Greed and Stupidity
So now the RIAA is suing 12-year-old girls for downloading music. And 71-year-old grandfathers. And divorced mothers of teenagers. And anyone else they pick out at random.

Bastards.

You know, there's a lot of great music out there that the RIAA doesn't control. There are literally dozens of great artists all over the world waiting for you to discover them. And if you're like me, one of life's sweeter joys is discovering some brilliant musician or band that you never knew even existed before. There's no need to settle for the pablum the big media companies try to foist on us. I'm not telling you to boycott the RIAA (although it's certainly worth considering); I'm urging you to go out and find all the great music that's out there that isn't controlled by plutocrats who seem to feel the need to sue 12-year-old girls.

How do you know whether something comes from an RIAA member company? Just go here.

Here's a list of some of my favorites to help you get started:

Warren Zevon - The Wind, Life'll Kill Ya
Lori Carson - House in the Weeds (you can order it direct from her website)
Gigi - One Ethiopia
Bebel Gilberto - Tanto Tempo (The Special Remix Edition on Ziriguiboom - if you want the original, email me and I'll burn you a copy)
Gilberto Gil - Refavela
Paco de Lucia/Eric Montoya - Flamenco Romantico
Like Irish music? - check out Green Linnet records. I'm partial to Altan and Wolfstone.
Putumayo puts out great collections from all over the world, as well as individual artists like Oliver Mtukudzhe.
The Texas Music Group brings together a bunch of great Texas labels like Antones and Watermelon records, so you can find Toni Price, Don Walser, The Derailers, and more.

And go out and see some live music. A bigger percentage of your dollar goes to the artist than it does when you buy a CD.

Life - The Good and Bad in Santa Cruz
So the city council has decided to send a letter to the House Judiciary Committee to voice the community's concerns about President Bush's actions. It isn't quite a call for impeachment, but it's the next best thing. You might assume that this is payback for the infamous DEA drug bust of a little over a year ago (after which members of the city council handed out medical marijuana on the steps of city hall), but it actually is a reflection of the will of the electorate.

I must look for references to this in various right-wing ideo-blogs tomorrow, just for the entertainment value of watching their mouths foam with righteous indignation. I'm not really a leftist, I just prefer the goofy entertainment the left provides to the mean-spiritedness of the right. And life here in the CenCal Riveria - the land that time and neo-conservatism forgot - is always entertaining.

The bad is that I have to drive over the hill to my job in San Jose. The "hill" is actually the ridge of the Santa Cruz mountains that separates the Pacific coast from Silicon Valley. To get to work, my fellow commuters and I have to take Highway 17, a twisty four-lane mountain road that cuts through Patchen Pass, the lowest point of the mountains near Santa Cruz. Normally, it's not too bad once you're used to it, but today it rained for the first time since late April. This always catches people by surprise, and they tend to do foolish things. That last rain was on a Friday, and I waited until after 8 PM to go home because I knew how bad things would be. And I wasn't mistaken; in addition to passing 3 multi-car accidents that evening, I also two cars - one on each side of the road - flipped over on their roofs in the right-hand lane. Today I only saw 2 accidents, neither of which looked too terrible.

The problem isn't the road itself; all you have to do is slow down and drive carefully. No, the real danger is an impatient yuppie in an SUV or a BMW. I assume today's accidents will be enough to bring the CHP patrols back, and I'll be glad to see them.

CalPolitics
So Cruz is a racist, Arnold once bragged about having group sex, and Gray is...well, Gray. It's great to see how the media is focusing on the important stuff instead of wasting their time on irrelevant matters such as investigating the candidates' solutions to the state's budget crisis. Perhaps it's best to completely pass over the question of how some dignity ever gets restored to California governance.

Bustamante's worst sin, as far as I can tell, is his utter mediocrity. Could the Democrats have two more dispiriting candidates than Cruz and Gray? That may be what makes Arnold attractive to lots of undecided voters. But it seems to me he suffers from the same problem that his Democratic opponents do - he doesn't really seem to stand for anything other than getting elected. It's possible he has some very definite positions, but we have no idea what they might be. And his handlers are working very hard at keeping him under wraps. This might be his best possible strategy. Current and former Texans of a certain age (like me) probably still remember how Clayton Williams lost a huge lead in the Texas Governor's race in 1990 by repeatedly sticking his foot in his mouth.

But comparisons to George W. Bush are probably are little more apt. Like GWB, we have a well-known candidate who's never held public office. He's backed by the best-connected insiders of his party, many of whom have extensive experience in politics. In particular, the folks advising Schwartzenegger are the same ones who were part of Pete Wilson's (the last Republican Governer of CA) administration. Like GWB, there have been charges that AS is simply a frontman for the decision-makers behind the scenes.

A big difference is that the Governor's duties in Texas are largely ceremonial. The Lieutenant Governor is responsible for the day-to-day business of the state. This is not the case in California, where the Governor has far more power and responsibility. GWB was very effective in advancing his agenda during his time as Governor, but it was Bob Bullock and then Rick Perry who ran the day-to-day show as Lt. Gov.

Schwarzenegger's claim is that specifics of his positions on the issues are not that important; bringing leadership to Sacramento is what's needed. This isn't really a bad argument; tough decisions need to be made by someone who's willing to stand up, carry them forward, and get the majority of state's lawmakers on board. But at this point, we have very little to help judge if Schwarzenegger is capable of providing that kind of leadership. A good start would be to demonstrate that's he's done his homework, and that he has some well-thought-out ideas and positions. Despite some test marketing to the far right, he's still largely a cipher, and his candidacy still looks to me more like a vanity project for his ego than a commitment to effectively governing California.

Update: I wrote this on Saturday and posted it without publishing (or so I thought). The reason I didn't publish it was because I thought it was poorly written and not very well informed - based on my emotional judgements of the candidates which have been formed without sufficiently educating myself. So this is a slight rewrite of the original post. It's a little better, but not much.

Society

Here's an interesting article on ESPN's hiring of Rush Limbaugh by Rogers Cadenhead. I felt motivated to write this comment:

“There's a simple cure for the Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters of the world:

By and large, ignore them. Don't buy their books, don't watch their shows. Don't waste energy debating their ridiculous positions. Doing so gives them a legitimacy that they don't deserve.

Of course, they'll continue to appeal to their core constituencies. There'll always be plenty of money to be made pandering to people's worst impulses. But remember that this sort of thing thrives on controversy, especially the emotional, name-calling, mean-spirited kind. Denying them the privilege of being taken seriously averts this and eventually results in their being reduced to irrelevance.

Now, that doesn't mean we should let them get away with anything. The truly offensive things they say and do - Limbaugh's repugnant remarks about 12-year-old Chelsea Clinton and his frequent bouts of racism, Coulter's indefensible defense of Joe McCarthy and labeling of liberals as "traitors" - need to be held up as examples of why they shouldn't be taken seriously. But the important thing is to to debunk and skewer such abuse of the right of free speech, not to respond in kind or descend to personal attacks. Rogers' article is very much in this spirit. The real point, to me, is the cynicism of ABC/Disney in hiring Limbaugh in attempt to boost ratings by 1) bringing in his core audience and 2) hoping this ignites controversy. Don't let it; in this case, principled detachment is more effective than rabid condemnation. Turning off ESPN and ABC is an easy thing to do. If lots of people do it, it's more effective than any other method.

This same advice can be applied to the idiots on the far left. Feel free to substitute Michael Moore and Al Sharpton for Limbaugh and Colter. But the point remains: call them on their nonsense, ignore them otherwise, and eventually they'll fade away.”

Barbershop Banter
Speaking of Dean, my barber Jerome mentioned a great quote while he was cutting my hair this morning. Apparently, Dean has been pointing out that he balanced 12 budgets in a row and that George Bush has never balanced one.

I'll attest to that. I was living in Texas when GWB pissed away the surplus Ann Richards had made possible during her term as Governer. And that was during the boom, not after it. Sorry, “pissed” is the wrong verb. He gave away the surplus. To his rich buddies and corporate benefactors. Molly Ivins tells you all about it here.

As an aside, Texas was facing a budget crunch almost as scary as California's current one after the '84-85 bust. One of the key reasons the state didn't melt down financially was Ann Richard's remarkable performance as State Controller and then Treasurer. Her right-hand man and successor, John Sharp, was equally brilliant. Their efforts and a recovery of the Texas economy eventually led to a budgetary surplus. California could really use someone with Governer Ann's financial acumen and leadership right now. Not to mention her wit, charm, and gift for stinging rhetoric. Instead, we've got Gray, Cruz, and Arnold.

Jerome, incidentally, was into self-publishing long before the web made it easy for the rest of us. Is that cool, or what?

Better Late Than Never
Dave Winer is asking bloggers to link to this post on blogging tips for candidates. Now, it hardly matters whether I do or not, but it's eminently worthwhile reading. Key quote: “Earlier this year I wrote an op-ed piece for the Harvard Crimson explaining the next step in democracy, voters with their own publications, everyone with an op-ed page, citizens with weblogs, a revolution in politics...it's surprising when a vision comes true, no matter how strongly you felt it would.”. The Dean campaign weblog seems to be the one that's blazed the trail, along with Larry Lessig's guest spots by Dean and Kucinich. But no one's really harnessed the medium yet. What's going to happen when someone does?

More Bernard Lewis
“Some features of classical Islamic civilization, such as tolerance, social mobility, and respect for law, are distinctly favorable to democratic development...Socially, Islam has always been democratic, or rather, egalitarian, rejecting both the caste system of India and the aristocratic privilege of Europe...[There remains] the political difficulty - the total absence of any conception or experience of representative or limited government of any kind. It is this, no doubt, that underlies the theory that democracy cannot work in Islamic lands. That there is a predisposition to autocratic government among Muslim peoples is clear enough; that there is an inherent incapacity for any other has yet to be proven.”

Books
I've been reading Bernard Lewis's The Shaping of the Modern Middle East. Here's an interesting quote:

“Of all the great movements that have shaken the Middle East during the last century and a half, the Islamic movements alone are authentically Middle Eastern in inspiration...the religious ideologies alone sprang from the native soil and expressed the passions of the submerged masses of the population. Time and again, the fundamentalists have shown, against all their competitors, that theirs are the most effective slogans and symbols, theirs the most intelligible and appealing discourse...the religious movements can still release direct immensely powerful pent-up emotions and give expression to deeply held aspirations. Aspirations are not programs, and the fundamentalists in office have so far shown themselves no better equipped than their predecessors either to solve the problems of their societies or to resist the temptations of power. But although these movements have so far been defeated or deflected, they have not yet spoken their last word.”

War and Peace
Salam Pax's postings have become increasingly cynical - maybe even a litle despairing - in the past month or two. Now his parents' house has been searched by the US Army.

“They came, freaked out my mother, pissed off my father, found nothing and left.
After refusing to get one my father finally conceded to get one of those cards that basically say you are a “collaborator”.”

Not a flip remark. Apparently, it's not safe to be to perceived as being in league with the Americans.

Still think we're winning? Apparently the right-wing ideologues do. I'm having trouble deciding where denial ends and cluelessness begins with these guys. They'd probably tell you that Salam and I are both part of the problem - foot soldiers in the army of fifth columnists who will be responsible if things don't go the way they're supposed to. Then again, as an Open Software writer and user, I'm a criminal as well as a traitor, so it's no wonder that I'm subverting the true path of freedom and liberty*.

It's easier to blame someone else when things go wrong than to admit that the policies you favored were flawed. That would too close to taking responsibility for your opinions and actions. And that can't be allowed in this blame culture (which itself, of course, is blamed on those traitorous liberals).

I was never a big fan of Ronald Reagan, but I always admired him for standing up and saying that the blame was ultimately his when something major (e.g., the blowing up of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983) went wrong on his watch. I can't imagine any leading politician of this time doing the same. I mean, can you imagine Gray Davis taking the blame for the California budget? Bush for the economy? Tony Blair for misleading Parliament? Clinton for Mogadishu? Katherine Harris for the election debacle in Florida?

No, it's somebody else's fault. It's always somebody else's fault. The right has the dubious distinction of playing the blame game better, but that's just one more indication that the left is in disarray.

Remember when politicians actually took some responsibility for their actions and policies? Remember when it was a sign of character to admit when you were wrong and that self-restraint and tact were once considered virtues? Remember when Republicans were actually fiscal conservatives and Democrats actually believed in standing up for the working man?

Has the society we live in really progressed from the one our parents lived in when they were our age?

*(But once more, for the record: I'd love to be proven wrong. I'd love to see attacks against us and the British slowly wind down. I'd love to see a successful reconstruction of Iraq that resulted in a stable and prosperous democracy. I'd love to see the repressive Islamic fundamentalists in Iran overthrown and replaced by a representative democracy. I'd love to see Osama and Saddam captured and tried for their crimes. I submit, once again, that you need an effective grand strategy to achieve most of these aims and that the present strategy, including the near-unilateral invasion of Iraq (with a force too small to successfully occupy it), is badly thought out, deeply flawed, and carries too high a risk of failure.)

CC - The Leading Edge of Satire
I just read a post on Adam Felber's site making fun of Ascroft's multi-city tour. You'll note that he wrote it 11 days after I made fun of the idea. I've seen a couple of other satirical references to the same subject in the last day or two, but hey - I WAS FIRST!

Granted, Felber's way funnier than me. But it took him 11 days to be funnier. So there.

Hey, do you think that if I titled this "CC - The Fair and Balanced Edge of Satire" I could get Fox to sue me?

Policy
I'll submit that the California recall and last week's blackouts on the other coast have the same root cause - an inability to make effective policy to achieve desirable outcomes.

The desirable outcome in California is a well-governed state able to endure the vicissitudes of volatile economic changes without succumbing to fiscal crisis during downturns. The desirable outcome for our power grid is to provide safe, highly reliable power without interruption at the lowest possible cost. We've managed to achieve the exact opposite of the outcomes we desire. And the ultimate reason is poor policy.

The recall is simply a second-order effect of California's budget crisis. I'm no big fan of Gray Davis, but the recall does nothing to help solve the budget crisis. The California Journal does an excellent job of tracing the budget crisis down to it roots. “Crisis in California” identifies 5 reasons why things have gone wrong. All are examples of poor policy making. Taken together, they've created a disasterous situation. The biggest question is whether they can be effectively reformed. If not, “The doomsday question is whether Governor Gray Davis is being recalled for failing to govern a state that is no longer governable.”

A not-disimilar story - albeit over a longer period of time - unfolds if you take a look at the roots of the blackout. Since at least 1982, experts have warned that the electric grid's ability to meet its goal of uninterruptable service is becoming more and more compromised. There have been multiple warnings since 9-11. Yet little to no action has been taken. The reason, once again, is poor policy. Some excellent background information can be found here and some good free-market oriented policy discussion here.

Notice that on both of these issues, everyone can share the blame. It's a completely non-partisan failure by all concerned.

Software
I've just about finished porting Chrysalis to MySQL; heck, I might even get it all checked in tonight. It's one of those I'm-glad-it's-over kind of things, because MySQL isn't particularly interesting to work with. Truth be told, it's a toy, not a full-fledged DBMS. It's very useful for lots of simple things, but so what? Of course, this is not a PC thing to say in the open-source world - putting down MySQL is the equivalent of questioning motherhood and apple pie.

But that's not what I really want to write about. I need to work on my own unfinished project instead of critiquing someone else's. God knows, I've got at least 6 more months of work to add features and support for other databases beyond this initial port. Of course, the port isn't really finished, either. I had to make a lot of changes to the structure of the code - even though I'd originally tried to write something that would be easy to port to multiple databases - and that means I need to take another pass through it and refactor it to make it coherent enough to understand and maintain. Among my goals when I write code is to make as clear and simple as possible. I can see how to get there with my current code base, but isn't really that close to meeting those goals. And the truth is that the code really isn't production quality yet because I haven't tested it or stressed it to any great degree. At least my versioning scheme is relatively honest - no one should mistake an 0.4 release for a finished product.

Music

We are the roses in the garden,
beauty with thorns among our leaves.
To pick a rose, you ask your hands to bleed.

What is the reason for having roses
when your blood is shed carelessly?
It must for something more than vanity.

10,000 Maniacs, “Eden”, Our Time in Eden

Our Civil Liberties
It should give us all hope - left, right, and center - that common sense and an awareness of what the Founding Fathers intended seems to be taking hold. Not only does the passage of Patriot II, in any form, seem more and more unlikely, but now there seems to be a strong and growing reaction from conservatives against John Ashcroft and his misuse of both Patriot I and the Justice Department to go along with the persistent criticism from the left. Instapundit sums up this trend nicely.This is heartening because it seems as if the self-correcting mechanisms built into our system may in fact be working to swing the pendulum back.

In reaction, Ashcroft just announced a multi-city tour to talk about the fight against terrorism and the benefits of Patriot I. A multi-city tour? What, is he promoting a new album? Will there be t-shirts? Is there a DOJ staff wrangler dedicated to removing all the red M and M's? I'm trying not to think about what Ashcroft groupies look like...

Math and Computing
Paul Graham, writing about Lisp:

“So the short explanation of why this 1950s language (Lisp) is not obsolete is that it was not technology but math, and math doesn't get stale.”

I'll make the same claim about the relational model, which is just an application of set theory and first-order predicate logic. Fabian Pascal puts it this way:

· a database is a set of axioms;
· the response to a query is a theorem;
· the process of deriving the theorem from the axioms is a proof;
· a proof is made by manipulating symbols according to agreed mathematical rules;

The proof, of course, can only be as sound and consistent as the rules are. That makes the DBMS a deductive logic system: it derives new facts (query results) from a set of user asserted facts (the database). The derived facts are true (query results are correct) if and only if:
· The initial assertions are true
· The derivation rules are logically sound

The sad fact is that none of the above is true of commercial SQL DBMS's. They're just stale technology - because they ignored the math.

Dolphins
We saw a group (school?) of dolphins this morning at the beach. I saw 4 together, but S. says she counted 8 total while I was trying to get a picture (I didn't; need a better camera and a better photographer). They tend to swim parallel to the beach just past the surf line, their fins bobbing up and down. I usually see them from October to April, but I've never seen them before in August. From the descriptions I read, I'd guess that they were bottlenose dolphins but they could also have been Pacific White-Sided Dolphins. Doesn't matter; either way, it's a striking reminder that we live right next to one of the greatest concentrations of marine life in the world.

Follow ups

IBM countersues SCO, following Red Hat and SUSE. Apparently triggered by SCO's attempt to sell SCO Unixware licenses to Linux users, which, BTW, is a violation of the GPL. Bruce Perens points this out, and also points out the danger of patents to Open Source, which is worrisome given that part of IBM's countersuit alleges patent infringement.

So this is more of a mess than ever. I still don't believe there's any real merit to SCO's claims. But the FUD spewed by all this is a terrific smokescreen for more serious attacks on Open Source - namely, patents and other manipulations of IP protections.

What's the situation in Iraq? Depends on who want to believe. All I know is that two more U.S. soldiers are dead in an attack and more than 10 Iraqis died in a car-bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad. Read Salam Pax for an insider's view.

Winning? Losing? The peace, that is.

Life
This is the time of year when the Amaryllis blooms. The local variety are a startling pink, gay and profuse. They seem to bloom overnight; you look up one day at the beginning of August and notice them everywhere. It's interesting that they choose to bloom at the least likely time - when the morning fog no longer rolls in and the sun beats down all day and it's bone dry. And they seem to grow best in empty lots, quiet corners, and other forgotten or ignored places. They only last for a few weeks and then they're gone. That, combined with the time of year, when summer peaks and then declines into the autumn, makes them very poignant to me; I feel summer's glory and passing all at once.

I also notice that the leaves on the Japanese Maples in front of Gault Elementary school are starting to turn red, getting ready to blaze with color and fall at the feet of the children when they return to school in just a few weeks.

I know neither the Amaryllis nor the Japanese Maple are native varieties, but I can't help but love them anyway.

An Abrupt Hiatus
I can't believe that I haven't blogged for a week. There's a lot of things I want to write about, but just haven't had the time; I've had to work on some critical customer issues at my new job and was also working on a little programming contest we had staged. Alas, I came in third. The winner was our intern, who used a friggin' Mergesort as the basis of his solution. Oh, the ignominy! At least I beat my boss and a couple of the other senior programmers.

Breakfast
Strawberries and Raspberries from Cortez Farms in Santa Maria. English Shelling Peas from Swank Farms in Hollister. Beef Bacon from Corralitos Meat. Co. All courtesy of the Cabrillo College Farmers' Market. Plus an Almond and Cherry granola bar.