Tread lightly on the things of earth

According to US soldiers in Iraq asked to pray for Bush —

Thousands of marines have been given a pamphlet called “A Christian’s Duty,” a mini prayer book which includes a tear-out section to be mailed to the White House pledging the soldier who sends it in has been praying for Bush.

Good grief. Not that soldiers praying for Bush is a bad idea, but a far better idea would be for President George W. Bush to commit to pray for each soldier, as he bears the responsibility for having put them in harm’s way in the first place.

The marines’ pamphlet reportedly says, “Pray that the President and his advisers will be strong and courageous to do what is right regardless of critics.”

This “regardless of critics” business bugs the hell out of me. You know, the President and his advisers are a control system. And a control system that doesn’t respond to feedback is broken.

[via AlterNet]

I’m trying to figure out deep down where I stand philosophically on free software. Specifically, I want to identify which of the various free-software licenses aligns best with my values. (I’m a mad stickler for internal congruence.)

On the one hand, I’m a big proponent of GNU; Richard Stallman’s unwavering commitment to freedom as embodied in the GPL appeals to me. (I’m especially influenced at the moment as I’m reading Stallman’s essays in Free Software, Free Society, which came with my FSF associate membership.) Accordingly, I’m a long-time fan of Debian GNU/Linux and an emerging fan of Gentoo Linux. On the other hand …

I’m also a fan of the simplicity and, apparently, the altruism embodied in the modified BSD license (under General). BSD licensing suits my nature as a behind-the-scenes contributor who’s happiest when I light up people’s faces anonymously. Accordingly, I’m also a big fan of NetBSD and now, Mac OS X, which is a free BSD (Darwin)-plus-commercial software hybrid.

Today I see that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber interviews Brent Simmons, the mostly-Mac programmer and creator of NetNewsWire, a Mac OS X news aggregator. Excellent thoughts! Maybe Brent is hitting my philosophical bullseye with this:

I agree that open source and closed source can coexist within the same projects. NetNewsWire is an example of that. Mac OS X is sort of an example … there’s a lot of mix there, lots of open source, lots of commercial software. I think that’s a good thing, if for no other reason than diverse ecosystems tend to be healthier.

What I’d like to see is less zealotry from all corners. Open source is good, shareware is good, commercial software is good. It all comes down to good apps, using the right tool for the job. I prefer less ideology and more generosity. For me, Mac OS X is the only OS that seems to have in its DNA that spirit.

Less zealotry, less ideology, more generosity. Yes. That sounds like where I’m at, man.

Thanks, Brent and John.

Next up: BBEdit, GNU Emacs, or XEmacs? :-)

From Bill Berkowitz, Coalition of the Chilling:

In one of those turn the mirror on thyself moments, [Bill] Bennett writes: “There’s nothing that has the power to immunize against thought so much as ideology — and if you’re an ideologue, evidence doesn’t matter, facts don’t matter. You’re an ideologue, which means that you have a priori beliefs which cannot be dislodged by any evidence or any experience.”

Interesting thing is, Bennett is talking about anti-war protesters, people who are displaying the imaginative and behavioral flexibility to press for alternatives to returning violence for (theoretical) violence.

Long time Religious right activist Dr. D. James Kennedy, head of Coral Ridge Ministries, focuses his ire on mainline Protestant leaders whose opposition to the war is “essentially propping up Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

I guess Jesus telling him to love his enemies really ticks him off.

This level of “seeing” make me think of the tragicomic circle of dwarfs near the end of C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle. The dwarfs maintain they are sitting in a dark stable, while those around them plainly see they are in broad daylight. These dwarfs choose not to see the light lest they risk being duped. Practically speaking, they prefer the darkness to (the possibility of) the light. Aslan says of the dwarfs that they are in a prison of their minds’ own making, “so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out” (more on this passage found via Google).

I watched part of Children of Dune today, and was reminded of the Bene Gesserit litany —
Fear is the mind-killer …

Yep, that seems to be true.

My next step:
Cultivate more compassion toward those whom fear grips.

In today’s NYTimes, U.S. Rejects Criticism on Awarding of Iraq Contracts:

An American official has strongly rejected European complaints that the United States was unfairly awarding contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq to American companies. The overriding United States objective, he said today, was to provide the quickest possible relief to the Iraqi people.

Hmmm, the way to provide the “quickest possible relief to the Iraqi people” is to stop bombing them. We’re not willing to stop bombing; hence, the stated objective cannot be true.

Further, the situation in which one country completely controls both destruction and reconstruction is grossly unethical; it displays a massive conflict of interest. Such a situation sets up opportunity for creating an infinite cash flow: bomb, award contract, bomb, award contract …

Given our sluggish U.S. economy and our looming, mounting, darn near incalculable U.S. national debt, it’s unwise to think future politicians will be any more able to resist this bottomless cup o’ money than current politicians are. Reconstruction contracts really do need to be overseen by an international body, governed by international law.

Wait, that won’t work — we don’t heed international law.

We’re shameless. And we brag about it. God help us.

[via Arms and the Man]

2003-03-31 update: What do you know?—
BBC News: Halliburton out of Iraq rebuild.

2003-04-11 update: Cheney’s hand back in cookie jar?—
New York Times: Details given on contract Halliburton was awarded.

The Pentagon contract given without competition to a Halliburton subsidiary to fight oil well fires in Iraq is worth as much as $7 billion over two years, according to a letter from the Army Corps of Engineers that was released today.

The contract also allows Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary, to earn as much as 7 percent profit. That could amount to $490 million.

In wrestling with whether to preach on the war, Fr. Bojangles at Le Prêtre Noir arrived at this insight:

The real Evil is the war itself and the division it’s causing. That’s how Evil survives and succeeds: in dividing us in our opinions and separating us from each other into fortresses of opinion so that we stop seeing each other and listening to each other.

Then he zeroes in further on what I probably need to hear, what I probably need to learn from:

Jesus, unlike others in his time, and us today, was neither for or against Rome. He didn’t waste his time pointing up the shortcomings of the administration or its benefits. There was no point to it. Within the politics of the world he lived in and the world we live in there is a higher way, and that is the way he tried to show us — the reign of God, in which love and caring for one another is the prime objective.

(Working “within the politics of the world” remains important, I think, insofar as God’s reign embraces the prophetic call to “do justice” as part of our caring for one another — and doing justice sometimes requires our peaceably working to dismantle unjust power structures like the one in which we find ourselves.)

The whole entry is worthwhile IMO. Go read it. Thanks, Fr. B.

Demosthenes provides a keen diagnosis of the prevailing U.S. spiritual condition:

It’s a catch-22, a fatal loop condition in the software of our nation’s soul; in this GWB perfectly represents his supporters. We are ignorant because we are too arrogant to learn. We are arrogant because we have learned nothing.

Universal antidotes to this toxic ignorance/arrogance combo?

Repentance, humility, self-education.

Now.

[in comment to Daily Kos entry Stunning victories in Bush’s War on the World]

In CounterPunch column The Lessons of Elizabeth Smart, Gordon Solberg absolutely nails the “get along, be nice, don’t make waves, obey authority” social world in which I’m, uh, embedded:

There is a lot of security, and often a very comfortable living, to be had from following “the path most traveled.” This path can be called “the lifestyle freeway” — it’s a broad, easy highway (the path Jesus said leads to destruction, but that’s another essay). … One merely has to accept the traditional religious beliefs (fundamentalist Christian), the traditional lifestyle (high impact consumer), and traditional politics (conservative, almost always Republican). At all times, get along. Be nice. Don’t make waves.

Gordon’s assessment of the phenomenon I’ve been calling being “pridefully dumb” is a hint more compassionate than mine:

Consider the “pro-life” “Christians for war.” Whenever I remind them of all those poor, unborn fetuses destroyed by Bush’s “shock and awe” massacre, they go into disconnect mode. George W. Bush would never destroy fetuses, therefore fetuses are not being destroyed …

This ability to disconnect at the slightest provocation is what makes nice Americans so dangerous, because this allows our government to get away with any outrage. Our planes bombed a wedding party? Never heard about it. Our country supports ruthless dictators except when they control vast amounts of oil? I never read that anywhere. The entire world opposes Bush’s massacre? That’s not what CNN says.

Maybe, as Gordon hints, this disconnect phenomenon is enculturated and therefore involuntary. I really want to understand the root cause(s) of this disconnecting so I can incline a pastoral ear toward people afflicted with it. Because waking ourselves from this stupor is imperative: a disconnected society is doomed, as viable by itself as a lung in an icechest.

Right now, though, the only response I can find in myself is anger … at … people … not … thinking.

I learned yesterday last week last month that you can install Cygwin OpenSSH in Windows NT, then use its port forwarding almost as if the Windows box were a Unix box.

This functional tidbit is useful to me because high-speed access to my work network is via a @#$%* proprietary Windows-only VPN tool. That’s been a PITA for me because (1) I’m accustomed to wireless PowerBook computing from anywhere in the house or yard and (2) I haven’t had a spare dedicated PC to run Windows so I’ve had to boot my multiboot NetBSD router into Win NT to access work network — and without the router my internal wireless network is down. IOW, too much trouble to use.

I finally found a spare PC to run Win NT. And I installed Win NT and the VPN software on it. So now I can access my work network without taking down my internal wireless network. Good. But only while I’m sitting at that PC. Not good. Back yard swing beckons.

So I installed TightVNC and Cygwin sshd on that WinNT box. Now from anywhere in the house or yard I can

• access the in-house NT desktop (via TightVNC; in-house NT box can then be headless)
• open an ssh session from PowerBook to in-house NT box and then — once authenticated via its Windows GUI VPN tool — open another ssh session from it to my work Unix boxes
• let TightVNC port forward through the NT box’s sshd to display my VNC-enabled work NT desktop on my PowerBook screen (using, say vncviewer -depth 8 -compresslevel 4 -encodings 'copyrect hextile' -via home_ntbox work_ntbox:0"

Luo’s generous instructions were nearly all I needed to get sshd running in Win NT. (And no need for Putty in my case because I’m doing everything from Unix.)

Security considerations? All’s well, I think, because —

• My wireless access point only allows connections from my MAC addresses
• All command-line and VNC content is going through encryped ssh connections
• VPN connection times out at intervals and must be reauthenticated

Wrinkles remaining —

• VPN- plus ssh encryption slows TightVNC’s responsiveness considerably
• Work-to-home VNC session droppage happens too often; I think there’s a too-quick session timeout happening somewhere

I’m mentioning this here because I spent years not realizing it was possible; I’d like to see others progress faster. If you see I’m overlooking additional useful functionality or else some security consideration, by all means please drop me a comment.

Hmmm, I can no longer say I have absolutely no use for Windows. Now I have exactly one use for it. :-)