Bob Hayes Online

My friend Brutus posts an inquiry into Congressional political malpractice. Of equal interest to me is something I just read on the RNC’s convention blog (you’ll have to scroll down - the advanced Internet technology known as “permalinks” have not yet penetrated the Republican web consciousness).

This is the first presidential election since 1928 where neither a president nor a sitting vice-president has sought office. In other words, this is the first election in 80 years where there hasn’t been someone with a claim to be a political heir.

No wonder things are so up in the air. We could use more of it.

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Bush-Cheney evil is so powerful, it could make America a fascist state even before it took office.

Catholic theologian John Haught is interviewed at Salon. The interview becomes a launchpoint for…well, for something, over at Pandagon. Starting from an outright mis-statement of the very headline of the article she links (one unchallenged in 230+ comments - no echo chamber here!), Marcotte fills four or five screens with an assortment of misreadings, evasions, and the usual childish insults. Haught’s interview is worth reading for its insights and explorations of how scientific advances such as Darwinism challenge and extend our theological understanding. Marcotte’s post…well, the beauty of the Internet in a free country is that anyone can write whatever they want to write. Let’s all appreciate that freedom and try not to think about what people are getting up to with it.

I was going to write up a post about why Ron Paul is an unacceptable candidate, but Stephen Bainbridge (who, like me, is drifting along as a nominal Thompson supporter but lacks huge enthusiasm) did it for me, God bless him.

The professor puts more importance than I do on the antics of Paul’s Internet cohort, but it’s his cut and run policy in Iraq that really cheeses us both.

Dan Fogelberg has died of prostate cancer at the age of 56.

It’s been many years since I listened to Dan’s music, but there was a time in my life when I enjoyed it very much. (I never stopped liking it, but he had such a long dry period that I just stopped.) He will be missed.

Get screened, kids.

Coding Sanity bites the bullet and upgrades from buggy, slow Vista to the high-performance reliability of Windows XP. Snicker.

My own Vista experiences have been relatively painless, at least personally, for the very good reason that I didn’t install it on any of the machines that I actually use. My long-suffering assistant has a laptop with Vista pre-installed; it’s a buggy, slow, piece of crap. It sucks to be her, and not just because she has to work for me. (I’ve got a desktop with XP for her, but we’re still working on getting it hooked up to the Internet so she can use a real computer again.)

So why DID Microsoft drop billions in R&D and untold billions in direct programming costs to shoot themselves in the foot? I don’t know, but I can guess: it’s the same reason that schools of education are still trying to find new ways of performing basic pedagogy 2500 years after the principles were first, and adequately, laid out. It’s boring to do things the same old way. It’s boring to say to people “this is our OS core, and it will remain stable into the indefinite future, and other than bug fixes and new device drivers, we will leave the kernel untouched.”

Programmers love to re-invent the wheel. Re-inventing the wheel is fun, satisfying, and achievable - and this time, we’ll do it properly with our new wheel flange code… Microsoft has a lot of programmers to keep happy and maybe throwing umpteen thousand person-years of programming time at reworking something that was working perfectly well is the best way for them to do that.

I just wish the rest of us didn’t have to use the resulting crap code.

Terry Pratchett, probably my favorite author, has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. He is optimistic and positive, and asks that his fans be the same - so other than to wish him the very best and to pray for his recovery, I will say no more.

I’ll grant you, video is cool technology. And I’ll concede that it’s neat to be able to embed videos onto web sites and such - it adds something to be able to play a movie clip relevant to a news story or blog post, for example.

But.

That doesn’t mean that I want my nice, text-oriented, written Web to turn into a TV show with high load times and lots of hiccuping. It seems like every time I go to a favorite site (case in point: the Onion), there are more and more video stories crowding out what I’m there to get: writing. I’m not a videophobe - I see the merit of this content, as I’ve noted. But video is intrinsically inefficient because it is based on sound and verbal language; it takes a news reporter 120 seconds to badly summarize what I could comprehensively review in 20 seconds. Video makes sense when the story is about a cat who can do backflips - I want to see that. For Mitt Romney’s tax policy, I want to see something more along the lines of written analysis.

The thing is, there’s already a place where video has primacy: the television. It’s OK that video is putting out tentacles and finding a home on the web. But let’s remember what this Web thingie is for - and not turn it into just another forum for the talking heads.

Appalling doesn’t begin to cover it.

Some of Michelle Malkin’s commenters focus on the absence of a response from feminist organizations; that’s a valid point but one which has been made many times before.

Last year, former Australian PM John Howard made waves (and won some friends and enemies) by telling Muslim immigrants to Australia that “Before becoming an Australian, you will be asked to subscribe to certain values. If you have strong objections to those values, don’t come to Australia.”

This is the West. The values of tribal backwaters permit the killing of children who do not conform with parental expectations regarding dress. The values of Western civilization do not.

Immigrants who are unable to make that adjustment need to return to their homes. They can’t make new ones here.