The Luney Bin: H. Wade Minter

The latest brouhaha about Iraq comes courtesy of Ted Koppel on Nightline. He’s planning to take his half-hour show tonight and read a name and show a picture for every soldier who has died in Iraq. Unfortunately, not everyone will get a chance to see it. Conservative media conglomorate Sinclair Broadcast Group has ordered its seven ABC stations not to broadcast the show.

I’m having a hard time reconciling this. On the one hand, the neocon warhawks of Fox/Rush/etc. have been pounding a drumbeat for a year or more that we must unconditionally support the Administration’s war. We must provide unconditional support for the troops over there. Anything less than that, they tell us, is “treason.” It’s been their common tactic to paint critics of the war as “Unamerican lefty liberals who hate our troops.”

Which makes their protest all the more bizarre. Sinclair justifies their move by saying that the Nightline show “appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq.” So, to make sure I understand, a simple act of recognizing our soldiers who have died undermines our efforts in Iraq? A couple seconds of screen time – a name and face to go with the daily reports of “A soldier from the 101st Airborne was killed in Fallujah today” is politically motivated?

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), in a letter to Sinclair, raises the obvious point:

I write to strongly protest your decision to instruct Sinclair’s ABC affiliates to preempt this evening’s Nightline program. I find deeply offensive Sinclair’s objection to Nightline’s intention to broadcast the names and photographs of Americans who gave their lives in service to our country in Iraq.

I supported the President’s decision to go to war in Iraq, and remain a strong supporter of that decision. But every American has a responsibility to understand fully the terrible costs of war and the extraordinary sacrifices it requires of those brave men and women who volunteer to defend the rest of us; lest we ever forget or grow insensitive to how grave a decision it is for our government to order Americans into combat. It is a solemn responsibility of elected officials to accept responsibility for our decision and its consequences, and, with those who disseminate the news, to ensure that Americans are fully informed of those consequences.

There is no valid reason for Sinclair to shirk its responsibility in what I assume is a very misguided attempt to prevent your viewers from completely appreciating the extraordinary sacrifices made on their behalf by Americans serving in Iraq. War is an awful, but sometimes necessary business. Your decision to deny your viewers an opportunity to be reminded of war’s terrible costs, in all their heartbreaking detail, is a gross disservice to the public, and to the men and women of the United States Armed Forces. It is, in short, sir, unpatriotic. I hope it meets with the public opprobrium it most certainly deserves.

As usual, McCain is spot-on. How disrepectful are Sinclair and their ilk being to our soldiers? They’re howling over a brief recognition of people who have died for this war. If anyone deserves to have their names and pictures shown to the world, it’s the soldiers, not people like Donald Rumsfeld. To try to deny the soldiers this brief, 11:30pm-on-a-Friday-night memorial for partisan reasons is sad.

The only reason I can come up with is that the warhawks are afraid that if people see the human toll that our occupation of Iraq is taking, they might have to provide a legitimate justification for their actions. Much better in that case to keep the death toll to anonymous stats. War is much easier when you don’t have to think about the dead people, after all. It’s no secret that I do not agree with what we’re doing in Iraq, especially since we seem to keep doing things that can only reinforce the perception around the world that America is a big bully, but the people who are dying over there deserve to be recognized. This is the least we can do.

Who would have thought that the hyperpatriotic would be the ones to try to keep our soldiers hidden in the shadows?

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The AP via the N&O reports that The Treasury Department agency entrusted with blocking the financial resources of terrorists has assigned five times as many agents to investigate Cuban embargo violations as it has to track Osama bin Laden’s and Saddam Hussein’s money.

Just another example of how the government’s (both parties are equally guilty) absurdly fanatical obsession with things like Cuba blinds them to serious charges. Nobody in the US government can stomach the fact that Castro didn’t fall quietly at the Bay of Pigs and, to add insult to injury, is still going. Much like the “War on Drugs,” it’s nearly impossible for the feds to admit that they were wrong about anything, so we continue to throw time, money, and people into dead-end problems just so we don’t have to face the facts. And any time someone tries to propose doing away with counterproductive things like the Cuban embargo, they get soundly defeated because “We don’t want to let Castro win!”

With a finite amount of resources to go around, an ever-ballooning scope of government, more wars, and the like, we’re still wasting our money on things like this. I guess the Treasury wants us to believe that people buying Cuban cigars are five times more of a threat to the American way of life than the actions of terrorists. Riiiiiiight.

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I got an email from a friend of mine out in Kansas City the other day.

Upcoming this weekend, 20/20 has a story on adoption, featuring a contest between 8 couples wishing to adopt, and the birth mother.

Here is the link

20/20 is promoting this almost like “Survivor” or “The Bachelor”, with
quotes like: “20/20 cameras were there last October when the competition for Jessica’s baby began” and “they become the judge and jury in an extraordinary competition.”

As a husband who has experienced the pain the infertility causes, and is
currently going through the adoption process, I found this to be horrifying
and disgusting. These 8 couples are competing, with the grand prize being a
baby.

ABC is happily promoting this competition, with teaser indicating that the
mother may not even give up the child in the end. Oooo, the suspense.

If you have ever experienced the pain associated with infertility, or know
someone who has, please let ABC know your opinion on this. ABC is owned by
Disney, and I love everything Disney. However, I can’t believe they would
stoop this low into “reality tv”. Maybe some realities shouldn’t be shown
for entertainment purposes.

He’s kinder to Disney than I would be (those copyright-abusing mofos), but he’s spot on. How sad have we become when we promote adoption as a reality-TV ratings grab? This isn’t a spotlight on adoption. This isn’t a “What do couples who choose to adopt go through?” This isn’t a “How does a teenage mother cope with a child that she can’t take care of.”

Nope. This is “Who wants to win a baby?“ And it’s pathetic. I thought “Temptation Island” was as trashy as it could get, but I think this tops it. Infertility and adoption are issues that should be addressed, and merit discussion, but this is the wrong way to do it.

I know I won’t be watching that show. I wonder if I can say the same about the rest of the country?

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I got my The Perl Journal subscription this morning, so I was able to download the April 2004 issue and read my article.

I think it turned out pretty well – there are only a couple of glaring grammatical things that I should have caught, and somehow a link to the newsgroup comp.lang.perl.tk turned into a URL for http://comp.lang.perl.tk/ (which is a valid website, oddly enough), but on the whole the presentation is solid.

By curious coincidence, Perl guru Randal Schwartz had also written a Perl/Tk article for that issue. So there are Perl/Tk stories from both ends of the spectrum – revered Perl master and “guy who managed to get something to work.” Kind of a yin and yang thing going on. I guess it’s good they cut my Randal Schwartz joke out of my initial draft, then.

I was kinda hoping to get some sort of comment from a reader, either good (“Hey, that was a neat idea”) bad (“Your code sucks!”) or indifferent (“I am acknowledging your presence.”), but so far the ol’ INBOX is empty. I wonder if that means that the topic is so focused that it’s not relevant to most people? I’ll leave that question to the philosophers.

I did spend a good part of the day sending the article to friends and family, posting it on a couple of improv boards, etc. I can’t help it – I’m proud of Mr. Voice, and it’s really cool that I got to write about it in a journal like TPJ. Hopefully other people will be able to glean a little something out of it as well, if nothing more than “You can solve problems in strange ways sometimes.”

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The URL name says it all.

http://www.johnkerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhimanyway.com/

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The April 2004 issue of The Perl Journal is out, and my article is in it. Go me.

Of course, they haven’t hooked me up with the TPJ subscription they said they’d give me, so I can’t actually read the article yet. So if any subscriber out there reads it, let me know how it comes across.

I’ll write more once I get the PDF in my hot little hands.

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Watched all 14 hours of the first round of the NFL draft today. I actually felt the time dilation while I was in front of the TV. After I managed to tear myself away, Hayley was married with kids of her own. How embarassing is it to miss your grandkids while watching one round of draft?

The story, of course, was Eli Manning redefining the term “whiny little bitch.” Being the #1 overall pick wasn’t good enough for him, oh no. He didn’t want to head out to San Diego. He had his short list of teams he’d play for and that was that. So when San Diego went ahead and picked him #1 overall, it looked like he was going to cry. He barely made it up to the stage to briefly hold up a Chargers jersey before going back to his seat to sulk. Chris Berman and the ESPN crew were trying to spin it that it was “classy” for Manning to go up on stage and hold up the jersey. No, that was the bare minimum he should have done. And, as it turns out, the bare minimum was all we got from him.

The #1 pick was announced right after the commish said a few words about Pat Tillman. Tillman played for a horrible team, the Arizona Cardinals, but turned down a raise to stay with the team that drafted him. He then quit football to join the Army. By all accounts, the guy was all class. Then, right after seeing that, we see the other end of the spectrum with Eli Manning. Sad.

Of course, Manning didn’t have to sulk long, as the Chargers traded him to the Giants for NC State QB Philip Rivers (who I was watching to see) and a few draft picks. Again, a study in contrasts. Rivers stayed home in Raleigh with his wife, daughter, and family instead of going to New York. When asked about playing for the Giants before the trade went down, he was very polite and humble, saying that he was happy to be playing for the team that drafted him. Now he’s in essence the #1 overall pick, and comes out looking good. Manning comes out looking like an ass and is headed to a team that’s not much better than San Diego. But at least he got to go back up on stage in New York and hold up a Giants jersey for pictures. Maybe he even wiped the tears from his cheeks before the flashbulbs popped.

Here’s hoping that Rivers does well in San Diego, and that Manning quickly realizes that New York is a rough place to play. The chants of “Eli sucks” that cascaded from Madison Square Garden might just start up again at the Meadowlands in a few months.

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In a shocking turn of events, the code for Mr. Voice (all 4200+ lines of Perl) now compiles under the “use strict” pragma. For the non Perl hacker, “use strict” imposes a more stringent set of rules on your code than Perl normally requires – things like disallowing undeclared variables, symbolic references, and so forth. While Perl’s “There’s More Than One Way To Do It” philosophy means that you don’t have to jump through the extra hoops, doing so helps you catch subtle bugs or design problems, and is generally a requirement if you have other people trying to mess with things. And since the TPJ article is due any day now, I may well have people who are a lot smarter than me grabbing the code and scrutinizing it. Much like when you have company coming over to your house, you at least want to make sure things are somewhat presentable for your guests.

I didn’t start writing Mr. Voice with “use strict” in mind, so it broke a lot of the strict rules. It still worked, mind you, but the code was messy even by my standards. So I’ve made it a point recently to go in and fix the problems that “use strict” was complaining about. One of the first things it led me to fix was switching from symbolic references for my config variables to a configuration hash – things are much nicer that way.

I’d say 3/4 of the problems were related to global variables. Many of them were easy to fix (variables isolated to a particular subroutine or block that just needed a “my” in front of them). Others, however, reflected a fundamental architecture that needed to be worked around or rewritten. I rewrote several parts to make them more elegant (which, I think, is the ultimate point of being strict – to stop habits that may work but could cause problems down the road), and for some of them I just cheated and made the variables global. I can always go back later and rearchitect those sections, and there aren’t so many globals that I’d be ashamed to show the code to other people.

The final hurdle was trying to find out how to properly use an imported constant while strict subs was enabled. I eventually posted to comp.lang.perl.misc and found out that a constant is just an inline function, so I just had to change CONSTANT_NAME to CONSTANT_NAME() and poof, it worked.

So while I’ll be the first to admit that my code still isn’t pretty or elegant, this is a pretty big step toward making it a whole lot nicer.

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Is it a sign of the end times that /bin/true on my Fedora Core 1 system takes the —version flag, and returns useful information?

[minter@localhost minter]$ /bin/true —version
true (GNU coreutils) 5.0
Written by Jim Meyering.

Copyright© 2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

I mean, it’s “true” for goodness sake. It does one thing – exit with a return code of 0. That’s it. It could be nearly 0 bytes long and do its job. But now it’s a 12Kb binary that takes option flags. Talk about feature creep!

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News out of Louisiana is that one of their state lawmakers has introduced a bill to make low-slung pants a crime. House Bill 1626 would punish anyone caught wearing the scandalous pants with a fine of as much as $500 or as many as six months in jail, or both.

You don’t have to look much past the guy who introduced it to see where he’s coming from:

“I’m sick of seeing it,” said Shepherd, a first-term legislator, who added he’s gotten similar complaints from ministers in his district. “The community’s outraged. And if parents can’t do their job, if parents can’t regulate what their children wear, then there should be a law.”

Um, no, you’re an idiot. The solution to every problem that begins “It bothers me that . . .” or “I’m offended that . . .” is not “Let’s pass a law to make it illegal!” Why more people aren’t concerned about this trend is beyond me. Far too often, people feel the need to run to the legislature and pass more laws whenever they don’t get their way, or see something they don’t approve of.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is why it is impossible for any one person to know all of the laws and regulations governing their behavior. That’s why each year that goes by brings more ways that you can break “the law” by living your everyday life. That’s why government is bloated, obtrusive, and expensive. Because people like this feel it’s their moral duty to protect us from ourselves, and so now the government will create the “Lousiana Department of Ass Crack Enforcement,” build a new headquarters building in Baton Rouge, and employ 100 state workers whose job it is to measure whether or not peoples’ pants are worn high enough.

The alternative, getting a damn life or praying for God to smite the Jezebels or hiding in the room or anything that involves realizing that the world isn’t Burger King, and you can’t have it your way, is of course not an option. Nope, gotta have Government take care of us, otherwise we may be forced to see thong straps. Won’t someone think of the children?

On the plus side, though, people in Louisiana wouldn’t have to worry about the dreaded “Plumber’s Crack” if the bill passed. Jethro shows up to work on your sink and Plumber’s Crack makes an appearance, just call the cops and he’s off to jail. That’s a lot easier than the old solution, which involved spackle and caulk.

We get the government we deserve.

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