Why I will vote for John Kerry

Let's honour this nation's diversity; let's respect one another; and let's never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States.

This is why I will vote for John Kerry: A simple belief in freedom for all and in allowing individuals to judge their own morality and control their own destiny. If you belive that your morality is so supreme that basic human rights can be removed from one set of peoples, you do not understand America nor do you value freedom.

This is priceless and worthy of sacrifice.

On flip-flopping

Let's talk about flip-flops. I won't spell it out for you - think of the current stance of President Bush and read the following:

• Prayer Focus - April, 2001
• Why Christians Should Not Vote for George W. Bush - February 2004
• George W. Bush on Civil Rights
• Bush's Abortion Flip-Flop?
• La Cage au George W.
• Bush Backs Gay-Marriage Ban

So, before being elected, our "compassionate" conservative President (which is possible, I just don't believe President Bush is compassionate) was planning on keeping President Clinton's "leave it alone" attitude as well as originally supporting Roe vs. Wade. Now he's flip-flopped.

So, let's quit the name-calling and get on to the issues!

[An aside, and somewhat a different topic is this: Why does Vice President Dick Cheney not beat up President Bush for his hatred of homosexuality? Dick Cheney's daughter is a lesbian! I'd be vociferously protesting such a move myself.]

Taxes

These are interesting posts regarding taxation.

• The Argument Against Tax Cuts
• More on Taxation, complete with a shameless plug

Embryonic stem cells

This is sort of a book mark to me. One of the blogs I read pointed to this blog - the 3rd comment containes a link to the NIH website on stem cells.

...

This is weird. I wonder what the real story is.

Lemmings

For those who enjoyed Lemmings a long time ago, somebody has created a version of Lemmings that you play right in your browser! Cool!!

A lack of morality

This really aggravates me. The Republican party is trying to split the Democratic vote between Nader and Kerry with the expectation that Bush will then win the election. I see no problems if you want to support two candidates - as long as you actually want either of those candidates to be president. However, if you are funneling money to a third party simply to undermine the Democratic party with no belief in this third party, it smacks of throwing the election.

I am utterly amazed at the "moral majority" and their tactics. I guess morality is written by the winner too.

Lessig on O'Reilly and Glick...

As usual, Lessig is a good read.

Liberal "funnyness"

I enjoyed this little write-up.

9/11 commission report...

...is available here.

This land is your land...

Check out this flash movie.

Medical Malpractice Costs

I wonder if this is true.

Copyrights...

In the continuing war between corporate profits and fair use, Lessig writes about the upcoming bill (link to his blog, follow that the the NY Times article).

Bigot

Bill O'Reilly sounds like he's a bigot. For your convenience, here's the definition of bigot.

He's pissed that the NY Times called supporters of the amendment conservatives (read the definition) - which they are - not in the Republican sense but in the dictionary sense.

He's also pissed that it was front-page news. Umm, FOX News also had it on the front page along with Bill O'Reilly's rant - to be fair, Bill should be pissed at both.

Again, there is the myth that because we live in a Democracy, we can subjugate anyone. If he truly doesn't care if Lenny and Larry want to get married, he should realize that is isn't any of his business. It is also not the governments business.

It does become our business when another bigot comes along and sticks his nose where it doesn't belong.

Please keep your nose to yourself.

Lawrence Lessig entry re: FOX on OutFOXed

As expected, an interesting article from Lawrence Lessige on FOX's response to OutFOXed. Read it! I think I will need to see the documentary.

"You're either with us or against us"

I don't know why, but that's been bothering me this morning. Maybe because my 5 year-old son uses that type of logic. I don't think I've used it since grade school, or maybe junior high school.

Unfortunately, our President hasn't gotten past this mentality.

Liberal vs Conservative

FOX has a little chat about When The Word 'Liberal' Attacks. It's interesting, and happily the article that is rather agnostic.

A friend at work pointed this out: The definitions of the words liberal and conservative.

The conservatives have so polluted the term 'liberal' that the word is assumed to be bad. But, review the definitions and see for yourself!

The stigma needs to be removed. Especially since I consider President Bush to be a radical who wouldn't mind having a theocracy instead of a democracy.

Democracy
One reason as to why I consider our President to be ignoring the principles of a democracy: "The principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community" have been left in the dust regarding his stance on gay rights. This is a post in itself and has already been a letter to every Congressman and Senator to whom it could be sent, so I'll leave it at that.

Theocracy
Why do I believe President Bush would like a theocracy? Again, to quote from the dictionary: "a political unit governed by a deity (or by officials thought to be divinely guided)." President Bush has made a clear siding with the religous right and has tried (or would like to) bring religion into the government. He also believes that God speaks through him. We have a clear separation of church and state in our constitution. We seem to have had some recent issues with a theocracy and a radical religious movement in the recent past.

Radical
One of the definitions of radical is 'far beyond the norm; "extremist political views"; "radical opinions on education"; "an ultra conservative"'. I don't think education is his radical agenda. He is an ultra conservative with extremist political views. He's trying to redefine "family" to suit his morality, which does not match what is the norm.

It is very interesting to note that the gay community is being targeted for "family values," although divorce is much more prevalant and not supported in the Bible. When we talk percentages, the difference is rather large on the divorce side (50%?) compared to the gay community (maybe 10%?) - but then again, President Bush did call them "fuzzy numbers". Sorry, that was catty. But I am a math major, and it annoyed me enough that four years later, I remember it. Note that I come from a divorced family and I seem to remember my mother noting that we do not classify as a family unit according to the government. The closest time box I can use is that this would probaby be during the Reagan years.

Before a flame war erupts: Please note, even though I use the term radical, I am not comparing President Bush to the Taliban or extremist, radical terrorists. That would be going too far - so calm down. There is a lot of grey area in the term radical, and President Bush is in the lesser area.

Liberal
Let's grab a few catchphrases from the word liberal:

• free from bigotry
• open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded
• Tending to give freely; generous: a liberal benefactor

The only bad definition is that associated with "a liberal amount", which I do think needs to be controlled and seems to be the piece that the Republicans always harp on.

But, and I'll leave it here. Not to defend Clinton, but he did get rid of the deficit and was eating away at the National Debt that the former Republican Presidents had built up. Now, we've got another Republican president, and we're burning through money like it doesn't matter. And, it does matter - if it didn't we wouldn't bother paying off the debt, right? Remember, money doesn't grow on trees.

[This post isn't perfect, but my son is awake now, so it'll have to stay in this imperfect form.]

More stuff from freepress...

freepress.net has some interesting articles. Try Why the Press Failed.

Spin

Isn't it sad that I don't even require proof regarding this story about "The O'Reilly Factor"?

Good questions...

and I wonder if FOX will get answers and publish them. These are the questions.

Java, HTTPS, and proxy servers

I spent the day at work resolving issues with a web service that didn't we couldn't connect to - our vendor code came back with a vendor-specific exception but no description. Sometime during lunch, we realized that one of our proxy servers somehow messed with the HTTPS transaction. A little experimentation showed that the same message was successful from a web browser and the other two proxies were fine from a little software program I kludged together. We haven't resolved why we couldn't connect through that particular proxy from Java but could from a browser and some other windows applications. Any one else seen this behavior?

(I know it lacks detail - but I probably cannot disclose much in detail. I also don't have any notes. Nor do I have any code... which I definately could not disclose.)

I can say that the code used Sun JSSE and the standard URL connection. My test code just used a standard HTTPS GET and then copied the response to System.out.

OutFOXed irony

Here's the FOX news stories on OutFOXed:

'Outfoxed' Attempts to Show FOX News' Bias
Read the title. Read it again. After thinking 30 seconds about this, I think the title is actually ok. Originally, I faulted the phrasing of "attempts", but I cannot come up with anything better at this time. They are stating the goal of the film. I do however think the first statement is a bit sensationalistic - aimed to get any conservative upset. The fact that the documentary is backed by liberal groups is listed in the story and is not required in the summary statement. Otherwise, kudos to FOX for having a pretty straight story.

FOX News Channel Statement on 'Outfoxed'
This sounds quite belligerant to me, quite honestly. I also find it extremely interesting that they never even state that they stand by their motto of "fair and balanced." Let's be honest, phrasing something as "Any news organization that believes this story is big and FOX News Channel is a problem will be challenged by FOX News Channel" tells me FOX is itching for a fight. I think the conjunction is the big issue. If I "believe this story is big" then "FOX News Channel is a problem" don't necessarily compute. I may believe the former but not the latter.

Details About Employees Featured in 'Outfoxed'
This may be legitimate. I have not seen the story, but it sounds like 4 of the 10 employees' relationship with FOX was stretched, to say the least.

Summary
I have no doubt FOX is slanted. This may be a definition, however. FOX News generally is pretty good. No better or no worse than BBC or CNN. When I think of FOX, I also think of the rest of the FOX News home page which includes a number of opinion columns, all conservative. So, in general, I have no doubt that FOX is conservative.

An additional note, after reviewing the site while writing this. I do find it interesting that the FOX News website doesn't cover, in particular, science nor international news as much as the other web sites. It focuses on the United States and business issues. My conclusion: These are generally conservative issues - aka Republican issues.

Please note that these are not judgements against FOX. Just of FOX's bias. Everyone has a bias. Every reporter has a bias. At the best, it simply shows up in the phrasing they choose. At the worst, it becomes propoganda. We, as consumers, must filter the news and decide for ourselves.

A minor quibble...

In his column "Dissent or Dishonor?", Bill O'Reilly writes:

So, flash forward to President Bush, who's being accused of many things, some of them flat-out untrue. For example, the Senate Intelligence Committee did not find any evidence that the Bush administration attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgment on WMDs in Iraq — so reads conclusion 83 of the Senate report.

Thus, all the bomb-throwers who accuse Mr. Bush of lying about WMDs have been dishonorable. They were wrong and had no proof to begin with. They are guilty of a slander, a dishonorable act.

I added the emphasis. Present tense versus past tense. If I accused Bush last year of lying about Iraqi WMD, just this week the Senate report (part 1) came out, how can I be accused of dishonor? If I accuse him now, you can make that statement now.

Eating your own dog food

If you're curious about how Eclipse seems to be so successful, there is a short PDF that may be of interest, as well as the original thread.

Wausau Balloon Rally

Went to the Wausau Balloon Rally with Harry Saturday... more photos on Webshots.
 

Postpone the election?

Interesting thought - in the case of a terror attack, should we postpone the election to prevent the attack from influencing the election?

Eclipse and Ant input tag

Ok, this is frustrating. In an Eclipse 2.1.3 "stock" install, the Ant input task tag would create a dialog box allowing the developer to enter information. In an Eclipse 3.0 "stock" installation, this doesn't work anymore, it just errors out:

Buildfile: C:\Documents and Settings\Rob\My Documents\Eclipse\Web Site - greener\build.xml
tryit:
[input] Enter something:
BUILD FAILED: C:\Documents and Settings\Rob\My Documents\Eclipse\Web Site - greener\build.xml:3: Failed to read input from Console.
Total time: 110 milliseconds


The XML involved isn't that hard, either:

<project name="TestInputTag" default="tryit">

	<target name="tryit">

		<input message="Enter something:"/>

    </target>

</project>

Hopefully, someone on the Eclipse newsgroups can answer my question regarding this. Maybe I'll need to write an Ant task tag - but that seems to be a bit silly.

Internationalization and Java...

I just finished up internationalizing AppleCommander (I'm not working on anything else right now). This is great, but it's also really messy. Maybe AC is different, but I found i18n good for the following:

• Error messages in the user interface and domain;
• General customization of text used in the user interface;
• Choosing the appropriate date (or money) formats;
• I suspect it will be good for switching images that contain text - either by placing the filename in the properties file or by appending a language name at the end (ie, "de" for German).

The parts that really stink, and I'm not really clear if this is the standard or an Eclipse thing, is marking all the text that doesn't apply with a "// $NON-NLS-#$" marker. This seems to make a mess:

• Wherever text is pulled from the ResourceBundle;
• Keywords need to be commented - such as in the Basic formatters;
• Text formatting needs to be commented - as in the AppleWorks formatter;
• Assembly code generated from the compiler needs to be commented;
• I also just marked the test cases since I don't want or need to internationalize them (and, no, they're not really a good example of JUnit test cases).

Some of these areas had over 100 markers placed in the files. Thank goodness for the wizard!

MP3's and guns

Ok, Mr. Hatch needs to be brought under control. Under the people's control, that is. He now wants to hold digital music device manufacturers liable for the customers use of their product. Alright, downloading MP3's is, at a minimum a grey area and in most instances copyright infringement. Without getting into that particular argument, I do see many legal uses of this device. For instance, load up MP3's into a digital device and then exercising - MP3's taken from legally purchased CD's or download services. Mr. Hatch's bill would stifle and innovation in this arena of not just kill it.

Isn't this the same argument made against gun manufacturers? One that they lost? And, one that the Republican party stands by? (Gun manufacturers cannot be held liable for the actions of its customers - "Guns don't kill, people do".)

Something's not computing here.

An article to read

Read the article about Islam. We also need to remember that our major faiths were founded by the same man. Founded may be a bit strong, but you get the point.

Steve... huh?

For those Blues' Clues fans, this article will be of interest.

Well it's time for so long,
but I'll sing just one more song!
Thanks for doing your part -
You sure are smart,
you know with me, and you
and my dog Blue
we can do
anything
that you want to do!!

Remote posting...

I’m playing with remotely posting to my blog via email. It’s a feature of Blogger.com, and I’m not completely certain of its capabilities. For instance, this message was composed in Outlook – and I expect that the formatting is very Microsoft-specific. Not sure if this will  be an issue or not, but it could allow me to post from wherever I am rather quickly.

I'm actually trying to contain myself...

FOX News is full of misdirection today. Wow.

I'll pick this story. My general statement is that anti-Americanism = anti-Republicanism. If someone views the world differently, you must (1) be bad or evil, (2) be stupid, and (3) must be humiliated as much as possible.

Moore is entitled to his opinion. I don't totally agree with his views of Americans (ie, being stupid). That doesn't make him anti-American - just cynical. That's fine and is what makes this country great: a diversity of opinion.

This is supposedly an "anti-American" statement by Moore (it's not entirely clear if that is just bad or untrue, actually):

"We, the United States of America, are culpable in committing so many acts of terror and bloodshed that we had better get a clue about the culture of violence in which we have been active participants."

I think we have two, very ironic, proofs to this statement by Moore:

• According to this document, the United States gave Saddam Hussein $40 billion dollars worth of arms to fight Iran and then gave him billions to keep him from allying himself with the Soviets.
• The CIA supported a certain bin Laden family member in their fight against the Soviets.

Isn't it ironic what is overlooked? I'm not saying they're nice guys - just that we helped make them and and then took them down. I'd also state that they caused a many acts of terror and bloodshed. Since we helped make them, we helped cause said acts of terror and bloodshed.

The article continues with a biased statement:

And about the war now underway in Iraq, in which Americans are being killed in lockstep with Moore's anti-American speech, he says:

How Moore's speech is tied to events in Iraq is beyond me. "Anti-American" is just decoration by the journalists bias.

This is a tough one:

"The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not 'insurgents' or 'terrorists' or 'The Enemy.' They are the Revolution, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win.''

On one hand, this is baldly wrong, but on the other it is correct. We conqured Iraq - and the Iraqi's want us out. However, on second thought, "revolution" is the correct term, but Moore is wrong about Minuteman. I do strongly disagree with "and they will win". That is an assumption which cannot be made. I don't think the average Iraqi wants these foreign fighters nor radicals controlling their country. What I do expect is that this will be a very long fight.

I strongly expect that we all accept what the media feeds us too easily. Maybe that's what Moore meant by these statements:

"We Americans suffer from an enforced ignorance. We don't know about anything that's happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing."

Records were destroyed...

I actually don't care that some of Bush's military records were destroyed, but doesn't it make you suspicious? I'm sure the more paranoid of you think that this was done to aid Bush. I'd bet money that it was simply FUBARed by the military itself. It's too bad that this will become a discussion point in the up-coming election. We have much more important stuff to discuss!!

More on politics

And, this one is from my Dad. Cool, huh?

Don't Vote Ralph is trying to convince people to not vote Nader in 2004. It's not a surprise - FOX has been crowing about this for some time. There was at least one article talking about how a multi-millionaire is now spending his money on Nader because that will pull votes away from Kerry and not Bush.

One more...

On this issue, neither of our major parties satisfy me. However, this sounds somewhat hopeful to me. I thought all Republicans despise homoesexuality. I thought most Democrats pretty much dodge it (by granting equal rights under civil unions). But, read the last bit (copied from the FOX News report listed above):

Several Republican senators have said they're wary of amending the Constitution, the nation's two-centuries-old founding document, before exhausting all other avenues.

And some senators, Republican and Democratic, simply oppose the idea.

"Nuts," said Sen. Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I. "To be seen as the party that's coming between two people that love each other doing what they want to do ... to me that's going to be seen as a liability, politically."

I'm glad to hear it expressed that way. Marriage is about love and committment. Not procreation (we've got that covered as a species). Not morality (God and the Church can handle that). It is simply human decency and a right guaranteed in the constitution. You don't start patching the constitution because you're uncomfortable with something.

Huh...

This is weird.

A FOX News report that actually criticizes Bush.

Oh, wait...

They're standing up for the tobacco companies. I guess that makes sense then. The proof consists of taking the hardest item to prove - second hand smoke is bad - and then spends the rest of the article discussing that. With 4 instances as proof, the entire thing should just be dropped.

Uh-huh.

How convenient. We'll just ignore the rest of the suit and toss it out. Saves the tobacco company a ton of money: What's good for business must be good for everyone else.

(Note: I am very biased against smoking. For instance, my wife will be out of commission for the next day or so with any quantity of smoke. Stuffed up nose, headache, etc. It is very hard for me to believe that something that is known to be bad for the inhaler does not have some harmful effect on those around them.)

(Note #2: Plus the proof is too transparent.)

Internationalization strategies for Java?

Somehow I've gotten myself deep into migrating AppleCommander to be internationalizable ("i18n-able", I suppose). Not completely sure how I got here, but I am and I think it would be pretty neat to have an internationalized application.

[For those unfamiliar with this, this is accomplished with a Java ResourceBundle. This is a simple text file that contains keys and text strings. By having differently named text files, different text strings can be used by the application. I speak American English, so the keys will be in my native tongue. Thus, a key of "WelcomeMessage" would map to "Welcome to AppleCommander!" in the English file while the German file would map to "Wilkommen zu AppleCommander" or something close to that. It's been a long time since I've pretended to speak German.]

Anyway, I didn't want to place all the text into one resource bundle. I don't have anything more logical than my gut tells me it doesn't quite fit. I have kept the AppleCommander domain separate from the user interface. This has worked out in the last year nicely - there have been two command-line versions of AppleCommander released. The domain logic was just incorporated and the GUI version was essentially tossed. That is according to plan. I think that same reasoning supports my i18n intuition.

I'm somewhat surprised that some Googling didn't show other people discussing this. I admit I didn't try too hard, but I'd expect to find something.

I have separate internationalization files for the domain, the user interface, and actually have separated out the compiler piece. It feels a little bit weird, but I'm going to stick to it until I'm proven wrong. (c:

By the way, Eclipse comes through big-time in this arena. If the compiler generates a warning for non-externalized strings, all string literals are marked with a yellow marker. Pressing CTRL+1 gives as one of the choices the externalize strings 'wizard' which lists all strings in the source file. From there life is pretty easy! My only modification is to use my own "TextBundle" wrapper instead of the default Eclipse "Message" wrapper. I wrote mine before I realized there was a wizard, and am sticking with it since it fits my internationalization strategy pretty well.

It's fun playing games...

... with your child. I just finished a game of Monopoly with my 5 year old son, Harry. It happens the be the Lord of the Rings Monopoly game that he got me for Christmas. Normally, he really does quite well - as in winning. Unfortunately, I won tonight. (c:

In all seriousness, though, Monopoly is an awesome game to work on the simple math skills. Think of all the addition and subtraction you need to do. Plus a bit of multiplication and financial planning and sportsmanship. I suppose there is word recognition - for the properties - but not really reading. Not yet, anyway.

Extremism

Before I sound like I'm way out in Left field, I should correct my title from an earlier post. Any extremist position is a turn-off. By definition you pretty-much need to be blind to any other alternatives. That includes the Left and the Right and all the other extremist positions out there.

Sad state of affairs

If even half of this is true, we are truly in a sad state of affairs. Science should be held outside of politics. Sometimes it will support - sometimes it will not. Science, done right, is pure knowledge with no political ambitions.

A side note: I seem to remember a lot of debate over science getting slashed and demented before the War on Iraq. (Possibly earlier than that.) Now it seems rather silent. I wonder if things have gotten better or not.

Right-wingism is a turn off (not to mention a new word)

I am disappointed by the right-wing bashing of anybody who doesn't agree with them. That, unfortunately, includes the President. If we don't support his war, we are un-Patriotic. If we air our views about the war against Iraq in public, we are un-Patriotic. I must disagree. By airing our concerns we preserve freedom. It is our right and our duty to voice them.

Why did we go to war? Because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, was planning attacks against America, and they supported and aided al Qaeda. Unfortunately we were wrong. Iraq didn't have WOMD and they couldn't have scurried into other countries, could they? We would have been watching. They most likely didn't have the capability to attack America and probably weren't planning it. They'd felt our wrath and would be stupid to receive it again. Al Qaeda and Saddam supposedly didn't get along, so any collaboration would be unlikely.

Now why did we invade Iraq? Saddam is a bad guy and we brought Democracy to the Iraqis.

I agree that Saddam is evil. There are many evil people in this world and many of them are in positions of power. But that is not why we went into Iraq. That is not a reason to go to war.

We goofed. (I'm doubly pissed because I was actually swayed by Bush's speech.) I'm extremely disappointed that the President is not able to even admit that we were wrong. In effect, he has when the intelligence community is blamed. But would he lose that much politically if he just admitted it? People are being killed because of that decision. I think it's over 1000 "allied" troops plus countless citizens of all nations involved. The decent act would be to admit to the wrong-doing and act to remedy it. The remedy would be to bring freedom to Iraqi civilians.

As it currently stands, we now need to stay in Iraq and stabilize the region. Pulling out is not viable. Iraq is now a haven for those who hate America because of the invasion. We had assumed that Iraqi's would have a love-fest with us, their invaders. We need to make Iraq love America. Somehow.

In all the confusion, we have completely forgotten about our real enemy - those who instigated 911.

This is classic for America. We get distracted by unimportant stuff.

Bush must go.

Maybe next election there will be somebody who I can believe in on the Republican ticket. It most definitely is not Bush.

I, Robot

A quick interruption from my political meanderings.

I'm an Asimov fan. Just saw an add for the movie I, Robot. I have a strong expectation that it bears no resemblance to the stories in the book. Just robots and the three laws of robotics. Having said that, the movie actually might be pretty fun. Here's hoping that I'm not disappointed!

A little bit left of center

I am quite frustrated by politics this year. I was in 2000 also, but I wasn't blogging then. My two bit description of my political views is that I generally socially liberal (please don't get in a snit about that word) but fiscally conservative (I'm a cheapskate). I believe in freedom for all and am proud to be an American.

I'll state up front that I am not voting for Bush. I didn't in 2000 and nothing he has done has convinced me to vote for him this year. I am not a card-carrying Democrat, but I see no other choice. My strategy is to remove Bush. Since there are no other viable parties that I see being elected, I'll be casting my vote with Kerry. I do not agree with everything he says, but he'll be an improvement.

I want to explore a bit, and this forum is as good as any. Work is taboo, home can be taboo and I'd rather not get the family riled up with me, so the blog is it.

Blogger confusion...

I've been putzing around with blogger and trying to find others' blogs. There are links on my profile for state, city, interests, and the like. From the dashboard, I can see recent posts by others. But, that's it. People cannot just go to blogger.com or blogspot.com and search. Are there people actually trying to find others? Or, must we sign in and setup as many interests as we can just to locate other blogs of interest? Seems to be lacking a bit of user friendliness! Maybe a "locate a blogger" that lets me plop in this information. Maybe I want to see people in, say, Minnteonka, MN. No clue how to do that.