WHY DON’T WE JUST GO BACK TO KILLING FUCKING NAZIS
(this post is dedicated to all my Free Speech Absolutist homies)
Tag: news
Today the world lost Prince, a true (and quite uncommon) musical genius, and I am shocked and devastated.
Prince’s artistic courage, his integrity, his fucking ALIEN skill on every instrument he ever looked at, his undeniably ultimate mastery of funk and every other genre he ever bent/combined/invented… these things are permanent, unforgettable, and quite possibly unsurpassable forever. He was the very pinnacle of musical achievement. Nobody who has ever listened to him play any instrument in any style could ever deny that he was literally The Best at it.
As a musician and songwriter who plays a variety of rock instruments in a variety of genres, his importance to me personally cannot be overstated. People like him, Stevie Wonder, and Todd Rundgren convinced me that it is totally possible for one person to play every instrument and make music of any style one might fancy undertaking. As a hero, he will always be the single most UNDER-rated musician I could ever name, no matter how legendary his status may grow. Prince was the True DIY King.
Go back and listen closely to his early records today. Then continue until his most recent work. You will find a thick thread of pure, unadulterated GENIUS.
You could do that, too, you know. Oh, none of us will ever be nearly as good – that’s just reality. But *practise* and *imagine* and *put it down* (DO IT!) on record, and keep on doing it. We can all create anything we can envision in our heads if we only try.
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Now
Finally, the United States of America has confidantly voted into office its first black President, and today is the first day of the Future after all. I am so proud again to be an American.
We owe a tremendous debt to black, female, latino, and other “minority” voters, many of whom have until today been disenfranchised – not just for what they have done today, but for what they have done in the past to bring us to this moment.
I can’t help but recall the more joyful lines of Walt Whitman‘s loving ballad to his President:
O Captain my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daringO Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won.
(Of course, i have omitted stanzas which are not needed and do not serve this day; the poem, after all, is an elegy.)
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Now
Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.
Finally, the United States of America has confidantly voted into office its first black President, and today is the first day of the Future after all. I am so proud again to be an American.
We owe a tremendous debt to black, female, latino, and other “minority” voters, many of whom have until today been disenfranchised – not just for what they have done today, but for what they have done in the past to bring us to this moment.
I can’t help but recall the more joyful lines of Walt Whitman’s loving ballad to his President:
O Captain my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won.
(Of course, i have omitted stanzas which are not needed and do not serve this day; the poem, after all, is an elegy.)
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Problems voting
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Problems voting
Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.
NOTE: this post is ancient, but still gets a good bit of traffic, so i need to let readers know:
This issue was fixed long ago.
So Google Chrome is out. That’s great! It’s really a cool, fast, secure browser.
Unfortunately, it appears to break sites in one very important way: it obeys alternate stylesheets, just as if they were normal, active stylesheets. This breaks sites who print their alternate CSS links after active ones (like mine – for now).
I’ve sent this in as a bug to Google, and i’d recommend that others do the same (select “report bug or broken website” from the page icon to the upper right).
At the moment, the only thing to do is to list alternate stylesheets before active ones, or exclude alternate links altogether.
However, there are (naturally!) problems with each method…
Listing alternate CSS (which would still be obeyed) could still cause style conflicts, if there are any rules which are not contradicted (read: overwritten) by later stylesheets below the alternate ones.
On the other hand, not listing alternate stylesheets disables additional functionality in user agents such as Opera, which allows users to select from a menu what style they’d prefer to view a site in – which is arguably the best, most accessible method of switching stylesheets (if you’re using one of those user agents, that is).
For my money, i believe the former is the best option. This means i may have to do some code “cleaning,” which i should have done anyway. In fact, rather than removing extraneous CSS rules, i’ll be adding rules which do not exist in, say, X.css to Y.css, in order to counteract any style collisions by overwriting them with alternate rules.
Btw, for those who need it, here’s the User Agent string i captured:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13
[UPDATE] Matt Wilcox helpfully pointed out that this isn’t exactly a Chrome bug, but a leftover Safari one which has apparently been around for years, according to a decently shrewd Google search. Lesson: test in Safari, even if you think it’s a Practically Perfect Browser.I have fixed it locally but am waiting for at least a few more hours in order to use this site as an example. Hey, it beats making a quick mock-up. Sort of. (My teachers always thought i was most useful as an example to warn others – well, i do what i can!)
And a big thanks to the great Jeffrey Zeldman for helping get the word out to designers about this. Of course, 99% of people making web sites won’t be affected, but for those of us using alternate styling, it’s a nasty thing to have happen.
[UPDATE 2] To clarify, Safari and Chrome both use the Webkit rendering engine, as well as parts of the Mozilla FIrefox codebase. Not to point fingers or anything. I’m just sayin’ is all. [UPDATE 3] I couldn’t take it anymore. I fixed things here so there shouldn’t be any issues. I use a browser sniffer to detect the user agent and deliver either modern CSS or a crappy facsimile thereof for older, less standards-compliant user agents. As long as i keep up to date, no problem… of course, the drawback is obvious. I must keep up to date. Anyway, i’ve completely eliminated the alternate styles for both Chrome & Safari, at least until this bug is fixed in the Webkit renderer. In the meantime, i’ll put together a tester page and link it here.
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Google Chrome obeys alternate CSS
Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.
So Google Chrome is out. That’s great! It’s really a cool, fast, secure browser.
Unfortunately, it appears to break sites in one very important way: it obeys alternate stylesheets, just as if they were normal, active stylesheets. This breaks sites who print their alternate CSS links after active ones (like mine – for now).
I’ve sent this in as a bug to Google, and i’d recommend that others do the same (select “report bug or broken website” from the page icon to the upper right).
At the moment, the only thing to do is to list alternate stylesheets before active ones, or exclude alternate links altogether.
However, there are (naturally!) problems with each method…
Listing alternate CSS (which would still be obeyed) could still cause style conflicts, if there are any rules which are not contradicted (read: overwritten) by later stylesheets below the alternate ones.
On the other hand, not listing alternate stylesheets disables additional functionality in user agents such as Opera, which allows users to select from a menu what style they’d prefer to view a site in – which is arguably the best, most accessible method of switching stylesheets (if you’re using one of those user agents, that is).
For my money, i believe the former is the best option. This means i may have to do some code “cleaning,” which i should have done anyway. In fact, rather than removing extraneous CSS rules, i’ll be adding rules which do not exist in, say, X.css to Y.css, in order to counteract any style collisions by overwriting them with alternate rules.
Btw, for those who need it, here’s the User Agent string i captured:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13
[UPDATE] Matt Wilcox helpfully pointed out that this isn’t exactly a Chrome bug, but a leftover Safari one which has apparently been around for years, according to a decently shrewd Google search. Lesson: test in Safari, even if you think it’s a Practically Perfect Browser.
I have fixed it locally but am waiting for at least a few more hours in order to use this site as an example. Hey, it beats making a quick mock-up. Sort of. (My teachers always thought i was most useful as an example to warn others – well, i do what i can!)
And a big thanks to the great Jeffrey Zeldman for helping get the word out to designers about this. Of course, 99% of people making web sites won’t be affected, but for those of us using alternate styling, it’s a nasty thing to have happen.
[UPDATE 2] To clarify, Safari and Chrome both use the Webkit rendering engine, as well as parts of the Mozilla FIrefox codebase. Not to point fingers or anything. I’m just sayin’ is all.
[UPDATE 3] I couldn’t take it anymore. I fixed things here so there shouldn’t be any issues. I use a browser sniffer to detect the user agent and deliver either modern CSS or a crappy facsimile thereof for older, less standards-compliant user agents. As long as i keep up to date, no problem… of course, the drawback is obvious. I must keep up to date. Anyway, i’ve completely eliminated the alternate styles for both Chrome & Safari, at least until this bug is fixed in the Webkit renderer. In the meantime, i’ll put together a tester page and link it here.
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Space Void!
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The Highest Cost of War
If i were living in a video game, i would probably do video game things: senseless slaughter, reckless driving, and generally causing mayhem. It’s sure as hell fun in a video game.
I’d probably have a real itchy trigger finger; blowing character’s heads clean off would cause me to ceaselessly cackle as i wheel about looking for more victims, and more nastiness to get into.
Soldiers, however, do not live in video games. They kill real people. Actual human beings, with lives and families and friends and day jobs – be they evildoers or just innocent civilians, caught in the line of fire. Sometimes, though, things go wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.
Frankly, it’s getting a little tedious, hearing and reading about all the civilian deaths in Iraq. It has been going on for a long time, after all.
That’s why i put off reading this The Nation piece (alt.link.print) for about a week before i got around to reading it.
The Iraq War is a vast and complicated enterprise… Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.
I can not and will not blame soldiers en masse or individually. It’s a real bad situation over there, and we need to get those guys out of there as quickly as we possibly can, before more soldiers crack under pressure and bring the whole damn thing down.
It’s ok to be against the war and NOT spit on returning soldiers. That kind of folly is for idiot hippies with misguided frustration. These guys need a lot of help, from many different angles. War does terrible things to a man’s soul. But we must have hope that these inner demons can be defeated, every last one of them, for every last soldier who was there and saw bad things happen.
The bottom line: we’ve gotta get out of that place.
In the four long years of the war, the mounting civilian casualties have already taken a heavy toll–both on the Iraqi people and on the US servicemembers who have witnessed, or caused, their suffering. Iraqi physicians… published a study late last year… that estimated that 601,000 civilians have died since the March 2003 invasion… [They] found that coalition forces were responsible for 31 percent of these violent deaths, an estimate they said could be “conservative,” since “deaths were not classified as being due to coalition forces if households had any uncertainty about the responsible party.”
“Just the carnage, all the blown-up civilians, blown-up bodies that I saw,” Specialist [Jeff] Englehart said. “I just–I started thinking, like, Why? What was this for?”
“It just gets frustrating,” Specialist [Garett] Reppenhagen said. “Instead of blaming your own command for putting you there in that situation, you start blaming the Iraqi people…. So it’s a constant psychological battle to try to, you know, keep–to stay humane.”
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RIP RAW
Farewell, Robert Anton Wilson. You were there when we needed you, and left behind an arsenal of hilarious and unsettling tools with which to battle the enemies of free thought. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Hail Eris; all hail Discordia. Praise Dobbs. Ramen.
Looks like the Army may get its way: Rumsfeld is quitting a disgraceful failure. The man who made Saddam Hussein is finally leaving.
These are good times, indeed!
Former CIA chief Robert Gates may be taking over. I’d like to think that any human being (or chimpanzee, for that matter) could do the job of U.S. Secretary of Defense better than Donald Rumsfeld has, but I’m not counting my chickens until they botch the war in Iraq further. Kind of feels like waiting for the other shoe to drop in a way, doesn’t it?
The races are over, and it looks like Democrats won all over the place, including quite a few governorships. That’s great, but let’s not get lazy over it. There is a lot of foulness to undo, and that’s going to take a lot of work.
Democrats, don’t break your arms patting yourselves on the back. And Republicans: think about what your party has done to deserve such remorseless spite.
I propose we start right away, to:
- Get out men and women the hell out of Iraq (after quickly tidying up as best we can)
- Try to repair damaged relations across the globe
- Ban religion from government
- Ban religion from public schools (get ID, aka Creationism, out of the classroom!)
- Funding science, esp. stem-cell research
- Amending the Constitution to clarify and equalize gay rights by law forever
- Take down that damn wall across the southern border
- Make the United States a place of Free Thought
- Ban spying programs focusing on U.S. citizens
- Encourage skeptical inquiry
- Start welcoming immigrants again
Personally, I’m very relieved to know that the many long years of iron-fisted Republican rule (Governor, Senate, and House) are over for people in my neck of the woods!
More human remains have been found at the former site of the World Trade Center.
According to the Washington Post article above, ~20,000 pieces of people have thus far been found. ~2,749 died in the attack. This means that, statistically, every person who died at the World Trade Center that day was blown into an average of about 7 pieces.
Really brings it home, huh?
Check out this angrily passionate editorial by the great Keith Olbermann re: the new, absolutely diabolical Military Commissions Act. (Read up on it and know that this is terrible and insane.)
[youtube]uqxmPjB0WSs[/youtube]
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Foley’s follies
Foley’s Alleged Priest Molester Named
So… I suppose this makes it… okay now?
Just like a Republican to turn around when he’s being accused of some heinous act and suddenly point the finger at somebody else. Poor priest probably never even touched the bastard. Maybe.
I can hear his voice, lo, across the great digital expanse:
“Well, yeah, I guess I did sort of do the wrong thing, kind of. But he’s the one who really did it! He made me! If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have done anything wrong at all, ever! It’s all his fault! I didn’t really do anything, really!”
Marijuana May Slow Alzheimer’s
THC, the key compound in marijuana… blocks the formation of brain-clogging Alzheimer‘s plaques better than current Alzheimer’s drugs.
Janda’s team found that THC blocks an enzyme called acetylcholinesterase, which speeds the formation of amyloid plaque in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.
The Alzheimer’s drugs Aricept and Cognex work by blocking acetylcholinesterase. When tested at double the concentration of THC, Aricept blocked plaque formation only 22% as well as THC, and Cognex blocked plaque formation only 7% as well as THC.
I’m not a marijuana smoker, but I do believe that it is just plain stupid to maintain its currently illegal status. We smoke cigarettes, which do nothing for us but kill us in the end, or at least reduce our life span; we drink alcohol, which makes us stupid and often violent, impairs our reflexes, and causes cirrhosis of the liver. Cannabis has shown time and time again that it is a valuable plant which should absolutely be legalized. Having had a great grandfather who had Alzheimer’s, I’ve seen first-hand what a truly horrifying thing that disease is (note: not “can be,” it simply “is”). If there’s a better-than-with-current-drugs chance that I may be able to stave off the potential onslaught of a slow, mind-reducing, soul-killing, life-crushing disease like that, I may just start toking myself. Better yet, I may start eating the stuff. Trust me, there are very few things worse than dying over a period of several years from a disease which eventually completely eradicates all memory and personality from a human being’s life.
Screw glaucoma (which I may one day develop as well), I want to see more research on this!
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Your history.
May I just take a moment of your time to point out that:
Every white (and non-American Indian) person living in the United States today is a descendant of debatably illegal immigrants? And that, while we’re on the topic, the non-white immigrants to this country were nearly exclusively brought here in chains by whites?
So just exactly what god damn right does anyone have to say that any human being is illegal or that they are trespassers?
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
-Emma Lazarus
ProTV Video, a Romanian private TV station, has a video of soldiers of the People’s Republic of China actually killing unarmed, harmless Tibetan refugees trekking through the snow on a pilgrimmage to see the Dalai Lama.
Who will stand up to this brutality? Who will make the PRC pay for their numerous despicable crimes against humanity?
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BAM!!!
Welcome back, The Future of Rock and Roll!