This shouldn't happen:

At around 11:30 p.m., CSOs asked a male student using a computer in the back of the room to leave when he was unable to produce a BruinCard during a random check. The student did not exit the building immediately.

The CSOs left, returning minutes later, and police officers arrived to escort the student out. By this time the student had begun to walk toward the door with his backpack when an officer approached him and grabbed his arm, at which point the student told the officer to let him go. A second officer then approached the student as well.

The student began to yell "get off me," repeating himself several times.

It was at this point that the officers shot the student with a Taser for the first time, causing him to fall to the floor and cry out in pain. The student also told the officers he had a medical condition.

Of course this being the 21st century, someone had a cellphone with a camera. It's kinda ugly to watch:

The student clearly has some issues with authority, but this is completely unacceptable behavior by the cops. It's also fucked up that there are "random ID checks" at the UCLA library, which is what triggered the whole incident in the first place.

The crisis of meaning is upon us again, and it's back with a vengeance. A lonesome vengeance, to be specific, the kind that hasn't been around in a long while.

Taking a look back at the old Love page, we can see where my life left off three years ago, misspellings and all. Sigh.

The present moment feels most like 2002:

I'm after the other thing: the harder thing: the thing where you find someone you like and you make something between the two of you over time. And I don't know how to get that happening other than wait and see.

The trouble is "wait and see" is a very boring and unsatisfying strategy. It leaves one feeling rather powerless and at the mercy of the cosmos.

I'm not the same person I was at the age of 23, and I'm not in the same environment either -- not by a long shot -- but I remember what that felt like and it's close to what I feel now.

One response has been that I'm going back through my history, wondering about the ones that got away, or more often that I got away from and later regretted. This is a debatable thing to get into, rummaging through the old files. It can feel weak and crutch-like, but you might look up long-lost connections on myspace and find something that strikes a spark. I think it all comes down to the spirit of the thing. Also, there's that bit about learning from history -- and purely as a matter of science one can't rule out a blast from the past being the ticket to ride.

The point, though, is that there's a kind of emotional turbulence that's not been around in some time. Strange feelings are brewing inside the Konezone. Gut feelings; questions without answers that lead to whistful stares into the rain. Vulnerability and instability too. I don't know where (or when) The One will come from, but I'm pretty sure that as long as I'm pushing for it or stressing it, it's not gonna happen.

Fucking annoying, that.

My man (and Firefox engineer) Tony Chang just answered one of my biggest problems with FF. When you hit backspace on a page, it's equivalent to hitting the back button. This is especially annoying on forms, as I'll often hit backspace one too many times and end up going off the page, which kills whatever other work I've done on the form. Raaar!

Luckily there's a fix for this. You type about:config into your browser bar, and search for "backspace." Then double-click on the browser.backspace_action line, and change the value to -1.

Problem solved. Thanks, Tony.

The Girth at Hastings 2006 Graduation

He passed the bar.

Glenn Greenwald:

That really is why we are in the situation we confront in Iraq. Because Richard "Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise" Cohen and his ilk demonized and caricatured the Howard Deans of the world as pacifist, amateur, naive, stupid, frivolous, dangerous French hippies even though everything Dean was saying was true and prescient and everything Cohen was saying was false and idiotic. And they're still doing that.

Atrios:

Someone finally gives Dean some props.

On a more depressing note, while hunting for something I came across this article Yglesias wrote. In May. Of 2004.

I can't believe we're still having the same goddamn conversation.

I strongly doubt that we'll see much of an uptick in accountability or integrity from the existing class of media figures and political pundits. They made their career choices a while ago; they live in that other world now. However, these people will probably continue to slide ever further into irrelevance.

Perhaps it will be the Koreans who first develop giant Mecha solders...

Apparently these are designed for deployment along the DMZ. Still kind of creepy though.

This week I've been having a hard time getting up and at 'em. This is in contrast to the past several months where I've been up by 8am at the latest on most weekdays.

I dunno... it feels like some kind of weird senioritis-like plague. The holidays are coming up; the business seems to be working; pressure's off. I'm kind of in a lonely little limbo personally, pent up, a little horny, feeling like I should be getting creative instead of squareball workin' my life away. Raaar!

Well, I get out of town this weekend, down to SF. I've been here nonstop for six weeks, so maybe I just need a break, a little city energy to charge the old dynamo.

It should be fun. I have a cool summit on transparency, and the Girth is getting his Bar Results back (party!) and the Airman of the Year will be in town on leave. We'll no doubt get into some fine trouble.

Oh my god, I wrote some good shit back in the day: Monkey Summer 2002:

He talked about seeing one of his peers almost drown recently at the pool near his house and how they hadn't let any of the kids see the CPR. He talked about emailing the President and NASA, trying to get his point across. He talked about how it was sometimes hard for him to connect with the other kids, about his parents and how it was sometimes hard to relate to them. He told me, "sometimes when you think your going to get the greatest reward, you just end up getting into trouble. And sometimes, when you think you're going to get in trouble, you end up with the greatest reward," neatly summarizing a whole morning's contemplation of the previous night's fiasco. The conversation naturally drew to a close. He was 12 after all and our prospective topics were rather limited. I thanked him for his time, asked him to look for us next year and bit a fond fair well to KC. I couldn't help but wonder how adolescence would treat him. Trouble vs. the greatest reward. Pure genius. I sat in the grass and contemplated his brilliant rendering of my fitful evening prior.

The doubting is over, Hillary Clinton is almost certainly going to run for president:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) is to step down soon from her position in the Democratic leadership, a move that clears the deck for her ambitions outside the Senate.

Clinton is also keeping her campaign offices in New York and Washington operational despite the fact that she does not face reelection for six years, and had scant opposition last Tuesday.

Many in the progressive online community will wince at this. She's not very well liked, and a lot of people have The Fear about her. They both doubt her worth as a leader -- too corporate, lacking in principles, too related to a recent President with an iffy policy legacy -- and fear her power as a totem to rally the orcs at the GOP base. The dittohead horde has been fed for a generation on tales of "the Hildebeast." She would stoke their passion like almost no other.

To me, Hillary has been a rather unexciting politician since getting kicked around on that Health Care thing back in 1993-94. I find her public persona to be almost unbearable -- a transparent exercise in very bad acting -- although I've been assured by more than one person who's worked with her closely that in-person she's great. If that's so, she'd better start showing some greatness in public, because really if you try and watch her do her thing at a podium it's pretty piss poor.

Perhaps this is because on the inside she longs to be a revolutionary firebrand, and because (like a certain former Veep who worked with her Husband) she doubts this inner flame and calculates her positions to retain her position, rendering her hopelessly without courage or any semblance of conviction. I dunno. I really have no idea who these people are or what drives them. I just know she's a C+ performer at best on the stump.

Start practicing, Hill. Dig deep.

Oh man. It's baaaaaaack.

Thanks to me remembering how to use sed and bash (handy dandies from the hardcore geek toolbelt) and updating a few PHP scripts from their clunky 2001-style coding, I've resurrected my "classic" content!!!

This is really good stuff, the first two years of outlandishjosh.com. That was a special time and place to be: North Brooklyn in 2001-2003, right in the sweet spot for the second-wave, before the war, and before the eurotrash and Single Guys In Finance started showing up.

Some of this is of course fantastically out of date, and my intention at this point is to bring it all into the new system... it's a TODO I may or may not ever get around do, but I'm happy to make the juicy stuff available again. Heck, if only for myself. It's as good as an old journal. Personal archeology.

Some highlights:

• Ren Fayre: Bugs, Drugs, Neitzche -- a gonzo account of my trip to Luke's graduation-year extravaganza at Reed College.
• For that matter, the whole Life section is pretty good. That's where the juicy stuff is.
• Bridgetrips -- I used to do a ritual of writing the thoughts that came from reflections on riding my old first city bike over the W-burg bridge.
• Performance Texts -- stuff that I wrote to perform in front of people in a theatrical setting.
• One Year Later -- a rant written on the first anneversary of 9/11

There's a lot of gold in the day to day archive of that old frontpage. Shames me every time I read it. I used to be so good!