Justice for Privacy Pretexters

I don't know about you but every time I hear the word "pretext" bandied about I keep thinking of something that teens do before they start txt-ing on their phones and not doing something on a pretext. Oh well, its probably just me.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when HP Chairman Patrician Dunn said how she knew nothing about the pretexting investigations and everyone told her everything was kosher. Then she went on with a bunch of her cronies to take the fifth to avoid incriminating herself, I mean take the fifth, WTF? Don't tell me... you were doing it on the advice of your lawyer. Maybe Ms Dunn if you've really nothing to fear you should start taking some advice from your conscience?

I'm sure there are hundreds of thousands of people working for HP who have nothing to do with this and are deeply disgusted by the hijinx of their board. After all lets not lose site that someone was actually leaking information here - just following examples from the White House no doubt. Anyway, I'm not going to be buying an HP computer any time soon, maybe next time there is a snitch on the board someone might actually take a principled stand and call their board on a principle of ethics... if they have ethical leg to stand on.

And by the way - hasn't anyone at HP heard of anonymous Internet protocols - they are ideal for leaking confidential documents, no strings or pretexts attached!

Franklin Diplomacy

Today I was just heading off to work when I got stuck in my local streets behind one of those big ass SUVs I love to bitch and moan about. I think it was an Escolade but really the point was it was crawling along the street, stopping, crawling, stopping and I couldn't get around it. Then it stopped stayed there and I figured he must be about to park so I backed up enough so I could see his driver side mirror clearly and waited. Then I noticed his reverse lights came on so I started to back up, realized there was someone coming up behind me so I laid on the horn.

SMACK

Oh well, there goes my third collision in that car in 13 years. One a hefty rear-ending (sufficient to give me whiplash for about a day) from a big Cadillac that didn't notice the light was red (or that I was waiting at the light...). I cut the guy a break - although my car was almost new the rear is actually very sturdy and all I had was some small imprints from his big wide front fender. It was actually pretty dumb because the whiplash could have ended up being much worse. The next collision was a front ender as I slid on a wet road into the back of stopped traffic on the notorious Hwy 17. Having a low front my car slid under the rear fender and it bent my hood somewhat and screwed up one headlight to point down too far. On reflection I really should have got that one fixed - it was the beginning of a steady decline in the exterior appearance, within a few more years it was already looking like a junker.

So enter the second front ender from my reversing friend in the SUV. Well after the guy behind me stopped honking (oh I was so tempted to reverse right into him...) the other guy parks and gets out. I get out and he just looks at my car. I look at my car. It took me a while before I noticed anything had changed. Basically he whacked my fender real hard (and dented it - big deal) on the right side and just about evened it up in the process since the first front ended had been on the left side. I think he dislodged another fog lamp but those hadn't worked in years and the other one was loose anyway. His monster seemed to have a smattering of my red paint over it but I couldn't really see that it was dented and he didn't even look.

Well I was about to say "Don't worry about it" when he thrusts two Franklins at me (you know $200) and says, "here I tell you what, have two hundred". So that was about it - Franklin diplomacy. I got more than I wanted, he got to keep his insurance clean and really my fender got straightened up.

Of course I really should have insisted on exchanging details - the $200 might have gone away then - later on I realized I didn't check my hood and sure enough its much harder to open now. However before it seemed to be barely closed, you could almost lift it up without the hood release being pulled. And I guess it was entirely possible he could have knocked my frame out of whack but it really didn't seem that hard - the fender took it and the first front end was much worse and had no effect. Ultimately if I'd gone the insurance route its anyone's give if I would ever have gotten any money since it would have been easy for them to argue the damage was already there since some of it has been there a looooong time and its hard to tell old and busted from new and busted. Plus they might have wanted to know just why my car is looking like such a wreck in the first place.

Next time I swear, I'm going to get a phone number - actually I did that once with my other car when it got rear-ended by a girl driving her mothers brand new Saturn. Made a real mess of her hood and I got $500 for scratches on my fender which no, I never took care of. Really, you couldn't see it for all the other scratches - that is what fenders are for. They should just put peel off layers of plastic coating on them or something.

Anyway, I feel like Ben Franklin just gave us some payback for that forged note we got passed the other day. Found money is all good as far as I'm concerned.

Not your soldier - anti-war for GENERATION TXT

I came across a flash movie called Not Your Soldier, it is aimed at young voters - those most likely to great drafted for Iraq. It is encouraging to see someone is thinking about getting the message across to "generation text" (as I'm going to call them - see the video to find out if you don't get it) which I suppose should be written typed as "GENERATION TXT" (or is it GNR8TN TXT?)

Yes I thought the chances of me actually coining that phrase were slim. A quick search proved me right. See the BBC page on Generation Text.

Flying on 9/11

Last week I flew to Canada via Las Vegas on September 11th. I didn't even think about the date until that morning but when we got to Oakland airport it was obvious it had had an effect on the flying public. We drove directly to the terminal drop-off point and parked with no waiting at all, something I haven't done there except very, very late at night. Then I went straight to the check in desk where the guy told me they had had only about 50 customers since the afternoon. I walked straight to the security check with not a soul in front of me. In fact I got there so fast I completely forgot to take my shoes off. Still the security guys were making full use of the extra time - I was given a complete shake down - they X-rayed my checkin baggage separately (don't they do that anyway?), poked my feet presumably to make sure they weren't fake, and searched all my bags. Once onboard although I had almost the worst seat on the plane - non-reclining last row seat next to the toilet - there was fortunately about twenty empty seats in front of me. All that made for a pretty relaxing flight into Toronto and I didn't once think about the plane being hijacked and crashing into a building...

Definition of a Terrorist

This is rather incoherent but...

I know Bush and other leaders of nation states get labeled as terrorists, and not only by the people they themselves label as terrorists. In my opinion it doesn't seem that unreasonable to me - often the only distinguishing feature between actions of "classic" terrorists like bin Laden or Hezbollah, and the nation state leaders is a matter of how well armed the people are, and whether they are a leader of a recognized nation state.

Well just now I read Howard Zinn's article "War-Mongering America Terrorizes the World" which seems to refine the problem of "What is a terrorist". Basically Zinn concludes if your actions inevitably lead to civilian deaths then you are ipso facto, a terrorist. I'm going to add that your actions must be intended to further some cause or other, presumably of some political nature - unless we want to allow for corporate terrorists (people who inevitably cause deaths due to known deficiencies their product in pursuit of profit).

I think Zinn's definition isn't quite there though, because basically almost any military action even in this day and age of "smart bombs" will inevitably lead to civilian deaths. So basically Zinn labels anyone participating in war, even between nation states, as a terrorist which doesn't seem very useful to me. I suppose you could ask the question "well did the action specifically target civilians?" but that also seems to have the flaw of "what is a civilian?".

In Iraq the US conveniently labels anyone who opposes the American occupation as "insurgents" so they become, in Bush's eyes, legitimate non-civilian targets and hence targeting them wouldn't be a terrorist act. In other peoples eyes they are still just civilians who oppose the military overthrow of their country. As another example in occupied France the allied forces would call the people who opposed German occupation "resistance fighters" or perhaps now "freedom fighters". We would certainly cringe at the thought of them being targeted and executed by the Germans. Yet really the Germans were just eradicating World War II "insurgents" something the US now legitimizes. This even seems to be happening at home, you don't even need to raise a weapon to be labeled as a terrorist, or a terrorist organization and lose all your civilian rights without recourse. Other people might just think you are legitimate dissenting civilians.

I wonder if 9/11 had only targeted non-civilian targets - like US Army bases would that have made Osama any less of a terrorist? Would he have instead been waging war against the US instead of terrorizing us? Would it have made the Bush rampage in Afghanistan and eventually Iraq any less inevitable?

Really I don't have a good definition of terrorist, but I do a) feel like the term is often applied for convenience to label anyone that is subjectively bad, b) our nation (and others) do knowingly engage in actions that inevitably cause civilian deaths, either directly or indirectly, and as such has lead to the "terrorizing" of people not directly and presently raising arms against us. As Zinn points out, this is at least immoral, if not as good as being a "terrorist" itself.

A year of rare piano performances

So far this year I've managed to catch both Keith Jarret and Oscar Peterson in concert. Jarret almost never does concerts and as for Peterson, well I have to admit I didn't even realize he was still alive and it was a super treat to walk down to Yoshis and see him right in my 'hood! It really doesn't get much better than this.

The real 9/11 conspiracy

9/11 conspiracy theorists and politicians should be watching Nova's Building on Ground Zero. Not only does it get a hell of a lot closer to providing a plausible explanation of the WTC collapses but also exposes an even more plausible conspiracy - that of government inaction to do anything about the lessons learned form the collapse and failure to implement improvements in building codes recommended by NIST. This includes really obvious stuff like wider stairways for escape, designing escape systems for full rather than partial evacuation so you can actually get people out before the structure exceeds its maximum fire rating, better fireproofing for steel that wont be damaged by maintenance or blown off in an explosion, and redundant critical systems.

What is driving that inaction? Well money of course, construction people, the government and others claim it would cost "millions of dollars in extra cost for each building" which is somewhat ironic when the government wrote a blank check in 2003 to invade Iraq that cost us hundreds of billions - a fraction of which would have paid for thousands of safer skyscrapers... If 9/11 had just lead to a big fire and a few hundred deaths do you think we would be in Iraq now?

Toward the end "Building on Ground Zero" focuses in on a new building in Shanghai destined to be the tallest in habited building in the world. The Chinese are proving to be anything but fruggle in that design - massively redundant structure, multiple reinforced safe havens accessible from stairs, interior and exterior elevators available for rescue to name but a few. The also mention the improvements used in the WTC 7 rebuild - far beyond code. So obviously some people get it, so why not just make all this mandatory and not leave the choice to be frugal and put lives at risk in the hands of penny pinching developers?