Unfortunately, this isn’t the easiest question to answer. There are those out there who would naively declare that it’s never OK to kill someone are just showing the gross inexperience in thinking in an ethically constructive way. These people are also most likely anti-Semites. The article, This Says It All by Justin Raimondo (Antiwar.com), gets us started.

“Vice President Joe “Loose Cannon” Biden, […] when asked about the attack on the flotilla, said: “So what’s the big deal here?” […] At the time he said it, the odds... [More]”

Why Iran? Why, why, why are we hammering on Iran again? Which countries have they attacked? Which countries have they threatened? And don’t say Israel, because that little tidbit is a mistranslation bordering on a lie. The NIE has, for the second time in a decade, come out and conclusively said that Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons. This despite the fact that doing this is pretty much career suicide for all involved in the report. Iran just sealed a deal to deposit about half of its already... [More]

From the article This column will change your life by Oliver Burkeman (The Guardian):

“[…] when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won’t think it’s rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who’s assuming you might decline. If you’re a Guesser, you’ll hear it as an expectation. This is a spectrum,... [More]”

After a relatively long dry spell of more toned-down blog entries, Krugman finally sinks his teeth into his opponents again, while at the same time pointing out an interesting concept, the anti–straw-man.

“[T]he construction of anti–straw-men: […] attributing to your intellectual opponents sophisticated, reasonable positions they do not in fact hold, ignoring the nonsense they actually espouse. […] both the OECD and Rajan are calling not just for fiscal austerity but for raising interest... [More]”

The article, My Brother Faces a Lifetime of Solitary Confinement on a Spurious Terror Conviction by Mariam Abu-Ali (AlterNet), tells of a young student’s life in an American super-max prison in Colorado. He spent two years in a Saudi Prison, a stay during which a confession was extracted using torture. His stay in the U.S. is hardly better, where he’s

“[…] under 23-hour lockdown, in a 7x12 cell. He has one recreational hour in which he must get strip-searched if he wishes to leave his cell. He gets one unscheduled... [More]”

Item the First: Search Bug

For the last couple of months, it has been impossible to search earthli in any of the applications (news, albums, recipes). This bug has been fixed as of today and searching should work as expected.

Item the Second: Styling of Citations

The default theme on earthli no longer uses a dark red color to indicate that a particular piece of text is a citation. Long time readers have doubtless become quite accustomed to picking out citations by color, and it is hoped that... [More]

I got this question recently in a mail:

“From my quick understanding I don’t see why it’s a big deal to ask the immigration status of someone that has potentially broken the law?”

The main reason that it would be a big deal[1] is that it violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. (Wikipedia)

Here’s the text of amendment:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no... [More]”

Despite the worst economy since the Great Depression and the clear failure of all of the policy tenets of the last three decades, economics and financial reporting has continued largely unchanged. It does not provide context or information that would help people understand why their wages are low, why their houses are underwater (worth less than they still have to pay for them) or why they can’t find jobs. Instead, it continues to generate vast amounts of propaganda designed to continue... [More]

In an effort to continue improving my German, I read the book mentioned in the title, which is a rollicking guide to the finicky nuance of the German language. A few years back, I read Eat, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, which effects a similar service for the English language. Another absolutely wonderful essay on the issue of usage and grammar is Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the wars over usage by David Foster Wallace (a few citations of which are documented on earthli News),... [More]

This was found as a comment on a Photo Essay of Vietnam (Big Picture Blog), which included photos from the war 35 years ago. It was one of the few thoughtful comments on a page full of jingoist fools defending the notion of America’s essential goodness and the necessity of war in the face of all historical fact.

Season 14, episodes 5 (#200 overall) and 6 (#201 overall) have been pulled by Comedy Central because of vieled death threats made by proprietors of a purportedly Islamic web site. The site—called RevolutionMuslim.com[1]—supposedly peddles Osama bin Laden support and celebrates 9–11. It’s hard to tell because they’re down right now and showing no signs of coming back up anytime soon. The proprietors of the site live in New York City and claim to be devout Muslims, though they are more likely... [More]

According to the official documentation, the sealed keyword in C# serves the following dual purpose:

“When applied to a class, the sealed modifier prevents other classes from inheriting from it. […] You can also use the sealed modifier on a method or property that overrides a virtual method or property in a base class. This enables you to allow classes to derive from your class and prevent them from overriding specific virtual methods or properties.”

Each inheritable class and overridable... [More]

Howling at the Muslim MoonJust one day after writing the article, Terror Kabuki, the cartoon to the right show up, almost as if on cue. The question mark is the coward’s shield, protecting the cartoonist from actually putting the statement in print that he doesn’t think the Times Square bomber was acting alone. That, in fact, he sees it as just another skirmish in the battle against Islam itself—as evidenced by the crescent moon and star.

That’s quite a stretch, though, isn’t it? The guy they arrested is the bomber?... [More]

Obama did his second White House Correspondents’ Dinner, as covered in the article, Did You Hear the Joke About the Predator Drone That Bombed? by Medea Benjamin and Nancy Moncias (AlterNet) One joke apparently stood out as out of line—as out-of-line as Bush’s jokes about not being able to find WMDs.

“‘Jonas Brothers are here, they’re out there somewhere,‘ President Obama quipped as he looked out at the packed room. Then he furrowed his brow, pretending to send a stern message to the pop band. ‘Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys,... [More]”

The American media machine is truly something to behold. On Saturday, there was a “bomb” in Times Square—bomb in quotes because the incident actually involved potentially combustible materials put together so ineptly that only smoke was (or could have ever been) produced. All qualified observers (including NYC police commissioners and mayor Bloomberg) deemed the would/be bomber laughably incompetent. Though his intent was undoubtedly malicious, his skills were so thoroughly lacking as to... [More]

The following tip was developed using Ubuntu 9.1x (Hardy Heron) with OpenVPn 2.1rc19. It builds on the the setup from Part I.

Part I of this guide to configuring a local firewall for OpenVPN introduced you to using iptables on Linux. It also included a script for OpenVPN that opened and closed the firewall for specific IP addresses. If you haven’t read it already, you should probably go do that first.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the firewall configuration from part I is not watertight... [More]

From the article, Roubini on Greece by Felix Salmon (Reuters):

“Sweden’s Bo Lundgren was also on the panel, and he helped explain how the Swedish population has the crucial and decidedly un-Greek ability to unite behind unpopular yet necessary policies once their political leaders have set a certain course. Greece, which is already seeing riots at any hint of fiscal austerity, just isn’t the kind of nation which is likely to decide that five years of wage cuts in a painful and deflationary recession is a price worth... [More]”

Fans would give up food, jobs for World Cup glory? (Reuters) is a tremendously fluffy and stupid article. Did they actually interview people or did they just make this shit up based on gross cultural stereotypes?

“It found that a majority of English respondents – 93 percent – would give up food for a week to see England win, while some 70 percent of Italians would give up their job for an Italian victory.

“Americans were most willing to sacrifice their homes, while South Koreans were most ready to... [More]”

Jesse Ventura is a former pro wrestler and action movie star—he famously starred in Predator with Schwarzenegger. He claims to have been in the Navy Seals—though it turns out he was in the predecessor to the Seals and never actually saw combat in ‘Nam, though he trained for it. He was elected governor of Minnesota as an independent and went on to write a book about conspiracies to accompany a TV show about conspiracies. He’s a self-professed 9–11 truther.

He sounds like a joke, really. A... [More]

Alternate title: Why Reddit is so awesome.

The post “Eyjafjallajökull” isn’t as foreign to English as it sounds (Reddit) is in the linquistics Reddit (to which I am subscribed, natch) and is treasure-trove of crowdsourcing goodness vis-à-vis the etymology, pronunciation (OGG file[1]) and unique linquistic characteristics of spoken Icelandic. There is no way I would have guessed the pronunciation from the spelling; the native Icelander seems to elide quite a bit, but what do I know about Icelandic... [More]

The following tip was developed using Ubuntu 9.1x (Hardy Heron) with OpenVPn 2.1rc19. It was originally published on the Encodo blogs and cross-published here.

There are dozens of guides around that describe how to optimally configure the iptables firewall on Linux for OpenVPN. There’s even a script installed by default that is extremely well-commented and shows to how close down the firewall, then open up only very selected ports and protocols for optimal browsing. However, all of those... [More]

A little while ago, WikiLeaks released a video showing a U.S. helicopter in Iraq on patrol in 2007. During its patrol, it engaged and killed several Iraqis. Despite several Freedom of Information requests, the Pentagon refused to release the video because two of the slain turned out to have been reporters for Reuter’s. The full, unencrypted video was finally leaked by Pentagon personnel and posted on the Internet. There is a 38–minute version and a 17–minute version. The shorter version is... [More]

Opera software is ordinarily quite stable. Released versions are rock-solid, running for weeks—even months—at a time. Betas are also usually very good and even Alphas (for those of us in the testing program) are quite stable. Sometimes, however, we testers get saddled with a very bad version. A recent build has the tendency to crash completely on its own: Look away for a few minutes and, instead of your browser window with many tabs, the crash dialog is on-screen, waiting for a report.
... [More]

Apple presented the iPhone OS 4.0 late last week. The new version includes hundreds of new API calls for third-party developers, including long-sought-after support for multi-tasking. The changes extended to the licensing agreement for iPhone developers, with section 3.3.1 getting considerable modification, as documented in the article, Adobe man to Apple: ‘Go screw yourself’ by Cade Metz (The Register). That section now reads:

“Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by... [More]”

I’ve been using Mercurial for a little over a year now, but I’m still kind of a newbie because:

1. I don’t use it every day
2. I use it only for private projects, so there aren’t many merge issues

For earthli.com development, I have two repositories: One for the web site content itself and another for the earthli WebCore, the backend for the web site. For each of these projects, I have the following repositories:

• Local repository
• Server repository (development)
• Server repository (production)

... [More]

At the end of last year, a bit of very good news emerged from the otherwise increasingly draconian U.S. As detailed in the article Did a Court Just Deal a Fatal Blow to Tasers for Police? by Raj Jayadev (AlterNet), the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals made what appeared to be a landmark decision that, in cases where officers used tasers, “[t]he objective facts must indicate that the suspect poses an immediate threat to the officer or a member of the public.”

Unfortunately, this sounds much better than it is, because of the... [More]

There are some for whom the dream of going to war with Iran has not died. As succinctly detailed in the article What War with Iran Means by Patrick Buchanan (Antiwar.com), these criminally insane members of the Senate have expressed themselves in no uncertain terms: