Will of the People

Today: Fixed a stupid bug with my blog software. I forgot to set a default for a boolean field in the database, and so various tests on its truth and not being false gave inconsistent results. This makes the Atom stream actually get all the entries now. I discovered this while testing changes that make the Atom feed is compliant (I hope) with 1.0 of the spec. I have a suspicion that the RSS feed is broken (will test/fix some other time). Do people still use RSS anywhere?

If any usually-out-of-town-people are in town for carnival and want to grab lunch/dinner/tea, please let me know. Likewise with people who are always here that don't see me very often.

Updated version of LJEscape here. It is much cleaner/nicer than my first shot, and retrieves tags on entries too. Reminder: It does its best to grab all information relevant to your lj account and save it to flat files on disk. Right now, this consists of all your entries and any userinfo it can scrounge up (including usericons, friends list, etc). It cannot get comments on your entries, but otherwise it's fairly comprehensive. Assumes Unix, Perl.

Behold, my first, last, and only video blog entry. (20 megs, OGG Theora format, please please please for the love of Fnord, if you're going to watch it, save it to a file/download it)

Supplemental: Converting from WMV format to OGG Theora was an adventure (of the sort involving airports and lost tickets and other horrors), reinforcing some points I made. I also am a bit rambly.

(not to be confused with my earlier singing blog entry)

Over the last hour or two, I whipped up a program that attempts to slurp as much information off of LiveJournal as it can, on the theory that this might be interesting/useful to those of you who don't mirror your blog to LJ from somewhere else (as I do), and are concerned about the recent sale of LJ to that previously mentioned Russian marketing firm. Details:( Read more... )

Intrested parties can grab the tarball here.

Mainly to LJ folk - you may recall that sometime back, LJ was sold by its founder to a company called Six Apart. They promptly updated the Livejournal social contract, original seen here (click for larger):

In order to remove the (circled) clause promising that they would never put advertising on the site. Six Apart, having broken the social contract with its users, has still tread lightly on the matter. In other countries it has been building partnerships with businesses which do their own advertising.

A few days ago, Six Apart announced that they're selling LJ to one of these partners - a Russian advertising/marketing firm by the name of SUP. I have no doubt that this will harm the community, at the very least changing that low-key violation of the social contract into a flagrant disregard. I hope it won't be on the scale that broke up many of the social projects I was involved with in the past such as NoWonder, but I would not be surprised. One thing I'm pretty certain of is that it will not be better - when was the last time a company you had dealings with was improved by an acquisition?

Slight additional detail:( Read more... )

To dream what jwz might say about this, "I, for one, welcome our new Russian marketing overlords".

Latest changes to POUND (my blog software):( Read more... )

Today was mostly spent programming - wrapped up the refactoring of my blog software and then continued real programming on it. I re-synced the development version and what's installed on blog.dachte.org as well. For the curious:( Read more... )

Those few of you who have POUND installed on your servers (or who don't yet but would like to play with it), ping me for an updated tarball (which I'll eventually put up anyhow). On that note, if anyone wants to join me in programming on it, and likes perl, mod_perl, postgres, and is of a unixy sort, let me know and we'll talk. There's a lot to do and the code is in a reasonably good state right now.

Recently have thought that it might be interesting to compare the origins of the Chasidic movement in Judaism and the Charismatic movement in Roman Catholicism. Haven't done so yet..

Because I'm babysitting Emily's cat Jayne, I've been regularly taking cat photos to send to her every week. While trying for this week's third picture of Jayne, I noticed this pic-worthy scene involving Beefalo and Tortfeasor:

I didn't notice that the teddy bears from my childhood matched them until after I took the shot, but it's lucky to see Yahni and Yanni match Tortfeasor and Beefalo in general colouration and position :)

I summarise interesting news events in my blog for the following reasons:

( Read more... )

Nobody else I know does this in their blog - hopefully it's not too irritating to y'all that I do it in mine. (I'm trying to get used to lowercasing "blog" after enough of you have told me that it bugs you to see it all capitalised. Give me time..)

Out of curiosity, I did some statistics on my BLOG. So far I have a bit over 800 thousand lines in all my posts, with about 55000 lines. I whipped up a cute little Perl script to give me rough word frequencies. Going beyond super-common words in English, interestingly common words include:( Read more... )

I would simply post the results, but the summary tool presently doesn't skip over private posts or private sections of posts, so I'd prefer to be safe.

Rewriting my email client is going well - it's almost theoretically ready to replace the old setup, although I'll probably keep working on it for awhile after I start using it -- with a cleaner codebase there are several features I'd like to add. In writing scripts and programs like this, I'm finally reaching the point where I regret that most of my code isn't done in OO modules, and I'm inclined to convert most of it to be so -- my Unix environment depends heavily on Perl, and I'd like to more easily be able to reuse data concepts and the like. I regret that PERL5LIB feels like such a wrong solution to tell the system where libraries are -- for development purposes I'd rather pick up modules at runtime, which feels even more awkward (eval {use lib "mypath" ; use MyModule;} gets a bit old with proper error checking and repeated for every component that wants to buy into the larger structure). Dynamic component loading tends to be fragile and/or ugly in most languages though (I mostly like C(POSIX)'s dlopen() function family though).

I recently read a little bit about the various truces in World War I held by the soldiers on some holidays, sometimes including leaving trenches for some sport or partying with "the enemy", despite the best efforts of their higher-ups. Especially given the messy causes of WWI, it makes it seem all the more tragic that so much death and conflict came to people who really had no quarrel with each other. Even in WWII, where there were some legitimate issues at stake and people presumably bought more into the ideologies that were shaping the involved countries, there were a number of people that were either drafted or were in it to defend their society with little ideological involvement. I find it regretful that in WWI at least the soldiers didn't, en masse, decide to stop fighting each other and go home to depose their governments. I guess maybe that would be both difficult and perhaps unthinkable though. Militaries acting on their own sometimes have had interesting effects on world history -- compare Kemal Ataturk to the Freikorps.

I'm interested and pleased to read that Sea Shepherd is continuing its work to prevent whaling. I keep thinking that it would be an interesting way to spend a few years joining them (although if it would work out, I would really want to do so with at least one friend, ideally a significant other).

I get a fair amount of spam on my blog, and as a result whenever I get a decent amount of it gathered, I look at the apache logs and try to find ways to block it. Methods I've used, along with how much I think they're chopping things out:

• Block individual IPs at the iptables level from all communication with my machine - I'd guess this chops out about 10% of my spam, but it's hard to know because I don't get logs of any sort from these attempts.
• Reject comments where the IP of the machine that gets the comment form differs from that which posts the form - This cuts out the majority of my spam (probably about 75%) - it's not unusual for me to see the form retrieved from thailand and posted from china (or other similarly distant places. This has a cost - any proxy pools won't be able to comment on my blog (chopping out AOL at least). That's fine by me.
• Keyword-based rejections - blocking mention of viagra, cialis, and a number of other products that spammers like to mention cuts out about 10% after the above.

Things I am considering doing:

• Block Tor. In recent times, I've come to the conclusion that tor is a bad thing (it diminishes responsibility for one's computer), and I found a nice set of scripts to find IPs that would likely talk to my servers as tor proxies. I probably would just block tor from posting, as I don't like the idea of automating things that talk to iptables.
• Block all of China, Korea, India, and other asian countries from commenting. I've only once had a proper comment from outside the Americas and Europe, and the majority of my spam comes from IP addresses in that sphere. This is definitely just WRT comments - I know I have readers elsewhere in the world.

Right now, about three bits of spam make it in every day.

I'm not currently looking at CAPTCHAs - it'd take some effort to implement, and would not stop the poor people who are paid to spam from doing so.

Slightly orthogonally, I found this on the topic of email spam. I've never seriously thought about such a system, but I've been on an anti-spam kick for the last few weeks...

I changed the default CSS on my BLOG, after all this time, to give a colour scheme that might be a little more readable. Does it look better? Should I give a darker background? I really haven't been giving POUND much attention. This, of course, only is relevant to those of you who don't simply use LJ to read everything.

My friend Jason is working on some interesting new ideas for his business. I think his laptop cases are pretty cool (they're too small for my 17" boys, but I don't mind carrying around what amounts to luggage everywhere), and seeing him do some counters for a local bike shop was neat.

On the day of DAY, PERSON woke up abnormally early to the sound of GARBAGE COLLECTORS. A PET came up to him on his SLEEPING SURFACE, and ANOTHER PET soon was seen, sitting still, on A NEARBY SURFACE. After a bit of time hanging out with his pets, PERSON pulled themself up, glanced at the clock to reveal it was NEAR SUNRISE HOUR. PERSON shrugged, took a quick shower, put on CULTURALLY APPROPRIATE CLOTHING and went out the door. PERSON swung by NEARBY RESTAURANT, had some BREAKFAST FOOD (a rare occurence, as PERSON is normally a very late waker), and made their way to work IN USUAL MANNER. On the way, PERSON remembered last night's WORK SOCIAL GATHERING.

Last night I went to my first departmental meeting (having skipped the the 2005 and 2004 ones) and picnic. By my records, I joined this research group on 9 June 2004, so I've been here for 2 years, 3 months. The meeting was worth going to -- it's nice to get a kind of overview of CMU Psychology. The party afterwards was kind of interesting too, although I didn't talk much with anyone. Some part of me keeps wondering why I have such a problem with shyness, although I think comparing this with Wikimania, it helps a lot when I'm with people who share some interests of mine. My perspective and interests are very different than that of most people, and that's probably roughly on par with reclusivity in why I don't tend to be very social. The picnic after the meeting had some pretty good food -- wine, corn, sliced potatoes, and finally ice cream. After making it back home, I went right to bed.

Two service announcements:

1. I'm turning off dachte_feed on LJ shortly, now that dachte on LJ has everything.
2. I'm going to be doing some more work on POUND. I might rework the way the Wiki side works, so on the off chance you have bookmarks to anything there (which would be odd because there's very little content), they may break soon.

The coming cold weather again brings severe discomfort, bit-by-bit.

I'm working on improving the LJ-POUND linkage (right now, POUND is relatively dumb and will re-post entries to LJ if I update them on my software). I have determined that while posting to LJ is easy, and blind batch manipulation of LJ entries is easy, finding a particular LJ entry programmatically isn't quite that simple. LJ does a shoddy job of indexing its posts - the best pseudoindex one can get is to ask for a particular date, get a list of entries on that date, and then plod through each of those trying to recognise the entry there. Entries do have a timefield, but LJ's concept of dates leaves a bit to be desired -- they do something funny with timezones (presumably), so your entry may be an hour off where you expect it to, programmatically (I say may be because looking at a set of entries, I see no pattern in when they're an hour off and when they're not). Oh, and LJ doesn't keep track of seconds, so you get to chop seconds off if you're doing a comparison. This up-and-down truncation means that if you want to robustly look for an entry, you might get to look in three spots, one for the date you wrote it, one for the date before (in case you posted within the 59 seconds after midnight and want to be really sure), and and one for the day after (in case it decided to add an hour to your after-23:00 post). You also get to try adding an hour and subtracting one in your comparison to deal with the random adding/subtracting hour thing, and if you should so happen to do two posts separated by exactly an hour, you simply lose if you want to deal with them without trying to recognise content. I'm going to sit on this problem for awhile to see if I can figure out more of what's going on. There *is* something called an ItemID that comes out of PostEntry() that maybe I should be using instead -- I could save these in the database whenever an entry is posted to LJ and maybe avoid this stupid mess.

Quirky, interesting things:

• Males are still male online
• I wouldn't mind inviting Lions to that Cafeteria
• Greenpeace lists companies by how eco-friendly they are. Nokia and Dell get props, Motorola and Lenovo suck. This might impact where I get my next phone from, and now that Dell is becoming AMD64-friendly, my next personal computer may indeed be a Dell (although my present laptop shows only light signs of wear at this point, so no rush)
• An Abugida is like an Abjad, but with a default vowel between consonants that can be modified by markers. This is kind of clever. I have a certain interest in writing systems, at various times inventing my own and trying to come up with novel ideas, along with attempting to make a syllabary for English that's visually close to the English alphabet.
• I want to know if CinePaint (once known as video-gimp) is a straight-up image editor that can handle still image formats often exported/imported from videos well, or if it is a movie editor that lets me edit images out of a movie without yanking it apart and putting it back together. The second is interesting to me, the first is not. If anyone's used it, drop me a line, especially if you're up to spending half an hour or so showing me how it works.
• The Beehive, my favourite coffeeshop (although I only go on weekends because it involves a longish bus-ride and a good amount of walking after that to get there), has a neat website. I think it's safe to say that it's my favourite Coffeeshop anywhere (I liked the old Insomnia in Columbus better, but it's long-gone)

On Wikipedia, I sometimes *shocking!* find myself disagreeing with the way the community or even Jimbo go on some issues. Mistakes and unfortunate things happen, and I find it tough to tell people that I think they were wrong on some issues -- sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. A certain amount of social capital is spent everytime one does so, and things by and large work more smoothly when one is quiet, but it's not particularly healthy when people never see other people worried by actions they do that might be questionable. One recent example involved some girl (a fairly new Wikipedian) uploading pictures of herself to illustrate some of the sex-related articles on Wikipedia -- there was some discussion on this, in particular if it was really her in the pictures, along with the dishonest maneuvering of both prudish factions (who would prefer such articles not exist and if they must, that they not be illustrated) and .. factions of people I'll call "pigs" who were cheering her on just because they like tittilation and presumably don't know about 4chan (or more realistically, like personally cheering on erotic "stars"). The argument was predictable, apart from the dishonest factions who did their best to find every technicality to keep or delete the images (a stupid, lawyerlike mentality), there was the usual debate between people who think an encyclopedia should be family-safe and careful, and those who are aiming for an encyclopedia in a more pure, audience-ignoring sense. I'm among the latter, being largely social libertine - I don't think Wikipedia should try to be safe-for-work or for children. Just as we decide it's more important to show the Danish cartoons on Mohammad in the article on the controversy, which we knew would offend many, many people, we should decide to accept pictures that help illustrate articles, even if they offend or arouse. There was, in this situation, some question on if the girl was uploading pictures that were really of herself or if she was simply taking images from a paysite and removing attribution. Alternatively, there was the concern that she was of an age sufficient to make it legal to share said images. Instead of carefully and delicately asking these questions, Jimbo decided to jump in, suggest she was trolling, and she was blocked almost immediately afterwards. I think this is unfortunate and bad judgement on Jimbo's part. The images reappeared on the horrible-but-sometimes-amusing Wikitruth site, one of the many sites devoted to criticising Wikipedia. Despite some occasional actions that I consider unfortunate on the project, by-and-large governance of Wikipedia is done well - the sites devoted to criticism tend to be run by mentally unbalanced folk with unintelligent criticism. That doesn't mean that I think that the right decisions are always made by my support of and involvement in the project.. On the other side, there's the problem that people enforcing policy to the extent it needs to be enforced (especially policies that are bound to anger when enforced, like reminding people that user pages are not personal webpages or making sure we don't run afoul of the law) tend to become unpopular, and our notion of consensus resembling, to a certain extent, voting, people doing what is necessary and good tend to harm their ability to take positions of responsibility. It's a difficulty in any electoral system when the demos don't understand or take responsibility for projects/societies. Apart from better ways to manage sufferage and/or inculturation, I don't know what the best way to manage the impact of these problems is.

I think I mentioned Malkit Singh before -- an indian pop-Bhangra musician who I saw on TV at India Garden before -- his clever music video for Jago Aaya helped me notice the song, which is an excellent song to program to. Having found more of his music, I've decided that I really like his sound - like many people who get a programmer's high, I have my own preference for music that helps me get in the zone. Almost none of the stuff has recognisable lyrics, and when it does, it's generally not stuff that grabs too much attention -- I suspect that music with lyrics tends to interfere with the word and spatial manipulations involved in weaving code. I also suspect that the music I'm listening to tends to influence my pace and style of programming (although I have no way to know for sure because my human introspection is turned off while I code). For me, Bhangra is great for coding - the constant rolling beats help keep me moving and inspired. On the occasions I need to stop to think, I typically switch to darkwave (not quite ideal because it has words, but Darkwave sans words becomes Trance, which I've never liked, either for programming or for casual listening). To my fellow readers who have programmed enough to enter Deep Hack Mode, what kinds of music help get you there? Do you vary the music for particular things, and what for?

Dear LJ-folk,

I suggest you unsubscribe from dachte_feed and simply friend my main account (dachte dachte). I just finished implementing glue between POUND and LJ::Simple (a wonderful Perl module) so that POUND will directly post to LJ, avoiding the messy, slow, comment-losing RSS/Atom syndication process. It took me this long mainly because I haven't been in a programming mood for awhile -- the interface is pretty simple. My glue is not super sophisticated at this point, but I'll probably be working on it over the next few weeks to get the details right. Let me know if there's anything particularly obnoxious about the glue.

Note:

1. Effective immediately, I won't be reading comments left on the feed anymore
2. If you friended my LJ account and don't want to see roughly-daily posts by me, feel free to unfriend it now -- I won't be offended
3. I still mildly prefer that you use my blog directly, but lj comments are not as bad now given that they won't disappear after about 2 weeks.

On a more personal note, random people have started to call me "Tex" because of my new hat. :)

I just wrote the first bit of glue between POUND and Livejournal (or, to be more precise, between LJ::Simple and POUND). The LJ::Simple module .. leaves a lot to be desired -- it's not as object-oriented as it should be, feeling a lot more like some of the more bizarre C interfaces I've seen (e.g. pass in a reference to something, and have the function return another reference to it for you, like a proud dog with a dead squirrel) than anything native to Perl. The interface is, at least, fairly powerful -- apart from some deficiencies that are likely part of the Livejournal interface (finding ids of old entries to update them is likely a lossy process), it does about anything I might imagine. Importing old entries involves setting a flag that, according to the documentation, won't flood everyone's friends list, so in theory I could import every single entry I've ever posted in POUND, having a full mirror on LJ.. I probably won't though. There's still a lot more glue to write -- this is somewhat richer than the "wrapper that decides how errors should be handled" but not quite the "glued into the guts of POUND" layer yet. I still need to write another markup discipline that will format my wikicode into as rich a HTML representation that Livejournal allows, and find the right place to glue this code in, but it's still enough that I'll be able to test the code and see if it works properly.

"A Scanner Darkly" finally came to Pittsburgh. It is a high priority for me to see this.

I am thinking of having a medium-sized gathering at my place sometime, where we do a mix of watch really bad movies and play board games/similar. It may need to wait awhile to come to fruition, but I am thinking:

• Manos:The Hands of Fate (I have the non-MST3k version on DVD)
• Find the Lady (with John Candy)
• Meteor Man

Although I'm generally a bit .. worried when friends from different social groups end up meeting, especially as it goes against #4 of Geek Social Fallacies, it generally has worked out well every time I've tried it. Apart from some obvious mismatches, I should try this a little more often, I think. Some of my friendships are (intentionally or not) low-volume friendships, and that's ok with me, but it's nice when I can introduce people that become (low or high-volume) friends in turn. Anyhow, it'd be great to have really bad movies as a background entertainment with alternative entertainment also available to avoid it simply being simply irritating. Part of me suggests that I wait until late August or September, and make it Ceilidh II.

I am now off to try to catch the film...

I believe I have the Atom stuff 95% fixed now. This is partially a test post to see if livejournal will be intelligent or not about it. Sorry for the excess postage.

It turns out that, while my new and different Atom feed is somewhat more standards compliant, it still doesn't validate. The XML::Atom perl module I am using makes things easy, but doesn't give me enough hooks to make sure I'm generating all the structure I want to -- I can set some things semi-manually using "set" functions, but for some objects, there is not a way to do that. This is frustrating -- I may need to nudge the author (or find another module).

It is, however, very handy to know Perl, both for class stuff and for other things. Hurrah.

I did not find the readings assignment for my Bioinformatics class until today. I have 112 pages of book and a paper to read tonight. I guess I can forget about catching up on sleep tonight. Phooey.

I have completely redone my BLOG's Atom feed so it now uses standard modules to generate a more standards-compliant feed. Please let me know if it radically breaks anything for any of you. I believe and hope it will fix some long-standing problems with the way things were done before (my RSS feed is still using hand-rolled code, but I'd like to change that too). As a small added plus, in theory I should have a livejournal feed of my actual BLOG now too. I'll still use my proper livejournal account to solicit opinion on a few things when I feel like it. Enjoy!

(note that, of course, the 1155 entries I've done in my blog over the years are not all imported into LJ, and I *do* hope that I mostly get comments on my actual BLOG on my website rather than on LJ, because LJ does not know who owns the feed and won't email me when comments are left.)

On the off chance you're reading this from the LJ feed, saunter over to my blog on its own site for the full experience.

Last night, having successfully revived ancient holly with Fedora 4 (Firefox is surprisingly usable on a PPro/200 with 96M RAM), I backed up my laptop, and moved it to FC4 as well. There wern't too many gotchas, and some of those I had, one involving a bug in the installer that didn't make me reformat partitions when I moved from the old layout to the new one, actually saved me. I keep a fair amount of information on a local install of MediaWiki on my laptop, and it not being visible on the filesystem means that I forgot to back it up. After puzzling through the installer crashing just before it started to install things, I realized that I forgot to do said backup, and rebooted into the oddly-still-working previous install -- it was odd because although the new partition table (totally different than the old one) was in place on the disk, GRUB was still happy to boot Linux, and apart from some things like swapping not working, everything was still intact for my last backup. Afterwards, I realized what was wrong with the installer, and told disk druid to mark the partitions as needing a new filesystem, and the install went (taking most of the night). When I briefly woke up at 6am, I started yum update, which proceeded to take another few hours. More gotchas -- while testing the sound card, it failed to first tweak the settings of the sound card to make sure sound actually comes out. This, to be fair, is more the fault of whoever wrote the driver for the Intel AC97 sound chip. A reboot, and I got a nice, usable desktop. I had to tweak the scripts I wrote to tweak the sound card to work with the ALSA interface. For the interested, here is the contents of ~/bin/lsoundup
#!/usr/bin/perl
if(! -f "/tmp/laptop_is_closed")
{
my @results = `amixer sget PCM`;
my $interesting = (grep(/Front Left:/, @results))LINK;
$interesting =~ /Playback (\d+) /;
my $val = $1;
$val += 2;
`amixer sset PCM $val`;
`amixer sset Headphone 22`;
`amixer sset Master 15`;
}


(sorry if that doesn't look right now -- I need to update my BLOG code to implement a CODE attribute to avoid markup. In particular, the end of the line that starts as my $interesting should end with a left-bracket, a zero, a right-bracket, and a semicolon)

There's a corrisponding lsounddown with a decrement instead of increment to $val, and here is lsoundmute:


#!/usr/bin/perl
if(! -f "/tmp/laptop_is_closed")
{
my $val = 0;
`amixer sset PCM $val`;
`amixer sset Headphone 0`;
`amixer sset Master 0`;
}


The need to reset Headphone and Master is that apparently setting PCM to zero doesn't quite mean zero PCM volume -- it means the minimum PCM value (found this out during testing). To really mute things, you must turn each sound output device that might be being used to 0 (hence the need to restore the settings to something more normal when other volume buttons are pressed). Everything else seems ok so far.

In other news, some time ago, I ordered the rare first album, Running with Scissors from Plaid Tongued Devils. I managed to find it on eBay, and ordered it despite the band's warning that it's not very good. Unfortunately, it's not very good. Go figure. I don't like a single song from the CD, although I like the majority of their later songs.

From the Bathroom Walls of Baker Hall.."Man knows all there is to know when he knows he knows nothing""Wow, what a conversation stopper. I bet your blind dates love that one!"

I present, for the interested, the second, fantasy BLOG (unrelated to Mustard, which is on Livejournal and still pending), the government blog of the head of the Upper House of the People's Republic of Larnesia. See HERE.

(section not shown)

Chinese policemen are being asked to change their uniforms -- their last change was in 1999. :)

I've been experimenting with doing a fantasy BLOG for my Nationstates nation. Hopefully it'll help me get momentum to restart my other sci-fi BLOG on Livejournal. When I have a few more entries on it, I'll provide a pointer. I increasingly think that, especially as I get older, building good habits becomes increasingly important to getting done what one wants done. Bad tendencies, like slumping, eventually become habits that are very difficult to change. Fortunately, BLOGging has kept me in the habit of regularly writing down my thoughts. Habits can be constraining too -- they're like the bones within us. To enable is to restrict. This is part of a growing criticism I'm feeling as I re-read Satre's Search for a Method -- Satre's notion of personal existential freedom is, to me, empty and based on misunderstanding. Creativity, which I believe he counts among what it is to be free, is born of the world and experience -- it is combining the experiences and ideas one has and builds in unorthodox ways. Satre's freedom is emptiness and nonexistence, as unappealing as infinite void. To live is to have experiences, to enact praxis, and to alter oneself accordingly. A philosopher or just a deep thinker may do the latter more than most people, but it is in a sense universal to experience as a sane being. I suspect that Satre's notion of free will is not present out of philosophical well-foundedness, but rather out of necessity for the (bad) arguments he makes towards his flavour of liberalism. Free will and its lack or presence does not have any moral implications. It should be just as possible to do what we do with or without it. An inherent free will of humanity, even if we were to accept it, should not tell us what type of government to have, or how to live our lives.

This would be amusing if it wern't so scary -- congressman Tancredo has suggested bombing Mecca in response to future terrorist attacks. According to Wikipedia, he's considerably more right-wing than BushJr, and has had angry discussions with BushJr's posse on immigration. Scary. Nuking Mecca seems like a very good way to provoke a very large world religious war. Such a thing, were it to happen, would certainly leave American liberals in a very difficult situation, as it would be opening a box on something that would be nearly impossible to put back away. At best, I'd sell everything and flee as quickly as possible to Europe (or Canada, if Europe were not open for some reason). Fortunately, people like him don't get elected (I hope).

Unlike some right-wing websites I've stumbled across recently, I think the loss of most inhibitions that society has is a positive thing -- sexual, racial, and other problems are likely to fall away as we become more tolerant. The same trend, which needs to be split off from this branch, also includes lack of any moral values at all, an increasingly commercial society, and lack of disturbation by violence. There's more than one kind of hedonism, some good for society, some bad.