Larry Lessig on Clinton and Spineless Democrats Generally

4Barack (Lessig Blog):

“But the part that gets me the most about Senator Clinton is the eager embrace of spinelessness. I don’t get this in Democrats generally. I never have, but I especially don’t get it after two defeats to the likes of George Bush (ok, one defeat, but let’s put that aside for the moment). Our party seems constitutionally wedded to the idea that you wage a campaign with tiny speech. Say as little as possible. Be as uncontroversial as you can. Embrace the chameleon as the mascot. Fear only that someone would clearly understand what you believe.”

Lessig supports Obama and Edwards, for reasons given in the article and others it links to.

Mark Pilgrim, Former Apple User, Is Not At All Bitter

Installing MySQL on Ubuntu (the NSFW way) [dive into mark] — a response to Installing MySQL on OS X…

But Jesus H. Christ, it must suck giant wet donkey balls to be stuck on an archaic OS where you need to be dropping into the terminal and tweaking configuration files and compiling shit all the time. I hope the translucent menu bar is worth it. But please, please stay up to date with MySQL security patches; I wasn’t kidding about that, it’s really fucking important.

El Tormento Del Agua and Godwin’s President

Apparently the Spanish Inquisition used waterboarding, and there are period illustrations of it. Search for “Tormento Del Agua” on this page, to see one. Here’s another one.

So it’s a favorite of the Spanish Inquisition as well as the Khmer Rouge, North Korea, the Nazis, the Viet Cong, Hirohito’s Japan, Stalin’s Russia, and… and the Bush Administration.

Bush is Godwin’s President. You can barely write a truthful sentence about his administration and its actions without finding yourself comparing it to the acts of an infamous dictator.