Someone passed along a quote to me yesterday made by the Nazi war criminal Herman Goering. Here is the original transcription, made by Gustave Gilbert, a German-speaking intelligence officer and psychologist who was granted free access by the Allies to all the prisoners held in the Nuremberg jail, of a conversation he had with Goering. It think it’s fairly appropriate in light of current events.

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”

“There is one difference,” I pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”

“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

I’m not sure how much longer this will remain active, but the folks over at Desmond Crisis are hosting a temporary mp3 audio stream of a police scanner feed from the war protests in San Francisco. A friend has pointed out that DNA Lounge has tuned its audio streams to the police channels as well.On a related note, here are a few anti-war related sites in San Francisco, Chicago, and nationwide.

I don’t have much new to report these days, so I figure I should share some blog entries that I happened upon that I thought were interesting reads:Switch, or why I stopped hating my PC and love my Mac.Why Nerds are UnpopularThey are fairly long pieces, so make sure you set aside enough time to read each.

Paul Graham has written another article about the work he is doing with his Bayesian spam filtering software these days. I recently sent him the following email describing a potential improvement to the software. Continue reading →

I’ve found a number of web sites over the past few years that have excellent pictures suitable for computer desktops (well, I like them). Here are some of my favorites so far:End EffectMandoluxTazl DesktopsThe desktop images at the following web sites can be hit or miss, but I’ve found a few good ones among the cruft:MacDesktopsMacMonkiesAnd this site has a number of desktops plus links to many other desktop sites:Rampant Mac

Updates for two cool Mac software packages have come to my attention. First of all, that Collapse! game that I mentioned in an earlier post is now available for Mac OS X, as is its successor Collapse! II.Also, a new version of the free, extensible web export plug-in for iPhoto called BetterHTMLExport has been released. A few of the new features to 1.6.4 were ones that I asked the author to add (after making a small donation of course): album name and comment now exported; added ability to add custom information to be exported; and several new variables available to templates (nextThumbFileName, previousThumbFileName – based on advice from Ian). I haven’t tried the new update yet, but I will inevitably test it out on one of the new rounds of photos to be uploaded.

Apple and Kodak recently had a promotion for 100 free 4×6 prints when submitted via iPhoto. The offer originally expired on December 31, 2002, but it looks like it may have been extended until February 28, 2003. Below is an account of my ordering experience, as posted on the Apple discussion board (may be deleted eventually). One thing that I did not note in the posting was that I went to Mike‘s place to celebrate New Years Eve, so in order to monitor the image uploading process I set up VNC on my G4 before I left and remotely checked up on the process periodically from time to time. Isn’t technology grand? Continue reading →

Okay, with nothing better to report right now, I’d figure I’d just make a post about this game that I’ve become addicted to called Collapse. Though there is a sample applet that you can play on their web site, there are a few extra features in the full version that make it a bit more fun. Unfortunately it’s only for Windows. Maybe with a little prodding they may make a Mac version. One can wish.

Fed up with President Bush’s war mongering ways? Loosing sleep at night over the impending death and destruction? Feel there must be a way you can change his mind about invading Iraq? Now you can! Contribute now to the Buy Bush a PlayStation 2 campaign. Included in the deal is a copy of “Conflict: Desert Storm”. Divert Bush’s commando instincts to a more appropriate war theater. Save our servicemen and innocent Iraqi civilians from the unneccessary horrors of war. Act now! Operators are standing by.

Wow. On a whim I decided to do a search for my name in Google to find out what would be revealed if someone wanted to find out about me. It helps that I have a fairly uncommon name and that I’ve done a bit on the web. Continue reading →