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Nobody in the United States is untouchable by the law. Everyone has done something that could have resulted in fines or imprisonment. Everyone. It almost goes without saying, except that I had to say it in order for the next paragraph to make the right kind of sense.

The inculcation of patriotism into every one of us at a young age is identical in form to the inculcation of a sense of religion into church-goers. People have used processes of religion such as this one to set up this thing that behaves like a god: it demands reverence; it demands tithing. It has the power to make your existence miserable, should you incur its wrath.

And, again, everyone has given it cause. There is no one who obeys all the laws or scrupulously calculates his taxes. He does not drive 35 in a 35 mile-per-hour zone, nor does he come to a complete stop. The person who does that would be a saint: The Saint of Traffic By-laws. What kind of crappy saint is that? It’s the crappy saint of a crappy god.

Government and the government are constructs of human imagination and need. They are an attempt to make a real, live, actual god. A drunken, lurching, real, live, actual god, but a real one nonetheless.

Government is not now omnipresent or omnipotent, but we’re trying to improve this god by allowing it to learn how to keep better track of where everybody is, for example, by satellite tracking of our stuff. And if you know where our stuff is, you know where we are. That’s key for a god; You have to know where Your people are. And people are fine with that because they don’t really know what kind of power they’re giving this drunken thing. People aren’t ready (yet) to put computer chips in their bodies, so the chips are going into the cellphones for now.

We can almost pay 10 dollars online to find out where any person is within an error of fifty feet. And I see a day when we can almost pay 5 dollars.

Did the founding fathers know what they were doing? That they were replacing one god by another? I think so; I think the founding fathers knew that they were setting up a substitute god when they separated church from state. That’s practically a smoking gun. And I think they thought of it in just that way: that it was time to change gods. And they knew their new, stupid god would never work if the older gods were allowed to bind to it; without that separation the substitute god would never have taken hold.

And the fathers had reason to do what they did. The old gods hadn’t ever seemed to work out. Why not create a new one? Things couldn’t get much worse.

In reality, things got much better. For a long time. Because the substitute god was consciously made to be crappy, and was meant to stay that way. But now, because engineers–the priests of the crappy god–are able to build things with the potential to allow the government to know where we all are all the time, the god is becoming less stupid. It’s getting smarter, taking on more of the qualities of gods. This is not a good thing. This is not what the founding fathers wanted.

I’m not ready to watch the crappy god evolve and grow; to become less crappy. The reason this god is tolerable to me at all is precisely because it is so stupid. I’m not ready for the government to know where I am all the time. So the more ways I can keep actively bothering the record-keeping function of the government while keeping a low enough profile that I still adhere to the American Compact, the longer I can keep the lurching god off balance and dumb.

That’s the curmudgeon’s goal, even if he doesn’t know it.

Recently, my hosting service (Midphase) has started to come apart at the seams. It’s one thing to have no access to the database and get the consequent “Wordpress Database Error” message; it’s another thing entirely when whole posts get swallowed up into the ether, which is what happened today. Two whole posts….gone.

Midphase has been telling us to bear with them as they move their servers from one farm to another, but that’s been going on for (literally) months now, and what should have been an improvement has resulted in the kind of service I’d expect only from drunken marmots. I didn’t mind…too much…when all I was losing was a little up-time. Now that I’ve lost actual posts, though…probably time to look for someone else. Any suggestions?

Last week I shrewdly bought an APC power supply with an extra battery attachment for the oncoming hurricane season. It’s that thing above. Right now, for some reason, our house is without power. Has been for about 15 minutes. Yet here I am, posting a post on my blog. In fact, I could post even more posts; I could do it for another, let’s see… 173 minutes.

I win!

So I blog about how clueless teenagers are nowadays and can’t add or subtract to save their lives. Then Arcturus tells me that my “Did you pass math?” plug-in has become dumber than a bag of hammers, a teenage bag of hammers that couldn’t recognize a correct math answer if it got hit over the head with one.

Man! That sounded waaay better when it was still in my skull. Anyway, long story short, you don’t have to pass math anymore to post a comment. I’ll let the dust settle on my wordpress 2.1.2 upgrade (which is the culprit here) for a little while before I try to straighten it out again.

I’m reading a top “worst tech products of all time” thing on pcworld.com…it’s not important why…and it reminds me, again, of how out-of-touch with peripheral crap I can get. Which is of course a good thing, I like to think, but disconcerting all the same. It’s mostly disconcerting because the article is obviously intended for a target audience that cares about such things, and I like to think that I *do* care about computer evolution. I like to think I *am* the target audience. I’ve owned several several computers in my life, have done the homework that’s necessary to acquire several several computers, and have learned the idiosyncracies of all those computers over months and years of happy interaction and berserk fury when bad things happen.

But I’m not really the target audience. Apparently I don’t have the necessary staying power. For instance, with this ‘top bad products’ article, I find myself agreeing with some of the entries, like pricelinegroceries and the PCjr. I remember those debacles. For other entries, though, I have not the slightest memory of debacle or fiasco. In fact, if it weren’t for this article, I would assume these companies from Yore are still doing business with someone, somewhere. The example is ‘dBASE.’ Yes, I’ve heard of it in the last few decades. It occupies an odd spot in my head devoted to business…devoted to business that I couldn’t care less about. My brain long ago decided there was a program called ‘dBASE’ that some businessmen used for obscure fiscal reasons; it decided that it would never be called upon to be an advisor to a person of that type, therefore it had no further use for that knowledge or that word, therefore it would be filed away permanently. Now I find that dBASE is synonymous with ‘fiasco.’ Not only that, I find out that that is common knowledge; common enough for the offending company’s name to place highly in a ‘worst of’ list.

So I’m not really the intended audience here. And you may or may not know of this fiasco, and know that dBASE’s place in this list is well-deserved. That’s not my point, really. My point is that no matter how clever you are, you can’t pay attention to everything. You can’t even pay attention to the things you pay attention to; something huge will always slip by.

Strooth!

I’ve got everything back. Everything except an updated “contacts” list in Outlook. The one I’ve had to settle for is several months old, so it lacks only a couple updates.

All my email was saved. All my work stuff was found. I found the contents of my desktop in a file called “userdata” in the file recovery program. In Windows Explorer, the userdata file contained a bunch of nothing. Weird also that a search in the file recovery program returned no .pst files; I had to manually find those bad boys.

Let this be a lesson. If I learn nothing else from this near-fiasco, I’ve learned…okay, I’ve learned nothing. I’ll keep not saving everything on a regular basis, and I’ll keep clicking buttons that I have no business clicking. And that’s just the way it is. Courage.

Ren: You fool! Don’t press that button! That’s the History Eraser button!

Stimpy: So what’ll happen?

Ren: That’s just it! We don’t know! Maybe something bad; maybe something good! I guess we’ll never know. Cause you’re going to guard it. You won’t touch it, will you?

I’d like to preface this by stressing that I’m not usually an idiot. Usually I can feed and clothe myself with practically no help. I can operate a car with a stickshift and successfully troubleshoot the fridge icemaker when it starts bogarting the cubes. I read books with big words. So when, yesterday, I partially reformatted my hard disk by mistake, well, I got to thinking about the many, many things I can do that don’t cause unbearable hardship and grief. Washing my own hair, for example.

Everytime I boot up my computer, a momentary window appears that allows several different pre-boot options. Everybody’s pc does that, of course, unless it’s set not to. I’d always escaped out of the window (to save those three or four seconds that elapse before booting continues on its own). Prior to yesterday.

This newest computer has been a rock. Unshakeable. I’ve never needed to tinker in any way with the boot process; Windows comes up, like the sun, and I go about my business. But I’ve idly wondered, as I’ve watched it warm up, what some of the pre-boot functions called. This computer has a different BIOS from my last machine, so the options were different. “Safe Mode” was there, of course. But so was something called “Fastbuild,” and something else called “System Recovery.”

On my last machine (that’s sitting on my son’s desk), an automatic disk scan occurred if the computer shut down abnormally. But this new computer has never once (at least obviously) performed any kind of diagnostic on itself after a bad shutdown. I wondered–as I waited for the machine to boot–why that was. Did it need to? Sure it did, if only to identify bad sectors and cauterize them. Maybe there was some setting in either “Fastbuild” or “System Recovery” that was switched off. Maybe I should switch it on, just to make certain that the hard drive knew where its bad sectors were. In order to make this rock-solid machine even more rock-solid.

So I hit “ctl-F” to enter Fastbuild. Turned out that was where the BIOS settings could be manipulated. I didn’t really want to mess with those, because it takes a lot of trial and error to get things right in there, and I was just idly curious. So I exited that and clicked on “System Recovery.” Ah! Here it was; a couple paragraphs with several exclamation points. The last paragraph stated that, if I did choose to recover the system, none of my data files would be harmed. That was good. The first paragraph was about two column inches long and looked boring, so I didn’t read it. I already knew everything I needed to know: if I recovered the system, nothing bad would happen.

I pressed “yes.” Another screen came up to tell me that certain things were wrong with my computer and the program would continue. A friendly little progress bar appeared at the top. “Time to go” read 18 minutes. That was good, too, as a final check. I mean, how much damage could a program do in 18 minutes? I left to make myself a sandwich. It was a good, successful sandwich.

Eighteen minutes later–right on time–the program completed and rebooted the computer all by itself. The usual boot process started, the usual pre-Windows windows appeared, and then something weird happened, as I ate my sandwich: A “Welcome to Windows” splash came up, followed by a sexy woman’s voice saying “Welcome to Windows.” That was odd. But even odder was the next screen, my desktop. It was barren. Barren except for an “AOL offer” icon, a “Help & Support” icon, and a “User’s Guides” icon. Barren as the Gobi Desert, if the Gobi Desert contained only computer icons, and only three of them.

“Christ Almighty,” I said. Also “Great Fucking Shit” and “Oh my fucking God.” Another screen superimposed itself on my cracked and bleeding desktop, wondering if I had a printer, and if so, where was it? “You’ve got to be fucking bagging me,” I added.

I canceled out of all the prompts in order to call up “My Computer” and take a look at my C: drive. Things were… things were still there! Outlook…there! Winpatrol…there! Thank God! Then I clicked over to HP-owner desktop in the file tree. There! But…where was everything? WHERE WAS EVERY FUCKING THING?

Calm down, calm down. Surely it’s still all there, I said to myself. I’d found things that wouldn’t be there if the drive had been completely turned back to its factory state; surely the rest of my stuff was there somewhere. So I searched for the names of files that I knew resided on my desktop and nowhere else. Things like my “Northern Exposure” download file and my “pa55word5″ file. Not…..there! Gone! Christ on a hatstick!

ALL the critical data files on my desktop–files that “system recovery” told me would still be there after I recovered the system–gone!

I clicked Outlook up to make sure all my email archives still existed. Outlook requested the serial code before it would initialize. Of course I didn’t have it; it used to be in the “Serial Codes” text file on my now-pulverized desktop! Same thing with Excel, same thing with Word. I searched for .pst archives, because surely they were still there, with all my correspondence. Gone! It must save to the muthafuckin HP-Owner Documents & Settings file! What about my work file, with all the stuff that I painstakingly entered by hand over literally a hundred hours the last year? Not there! Must’ve been in the muthafuckin HP-Owner Documents & Settings file! For the fuck of Buddha!

Like I said, usually I’m not an idiot. Usually I’m pretty cautious when it comes to my computer. I do have some backup files spread out on my kids’ computers, but they’re almost a year old. So a year’s worth of puttering and writing and squirreling away links and fiddling with my computer to get it just so, to make it the rock-solid computer of my dreams, is gone. It’s like a fire swept through my house. A very persnickety fire that charcoaled only things I’ve touched in the past few months.

I’ve got a file recovery program running in the background right now; maybe it’ll find a few odds and ends that I can work with, I don’t know.

And I know it’s all my fault, too. That’s probably the worst part. If I’d only bothered to read the first paragraph of the System Recovery screen, maybe things would be different. Maybe I’d be driving to the grocery store, shifting gears like all get out, feeling good. I don’t know.

I still make a good muthafuckin sandwich. Now, if you’ll excuse me, #$% ^**@-$%%&?? *%&#$^%; #$$? % #@@ #$&&?-$%??!!@.

A curmudgeon is one who does something for himself, and be damned the response of society.

A curmudgeon mows his lawn naked. He makes a roost out of netting and twine in the backyard to view the stars more easily, and leaves it up because it’s easier than taking it down. He pays for things in cash to avoid a paper trail. He farts in a crowded room and blames it on his neighbor. He farts alone and blames the dog.

A curmudgeon sees the inevitability of the global cyber awareness, and leaps into action. He asks a question of the professor in a crowded classroom even though the answer will delay the end of the class, for which the other students fervently pray. Fuck them; he paid money to be in that classroom! He will get his money’s worth!

A curmudgeon abides by his own rules. He may be gossiped about by his neighbors, but he doesn’t care; what could possibly be gained by caring what the neighbors think? If they have so much spare time in their lives that they can fritter it away by gossiping about their neighbors, they’re insane. A curmudgeon knows this. He takes it into account.

A successful curmudgeon’s only obligation to civilization is really an obligation to himself: the responsibility to avoid being jailed by that civilization for too many flagrant displays of curmudgeonhood. Because a jailed curmudgeon is an unsuccessful curmudgeon.

A successful curmudgeon acts to minimize the possibility of being jailed by minimizing his contacts with civilization. The easiest way to do that is to avoid living in suburbia. In the woods, it’s easy to be a curmudgeon because there are no witnesses; even the dullest curmudgeon is a successful curmudgeon in the woods.

In the city, it’s almost as easy to be successful, because the number of curmudgeons is so high that it’s practically impossible for sober society to take them all down.

It’s only in suburbia where witnesses have enough time to spare to efficiently persecute the curmudgeon, and therefore it’s in suburbia where the only successful curmudgeon is a wily curmudgeon. Paradoxically, since one of the hallmarks of curmudgeonhood is a lack of wile, the suburban curmudgeon is a rare beast indeed.

I’m not saying I’m a curmudgeon….yet. I just envy the hell out of them.

“Everybody started scattering, you know, there’s mayhem everywhere. And then a police officer came into the building, you know, came in professional with his gun raised, and then he proceeded to shoot the guy.”

This is a recent phenomenon. A hundred years ago, no one would’ve described the scene this way. A killer would never have proceeded to shoot the guy; he would’ve shot him.

Today people no longer know how to react to something that actually happens to them. They act like reporters, like they were somehow removed from the action, like they’re dispassionate observers from another planet. They just beamed in and beamed out.

Reporters are not balanced. They are not un-biased. The idea that a “balance” of fairness must be struck between a community and someone who preys on that community is appalling.

A “balanced” look at bigots or Hitler or napalm is so far away from real balance that it boggles the mind. Today, being a reporter means being required to substitute the word “nazi”for “that fucking soulless nazi,” reducing the outrage to a mechanical phenomenon, like a malfunctioning toaster oven.

Normal people ape this, and have for years. It comes from a lifetime of watching television, from seeing reporters report. It has fed on itself. People are no longer people; they’re eyewitnesses. No one ever appears to be directly affected by anything that happens. Things never really happen anymore, they proceed to happen.

Learned dispassion can be beneficial in some ways that are hard to knock: it’s an anesthetic for the masses. People simply don’t respond to horror in ways that might lead to further horror. They have subconsciously learned to turn away from spectacles and get on with the job of production. That’s useful, but it’s costly. People never learn how to live, they just learn how to exist.

The media inoculate people against responding in a normal manner to manifestations of evil, and it’s possible that this mechanism isn’t a dumb outcome of modern history. It’s possible that the mechanism was thoughtfully begun by some cabal of the powerful in order to produce the results it has produced. I’m just sayin. The result is certainly economically wonderful: dispassionate workers are productive workers.

In calmer times, it’s my belief that the world is too complex for any organization of humans to fathom it to the degree necessary to control it. It’s so complex that a group of humans or a government cannot manipulate its parts in any but the simplest of ways. But I also believe that won’t always be the case, because of technology.

Some day, maybe soon, powerful people will have at their disposal software and processors that can crunch enough numbers quickly enough that they will be able to control systems that have heretofore been uncontrollable. When it’s only necessary to push a button on a very expensive computer in order to profoundly guide events, a profound and secret compulsion to do so will be unavoidable. I don’t think it’s happened yet, but it’s possible.

Another aspect of this line of reasoning is that a very expensive computer engorged with subtle programming won’t die. Once it exists, it exists. That’s never been true before. All of history’s previous warlords and despots eventually died. Napolean died, Alexander the Great died, Hitler died. This thing won’t die, and it won’t need a Napolean to press its buttons; it’ll just need somebody who knows where the buttons are. Once it exists, there’s no reason for it to stop existing. That’s frightening.

Given for a moment that a cabal is responsible for the marvel of social engineering that is the Western media, I don’t think they planned on the response of non-Western people, people who are not veteran media consumers. Non-westerners can’t be anesthetized in the same way, if only because many of them are so dirt-poor that they can’t afford to consume enough media for the inoculation to have any effect.

I suppose the assumption was that since these people were dirt-poor and far away, they could never matter. That assumption has turned out to be wrong, of course. 911 is proof that they matter. And now that the Western world is being affected by these people, I’m afraid that our years and years of being inoculated by the media prevents our responding in any normal empathic way to the situation.

A normal response would be to come to the aid of these communities that are so completely fucked up that they produce mass-murderers, so that they won’t produce mass-murderers anymore. An appropriate cabalist response might be similar: to raise these people’s standard of living high enough so that the media could begin to soothe them, and make them as disconnected from reality as we are.

Neither of these things is happening. Instead, we’re killing them.

My mom’s old computer died on her, so she bought a new one. The old one—which had taken to not going past the Windows splash screen—was given to my oldest son in a fit of magnanimity.

I was pretty sure I could get it to work, and I tried to tell my mother that before she took on the expense and trouble of getting a new computer down at Wal-mart (yes! Wal-mart! she’s old).

She got a new computer anyway, and we got her old one. The first thing I did was to try to load up my XP using a Dell cd lying about, but that didn’t work, because it didn’t have enough RAM. So. I looked around for an old copy of Me or 98, but I guess I threw all that out years ago. With gusto! I love throwing away shitty OS’s that have wronged me over the years! I wish I hadn’t.

I did, though, come across an old ‘TurboLinux’ cd. What the hell; why not? I said to myself. I’m savvy. I’ve done Macs, I’ve done Windows, I’ve done DOS; hell I knew my way around the C-64, back in the day. Tape drives! Tape drives, back and forth from school, uphill both ways!

It still didn’t work. Subroutines kept telling me the hard drive was wasted.

So I went down to Wal-mart and bought a new hard drive. 40 gigs, 69 bucks.

After fiddling with the BIOS for far too long, I got the computer to recognize the hard drive. After that, TurboLinux loaded easily.

The thing is, it’s been a long time since I had to learn a new OS. It’s a shitty endeavor under the best of circumstances, but with a jury-rigged system, it’s more so. And there are completely new metaphors to learn. Usually, when something craps out on my Windows system, I can figure it out in fairly short order, because I’m experienced with it. I’ve had many things crap out on my Windows systems over the years, so this accretion of dismay, rage, and eventual triumph over the forces of Evil has given me confidence enough to believe that, no matter how evil and crappy Windows is, I can eventually browbeat it into working again.

Not so with TurboLinux. I mean, things are happening that my limbic system doesn’t know whether to urge me on in a fit of rage and disgust, or just quit and order a pizza. For instance: mounting the cd-rom. Apparently, I have to ‘mount’ the cd-rom almost everytime I start the computer, else the computer doesn’t know it’s there. Oh, there’s a function that can be set from a command line sort of interface, that should tell the computer that it has a cd-rom at start-up, but it doesn’t work all the time. And I have no idea what parameter is changing that the computer decides to make me re-mount the thing; I didn’t change anything, it just changes!

Also, I tried to load a DOS emulator into the system, to give it a little functionality. Meaning that it would allow me to play some ancient games that I haven’t played in years, yet I still have lurking in my closet. I followed the recipe I lifted from the site I got DOSemu from, which called on me to invoke commands that I was clueless about. It actually behaved fairly well. The loading, I mean; things scrolled by efficiently, as if other things were really happening. In the end, though, the load returned cryptic errors. Mysterious errors; errors that I wouldn’t even know were errors, except that the computer prefaced them with the word ‘error.’

I guess I’ll figure it out, but I’m kind of tired of re-learning shit like this. I just want it to work, anymore.