A few days ago Alwin posted about his referrer spam and a solution he is using to at least cut it down. (Once the referrer spammers move on to v14gr4.somescummyhost.com it'll stop working, but hopefully they don't get that desperate, because hopefully they'll realize the pressures that drove email spammers to do that don't apply to them. But expecting intelligence from spammers has proven a futile endeavor.)

I went ahead and implemented it. To my great suprise, it seems to have cut my website bandwidth usage approximentally in half. Which bothers me; I had thought the spammers would use HEAD requests and not actually download the pages, as that would slow their referrer spamming way down. See parenthetical in paragraph one. I'll have to wait a few more days to be sure, but if so, this takes my bandwidth pressure off.

At this point in our political discourse, the terms "liberal" and "conservative" are meaningless labels that for historical reasons are applied to what they are applied to. They have no reliable relationship to their historical meanings, or the meanings used in other countries for the same terms.

"Liberal" and "conservative", in literal modern non-political usage, both refer to a resource allocation strategy; a "liberal" strategy allocates a lot of resources to something, while a "conservative" strategy tries to use as few resources as possible. While there is some correlation between these meanings economically, it is not one that will usefully help you to determine if a given policy is usually considered liberal or conservative. "Cutting the military budget" is a common liberal position, while a conservative might want to increase money for the space program.

I'm still buckled down with work, but financial stresses are getting stronger and stronger. I had thought that was why I wasn't posting much, that and the depression (not strong, but real) this has been causing me.

But today I got up "early" for a conferance call, and while waiting for it, I've posted more today than in the last month.

Maybe I'm not posting because mornings are my "posting" time and I've been sleeping through it? In the absence of a "real job", I tend towards a sleep schedule of 2 a.m. - 10 a.m.; this makes me comfortable and seems to maximize my useful programming time. Maybe 8a.m.-10a.m. are my best posting times, though.

From The Anglosphere Challenge to the Political Left:

On the Right, I believe that it is still possible to discern the tensions and compromises that one would expect in an alliance-building environment. The loose coalition includes libertarians and moral conservatives, deficit hawks and tax-cutters, immigration supporters and immigration opponents.

What has emerged on the Left is a core of rigid, dogmatic, conformity enforcers. Its organizations, such as MoveOn.org, the Howard Dean campaign, or the movement to resist Social Security reform, are self-marginalizing. They can achieve a high level of intensity, and with the Internet they can be successful at co-ordination and fundraising. However, they lack the flexibility in forming alliances that politics in the Anglosphere has traditionally required.

What this story doesn't say, but should, is that the Parents Television Council is the almost the sole source of the "mounting complaints" Powell refers to near the end. From a Mediaweek article:

The number of indecency complaints had soared dramatically to more than 240,000 in the previous year, Powell said. The figure was up from roughly 14,000 in 2002, and from fewer than 350 in each of the two previous years. There was, Powell said, “a dramatic rise in public concern and outrage about what is being broadcast into their homes.”

What Powell did not reveal—apparently because he was unaware—was the source of the complaints. According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003—99.8 percent—were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group.

I've released XBLinJS 0.2, which includes some example widgets and much better documentation.

OK, forget my last post about what the Democrats need to do. After a few more hours both online and on TV, I can't help but think that those actions are a little too mature for too many Democrats. Let's start more simply. Speaking as a Bush voter, here's a short list of things various Democrats need to stop doing, lest they continue to marginalize themselves.

• Stop explaining to us why we're stupid.
• Stop explaining why it isn't our fault, we're just victims of Karl Rove. It is patronizing. That will win you neither votes nor friends. You have neither a lock on truth nor intelligence. I don't like to wave my credentials or ego around, but I'll happily take any of you on in the intelligence department, and I'm still "red". If your theories can't account for that, you need new theories.
• Stop explaining our actions in terms of "-isms". Rejecting gay marriage is hardly homophobia. (There's actually a danger here if you try to insist that it is; munging the difference between not wanting to grant marriages to gay couples and murdering them may cause certain borderline personalities to munge the difference too. That's bad for everybody.)
• America is a special nation, the only hyperpower. Consider the possibility that part of the reason for this also lies in its special demographic makeup. "Blue" folk keep tossing out the observation that "red" America is out of step with the rest of the world. Consider the possibility that it is exactly this "out of step"-ness that is also the reason we are strong. I know you love Europe, but I don't think I'm going to want to live there when their Social Security bills come due. (In fact, if you factor in their SS commitments, I'd bet money they are more in the hole than we are, and less able to crawl out!)

By now, the election results for the US are well known: The Republicans keep the Presidency, they get more seats in the House, they get more seats in the Senate, and they will almost certainly be placing some people on the Supreme Court. Basically, while it isn't quite enough to be considered a blank check, especially as party loyalty isn't what it used to be, it is rather close; the Senate control is only a few seats short of being able to unilaterally break a filibuster.

I think what this argument typically indicates is an individual who is using the following logic, more or less consciously:

1. My vote isn't going to be the vote that changes the outcome.
2. Therefore, my vote is of exactly zero value.

Ultimately, this is a very selfish line of reasoning, because it implicitly is claiming that only their vote should count. Well, I got news. There are about three hundred million other people in the good ole' US of A, many of them able to vote, and their votes count too.

(This is actually true of all voting systems, not just the US Government.)

It seems like common sense that the purpose of voting is to determine the winner. But like much common sense, it is wrong.

The purpose of voting is to satisfy the loser that they lost. Determining a winner is easy, it is the guy with the most guys and guns who is still alive. A voting-based system depends on the acquiescence of the losers, so that they don't just grab guys and guns and take over.