Google Censorship

Posted on September 24, 2011 by ehurst

You can Google for censorship and get a lot of information, but you aren’t likely to find much about Google’s own censorship actions.
No one should be surprised effective political dissent will get results, and those results aren’t the political reform suggested. The results are more oppression, usually targeted at the dissent. Savvy Net users already know Google was built on covert funding from the CIA. They lie about such things, but have a powerful connection with the US government. Effective dissent requires two things: content and traffic. Genuine flakes don’t get much traffic, and controlled opposition won’t have the content. Sites using Google’s services, particularly Blogger, run a high risk of being summarily shut down if they are effective in dissent.
Such is the case with Activist Post. A couple days ago, they were shut down and Google is not answering their contacts. If you really want that content, you’ll have to visit them at Before It’s News. As a side note, I despise sites like Before It’s News because they love heavy JavaScript and have refused to answer my complaints. Their front page is so loaded with ponderous scripting, it takes several minutes to load, not because of a slow connection, but every browser I have has to run hot and heavy to process that crap. I hate JScript, and I don’t think much of people who think it’s great stuff. The folks at Before It’s News are downright truculent about it, and all their content is controlled by it. You get zero content without allowing them to hammer your system through your browser. This is almost as bad as censorship. Let’s not forget, there are a surprisingly large number of blind computer users, and most of them user browsers which don’t process JScript, so sites like that are closed to them. The point here is, censorship by the government isn’t necessary when the site is crappy to begin with. Activist Post made a really bad choice using Blogger, but sharing through Before It’s News is little better.
(Update: The domain name for Activist Post now resolves, but they are struggling to get it working properly as of midday, Sunday 25 September 2011.)
But like the pirates who have been chased off the mainstream services before us, we who engage in truth seeking and hoping to be effective in our dissent need to start planning for hard times. While it’s possible the various governments will conspire to shut down the Net as we know it, more likely is they will simply wall off effective dissent from the masses.
Consider this: Most sheeple aren’t interested in truth, but they might enjoy some dissent. As long as their dissent is based on false impressions, it’s just fine with the government. The controlled opposition sites will advertise bogus censorship, but the real thing is actually quite effective. As with many other things, if you hear a lot about censorship, it’s not actually happening. Those who strive to bring genuine dissent within reach of the sheeple will be hammered quickly, as soon as the government bureaucracy gets around to them. It’s based on how the government evaluates the threat. I’m not sure what Activist Post did which triggered the shut down, or if it was just the case it was finally their turn. Those with real threatening information, like Cryptome and Public Intelligence are always at risk, and have fought this constantly since the beginning. Others are put in prison on trumped up charges, like Edgar J. Steele. His site is out of date, but you can use any search engine to learn more about his current status. A few dissenters, it seems, have been assassinated via covert ops, but you’ll never learn that from the MSM. Being too successful at breaching the consciousness of sheeple with elements of truth will get you in trouble. But we dare not stop.
Those of us who want to know the truth will have to work a little harder in the near future to keep up with this stuff. Those of us who want to tell our own truths need to keep an eye on the options. Even WordPress seems to have caved to political correctness from time to time, shutting down blogs for daring to be too controversial. But for now, Blogger and WordPress are the two biggest free blog services, and are the best place to get attention. There are lots of lesser known services, easily found with any search engine, but any use of free services like this runs a risk. Track record means a lot, and bad publicity against Blogger and WordPress has been censored, too. I also use My Opera for my my other blog, and they only censor truly alarming pornography or shocking content. It has to be pretty extreme, but I’ve never heard of them hitting mere political dissent. Then again, they’re based in Norway and most users are not American, and the site works best with Opera browser.
I have tried to use one other service: Free Conversant. They’ve been around for more than a decade, and are vociferously committed to free expression. However, the site is pretty obscure, and it requires some serious coding skill to modify, particularly CSS. Even then, the options are limited. However, they do offer a good chance to learn and they will respond to emails.
How long will such services remain? It’s hard to say. Economics is the main question right now. For example, can they afford the bandwidth for a surge in popular traffic? So long as the backers are viable, the service is likely to be there. You can always follow the pirates’ example in chasing down “bullet proof” hosting solutions, and not all of them are expensive. There are plenty of cheap hosting services which will tend to resist political pressure, and not a few will adamantly require a court order. Then the question is how likely are you to face such a thing. Most of us are safe right here at WordPress. I’d suggest Activist Post do a little research and take their domain name to another provider, someone with a greater degree of political independence, and perhaps with a strong Unix server package which is harder crack. The situation is fluid and we all would benefit from at least thinking about back-up plans in case things get worse.
Things will get worse, but I doubt it calls for paranoia. Still, if it’s worth doing, do it better.

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Music and Self-Deception

Posted on September 23, 2011 by ehurst

I’m not a real musician. I just happen to be able to sing some, and can almost read music — I can pick out the correct notes on a keyboard, but can’t actually play. People tend to like my singing, but my baritone voice is highly unreliable due to capricious and persistent allergies. It’ s not often I can actually use the full range, which is nearly three octaves. I’ve led singing in church worship a few times, once or twice in a regular position. My primary weakness is remembering the intervals between notes well enough to reproduce them, all on pitch. The best way to work on that is sing the intended song a capella until it sounds right.
I’ve worked with youth choirs since the last time I was young enough to be in one. A primary and growing problem with kids singing is most of them learn what little they know by singing along with their favorite artists. Typically, they wear headphones, or worst of all, earbuds. The effect is to become absorbed in a sounding atmosphere which masks their own voice from their ears.
I suppose if you watched the premier episodes of X Factor on TV the past few nights, you were confronted with people whose singing shows that sort of bad self-training. They can’t carry a tune on their own because they’ve never heard themselves without that poor quality of music blasting in their ears. Most modern recordings are almost completely lacking in dynamic range. Granted, a few contestants appeared utterly tone deaf, but several sounded like most kids trying to sing without any formal training.
It’s bad enough folks never really hear themselves the way others hear them. Our voices echo partly inside our own heads, and what we hear in our ears is never quite what comes out into the air. If someone records us singing and we hear the recording, the first few times we are shocked. I’ve had just enough formal training to get away with singing in public. I know I don’t hear the tones you hear, and I have to make sure my mouth and neck are in proper physical position for sound to come out as clean and pure as it can. Then I have to consciously relax my throat in certain places and breathe carefully. A lot of folks auditioning have never learned any of that.
One particular choir instructor I worked with made much of getting the kids to hear themselves as they actually sounded, then correcting all their stupid habits, habits which arose from trying to sound in their own ears like those they mimicked. I learned an awful lot from that guy, and I’ve never forgotten much of it. I can be as lazy as anyone else, but if I intend to be heard by others, I always go through the mental exercise of doing it right. It’s hard work when you do more than two or three songs in succession. Almost no one instinctively breathes correctly, so keeping your stomach muscles working that much is tiring. A depressing number of kids give up before they have a chance to learn much. Some simply refuse to learn, and insist it’s alright because it sounds okay in their ears.
So the next time you observe and hear someone making an utter fool of themselves in public, auditioning with gusto and making sounds which violate your sanity, it’s usually one of three things. It takes a lot of moxie, but you can go too far. (1) Some may simply suffer from blind narcism. (2) A few are tone deaf; they simply can’t tell the difference. (3) Most have simply never heard themselves a capella, never had anyone play their recorded singing back to them.

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Womanhood: The Big Western Lie

Posted on September 22, 2011 by ehurst

Fundamental to our modern Western notion of what men and women ought to be to each other is the Western Medieval Mythology of Mariolatry.
Please note: I don’t attack revering Mary as the mother of Jesus, and this is not about religion, per se. What I refer to here is the social mythology which arose from the primitive version of Mariolatry which lurked about in the Middle Ages. If you can’t recognize the differences between current teachings of the Roman Church (and others) on Mary versus the typical mythology some nobles and churchmen exploited during the Middle Ages, you won’t understand what I’m trying say. Mother Mary as a figure of religious devotion is one thing; fallen human women are quite another. Medieval noble and royal women aspired to divert some of the reverence for Mary toward themselves. While I don’t subscribe to Catholic teachings on Mary, I also won’t waste time attacking it.
The point is some women and men with a hand on the cultural pulse of their Medieval world exploited religious devotion to create various false idols, seldom because of any grand altruistic motives or actual religious self-denial, but because they found it useful in promoting their own welfare is some way or another.
Scripture makes clear we cannot possibly know the motives of another without a revelation from God. However, we are encouraged to discern probable motives based on behavior, and apply the standards of God’s justice accordingly. The Laws of God have always offered lots of room for mistaken perceptions, misguided beliefs, and mixed motives, all with ways of cleaning up your mess so as to claim whatever blessings God offered under His Laws. Further, He still requires victims to generously offer absolution for most human foibles, and demands a vigorous pursuit of restoration of good relations.
Now is the time — it’s always the right time in the mystical sense — to fix past mistakes. We can’t pretend any crusade to correct the rest of the world will ever accomplish any good thing. But we can always proceed with fixing our own mistakes, and we should do so whenever they are made apparent to us. I invite you to examine the good, clear explanation offered by Vox Day on the big lie of modern femininity. Human nature has not changed since the first day we were kicked out the Garden of Eden. Lots of externalities have shifted, but the root nature of humanity is immutable from where we stand. There is no such thing as evolution on that level.
I assert this without apology as the Word of God. Vox’s explanation, best I can tell, reflects that Word of God:

First, you can’t argue with the facts and you can’t really hold people morally responsible for the vagaries of biological chemistry. The reason women were never permitted to vote or be involved in government isn’t because ancient men hated ancient women or got their kicks out of oppressing them, they simply lacked the ability or the desire to permit abstract idealism about sexual equality to trump what they observed in their daily reality….
Second, understand that society is extremely vested in deceiving men and taking advantage of them for the benefit of propagating both the species and the society. If most young men truly understood what a little slut their pedestalized picture of ideal young womanhood actually is, even if her sluttiness is only in her own mind, they would tend to recoil. All are fallen… and Eve fell first.

He goes on to say lesser men would not marry the gal who was finally ready to settle down if he knew where she had roamed before she met him. What he doesn’t say is the whole thing simply excuses immorality, both in the profligate evil of uncommitted recreational sex and in deceiving the bulk of men to manipulate their behavior. There are very good reasons the Ancient Hebrews had such a straight-laced social structure: It restrained human evil efficiently. If we pretend there is no human evil to restrain, we call God a liar.
Men with a mission do not particularly like claiming abandoned, well-used female flesh. There remains a very high risk she’ll continue seeking opportunities to sate her own brand of lust. This is far more than simply having to face the risk of raising someone else’s children. Scripture imbues the whole thing with a much higher, mystical quality, while bluntly rejecting the doctrines of Gnosticism:

Or do you not know that anyone who is united with a prostitute is one body with her? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” But the one united with the Lord is one spirit with him. Flee sexual immorality! “Every sin a person commits is outside of the body” — but the immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God with your body. (1 Corinthians 6:16-20 NET Free Bible)

It matters. Taking sex lightly is evil. You can nobly choose to overlook the former indiscretions of someone truly penitent when it comes to selecting a spouse, but don’t be a fool. Look at it realistically, and toss all the cultural mythology in the trash. Women are what they are, and men are no better, just different.
A good man is not boastful, but does what he says. He tends to avoid discussing himself in the first place, but makes himself known by his efforts at pursuing his mission. He has a strong conviction what that mission is, even if he can’t or won’t tell you. Where things don’t matter, he absorbs a lot of crap and doesn’t take himself too seriously. On the mission, he is resolute and will die before surrendering. He selects a woman who supports his mission as her own, and is contented with whatever gifts she brings to that. He could do without her, but prefers facing the mission with someone he can trust beyond the bounds of this life.
A good woman knows her own weaknesses, and willingly submits to a good man. She knows the fire of envy burns in her own soul simply because she is a woman, and can’t trust her own feelings, even as she knows her variability is part of what make her so fascinating. She takes advantage of her youthful beauty to build a deep and lasting love that will outlast her looks. Her salvation is in building the nest, and she knows it, knows the nest is always bigger than just her own household. She never forgets she can’t do it alone, and patiently waits for her man to reach some sense of accomplishment because that’s what makes him worth her admiration. So she encourages him to drive on with whatever he can’t put aside, and does her best to fire his quest with full devotion, while never pretending she could possibly decide for him what it is.

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Clueless: Tulsa World News Site

Posted on September 21, 2011 by ehurst

Where I live in Oklahoma, the state capital is just a few miles west. It’s a busy place with all the horrors of any modern socialist bureaucracy. Some of the buildings are almost tolerable, but most are ugly as sin. They stand as an island of power and prestige, with too little public parking, and half surrounded by poverty and decrepit housing. Awhile back some big politics and private investment turned some of squalor back into decent housing for upper middle class liberal folks. It meant kicking a bunch of poor folks out, of course. In other words, pretty ordinary place as smaller state capitals go.
The real money and power in the state is mostly in Tulsa, a couple hours’ drive northeast of here up Interstate 44. It’s a different kind of stupid there. It’s where most of the big church money is in this state, too. The big church money here in OKC area is divided between liberals and conservatives, but in Tulsa it’s just about all conservative, though of different versions mixed together, and lots more zeros in their bank accounts. But it’s still stupid.
A primary example is the website of a big newspaper, the Tulsa World. Not too long ago they upgraded their site. Now, you are not permitted to visit their web pages unless you accept a huge collection of predatory tracking cookies, and allow them to run all sorts of very annoying and distracting JavaScript animations. I’ve tried a couple of times to ask them if they realized their site was not simply non-compliant with standards, but openly hostile to blind users, for example. Never got an answer back.
It’s their site. They can do what they like. But it’s everybody’s Internet. I’m not one to grab an attorney and file an ADA lawsuit, which would probably get some traction, since that newspaper pretends they are public servants and the local governments are required to post certain public notices with them. Instead, I’ll simply try to embarrass them a little by making some noise here on my quiet little blog.
But if you bother to read this whinygram of mine, perhaps you’ll give some consideration to pressuring the Tulsa World and other similar cranky websites. These people do not get it. They are still operating under all the assumptions of a paper-printing operation, and can’t imagine the Internet is any different.
Oh, and while I don’t have to run a business, nor a whole website of that size, I do have friends who do. Advertising is one thing, but I am assured by some pretty honest and ethical folks there is simply no valid excuse for demanding people accept tracking cookies, nor requiring them to tolerate dancing and spinning graphics just to make a profit on their news presentation. Tulsa World folks are greedy slimeballs, the sort who would sell their mothers for the right price. I say that, of course, based on other information I have about them which has nothing to do with the Internet. Hey, this is the MSM, after all.

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A Thousand Ways to Say: Be Yourself

Posted on September 20, 2011 by ehurst

The biggest mistake we make is rejecting opportunities to assert our personal independence. The second biggest is refusing appropriate support when it’s available. Both require you bother to look in the mirror of your soul pretty often.
It would require a set of encyclopedias to cover all the various ways I’ve heard it said: Discover yourself and live from that. Chase down all the most useful schools of psychology. Within their acknowledged limitations, they always seek the same thing, which is to reduce dependency and encourage accountability. How about Transactional Analysis? That’s all about breaking out of the conditioning of your youth, and breaking the habits of responding to the expectations of others to whom you really owe no such dependency. Parent Effectiveness Training? Same story but the other side of the coin; stop taking control and responsibility for things you can’t fix.
Game Theory? Throw aside the cultural mythology of human sexual response and operate according the facts of human nature. Don’t be restrained by feminist lies which dominate our social structure. Or the politics of the Tea Party? Plenty of mythology there, but the central theme of reducing the Nanny State has always been a good idea. I go farther by saying the modern State is all wrong in the first place, since it is specifically formulated to dissolve human rights and freedoms by making them mere ideas subject to debate. Western Civilization refuses to admit there is anything of substance beyond the material world, despite any pile of words to the contrary. You aren’t permitted to propose moral realities which aren’t subject to human inspection and logical analysis. Among those higher moral assumptions is the very fundamental necessity of people taking an awful lot more control over their own lives than any Western government can tolerate. It’s the nature of the beast.
Yet we are also designed with distinct limitations. We are required to seek a certain level of protection and support from others. Some threats are just too big, and no one is competent and talented at everything humans need to do. The big problem we always have until The End of all things will be the vast number of ways we do it wrong. There has to be some balance between dependence and independence, and human history has seen precious little effective balance.
In raising these issues, I would hardly be helpful if I pretend my answer is the only right one. That would be a grand hypocrisy. Rather, the purpose here is to raise the question. That’s the only real answer I have. I’ve written it repeatedly: Questioning is the answer. That’s the whole point. The only way to get it wrong is not looking into it. Underlying my philosophy-theology-theory is the assumption whatever absolutes there may be in all of this would surely be outside our ability to perceive and state. The best possible world includes the natural conflicts arising from differences of opinion. It’s the shape of the give-n-take I struggle most to define. Again, there has to be some balance between seeking our own self-realization versus stomping someone else unnecessarily.
It’s not the answer, but the seeking part for which I have the strongest sense of moral definition. Nothing else I do or say matters a whit against this one thing: You need to search.

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Scientific Linux 6: Build Chromium Browser

Posted on September 19, 2011 by ehurst

I couldn’t find a current build for any of the RHEL 6 clones of Chromium, so I did it myself.
Short and sweet; if you don’t understand the process of using RPMbuild, you’ll need to read up on that.
Get your SRPMs here. Take one of each SRPM listed there. Aside from the basic development libraries, and whatever extra dependencies pop up during the RPMbuild process, you should probably start with:

yum install subversion pkgconfig python perl gcc-c++ bison flex gperf nss-devel nspr-devel gtk2-devel glib2-devel freetype-devel atk-devel pango-devel cairo-devel fontconfig-devel GConf2-devel dbus-devel alsa-lib-devel libX11-devel expat-devel bzip2-devel dbus-glib-devel elfutils-libelf-devel libjpeg-devel mesa-libGLU-devel libXScrnSaver-devel gnome-keyring-devel cups-devel libXtst-devel libXt-devel pam-devel

That’s according to this page. Finally, you’ll need the latest libvpx, libvpx-utils and libvpx-devel from ATrpms — make sure you select the ones for your architecture (i686 vs. x86_64). The slightly older version available from SL repositories won’t work, leaving you an unfix-able error on building one of the SRPMs.
I’m not sure what the canonical build order is, but I went in this order and it worked fine:

  1. v8
  2. libsrtp
  3. libjingle
  4. chromium-ffmpegsumo
  5. chromium

Naturally, you’ll need both the base and “devel” package from each build except the last, the browser itself. I note this build (12.0.742.91) does not offer the silly nonsense about trying to execute “text relocations” which aren’t allowed under SELinux. However, not a bit of your Chrome configurations will be picked up, and Chromium completely failed to import any bookmarks from anywhere. I had to manually move them and reinstall all the extensions I use (Flashblock, Adblock Plus, and Ghostery).
Enjoy.

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Soap Opera World

Posted on September 19, 2011 by ehurst

Few people are more deeply enslaved than those who won’t walk away.
These days the thing which angers me most is one person seeking to remove the options God granted to others. This ranges between literal physical force all the way down to the most subtle deceptions. Does the physically impotent bear any less guilt than the one simply distracted from birth? If all you’ve ever known are restrictions, then lightweight chains look like freedom. The widow who simply must have her daily dose of TV soap operas is no more guilty than the prisoner who avoided all those opportunities to work out so as to be harder to capture. Both forms of captivity were carefully planned by someone with a will to harm others for their own gain.
The world is a predatory place, and the consumption of life takes all forms. The balance of advantage swings like a pendulum. The cycle is familiar to most of us. Some shift in the natural environment brings a wealth of passive food, and the grazer population explodes. Behind them, the predators explode to exploit the grazers. At some point, the predators overpower their own food supply. Increasing competition eliminates the less able, sending them away empty handed to die. Among humans, the predators have implemented herding and controlling the grazers, but that can also be carried too far to work right.
In many ways, our world is currently near the end of that cycle. You can read chase the news sources, both mainstream and alternative, and find lots of soap opera, in all flavors. Name your poison. A current theme popular in many of these dramas is the impending crisis from excess debt. Whole countries have borrowed more than they could possibly repay. It was okay while the economy was rolling along, but there has been a contraction, a reduction in economic activity. We seem to see the system breaking down, unable to support the previous frenzy of activity. We see the very wealthy scrambling to maintain control, refusing to reduce their own frenzy of consumption. Because of the levers they can touch, which are completely out of our reach, we find them sucking up all the available wealth and leaving us nothing. So we stop producing and start scratching for survival, and a great many will simply not make it, lacking any comprehension and capability to adapt.
But when it all comes to a halt, will the plutocrats suffer any? Have they so confined the herd of grazers there is nothing left to strip from those bony carcasses?
That’s the drama, at least. The real threat is not that Greece is on the verge of defaulting, threatening to be the first domino to fall, knocking the whole thing flat in cascading waves of failure. The real threat is that we have been such suckers for those who actually run this system. If you read the news from all the various sources, it’s easy to miss the one important item: You and I are not in control of our destinies on that level. Sure, there are limits to this control, particularly for those of us who possess some superior ability to escape, either fleet of foot or smart enough to anticipate and dodge the predators’ swipe. The real problem is that we have chosen to be herded.
The reason soap operas succeed in capturing viewers is because we all need a sense of belonging. We are not solitary creatures unless something inside is broken. But substitute socializing on the TV or Internet cannot really fill that void, that sense of loneliness which is a primary effect of the Fall. Somewhere along the path out of the Garden, we forgot something which we were permitted to carry away with us. We were slapped with the curse of living by the sweat of our brows, but that didn’t mean we had to work alone. We could still reach across the gulf of isolation from others and include in our work routine the burden of keeping relationships alive. The hardest thing you’ll ever do is create community the way it was meant to be.
One of the biggest chains on all humanity right now is the false logic of specialization and division of labor. That’s fine if you are a machine, but you shouldn’t aspire to that. No one can do all things possible to humanity at large; there are limits. Each of us carries our own unique collection of them. But we need not assume without question the limits we are told by someone else. Such information serves merely to help us estimate the likely cost of something we haven’t yet tried for ourselves. It may turn out the price of pushing some limit is pretty cheap compared to the returns. The principle of high efficiency of labor utilization for greater economic production presumes too much on human wisdom. Better to hedge your bets by cross training into everything for which you can estimate some value. Never believe you are out of choices simply because what you did before is no longer possible.
Right now the plutocrats are trying to set Greece on fire. They are playing both sides of the conflict between government austerity and popular dissent. They are guiding the discussions between government figures in the Eurozone, then leaking selective details mixed with lies so the various news sources will play their role in stirring support for what appears to be two sides to a debate which ignores the real questions. The soap opera with all its plot twists keeps everyone glued to their sources. About the only thing of genuine interest here is it seems the plutocrats have decided to set their first ambushes in Europe, seeking to begin the final plan of enslavement there first. What we see there may be a clue to what’s coming here to America.
The plutocrats will continue playing us to the end. Stirring the fear of economic collapse on one side, they drop the bait of stability on the other side, which rests on the most hideous trap of all — voluntary enslavement. The most powerful chains of all are those you forge for yourself. The conditions of life may well be constrained by circumstances far outside our control, but not all of them. Who said cows can’t climb cliffs? Who said you were a cow in the first place?
Most of what we think we know about the coming tough times is surely wrong. That life on this planet is about to become much more unpleasant for a sizable chunk of humanity is pretty obvious, but it’s not some accident arising from a series of miscalculations. It’s not simply the combined foolish choices of a string of elected rulers. They were herded, too. The whole system is a pile of lies meant to teach us to be cows. Selective breeding and feed lots produce meat which makes a profit, not a life to make cows happy, nor to produce the best quality of meat. It’s a vast supply of nearly toxic flesh with only a vague resemblance to real food, but it’s predictable and almost totally under the control of the meat companies. Or so they think, until we start seeing plagues resistant to the medications they’ve been slipping in the feed. It’s not just a lie for us as consumers, but a lie for the meat company executives, because the whole thing is on the verge of breaking down. Even more important is how it symbolizes the much bigger lies. We have been herded into nasty feed lots and fed a most unnatural diet of falsehoods, and the plutocrats have decided it’s time to eliminate all the free range and feral cattle so there is no competition for their system of production. The problem is, most of the alternative styles of life offered to our awareness still come with horns and mooing. The plutocrats’ hired cowhands are saddling up right now, and will be roping and herding, but you don’t have to make it easy — at least take the horns off.
What we often consider our best protection and proud distinction is nothing more than an excuse to be prickly and weaken your chance at friendships. When you start looking for excuses to overlook someone else’s foibles, when you start remembering you have your own foibles to overlook, and you don’t try to conform every link to other humans according to some convenient formula, you’ll find yourself with fewer friends, but real ones. Keep your friendships in the moment, because you know better than to want control over the supply of friendship. Only what’s freely given is worth having. There’s plenty of real soap operas in simple free human society on this fallen plane. You don’t need to experience it vicariously through someone else’s fake dramas.

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I Can't Drive…

Posted on September 18, 2011 by ehurst

Reference the famous song by Sammy Hagar song. Today is my birthday; can you guess the numbers?
Now, most of those “senior discounts” kick in and you can start making fun of me with symbols of decrepitude and death. I already have a walking cane, so you’re too late on that one. And I had a series of wheelchairs until after my knee surgery, so that won’t be too funny. But I welcome any and all poking fun because, as always, I don’t take myself too seriously.
Actually, I’m closer to Hagar’s video. I can’t run any more, and I haven’t driven like a maniac in a very long time. But I still love the music genre, still appreciate fine powerful toys machinery, and I would wear crazy outfits like Sammy’s if they would fit me. For some reason, you can’t find that stuff in 2x these days, not in my price range. And while I’ve had long hair, it got pointless some time ago when there simply wasn’t enough of it sprouting any more.
So even though I still work out and people tell me I look intimidating, I’m old enough to have zero appreciation for how smartphones have destroyed computer GUIs. I’ll never use a computer which doesn’t have a keyboard made for my fat fingers. To be honest, I’m old enough to consider a computer nothing more than a fancy typewriter. Were I not pretending I was a writer, I’d have never gotten my first one, back when DOS was still the dominant PC OS. I still have my favorite DOS office suite on CD, which originally came on 16 floppies — Enable.
Have a laugh on me.

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Whimper: Google Chrome Broken Again (Updated)

Posted on September 17, 2011 by ehurst

You can probably ignore this whiny-gram unless you need a chuckle.
I run Scientific Linux 6, a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It includes by default a very nice system security package called SELinux. It was designed with the help of alphabet soup federal agencies to enhance the security of Linux systems, probably one of the only honest things we ever got from the government. It’s primary objective is to prevent execution of binaries and scripts which could cause harm to the operating system. It used to be a messy tangle, always getting in the way. When RHEL 6 Beta came out, it had been vastly improved. I no longer recommend turning it off, because it seems to serve the intended purpose without getting in the way.
The problem is people who develop software for Linux tend to ignore it. From one release to the next, I’m never sure when Google Chrome, for example, will fail to work against SELinux. Last night was an update, and once again, it fails completely.
I won’t bother pasting the errors here. Alright, here it is:

/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome: /lib/libz.so.1: no version information available (required by /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome)
/opt/google/chrome/chrome: error while loading shared libraries: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied

I’ve done some extensive searching, and even the developers at Google seem pretty confused about it. It doesn’t help they insist on building everything on Ubuntu, and can’t be bothered to use a free Red Hat clone for the RPM packages. So the executables keep asking for some response peculiar to Debian-based system calls. Most of the time, it doesn’t prevent Chrome from running, but it does too often. This time, though, it seems to be an error bouncing off SELinux. All the advice I could find was “disable SELinux” or to grant Chrome some unreasonable level of permissive freedom with any normal restrictions.
This is insane. I’ve already shown in previous posts Google developers will lie about how Chrome works. If it’s not lying, it’s an abysmal lack of knowledge. They aren’t worthy of any such high level of trust. Further, the one greatest attack vector on the Net seems to be browser vulnerabilities, and they think I should turn off the one best layer of security I can have against browser exploits? For all the advantages there may be from using Chrome, it’s not worth the trouble any more. I used to think GNOME and KDE developers were arrogant, but I’ve not seen anything like the hostility to user accountability one sees coming from Google and Webkit developers.
Of course, the Firefox fanboys deserve to be slapped around a bit, too. All versions of Firefox, whether built and optimized on my system, or simply installed as a package, nearly choke on rather simple and mundane JavaScript on major sites. It bogs down my system to the point it’s almost unusable, with only two tabs open — and one of those has a very simple HTML page without even any graphics.
Right now, only the console-based browsers and Opera work well enough to bother.
Update: I think I understand now why Chrome fights with SELinux: It wants permission to do something no browser should. This is the debut of the so-called Native Client technology, in which applications can run from the browser directly on the hardware, with all the same privileges and power of native applications built for the OS. After all the horrific threats we’ve seen over the years from Web attacks taking advantage of unrecognized security holes in browsers, attacking the OS itself, now Google wants to implement it on purpose. The arrogance and ignorance is stunning.
The only hope is learning how to turn off this feature when you build the Open Source version of Chrome called Chromium.
Addenda: I didn’t find out how to turn off the Native Client business, but I did learn how to build Chromium from SRPMs and it does work better.

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Advertising Slavery

Posted on September 16, 2011 by ehurst

It’s easy to ignore moral principles when it makes you money.
Advertising as we experience it today is nothing more than slavery. It’s designed to enslave the choices and wallets of “consumers.” The very choice of the term “consumer” reduces the mass of humanity to a collection of ATMs. Sure, you advertisers claim to give some value for the exchange, but you cannot possibly entertain the notion what you are selling is simply not need. The only reason you don’t put buyers in a cage is because it’s too much trouble and it might get you killed. Advertisers are scum.
Since the Garden of Eden, we have seen humanity is vulnerable to deception. Satan is the Father of Lies, and his first accomplishment was selling a falsehood to a couple of folks ill prepared to fight the lies. Their operating assumption was communication had only the purpose of sharing, not controlling. Ultimately, lying is an attempt to control the behavior of another by denying him full and accurate information. People are gullible about things they don’t have time to study. We have an instinct to trust one another, and it’s damaging to the human psyche to be taught to fear and distrust. The damage can be mitigated by how we go about teaching it, but most of the time it comes by the most painful experience of betrayal. This is what leaves so many scars.
Nor should we simply wallow in this foul reality. There are moral laws in this universe, and ignoring them guarantees other people get hurt. That your conscience might lack any ability to perceive guilt does not remove that guilt. At some point you will pay — so says the God of Creation.
No one in the advertising business has clean hands today. That’s because the whole idea of advertising is not about communications, regardless of what they call it. Advertising is about persuasion, manipulation, and whether it actually offers something people need is hardly a consideration. Real world testing has shown there are methods, some illegal, which bypass normal human resistance to deception. Advertisers have made a science of using them, and were it not for legal restraints, no method would be ignored.
Concrete example: We know the human mind operates visually in snap-shot fashion. We are hardly conscious of this, but there are host of things which prove it. Look up the terms “nystagmus” and “saccade” and you’ll begin to understand the human mind operates by gathering a collection of still shots and constructing a smooth image, but apparently cannot simply absorb the smooth image itself. Most of us retain bits of memory from focal points of any scene displayed before us. (This also explains how we miss visual details, but that’s another subject.) It is entirely possible to replicate a sense of smooth reality using a series of still images appearing before the eyes at a rate faster than the normal mental snapshot rate. Thus, we have movies. We also know it is entirely possible to insert messages into the movies which are captured only in the subconscious. Not simply by representative imagery and associations, but standard advertising logos cultural images can be flashed on a single a few frames, and it does not register consciously, but is processed nonetheless (see addenda below). It still prompts a desire for the advertised product, bypassing the normal conscious process of thinking about the product first. This is illegal in the US, and that fact is the only thing preventing advertisers using it. They lobbied hard to make it legal.
There is no reason to imagine any advertiser, down to the very individuals involved in the entire industry, would not gladly take advantage of such underhanded tactics. Surveying the entire range of efforts since the earliest efforts at commercial advertising indicates a relentless effort to sucker readers into wanting something they might not normally even consider. If people already wanted the item in question, there would be no need for advertising. Thus, we have this ubiquitous effort to overcome “buyer resistance.” It goes so far as to treat such resistance as evil, which stands the whole equation on its head. In moral parlance, turning something upside down is called “perversion” — advertising is inherently perverted.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Addenda: I realize Snopes and a few others have tried to debunk the original story on subliminal advertising. Yes, I realize I had forgotten something so blatant as a single frame devoted entirely to the advertising logo is not going to work. The real story is actually later efforts with far greater subtlety than the old urban legend depicts. It’s a Straw Man Fallacy. When a few frame are slightly altered, all within certain artistic limits and matched to the cultural bias of the audience, there appears to be some effect, though the results are not immediately measurable.

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