Month: August 2010

For some reason, it’s all memories of September lately. Start of a new year, start of a new football season, start of a new term. Cool at night, and a new jacket to wear with it – not to mention a replacement pair of jeans, at least one or two new shirts of some sort, and in all likelihood a new pair of kicks to help cope with the endless hills and stairs of high school and college and grad school. (Reebok Phase 1 throughout high school, a Nike deal thereafter until I left Vandy.) A fresh look, a fresh start. Nice thing to be able to count on every year.

It occurs to me that you don’t often get a reset point in adulthood. Change of jobs, maybe, or when you marry or have another kid, or if you move house or to a new town. But for the most part, there’s not a time when you get a regular chance to make a fresh start of things.

The other thing that strikes me lately is that I went from a high school where everything was a half-hour drive away (or worse) to a college where everything was inside a fenced perimeter – and then a grad school where everything you’d want or need was within walking distance. Those were the years that really transformed me into a person who didn’t want to need a car for anything. And now, as we shiver through another San Francisco summer, I feel the need for a sharp new set of clothes and a reliable pair of kicks to step out under the cloudy gray autumnal sky.

Now I just need to shop through my own closet and schedule a day trip on Saturday…

“A state’s interest in an enactment must of course be secular in nature. The state does not have an interest in enforcing private moral or religious beliefs without an accompanying secular purpose. See Lawrence v Texas, 539 US 558, 571 (2003); see also Everson v Board of Education of Ewing Township, 330 US 1, 15 (1947)…”

and

“In the absence of a rational basis, what remains of proponents’ case is an inference, amply supported by evidence in the record, that Proposition 8 was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples. FF 78-80. Whether that belief is based on moral disapproval of homosexuality, animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate…”

The long-awaited iPhone 4 jailbreak is finally here. In fact, it can be done by just visiting a website and clicking a link! HOORAY WE’RE ALL FREEEEEEEEEEE–

Step back from the Amazing Freedom Sauce and think about this:

This is your OS being rewritten with the click of a webpage link.

This is, hands down, the single biggest security hole in the history of Apple products. This is a blockbuster vulnerability, as bad or worse than anything in recent years for Windows – just click one link, and damn near any code can be executed on your phone, as root – you can, in every meaningful sense of the word, get pwned.

I have absolutely no doubt that iOS 4.1 will hold now until this gets repaired – 4.1 beta 3 just dropped and probably does something to fix this. One can only hope, anyway. The fact that this is being pitched as a heaven-sent means of liberating your phone, rather than the most embarrassing flaw in a shipping Apple product of the Steve II era, speaks volumes about how distorted are the sensibilities of the tech press. Gizmodo, for instance, was hailing the jailbreak two days before decrying the vulnerability, having apparently never considered that jailbreak-by-web-site might represent a serious breach of security.

The problem is, as soon as Apple fixes this bug, it’s probably going to break a lot of newly-jailbroken iPhones. And there will be people screaming about how Apple is out to screw jailbreakers and decrying the evils of the beast of Cupertino, who sincerely believe that trying to fix the OS equivalent of Pearl Harbor is less important than making sure that Billy L33t H4xx0r can still run Cydia on his iPhone, and that Apple is wrong to fix the former at the expense of the latter. These people should kill themselves at the first opportunity, for the sake of the human race. We have enough trouble with teatards without keeping script kiddies in the gene pool.

Can we stop being shocked that Target and Best Buy threw the interests of their LGBT customers under the bus? Yes, the candidate and PAC in question are terrible on matters of equality, but they are all for tax cuts for business. And it should come as no shock when a big corporation comes to the conclusion that making more money trumps their “values”. Target is going on about their previous endorsements from HRC and the like, and that’s real sweet, but the fact that they’re willing to compromise that because of “pro-business” positions – well, it’s maddening, but it shouldn’t come as a shock.

(Who the hell is still getting consumer electronics from Best Buy?)

In the bigger picture, this is why you have to be scared about all this Teabagger bullshit (yes, I’m going to use that epithet, because fuck those redneck mental defectives). There are far too many people out there who will at least be uncomfortable with (if not outright deplore) the excesses of the movement, but they’ll go along with it because it’s on their side. And there are people who may think that Sarah Palin is a clown, or that holding hearings on whether the 14th Amendment should actually apply is abysmally stupid, or get embarrassed that elected officials endorse questioning whether Barack Obama is in fact a secret Muslim and not an American citizen at all – but you know what? They’ll still pull the GOP lever, because that’s their side.

I’m not interested in the whole false-equivalence, either. People will scream “MoveOn!” and “Michael Moore” and “International ANSWER” – but you know what? None of those entities ever had a prominent role in the Democratic party, none of them were elected officials, and certainly no Democratic leaders felt compelled to genuflect before them and rush to embrace their flakiness. Meanwhile, the Senate’s top Republicans wants to address the notion that people born in the United States shouldn’t automatically be citizens – and hold Congressional hearings on the topic. The last time the Democrats went this far off the baseline was 1972 – and establishment Washington and its kept catamites in the Beltway media are still acting as if George McGovern and his boosters are running the day-to-day operations of every politician left of Joe Lieberman. All you have to know is that individual mandates for health insurance were part of the Republican health care position in 1994, and that cap-and-trade was a Republican answer to greenhouse gasses in 2008, to know that the Democrats are if anything running to the right to try to make something happen.

So yeah. At this point, we are at the mercy of whether non-insane Republicans are willing to stand up and say “this isn’t cool.” I’m not even talking about embracing the Obama agenda – I’m just talking about simple stuff, like making it abundantly clear that Obama is an American citizen and the legitimate President, that the first sentence in the 14th Amendment is clear and unambiguous and not up for debate, that there are no such things as “death panels,” that the election wasn’t stolen by ACORN, that there is no pending government plot to take everyone’s guns and open concentration camps. I would like to see prominent conservatives come out in public and loudly proclaim, in short, that they don’t want to base our political discourse on derangement and abject stupidity.

I’m not going to hold my breath.