Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Theodore D. Roosevelt (October 27, 1858 – January 6, 1919) was the 26th President of the United States, and elected as a Republican. Compare his legacy to some of those Republicans who followed him. He fought to increase the regulatory power of the federal government. One of his first acts as President was to deliver a 20,000-word address to Congress on December 3, 1901, asking it to curb the power and abuses of the business community, and during his presidency he brought 44 lawsuits against major corporations. In addition to breaking up J.P. Morgan's Northern Securities Company (a railroad holding company) he used the powers of the federal government to dismantle J.D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil in to 30 separate competing companies. The Hepburn Act gave the ICC the power to replace existing railroad rates with "just-and-reasonable" maximum rates, with the ICC to define what was just and reasonable and pushed Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. During...

I've been playing with the Windows 7 Beta on and off for a couple of months. It's not bad. Now word (including release dates) about Windows 7 RC1 has begun to leak onto the 'nets. According to Ars Technica and ZDNet , RC1 (release candidate 1) will be available some time in May, and will expire on June 1, 2010. Unlike the usual unsubstantiated rumors, Ars Technica grabbed a screenshot off the Microsoft website from a page subsequently pulled. The screenshot is visible at the Ars Technica link above. Although there have been some tweaks to the User Interface , hardware requirements have not changed much from the Beta: 1 GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor or higher 1 GB of system memory or more 16 GB of available disk space Support for DirectX 9 graphics with 128 MB memory (to enable the Aero theme) DVD-R/W Drive Once released, the beta will be generally downloadable through June 2009, with no limits to the number of product keys.

I confess I've been shamelessly whoring for hits the last week or so by continuing to post updates re: the Stephen Colbert / NASA Node 3 naming game. Over half my traffic came from searches on Google for "Colbert NASA" or some variant. As of this evening I'm the 6th and 10th search result on Google for those terms. Amazing. It shows just how popular this particular meme has become. Web stats generated by Google Analytics and Stat Counter (both free services) showed "Colbert" and "NASA" were the top search terms. Below are some of the more interesting places from where visitors came. housegate10.house.gov gnat.generalmills.com unallocated-(xxxxxxx).mcafee.com (xxxxxxx) .google.com (xxxxxxx).larc.nasa.gov Although Colbert / NASA are popular, other persistently popular pages include one on fixing up hard drive partition issues (I get a lot of foreign visitors for this one) and for a while, a page republishing some piece of spam I got. For about a...

Okay -- this is extremely unofficial and third hand, but after some Googling about, I found a post on the No Fact Zone which claims the final numbers on the Node 3 on-line vote were: Colbert: 230,539 Serenity: 190,196 Numbers (allegedly) courtesy of NASA’s Jacob Keaton. Hopefully releasing these won't be a career-limiting action on Keaton's part. It must be repeated, NASA has left themselves an out by stating the name should "reflect the spirit of exploration and cooperation embodied by the space station, and follow in the tradition set by Node 1- Unity- and Node 2- Harmony." Uh-huh. So the Firefly Fanboys may get naming rights, but Colbert Nation gets the glory. Again, in the spirit of compromise, if NASA can't bring themselves to name Node 3 after Stephen Colbert, the least they can do is name the Urine Processor Assembly after him. SCUPA -- it has a nice ring to it. A tinkle, as it were. ( Thanks to No Fact Zone for ferreting out the numbers . Consider them ...

Okay, the voting ended yesterday for NASA's Name That Module contest, er, survey. While the official results have not been announced, the unofficial tally seems to have it that Colbert whipped the competition , outpolling NASA's own fave, Serenity. Even the Firefly Fanboys couldn't come to the rescue. The "winner" is scheduled to be announced in April. Even before this started, NASA reserved the right to disregard the outcome of the vote, if they felt it didn't "reflect the spirit of exploration and cooperation embodied by the space station, and follow in the tradition set by Node 1- Unity - and Node 2- Harmony. " In other words, no way in hell are they going to name it "Colbert." Okay, we probably all knew that from the start. I'd like to suggest that NASA strongly consider, at the very least, naming the Urine Processor Assembly (UPA) portion of the module after Stephen. It seems only fair. When astronauts are taking a number one, th...

Having traipsed around Washington, DC for the last couple of days, for our final day we decided to do something different. Part of this was dictated by having a hard stop on our activities, since we had a plane to catch. After some discussion, we ended up heading down to Mount Vernon . Mount Vernon, located south of Alexandria, VA on the banks of the Potomac River is of course George Washington's estate and final resting place. The estate was purchased from Washington's great-grandnephew, John A. Washington, Jr., in 1858 by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union. The house and grounds had fallen in to a state of disrepair by that time. During the Civil War, despite fighting all around it, Mount Vernon was treated as neutral ground. See the Wikipedia article for an extended history. I confess, though this was my suggestion, I thought it might end up being a bit of a bore. Not so. The main estate has been thoroughly restored, with lots of information posted throu...

Yesterday was a gorgeous, sunny day in Washington, DC. Today: cold and rainy. We got up and, after much diddling around, finally left the hotel in Fairfax to head back to DC. At the Metro Park and Ride, a "Lot Full"sign greeted us. After much testy negotiation, we drove around until we found Metro station with a Park and Ride lot. Back in DC (at last) we headed back to the Smithsonian Museum of American History and finished viewing the Price of Freedom: America at War , which examines how wars have shaped American culture and society, from the War of Independence to the present. The amazing thing about the Smithsonian is its astonishing collection of miscellaneous objects of enormous historic importance. Things like the coat Marion Anderson wore when she sang at the Lincoln Memorial, security badges worn by workers on the Manhattan Project, the Ruby Red slippers worn by Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz. On a less serious note, they had the triple portrait of Stephen Colbert s...

Today was the day of our George Mason campus visit. We arrived (late) at the Johnson Center (home of the Admissions department) and joined our tour (already in progress) led by bright enthusiastic student Ambassadors, who answered parent and prospective student's questions. After a walk around the campus where the dorms and major academic buildings were pointed out, we grabbed lunch at the Johnson Center and hit the bookstore for GMU t-shirts and the like. We wandered over to the Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering, where we were fortunate enough to catch up with the Associate Chair of the department. She sat and talked with us about the program for a good 30 minutes -- not bad for having no appointment. We left extremely impressed and pleased with our choice of George Mason. All this is beginning to get real for youngest son. As it was only about 2:45, we headed into DC via the Metro. Students can take the free GMU shuttle to the Vienna/Fairfax station but w...

Arrived in Washington, DC today around 3:30 and after getting bags, picked up our rental - an incredibly underpowered Toyota Yaro - and drove into Fairfax , Virginia. Our hotel was next to Giant Foods. Maybe it's my own shelf-stocking days, but I love going to grocery stores in different cities. They reveal much about the character of a place. We promptly loaded up with miscellaneous snacks, drinks and the like. After dinner at the Bombay Cafe, an Indian restaurant with an amazing $5 dinner buffet, we meandered around in Fairfax, until we finally found George Mason University. Unfortunately, it was (a) dark and (b) packed with cars for tonight's NCAA playoff game (go Patriots). We did manage to drive by the as-yet unfinished Volgenau School of Information Technology . Tomorrow: more fun.

According to the Discovery Channel website, Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report is now outpolling NASA's officially sanctioned name for Module Number 3. As of March 11, the tally for "Colbert" stood just shy of 115,000 votes, with Serenity trailing at 98,641. More than 451,000 people have voted. If you haven't voted yet, go to the NASA site - you can vote once a day - and check the box labeled "Suggest your own" and enter Colbert . Hurry though. Voting ends March 20. UPDATE: NASA to announce name on the April 14th Colbert Report!

By now you've at least heard about Thursday's Daily Show, wherein Jon Stewart pulled off his foolscap and grilled former hedge-fund trader turned business entertainer Jim Cramer about CNBC's (and the business news networks in general) failure to rise above mindlessly parroting the lies and half-truths fed them by the folks who brought you our current financial fiasco. Jon Stewart once again showed his "fake" news show does news better than the "real" news shows: his staff prepped him with a series of clips he rolled anytime his subject protested he was misquoted or hadn't said something. Jim Cramer was left no wiggle room. When was the last time you saw that sort of interview on, say, NBC? It was effective and devastating. By the end, Cramer was contrite and apologetic. Say what you will, Cramer went knowing he was going to get bitch-slapped. He gets marks for doing it anyway - unlike Rick Santelli, who's done little more than whine after Stewar...

Indulge me for a few paragraphs...I've put off writing this for 6 months. He's been gone that long. He arrived on the scene about a year after the last of my two old cats went to whatever passes for cat heaven (slow mice, flightless birds). I went out in my bathrobe to get the paper one morning and a little gray tabby-striped kitten, no bigger than my hand, popped up and said "Pet me! Pet me!" Well, he didn't actually talk, but he did rub up against my bare leg and purr louder than I've ever heard a cat purr. I obliged and he followed me up on the porch and into the house, still purring like a fiend. I picked him up and tossed him on the bed where my spouse lay sleeping. She was not the cat person in the household ("how long do cats live, anyway," she once asked). She pulled the covers down from her face and frowned. "Get that cat out of here. You don't know where it's been." Within a month she was letting him sleep on her hea...

Ayn Rand is to Conservative/Libertarian Free Market True Believers what Mary Baker Eddy is to Christian Scientists (or is that what L. Ron Hubbard is to the Scientologists?). She is the originator and high priestess of "Objectivism," a religious cult for the non-religious which elevates the individual's tendency to be a self-absorbed, selfish prick to evidence of the divine. Its major tenet, boiled down to layman's terms, is "Fuck you, I got mine." As a side note, despite Libertarians' commendably progressive views on gay rights, Rand's views on homosexuality were considerably less enlightened: she held that it was immoral and disgusting . Some of her prophets (profits?) include Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, and pretty much the entire Cato Institute. As you might imagine, she's very popular on Wall Street and in Board Rooms all across America. The Randistras' Bible is her novel " Atlas Shrugged ," where in all the world's l...

Okay, I'm always up for fun. So, as previously noted, I downloaded the new Windows 7 beta, both 32 bit and 64 bit editions. The 64 bit edition went on the young padawan's honkin' big gaming box: Athlon 6000 3 gHz 64 bit dual core processor, 4 GB memory, 512 MB video card. His initial reaction: "It's ridiculously awesome." He's already told me to hold off buying a laptop for college as long as possible since he wants Windows 7 on it, not Vista. I have to say, with Aero effects (possible with the badass video card) there is some cool looking stuff -- such as previewing windows as you switch between apps -- and if you like eye candy, you'll love this shit. On his machine, it runs well: no lock ups or crashes or other signs of instability. He did find, however, after buying a new Zune 120 that the Zune drivers are not ready for prime time, and have caused him some degree of pain. Still, he's happy. I installed the 32 bit version on a (relatively) ol...

Quick reminder: NASA is having a (we suspect) slightly bogus "vote" to name a new module on the International Space Station. Stephen Colbert has called on all loyal Colbert Nation fans to sneer at NASA's wimpy suggestions ("those are organic teas") and instead name it after him . Go to the NASA site - you can vote once a day - and check the box labeled "Suggest your own" and enter Colbert . Go on, you know you want to. Serenity, NASA's officially sanctioned name, is sinking fast. Hurry though. Voting ends March 20. The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Stephen Becomes Scientology's Galactic Overlord Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Rap Battle Joke of the Day

By now who hasn't at least heard of CNBC on-air financial personality Rick Santelli's " Rant Heard Round the World, " in which he castigates "losers" who shouldn't get help by the government on their mortgages. Santelli, a former commodity and futures trader turned professional entertainer, launched his diatribe from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, surrounded by the guys we can thank for $4.00 a gallon gas not too long ago. Short investment lesson: greed whips up panic over the cost of gasoline in 6 months and people investing in futures bid up the price to astronomical levels. Traders make a shitload of money. Fear they paid too much grips investors and the price falls like a stone. Traders make another shitload of money. "On-Air Editor" Rick Santelli's job? Whip up the fear and panic. Down in the pit where Rick prowls there's been a huge market over the last few years in " derivatives :" financial contracts, o...