Content?

[ravan]

I have a kernel compiling, so I can whack out an entry.

Health

I have been having sinus problems for the last two weeks. I stayed home sick from work yesterday, because it finally got so bad that my head wanted to explode. I still feel crappy, but a little better.

Ronald Reagan

He is dead. The repuglicans are cannonizing him, and playing partisan politics with his funeral. Some liberals are demonising him, not realising that they are playing into repuglican hands by disrespecting the office of the President.

Me? I thought that he sucked as a president, as far as his policies were concerned. When he ran for re-election, he asked "are you better off now than you were four years ago?" My answer was "Hell No!". I was in layoff and temporary hell. Yet, I liked him as a person - he didn't provoke the total "slimed" reaction that George W Bush does. I liked the fact that he kept his sense of humor even when he'd been shot.

I am glad that he's dead, but only because it ends a long, slow, and degrading end from a horrible disease. I feel sorry for Nancy, having to watch her husband, who she obviously really loved, fade away as a person, leaving only an increasingly diminished set of reflexes and habits behind.

So I will mourn the passing of an ex-president. Hell, I even remembered the good that Nixon did in office when he went. Why should I do any less for Reagan? Our ex-presidents, regardless of what you think of their policies and actions, are part of our history. They should be remembered, and remembered honestly.

AbuGhraib, Bush and Rummy

Quite frankly, I can well and truly believe that the crap going on at AbuGhraib (and probably at Gitmo, as well as any other facility) is a direct result of White House and Presidential policy. The fucking bastard Bush and his chickenhawk cronies think they are above both international and Constitutional law. There has been all kinds of stuff pointing to and proving this.

But the neo-conservatives buy the spin, and the excuses. They can see written text, and put spin on it. You refer them to site after site, with good, solid references, and all they will say is that "that site is biased, therefore no good. Liberal Media, blah, blah...". They have blinders on, I swear. When will they wake up - when the "Homeland Security" (geheimstatzpolizei by any other name) jackboots come to kick down their door?? By then people like me will be dead or in some Ashcroft confinement as an "enemy combatant", undergoing "stress and duress" interrogation for the 50th time.

Work

I hate NFS, and trying to do PXELinux and/or Ethernet boots with an NFS mounted drive. It just doesn't want to work. The kernel will boot, but I can't get it to see either the NFS root filesystem, even though I have all the right stuff in the kernel - I checked three times - and the server will mount the directory that I want to use as root, nor the usb stick as a root file system (but it hangs in a different place. I'm trying to make an initrd, but the 2.6.x kernel initrd's are different than 2.4.x kernels use.

Miscellaneous

I may have to make a run to Sacramento this weekend, to play hardware tech support for datapard's brother. Fuzzy, datapard and I all in the same car. Fun... not.

This means I won't be around until Sunday evening for ertla to possibly come over, now that her last paper will have been turned in and she has more headspace to deal with people. During the week my hours are so geekish that I can't schedule anything then. Argh.

Comments

[weofodthignen]

Sorry to hear about the work stress, which I had intuited from comments here and there although obviously I can't appreciate the specifics--and about the sinuses, which I hadn't realized.

Reagan's death and the people expecting us all to rend our garments and hurl ourselves prostrate before his image have brought some things into focus for me.

I didn't like him. I didn't like his political tactics, I didn't like his face, I didn't like his "What, me? I'm not responsible" so-called folksy pose. I remember the America I encountered in 1977 and 1978. I remember events of his presidency--most of all Iran-Contra, for which he should have been impeached, and which is the reason I hated Bush, Sr. from the get-go. Reagan deeply hurt America. Not just economically, and with his war on common citizens, and with his indulgence of his wife's love of monarchic excess, and with the fact the Republicans decided to leave him in office after he became manifestly incompetent, so that the country was ruled for several years by Nancy's astrologer. But Iran-Contra was treason, pure and simple.

What I've come to realize the past few days is that he's the reason I will never trust the Republican party again. He's the reason we have Xian fundamentalists throttling the life out of this country and daring to call their revolution "conservatism." (Carter was and is born again also. And Carter was a good president.) He's the reason we have a hereditary monarchy in power in the US right now.

No, we should not forget, or be unfair. It's not being unfair to recognize that man was evil. His wife is evil. No suffering is enough. I hope he gets well toasted in Hell, and I hope she dies in penury. Marie Antoinette was at least an innocent.

Also ... I think respect for the office as such is monarchy in all but name. George Washington didn't want to be called anything but "Mr. President." Didn't the Nixon example demonstrate the dangers of automatic respect for the office? Don't we have another very recent example--lawyers advising Shrub that he need not honor international agreements simply because he is President? The office is not worthy of respect per se. The constitution is. The country is.

Reagan was at best the self-absorbed, wife-besotted figurehead (the idea he was not 100% responsible for what he did is the closest I can come to finding anything positive to say about him) for changes that have brought that country to a terrible state. And destroyed the careers of good people who genuinely have the country's best interests at heart--merely because they are not Republicans.

M

[jemyl.livejournal.com]

Sorry to hear about your sinuses, Ravan. Hope you get to feeling much better soon. All of us here have had that to one degree or another over the past few weeks. Bill even seemed to get it for a day this week. He scared the you know what out of me about it, but seems to be better now. We are keeping everything crossed and his food slowed down to help with his nausea from the drainage, and working on avoiding the pneumonia that often plagues him after a bout with either allergies or sinus problems.

PLease email me your snail mail address. The jemylfla@yahoo.com will get to me the best as I seemt to check it more. Comments from here get mailed there. I have something I want to sent you for "Flag Day" LOL.

Hang in there, Kiddo, and lots of Hugs your way.

[ertla.livejournal.com]

Heh, the good news is that Sunday evenings are far more feasible now that I don't have to be in Berkeley on Monday morning.

I hope you feel better already, health wise.