Bush/Cheney Impeachment unimaginable? Not for me

In a recent Nation editorial they say something like, whereas a few months ago it was “unimaginable,” a successful impeachment movement is now merely “improbable.” Dudes:  improbable shit happens! Don’t be defeatist.

From the Downing Street memo and WMD lies to Abu Ghraib to Guantánamo, the justification for impeachment of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld is now more than sufficiently documented. And knowingly leading your country into an illegal war based on lies has got to be more serious than lying about what you did with your dick, don’t you think? They need to be impeached, removed from office, and tried for war crimes. Why is this so unthinkable? How can we not think it and still pretend to care about democracy?

So let’s all pony up our dollars and contribute to http://www.votetoimpeach.org/ (as I just did) and start thinking ahead to September 24, when there is going to be one kick-ass demonstration in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Let’s not just be pissed as hell. Let’s do something about it.

Linux distros, religious wars

A Beginner’ s Guide to Linux Distros provides an illuminating comparision of several of the most widely used Linux distributions. The problem, for typical non-technical windoze users looking for relief, is that their eyes will glaze over upon reading this, and they will likely be intimidated and confused by all the geek jargon.

I’ve been there, having started trying Linuxes in 1996. I have been through half a dozen different Linuxes with successively greater degrees of success (as they installs and hardware support improved). I think it’s now reached the point where there is really no reason why an average windoze user can’t learn to use a distro like Ubuntu. I don’t know if many would have the cojones to install it, but if you give them a machine with Ubuntu already on it, I can’t help but think they could be happy, or learn to be happy. Yes, Gnucash is different from Quicken, OpenOffice is different from Miscrosloth Office, and so on. Users have to want to leave the abusive relationship with windoze enough to put up with some migration pains.

I recently replaced my aging Red Hat 9 on my home desktop with Ubuntu, and it runs faster than the old Red Hat, everything works, it’s pretty, and there’s just nothing not to like. In the endless religious debate over distros I now take the side of Ubuntu for beginners and even intermediate users who want something that just works.

Changing OSes is no trifling matter for ordinary mortals. The author of the Tipmonkies piece describes himself as having been a “distro whore” trying new Linux distributions all the damn time. Who has spare computers and enough spare hours to squander fucking with those computers? I procrastinated for months before upgrading this box of mine for fear that hair-pulling and struggling with problems would eat up too much time. (Fortunately, Ubuntu is good and I was not unlucky.) But if I had that kind of time, I think I might try to catch up on the hundreds of books and movies I need to read and see, improve my French, learn to scuba dive…

Bravo Michael Jackson

I’m glad he got acquitted. As I’ve repeatedly told everyone who would listen: you don’t deserve to get convicted just because a fifteen-year-old liar says you gave him a handjob. And when you try a case, you don’t put in fingerprint evidence about a porn magazine from which the prints weren’t lifted until after the kid handled it during grand jury proceedings — unless you are woefully incompetent.