Water Vapor Molecules in the Air

There are many ways to describe what I saw tonight. One of them is that there was excessive moisture in the air, causing the solar photons bouncing off of the moon’s surface to refract in interesting patterns, all of which can be described mathematically. But a description like this misses something. Though it contains a lot of Truth, there is not much in the way of meaning or inspiration. Very little feeling or intensity is evoked in the reader who hears this description.

On the other hand, I could say that I saw the moon, radiant in the same way that pregnant women are radiant, its round belly shining pure, warm light down upon me like an overpouring of love from the mother. This sentence probably contains less Truth than the previous description. But I would say it has more meaning. Though I hardly claim to be a poet, this description has a chance at evoking some sort of feeling in the reader. It is more memorable, it’s not just a recipe of reality.

Why do I talk about this? Tonight I saw a really amazing movie, Tim Burton’s

Big Fish
. This distinction between Truth and Meaning is the central theme of the story. In the movie, Billy Crudup plays Will Bloom, son of Ed Bloom played by Albert Finney (and by Ewan MacGregor in flashbacks). Ed Bloom is storyteller to the extreme; full of charm, a big smile, and a teller of tall tales. As the movie says repeatedly, “he’s nothing if not a social man.” And in the movie, he’s dying.

Will Bloom, on the other hand, is a reporter. He is interested in facts, and grew tired of his father’s tall tales. He goes to visit his father and tells him, basically, I don’t know you, I just know your amusing little lies. When Will was still a child, he discovered that some of his father’s tales were impossible, and lost all trust in his dad.
This is the central conflict in the story. Fact vs. story. Teller of tales vs. speaker of Truth. It’s a great movie; in the end, it is clear that we are our stories, no matter how we choose to tell them.

It made me cry on a couple of levels. One of them is that my grandfather is currently in the hospital, perhaps for the last time. He’s 93 years old and physically very weak; he’s also undergoing radiation treatment for skin cancer. A few days ago he had basically a heart attack; he has, in addition to his skin cancer, congestive heart failure and pulmonary edema. When (or if) he is released from the hospital, it is quite likely he will go on to Hospice.

I will always remember my grandfather in stories. One of my favorites: as a child, we used to “go to the lake” where my grandparents had a cottage. There was decent fishing at Boone Lake, actually; I remember fishing for bluegill and largemouth bass primarily, though there were also crappie to be found. Anyway, once I managed to get my fishing line hopelessly tangled into a large ball of monofilament plastic. I did this often; usually my father would untangle the line for me. Well at this moment, dad wasn’t around, he must have been off fishing or something. But Grandpa was there, and he went to untangle the line for me. I was in an “annoying kid moment”; I remember saying over and over to my grandfather: “that’s not how daddy does it.” Grandpa endured this for a few minutes and finally stopped, turned and looked at me half-glaring and half-smiling with his pipe clenched between his teeth, and said four words that utterly shut me up. “Who taught your father?”

In Big Fish, Will Bloom finally realizes that though his father exaggerated some of the details of his stories for effect, the essence of the stories was usually accurate. The Chinese Singing Twins weren’t actually siamese twins; the giant wasn’t 20 feet tall but 7 and a half. More importantly, Will Bloom realizes that our stories are our lives, and that we can only relate to other people through the stories.

It makes me wish I had listened to more of my grandfather’s stories.

Mozilla Firefox

Well, what used to be called Mozilla Firebird, the browser I’ve been raving about here, is now called Mozilla Firefox. This is because there is apparently an open-source database project called Firebird. Note also, that Firefox released version 0.8 today, getting ever closer to that 1.0 release.

Also, the Mozilla Thunderbird email client released version 0.5 today.

Both of these programs, just to clarify, are previews of the next-generation of Mozilla. The developers took regular Mozilla 1.5 (which has everything, the browser, email, etc. wrapped up in one program) and split it into its component parts. I believe that when Firefox and Thunderbird (and possibly nVu) are at version 1.0, they’ll together be packaged as Mozilla 2.0. But I’m not sure. They may just keep them separate.

Anyway, both of these programs look really sweet. I want to install them asap, but I’m having a disk space issue on my /usr partition at the moment. :-(

Thank Dean?

Well, according to this article I should. It claims:

You were around a year ago — you remember how hopeless it seemed, how many people were saying that Bush could not be beaten. You were looking into Canadian real estate, and Howard Dean was deciding to run for president. See what I’m saying?

Now people believe that Bush can be beaten. His popularity rating has dipped below 50 percent for the first time since the election (when it was also below 50 percent but, hey, let’s not go there again). Now people are voting for John Kerry on the interesting thesis that he has the best chance of beating Bush. Imagine that.

Interesting point, to be sure. Yes, many people are organizing under Kerry’s banner because they believe he has the best chance to beat Bush. OK, maybe. Why? He’s “most electable.” Not sure what this means. Does it mean, “least frightening to the status-quo?” Perhaps.

And Kerry probably will beat Bush. The pattern of the election could well be that of Clinton’s victory in ’92, though I wonder about the “Ross Perot” factor. If one can argue that Nader cost Gore the election in ’00 (this is nonsense, by the way), then one can also argue that Perot cost Bush the election in ’92. I remember at the time, I didn’t think it possible that Clinton could win. Then Perot came and took more than 10% of the vote, as I recall, many of whom “would have voted for Bush.”

But even if Kerry wins, even if he is re-elected for a second term, and some semblance of sane sameness is restored to the American government, what of the future? Bush has done so much in 3 years to damage the working class and the poor and the environment and he’s done so much to benefit the energy industry, the corporate elite, and the power establishment. How bad will the next Republican president after Kerry look?

Scary to contemplate.

This is why someone like Kucinich is so important. But in this election, he’s the “token progressive.” He’s not even as progressive as he should be, yet he represents the stance so far to the left that it’s “not electable.”

The political spectrum in this country is so narrow and right-shifted. I’ve intuited this for a long time, but Eric Alterman‘s (of Altercation fame) book What Liberal Media? is articulating this problem eloquently and elegantly for me.

KDE 3.2 in the Big News

The KDE 3.2 release made Yahoo! News:

Available in 42 languages and partially translated into an additional 32, KDE 3.2 is the result of a year-long, global development effort that included processing 2,000 feature requests and 10,000 bug reports into the new version.

KDE counts its global user base in the millions. It is the default user interface for Linux-based operating systems Ark Linux, Conectiva, Knoppix, Lindows, Lycoris, Mandrake Linux, SuSE Linux, TurboLinux and Xandros and is available as an option with Debian, Free/Open/NetBSD, Gentoo, Libranet, Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT – news) Linux, Slackware and Solaris.

Now, if only I could get it to work with Fedora

Forbes: “Microsoft should be worried”

Thus Spake Forbes:

Firebird is available for a free download from Mozilla and is currently at version 0.7, which means it has not quite reached the point of being a fully stable product. Eventually Firebird will become the default Mozilla browser, although that won’t happen before it reaches version 1.5. But it’s certainly worth a try if you’re finding Explorer getting old. If, in its unfinished state, Firebird is this good, perhaps Microsoft should be worried.

Even the mainstream corporate/capitalist media know Microsoft is in trouble.

Mozilla (Firebird and Thunderbird and Nvu and … get the point? Mozilla is extensible) is going to come out of nowhere and win the browser wars once and for all. It should dominate well into the next decade. It’s growing in usability at an exponential rate; each new release gets better and better. Already it’s better than IE. The final nail in IE’s coffin will come when all of the plugins work seamlessly with it. It should be easy to install, with a standard Fedora or Debian package for all the useful Mozilla plugins. Here’s hoping.

But the victory in the browser wars is just the beginning. I predict a similar fate for OpenOffice.org over MS Office and for desktop Linux in general. It’s a matter of both momentum and the laws governing exponential curves.

Janet’s Tit, Outrage, Janet’s Tit, missing WMDs, Janet’s Tit, record concentrations of wealth and power, Janet’s Tit, Iraq, Abortion, Janet’s Tit

This hubbub over Janet’s tit is nothing more than a weapon of mass distraction. And it’s completely consistent with standard procedures used in American politics for many years.

Many of The Powers That Be use these faux-moral issues as smokescreens. If they (in this case, “they” means Michael Powell and others) can focus on this stupid little meaningless event, it means they don’t have to focus on the real issues facing this country. They’re too busy being outraged by Janet’s tit to spend any neuron power on the Bush regime’s lies and destruction, the fact that the global economy has concentrated more wealth to fewer people than ever before, etc. etc.

In an article in this month’s The Progressive magazine, Bernie Sanders writes:

So how do the rightwingers get elected if they have nothing to say about the most important issues facing the American people? That is the central question of modern American politics. And the answer is that they work day and night to divide the American people against each other so that they end up voting against their own best interests. That is what the Republican Party is all about.

They tell white workers their jobs are being lost not because corporate America is downsizing and moving to China, but because black workers are taking their jobs–because of affirmative action. White against black.

If you turn on talk radio, what you will hear, in an almost compulsive way, is a hatred of women. And they’re telling working class guys, you used to have some power. You used to be the breadwinner. But now there are women running companies, women in politics, women making more money than you. Men against women.

And they’re turning straight people against gay people. The homosexuals are taking over the schools! Gay marriage is destroying the country! Straights against gays.

And if you’re not for a war in Iraq waged on the dubious and illegal doctrine of “preemptive war,” you’re somehow unpatriotic. And those of us who were born in America are supposed to hate immigrants. And those of us who practice religion in one way, or believe in the separation of church and state, are supposed to be anti-religious, and trying to destroy Christianity in America–and we get divided up on that. And on and on it goes.

The Republican leadership does all of this in an incredibly cynical, poll-driven way, because they know when you lay out their program about the most important economic issues facing America, it ends up that they are representing the interests of 2 percent of the population. You can’t win an election with the support of 2 percent. So they divide us, and the result is that tens of millions of working people vote against their own interests.

Sorry for the long quote, but this may be the most salient and succinct commentary on American politics I’ve seen in a long time.

America is still very much a Puritan culture, at least on the surface. How else can one explain the remarkable attention given to a breast, which I remind the reader that each of us has, being shown on television? Furthermore, this faux-Puritanical outrage being expressed over it is nothing more than political manipulation, designed to distract the masses from the real issues.

new case, RIAA vs. reality

During the appeals process of the RIAA vs. Morpheus and Grokster case, the judge told the RIAA’s attorneys to “stop using abusive language.” A transcription of his commentary runs thusly:

“Let me say what I think your problem is. You can use these harsh terms, but you are dealing with something new, and the question is, does the statutory monopoly that Congress has given you reach out to that something new. And that’s a very debatable question. You don’t solve it by calling it ‘theft.’ You have to show why this court should extend a statutory monopoly to cover the new thing. That’s your problem. Address that if you would. And curtail the use of abusive language.”

This alone is a huge victory for the virtual commons. The Intellectual Property interests — those who would enclose the virtual commons — have been using harsh language to attempt to frame the debate so narrowly that no one could possibly disagree with them. This judge finally called them on it. Groklaw, as usual, is on top of it, with a detailed summary of this story. Check it out. On that page there are transcriptions, as well as mp3 recordings, of the court case.

Interesting Juxtaposition

…between this article and this article. The first one begins thusly:

Many have said that enough is enough taking[sic] about Linux. How Linux is great. Why Linux rulz and Micro$oft sucks, blah blah blah. I will promise you that this article is going to be something different.

And the second one’s title is “The Anything-But-Microsoft Market.”

This reveals one thing to me: that there are a large number of people sick and tired of rah-Linux, fuck-Microsoft rants (I’m guilty of this on many occasions). These people tend to be pragmatists; they just want software that works, and are happy as long as things are running well.

But there are also a lot of people who are utterly fed up with Microsoft. For these people: check out open-source alternatives. I’ve already written about Mozilla here, and I’ve written about OpenOffice in the past. Linux is worthy of attention, too.

The question of “I just want what works” is, in my view, incomplete, now that Free software “just works” in most cases. In other words, there are different options within the set of “what works.” So a choice still needs to be made. In order to embrace freedom, a computer user must be willing to break inertia. This is a commitment on some level. Personal Computing can be done and done well with Free software. It makes little sense to me to give up the freedom included in Free software in order to “go with the flow” and use what “everyone” uses.

(This argument, about what “everyone” uses, reminds me of the Heideggerian “They” — which are everywhere but nowhere; “they” is everyone, but no one in particular — he outlines in Being and Time. I’ll have to think about this connection some more…)