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Author Archive for Dan Klarmann

A convoluted mind behind a curly face. A regular traveler, a science buff, and first generation American. Graying of hair, yet still verdant of mind. Lives in South St. Louis City. See his personal website for (too much) more.

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Fundamentalism, Fox, and … Scientology?
By Dan Klarmann on October 28th, 2009

Fundamentalism, Fox, and … Scientology?

I was recently chatting with a friend who has been a Scientologist for several decades. He was attacking the White House for its conspiracy with other networks to censor and muzzle Fox News. He later sent me this screed on the Campaign for Liberty blog under the Subject “Fox News is Right”. The CfL is one of the political arms of Scientology. Check out their mission and board if you want. The introduction to the post is (in part, go read it yourself):

Why is America under such a vicious and prolonged [internal] attack against its basic beliefs? Why are some Americans attacking the hand that feeds them? Why tear down a working system? None of the attacks make sense. It is as though we are living in a looking glass world. I am looking backwards and it seems left is right and wrong is right and right is wrong. Politically correct speak replaced plain speak and the silent Christian majority are called domestic terrorists.

Okay, I paused at this point and replied (in part):

Lost me at “silent Christian majority”. An iconic building in every neighborhood, billboards every mile, ads every hour on radio and TV channels not already owned outright by Christian networks, and their creed printed on money and embedded in children’s daily oath to the flag does not fit my definition of “silent”.

I didn’t mention the wholesome Christian activities of blockading health clinics, continuous protests with gory signs on streets and campuses, bombing clinics and shooting doctors.

But the actual point of the article is that the KGB is alive and well and still trying to take over America via a conspiracy with the Psychiatric Industrial Complex. They have (the article claims) powerful mind control methods that are being used on the public.

If so, I asked in reply, how did we ever manage to get rid of CheneyBush?

Today, my friend sent me (among other Scientology political pieces) a YouTube video attacking Obama’s plan to sign the latest international emissions control treaty. It took a while of watching to figure this out, among the doomsayer speech of One World Government, global warming denialism, and the demise of America and such. Many of the positive comments to the video seem to be from garden variety End Days Christians, but the platform is quite visibly Scientology.

The point of all this is, Why are the Scientologists aligning with Fox and Christian Fundamentalists? For recruitment? For political palatability? To hijack a powerful propaganda machine?

Read and listen to what they actually say, and get back to me.

American Culture • Censorship • Civil Rights • Communication • Culture • Current Events • Featured • Law • Networking • Politics • Religion • Science • advertising • global warming • ignorance
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Amazon Accidentally Increases Internet Disinformation
By Dan Klarmann on October 20th, 2009

Amazon Accidentally Increases Internet Disinformation

We have previously posted regarding the latest reprint of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”, by Ray Comfort. If you don’t know about it, it has a 50 page forward full of untruths, confusion, and misdirection in an attempt to discredit the original text that follows. Yes, he’s trying to use Darwin to discredit 200 years of thoroughly tested evolutionary biology.

Unfortunately, Amazon.com reviews and ratings confuse it with another (reputable) reprint by the same name, as discussed in detail here:

American Culture • Culture • Current Events • Education • Evolution • Intellectual property • Internet • Media • Religion • Science • Videos • Web Site • advertising • ignorance
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Microsoft Stabs FireFox
By Dan Klarmann on October 18th, 2009

Microsoft Stabs FireFox

I’ve long been an advocate of the FireFox browser. I’ve used it since it was first announced, and rarely use IE for anything but testing web designs and browsing Microsoft’s own non-W3C compliant web pages.

One of my reasons is that Internet Explorer has major vulnerabilities via its ability to directly run ActiveX code on the machine of users without asking permission. That is, it is a hacker’s pipeline into your operating system.

Well, a few weeks ago, a Microsoft Update quietly installed the .Net Framework assistant into any FireFox browser it found. Shoved that narrow shiv of vulnerability right into the heart of the generally more secure FireFox core. When it was noticed, the savvy segment of FireFox users were outraged. Not just because it was done, but because it was done in such a way that it couldn’t be easily removed! Sure, it would let FireFox users see those rare sites dependent on ActiveX, but it would also let hackers run ActiveX on your machine!

When I found out, I first Googled to find a way to remove it using regedit and about:config (two dangerous powerful tools). But a week later, updates by Microsoft and FireFox made it easier to remove. If you have it, remove it.

Here’s one of the articles about it from ZDNet, a generally Microsoft friendly environment. This article also contains removal instructions that assume you have recent updates.

btw: If you didn’t know. FireFox spell checks all blog entry fields as you type. And you can add nifty customizable Make Link tools for easy creation of links in comments to blogs and such. Just highlight text on a page, rt-click and Make Link to copy complete link code, ready to paste.

Current Events • Featured • Internet • Technology • Web Site • computers
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Die, Caps Lock, Die
By Dan Klarmann on October 12th, 2009

Die, Caps Lock, Die

One of my peeves against propagated obsolete legacy is the caps lock key for computers. I hate it. In the 32 years that I’ve been using computers, I don’t think that I’ve ever hit it intentionally. It is where it is because typewriters used it to mechanically lock down the shift key.

But I have yet to meet anyone who types in all caps, except to indicate online screaming. Even then, it isn’t hard to hold a shift key with a pinky while typing with the other 9 fingers.

But now there is a fix! In every version of Windows since W2K, there is a secret patch that lets you convert any key to another. I’ve chosen to make CAPSLOCK into a simple shift. If I really need to lock caps, I can do it through software, or convert another useless key (e.g. scroll lock) into caps lock.

I found the magical tool in JohnHaller.com’s Useful Stuff essays: Disable Caps Lock. It’s a simple registry tweak that he found at annoyances.org (where they have full technical details).

Just download and launch the tweak. You get warnings, But it works! Just follow the directions and you’ll never be bothered by caps lock again.

Quality of Life • Recommended Reading/Films/Sites • Software • Web Site • computers
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Conservative Rewrites the Bible
By Dan Klarmann on October 11th, 2009

Conservative Rewrites the Bible

We’ve featured Andy, son of Phyllis Schafly and his anti-reason heavily monitored blog site, Conservapedia before. His latest project is to create an edited version of the Bible better suited to American Reactionary philosophy.

Yes, he is removing all those Liberal parts where the inerrant Word of God must be wrong.

Mark C. Chu-Carroll (Good Math blog) wrote The Conservative Rewrite of the Bible where he gives specific examples of what is being edited and why. Like removing any mention of “government”, and merging all the names of God to avoid confusion. Even God, in his 10 Commandments, says to forsake all those other Gods over which he has no control and only worship him.

Schlafly represents this as a new, better translation. But he is using the KJV as his primary source. The English translation with the most known inconsistencies from original source material is his best version from which to start. Well, might as well. After all, he will be “fixing” God’s Word.

Even conservative Christians that I know think that this is a crazy project.

American Culture • Censorship • Current Events • Featured • Religion • ignorance
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By Dan Klarmann on October 09th, 2009

My Cat Died and I’m Feeling Old

This morning my cat was stiff as cardboard. He’d died overnight. It was not much of a surprise, as he has refused to eat for 26 days. He basically died of AIDS, the feline variety (FIV). So I’ve been a bit distracted for about a month, and now the sword has fallen.

I posted a short photo essay of his short life here, if you are curious.

Then I read today’s XKCD:

XKCD is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5

So I’ve outlived several cats, and kids born after too many events I experienced are old enough to bring them to mind. I’ve lived on the same block for as long as it took me to go from birth to two college degrees. I predate manned space flight and weather satellites. My first record player had both 16 and 78, as well as 33 and 45. I have changed tubes in my radio. 1984 still feels like it should be the future. I celebrated the American bicentennial. I still have a Vote McGovern button from just after my parents got their citizenships.

No real point, today.

Current Events • History • Humor • Meaning of Life • Whimsy
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By Dan Klarmann on October 01st, 2009

New Direction in the World Wide Web

The U.S. Government is considering loosening the hold on the group created by the U.S. Government to oversee internet naming for the world. This recent PC Magazine article describes how ICANN Begins Moving Away from U.S. Control.

One big milestone will be to allow alphabets other than Latinate (English) in website names. This is a big change; going from one-byte letters to unicode two byte letters to accommodate the thousands-of-letter alphabets of pictographic languages. You browser already can handle this. And the next billion new internet users won’t need to first become fluent in the Roman Alphabet.

But the change that has the business community abuzz is that they are opening up the Top Level Domains. You know, .com, .org, .us, etc. Back when they added .com and .org there was some sputtering about the lack of need. After all, we had .gov, .org, .edu, and all the country domains. Why have specific virtual realms for-profit and non-profit suffixes? Then the web took off, and “everyone” soon associated the commercial superdomain (.com) with “the web”. Eventually, even government entities gave up on .gov, and made .com their native home, like usps.com.

Now, businesses are worried that opening up these suffixes completely will get expensive. One likely suggestion being debated is “.food”. Will McDonalds have to pony up to buy its suite of names in .food as well as in .com? What if someone opens up .burger? Want dot fries with that? It could get expensive and confusing to have dozens or hundreds of names for any given website.

Will this become a new boom time for cyber-squatters, those who buy up names and hold them for ransom?

And what about “www”? 15 years ago, there still was a subtle distinction between hyper-text transfer protocol (http://) and the Web (www). The former originally applied to text-only Bulletin Boards. But this has long evaporated, and www has become an artifact that remains mainly because it is easier to type than “http://” as an indicator to a browser of what you mean by a URL.

American Culture • Bigotry • Communication • Current Events • Internet
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By Dan Klarmann on September 28th, 2009

Womens Rights in the 21st Century

I found a fascinating post on one of the blogs I regularly read: Weekend Diversion: An Amazing Group of Women. It is mostly about the Asgarda women of the Ukraine, a small group of (mostly young) women working for the rights of women in an environment plagued with sex trafficking and other abuses of women, Eastern Europe. There is also a video of Loudon Wainwright singing “Daughter”. Well worth clicking over to hear the song and see pictures of essentially a modern tribe of Amazons.

Meanwhile, I wondered if the United States is the only nation in which there are so many groups of women actively protesting against rights for women. Like Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, who worked diligently to persuade women to vote against the Equal Rights Amendment, and continue to agitate to prevent any laws from passing that explicitly give women protections already enjoyed by men.

Pro Life groups are also essentially anti-women’s rights, and largely manned by women. It is basically a matter of whether the government or a women may legally decide who or what may live within her body and what may be expelled. Men already have this protection, granted by their reproductively deficient bodies allowing them to claim any foreign internal organism as a hostile alien.

American Culture • Civil Rights • Communication • Current Events • Health • Noteworthy • Reproductive Rights • Social justice • Web Site • ignorance
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My Stuff Expanded to Fill All My Gigabytes, Ergo Got More Gigs
By Dan Klarmann on September 23rd, 2009

My Stuff Expanded to Fill All My Gigabytes, Ergo Got More Gigs

I am old enough to remember floppy disks that deserved the name. They bent. I remember wondering why I might need more than one to back up my files. 360,000 characters was a lot of writing. A full novelette.

When I bought my new desktop computer a couple of years ago, I got what I thought was an adequate hard disk: Equivalent to 417,000 5¼” floppies, or room for about 100,000 five megapixel photos.

But then I started playing with video. A normal digital video at 640 x 480 30 fps eats 100Mb/min. So my once open spaces got filled in. What to do?

I considered adding a second drive. I’d done this on several of my previous computers. It requires remembering what is on which drive for daily use, as well as backing up. And how does one reliably back up such huge amounts? I didn’t want to do this, yet again.

So I decided to replace my main drive. “What?” you may well ask, aghast. This is not the ordeal it once was. I got a bigger drive, cloned the old one onto it, and then swapped it. Easy, and here’s how (assuming you aren’t stuck with a single-source machine (Apple)):

(Details “below the fold”)

Education • Whimsy • computers
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By Dan Klarmann on September 13th, 2009

Microsoft Practically Admits Vista Sucks

I’ve recently bought a new laptop, and have been battling Windows Vista for a week to get it to run some of my clients’ apps. I had considered paying an extra hundred dollars to retrograde my system to XP. But I figured that the future is coming, so I might as well get a handle on it.

Then tonight I saw a commercial:

Did I hear this right? Microsoft is practically admitting the Vista nightmare is drawing to a close. The last clause is, “…more happy is coming”. When my free upgrade to Windows 7 comes, I hope it solves some of my problems. But I doubt it.

Current Events • Technology • Whimsy • advertising • computers
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By Dan Klarmann on September 11th, 2009

They Might Be Science

For those of you who haven’t already heard, They Might Be Giants have a new album and video series ostensibly for kids. Here’s a sample:

Just what I’m always arguing, “Science is Real.”

American Culture • Art • Communication • Education • Films and Videos • Science • ignorance • music • scientific method
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Missouri’s Turn for Anti-Science Ridicule
By Dan Klarmann on August 31st, 2009

Missouri’s Turn for Anti-Science Ridicule

A minor brouhaha erupted over a t-shirt in Sedalia Missouri. But this isn’t about an uppity student. The band director designed an official band t-shirt to illustrate the evolution of brass music. What image did he choose to evoke the idea?

Yep, a common ascent-of-man icon from the early 20th century.

After some parents saw the shirt proudly worn at the Missouri State Fiar parade, they complained. From the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch:

“I was disappointed with the image on the shirt,” said Sherry Melby, a band parent who teaches in the district. “I don’t think evolution should be associated with our school.”

What sort of science program do you think she had? What sort do you think she would vote for?

The school quickly recalled the t-shirts, eating the cost of their production, and will be designing new shirts that don’t offend by presenting an image that obliquely refers to actual science.

Naturally, Pharyngula jumped on it.

And in the Sedalia Democrat, they quote the assistant band director about pulling the shirts,

“If the shirts had said ‘Brass Resurrections’ and had a picture of Jesus on the cross, we would have done the same thing,” he said.

Apparently there is a strong belief that science is a religion that should not even be tangentially promoted over any other belief.

And people wonder why I sometimes write that I live in the state of Misery.

American Culture • Censorship • Communication • Current Events • Education • Evolution • Featured • Religion • Science • ignorance
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The Hierarchy of Disagreement
By Dan Klarmann on August 17th, 2009

The Hierarchy of Disagreement

I found this illustration of how to order your arguments at the Starts With A Bang blog. This blog usually leads one to a first source. However, I had to do some digging to find the original creator of this image. This image is all over the web, but I think the first source is here, from the Create Debate blog in April 2008.

This image (click on it to enlarge) was created to illustrate an earlier point by Paul Graham, whose text-only posts I’ve been (occasionally) reading for years.

The premise is to always lead with your top level reasonable arguments, and never resort to the bottom layers. As Ethan Siegel (SWAB) put it,

It’s sometimes tough to decipher what the central point of someone else’s argument is, because most people don’t argue clearly and logically. But if you can identify it, that’s when you win. When someone else mucks around at the bottom of the pyramid, don’t sink to their level; stay up high. Those top two levels are really the only way to ever change someone’s mind, or to sway other intelligent, thinking people to your side.

This is an attitude that would serve us well on this site.

Communication • Education • Featured • Web Site • Writing • scientific method
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