more on this fake Chistmas controversy

Liberals like Christmas too, at least most of us

The problem isn’t that people celebrate Christmas, actually, most liberals do to. What many people, including me, object to is that Christians demand that Christmas be celebrated and that all other holidays are excluded. It isn’t that liberals hate Christmas, its that Christians hate Chanukah and Kwanza and Eastern Orthodox Christmas and basically anything that they don’t celebrate. You wanna sing Christmas songs in school, excellent. Whoop de doo, just please don’t force the non-Christian children to sing about how great Christ was. There are about a zillion non-religious Christmas songs. How about singing them instead? How about tossing in “Dredyl, Dredyl, Dredyl” while you are at and maybe just some nice winter songs? What scares me is that the Christian right isn’t just demanding that they be allowed to celebrate their holiday in a government sponsored setting against all measures of Church/State issues that our country was founded upon. It is that the right considers anything that isn’t Christian to be evil and demands that their children aren’t exposed to it. Remember that flap about the southern university giving the Koran as reading in their comparative religion class?

This country was founded upon the belief that all people should be allowed to worship as they please without government intervention or backlash. You wanna dance with snakes or play loud gospel music in your church, go for it. More power to you. Just don’t force me to do it if I don’t want to. It is in the freaking bible: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” Right now, the religious right is doing a lot unto me that I don’t think they’d be happy me doing onto them.

The right war on the left and the ACLU

Flush with a stolen victory and a deeply divided America, the right has declared war on the left and specifically on the ACLU and non-Christians
I’m not sure if the right is feeling galvanized and emboldened after the election, or if they are trying shore up support because they are feeling vulnerable. My guess is the former. It seems that Christian Conservatives are using the Christmas season to wage a war on non-Christian liberals and the ACLU. Why they are choosing to go after the ACLU is beyond me since they have defended Christians right to their religion pretty often too.

This attack is too coordinated for it to be coming from a single high ranking member of the religious right. Time and time again, the White House has pushed the more extreme planks of its agenda using Christian Conservative mouthpieces and an emasculated press which does no reporting of its own. Press releases are being issued by churches and Christians claiming that the ACLU is threatening to sue them over all sorts of nonsense things. A teacher in San Francisco tried to teach his social studies class that America is a Christian nation and they Christianity is the one true religion. The result, he was fired. He is suing the school claiming that he was just teaching the constitution. Of course he issued a press release that he was fired by a “liberal” school board because he was religious. The right-wing-nut talk show hosts picked up on it and now they are spinning it. There are about a million stories like this floating around this year.

I think that the rest of us can’t let this go by, it is unfortunate that there isn’t some sort of coordination across liberal groups, it makes it very difficult for concerted action, which is exactly how the right continually trashes us. Maybe it is time for us to get more organized to counter this liberal-bashing. Maybe it is time for us to start bashing the right more publicly. Maybe it is time for a showdown.

Randi Rhodes has been covering this in excellent detail on her show for the last couple weeks.

Here’s some examples I’ve found in disperate parts of the web, but with eeriely similar ideas and wording.
A Letter to the editor of the Southern Illinois University student paper
A poll conducted by a Conservative media watchdog group (lots more creepily evil articles here)
Some complete asshole’s blog
Another sheep brainwashed by right wing blog
A bunch of idiots protest the ACLU for something that hasn’t happened
Another moron’s blog (this site gives me some kind of Timothy McVeigh vibe, I’m not sure why)
A scary, 38 year old single man defends family values and attacks liberals for hating christmas

Now, how can YOU help?
Join the ACLU if you aren’t a member! If you hear someone on a radio show or around you attacking the ACLU or liberals, point them to the website and challenge them to find evidence of any of the right wing’s claims that the ACLU hates Christmas. Show them all the many times that ACLU has defended people’s ability to worship as they please (including Christians). Most importantly, make sure your voice is heard! The right and religious zealots rely on the fact that they can drown us out, show them that they are wrong!

Remember:
First they came for the socialists,
and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

–Pastor Martin Niemoller, Nazi Germany, circa 1945.

Seriously, America, you are scaring me

A recent poll found that 44% of Americans were in favor of restricting the civil liberties of Muslims

Salon.com had an article about the poll. I’m not 100% sure if I trust that Cornell students polling 715 people are accurately representing the feelings of the entire American populace, but even if that number is truly closer to 10%, that is still way too many. There is an old saw about people who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. This is so well known a statement as to approach cliche, but it seems to me that people can’t be so stupid as to not remember the Japanese internment camps during world war II or the McCarthy hearings not long after. I wonder what people would have thought if after the Oklahoma City bombings, 44% of Americans supported curtailing the rights of American Christians?

Another interesting tidbit from the Salon.com article: “Researchers also found that respondents who paid more attention to television news were more likely to fear terrorist attacks and support limiting the rights of Muslim Americans.” If this isn’t a stinging indictment of the conservative bias of mainstream American media then I don’t know what would be.

The Invisible

Portland’s next big thing?

My band, transPacific, played a gig with Invisible from Portland, OR last week and I was pretty impressed. They have an excellent self produced set of videos that their songs are synchronized to. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill sync either, this is beat-break-beat kind of sync. They have a cute trick to making that work that I won’t give away, but lets just say that it is very effective. Of course, that wouldn’t be enough to woo me to any band if it wasn’t for the fact that their music is very good as well. They’ll be touring next year and I would highly recommend anyone go check them out who is into the whole post-rock/shoegazer kind of thing.

A not very radical proposal

I’ve got an easy idea to build troop morale in Iraq.

George Bush is going on vacation again. I can understand, since it takes so much energy to mismanage a country and cheat an electorate. Meanwhile, our troops overseas are having their tours of duty extended and being sent back repeatedly with only a few weeks or months break between fighting for their lives without proper equipment. Their leader, Donald Rumsfeld nearly mocked them to their faces as one soldier expressed the honest wish of having enough equipment so that he could make it home safe. The White House continues to pump old Rummy and keep him around since his leadership has obviously been so successful.

So, George, here’s a little tip from someone who has seen leaders try to boost morale many, many times. How about promising not to take a vacation until you’ve actually been working as long as the longest tour of duty of a soldier in Iraq? Better yet, how about not taking a vacation until the war in Iraq is over? It’s not like you work on an oil derrick, you aren’t living a very hard life, maybe you should try actually working for the people who hired you for a change?

Philips GoGear Camcorder Review

I got this device which I mentioned previously on this blog for Chanukah, here is my review

My wife got the many, many hints I dropped about the Philips GoGear Key019 Camcorder and got my one for Chanukah. She rules. Here is my review.

the camcorderThis is a pretty cool device as long as you know exactly why you are getting it. This is not a digital camera replacement, nor is it a video camera replacement. If you have a video or camera equipped cell phone, you may not need it. This is a perfect tweener device. Extremely small and portable it is made to be carried around and take those shapshots or quickie videos (WITH SOUND!) that you always mean to take but never have your camera or video camera around for. It makes it perfect for me (see earlier post). It’s small, it feels well made and solid. It is simple to use.

CAMERA MODE

Here are some sample snapshots I took under various conditions. These are all sampled down to fit decently. The camera claims to take 2 mega-pixel images, I think that it is probably more like 1 mega-pixel interpolated, but I’m not sure. I took some shots on a cloudy day and on a sunny day.

Cloudy day pictures:

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Sunny Day pictures:

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Here was a picture I tried to take in a mirror of the camera this was a moderately lit room, but you can see that the camera doesn’t have a macro setting

pict0017.jpgHere is my wife by lamp light (60 watt)

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As you can see, you need some pretty bright light to take a decent photo. This isn’t too unexpected given that the lens is TINY. The camera works well in well lit situations: sunny days, well-lit rooms, etc… In lower light it gets pretty hard to take a sharp photo of any object. I don’t expect a flash in this form factor and I don’t expect these low light situations to work that great either so that isn’t a major negative in my book.

LITTLE ASIDE

I do have a few specific complaints. One is that the unit doesn’t come with a carrying case. Given that the lens is exposed this is a serious flaw. You don’t want to carry this in your pocket with your keys unless you’ve got something covering the lens. My second complaint is that while it has a microphone and can record audio, there is no audio-only record mode. Given that this is also an MP3 player, that doesn’t make any sense to me. If there is a second generation of this device I would expect that to be rectified.

Now that my complaints are out of the way, there are some things I really like about it. It is small, not as small I thought it would be, but very small, easily carried with you wherever you go. It has a lithium ion battery so that you don’t have to worry about fully discharging it. Additionally, it comes with an extra external battery pack that uses AA batteries, so that if you run out of battery but have some extra memory to use, you can pick up some AAs and keep going before you head back to your computer. The interface is simple and surprisingly featured given its diminutive form factor. There are two modes, recording and playing. When the remote is plugged into the jack, you are in playback mode. Here you can listen to your MP3s and view recorded pictures and videos in its tiny video screen. You can delete individual shots or videos to free up memory if you don’t like them. Without the remote you are in record mode. In record mode if you switch to the MP3 switch you turn the device off, but the other switches are for letting you take a photo or video. Another plus is that while the Camera doesn’t acknowledge OSX as an operating system, I plugged it into my mac and iPhoto recognized the device and grabbed the photos no problem. It’s on the side of my laptop charging as I type. The videos are encoded as Windows-only MPEG4 (Windows Media ASF format) which is a bit of bummer rather than using quicktime which would make the device completely OSX compatible.

MP3 MODE

this keyring line that philips make are mostly MP3 players so it isn’t too surprising that this version has an MP3 player too, but I think it isn’t really that useful given that there is only 128 MB to share between your video, photos and MP3s. I’ve already got two MP3 players so I’m not gonna use this for that. Sorry…

VIDEO MODE

The device writes out its files as MPEG-4 ASF windows files which means that if you want to do anything with your files except play them in Windows Media player, you’ll need to download some shareware converters.

Below is a short clip of two shots I recorded of the same bridge, one on a cloudy day and one on a sunny day. They are short because I decided to have them at the highest resolution I could which meant a big file which meant that I had to keep it short. These were converted from ASF to AVI with a shareware tool and then edited in Premiere Pro 1.5 and exported to a Quicktime MOV with the lowest compression I felt ok with. It won’t give you the exact idea of the quality, but it is pretty close. The titles were obviously added later.

The camcorder works pretty well and I’m actually happy with the video quality given the enormous compression going on. The audio quality isn’t so hot, but the microphone is a tiny dot on the front on the device and I’m sure that they sacrificed the audio quality to get the file sizes down.

CONCLUSIONS

At this price point and feature set this is a device that is not long for this world. From above, high quality digital cameras are getting cheaper and smaller and most of them take some kind of movies now too. From below, cell phones are increasingly incorporating cameras and video recording and they’ve had MP3 playback for a while. But, if you want a tiny device that you can always carry with you to document this weirdness of the world and you don’t want to wait for the technology curve to hit your ideal device this is a pretty awesome little thingy. There are some good user reviews on Amazon now.

George Bush doesn’t care about you

Just heard about yet another website soliciting donations to equip our troops in Iraq. Now how bullshit is it that tax paying citizens need to directly buy equipment for an unjust war to protect our soldiers while Haliburton is taking in record profits?

Cheers to that soldier who stood up to Donald Rumsfeld in public forum, even if he was prompted by a reporter looking for a good story. It took serious guts and I’m betting that he’s paying for it. The US Government is treating the military like crap. It is so obvious that we are ruled by a bunch of chicken hawks who have no idea what being in a war is all about. If they did, we wouldn’t be in Iraq now. Given that we are in Iraq, the fact that a private citizen has raised $200,000 to supply snipers with Binoculars and Body Armor is great, but also insane. Why the fuck are we sending snipers into Iraq without binoculars and body armor in the first place? The reason is that George Bush doesn’t care about our troops. Our troops which are made up large numbers of minorities and urban poor. George Bush doesn’t care about poor people. If George Bush did care about poor people, he’d be spending more money on education instead of cutting it, he’d be spending more on non-religious charitable organizations, and he certainly wouldn’t be cutting taxes on the people who make the most money. All this time, Haliburton and the myriad of other private companies who are doing most of the support work for our troops INCLUDING PROCUREMENT are making tons of money. These are the people George Bush cares about. Hell, most of these CEOs are personal buddies of his who donated large sums to his campaign.

It’s time the remaining Democrats get off their asses and start making this stuff public. Enough appeasement of the right. We’re in a constitutional crisis here.

Milwaukee’s finest!

A leetle bit about Couch Flambeau

So, I was home for thanksgiving talking to my sister and something she said reminded me of this great band I used to listen to called Couch Flambeau. They were a great punk band in the funny punk vein like The Dead Milkmen. She had two of their albums. I spent a long time trying to convince her to loan me the albums so I could make CDs of them since I didn’t have my own copies. She didn’t want to let their rare gems out her mitts and finally I gave up. I knew that if I had to wait for her to make CDs of them, it would be another 15 years before I heard them again. When I got back to the hotel, on a whim, I went to CouchFlambeau.com, fully expecting a dead link. What did I find? Not only are they still together and doing shows, but they just re-mastered their Vinyl for CD! As a bonus, their CDs were available through CDBaby which is my favorite independent music outlet on the net. I immediately ordered the discs and I’m happy to report that even after many, many years they are still awesome. The collection, “I Did a Power Slide in the Taco Stand” is worth the $13 for the song “We’ll go through the windshield together” alone!

Posted: Fri – December 10, 2004 at 06:45 PM