to mind.

So not being able to run the American government like a business is NOT a bug of the system, it’s a feature. We’re not “customers” of the government; we are, or should be, the board of directors.

The negation of the climate change initiatives are beyond foolishness. “They are an affront on God’s creation and on all of humanity.” I like that; unsubtle. A lot of Catholics are ticked off. And climate change will be an economic disaster.

That made Congress decimating Internet privacy rules only the SECOND worst thing that happened that day the last week in March, and it IS terrible.

Oh, and Obama-era LGBT protections were revoked, letting federal contractors discriminate.

At least the right-wing media helped Obamacare in spite of itself. Not that it’s adequate. Here’s a generally healthy young woman, under 30 and uninsured, who had untreated strep throat and is now coping with the consequences. Note that she ended up going to the emergency room, one of the cuts proposed in the Republican bill that failed.

In some poll after the GOP healthcare defeat, 14% each blamed the Democrats, the Republicans in Congress and Orange. 49% thought it failed because it was a bad bill, which it assuredly was.

Put another way, it is all transcendental solipsism. No wonder we need comedians to explain him.

Timeline: How President Obama handled Syria.

Satire: Ivanka appointed to head anti-nepotism task force.

Not satire: Financial trust altered on February 10, a month after announcing that DJT had isolated himself from his interests, to allow secret withdrawals any time he wants.

My buddy Amy Biancolli had done a TEDxAlbany talk You’re still here — Living after suicide a couple years ago. She’s been sampled! fragile – i want to be cold. She also writes about her sister Lucy, who committed suicide a quarter century ago.

My favorite Don Rickles appearances: In a 2-part Dick Van Dyke Show, he holds up Rob and a pregnant Laura in an elevator, then Laura and the writers perform at the prison he’s in.

Hope you can read this article about Glenn and Miriam Lawrence Leupold, my pastors. The ‘Religious left’ is emerging as U.S. political force.

On a more prosaic note, I’ve seen at least a half dozen invitations on Facebook in 2017 from people I know IRL who are already “friends,” including one from P K Miller, who died earlier this year. Here’s a piece on Facebook cloning, which isn’t being hacked, since changing one’s password doesn’t help.

I’ll be giving up running ABC Wednesday after the end of Round 20 around 4 July. Melody has agreed to take it over, with a new URL, and I’ve decided to stay on the team that visits folks. Melody sent me a card, all the way from the Netherlands, thanking me, which was very nice.

Dustbury has been blogging for 21 years. Who DOES that?

Finally, some more music: Emmylou Harris covering Chuck Berry, and Coverville 1165: The Chuck Berry Tribute.

The Internet domain of Colombia

Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s leftist president, seemed to bask in Assange’s bad-boy glow.

Chris asked in the previous round of Ask Roger Anything, albeit not until December:

Have you ever wondered why Assange is in the Ecuadorian embassy or all those fake news places are registered to Columbia? Don’t those seem like weirdly arbitrary choices?

Why Ecuador’s embassy?

Let’s take the Colombian connection first. The two-letter Internet domain for Colombia is .co, which looks a whole lot like .com or some new generic top-level domain. Go Daddy has put on the big push advertising these new domains, at least in the past.

Some countries restrict the use of their domain to registrants who are in, or are from, their country. Colombia does not. Thus, one gets sites such as wsj.com.co or nbcnews.com.co out there to try to fool the user, and often succeeding.

There are some interesting country code top-level domains that are more open:

.fm for the Federated States of Micronesia, an independent island nation located in the Pacific Ocean. “Except for reserved names like .com.fm, .net.fm, .org.fm and others, any person in the world can register a .fm domain for a fee, much of the income from which goes to the government and people of the islands. The domain name is popular (and thus economically valuable) for FM radio stations and streaming audio websites

.io for British Indian Ocean Territory, treated as “a generic top-level domain (gTLD) because ‘users and webmasters frequently see [the domain] more generic than country-targeted.'”

.nu for the island state of Niue. “It was one of the first ccTLDs to be marketed to the Internet at large as an alternative to the gTLDs .com, .net, and .org… Commonly used by Danish, Dutch, and Swedish websites, because in those languages ‘nu’ means ‘now’.”

.tv for Tuvalu. “Except for reserved names like com.tv, net.tv, org.tv and others, any person may register second-level domains in TV. The domain name is popular, and thus economically valuable because it is an abbreviation of the word television.

.ws for Samoa. “The .ws domain is an abbreviation for ‘Western Samoa’, which was the nation’s official name in the 1970s when two-letter country codes were standardized. While there are no geographic restrictions on registration of most second-level .ws domains, .org.ws, .gov.ws, and .edu.ws registration is restricted.

“The .ws country code has been marketed as a domain hack, with the .ws purportedly standing for ‘World Site’, Web Site or Web Service, providing a ‘global’ Internet presence to registrants, as it supports all internationalized domain names

In other words, Colombia is the country for the faux sites because of the stroke of fortune that the Internet domain for Colombia is .co, and because there is money to be made.

As for Assange, this Washington Post article from October 2016 explains it well:

Ecuador treated Julian Assange like a trophy in 2012 when it opened the doors of its London embassy to the WikiLeaks founder, sheltering him from extradition to Sweden over rape allegations and, possibly, to the United States.

Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s leftist president, seemed to bask in Assange’s bad-boy glow, which gave the small South American nation a big role in a global drama. Protecting the WikiLeaks editor also gave Correa a way to poke Washington in the eye and look like a champion for press freedom even as he cracked down on journalists back home.

Correa embraced Assange’s mother at the presidential palace in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, and championed the Australian “hacktivist” as an anti-imperialist comrade-in-arms.

Now he’s treating Assange like a bad tenant who won’t leave.

There may be other factors in play here that I’m not aware of, but I don’t think it’s some odd South American conspiracy.

Haunted computers

SOMETHING is emanating from our house that risked disconnecting not just our service, but the service of a dozen and a half other customers in our neighborhood.

My friend Broome posted the xkcd cartoon above on his Facebook page. He explained that his astonishingly patient wife is “the only one who believes me when I say I experience certain things, people and places differently, like this great restaurant that always serves me uneatable food,…or haunted computers…or…”

I totally relate. At work, I have my computer switched out more often than anyone. I used to believe that I had some sort of electromagnetism that wore down the functionality of electronic devices.

I got an Android tablet from work a few years ago, but in a few months, it stopped working. I bought another one, and it lasted just as long before refusing to charge. My current Amazon Fire is operable so far, knock my forehead.

And it’s not just me, it’s my house.

As I’ve noted, I’ll walk down the street talking on my cellphone fine – assuming it doesn’t read “Low Battery,” which it often does, even when I hadn’t turned it on. Walking into the house, the signal nearly dies. This is a problem when I’m calling Time Warner Cable to report the Internet and phone is out.

Two weeks after I contacted the company, a TWC repair guy came to our house to fix the service that was no longer in need of repair. The bottom line: remember a couple of weeks ago when I joked that I wondered “whether the outage had anything to do with the TWC truck that was in front of our house just before the service went down”? Well, it DID!

Apparently, SOMETHING is emanating from our house that risked disconnecting not just our service, but the service of a dozen and a half other customers in our neighborhood. It could have been the cable connected to an old TV (not the case) or other factors.

Rather than having all of our neighbors losing service, and them contacting TWC, TWC sent a “repair” person up the utility pole to disconnect OUR service! And didn’t even tell us! The guy at my door arrived to fix the problem, assuming I hadn’t noticed the service had been out for a fortnight.

My house and I break cable services, and Android tablets, and all sorts of electronic devices. I’m not computerphobic; it’s just my electrons mucking up everything.

xkcd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

T is for Trolls

Trolls never need proof of their claims. They get their power from readers’ outrage.

Trolls, in Scandinavian folklore, were entities that “live far from human habitation… and are considered dangerous to human beings… Trolls may be ugly and slow-witted…”

Whereas an Internet troll is “a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.” Very similar.

“This sense of the word troll and its associated verb trolling are associated with Internet discourse but have been used more widely. Media attention in recent years has equated trolling with online harassment. For example, mass media has used troll to describe ‘a person who defaces Internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families.'”

I was thinking about this because some “person” suggested that shootings in Sandy Hook, CT in 2012 did not happen, and he would give anyone $25,000 if they could provide him with “proof.”

Naturally, this caused all sorts of anger. Someone wrote, “He’s the one making an extraordinary claim. It’s up to him to support his hypothesis with evidence.” But I think that’s wrong. Trolls never need proof of their claims. They get their power from readers’ outrage.

A few months ago, SamuraiFrog linked to this interesting article, 10 Former Internet Trolls Explain Why They Quit Being Jerks. One response, in particular, I found instructive:

1) I had two different personalities and demeanours, one online and one offline. I even ended up being obnoxious online to somebody I knew personally and he pointed it out to me. It was a wake up call.

2) I wasn’t making any friends or allies. Even when I was right about something or other people held the same opinions, I was getting fewer and fewer responses or agreements. I didn’t care about the numbers, but I realized I was making myself irrelevant and unwelcome in discussions and forums. And sometimes I was banned…

3) I saw the effects of trolls. The increasing number of news stories… about suicides, harassment, death threats, racism and other revolting behaviour got to be too much. I may not have been guilty of any of those types of assaults, but I recognized that I was part of the problem.

4) I was starting to become the target of trolls and abuse… I saw a news item about a man who left a white supremacist group and changed his tune when he realized the group’s list of “undesirables to be euthanized” included his own mentally disabled son. It wasn’t until the hate affected him personally that he realized he was on the wrong side. Same here.

When foolish people say inane things online, feel free to vent your anger. But know that you may just be feeding the beast.

ABC Wednesday – Round 17

October rambling #2: absquatulate

I have a stuffed lion with a wild mane which I named Lenny.

The office move is mostly complete, but the inner offices are chaos. The recovery goes well, so now I’m trying to catch up on everything that got put on hold.

How Propaganda Works.

The Rise and Impact of Digital Amnesia.

Re: Hassan v. City of New York lawsuit against the NYPD over its surveillance program targeting Muslims. Plus the dreadful Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Greenland Is Melting Away.

MIT Technology Review: Why Self-Driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci

There are No Innocent Black People.

Buck Rogers and the Copyright Trolls.

Plus The Orwell estate is cracking down on people who dare to use the number “1984” without permission.

Pope Francis has NOT endorsed Bernie Sanders for President.

The 1,657 TV shows that spent less time on the air than the Hillary Clinton Benghazi hearing.

Pastor, former Arkansas governor, and current Republican candidate Mike Huckabee Suggests Poor People Should Be Sold Into Slavery For Stealing.

The Atlantic has a LOT of interesting videos on various topics, among them ‘Don’t Sneak’: A Father’s Command to His Gay Son in the 1950s.

Say “no” more often. You’ll be happier and healthier.

6 Phrases With Surprisingly Racist Origins.

Jim Crow-Era Travel Guides for Black Families Now Online Through Schomburg. Hey, I wrote about this.

Arthur does some Internet Wading: Truth and facts. I almost picked items 2 and 3 myself for this feature in my blog.

There’s an online petition to Congress to end Daylight Saving Time, which I signed, because DST makes no sense.

Happy 600th Anniversary of The Battle of Agincourt.

Cole slaw killed Ogden Nash.

I still need to see more films with Maureen O’Hara, the lovely actress who died recently at the age of 95.

Albany basketball legend Luther “Ticky” Burden died.

Marty Ingels, R.I.P. I watched I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster the year it was on. And Al Molinaro died, who I watched on The Odd Couple and Happy Days.

‘First Lady of Jazz,’ Lee Shaw, dies at 89. I talked with her a couple times during breaks in her sets. She was a wonderfully gracious, and an amazingly talented musician.

This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the passing of Leonard Bernstein. True: I have a stuffed lion with a wild mane which I named Lenny, in honor of the composer and conductor.

The Beatles “Revolution” Original Video, Remastered, New Audio Mix. My FAVORITE iteration of this song. Also, A Day In The Life.

LISTEN NOW, before it disappears. First Listen: Bob Dylan, ‘The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12’.

There’s a reason so many people love ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’

K-Chuck Radio: The Rocshire Memories. Featuring a song by Eddie Munster.

The three times Nasreddin was called upon to speak in public.

The word absquatulate came out of an odd fad in America in the 1830s for making playful words that sounded vaguely Latin. My spell checker recognizes it, too, Dan!

Now I Know: The Epidemic That Saved Lives and Winnie the Pooh-Poohed and Cattaxtrophy.

Advice From the Creator of Calvin and Hobbes; Comic by Zen Pencils. Words by Bill Watterson, art by Gavin Aung Than.

About comic book inking.

Ken Levine mentions Oscar Levant, confuses readers, comes up with a list of some people you might want to know.

Bob and Ray, and Dave Garroway, plugging the new show called TODAY.

GOOGLE ALERT (me)

The TWCQT gang reflects on which penciler/inker teams have had the most impact on them.

Alan David Doane Remembering His Mom on Her 90th Birthday.

GOOGLE ALERT (not me)

Would-be Bond: The naked truth. “Enter New Zealander Roger Green – ex-All Blacks rugby union player, ex-sheep farmer, and party animal.”

Colonial Heights (VA) mourns loss of Roger Green of the Chamber of Commerce. “Green had been battling Urachal cancer, a rare form of bladder cancer, for several months. He was 64 years old.”