Today Would Have Been Our Anniversary
Today would have been our anniversary
As I’ve mentioned before, I met my wife back in the Dark Ages, using a Commodore 64 and a 300 bps modem. I first met her online in 1986, talked with her a lot in 1987, and married her in 1988. On July 30th, 1988.
Someone who hadn’t been born when we got married asked last night “Did they even have the Internet back then?” Well, online services for the public back then didn’t use the Internet. Online services used dial up modems and X.25 networks that were designed for business. Those business networks were empty at night, so the networks considered selling access to the new online services as found money. (This is me manfully resisting the temptation to keep talking about old tech. It would be easier than the post I’m here to write.)
She lived in Arlington, Virginia and I lived in San Diego, California. Lots of long talks online, as the long distance bills (there wasn’t any VOIP) would have ruined both of us, though we did call each other more and more as time went on. Our first date was when another couple that we knew online got married. My pickup had a flakey head light. I was banging on it with my fist to get it to come on and was so nervous that I stuck my fist through the headlight. By the time our friends’ wedding was over I was bleeding through the bandages, so Ginny bullied me into going to the hospital. Sitting there, I still thought I didn’t need stitches. (I did.) We argued back and forth about it. When I went up to the desk to sign a form the guy there asked me how long we had been married. I told him it was our first date. “Well you FIGHT like an old married couple” he replied.
When I asked her to marry me, she said she would, but there was something that I needed to know. “The Bible says a wife should obey, and I believe the Bible, but I’m no good at it. I can promise to obey you if you want, but I probably never will.” The word “obey” became a running joke between us for the rest of our life together.
The first few months we were married we weren’t online as much as usual for some reason. When I got back to the message board for Q-Link’s Trivia Club I posted a note to explain why I’d been so scarce of late. I began by explaining that I had gotten married on June 30th. Later that night she saw the post and pointed out that the actual date was July 30th. I tried to explain that it felt like we’d always been married, but the words that came out were “Well it FEELS like longer!”
We never had any kids, it wasn’t in the cards for us. When women asked her if she had any kids she would reply “Only the big one I married.” For some reason every married woman she said this to exchanged a knowing look with her and nodded. I’m sure it had something to do with the Vast Female Conspiracy.
I’m not an easy man to live with. I’m not going to catalog my faults; I’m far more comfortable pretending I have enough virtues to offset them. But in the moments when I’m honest with myself I seriously doubt it. But she not only put up with me, but more. She loved me. It was either insanity or a miracle from God. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. The whole nine yards.
A book wouldn’t be enough to write everything about her, but the fact is that even this much about her would have horrified her. She loved to play online, but she drew a hard line about things that were private. This was doubly true after her first online stalker. She fumed at rudeness, especially after we moved to the South and the Chicago native discovered a world of polite people. Once she got used to that, the occasional thoughtlessness of fellow Yankees infuriated her. She never wanted pity. She refused to let me tell anyone, even family, when she was being treated for cancer because she didn’t want the kind of looks that mentioning the “Big C” so often brought. And she beat the cancer.
Late in 2006 I started getting sick. It was frustrating, there were lots of little things and the doctor was sure there was an underlying condition, but couldn’t find it. It was finally identified as a problem with my left kidney, probably cancer. (Biopsies don’t work well on kidneys.) Surgery was scheduled but I got weak faster than a cancer of that size would explain. Surgery was moved up. In March of 2007 I went into the hospital. It wasn’t cancer, it was a huge infection, and my organs were trying to shut down while I was being operated on. A left kidney, gall bladder, and 8 inches of large intestine were removed while I was on the operating table for 8.5 hours. When I woke I couldn’t even breathe for myself, or move my limbs. It was critical illness polyneuropathy.
Six weeks in intensive care and six months in inpatient physical therapy later I used a walker to leave the hospital. She’d been with me the whole time. She bought a little Nokia linux tablet so I could get online, read mail, read news, and download ebooks. (No, they weren’t born with the Kindle, you just didn’t hear much about them before that.) She brought me real books. She brought me pizza. She brought me Chinese food. (The doctors didn’t mind, they said I needed to eat more to regain strength.) She told me about life outside the hospital, something that became vital after a few months of the same four walls.
She cheered me on as I learned to wheel myself about, then walked a few steps with most of my weight taken up by a fancy machine. She cried the day she saw me stand up, grab the handles of a walker, and take three steps under my own power. She would stay late, until the nurses caught her and chased her out. She did everything to take care of me- And nothing to take care of herself.
7.5 months after surgery I got out of the hospital. 2 weeks later she was dead. All of that time taking care of me and not taking care of herself had taken a toll, and her heart gave out. She was 51 years old. My friend and neighbor, who was with me when I found her, told me that had she known that it was her or me she would have picked her being the one to die. The hell of it was that the reverse was true.
Giving everything to take care of the ones you love is not enough. They love you, too. You’re important to them. Taking care of you is part of taking care of the people you love. Yeah, you’re busy. Yeah, you’ve got a million things to do. But do it for the people you love. You’re their most important You.
Video: The Android Phone is for Porn
The Left Approves of What Hasn’t Failed Yet
A few minutes ago Sissy Willis tweeted:
It’s A Landslide! Netroots Want Sarah Palin To Run For Presidenthttp://bit.ly/aQHHbV ~ @tpmmedia
The shortened link goes to this story at TPMDC. Both Sissy Willis and TPM’s Christina Bellantoni focus first on who the lefties at Netroots Nation this year want to run against Obama in 2012. But what caught my eye was near the bottom of the story.
The group also — by 69 percent — said health care reform was Obama’s “top accomplishment.” That was followed by his economic recovery plan with 13 percent, improving the U.S. image abroad with 7 percent, extending unemployment benefits with 5 percent, Wall Street reform with 3 percent, moving toward the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell with 2 percent and a new Afghanistan strategy with 1 percent.
Even the Left thinks that the most impressive thing that President Obama has done is the only thing that hasn’t had a chance to fail yet.
Economic recovery plan? Not really working.
Improving US image abroad? We’re still the Great Satan.
Extending unemployment benefits? He managed after three tries and Americans are still worried.
Wall Street Reform? Another item that hasn’t had time to fail yet.
Ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell? They give him credit for moving, not accomplishing.
New Afghanistan strategy? Once more, not enough time to fail.
So 73% of the Progressives at Netroots Nation approved of things that Obama has done that haven’t had time to fail. Another 3% give him credit for something that he hasn’t accomplished. In other words, three quarters of the most active, engaged part of the left aren’t thrilled with what President Obama has actually done, and are still stuck hoping something that he does will actually work out well.
Lawyers Will Save the Internet
Last night I made a long post about the latest Impending Death of the Internet story. I tried to explain it all in English, but I have since heard that even that modest amount of tech, plus the length, caused eyes to glaze over. So here is the argument with as close to no tech as can be managed:
Every couple of years there is another story about The Impending Death of the Internet, yet somehow the Internet is still here. The latest problem that threatens to kill the Internet is that there is less than a year left till we run out of addresses.
Someone tweeted that this felt a bit like the Y2k scare. (Computers used to store dates as two digits, because memory was expensive. But once we reached the year 2000 a lot of the math operations for keeping track of dates were going to break. This was generally considered to be a Bad Thing.) The underlying implication was that Y2k was a fake scare. While I’ll confess that some of the stories of horrors that might happen got stretched a bit, Y2k was very real. A lot of people worked very hard to make sure that the problems didn’t happen, and a lot of people (including me) were doing double shifts when the year rolled over in case we had missed something. Why were Y2k issues fixed so completely that people thought it was a hoax? Fear of lawyers.
The dangers of the Y2k issue were well understood, and the damage was predictable and preventable. I was Y2k champion for a group where I worked at the time and our instructions were clear. Take NO chances. Anything that we couldn’t PROVE was going to work had to be fixed or replaced, and it had to be complete by July 1, 1999. The risks of high dollar lawsuits wiping out the company were clear. So Y2k got fixed so completely that most people thought the threat was a hoax.
We really are running out of Internet addresses. However people far geekier than I have already worked out a solution. The fix for this is Internet Protocol Version Six, henceforth IPv6. IPv6 has a LARGE number of addresses. Large like the number 340 followed by thirty-six zeros worth of addresses. That should last us while we’re limited to a single planet (he said, blithely ignoring history.)
The pull quote in the article that started all of this says:
Moving from IPv4 to IPv6 is a little like changing the roads and tires while continuing to drive along in your car.
Fortunately almost everybody can remain asleep in the back seat.
Your Internet Service Provider will fix the problem with an upgrade to IPv6. They may have to send you a new cable modem or similar device, or they may fix it by sending new software to the device that already connects you to their network. But the ISP will change their network to do IPv6, while inside your house you keep using IPv4.
They won’t do it because it made your TiVo not update correctly. They’ll do it because it causes security features to fail. They’ll do it because e-mail ends up at the wrong place. They’ll do it because they fear that someone who uses one of those Internet phone services that cable companies are forever advertising won’t be able to call an ambulance. They’ll do it because someone got connected to the wrong bank account without having hacked the system. Once it is documented (or even suggested in the popular press) that they are putting your financial, health, shopping, telephone, and whatever other communications you do on a computer at risk the lawyers will do the rest. The Internet Service Providers will switch to IPv6 for the same reason that everybody fixed the Y2k bugs- They’re afraid of getting sued.
So the Internet is NOT going to die. We’re going to be OK. And the reason is something we usually curse, the litigious nature of our society.
Death of the Internet, Again
Every couple of years there is another story about The Impending Death of the Internet, yet somehow the Internet is still here. The latest concern is an update of an issue I wrote about last year, running out of IPv4 address space. (I’ll put that in English in a minute.) The updated version of the story is that there is less than a year left till we run out of addresses.
Someone tweeted that this felt a bit like the Y2k scare. (Computers used to store dates as two digits, because memory was expensive. But once we reached the year 2000 a lot of the math operations for keeping track of dates were going to break. This was generally considered to be a Bad Thing.) The underlying implication was that Y2k was a fake scare. While I’ll confess that some of the stories of horrors that might happen got stretched a bit, Y2k was very real. A lot of people worked very hard to make sure that the problems didn’t happen, and a lot of people (including me) were doing double shifts when the year rolled over in case we had missed something. Why were Y2k issues fixed so completely that people thought it was a hoax? Fear of lawyers.
The dangers of the Y2k issue were well understood, and the damage was predictable and preventable. I was Y2k champion for my group where I worked at the time and our instructions were clear. Take NO chances. Anything that we couldn’t PROVE was going to work had to be fixed or replaced, and it had to be complete by July 1, 1999. The risks of high dollar lawsuits wiping out the company were clear. So Y2k got fixed so completely that most people thought the threat was a hoax.
To return to IP addresses, most people are not good at remembering long strings of apparently meaningless numbers. Most computers are not good at handling words. Yes, you’re reading these words on a computer. But the computer is only reproducing the words, not handling them. Want proof? Go to Google Translate, translate this page into some other language, and translate it back. The results won’t look pretty. (One autoblogging tool that I shan’t link to actually uses this to hide the fact that you scraped your content from somebody else’s site. It will translate what you stole to German, then back to English.)
Anyway, since computers speak numbers and people speak words there is a computer that translates the word addresses to number addresses. This is called a DNS (Domain Name System) Server. (It doesn’t understand words either, but it can look them up in a table.) Thus you type in or click on beregondsbar.com and the DNS Server computer performs a lookup and tells your browser that it REALLY wants to talk to 97.74.215.234 (or whatever address I’m at by the time you read this.) The 97.74.215.234 is called an IP address. IP stands for “Internet Protocol. The version that almost everyone in the world is using as I write this is version 4, usually written by techs as IPv4 because we HATE extra keystrokes. Besides, if you understood everything we said it would take half the fun out of being a geek.
IPv4 theoretically has 4,294,967,296 possible addresses. There are some addresses reserved for special purposes and private networks, but that still leaves a bunch. Still, we should have run out of IP addresses a long time ago. IPv4 was invented before the PC, when a computer was a big thing that lived in a clean computer room at a corporation or university and was attended by men who wore white lab coats. 4 billion addresses were enough to last forever, just like storing the year as two digits was plenty till we got to Y2k.
Even after the PC came along since there are probably fewer than 4 billion people with computers right now it wouldn’t seem to be a problem, would it? But wait a minute… My TiVo has an IP address. My SlingBox has an IP address. Each of my computers has an IP address. My smart phone has an IP address. My wireless router has an IP address, and my cable modem has an IP address. And all of that leaves out the IP address of my blog. So little old me is using a bunch of addresses all by myself. Worse, the special computers that get Internet traffic where it is supposed to go, called routers, use an IP address to manage them plus an IP address for each hardware connection to them.
The spread of individual computers and terminals that used Internet Protocol instead of earlier protocols (and later protocols that never were as widely adopted) caused the first crisis when the Death of the Internet was coming Real Soon Now. Without getting into details, the original system for defining how the address was split up so that data arrived at the correct network and not the network of the competing company next door was inefficient and led to a lot of wasted addresses. So a new way to split up the IP addresses was created. That worked fine for awhile, then we started running out again. The Internet Was Going To Die. So The Powers That Be declared that the people who had gotten lots of addresses in the early days had to give back big chunks of addresses that they weren’t using.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that another thing was created called NAT, which stands for Network Address Translation. This one actually has a bearing on the current problem, so pay attention. I don’t really use up 10 IP addresses for my home. The cable company gives ONE IP address to my cable router. The cable router then connects to my wireless router. The wireless router inside my house actually creates a private network, and gives out an IP address that the rest of the Internet can’t see. It then performs some technical magic to translate from those private addresses to the one IP address the cable company gave me. I can have as many devices as I want and still only use up one real IP address. So between more efficient use of the addresses and address translation we bought several years.
However, we really are running out of IPv4 addresses. The fix for this is Internet Protocol Version Six, henceforth IPv6. IPv6 has a LARGE number of addresses. Large like the number 340 followed by thirty-six zeros worth of addresses. That should last us while we’re limited to a single planet (he said, blithely ignoring history.)
The pull quote in the article that started all of this says
Moving from IPv4 to IPv6 is a little like changing the roads and tires while continuing to drive along in your car.
Fortunately almost everybody can remain asleep in the back seat. And it’s a good thing too, because there is a lot of consumer gear that isn’t compatible with IPv6. Most people don’t know what it is, or why they should look for it when buying new electronics that connect to the net. But your equipment doesn’t have to speak IPv6 yet (though Windows Vista and Windows 7 plus Macintosh operating systems do speak IPv6 if you tell them to.) At some future time when everything is IPv6 compatible you’ll need to borrow or hire a geek to set things up again, but you probably had to do that anyway once you had more than one device in your house connected to the Internet.
Your Internet Service Provider will upgrade to IPv6. They may have to send you a new cable modem or similar device, or they may fix it by sending new software to the device that already connects you to their network. But the ISP will change their network to do IPv6, while inside your house you keep using IPv4. They won’t do it because it made your TiVo not update correctly. They’ll do it because it causes security features to fail. Once that is documented that they are putting your banking, financial, and whatever other communications you do on a computer at risk and it gets around the legal community the Internet Service Providers will switch to IPv6 for the same reason that everybody fixed the Y2k bugs- They’re afraid of getting sued.
So the Internet is NOT going to die. We’re going to be OK. And the reason is something we usually curse, the litigious nature of our society.
Oddly Enough, I Was Wrong About Something
Lots of people have argued that what is commonly called “MSM” or “Main Stream Media” (or variations thereof that were funny the first hundred times you heard them) was made up of a bunch of Leftists. These Leftists were actually a secret cabal that manipulated the news to create an environment that was hostile to those not of the political Left. On a really good day they could actually change history by carefully shaping the narrative.
In plain black and white pixels it looks like crazy talk. When you read it aloud it sounds like the ravings of a deranged conspiracy theorist. I mean, come on now, we’re reasonable people here, and there’s obviously a sensible explanation that doesn’t involve the people we trust to deliver the news to us trying to screw with our heads.
I have long been of the opinion that the obvious slant found in the news that was unveiled as alternate news sources began to develop were a result of environment and training. In broadcast journalism classes in college I was taught that the REAL news, the things that everyone needed to know, were on the front page of the New York Times. It might on rare occasions be scooped by the Washington Post, or even occasionally by the Los Angeles Times, but that was rare enough not to worry about. The front page of the New York Times was the yardstick.
I thought that a Times fixation combined with a bunch of people who weren’t trained in the hard sciences to ground them and had a major or minor in journalism or broadcasting was enough explanation by itself. Add in self selection in the newsroom so that it becomes filled with people that find each other more or less congenial. Then make those people with common training and backgrounds chase a limited number of stories. Voila! No conspiracy needed. (Gosh I’m smart.) Stop worry over fantasies of conspiracies, there are real issues to pursue.
Except it turns out I was wrong. At the end of June e-mails were leaked from a private e-mail list called “Journolist.” These e-mails were written by Dave Weigel, a writer hired by the Washington Post to enhance their online presence by blogging about conservatives. The e-mails showed that he was not unbiased on the subject of conservatives. Excerpts from Weigel’s own account are here. If you want his whole life story to see how he got to that point Weigel wrote it all for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government here.
It was announced that the Journalist had been shut down. It wasn’t really a big deal, nothing to see here, move along. Breitbart wasn’t buying it. What he was buying, if anyone would sell, was a full archive of the Journalist. He offered $100,000 for full archives, with the source fully protected. As he wrote at the time “$100,000 is not a lot to spend on the Holy Grail of media bias when there is a country to save.”
It looks like The Daily Caller beat Breitbart to at least partial archives. The excerpts released so far show clearly how badly I was wrong.
There was a conspiracy. Around 400 political activists, journalism professors and journalists participated on an e-mail list where they plotted to shape the news. When the racist pastor Jeremiah Wright, who had been Obama’s pastor for 20 years and famously shouted “God DAMN America!” from his pulpit became a campaign issue the members of Journalist began to talk about how to deflect attention from the issue. If it had just been a matter of journalists conspiring to deflect attention or bury the story it would have been bad enough. But that was just the start.
In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”
That’s right. This collection of objective journalists was ready to use one of the worst accusations that can be made in modern America against innocent people in order to keep conservatives in line.
Fast forward to summer of 2009. Tea Party activists show up at town hall meetings held by members of congress all over the country. The members of the Journalist talk about the “violence” of the Tea Party people (when in fact the only violence had been directed against Tea Partiers) and likened them to Brown Shirts.
Not being content with casting aspersions on the opposition they began discussing trying to get the broadcast license for Fox News pulled. (The irony of a law professor not knowing that a network doesn’t have a license to pull.
The very existence of Fox News, meanwhile, sends Journolisters into paroxysms of rage. When Howell Raines charged that the network had a conservative bias, the members of Journolist discussed whether the federal government should shut the channel down.
“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.” Davies, a Brit, frequently argued the United States needed stricter libel laws.
“I agree,” said Michael Scherer of Time Magazine. Roger “Ailes understands that his job is to build a tribal identity, not a news organization. You can’t hurt Fox by saying it gets it wrong, if Ailes just uses the criticism to deepen the tribal identity.”
Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. “I hate to open this can of worms,” he wrote, “but is there any reason why the FCC couldn’t simply pull their broadcasting permit once it expires?”
As Glenn Reynolds notes: “Stalinist by instinct, aren’t they?”
So mark today down in your diary. I was wrong. It wasn’t just group think. There is a conspiracy in the liberal media to lie to us in order to protect those they favor.
Fish Rots from the Head; Third Parties Grow from the Roots.
Over at Liberty Pundits my friend Melissa Clouthier points out that the ruling class in Washington of both parties have more in common with each other than they do with us in a piece titled “Us and Them.” After outlining some of the similarities on both sides she issues this warning:
Worse, the big Republican class sees the Tea Party movement a threat to their power rather than an affirmation of REPUBLICAN PARTY PlANKS. Hello, fiscal sanity used to be the raison d’etre of the Republican party. No more. So why should voters vote for pretenders and poseurs?
The current Republican leadership has very nearly destroyed the Republican brand. Voters interested in one thing, economic discipline, are turning to the Tea Party.
Here is a blunt warning to the smarty pants set in D.C.: If the Republican party does not change their ways, there will be a third party. It will not have the Ross Perot effect. In fact, it will draw from the Democrat base, too, because it will be based on cutting the expansion of the Federal government.
I’m sure that the Republican leadership thinks of Ross Perot and laughs at the idea of a third party. After all, even Teddy Roosevelt couldn’t pull it off. But there’s a difference that they’re overlooking.
Both Perot and Roosevelt founded parties that had the aim of making them president. They invited some others to come along, but in reality the campaign was all about them. Elected officials with good prospects where they were didn’t jump ship, though a relative handful said nice things about the Perot and Roosevelt to hedge their bets. But the fact is that it was a top down structure, and even if Perot or TR had been elected as part of a third party they would have had little support in congress or the state legislatures. The Bull Moose party (officially the Progressive Party) managed to elect a grand total of 17 people.
In contrast, the Free Soil Party elected 14 congressmen and 2 senators in 1848 and was growing in influence as it absorbed Democrats who couldn’t abide slavery. Six years later it merged with anti-slavery elements of the Whig party to form the Republican party. In addition to the candidates the Free Soilers had elected, established Whigs switched to the new party. Lincoln, who later would become the first Republican president, had been elected as a Whig repeatedly since 1834.
What happened when the Republican party was founded was that people from an existing third party, plus people who were part of the major parties of the time found that they held a common set of beliefs so strongly that it transcended the bonds of their earlier political allegiance. Candidates were elected in local elections, then to congress, and it began to snowball. In 1856 Lincoln helped to organize the Republican party in Illinois. A scant four years later he was elected president on the Republican ticket.
Perot and Teddy Roosevelt tried a top down approach and failed. The entrenched powers generally do top down better than anyone else – That’s why they are the entrenched powers. On the other hand, the Republican party grew out of various groups with a common cause and welled up from the grass roots. From the official founding of the Republican party in 1854 to the election of Lincoln was just over six years.
Fish rots from the head, and once the rot sets in things fall apart much faster than most people expect. It doesn’t happen often, but America may be reaching another tipping point as people who want limited government and economic discipline join together.
Racism Charges
The first time someone called me a racist I cried.
Racism is an awful thing, as anyone save a relatively few troglodytes will agree. There are not other words bad enough to describe what kind of low life scum people who practice racism are. Thus the word “racist” stands alone, an abhorrent charge. If it is true the person who is guilty of racism should be cut off from all civilized contact. If someone wants to reach out and try to teach them to be better that is a Good Thing, but in the mean time the racist should be despised, quarantined, and castigated.
Me, a racist? Could I be such an awful creature? I knew I wasn’t, yet somehow here was someone saying that my actions made her believe that I was one. I cried. I went home and was sick. I wallowed in self doubt for days, examining myself and my actions to try to see if there was any basis for this hateful charge.
What had I done? As a supervisor I had held a black employee to the same standards of performance that I held everyone else in the group to, including myself. She was, I was informed, doing the best she could. To expect more of her was racist.
When I write it out like that, it looks a bit silly, especially given that almost twenty years have passed since the incident. Then I remember the sick feeling, the concerned face of my boss as I told him of the charge. I recall the long interview with a very serious human resources guy who just wanted the truth. If he didn’t believe me it would destroy my career forever, but that was almost a side issue – Someone thought I was a racist! I recall breaking down and crying during the HR interview, wondering WHAT WAS WRONG WITH ME that another human being could think that about me.
Despite being completely cleared, the incident shook me to my core. I got out of management as soon as possible. The charge of racism was too monstrous to contemplate having it directed at me again.
That’s what being labelled a racist was.
I say “was” because in the years since then the term “racist” has been used over and over in so many situations that “racist” has almost become a synonym for “anything the political left doesn’t like.” This abuse of the charge of racism has become so common that there’s an expression for it- “Playing the race card.” This is a national tragedy. There is no term that conveys the history of wrongs and the awfulness of the act in the same way as the word “racism.” If you destroy the sense that a racist is morally corrupt and not fit for civilized society then there is no word to take its’ place.
But that’s exactly what some on the political left are doing for partisan political gain.
The NAACP should think long and hard about what they are doing. Pointing out real racism and ostracizing the practitioners advances the cause of humanity. Using false charges of racism against people who are not racists but simply disagree about the size and scope of government not only erodes the credibility of the NAACP, it also erodes their most potent tool for dealing with the issues that still remain from our history of racial injustice.
Much of the civil rights struggle was invested in convincing mainstream America that a racist was a moral reprobate who offended against both God and man. If the term “racist” no longer means a pariah but instead is something you call a neighbor who puts up a different yard sign than you in November then we all lose. By diluting the meaning of the word “racism” the NAACP is selling their birthright for a mess of pottage.
Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee – Beyond Parody
Sometimes you see a tweet on Twitter or a blog post with a link, but you can’t look at it right now. So you open a tab and leave it sitting till you have time to work your way through the backlog, or till you have so many browser tabs open that you declare Web Bankruptcy and close them all. So it was with a link that led to this video. Someone tweeted it last night, and by the time I got to it I had forgotten who, so I can’t give credit.
Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee apparently has a problem with history. It’s not some obscure bit of ancient history that might trip up anyone. No, this is history about Viet Nam. She was born in 1950, so America’s involvement in Viet Nam happened during her lifetime. So how did she come to believe that there are TWO Viet Nams, a North and a South, existing side by side today in peace.
It would be bad enough if she were just another citizen who had a vote that counted the same as yours and mine. But this unspeakable piece of ignorance is the congressional representative for the 18th district of Texas. And people wonder why the US government has so much trouble dealing with so many issues.
Moving to WordPress
Time to see if I can use a blogging system that the Big Boys use. I’m moving to a WordPress site. This site will remain for awhile as beregondsbar.blogspot.com, but beregondsbar.com is what I will be updating after I manage to export things from this site.
