Do the Right Thing – Page 32 – third world county

January 30, 2009January 30, 2009

A Word About Ubuntu Forums

I’ve had remarkably good experiences, for the most part, finding helpful information on the Ubuntu Forums site when I ran into something puzzling about the OS that wasn’t readily dealt with via my normal troubleshooting efforts. I’ve seen some threads where some self-important twit mocked folks for asking for help in a manner they felt was beneath them to answer, but only rarely. I’d never experienced something like that myself until today. A quick crosspost:

Quote:Originally Posted by mnmus

I have a similar problem. Yesterday, Nautilus reported over 221GiB gree space on my drive (out of a nominal 400gig drive with a little over 20gig reserved for swap file/extended. (GParted has never seen more than about 380GiB of that, normal for drive/OS)

Today, after applying recommended updates (mostly security-related, IIRC), I can do very little as Nautilus reports 0 bytes free space on the drive. That means, of course, that Thunderbird won’t download mail–or even allow me to delete mail, and anything that requires any disk space usage–apart from swap file, apparently, is an exercise in futility. Heck, my saved sessions in Opera and Firefox disappeared, as well.

Oh, GParted reports that I have about 10GiB free apart from swap space, out of the ~362GiB it sees on my primary partition… quite a bit less than the 221GiB available yesterday.

Additional pieces of the puzzle:

Nautilus reports only 137.2GiB of files, adds that “some contents are unreadable”–something like another couple hundred GiB “unreadable”?

*sigh* I’ve had petty lil things regularly go south after updates (sound, video, etc.) but never a couple hundred gig of storage just go *poof!* before. For something like this, I’d almost switch back to *shudder* Windows. (More likely, I’d back up my Home folder to an external drive, nuke Ubuntu and install Puppy Linux, Suse Linux, PC-BSD–even though importing my data might be a lil less straightforward–or something else equally well-behaved, instead of what has turned out to be a very cranky Ubuntu… *profound sigh*).

Any suggestions about what the heck is going on?

The time it took you to post this long whining post, you could have posted the outputs of those commands in my previous reply. Then, somebody could have figured out what’s wrong with your disk space!

Indeed, the guy who responded to my post is correct: I could have posted the information he referred to; in fact, I already had it on hand. But. That same jackass had told the originator of the thread I posted to to post the same information… two weeks ago. The thread originator had done so and… *crickets chirping* Mr. Jackass had made no further reply in that time. Indeed, had Mr. Jackass been paying any attention, he’d have seen that the major information resulting from the suggested commands was already contained in my post, just confirmed from other apps within the GUI.

I’m glad of one thing. The above took place online. If the jackass had sneered in my face like that in person, I might be having to find a place to hide the body. *heh* OK, so maybe not. ONE of us would likely be looking for a place to hide the body… 🙂 Well, perhaps not, but he’d sure feel like he had had a new anal orifice installed… (because the one he is using to form words with is past due for replacement).

And it still leaves my issue unadressed: how the heck to I access my hard drive space? Oh, I can access it using root priviledges, either from the command line or by invoking Nautilus with root priviledges, but that doesn’t help if I want to create a text file or a spreadsheet or even check my mail using Thunderbird–or even save a session in one of my browsers.

Here’s a tiny little piece of the puzzle. Nautilus, reporting after deleting a little over 30GiB of no longer needed data and programs, now reports an awesome 1.4GiB free space!

January 18, 2009January 18, 2009

Just Stop It!

Conversation with Son&Heir. I mentioned the “symbolic links” to Lincoln Obama is attempting to insert into his innauguration (Yeh, yeh, so he traveled a part of the same rail route Lincoln traveled to his innauguration and… and… BSD–big stinking deal), and he injected what more than a few have suggested in the last few weeks that they fear: the fear that Obama may emulate Lincoln in more ways than just the symbolic, throwing the country into a chaotic race riot…

Just stop it folks! Giving voice to those kinds of thoughts gives them more life than they deserve. Concentrate instead on doing whatever you can to preven The Obamassiah emulating and epanding on Mr. Lincoln’s very successful attack on the Constitution. We do NOT need more and more and more of Mr. Lincoln’s preferred (All-)Powerful Central Government!

January 11, 2009January 12, 2009

Read This

Notsomuch this post as the one Beagle Scout points to which contains, among other things, this pointed question:

How did we have a bill, the EESA/TARP that obligated citizens to pay $700 billion in taxes that we do not have (that is, to put us all in debt by another $700 billion), that was opposed from 100:1 to 300:1 in calls, faxes and letters to Congress, was passed over those objections with an election less than a month away, and we the people then returned 90% of those who voted “Yes” and stood for re-election to office?

That’s right. Instead of “throwing the tea in the harbor” we sent the poisonous ~~shi~~, urm, tea bags back to poison our government/society with their toxic bloviations made law.

Good catch, Beagle Scout. Now, y’all go read and remember:

January 5, 2009January 5, 2009

The Road Ahead, 1.5

In line with the other “Road Ahead, volume 1” posts, here’s a suggestion: you have (or have access to) a computer or you’d not be reading this. If you’re not already using some sort of personal finance software to budget and plan for the future, get off your a$$… ets and Just Do It. Here are three tightwad-satisfying, cross-platform suggestions (there are certainly others, but these have strong followings):

Buddi

Gnu Cash

Home Bank

Free software to manage your personal finances. Words to warm the cockles of any tightwad’s heart.

(Addendum: For those who may read this but who have only access to someone else’s computer, not one of their own, Gnu Cash is available in a portable version one can carry on a USB flash drive and use on almost any computer that has available USB ports. Two other portable money management softwares are available at the linked site as well.)

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December 31, 2008December 31, 2008

The Road Ahead 4.1

I gave “The Road Ahead” and other posts a rest through the Christmas season, but now that it’s the last day of the year, it’s time to start a new thread in the series: issues that face us.Already, I feel the urge to simply drop a laundry list of issues that need cleaning up in ur society, but I’ll try to be disciplined enough to simply mention briefly one issue per post. Today’s issue: anarcho-tyranny.

What are the classic, time-honored reasons that legitimize government? What benefits do citizens rightly expect from obedience of the law and submission to a “ruler”? Hobbes put it this way,

Obedience is exchanged for protection. …It is sufficient for each citizen to know that anyone who intends to injure him has more to fear from punishment by the sovereign than he has to gain from his crime

In arguing that Christians owed respectful obedience to civil government, the Apostle Paul made this argument,

Romans 13:1 Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. ²Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. ³For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. ^{4For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.}

But what can we say of the legitimacy of a government that does little (or nothing) to protect its citizens from miscreants, because miscreants have no cause to fear the government, but instead that government encourages evildoers by persecuting its own citizens and at most simply handing out mild slaps on the wrist to those who do others harm? What can we say of the legitimacy of a government that goes even further and persecutes citizens for simply being prominent or for doing their duty or for being different or standing up for their God-given and supposedly constitutionally-protected rights?

Well, we can be honest and admit such a government has surrendered any legitimacy; it has become an outlaw government that simply uses its power to afflict the powerless and expand its own power.

Under anarcho-tyranny, criminals aren’t punished (which is why it’s anarchy), but the innocent are (which is why it’s tyranny).– Sam Francis

Examples of state-fostered anarcho-tyranny abound in today’s (dis)United States.

Continue reading “The Road Ahead 4.1”

December 8, 2008October 6, 2011

Music and Sensibilities

One of the serious issues facing our society today is a direct result of what Ortega identified as but one of the undue effects of “mass man” on society: a coarsening of art in the public arena. Given my background and inclinations, I perceive the coarsening most often in the performance arts, particularly music.

Now, let me back up a bit and articulate a bit of what this lil rant was spurred by. I recieved a glurge-filled email today that went on about the life of John Henry Newton, author of the song most widely known as “Amazing Grace.” So, naturally, besides beginning an automatic critique of the glurge in the email text, my mind’s ear began replaying various performances–including choral, congregational and solo–of “Amazing Grace” and found, as always, that (almost) ALL of them fell short of the power and beauty of the lyrics, because the tune most commonly sung to the words is a lousy match for the words’ meaning and is not really very singable, to boot.

*sigh* And then there’s the fact that everyone and his untalented dog seems to think that they can improve the tune (and thus the song) by screwing around with it and mangling it badly. While it may well be proper to abuse poor tunes in sch a way, sadly the abuse never seems to be performed by anyone with any real musical ability.

Well, that’s where this rant originated, at least. Now, what’s its point? Simply this: most folks’ ears are too deafened by crap sold as music nowadays that even attempting to point out the differences between good and bad prosody, between music/lyric marriages made in heaven and those made BY hell is almost impossible. Sure, if one is able to catch a child young enough, and feed the child a daily dose of well-wrought music, perhaps the child will attain adulthood with ears that can actually–at least–reproduce pitch and hopefully even desire music that feeds rather than craps on his higher nature.

But should that occur, then that adult will be an alien in our debased society.

And this alienation from “better things” in favor of scarfing up feces misrepresenting itself as art is symptomatic of the coarsening of every aspect of our society. The deaf ears that cannot even hear the difference between the musical feces that passes as most “music” today (and I include most contemporary soi disant “serious, academic or classical” crap as well) and real music cannot tell the differences between any of the other lies that the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind spews and truth, either.

*sigh*

And it’s all our fault for elevating the sensibilities of the common man to iconic stature, for whatever genuine virtues the common man posseses (and there are more than a few), lowering social sensibilities, and thus social virtues, to the lowest common denominator is a sure recipe for the demise of a society.

Teach your children well. The government schools and the Hivemind certainly will not.

Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, , Democrat=Socialist, The World According to Carl, Right Voices, and DragonLady’s World, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Continue reading “Music and Sensibilities”

December 5, 2008December 5, 2008

The Road Ahead; 3.3

Good citizenship, properly applied, must demand accountability from every person, from political elite, “self-elected” nomenklatura, to the common Joe and Josephine in the street: everyone. But in demanding–and holding firm to that demand–accountability, we’re going to hear a lot of pigs squealing, skewered by accountability:

In trying to resurrect conservatism and the Republican party, I fear there’s a whole segment of our country we can never reach. These people, whether rich or poor, are not our natural constituents. These are the people to whom things are owed.

We saw it after the Katrina debacle, at the other end of the socioeconomic scale: “Why are you so slow to help us? Where is our money and food? Why haven’t you been here, government, rebuilding my house? I know my rights, and my rights include welfare, subsidies, support, and attention. We’re not to be treated like those victims of tornadoes in the Midwest who pull themselves together, help their friends, patrol their communities, and rebuild their neighborhoods. No, life is supposed to be easy, big and easy; why aren’t you here right now with the support I deserve?” And we hear it from the fat financial community who want the bailout check left at their door while they go on rich retreats to celebrate their good fortune.

This, by the way, is why Sarah Palin was so refreshing and, to be clear, so exotic to all the elites: a woman who could raise herself up by dint of hard work and self-sacrifice to be a wife, mother, mayor, and governor. She didn’t do it by set-asides, by birth, by quotas, or by handouts. She did it as a woman and she did it by her efforts. She exemplified what we all once saw as America—a land of opportunity, where you could be anything you set your mind to be so long as you worked for it. She showed us something about both her character and ours, our old-fashioned American character. For all this, she had to be ridiculed—she represented a kind of American virtue that shames the privileged, whether they be rich or poor.

Shame the privileged. A worthy goal. How? B y demanding accountability from our political (and bureaucratic) elites and by quietly, firmly, consistently emphasizing our differences to both the statists of the Left and the statists of the Right (most often found among the country club repugnican’ts now in power in the Republican Party).

In the second chapter of I Peter, the apostle charged first century Christians to make a positive impact on the world around them with their alien character:

1 Peter 2:11–Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. ¹²Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. 1 Peter 2:11-12 [emphasis added]

Now, while I’d urge Christians to follow that injunction, I’d also urge all good citizens of whatever religious persuasion (and by “religious” I also include atheists, no matter how silly they might be in denying that their belief system is a religion) to emulate the principle ennunciated by Peter: be good examples to those around you. Express your God-given rights (yes, God even gives rights to atheists) and liberties in such a way as to shame your fellow citizens (those few who have any ability to feel shame left) into honoring truth, seeking justice, examining mercy and voting knowledgeably and wittingly for these principles the next time they go to the polls.

Shame the privileged. The rich privileged and the poor privileged. The privileged politician and the privileged bureaucrat. Whoever and wherever they may be: shame them by your life, lived well.

Trackposted to Rosemary’s News and Ideas, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Faultline USA, Woman Honor Thyself, and A Newt One, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

December 3, 2008

The Road Ahead, 3.2

What does a good citizen do when faced with a bad government? Well, as I’ve pointed out before, in a representative reublic–which in theory is these (dis)United States–we have a responsibility to be directly involved in the process of selecting our leaders, not just by voting but also by doing all we can to influence the selection of candidates and to keep our representatives’ noses pressed firmly to the grindstone of OUR choosing.

But more, much more than that, we need to do everything we can to educate our local, state and national representatives as to their poper place in the scheme of things as public servants, employees of The People, not all that important in our daily lives, mostly warts on the body politic.

In order to achieve this objective, we must

1. Give due honor to genuine public servants
2. Give the raspberry to politicians exercising illegitimate power as though it were legitimate authority, but most of all,
3. Be a daily example to our children, friends and relatives of persons who consider the law a negative thing and politicians’ proper role in the scheme of things to be that of chidren in the Victorian age: seen rarely, rarely heard.

*huh*?

Yep. We must train those around us and future generations to view the purpose of the law as mostly negative: punishing–harshly punishing, in most cases–malefactors who harm others by violence, theft or deceit. (Hmmm, that’d place 90%, at least, of our congresscritters in harm’s way PDQ.) We must peacefully, quietly, consistently refuse to acknowlege laws and regulations that violate basic human and civil rights as noted in the founding/source documents of this nation (BTW, for any illiterati having this post read to them, that does include the Bible–check the Founders’ own words, if you can.) Sure, some of us will run afoul of some nancypants government bureaucrat intent on doing us harm, but we must do what’s right for the good of our progeny.

And as we go about our daily lives, simply doing what is good and right and just, as instructed by the same wisdom that instructed the Founders, that means that we will do the ordinary things of life purposefully, as revolutionary actions in resistance to the growing anarcho-tyranny of various civil governments and quasi-governmental agencies (like public schools).

In that vein, expect more “beer posts” and more “compgeeky posts” and more other such posts apparently unrelated to politics, societal decay, etc. Just figting the good fight in quiet ways…

Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo – WordPress, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Allie is Wired, Faultline USA, DragonLady’s World, Cao’s Blog, Democrat=Socialist, Rosemary’s News and Ideas, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

November 21, 2008November 21, 2008

The Road Ahead, 1.4

As we face uncertain economic times, one thing to keep hammering on is being careful what we spend and how we spend it…

Over at Lucy’s Frugal Living, I ran into the meme-of-the-week:

I think people are just afraid to buy things right now, with all of the uncertainties…

Well, good! People (we all) buy too much stuff. Stuff is the bane of our society’s existence. We buy too much, hoard too much and throw away too much. Almost all of the “too much” is of the wrong stuff. Junk food and flashy toys that break and faddish clothes, etc., instead of staples and healthful food and really durable goods that we need and clothes that will last us for years.

And we–as a society, not all as individuals–have been buying this crap for years on credit! Maybe a few credit junkies buying crap with other peoples’ money will be scared straight by a crash. Maybe. One can hope.

Maybe congresscritters will grow some brains and rent some intestinal fortitude and allow big car makers who’ve made stupid financial decisions for years reap the whirlwind they’ve sown. Maybe. One can hope.

And maybe a few grups will actually GROW UP and act like adults for a change, putting away their irresponsible, childish pursuits of childish pleasures long enough to actually BE adults, begin eschewing spendthriftism for frugality and actually contribute to society. Maybe (but I doubt it).

*feh* Enough of this. Two or three tightwad, money-saving tips for the “scared straight” among credit abusers and junk hoarders:

Continue reading “The Road Ahead, 1.4”

November 18, 2008November 19, 2008

The Road Ahead, 2.2: Live and Learn…

I used to say (probably stolen from Lazarus Long *heh*) that you live and learn, or you don’t live long, but in today’s rubber-bumber society, that no longer applies. It’s be more accurate to say “You live and learn, or you don’t really live at all.” Or perhaps,

“‘A learning experience.’ The traditional three-word preamble to a burial.”

*heh*

I had occasion to sit down the other day with my parents–both in their mid-80s. They live a few hours away, so I don’t have a sit down with them all that often, though we do chat once or twice a week on the phone. One thing that struck me during our chat was that each of my now elderly parents are still learning… and using what they learn in productive ways.

Over the course of our conversation, it turned as it often does with them to the time when they were the most active in my life as parents. After all, that period does contain the most mutually shared memories. And yes, school came up, and, as usual, my status as the family changeling entered the conversation. *heh*

Now, unlike most Mass Media Podpeople, politicians *spit* and Academia Nut Fruitcakes, all my siblings easily have more intellectual capability than a head of cabbage. In fact, no dummies need apply at our family reunons. Still, I’m the odd one out among my sibs. For one thing, I’m almost certainly the only one that’d go back to school at the drop of a hat, were time and money pressures a tad different. Oh, not for a degree. Have enough of those. For the pleasure of sitting in a class taught by someone who knows more than I do and likes to share that knowlege with people who want in on it.

Oh, and I like taking tests. Just a wee tad competitive. No, not with fellow students, my competitiveness usually manifested itself in striving to outdo my teachers in some way. If it showed up to party at all. *heh*

Still, my sibs and I caught the learning bug from our folks, to one degree or another, and so learning new things is just what we do, even if not in formal school settings. Not all the same kinds of things, of course, but curiosity and imagination have made us into lifelong learners.

Some people aren’t like that, though. Some folks have to have new information crammed down their throats, packed into their heads like sand into a rat hole, poured into their stopped up ears and then hammered. And still they refuse to think about what they’ve (not) “learned”.

I think that’s a large part of the political and societal mess we’re now in: a large population of sheeple who have a hard shell of stupidity wrapped closely around a cotton candy fluff of contrafactual “truths” they’ve been drip-fed, NG-tube-fed, by the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind after long and careful enstupiation (with the sheeple’s mostly willing cooperation, of course) by Academia Nut Fruitcakes’ and remote educrats’ Prisons for Kids, enstupiated parents (yes, it’s a generational thing, now), “edumacators” and real teachers who’re trapped in the machinery of “public schools” and dumbed down colleges, forced at every turn to surrender teaching to “edumacating” (lobotomizing) young minds.

What to do, what to do?

1. Don’t attack directly. Chip away at the hard shell stupidity covering the cotton candy ignorance with humor, ridicule. When the enemies of The People are shown to be fools, the sheeple may be open to being fed real food. Dennis Miller’s biting sarcasm comes to mind. Oh, you’ll not be able to reach a True Believer in Leftardism with Miller’s material, but those who are just among the common enstupiated sheeple might find a bit of the hardshell stuidity eroded by his ridicule of Leftardism.

2. Once you find any crack in the hardshell of stupidity, start pouring facts through the cracks. Facts are stubborn things. Amazingly, once facts can be brought into juxtaposition with the “reality-based fantasies” of Leftardism’s many lies, the lies begin to unravel. The difficulty is in finding the cracks in the hardshell of stupdity into which one can pour a bit of the antidote.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Unceasingly.

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