OneMind

Tony Seton scores again, this time with a pointer to an important analysis of the current political situation in this country and the hope that the jig may just about be up for those in Washington who have all but destroyed our way of life. Check it out.

I am if anything slightly more optimistic than writer Ernest Partridge. I suspect this fall may be a watershed because I think we’re gong to see the convergence of several events in a compressed time space. If any three of the flashpoints Partridge identifies in his essay come to fruition at one time, America may be jolted out of its somnambulance and rebel strongly against a regime that no longer represents anyone at all.

My buddy Tony Seton, who is one of the most fair-minded guys I know (in fact, he can be infuriatingly so at times) sent along the Washington Post column (free registration required to read) written by Flemming Rose. Rose is the Danish newspaper editor whose publication of cartoons some Muslims find offensive. This column explains Rose’s reasoning. It presents a side of the story I haven’t seen mentioned much in the heat and flame of rhetoric and physical violence, even death, that has ensued.

If you’re interested in all sides of the story, you owe it to yourself to read the column and to read the rest of this post at the least.

Essentially, Rose’s explanation boils down to this. There was a rising climate of censorship and self-limitation in Denmark over fear of reprisal from Muslims for any perceived slight. This self-censorship showed itself in several worrisome ways in a short period of time. Rose, relying on his newspaper’s long-standing tradition of satire, asked 25 cartoonists to draw the Muslim Prophet Mohammed as they saw him. The rest, as they say, is recent history.

Here’s a telling quotation from his column with which I find it hard to disagree.:

“Has Jyllands-Posten insulted and disrespected Islam? It certainly didn’t intend to. But what does respect mean? When I visit a mosque, I show my respect by taking off my shoes. I follow the customs, just as I do in a church, synagogue or other holy place. But if a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with a secular democracy.”

Let me ask you something. How are you going to feel three weeks from Tuesday? Can’t say, eh? How about that slight twinge in your knee that you felt this morning? You reckon it’s going to turn into bursitis by Flag Day? Not sure, right? You figure you’ll still be able to walk five miles pain-free every morning next year at this time? No way to tell, right?

So why in the world do the morons of the sports press expect Barry Bonds — or any other athlete for that matter — to be able to answer questions about their medical futures? All of the stories coming out of Giants’ spring training today are about Bonds’ return to the team and his inability (sometimes characterized as a stubborn refusal) to predict how his thrice-sliced right knee is going to hold up this season and next. Stupid questions deserve stupid answers but by all accounts Barry didn’t offer stupid answers or even insults.

Let’s get some facts, alright? Here’s what we do know about Barry:

1. His right knee is “connected.” (That’s all he’d say about it.)
2. He still walks with a slight limp.
3. He’s 10 pounds heavier than last spring compared to the 20 pounds lighter he was hopting for.
4. He still has a fast bat through the strike zone.

As for the rest of it, we’ll just have to watch along with Bonds as the spring unfolds and see how getting back into baseball shape goes.

Meanwhile, how’s that writing finger of yours going to be next spring?

Thought so.

America Online has announced a program which would have the ultimate effect of destroying email once and for all. This company proposes to auction off access to your email In Box to big emailers and spam shops willing to pay them for the privilege. Ultimately, this would result in unpaid email being relegated to the sidings of the Internet while those who pay AOL a premium get away with In Box murder.

Not only is this a horrible idea, it’s coming from a company that has resisted the Internet’s openness and freedom from the very beginning. These guys are hypocrites and crooks of the first rank. They have to be stopped. Join MoveOn‘s petition campaign NOW. Stop this thievery before it has a chance to become the cancer that chokes off your email access.

You may not even believe this story and pictures, but they’re true. Check out how three other nations protect their water-threatened cities vs. how the richest, most powerful nation in the world does it.

Bring your antacid.

One of my good buddies, George Sidman, sent me an email the other day with this set of photos and messages. I decided it was too good to pass up sharing with you.

Here’s how the British hold back the waters from flooding London:

And the Dutch solution to protecting an entire nation that mostly rests below sea level:

The Italians are defending their city on the sea, Venice:

(Note the inset. Hinges in the giant platforms raise up to break the waves when they get too high.)

And the richest, most powerful and technologically advanced nation on earth…USA!!!!!! Go Corps of Engineers!!!!

Hey, it takes a lot of money to keep corrupt politicians in office!

I get a lot of requests from friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and readers that amount to the same question. “I just got an email from asking me to update my information and telling me my account is limited or frozen until I do. Is this real?” I figured I’d put my answer in one place so I can always refer them here. And who knows it might even help you.

There are three rules of increasing complexity to apply:

First rule: Reject the email. Trash it. For Heaven’s sake don’t open any attachments to it. There is a 99% chance it’s a phishing expedition.

Second rule: If you don’t like my first rule for some reason, the next step is to go to your browser and log into that account as you usually do. Note, do NOT click on the link in the email to log in. That link is almost certainly bogus. If you can log into your account and you don’t see any warnings or notices from the service provider (PayPal, EBay, Amazon, your bank, whoever), then you can be sure the email is garbage. Refer to the First Rule.

Third rule: If you’re really a skeptic, you can take a look at the real origin of the email you’ve received. To do this, you need to ask your mail program to show you “full headers.” Different programs do this differently. Apple’s Mail, e.g., has an option on the View menu’s Message sub-menu. Once you have full headers open scan down to the last “Received” line which will be a little above the email itself in most cases. Is that a PayPal address (or EBay or whoever)? Odds are it’s not. I just got one this morning, and the last Received line looks like this:

Received: (from web@localhost) by www-039.cen2k.com (8.12.10+Sun/8.12.8/Submit) id k1HIPWrb007996; Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:25:32 -0500 (EST)

Note three things. FIrst, “PayPal” isn’t mentioned as the sending system. Refer to the First Rule. Second, the sending location is a Web address, not an email (it has “www” in it). This means the mail was probably sent via a non-standard method. Refer to the First Rule. Finally, notice the sender’s id (k1HIPWrb007996). Spammers and phishers almost always use such obscure email IDs and almost nobody else does, so this is a big tip-off. Refer to the First Rule.

Hope you find this useful.

My favorite tool for developing desktop and standalone applications, Revolution, has just released Version 2.7 with a ton of improvements, enhancements and bug fixes. This amazing tool just keeps getting better all the time. It runs circles around every other tool I’ve ever used for this class of applications. I’ve introduced a dozen or so of my colleagues to it. Most of them adopted it and every one who did is delighted at having done so.

If you’re interested in desktop app development, especially cross-platform, you really need to check it out.

BTW, for a short time only, you can score a free copy of an amazing development tool overlay on Revolution called “Constellation” that turns the IDE into a very Smalltalk-like environment. My buddy Jerry Daniels at Daniels-Mara has developed it and it is hot-hot-hot!

I’ll blog more on Rev over the next few days as I explore some of the newer and improved features in greater depth.

Spring training starts this week as pitchers and catchers start to report. I can hardly wait for my favorite sport’s season to resume.

My San Francisco Giants are fielding an old team this year, obviously shoving all their poker chips onto this one set of deals. And one of the sort of middle-aged guys on whom they are relying the most is ace starter Jason Schmidt. The San Jose Mercury-News had a semi-analytical piece on this subject this morning.

Now, Schmidt is hardly old. But at 33, he’s no youngster either. I think the G-men are probably right to place a lot of their season on his shoulders along with those of aging and creaky superstar Barry Bonds. As that story points out:

In 2003, Schmidt went 17-5 and pitched 207 2/3 innings, and the Giants won the division. In 2004, he went 18-7 and pitched 225 innings, and the Giants were in contention until the final day. Last season, Schmidt pitched only 172 innings; he went 12-7, and the Giants went 75-87.

The 2005 season notwithstanding, the Giants are 89-40 in Schmidt’s starts with them.

The issue is not Schmidt’s prowess, it’s his health. If he can go 200-plus innings in this, a contract year, then he will probably winn 15 or more and the Giants have a decent chance of staying competitive and in contention. If he experiences more of the injuries that often plague an older body in a young-man’s sport, and if he therefore ends up throwing 150 or 170 innings, SF will be in trouble.

The note I posted a couple of days ago about the MediaMatters study of Sunday morning political shows on U.S. television and its demonstrable conservative bias churned up a bit more heat today. First, CBS News blogger Vaughn Ververs took issue with the report’s methodology. Then MediaMatters Senior Fellow Paul Waldman answered Ververs’ criticism in detail. Both pieces make for interesting reading if this is a subject you follow.

I read the report and both of these commentaries and I still think the MediaMatters study was very well done and in fact definitive. But it clearly wasn’t exhaustive and isn’t, as Waldman gladly admits, the final word on the subject. Any attempt to catalog content of any kind along ideological lines will be inherenty flawed because of the subjectivity of some of the terms involved and because of the refusal of most people who are not outright idealogues to be consistent in their overall politically philosophical positions. Thus Ververs is right in some of his specific characterizations but the overall impact and meaning of the report stands unchanged.