May 14, 2008
Sigh...
So Microsoft finally released World Wide Telescope the app that "made Scoble cry". Of course, he's all gushy over it. Of course he is, it lets him think he's experiencing nature without having to leave his computer.
Oh, what's that? No, of course it doesn't run on Macs. Did you really take any of Ozzie's or Microsoft's bullshit on openness seriously? It requires the .Net framework, etc. Same old story, with a new UI.
However, since I do have more than an small interest in Astronomy, (my first "real" book was on Dinosaurs, my second was on Astronomy), I decided, against all better judgement to check out the comments. (No, I didn't actually comment, I wasn't that decaffeinated.) Of course, there's Scoble insisting that the only way to really experience astronomy is with shit like WWT, because you can't see shit with anything but the Hubble. No, really, he said that:
RBA: Ok, wise guy. Show me a galaxy, even on a dark night, with even a $2,000 telescope. Simple: you can’t see shit. You need to have a Hubble telescope out in space that costs billions of dollars to see such a thing with any level of detail.Just when I think Le Scoble has reached the nadir of stupid, he creates new digging technology.
But then, the very idea that Robert would understand the joys of amateur astronomy is ridiculous at the core. See, when it all comes down to it, professionally, Robert is about exactly two things:
- Being faster
- Being bigger
He is no more capable of understanding the kinds of things that amateur astronomers derive joy from than a stump is of appreciating a beautiful sunset. (In the stump's defense, it's more practically useful than Scoble.) I remember the joy I got from a crappy little Tasco refracting telescope. Maybe a 3" lens. But on a regular basis, my dad and I would drive out to the end of Key Biscayne, and just look at stuff. Stars, the moon, venus. My friends and I would no more miss an episode of Star Hustler/Star Gazer than we would miss eating.
Robert looks at WWT, and thinks "This is the ultimate". Yes, if all you care about is bigger and better, perhaps. But nothing the WWT ever does will beat the nights in N.D. when, due to almost no light pollution at a friend's farm, we'd turn out all the lights on a summer's night, wait for our eyes to adjust and just stand there, watching the Universe. Seeing the myriad shapes in the Milky Way. Sometimes, someone would bring a telescope, and we'd stare even deeper into everything. The moon, the planets. Even the stars. No Hubble, no Chandra. I love the Hubble and all the others. I remember being riveted by Story Musgrave's Hubble repair spacewalks. Actually, I'm pretty much reading anything Story Musgrave cares to jot down. The best part about the Hubble repairs? It was low enough that if you were in the right part of the world at the right time, with a shitty little telescope, you could watch it yourself. Live. You didn't need to wait for Microsoft, or Google, or NASA to tell you when you could download prepared images.
There's nothing on the WWT that will ever surpass the night I saw a meteorite almost crash to earth. It didn't, but as it came down, it lit up the sky, leaving a trail of smoke and fire, roaring down to its doom. Maybe a hundred feet off the ground, it stopped. The WWT can't ever touch that. It shows you moments in time, static, unmoving, unchanging. I saw the Universe at work, as the dynamic thing it is. Gravity, heat, physics, chemistry, all of it, over Highway 2 heading east from Grand Forks AFB at ungodly o'clock in the morning. Or sitting in traffic in Clearwater, yet watching the launch of a shuttle from the other side of FL. "...can't see shit"? No Robert, it is you that can't see shit, and no amount of software or lens size will ever fix that.
The WWT can't replicate the night we all laid in truck beds and on car roofs, and watched the Aurora almost explode overhead, in a burst of yellow and green, moving, sweeping, and hissing. "...can't see shit" indeed.
I'm not knocking the views we get from Hubble, Chandra, et al. Seeing the images composited from all those observatories, those are magnificent too. They do truly show us things we'd never see otherwise.
But "you can't see shit" without WWT? Without Hubble? That's one of the saddest and most ignorant things Scoble's ever said. Which is saying something. Maybe one day, he'll stop letting his obsession with his online penis size blind him to what's available if you only go outside and look.
Technorati Tags:
Le Scoble, Robert Scoble, Astronomy, Amateur Astronomy
May 13, 2008
Goddamnit, somebody vote this biddy out of office
Kerns, that is, Sally Kerns, homophobe, anti-intellectual, Oklamhoma State Rep.
Not content with asserting that homosexuality is worse than terrorism, she's found a new way to make sure that Oklahoma is not left behind by Florida and Texas in the race for "America's Next Top Dumbass": New language in Oklahoma House Bill 2633, aka "The Return of the Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act".
Once again, justifying it with anecdotes:
Kern spoke of an instance when a child was criticized for religion on a school bus, and she said another student got into trouble for the content of a paper. She did not provide specific examples.I mean, I understand that fundies are not down with actual data, hell their entire worldview is based on nigh-anonymous anecdotes and selectively literal interpretations of allegory. But here's the money shot:
A controversial provision in House Bill 2633 states that "students may express their beliefs about religion in homework, artwork, and other written and oral assignments free from discrimination based on the religious content of their submissions."What's that really mean? Well, just like meatcake, we don't know. However, if a kid answers every test on a science exam with "'cause Jesus says so", that language would keep them free from discrimination based on the religious content of that submission.
But the entire thing is religious content. So how does a teacher properly fail the little idiot without "discriminating against the religious content" of the submission? Seems rather difficult.
Of course, if it passes, and it hasn't yet, we all know the test case that will make Ol' Sal' push to repeal the law: Some little smartass is going to say "Our Lord and Saviour Satan did it in between blowjobs". DOH! Hey, Satan worship's a religion, right?
Somehow, I don't think Ol' Sal' will be down wit dat, yaknowwhuti'msayin?
Can we institute a "No Fucking Idiots" requirement for being elected? Please?
Technorati Tags:
Religion makes you stupid
May 8, 2008
Pics from the Seattle Museum of Flight
I was recently in Seattle on business, but had time to go to the Seattle Museum of Flight, and take many pictures. Pictures are here.
It's an amazing museum, with a ton of Boeing history, and a really cool display about Pete Conrad, including his flight logbooks from his Gemini and his Skylab missions. Skylab for me, as a kid, was huge. I know it seems like a nothing thing, but we hung onto news about the Skylab missions like people hang onto "American Idol" updates today. Yes, that is depressing I suppose, but back in the 70s, space exploration was still shiny and new, so such things meant something.
There's also an SR-71 with a D-21 drone there. DROOOOOL. Oh, and a very amusing 707-based Air Force One. The "State of the Art" comm gear is hilarious, albeit unintentionally. So are the ECM pods on the engines. If you're ever in Seattle, and have a few hours, (okay, MANY hours), go, it's cool as hell.
Technorati Tags:
Science rules!, Museums, Airplanes
May 6, 2008
THE HOME OF THE FUTURE! and why such things are crap
Gavin Shearer, of the Microsoft Mac BU talked about his tour of the Microsoft Center for Information Work and the Microsoft Home on his site. It's an interesting article, mostly because unlike the Scobles of the world, Gavin brings a good critical eye to such things, and points out that the future has an annoying habit in developing however it damned well feels like. It's usually messy. I love the fact he compares it to Epcot and Disney, because they both have the same problems as the Microsoft version
Let's start with the Microsoft Home
The big problem with the "WON'T THE FUTURE BE AMAZING" exhibits, in addition to the amusing things Gavin listed, (Gavin, you should have seen it circa 1986...even.funnier!), these houses always look like an episode of Cribs. In other words, these things never ever look like people live there. (Seriously, in all the years I've watched Cribs, I've seen lots of houses, but 3 homes: Jerry Cantrell, Gene Simmons, and Hugh Hefner. Those three places were homes. People lived there. The others? Not so much.
- No one outside of Bill Gates' personal circle has this house. It's a 3 mil. home, and I mean in Kansas City, much less Seattle. Seriously, that's Larry Ellison's house. There's nothing in there that looks like a home that the !super-rich have. I mean...the sliding panel giant TV? This isn't even a concept house, this is a geeky episode of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous"
- I honestly think dirt doesn't exist in this world. There's nothing here that's going to survive 6 teenagers on a Halo 3 binge, or a room full of college students. The Surface is the same way...none of this stuff will survive kids, pets, or a good New Year's eve party. Can you imagine a Surface the first time the dog pees on it, or the cat scratches it up? Hairballs? There's a reason the only people buying Surfaces are high-end hotels and casinos. Dear future people, the real world is dirty.
- It's just...disjointed. Putting the TV behind the head of the "Dining Room" table? What, so someone has to twist around? Who has that dining room other than Bill and his echelon? What's the tablet for? So I can send mom an IM to get me some water, and she can twitter back "Get it your own damned self"? The woman in the kitchen HAS to make food that far from the screen...it's either be close enough to read, or coat it in cooking detrius. And who the hell preps veggies and raw meat 4' from the sink? What, it's the MS home workout program? "We make you RUN when you cook, or it's salmonella for you!"
- So much of it is totally impractical. Look at the "teen bedroom" pic. How much juice is needed to keep that shit running? The glowing wall? WTF, is that an OLED wall? Who affords this? LEDs UNDER the bed? Dude, that shit was uncool in the 90s, stop trying to bring it back. Is this a girl's room? A boy's room? A human's room? Look at the chair...seriously, those no back chairs? Only if you're proving how big your yoga dick is
The Center for Information Work is just as silly. Take the big StrataTech monitor. Please. Now, for a gaming rig, where you're sitting back a few feet and going for total immersion? Fan-fucking-tastic. Release it now, the gamers will blow you on the spot. But for IT work? Look at where the guy is sitting. Unless you have amazing peripheral vision, you cannot see that entire screen clearly without turning your head. So throughout the day? Like an all-day tennis game. Looks cool, but unusable in a business situation. Well, if you wanted an impressive NOC monitor, but I think the world is done with that bullshit. At least I hope so. DigiDesk? Two Words: Coffee Spills. Can you imagine doing anything but playing "Minority Report" on it? Now, I know some artists that would love that, like a Cintiq on 'roids, but for routine office work? Dude, show me shit I can use. Stop hitting the Star Trek crack pipe. At least the "next generation work spaces demo" isn't insane. Nicer way to have dual monitors, although stop with the over-complicated keyboards already. Also, lay the fucking phone down, only pretentious idiots who want you to know OMGLOOKWHOCALLSME set it up like that. On the other hand, props for Microsoft realizing people still manual dial numbers. I just wish they'd stop pushing the Table PC. It's a great vertical market solution, especially for warehouses, hospitals, etc. But the general world has said "We don't want to fucking write everything out longhand all fucking day, now give me a faster portable with a fucking decent keyboard." Maybe once Bill leaves.
I hate to tell them, but their "Doctor's office of the future"? It's not the future. The medical profession is jumping on tablets like panthers on meat. Why? Because for that industry, tablets rock. Right tool for the right job. Same thing with the PHARMACY OF THE FUTURE. It's already here guys. That, by the way, is a problem with THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE. They're either out in left field dropping acid, or they're actually a bit behind.
And again, pushing the tablet crack, is the MEETING ROOM OF THE FUTURE. Okay, here's a test. Take a notepad. Now, in a meeting, write notes for a few hours, but, don't look at the paper as you write. See how well that works. With a keyboard, and a little training and practice, I can easily type notes and only occasionally glance at the screen. When you write shit longhand, or use a pen at all, there's no way to create the tactile references that nubs on the "F" and "J" keys do. So you have to look at the screen constantly.
As well, two separate meeting tables in the same room? Why? You put 11-12 people in a room, and have half of them talk about one thing, the other half talk about something else, and measure the volume levels over time. Yet with all that shit, there's no goddamned outlets, not a single ethernet port, and they put the fucking old-school whiteboard over the AC return. There's a couch UNDER an LCD screen. Come on people, room ergonomics count, and there are better choices for 'electronic' whiteboards today. Now. And what the fuck is up with the color scheme in that room. Does someone at Microsoft have a huge love for gastronomic colors and patterns? What is the deal with the relentless 70s decor? Where's the acoustic tile on the rest of the room? It's almost an echo chamber.
But then, Microsoft has always missed the small practical details of things, and hoped you don't notice that it only looks great at a glance.
I'd love to see a "Room of the future" that shows someone actually designed for how people use that room, and planned ahead, rather than just pushing their tech. That might be cool.
Technorati Tags:
Futuristic Bullshit
May 5, 2008
Hidden Caches/tmp folder in Leopard
This is a quick one for the great Google Tech Support Database:
In Mac OS X 10.5.X, there is a new place for caches/tmp files: /var/folders/ or /private/var/folders
If you're having potential cache-related issues in Mac OS X 10.5, you might want to keep that one in mind.
Technorati Tags:
Apple, Mac OS X, Troubleshooting
May 3, 2008
More on Leadership done right
This is based on an article on Gigaom, "Pixar's Brad Bird on Fostering Innovation", that Daring Fireball linked to, and it is literally, a checklist for every company in the world on "How to do things right":
Lesson Five: High Morale Makes Creativity CheapI would say that if you have to pick one thing to not go cheap on as an employer, morale is it. If you have high morale, you also have loyalty, and a group that will stick with you through thick and thin, when the cash falls like manna, and when you have to wander in the desert.The Quarterly: It sounds like you spend a fair amount of time thinking about the morale of your teams.
Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. [what’s true for a movie is true for a startup!] If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.
Without good morale, you're fucked. You may limp along for years, even decades, but you will never truly excel, and you'll be doing nothing but vampiring off of past work and glory. Another point:
Lesson Six: Dont Try To “Protect your success”If all you do is protect what you have, you are not growing, you are preserving. There's another name for a well-preserved organism: Mummy. If you want your company to be the walking dead, trodding the same path for eternity, then preserve it. But you'll do no better than you are right now. To succeed, you have to take risks.The Quarterly: Engagement, morale—what else is critical for stimulating innovative thinking?
Brad Bird: The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. … “You don’t play it safe—you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.”
Another one that I love:
Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.The other thing this does is make siloism and empire-building difficult. When you have to deal with everyone else all the time, you can't hide away, nor can you hide information. I have worked at companies that make siloism an unspoken core value, and it is like death. When you can't just talk to someone else without manager approval and a meeting? When never even talk to people in your own department except by accident? That is the mark of a company that is limping along, with leadership that only looks at the bottom line. "As long as we made a profit, everything is perfect." Penny-wise, but so terribly pound-foolish, and when the master of the silo leaves, so does all the knowledge they never shared with anyone else.
Lesson Seven: Encourage Inter-disciplinary LearningBrilliant. The company I work for now has something similar to this. I don't know if I'll ever use it, but I'm tickled pink that they do that. It's an amazing concept, one that the military is good at. Why is this important? Because you never know what hidden desires or talents someone has until you give them a chance to use them. Think of Al Davis in the early years of the Oakland Raiders, taking players who were thought of as poor, or broken-down, and figuring out where they really needed to be, and making them, and the Raiders, into superstars. Just because someone's in IT doesn't mean they don't go home and write, or compose music, but if you never ask them, you'll never know, and you just might miss out on someone amazing. A job title is a convenience, not a straightjacket.The Quarterly: Is there anything else you’d highlight that contributes to creativity around here?
Brad Bird: One thing Pixar does [is] “PU,” or Pixar University. If you work in lighting but you want to learn how to animate, there’s a class to show you animation. There are classes in story structure, in Photoshop, even in Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defense system. Pixar basically encourages people to learn outside of their areas, which makes them more complete. [and more creative].
Finally, the most important one:
Lesson Nine: Making $$ Can’t Be Your FocusI have to disagree with Brad here. For any company to succeed in the long run, making money cannot be the focus. You do have to make money, but that cannot be why you do work. If your primary focus becomes shit like profit and shareholder value, then walk, you have no more value to offer, unless you become an accountant. When you focus on doing what you do so well that it makes you giddy, you can make money forever. When all you care about is the next quarter, then that's what your commercial lifespan is. Three month. You live and die every three months.The Quarterly: How would you compare the Disney of your early career with Pixar today?
Brad Bird: When I entered Disney, it was like a classic Cadillac Phaeton that had been left out in the rain… The company’s thought process was not, “We have all this amazing machinery—how do we use it to make exciting things? We could go to Mars in this rocket ship!” It was, “We don’t understand Walt Disney at all. We don’t understand what he did. Let’s not screw it up. Let’s just preserve this rocket ship; going somewhere new in it might damage it.”
Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” That’s a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It’s also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.
Is that what anyone wants to do?
More companies should read this, and even better, listen to it.
Technorati Tags:
Leadership, Companies that excel
May 1, 2008
Oh lord, here we go again
Dear Windows people without any knowledge of the Mac Market whatsoever, or no ability to do research, please...stop. Just stop talking about Apple and the Mac like you know what you're on about, because well, you don't.
Take Matt Freestone of Windows Connected, and his blog post: The Vista Schoolyard Bullies........
He's trying to defend Vista and how users of older machines simply should not expect the same performance out of it as a new machine. That's logical. That's not really why people are pissed about Vista performance, but okay, we'll go with that.
But Matt has to compare Vista to something, and of course, he uses Mac OS X 10.5. The problem is, he doesn't know anything about the Mac market:
Before I explain some common sense things, let's first take a look at Apple's OS history and deployment strategies. I ask you, how many Apple users do you know that own a 3 year old Mac, and install Leopard on it? The silence is deafening.If by "silence" you mean "The sound of PowerMac and iMac G5 owners running happily along", then yes, the silence is deafening. Yeah. See, G5s, while not as fast as a current Intel system for a lot of reasons, are not dogs.
You also have quite a few PowerBook G4 users on Mac OS X 10.5. Again, not as fast as a MacBook or a MacBook Pro, but none of those systems are running Mac OS X 10.5 in "Crippled Mode". Obviously, it didn't occur to Matt to go to Apple's support site and do a little research If he had, he would have found every machine released in 2005, (three or so year old hardware), listed nicely for him. But never let a lack of research slow you down, and Matt doesn't. He presses on:
All the Mac OS's through it's life cycle have been hardware dependant. In other words, for the most part, you bought a new PC to get the new Mac OS.Matt is so far out in left field here, he's in right field. While Apple does regularly cut off older hardware from the latest OS releases, that is still not, nor never has been the same as "You have to buy new hardware to get new OS versions", nor is it even close. In fact, prior to Mac OS X, Apple would constantly provide for truly ancient hardware in their OS releases. Mac OS X 10.5 still supports a machine with at least an 867MHz G4, 512MB of RAM, and a DVD drive. You have to go back into 2002 to start hitting sub-867 MHz G4s. Now, Mac OS X 10.5's performance on those machines won't be anything close to a Mac Pro, or even an Intel Mac Mini. But, if you have a decent G4 Tower with a good video card and decent RAM, you can run Mac OS X 10.5, and well. You certainly won't see any kind of OS degradation on a scale with VIsta's "NoAeroForYou!" issues.
However, Matt's got the backhoe firewalled, no slowing down here:
Obviously that has changed in the last 5 or more years, and has changed more drastically with Apple's adoption of Intel processors. But still, this question is a valid one. Mac OS's have never been designed with backward compatibility (hardware wise) in mind.Wrong, wrong, and wrong. In fact, prior to Mac OS X, you could easily have Macs that were ten years old still on the list of supported systems for a given OS release. That caused Apple no end of pain, and that tendency to be far too generous with hardware support was a major factor in the death of Copland. But even in the Mac OS X era, neither Matt's facts, nor his implications are correct. However, we are in the Scoblelite era of "Fuck Research and Facts, that's what your readers are for". Somehow, I bet a similarly inaccurate screed by a Mac Web site be greeted with equanimity by the Mattster there. He now brings out the strawman:
Why? Simple, Apple is a hardware vendor, not just a software vendor. Apple makes 50% of it's profit from the hardware. It's against their best interest for you to simply upgrade your old computer with their new OS. They want you to buy a brand new computer. This is a very liberating thing as it allows them to design the OS to take advantage of the latest hardware and provide much 'cooler' user interfaces as they don't have to worry about older or slower hardware not being able to run it.Actually, by that logic, Apple could easily get people to buy more hardware without giving a rat's ass about what OS they run on it. Matt's implications here are not just wrong, but bordering on stupid. Dell is a hardware company, Apple is a systems company. Apple sells you a system, of hardware, OS and application software all designed to work well together. Dell sells you a box and if you want, puts an OS on it. There is a difference, but I don't expect Matt to understand it. I only want him to stop talking about shit he doesn't really understand, or do a little damned research. Finally:
So again, I ask you. How many Mac users have wanted to install Leopard on a 3 year old Mac, and if they do, how many complain about it's performance? They don't because they knew it would be horrible.<Raises Hand> I have several G4 machines running Mac OS X 10.5. Honestly, when it just comes to running the OS, it feels no slower than Mac OS X 10.4 did, and some things, like Spotlight, actually feel faster under Mac OS X 10.5. Same thing for G5s.
If Matt wants to make a point about unrealistic expectations for Vista, that's fine, but he should stick to things he knows, and folks, Macs are not in the set of "Things Matt Knows".
Technorati Tags:
Blogosphere = Dorkosphere, Blogosphere = Stupid, Mac OS X, Microsoft Vista, Don't Talk Out of your ass
Today on Stupid AppleScript Tricks
I know I'm reinventing a wheel here, but it took like five minutes, so who cares. Anyway, one thing that makes me bonkers about Apple Remote Desktop is that while I can run Unix commands on a remote machine with it, what I can't do is easily select a machine and just open an SSH session to it.
Well, now I can. Here's the script:
set theSSHList to {}
tell application "Remote Desktop"
set theComputers to the selection
repeat with x in theComputers
set the end of theSSHList to Internet address of x
end repeat
end tell
tell application "Terminal"
repeat with x in theSSHList
do script "ssh username@" & (contents of x)
end repeat
end tell
It's pretty simple. We initialize theSSHList, then grab all the selected computers in Remote Desktop. (Note...if you have Apple Remote Desktop open, there is always a selected computer as long as there's a computer in the window to select, so this will tend not to fail unless you're pointing at an empty computer. For obvious reasons, it won't work on a computer you haven't added to Apple Remote Desktop yet.)
We process the list of computers, and dump their IP addresses into theSSHList.
Next is to interate through theSSHList, and open a new ssh session for each item in theSSHList.
This won't bring Terminal to the front, by the way. I don't tend to like that, but if you do, then just add an "activate" command right after "tell application "Terminal"" and Terminal will merrily pop to the front.
Put that in your scripts menu and you can now easily pop ssh windows to Apple Remote Desktop computers when you need.
Technorati Tags:
AppleScript, Stupid AppleScript Tricks, Apple Remote Desktop, Apple Remote Desktop Scripting
April 30, 2008
Religion makes the stupid, part #32498
So a girl dies of undiagnosed diabetic ketoacidosis because her parents decided to play mumbly-peg with the magic man in the sky instead of doing like God told them and helping themselves...to commonly available and reliable medical treatment. However in this case, they aren't getting the standard "Christian Get Out Of Jail Free" card, normally given in this country to anyone who belongs to the right sect, and are instead being charged with second-degree reckless homicide.
Good, and I'm pretty sure that God, such as it is, would approve. Because I don't see a supreme omniscient being saying "Okay, now listen, because this is very important: you all have to be a big bunch of complete DUMBASSES to get into heaven, got that? To get into heaven, you must be dumb. Now, go forth and stupidify."
I just don't see it happening that way.
It's about time that this kind of bullshit was treated properly...with jail time.
Technorati Tags:
Religion makes you stupid
April 29, 2008
The First Fucknut does it again
Some days, you see something that is beyond appalling.
Like this bit from CNN, about general dissatisfaction about the GI Bill. Now, the GI Bill I got was worse than they have now, and far worse than the original, but hey, it was still decent, and thanks to Massachusetts not charging veterans tuition at state schools, paid for a lot of college.
However, it could be better, and even though it won't benefit me personally, I'm really happy to see that Jim Webb introduced a bill, co-sponsored by 57 other Senators, including John Warner, that will make real improvements to the current Montgomery GI Bill, like:
- Paying tuition, room and board up to the most expensive in-state public school tuition in a vet's state
- A monthly stipend, tied to local housing rates
- Additional payments for tutoring
- Additional payments for licensing/certification costs
- Dollar-for-dollar matching of any voluntary additional contributions from vets to schools whose tuition is higher than the aforementioned in-state max
- 15, instead of 10 years to use this entitlement
Again, I won't get a dime from it, but I have friends who will. This is a good bill. Unlike bullshit parades and platitudes, this will actually help a lot of people out in meaningful ways, people who under the Mongomery G.I. Bill, which does not suck, might not have been able to follow their educational dream. This is the kind of bill that will do for this generation's vets what the original did for guys like John Warner.
So the sponsors are talking about adding it to the Iraq War Spending Bill. Makes sense, I mean, compared to what we're spending on that fucking quagmire, this is cheap, and it's a chance to do some actual good for the troops that have been getting so routinely fucked over by the very people who claim to support them the most.
Bush's response?
President Bush warned Tuesday at a Rose Garden news conference that he would veto any additions to the bill.Hey, you fucking Texan-wannabe pinhead ass-monkey, you fucking sign this bill. Period. I don't care if it's added onto the Iraq War Spending Bill, sent to you on its own, or tied onto a bill authorizing Papa Smurf, as the fucking Surgeon General, you shut up and you sign this bill. You put thousands of people in harms way based on lies and bullshit, totally ass-raped our military efforts in Afghanistan, and overstressed our military to where they're not letting people out when they were supposed to get out, the Army is damned near letting anyone with enough sanity and mobility to walk in and make a fucking mark on the contract, and you are pushing back at all on what would be the one truly good thing you might possibly do?
Have you no decency? At long last, will the rest of the country finally realize that for all your bluster about morality, decency, and righteousness, that you have absolutely not a shred of human decency, and all the moral fiber of a rabid weasel?
It is too late to do anything but wait for your too-long time in power to be over before the long, hard job of trying to fix the shit you've piled on the lower and middle class of the country that gave you everything, the people who do the actual work that you barely even notice as you ride around Crawford like the petty dictator you are. I can only hope that when you finally leave the office you've sullied, that you are forgotten and abandoned, and treated with the same barely disguised disdain that you leveled on all who were not in your inner circle.
I expected little from you, George W. Bush, but to fail on something as simple as this? Shame on you sir. Shame on you.
*****Update*****
Thanks to Dave Pooser for this link in the comments, with this bit from Sen. "I am the best candidate for the military"
and vet, McCain:
Disappointingly, Sen. John McCain, presumptive Republican candidate for president, so far declines to back the measure. He seems to be responding to concerns of the military brass that enhanced educational opportunities could negatively affect retention rates. Not only is it wrong to want people to stay in the military because they have no alternatives, but such thinking ignores the advantages enhanced educational benefits offer in recruitment. To meet recruitment goals, the military has offered bonuses and lowered some of its standards. Imagine being able instead to promise possible recruits a first-class college education.Dear Sen. McCain,
If it was possible to be more disgusted than by what the chimp is trying to pull, you have gone the extra mile. For you to offer anything but your fervent and complete support for this bill is beyond the pale of decency. For you to do anything but sign your name as a co-sponsor in letters bigger than Hancock's is unimaginable. There are not enough letters in "pathetic hypocritical suckup" to illustrate how far you have fallen in your attempt at one last bit of glory.
Of course, thanks to your trophy wife's riches and your government benefits from your years in the U.S. Senate, this will never be your personal problem ever again. But for you to backstab your own people, the veterans of war? To betray those who, like you before them voluntarily place themselves in harms way for no more reason than their country asked them to? For that sir, there can be no forgiveness, no restitution, no "making it better". For you to waffle even slightly in supporting this bill, you have lost any respect I have for you, which, once upon a time was enough for me to have been willing to vote for you instead of Al Gore.
You have betrayed every veteran everywhere, John McCain, and I would ask that you stop referring to yourself as a member of that group.
You no longer deserve that privilege.
