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

Reagan and Religion

[jemyl.livejournal.com]

I didn't particularly agree with Reagan and much of what was done during his presidency, particularly here at home in the gool old U.S.A. I respect your right to your own opinion.

I have one question, though. In your anger are you not doing the very thing most pagans rant that the Christians, particularly the born agains and fundamentalists, do to them? Are you not equating the religion with the person and blaming Christianity for the actions of several presidents?

When you say that they are all evil, I am reminded of the things some Christians say to convince others that pagans or wiccans are dangerous. Both points of that view are too extreme for me. I cannot, in good conscience, damn anyone to hell as you have done in your comment. But, that is me.

AS for the Constitution, I tend to agree with you. A Libertarian friend reminded me today of something I had forgotten. That is that the Bill Of Rights has been suspended during most of our major wars. I hate the Patriot Act but am beginning to realize that it does have a historical precedent in this country. At least it hasn't gone so far (yet) that it is limiting comments such as yours above. That is good. I may disagree with you, but will fight to my very last breath for your right to comment and say whatever you want in criticism of our president.

(BTW, if you think Dubya is bad, take a long look at Jeb. He is cutting so many social programs in Florida that it won't be long before most of the disabled will end up homeless because the funding is cut for the programs that provide their housing, transportation and care. This is true for botht he elderly and young disabled. It is a sad time for poor and disabled people in Florida right now under Jeb)

Re: Reagan and Religion

[weofodthignen]

Actually, people have been jailed for saying less than that the US is now a hereditary monarchy--but that doesn't make it any less of my duty to point it out.

Similarly, yes, Jeb Bush is warring against the poor and helpless in Florida. G.W. Bush did the same in Texas when he was governor. I'm afraid it's par for the course. And not very different from Reagan's attitude toward welfare recipients during the 1981 campaign and both his terms (disclaimer: in 1977 he was campaigning for things that resembled what became WorkFare--that I approved of at the time), or Nancy Reagan's response to the victims of drugs and AIDS.

I don't see how I am blaming Xianity, or even fundamentalism, as such--I was careful to state that Carter was and is also born again (both candidates in the 1977 and 1981 campaigns were born again, it was a prominent feature of the campaigns both times). I do blame the Reagan administration for the stranglehold the likes of Pat Robertson now have on the country--it was his régime that subordinated everyone's constitutional rights to the so-called "Moral Majority." Whereas, as I said, his predecessor in office was and is a devout Xian--Southern Baptist, I believe--but did no such thing.

So the conclusions I draw are that, yes, the man was evil. By the tenets of his own stated religion, and also as a traitor to his country in the Iran-Contra affair. Maybe also in his dealings with China, who knows? But Clinton also caved utterly over China.

So there's some further support for my judgment. I won't trust that crew again; Lincoln is spinning in his grave, and the America I liked and defended to friends in the late seventies has been irrevocably marred to indulge a clique's vainglory and a bunch of revolutionaries' shallow notion of morality.

M