Paul's Down-Home Page

I don’t wish to denigrate the honest patriotism of Americans who exercise their Constitutional right to freely assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. However, I think that a lot of participants in the recent marches might be surprised to know where some of the money to fund them came from. Try reading this article, then ask yourself: are you comfortable with the organization and funding behind this particular movement? Does the end justify the means?
Switching to a related topic: the San Francisco Chronicle released a story on Friday that reports that the San Fran anti-war rally only had about 65,000 attendees, not the 200,000+ originally reported. They asked the rally organizers to estimate the time when the crowd was at its peak size, then used aerial photos overlaid with grids to estimate the number of protestors. So, big surprise: there probably weren’t quite as many people at the worldwide protests as their organizers claim. This was true of the Million-{Man, Mom, Gun, Youth} March, and it’s probably been true at most large-scale crowd events. At least the Chronicle was trying to come up with an accurate estimate– that’s the kind of fact-finding that I wish more news outlets would engage in.

I make fun of the Toledo Blade a lot (I know, I know; I shouldn’t pick on such easy targets.) I usually get irked by the contents of the Sunday op-ed page (particularly Marilou Johanek, who gives every impression of being a leftover Amerika-hater from the 70s), but I saw something there yesterday that I liked: this article by Ann McFeatters makes a number of good points, not the least of which is that the Democrat field for President is too crowded. Rather than beat that dead horse, though, let’s focus on another point. McFeatters says “Democrats need to offer a clear choice with a compelling message to get them over the hump of more voters now identifying as Republicans.” So far, the clearest message I’ve heard comes from Ho Ho, and it loosely translates to “Send lots and lots of money”.

Our house has two upstairs rooms that are built into the slope of the roof on the front side of the house. There aren’t any windows, so they’re lit by fluorescent fixtures, which makes them feel a little confined. We’d talked about building in dormers on the street side, but that would make the front of the house look goofy. Instead, I’m thinking of using light pipes, like the ones from Sunpipe or Sunlight Tech. It’s hard to tell which one will work best, since all the manufacturers I’ve found have crappy websites. I wonder if Lowe’s or Home Depot carries them?

So, the ./ crowd is always griping that Microsoft is an evil monopoly, etc, and that they steal others’ technology and pass it off as their own. Right, then: why don’t I hear the same folks complaining about products like Evolution that blatantly steal Microsoft’s user interface and application behavior (in fact, Evolution is an Outlook clone, except it doesn’t work as well as Outlook does)? Worse, what about XPDE, which steals (oops, I mean “recreate[s] the Windows XP interface to-the-pixel point”) the entire user interface of Windows XP? The XPde FAQ says (paraphrased) “Microsoft can’t sue us because we’re not copying anything that they can copyright”– but that doesn’t make their copying right. Pure hypocracy.
Hey, Linux guys: if you want to beat Microsoft, do it by making something better, not by copying their investment.

I can’t take credit for this, alas; all props go to my friend Kim. She writes:

A few weeks ago in the cafeteria downstairs I suggested, perhaps too loudly, that maybe it should be illegal for people to put stickers of American flags on vehicles that get less than 15 miles per gallon.

I think this is a brilliant idea, and I’m going to write my representatives in Congress. (Since my rep is one of the most liberal folks in Congress, I bet she’ll love the idea!)