I just watched that crazed leftist clown Gore Vidal splutter his splatterings on the Chris Matthews show, pushing his new book. A hodgepodge of alt.conspiracy and the insane ramblings of a senile man no longer in his powers (trivial as they once were), this diatribe, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, can be summed up with the phrase, "it's all our own fault." I pretty much flew off the handle in September in reaction to those who chose that time to blame the US for bringing the attacks on herself, and it's no more palatable eight months later.

I've made excuses for Norman Mailer and his bizarre ravings concerning the Sept. 11 attacks, mainly out of a literal lifetime's worth of respect and admiration for him; if his views seem strange and radical, then it's only because his vision passes through a great number of filters of which we ordinary human beings are exempt. Not every one of his utterances will ring true, but the ones that do are profound and extraordinary, so he gets some latitude.

Gore Vidal is another story. I've never once read a single sentence or heard a single comment from him that I value in the slightest bit (although admittedly, I haven't read his biographies, which I'm told are good). In this book he reveals himself as a spiritless man's intellectual (and I use the word in it's most pejorative context, since I do not know how to properly define it), a second-rate activist chasing the clumsy coattails of Michael Moore, a man Vidal must despise for attracting so much more attention with so much less breeding, and who at least possesses some homey charisma in contrast to Vidal's petulant and hollow air of superiority. Watching him now, he bumbles and fumbles, loses coherency, and loses the argument every time.

Usenet is replete with those who know and are anxious to spread the "truth" about American deviousness and corporate inhumanity, and Vidal's voice is but one in that same hectic chorus, clamoring, proselytizing, begging to be heard, and finally returning to the vapid memepool from which it sprang. So if it offends, it does so with the same force of and no more damage than the sound that carries it.

Indeed, Vidal is more interesting as a failed intellectual than as a conveyor of ideas or information. When asked by Matthews for evidence of his assertion that the war in Afghanistan is a front for securing oil and the land needed for its pipeline, he replied, "There *will* be evidence!" Matthews was dissatisfied with that for some reason, and when pressed, Vidal admitted, "I read it in a French newspaper." (!). Hold on a moment, I need to repeat that: (!).

But isn't this always the way with modern American "intellectuals"? Whatever they read in the European press, even if it's in some trashy tabloid, they hold aloft as if had been inscribed by lightning onto stone tablets; the European press knows the truth, they claim, Vidal among them, the European press has reporters down there working on the story.

If it's not a newspaper or journal, it's some European intellectual to whom the leaches and parasites must cling, using the words of other exalted cranks in order to support their own mindless rages. They especially favor the French, because those are the most elitist, and elitists flock to one another for mutual justification, not unlike the molecules of a soap bubble, drifting up and aloft and away together. It's no wonder Europeans have such little regard for American intellectuals, that they should have such high regard for theirs. How sad for America that the days of Emerson are so long ago now and so thoroughly forgotten.

Still waiting for Operation Overlord 2002 (or how about Overlord XP?), the full-scale invasion of Asia Minor, Alexander the Great with a GPS.

How about embargoing the al-Saudi and their UAE buddies instead? I can afford to pay more for oil; if it means toppling these corrupt, parasitic regimes that feed on our wallets as if we had made them from Doritos, I would consider it money well spent. Price increases would be temporary, lasting only until the market catches up. Despite the common fallacy, we do not depend upon Middle Eastern oil. First of all, we only import around 50% of our oil; the rest we obtain domestically. (The US is among the top 5 oil-producing countries, along with Russia and China--Iran and Saudi Arabia are the remaining two, and we have not had oil from Iran since 1995.) Of our remaining imported oil, 50% of that comes from OPEC, half of which is supplied by the Persian Gulf states. While this represents a huge amount of revenue for these countries, it represents only 25% of total US oil dependency (12.5% Persian Gulf). If we were to cut it off, the Russians, the Chinese, the Mexicans, the South Americans--hell, even the Alaskans--are more than ready to make up the difference.

When Iraq made the risible suggestion that other Middle Eastern states embargo their oil, a Kuwaiti delegate demurred, saying it defeated the point: "How can we support our Palestinian brothers," he said, "if we do not have revenues?" Exactly. An embargo by (or against) OPEC oil, would shift market share to other countries--it would not eliminate the market. Furthermore, and precisely to the point, the Palestinian terrorists and their fanatical "brothers" crouching in the caves and across the deserts of Asia Minor and busily strapping bombs to their bodies and studying the blueprints of nuclear power stations would no longer receive the bulk of their financial support. They might even have to go get jobs or something.

If President Bush and the US wants to curtail the finances of terrorists, they need look no further than curtailing the shipments of oil from these countries. Closing bank accounts are one thing--this money already exists, but will eventually run out. Stopping the pipeline of money altogether, is something altogether different.

In a rare moment of candor, Dr. Ubermensche Jones, mad scientist, cunning criminal, and general apologist for evil, has conceded that his second most widely deployed memetool, Islam, has proven a general failure for its buyers. Developed in imitation of and in order to compete with other social control devices, such as Christianity, Buddhism, and Judaism, Islam was intended to provide The Prince with a means of population management that did not rely upon the considerably more expensive (and ultimately impractical) methods of simple force, without the intrusive and costly intellectual property disputes and ultimate management and ownership issues that typically plague adopters of its more conventional and older cousins. But somewhere in its design, Islam had a fatal flaw which has led its adopters down what some have been calling a blind alley, and which others describe as nothing short of absolute disaster. One Prince after another has been forced to deal with revolution and coup d'tat attempts by the very groups Islam was intended to control, not to mention unwelcome spectacles like the Sept. 11 attacks and repeated suicide bombings in Israel.

Given Dr. Jones' not inconsiderable reputation for carefully orchestrated acts of villainy, there are some who have been loudly questioning whether Islam is not in fact performing exactly to his original specifications. Their supposition is that an ulterior motive remains to be revealed, and that nothing short of wholesale slaughter and the abandonment of every Islam-adopting Prince's Original Enterprise could possibly prevent it now. When asked by reporters about these suspicions, Dr. Jones offered only the following cryptic comment: "Islam was never packaged with any guarantees. Those who chose to adopt and implement it over the more proven strategies did so at their own risk. They knew the chance they took, the outcome is theirs alone to bear."

The genesis for this idea (or at least my familiarization with it) comes from Adam Curry of all people. He's calling it "the Last Mile" in deference to the distance between the final internet server and your own computer and how it represents the real bottleneck for broadband--whatever and anyway, the gist is this: set up a server to stand in front of your desktop that does all your internet downloading asynchronously: email, usenet, web cache--and can provide the illusion of a much faster internet connection. (In fact this strategy could even obviate some of the need for broadband for many users.)

The notion of a separate server might seem excessive to most casual internet users, but considering this server doesn't need to have much power or capacity, and also considering most people do total upgrades of their equipment every two years or so, I think most even casual users have an old computer lying around by now.

This server can also run firewall and antivirus software to stand as the sole point of connection to the Outside. Some refinements might be: a learning mechanism to determine which web sites you visit every day to inform the web cache proxy what to download (I had this desire after I first encountered quickbrowse); one click saving and archiving of any mutable sources of interest like articles and weblogs (could even do smart extractions into whatever file format one prefers); alerts for updated content on a watchlist or frequently revisited URLs; a p2p agent for songs or other media you might otherwise check some source every day for (like the ever elusive Futurama episode 2ACV19 which never seems to be posted to usenet), or which will daily acquire parts to messages posted over long periods of time (like the new star wars movie).

In an effort to counter growing criticism of Muslim technology and of the Islamic Framework in general, a large number of contractors and vendors will meet today in Madrid in order to ratify a PR strategy and, perhaps more significantly, develop a set of general "Principal Guidelines" for all future development. What these guidelines will entail, reports the trade journal Mohammed Tech, is nothing short of a rules revolution for Muslim systems management and for all future implementation and augmentation efforts.

"It's not the many corrective efforts now underway that we worry about," said David Duncan McClean, the conference's organizer and spokesperson. "It's the new toolsets currently in development and the rogue implementation groups who we fear will alter the general Framework for centuries to come. We acknowledge that this is a real problem for our industry, and we want it to be known that we are taking steps to correct it."

Radical Muslim components like the much decried Wahabbi tool-suite have taken much of the blame for Islam's tendency toward unrest and terrorism in recent decades. These products, often developed and deployed outside of the purview of the Islamic Management Council (IMC) and the Memetools Oversight Organization (MOO), are said to be leading Islam down an "irreconcilable path", in the words of Jacob De'Morely, an architect for an off-the-record design firm.

"The question of incompatible and non-conforming third-party tools will be addressed," insists McClean. "We believe we have a strategy to correct these problems; all that's left is to ratify it."

But many Islam adopters claim any measures taken by the IMC will not be sufficient to curb the growing replication errors they've encountered in recent years, most notably in Middle Eastern and Arab countries. "Component technologies sold on the black market through rogue vendors are causing immeasurable problems for the entire Framework," complains an unnamed spokesperson for an unnamed management group. "Until add-on components like Wahabbi are completely removed from the marketplace, Islam will continue to see problems as a whole, both in global reputation and in its fundamental direction. This conference is a step in the right direction, but we need leaps now, not just steps."

Islam's architect, mad scientist and ruler of the Southern Hemisphere, Dr. Ubermensche Jones agrees with this assessment. Defending the Islamic Framework, he has criticized third-party component and tool developers for not following the primary guidelines laid out in Islam's manual, the Koran. "It is time they take responsibility for the defects inherent in their add-on products," Dr. Jones told an industry reporter. "The Framework itself is sound." Dr. Jones is not expected to attend the conference.

Islam has been under attack recently both by adopters and by industry analysts claiming the memetool suffers from a host of hidden problems, including an inflated Thanatos Quotient which has led end-users to commit unspeakable atrocities. Some analysts have recommended radical changes to the Framework, including the removal of the controversial Jihad tenets, which some have argued sponsors unpredictable and self-destructive behavior. "Jihad was included in the Framework under the sound and proven principles of war-rallying," Dr. Jones has stated in defense of the component. "It is an innovation, not a defect. If you know of a faster or more efficient means of assembling a fanatical army, I'd like to hear it."

"An army is one thing," counters De'Morely, "but fractional groups operating without the control or political authorization of the Prince is something very different." Islam's degree of decentralized activity has grown unmanageable for some firms, and they largely blame the Jihad tenets, which rely upon a centralized, monolithic control structure. "This design is simply incompatible with the modern world," said De'Morely.

The Madrid conference is expected to meet for three days.

This is a test of blogBuddy, a desktop weblog update tool. It's exactly the kind of app I like: simple and direct. Hopefully it will work.

I just watched Vanilla Sky, and it was entirely better than I had been led to expect. It's interesting that Tom Foose would sign on to another film so concerned with masks and identity (after Eyes Wide Shut)--maybe things aren't so rosy (or indeed so bland) in there behind the Handsome Man face after all. I do not like Tom Cruise from what I've seen of his real person, his implacable arrogance and self-importance; but I think he's a good movie-star, in the domain of needing to have just a few people as "movie-stars" (of which I remain unconvinced).

In EWS, Foose plays a doctor who descends into depravity and darkness when his perfect world shows a fracture. While this may seem an extreme reaction to spilled milk, I was convinced by both the script and the portrayal: for some, a fracture can be worse than a break, for it is the fear of losing that rules them more than any sense of loss. Loss can be liberating (cf The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking). Similarly, Vanilla Sky is about a hereditarliy rich guy who suffers a full break, and a terrible one, and about the cascading decline that follows. And there is something of a comment on this loss vs losing argument at the end, but I won't spoil it for you. Incidentally, there are about 2 minutes within the first four of this film (empty Manhattan) that I believe I could loop and watch for hours. In fact, I believe I shall.

Cameron Crow, by the way, continues to score high marks with me for his love of Red House Painters. Anybody who loves Red House Painters.

Those swine at Fox have cancelled Futurama, and while I've never heard of such efforts succeeding, one must at least try, so go sign a petition. The fact of the show's demise after four seasons would probably be more palatable if it seemed Fox had honestly given Futurama a chance, but it was routinely placed in roving, terrible time slots without any lead-in and a low ad budget. Things would have been much different if the show had followed The Simpsons instead of nothing (it was normally placed after local broadcasts), but for some reason the studio gave that slot to that crappy snore-fest King of the Hill (and *that* show is still alive somehow). Fox will air the rest of Futurama's fourth production next season (and call it a fifth season), but they will be making no more new ones. Sigh.

The courts in Philadelphia have declared unconstitutional an initiative by the local government to require libraries to employ internet filtering software on their public terminals. In agreement with the libraries themselves, the courts ruled that this is a violation of free speech, and that furthermore, since the software designed to perform this filtering is anything but efficient at doing so, it has the side-effect of preventing people with a genuine need for information, for instance those wanting a cure to herpes, from gaining access to it. (Never mind all the books they sometimes keep in those libraries.)

The ACLU, in defending the invented rights of the LCD, has made the additional argument that prohibiting access to "the full internet" at public places like libraries is unfair to some people, since others, presumably those with a telephone line and $20 a month to spend, do have that access. It would be discrimination against the poor, who have just as much right to porn as the next guy (the one with the job).

None of this has dissuaded the US Congress from returning to their attempts to make such rules for the entire nation, applying them to all public schools and libraries. Their argument, as with most things relating to censorship, is that children must be protected from pornographic and other debased images and language. Which is a nice purpose, but it's putting the cart before the horse by attempting to pass laws that are unfeasible and impracticable. (See: Fritz Hollings.)

The state of the internet at the moment doesn't lend itself well to content filtration (just ask my spam filters). What lawmakers should really be striving toward is a standardized categorization system for internet (or at least http delivered) content. Even adopting the MPAA guidelines for movie labels would be sufficient. After allowing some time for compliance, such a labeling system could be enforceable by law for all servers under the jurisdiction of the US government (read: most of them), and would pose a relatively simple task for those forced to comply. The addition of a META tag into all html documents, for instance , and a similar label for other media formats, would effectively label the majority of what the censors object to, and would trivialize the problem of filtering it.

The difficulty Congress has with understanding technology, and their apparent unwillingness to listen to those who have such understanding, is creating a rift between those who want the impossible and those charged with providing it. Legislators should be very careful before passing laws that are impossible to follow, since ultimately it can only undermine their own authority.