Jon Stewart was on CNN's CROSSFIRE today, declaring it all theater, declaring the lunch naked, making known the opinion of many that such a farcical slapfigh passing for the highest level of political discourse is in fact hurtful for the country and for democracy. Watching Carlson and Begalia do their best to laugh it off, you really get a sense of how hollow that whole scene is. Stewart's on the main nerve now: it's not Bush that's the problem. He's not even all that good a politician.

What's wrong is the system that let him do what he has done.

Jon, you are now my personal hero, not in any romantic sense, but in the mythic sense that I identify with your struggle and wish that I could do the things you are able to do. My hat is off.

Bittorrent link here. Pass it on!

(what the heck is "bittorrent?")

One of my early literay heroes is blogging again, after taking quite a long hiatus:

Why?

Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succintly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.

And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, "At times, to be silent is to lie."

See, George, now you've got the neuromancer on your ass too. What are you gonna do?

No One Cares If You Don't Vote.com

In case anyone else has idiot friends who aren't registered/aren't voting. It's a work in progress. Suggestions welcome.

I'm having email problems. My hosting company and my spam-filtering service aren't working well with one another, and as a result email sent to me at outlanishjosh has a snail-mail-like delay of 3-days.

Sometimes the machines turn against you, and the only solution is to pay them tribute.

Update: It seems I was getting incoming spam faster than my service could filter it. To protect their server from overload, they'll pick up 50 messages every 7 minutes. Since I was apparently at times getting something like 10 spams a minute, my real email was sometimes going without being picked up. Amazing. I've tweaked some settings on my side and they opened it up to slurp in more messages on theirs, so hopefully my email will be back to normal.

But this just goes to show you what a total mess the email system is. An unwanted message every 6 seconds? That's unbelievable. The world of spam is crazy. For instance, did you know that 80% of spam comes from home computers (read: windows PCs) infected with malivious code that allows them to be used as spam-sending zombies by their devious masters?