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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, September 29, 2007

...On How Apple Attempts To Replace Microsoft As "Worst Company In The WOOORRLLLDDD" 

...i've never been an Apple guy. Since my personal and professional world is filled with Microsoft-based PC's, the most frustrating aspects of my technological life have featured the fact that my children's schools have suffered a long infestation with Apple computers, which has resulted in the need to be sure to have software applications that can communicate with both platforms, since the two main players in this particular war seem obsesses with the idea of making things as hard as possible for anyone lined up with the other guy. While I fell prey to the media hype and actually purchased Apple I-pod's - a mistake that I will never make again after a series of circumstances revealed to me the greater ease of managing the inventory of a number of other MP-3 players as opposed to the fascist hegemony that i-tunes imposes on i-pod owners - the whole i-phone frenzy was lost on me for one simple reason...

AT&T doesn't offer cell phone service in Central Oregon...

Without that entry point, you can't even get in the game. Not that it mattered to me, because I can't even bribe anyone to get high-speed internet service to my neighgorhood so I live on the back side of the New Age Technology wave anyway, but it was surprising to contemplate the idea that a couple hundred thousand people in the middle of Orygun could only snarl and throw beer cans at the high-def wall screen during all those spiffy "Look at meeee" iphone ads that come on every 10 minutes or so. The whole idea of gaming 'The Man' and hacking iphones to be able to use them with other cell phone providers sounded a lot like some latter day intervention by a digital Robin Hood...

Now, however, in it's second attempt to truly piss off anyone who comes in contact with its products, the Apple Borg has let it be known that software updates that it may or may not identify as "voluntary" will disable phones that have been 'hacked' or 'unzipped' or 'released' or whatever other name you might want to assign to the cleverness of people in figuring out how to free the iphone from its AT&T connection. This may well not please those iphone users who were willing to push the limits and pay a whole bunch of money in order to have an iphone of their very own while keeping service with another provider. It certainly won't please those early iphone buyers who 'hacked' their phones, only to see Apple - in a move unrelated to their actions - massively slash prices in a way that the ipod market and their personal computer line have never seen and have now seen Apple offer updates that will render their really really truly expensive phones unusable...

The business world is a cruel, vicious environment where only the strongest survive. The Average Consumer, even when he or she is trying to gain some personal edge, can't really understand this environment any better than a yearling gazelle on some African prairie faced with the prospect of being cut out of the herd and chased down to a brutal death by a pack of lions. As far as as the big dogs in this business are concerned, that's too darned bad, and if you messed with the system you deserve whatever dark times are headed down the road toward you. There is The Brand, and messing with The Brand is a bad thing, or at least it is as far as The Brand is concerned. It's interesting to see that Apple, after a couple of decades of trying to be "the other guy" has decided to fully and completely embrace the Microsoft mindset of being The Brand...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:00 PM 0 comments

Dusting Off An Old Republican Game Plan 

...one of the big plays in the successful Republican effort to wrestle control of the US Senate away from the Democrats after 40 years back in the mid-1990's was to stymie the efforts of the Senate majority to get it's business done - by legislative holds, monkey-wrenching by the Republican-led House in conference, and threats of filibuster - and then drape the mantle of "Do-Nothing Senate" on the Democratic incumbents. All in all, given what was even then either laziness or out-right duplicity on the part of the MSM, it was an effective strategy at a time when the Democrats had the most Senate seats to defend and the outcome was pretty easy to predict if you knew which rail to press your ear to in order to detect that oncoming train. Circumstances are a bit different now, however, and it's the Repub's that have the bulk of incumbent Senators to defend at a time when being a Repub - and especially being a Repub who has maintained steadfast alliegance to one of the least popular Presidents in American history - is about as about as attractive an option as pounding your own hand with a hammer over and over again rather than slamming it repeatedly into your forehead...

Repub's are nothing, though, if not reliable in their behaviors and we are beginning to be able to slowly tease the same sort of story line out of their current efforts to avoid the potential electorial bloodbath that looms thirteen months from now. Even though the ratlines of the flaming hulk of the Ship of State that we have been left with are crammed with the fat fleeing bodies of Honorable Members of the Congress of the United States with (R) behind their names who have submitted to the sweet whispered inducements of retirement to avoid the potential humiliation of a beatdown at the polls, the old game plan is new again, with a host of little-discussed legislative holds, truly bizarre talk about the need for a 60-vote minimum in the Senate for the passage of any legislation, and brave chatter and trash-talk by a President who seems unaware that he is exceedingly lucky that the Rove charm stll lingers to protect him from the impeachment conviction that any Oval Office occupant prior to Richard Milhouse Nixon would have clearly understood was his grim fate if all the other players in the game ever got together and started to compare notes...

It just so happens that I know for a fact, primarily because it matters to me personally, that most previous Repub-led Congress's going back to the beginning of this run have failed to produce budgets on time. The current budget deficit compared to the state of the federal ledger in January, 2001, also suggests that the old standby "tax and spend Democrat" argument doesn't have much throw-weight either. The true intellectual weakness of the neo-con, religious fundamentalist base of the Republican party is fully in view and all the muddy tracks and spoor are there for the tracking if only the once-proud Fourth Estate would step up and properly read those signs - out loud - for the people who don't live inside the Beltway. We probably won't get any sort of actual independent analysis, though, given that the last few weeks of reportage of Senate action has spent a lot of time talking about Democratic failures to get the required 60 votes on this bill or that, without any meaningful discussion about why that number matters or why that number has only become important on an almost daily basis after over 200 years of operation as a democratic republic. That is all to the advantage of a failing regime, though, and it gives the Repub's - who can no doubt feel the reins of power slipping out of their desperately clutching sweat-slickened hands - a chance to make that one last big play to win the game...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:50 PM 0 comments

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Meet The New Cold War, Same As The Old Cold War 

...never let it be said that George W. Bush and the minions who whisper all the right words into his ears to feed his delusions of God-like grandeur can't take a difficult situation and turn it into a fully hashed-out disaster. Having managed to turn most of the Muslim world against us without even breaking a sweat, he and his have now apparently decided to deal with that sticky little difficulty of not actually having an enemy really worthy of our attention (I mean, come on now, Iran? It may cheer them up to bomb it for a number of days or weeks, but Iran is a cheap small pile of potatoes) by trying to conjure up the good ol' days of the Cold War by stationing Star Wars anti-ballistic missile facilities in northern Europe, remarkably close to the flight path of Russian missiles that might someday be rocketing toward the Mothe...uh, I mean...Homeland...no, that doesn't sound good, either...

But never mind that. Bushco has been making all kinds of noises about how this was actually a response to the growing threat of Iranian nucular missiles, but the Russians haven't been buying this story, and now a long-time critic of Bushco's Star Wars program and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ted Postol, has chucked a little cordwood onto that particular fire by suggesting that, yes, the Poland-based missiles can, too, fly fast enough to intercept Russian ICBM's, despite the assurances by Bush administration officials that these babies are the three-toed tree sloths of rocketry. The vigor of administration denials would seem to suggest that he is on to something here...

Professor Postol makes an interesting point: any ABM system capable of engaging Iranian missiles a quarter of the way around the globe would need to have the sort of speed at burn-out that would also make it capable of engaging Russian missiles launched from much nearer sites. Such a capability reintroduces the whole 'balance of terror' game that we may have foolishly thought we were getting away from as far back as the Reagan era. Given the foolhardy toughguy nature of the the people that have been infesting the administration over the last nearly seven years, it probably shouldn't be a shocker to find that they would be willing to play this tired game one more time...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:15 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Slippery Mitt And The Curse Of The Mealy Mouth 

...proving once again that he is more of a shape-shifter and triangulator than the 'new way' that he would like to portray, Mitt Romney displayed the sort of moral weakness that has become so common amongst political figures that we just take it for granted. Mitt was more than happy to blatantly misrepresent Hillary Clinton's views on the appearance of Iranian President Ahmadinejad at Columbia University, playing out yet another hand in the "toughness" game that has been a hallmark of what has passed for Republican foreign policy for years. On the other hand, Mitt seems to think that judgement needs to be reserved on the murder of Iraqi civilians by employees of the security contractor Blackwater USA...

This would be a classic example of a wise measured politician waiting for all the facts to come in were it not for a particular fact that we don't have to wait on: the presence of Cofer Black, Vice-President of Blackwater, USA, as a senior advisor to Romney's campaign. Given the list of alleged episodes involving Blackwater that the Iraqi government has laid down, it would appear that, in Mitt's own words, he has demonstrated a "fundamental failure of...leadership" and has fallen short when it was "time to demonstrate resolve and not vacillate...". Darn that curse...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:12 AM 0 comments

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