Fort Hood Massacre: Buried in Deception

With a little experience, you can tell when conflicting reports are natural to the process, and when they are proof of deception. You don’t even have to guess at what the officials are trying to hide. Something in the mass of reports coming out of Fort Hood, starting with the earliest public notices, screams loudly of cover-up.

So while I cannot pretend to know, and am reluctant to speculate, about what might have actually happened, what I do know is the official story is a pack of lies. Furthermore, this will be used in the very near future as a goad to steer public sentiment away from something very sensible, which also happens to threaten exposure of the criminals in Washington, DC. This is another 9-11, another Murrah Building bombing, another TWA Flight 800, another KAL 007. In this case, after all the years of lies leaking out, and the powerful response to various bands of “truthers,” the official story is falling apart even as it oozes forth.

It may well be what we are being told is accurate, but it’s clearly leaving out critical facts. Not just national security secrets, but accountability stuff — sinister motives. This is a big CYA, and the propagandists are trying hard to capitalize on disaster to stir hysteria over as many different issues as possible. Don’t believe them. Don’t buy the lie. The mainstream media and government spokespeople are paid to feed you intellectual manure, to keep you dependent on them for your worldview. “We will tell what the think and when to think it.”

Don’t buy it.

Fog in the Mind

Today we got away and drove the Talimena Highway, or more accurately, the Winding Stair Mountain Trail. It follows a ridge top path between Talihina, OK and Mena, AR, in the Kiamichi Mountains. We were just a little late to catch all the foliage colors of fall. Still, it promised a picturesque drive with wide high views of the valleys on either side, and the mountains beyond in each direction. It’s quite popular, especially with motorcycle riders.

So we climbed toward the sun, starting on the west end in Talihina. As soon as we got to the highest elevations, the clouds rolled in over the ridge. Thick clouds. At the Wilhelmina State Park Lodge, visibility was less than 100 yards. We still drank in some history lessons, then drove on down to Mena. As we turned north to find a parallel route back the way we came, down through the valley on the north side, the sun came back out.

The view from the valley was far more interesting. No, not because of the clouds up on top blocked the view, but because there is only so much you can see from up there in the first place. You are looking down into the valleys, but by the time your gaze moves up the next slope, it’s just distant green humps. The view of the peak itself was pretty monotonous. From the valley floor, you see up, but you also see the very many lovely details. Rocky creeks, green waters, mixed forests and far more color below the tops of the tall pines. I will remember the valley view far, far longer. I’ve already seen the view from the top when it was clear, and it doesn’t stick in my mind.

Indeed, I now wish I could find a place to live down there. I want to pass through there again sometime soon. Did not the fog roll in to tell us the things we really wanted and needed for our souls were down in the valley? You can’t buy land on the ridge, because it’s all government owned. Food and drink are pretty high-priced, and very limited. It was entirely too crowded with tourists. In the valleys, there is land for sale, a great many homes and shops, and the prices more — ahem — down to earth. We weren’t boxed in by the filthy rich flaunting their toys.

I love the mountains because they make the valleys so beautiful.

Trusting Microsoft?

Dana Blankenhorn asks What Would Make You Trust Microsoft? Good question. I’ll apply the same standard here as I do to everything else — God’s sense of justice.

First, I suppose we should note, as one poster did, there are several different major parts to the Evil Empire, and they aren’t all evil. I agree the computer accessories are some of the best. Upon pulling my Dell Inspiron 545 MT out of the box, I immediately replaced the mouse with a Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse 2.0. I absolutely hated the Dell keyboard, because they have done insidious things like moving the 6-pack around to vertical, and I can’t touch-type any more, so as soon as I could afford it, I got a Microsoft ComfortCurve 2000 keyboard (I hate wireless). Good hardware. The rest of the company I don’t trust.

What would change that?

1. Fess up — It would take a huge fat book, but all those times they bought, stole or simply squashed a better product by someone else. It’s okay to buy a competitor out if you don’t orphan the loyal users. To this day I hold a measure of genuine hatred over the loss of certain favorite products, vastly superior to anything MS has ever had or ever will produce. They are gone forever because MS broke the law, and God’s Laws, in destroying the company that made them. Don’t tell me this is “just business” — humans are not machines, and God requires everyone to respect their needs.

2. Drop the Arrogance — This is actually the most hateful thing of all: The company takes itself too seriously. The moral high ground is to admit mistakes with good humor, and openly confess when someone else has a better idea, and then promise to compete honestly. “We honestly believe we can come up with something you’ll love, so give us a chance.” Think what that says to people about the personality of the company. Instead, MS spokesmen try to deny reality itself, working to construct a false propaganda world-according-to-MS. “We will tell you when to think and what to think.” This is the underlying evil which foments such things as the arm-twisting of hardware makers about monopoly installation of Windows, etc. If you never experience anything else, how can you know if Windows is really the best?

3. Culture war — To a large degree, what makes major corporations a very serious threat to humanity is embodied in, and derived from, the actions of MS. That is, what makes it all so ugly can be blamed partially on MS. The unconscionable denial of accountability has made MS tactics a household word — “clickwrap.” Greed and unreasonable profits are a sin, for all you capitalists out there. God is not a capitalist, nor a communist. He’s a family God, and both of those -isms are a sin against God’s intent. So we have a huge body of civil legal expectations shaped by MS, and it is distinctly a turn for the worse.

I have no bone to pick with the big push against piracy. While I do find it an utterly foolish, dead end business policy, it’s legitimate. So, to some degree, I see this as the seed of their own destruction. The future for software viability as a market is recognizing you cannot possibly control the bits and bytes, but you can control the support system which keeps them useful. RedHat is the future of corporate computing, and Canonical does best at reaching the common user. What the latter now needs is to slow down and stop catering so much to the hobby users, and focus on the needs of the much larger market of ordinary home users. Their LTS releases are almost there, so they only need a stronger emphasis and a fair market entryway.

Mac can never displace the Linux market, because Apple holds little appeal for the more staid average consumer. Besides, they are hardly more honest than MS in how they handle consumers. Both MS and Apple are guilty of cynical abuse on a massive scale, so I don’t trust them, either. To the degree any entity adheres to the hobbyist, rolling-release, never fix anything or produce a stable product, I don’t really trust too many Linux operations, either. So I don’t trust the GNOME or KDE projects, for example. They might be open, but they are utterly heartless. What makes them usable at all is that you can fix their stuff if you have the resources, so it justifies RedHat’s default choice for GNOME.

XFCE: Less Is More

GTK is a very nice GUI toolkit. GNOME is rickety and parts, if not the whole thing, tend to crash way too much. You may have gotten a stable implementation on your Linux system, as CentOS does, but that’s only because you got one which was somewhat older and had been fixed. It’s the nature of GNOME development to ignore bug fixes, per se, and simply include fixes in the next release. That’s the next release which has lots of new features and lots of new bugs. The whole project is marked by an open hostility to fixing any previous version. Indeed, the developers don’t even want to discuss it. We could say the same for Qt and KDE; it’s a mess because nothing ever really gets fixed. Both desktop environments simply keep rolling forward, at a breakneck pace.

Let’s face it — that’s the way it is. Open Source tends to operate that way because most of the developers are hobbyists working on their own time. Hobbyists tend to obsess over new features and flashy stuff, and have no time for the drudgery of making it actually work. The Linux kernel and some of the essential subsystems receive a tremendous amount of corporate care, so they tend to work better, but the desktop environment (DE) is always broken. That’s in part because they do way too much for something which is never really fixed.

Many of the complaints about Ubuntu’s recent 9.10 release (Karmic Koala) seem tied to one or the other major DE, GNOME or KDE. That’s my own experience. Quite some time ago, I gave up on KDE. All the lovely promises, but it never really worked well enough. With the new 4.x series, they destroyed one of the few real advantages by reducing the configuration options. I began using GNOME simply because it was the default on CentOS, and RedHat had taken the time to fix almost every bug you might notice — but it was the ancient 2.16 release. The KDE version for CentOS was unfinished, but about the only hope for better is the KDE-Redhat Project. There, it’s all or nothing, since they can’t maintain your preferred select release. Also, it’s nowhere near as polished since they merely build the upstream supplied code from the KDE Project with RedHat branding.

On a philosophical level, KDE is simply the Windows GUI done right. GNOME is some of that, but takes more from the Mac GUI. As noted, both simply do too much for the amount of bug-fixing they get. What if you offered something a little less all-encompassing? Can we get good function without going too naked — like FVWM, IceWM, etc.? If a DE does less, there is less to go wrong. How much is enough? You can surely find many in-betweens, such as Enlightenment and XFCE. With the latter, you get the consistency of the GTK GUI, but little of the crashing you get with GNOME. I’m not aware of any similar projects with Qt, but I haven’t checked lately. In my case, XFCE does enough.

I miss the window event audio cues which came with XFce 3.x. The older style toolbar was adequate. If you needed extra widgets, you could run them separately as dedicated applications. With the recent 4.6 release included in the Ubuntu Karmic series, you get all the best and latest, and it’s configured by default to look very much like the GNOME DE. That is, you’ll see a thin toolbar top and bottom of the screen. The widgets are considerably more limited in types and function. Again, you may not like the limitations, but there’s less to break. Over the years when I’ve played with XFCE, I’ve typically preferred to run GKrellM to satisfy my urge to keep an eye on things, and allowed the toolbar(s) to be just a menu holder, and later a window-tracker. I’m not a genuine devotee of any DE, simply because I can adapt to most of them with enough use, and get what I need from my computer with just about anything. I can almost run console only, if it comes to that. Still, I want as much convenience as I can get without the complications.

My disappointment with Karmic’s GNOME was enough to prompt a change. I kept running into a problem with something so silly as Aisleriot. I’d be playing away on Freecell and suddenly the GUI would crash and log me out. I chased down every log I could find, tried various tweaks, all to no avail. I realized whatever it was, it didn’t hit the logs, because after testing different attempts to fix, the contents of the logs kept offering totally different clues, none of which seemed connected to my experience in the voluminous bug reports one finds in the Ubuntu community. Sure, I could have simply chosen another card game set. The point is I play such games to allow my brain to process in the background something important enough to refer it to the mystical processes. The card playing redirects my conscious mind while the subconscious carries on the important work. (Yes, I’m a complete weirdo, but it works for me.) This bug stood in the forefront of other things I didn’t like about the way GNOME was working. I’m tired of distro-shopping, and this was as close as I could have gotten so far on this machine, and still have some hope of eventually having a very stable, long-term OS and desktop. So I installed XFCE, essentially shifting my system over to Xubuntu.

Because my screen is so wide, using GKrellM in sticky mode is perfect. I can afford to “waste” lateral space. I’ve loaded it with all the monitors I care about, and still have some empty space below it, but I don’t feel the urge to fill every available pixel of my screen. There is a lot of empty space on the two panels, but I’m not too concerned right now. I like keeping various functions in certain corners to maintain old habits, and there’s really no compelling reason to change. XFCE offers just enough adaptability I don’t have to waste time retraining myself. I can simply do my work the way I prefer. For now, it’s a keeper. Just to play it safe, though, I installed my old favorite XPat2, since I like how it works better than Aisleriot. I can keep my preferred color scheme, which is Dirty-Ice; I use the old Trench window style, and the Blue Steel theme on GKrellM. I end up with something far less Windows-like, and more in the Unix style. I’m sure I could get by with my other old favorite, IceWM, but I have gotten into some less Spartan habits.

For the most part, I’m tired of testing and poking. I’m not a hobbyist; I’m just a user who prefers Linux and BSD and won’t consider using Windows without a gun pointed at my head. Okay, I suppose if I was restricted to hardware on which Linux simply would not work at all, I might be stuck with it, but God has been gracious to give me something just inside the circle of hardware compatibility for Linux. There are several threads of working habits, but I’m trying to reduce them to save time. I’m getting older and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. At this point, I can no longer consider KDE, and I’m about to drop GNOME. If XFCE continues to offer just enough of the DE continuity, and I don’t have to fight obscure bugs to use it, that’s one less issue I have to consider when the inevitable upgrade comes.

Xubuntu it is.

Ron Paul Proves It’s Pointless

Hats off to Ron Paul. From within the system he has striven to make things go right. He preaches the Constitution, does everything he can to get folks to abide by it, works to restrain or remove anything in government which is not in accordance with it, and shows in every way possible the whole thing is so utterly broke, it can’t be fixed.

During the election, the party apparatchiks pulled every possible crime — I saw reports at least one of his delegates was murdered — to prevent him having a fair shot at the nomination. If you still support Republicans, you are no better than a communist thug. We already know Democrats are avowed communists, they just don’t call it that. So we have a complete and utter coup from within, and few people notice. Think about it for just a moment: How utterly shameless are the powerful insisting they do nothing wrong; they won’t even admit it’s possible they’ve done wrong.

Still, the mere fact Ron Paul keeps trying, and it keeps failing so splendidly, shows it can’t be fixed. It’s all the proof anyone needs. Once you accept that, you realize several things are possible, and some quite likely.

1. There will be an attempt to dissolve any semblance of national sovereignty, surrendering us to some global governing authority.
2. There will be a matching attempt to dissolve the nation into individual states and sections, wresting sovereignty back down to a smaller level.
3. Police agencies refusing to abide by sane limits will provoke increasing armed resistance from very ordinary people. The entire facade of protecting the public will be ripped away in naked oppression. We are already seeing this some, particularly in major urban centers.
4. Anyone actually capable of changing things for the better will be marginalized, silenced, and if necessary, murdered, to prevent the current ruling elite from losing their franchise.
5. There will be major armed revolts in scattered places, with serious loss of life among government officials and law enforcement.
6. Government officials and their friends in corporations will work together more and more in the most egregious farcical schemes to take all we’ve got.
7. There is a very high likelihood of military mutinies, and some stand to succeed in some measure.

The point is, we have gone past the safety line. There is no going back, and no amount of reform will stop the momentum. At every level (though not quite yet in every place), government has become the biggest threat to life, liberty and property. In a broad sense, your government is the only real terrorist organization you have to worry about.

I’m making preparations to avoid being sucked into this mess. My commitment is to remain aloof from the very public folly, since human government has never been good or right for more than a few seconds at a time. The only way to live sanely in this world is to cling to a higher plane. Don’t take this madness too seriously.

Ukrainian Death March?

The mainstream press aren’t covering it much, if at all. From the alternative news sources, we hear a plague is sweeping the The Ukraine. The information coming out of there is very, very confused. It’s been related to H1N1, pneumonic plague, and any number of other possibilities. We do seem to get consistent word this is only in some western areas, and perhaps some of Belarus.

Now for the other stuff. Some are saying this is connected to the incident two months ago involving a certain alleged Mossad agent named Joseph Moshe. The man was apparently trying to reach the Israeli consulate, but the police intercepted him. We don’t know why, but they allege he had threatened to bomb the White House or something equally crazy. He didn’t come that close to the White House. Instead, he was trapped by police cars in the parking lot close to the consulate. But they didn’t arrest him, simply forced him out of his car, and we are told they confiscated some papers from him. The alternative news sources say those papers were evidence Baxter’s Ukraine lab was producing bio-warfare agents. This was two months before the hullaballoo in Ukraine.

But let’s get a little context. This part of Ukraine is quite poor, with folks sometimes lucky to eat. And do you remember Chernobyl? Lots of the contamination went right to this area. Not so long ago, routine WHO reports indicated these folks suffered a high degree of compromised immune system. I understand TB is a serious problem there. In that situation, just a seasonal URI (head and chest cold) could be pretty rough. How much tinkering with natural plagues would it take? From past years, we’ve seen this part of the world suffers a fairly high mortality from all sorts of natural bugs. With a reported death rate below 100 for some 250K sick folks for this particular incident, it sounds pretty mild.

We can’t doubt Baxter is capable of doing it, first in the technical sense, but also in the sense of likelihood — they sold AIDS tainted blood products after they knew officially their stock was tainted. They also shipped those tainted vaccines all over the world, which was just accidentally discovered by a lab in Czech Republic. Please note: The Austrian lab is known for its rigorous enforcement of procedures, so this could not possibly have been an accident. So we can see there is something awfully nasty going on with Baxter. And why, for Pete’s sake, has no governing body held them accountable? I am forced to suggest there is a pay-off somewhere to government officials.

Somewhere in all the madness, we may never really know what’s going on. It doesn’t help there are elections coming real soon in Ukraine, and just about anything can be made a propaganda issue with these folks. That business of the “Orange Revolution” was pure poppycock, in that it was all funded by Western governments like the US. That campaign was bought, but it’s not as if there weren’t some eager vote vendors in Western Ukraine. Most of what you think you know about the world is likely nonsense, simply because it’s too hard to get an honest answer, even if you are running around the place. Deception is the norm.

If you want to feed your voice into the panic, feel free. My position is the official noises and the alternative news noise are both probably wrong. Sure, we weren’t given the real story about Joseph Moshe, nor are we getting much truth about the sickness and mortality in the Ukraine. Watch out for Baxter, sure, but I suspect this story is blown way out of proportion.

Purely on Constitutional Grounds

Never mind your political aspirations, let’s just look at what the US Constitution requires. Now, we could easily write whole books laying out the details, but there is more than enough information out there. Let me cite a single instance which is undisputed: The Hage Water Rights case. There are summaries all over the Net, but it boils down to some bureaucrats abusing their authority in an attempt to dispossess the Hages from their land. It’s not as if the bureaucrats were confused, or testing the limits. They knew. They felt free to pull this stunt because, political crap being what it is, they knew nothing would be done to them personally.

There are tons of regulations and laws built on top of the Constitution. All of them remain subject to a proper understanding of that underlying document. If we were to apply it evenly and fairly, with no respect for persons and parties, those bureaucrats might still be in prison. As it was, not a one of them suffered in the least. They used their office in an attempt to destroy the lives of citizens who had done no wrong.

Let’s extrapolate. By the same standards, most of Congress would be in jail, and a few would be executed. Most of the Supreme Court would be disbarred, and a couple of them in jail. Almost the entire Executive branch would be in prison, and a very large number of them executed. On the grounds of pure justice according to that constitution, most of the federal government would be dissolved, anyway.

Now, I’ve already said many times the US Constitution does not pass God’s standards, but He does take a limited interest in supporting it as some sort of covenant. If you really want to force this nation to follow your particular agenda, you’ll have to rewrite the Constitution. All this business of perverting it piecemeal is what demands God crush the whole thing. That’s coming. Soon.

Fear Fatigue

Sometimes I wonder if there isn’t some conspiracy to create false fears.

We had the scare about gun confiscations once Obama was elected. Now that might happen, but it won’t be right away. People are still sucking up huge quantities of ammo, and the gun trade is still pretty strong, but it’s not in the news any more. We heard about cap-n-trade, but that’s currently dead in the water. It will probably come, but not right away, and not all at once. There was a big panic about forced flu vaccine inoculations, with metal ID bands, etc. It could still happen, but it was certainly not when the clamoring voices warned it would happen, since October is gone. The dollar is still slipping inexorably down, but it seems to have held on a lot longer than predicted. We do have a surprising number of banks closing on Fridays, but frankly that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to how many are actually insolvent if they were honest. But the folks who make their living telling wild tales about the need to fear dramatic evil issuing from the federal government are now all moving on to other subjects. I’m wondering if they are either their own conspiracy, or if they are part of something bigger.

And would they know, themselves? Are they being pumped full of crud because someone hidden in the nooks and crannies of government wants a part of the population distracted by unjustified frenzy? Sometimes I wonder.

You don’t have to believe in conspiracies to know bad stuff is coming. That’s what governments have always done. They keep getting nastier and more corrupt until they collapse, or a revolt destroys them. And then the cycle starts over. So you can chase the fear hucksters and keep marking your calendar with dire predictions, or you can settle down and just keep this general expectation things will go from bad to worse. And you can simply decide you won’t be drive by such fears.

So while I am quite certain the federal, state and local authorities will become increasingly intrusive and burdensome, I don’t make plans to operate in the shadows of looming bad stuff. If I spend all my time sweating the small stuff, I’ll never be able to act on the bigger stuff, the things which require a deeper understanding. I understand God is not happy with any government in the Western world. I know He has promised if I stick to His standards of justice, I can expect Him to support that commitment. Sometimes it will simply be something in nature, some subtle shift in the way things happen visibly. For example, storms do hit our trailer park, but they never do much damage compared to the surrounding area. It’s consistent. That’s an example of how it works. I make plans to increase my understanding and compliance with God’s Laws.

By understanding all this in such terms, it’s a lot easier to decide how to respond when some new idiocy comes down. In the first place, I don’t have much to lose. Having lived out of a rucksack for weeks at a time, it’s not hard for me to get by on even less, now that I don’t have to worry about some commander making me do stupid stuff. Anything more comfortable than that experience is a bonus. My soul is not imprisoned by a sense of entitlement, so the threat of some change in my creature comforts causes no panic.

I hope you can adapt to the same frame of mind, because every week sees new and more dramatic grabs by bureaucrats for the product of our labors. For example, the FBI in Phillie are telling even tattoo artists to snitch on anyone who insists on anonymity, wants to deal only in cash, and talks about government not being Santa Clause, so to speak. You can’t make this stuff up. Last week the cops in the UK started raiding safety deposit facilities, confiscating all sorts of wealth. And you know our government takes a lot of cues from them. Relatively minor infractions, false charges in particular, will take thousands of dollars to defend, and it will be frankly cheaper to plead guilty. And if they can’t get you on something real, they’ll make up stuff. Yes, cops lie. They are trained to look for ways to blow things out of proportion, which is lying by another name. And so on and so on, ad nauseum.

It’s not as if I’m hiding, lurking around and trying to avoid the cops. I seldom do anything that gets their attention. I never call them when things go wrong, unless it’s something really critical and huge, something that will really keep them busy. Once they come on the scene, if they aren’t fully engaged in massive effort, there’s precious little to keep them from deciding you, the victim, did something illegal. Of course, I have the advantage of living in a state where such idiocy is generally frowned upon. We have a state law which says in essence, if you know for a fact something a cop is ordering you to do is wrong or illegal, you don’t have to comply. That sort of thing creates a wholly different atmosphere in police work. But I’m under no illusion that couldn’t change tomorrow. It’s because I’m truly interested in God’s justice I tend to do things which keeps me below the radar, plus God Himself keeps me unnoticed. Yeah, it works that way.

And when it doesn’t, it’s because something I need to do is on the other side of that hassle. It’s not like magic; it’s a little closer to the concept of karma. As long as I cling to justice, and keep a clear conscience, I can expect things to work out in the long run. That’s the promise of God’s Laws.

Ubuntu Karmic Koala on Inspiron 545 MT

This is the 64-bit version of Ubuntu. There is little point to running down the entire catalogue. Almost everything works Out of the Box® as we have come to expect from Ubuntu. When it doesn’t is when we have something to say. Further, having something to say is often limited to what little we each tend to mess with, so we only know what we use. I’m not a grand testing guru, but I’m sharing this with those who are doing something similar. Nobody here is pretending this is a proper technology review.

The primary big problem is Alsa. Currently, the hardware detection is unable to recognize every pertinent detail. For the impatient — on most recent Inspirons using ICH9 sound chips, edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf by adding the following line to the bottom of the file:

options snd-hda-intel model=6stack-dell

Then reboot. It’s that simple.

For those of you seeking clues to working it out with other machines, the solution means you have do some research, then get your hands dirty with modifying the config files by hand. I assure you it’s worth it. The context is realizing a great many recent onboard chipsets, Intel in particular, are configured in so very many different ways, there is no way to know exactly what does the trick. The details are buried on the Alsa website, and can be gleaned from a hundred different bug reports and forum discussions. A good starting place is this page on the Ubuntu Community documentation website. The critical items start under the heading “Manually Specify Module Parameters”:

1. Find the codec used by your chipset. My Inspiron reports “Realtek ALC888″.
2. Check the listing of possible model names Alsa uses in your distro bundled documentation. For Ubuntu, that turned out to be /usr/share/doc/alsa-base/driver/HD-Audio-Models.txt.gz, which was easily read by using zless from the commandline.
3. If you cannot identify what’s most plausible for your hardware, start with the “auto” parameter.
4. Prepare yourself to keep testing different options until you get something which works properly.

In my case, the primary issue was a small amount of popping in the output, but worst of all, plugging in headphones at the front panel of the tower didn’t cut the main speaker output. Alsa didn’t know which output channel did what until I identified the layout by the model name. Most of the complaints were along the lines of “no headphone jack sense control”. The fix I found does not fix that peculiar problem with the mixer interface, but it did fix the problem automatically.

When testing different distros to find which will work the best, I realize perfection on any particular hardware is unlikely, for the simple reason the developers can’t buy a sample of everything out there. A limited number of glitches, and some do-it-yourself fixes are always acceptable with every OS. Some things are simply too much, or there may be too many little things together. Here is my experience on what I’ve tested so far on this machine:

• CentOS 5 — This would have been my preference. I couldn’t get past the IDE detection, since the installer kept loading the wrong driver first and finding nothing. The IDE driver ata_piix is unable to read it, and would prevent the AHCI driver from loading. This is a highly debated bug in the RedHat world, and it seems the developers insist the manufacturer is wrong for not including an option in the BIOS for it. They don’t appear to have any interest in fixing it, and it affects Fedora, as well. Nice.
• openSUSE 11.1 and 11.2 — Both were afflicted by numerous issues. Aside from the same failure to understand which model was appropriate for the ALSA driver, the instructions for debugging are missing critical steps not obvious to ordinary users trying to figure it out. Their whole approach is different from the Debian world, so the above advice may not help at all. However, there were still a large number of minor flaws which have come to characterize SUSE these days.
• Debian Lenny — The installer could never find my Realtek RTL8101E ethernet port. Without having the full DVD on hand, I would not have gotten enough installed to work out a fix. (I didn’t get around to testing Squeeze.)
• Ubuntu 9.04 — Everything was pretty good, but I kept getting random I/O freezes. I would be typing away on something important and the system would lock up hard. A full reboot was required, and I always lost my work — that’s unforgivable. Something in the way the X server interacted with the hardware was very wrong.

Biggest Dope Dealer in the World: CIA

It’s easy to confuse things talking about the US Government, as if it were one single thing. It’s not. The federal bureaucracy is multiple governments under a single umbrella, and occasionally competing. I have long said one of the greatest threats to the average US resident is the CIA. It’s not as if they spend all their time actively ruining our lives individually, but what they really do spend their time doing is a real threat. The CIA, insofar as we can think of it as a single entity, is responsible for a very large portion of what makes it hard to live here in the US.

In particular, the CIA is the number one supplier of illegal drugs in the US, and maybe the whole world. In times past, that could easily be the number one reason for just about anything the CIA was doing in any place at all, here and abroad. Whatever else was suckering us into Vietnam, the reason the CIA was involved was simply to keep the Southeast Asian drug supply line open. It’s probably the number one reason our POWs were left there. Then, when opium lost it’s popularity in favor of cocaine, the CIA stayed busy south of our borders. You may recall the “Dark Alliance” series by Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury. By whatever means, the CIA killed Webb for daring to expose the truth so very clearly. Nowadays, the number one project for the CIA is supplying heroin again, but this time mostly in Europe, including Russia. Naturally, this is a major reason for our involvement in Afghanistan and the surrounding region.

Did you know our combat assets in Afpack are used to guard poppy fields? Ask a Conservative why they don’t press this issue, and it’s left to Liberals to talk about it. Not that I’m supporting either side in politics, since they are both holding forth illegitimate agendas as measured by the Covenant of Noah.

Commonly abused substances are a serious threat, but we don’t deal with them properly at all. In the West, we simply cannot imagine keeping government out of the picture. There are some folks fully aware of how our drug laws are what keeps this trade by the CIA so profitable. While the CIA and DEA seldom cooperate — the Lockerbie Bombing was the CIA killing DEA agents who had evidence of CIA drug running — they are two halves of the profit equation. That is, making drugs illegal and building a massive federal bureaucracy to enforce those laws is what raises the street price of things like cocaine and heroin. It takes extraordinary efforts to get past all the enforcement. The CIA doesn’t control the entire supply line, but takes advantage of their free pass across the border with anything they want to ship. However much they bring to the market, while seldom threatened until delivered to lower level dealers, is very high profit.

Making the whole thing so clandestine, so criminal and socially unapproved is what makes it so dangerous. Under Noah, if you knew your neighbor (typically a cousin or such) was buying and using crack, you’d keep an eye on him. You might have a hard time justifying direct intervention in the use itself, but you’d be there to make sure that nasty habit doesn’t hurt anyone else. That’s how it should work. You can’t prevent sinners from sinning, but it’s your duty to prevent their sin from splashing all over you and anyone for whom you are responsible. Some sins are inherently dangerous to all, but not this one. If a man is determined to destroy himself, it’s his choice before God. He isn’t your property. So we focus on the results of his dissolute choices, and God holds us accountable for things like cleaning up his messes. That’s the way it is. By having some bogus cultural expectation we can intrude more directly, we have the false justification for making a crime of what is really nothing more than self-abuse, because we reject God’s call to deal with the associated consequences. If his kids starve, God says we feed them. If he beats them, God says we doctor them up and censure him for abuse, but they are not our kids — “thou shalt not covet.” Our cultural malaise is what builds this hideous justification for confiscating all sorts of private property under Satan’s beloved forfeiture laws. It’s all about the money.

So the likes of the CIA grab big wads of illegitimate tax appropriations, then milk whomever they can via drug addictions, and sell arms at outrageous profits for wars they provoke, and who-knows-what-else to justify their existence and perquisites. The DEA scrapes in lots of dough from forfeitures, taking a share of what local police agencies haul in under some of the most egregious abuses. Meanwhile, all that military occupation keeps the contractors busy. And when the CIA wants to keep their hands clean for some obscene reason, there’s always the mercenaries, like Xe (AKA Blackwater), who we now know do a lot of dirty work — assassinating Bhutto, arming the terrorists, producing false-flag bombings to keep warfare alive, etc. And if you find out Xe wants a chunk of land in your neighborhood for their terrorist training camps, God help you if you dare to resist. What they won’t do they can get the CIA or some other federal or private agency to handle. What holds them all together is the money and the federal government umbrella.