American Terrorists
Keith Olbermann on terrorism and the modern Republican Party:
…The dictionary definition of the word ‘terrorize’ is simple and not open to misinterpretation: “To fill or overpower with terror; terrify; coerce by intimidation or fear.” Note please that the words ‘violence’ and ‘death’ are missing from that definition. For the key to terrorism is not the act-but the fear of the act. That is why bin Laden and his deputies and his imitators are forever putting together videotape statements and releasing virtual infomercials with dire threats and heart-stopping warnings. But why is the Republican Party imitating them? Bin Laden puts out what amounts to a commercial of fear; the Republicans put out what is unmistakable as a commercial of fear….
and more:
…This administration has derived benefit and power from terrorizing the very people it claims to be protecting from terror. It may be the oldest trick in the political book: scare people into believing they are in danger and only you can save them. Lyndon Johnson used it to bury Barry Goldwater. Joe McCarthy leaped from obscurity on its back. And now the legacy has come to President George W. Bush….
and more:
…But to forgive you for terrorizing us, we would have to believe that you somehow competent in keeping others from terrorizing us. Yet last week, construction workers repairing a subway line in New York City were cleaning out an abandoned manhole on the edge of the WTC site, when they stumbled on the horrific and impossible: human remains from 9/11. Bones and fragments, eighty of them. Some as much as a foot long. The victims had been lying literally in the gutter for five years and five weeks. The families and friends of each of the 2,749 dead, who had been grimly told in May 2002, that there were no more remains to be found, were struck anew as if the terrorism of that day had just happened all over again.
And over this weekend, they have found still more remains. And now this week will be spent looking in places that should have already been looked at a thousand times, five years ago.
For all the victims in New York, Mr. Bush, the living and the dead, it is a touch of 9/11 all over again. And the mayor of this city, who called off this search four and a half years ago is a Republican. The governor, with whom he conferred, is a Republican. The House of Representatives, Republican. The Senate, Republican. The President, Republican. And yet you can claim that you and you alone can protect us from terrorism?
You can’t even recover our dead from the battlefield. The battlefield in an American city. When we’ve given you five years and unlimited funds to do so….
Here’s the video, long at 10 minutes, but worth every second:
Posted by Jonathan at 04:46 PM, 25 October 2006 | Comments (2)
Spam kills
Spam kills small websites. Especially, small sites that have a modicum of user feedback. Because the volume of user feedback on my site was small, and I’ve had a web presence for years, my site was (and is) particularly attractive to spammers.
They inundated my forum, so I closed it down. They spammed the comment area on my blog, so I have to approve any comments. But I still get so many spammed comments that the real ones sometimes get deleted along with the spam. Since I’ve started my site, I always allowed any email that is sent to my domain to reach my mailbox. Because it costs nothing for a spammer to send emails, even to bogus addresses, I would get hundreds of spam emails to addresses like grreks@macphoenix.com or qpxb@macphoenix.com. Still, the filters in my email reader were good enough to reduce the amount of spam in my inbox to the dozens per day, which I could easily delete.
Recently, however, some enterprising spammer decided to put macphoenix.com as the reply-to in his latest spew. He forged the headers, illegal in America but hardly uncommon, to make it look as though these emails were being sent from my domain. Again, they were all random “users,” like my good friends hertz@macphoenix.com and jfres@macphoenix.com. When a good portion of the spam was returned, because the addresses were false, or the domain had anti-spam measures put in place, it would end up in my inbox. Last Saturday, I had 2000 emails. I had to sort through them, for the needle in the haystack, and deleted the rest. On Monday I had 3000.
I had to stop accepting every email to my domain. For five years, I’ve accepted anything, in case someone misspells my name, which happens constantly. On the fly, I’ve been able to sign up for mailings on dubious sites, because I could always route the made up name into a spam filter. It made tracking those that sold my email address easy, since I know that bmgjunk@macphoenix.com was the name I gave to BMG. But no more. Now, I’d have to sign into my sites control panel, make up a new email address, new password, then tell my email reader to check that account. Eventually, I’d have dozens of accounts, for the sole purpose of making sure my increasing worthless name doesn’t get shared with spamming lists, when my whole domain has been poisoned.
Because of the volume of spam that seeming has been sent by me, my IP has been blocked by certain hosts, so I can no longer grab the RSS feeds for the weather or the Word of the Day. So spam has crippled my site, my email, and my productivity. And I’m just a small unregarded nobody out on the unfashionable end of the western arm of the Internets.
Posted by Jonathan at 01:28 PM, 11 October 2006 | Comments (2)
