November 2004 Archives

Today I learned:

1) You -can- get used kids skis for a decent price. Play It Again, Sam, a chain of stores around here, had stacks of used kids skis. I got 120cm shaped skis with bindings, size 2 ski boots, and ski poles for a mere $90. Zach and I are ready for the ski season! It's going to be interesting seeing how him on skis and me on my snowboard will mix it up. Maybe I'll go back there and look for a used set of skis. My old 195's are really too small for me now.

2) 256mb 'Cruzer' flash pen drives can in fact survive being run through the washing machine. I emptied my laundry today to find said drive sitting in the bottom of the washing machine. I use my pen drive for backing up my databases, mail files, and other important things, so I was a little concerned. After giving it a few hours to dry out, lo and behold, docked it into my laptop, and :

root@jboat:/mnt# df -k .
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1               250496    160064     90432  64% /mnt

Hooray!

There are a few games in the opensource / freeware arena that are really exceptional. Complete, polished, documented, and durnit, fun to play. FreeCiv, available for Linux, Mac, and Windows, is one of them.

For years I've been going on about the wonderful online music station Radio Paradise. With it's self-proclaimed "eclectic music" selection, active user community, and high quality feeds, it's easily one of the best stations on the net.

Bill Goldsmith, the man behind Radio Paradise, happily agreed to an interview...

So I don't really watch much network television, but I have to admit I'm a Law and Order junkie. All the spinoffs too. Between various cable channels, it's a 50/50 chance that at any given hour, there's a L&O episode on. Nowadays, you can pretty much run from 9pm til midnight just hopping from one show to another.

Last night there was a new L&O: SVU episode on NBC. Rosa and I decided to sit down and watch it - a new episode? Sure, why not! We were feeling pretty low key and it seemed like a nice thing to do.

The episode was quite good, really leaving us guessing right up until the last 5 minutes. No clear bad guy, no deliberate bias, some very interesting interplay in the characters - a good episode.

L&O is somewhat formulaic. At the end of the trial, the verdict is read, and there's usually some pithy commentary afterwards by the trial lawyers, or something dramatic happens (fellow commits suicide, gets shot in the courthouse by an angry family member, whatever) - there's about a 3 minute window there.

Last night, NBC -CUT OFF- the end of the show. "We the jury find the defendendent..." and stopped it! They flashed up a message "Do you think the professor is guilty or innocent? Go to NBC.com to find out!"

We were aghast! It totally destroyed the mood / interest of the show, and we were outraged that a story we were immersed in was now held hostage by a marketing ploy.

There was no completion, no ending to the story, they went on to the next show. Now, leave aside the fact that despite our digerati lifestyle, a huge percentage of the populatioin does NOT have net access, let alone ubiquitous net access. They have to dialup, or turn on their computer, or whatever.

Beyond this, the NBC.com website was totally swamped and unavailable. I gave up after a few tries, and wandered off grumbling. Today I hit the site, and had to dig a while to even get a REFERENCE to last nights show, and saw only a poll. "Do you think the professor was innocent or guilty?" - "Innocent" "Guilty" "Need more evidence." - I basically picked one at random, it showed me the current results (most folks appear to think innocent, but who the hell knows), and that's it. No explanation, no detail one way or the other. End of story.

What the hell is that all about? Is this like schroedingers courtroom? He may be guilty, he may not be, it depends?

How will this possibly play in syndication, which is where the show actually makes its money... will they fill in the missing dialog and show then?

I know that Rosa is planning on writing a letter to NBC about it, she was as incensed as I was.

Sheesh.

I've been avoiding going to the movies lately. What used to be an enjoyable experience has continued its slide into blatant commercialism and customer gouging. Skyrocketing ticket prices, indifferent service, and obscene concession prices make consumer action a necessity.

In defense of that age-old institution of the American movie experience, I bring you Planet Geek's Guide to Modern Movie Attendance.

According to this article from Reuters, VHS is gettin the boot...

"Accepting the inevitable, Britain's biggest high street electronics retailer Dixons announced over the weekend that it was taking VHS video players off its shelves for good."

Good riddance.

I have a fairly large readership that uses Livejournal as a news aggregator for reading my blog postings. This posting is for them...

Ya'll probably notice a tagline in the postings you see that ask not to use the Livejournal comments mechanism to post replies. The reasoning behind this is that I want to keep commentary on the postings in one place - on the blog itself. When you comment on the feed in Livejournal, you're just commenting on 'a copy of' the article, not the article itself.

I do understand that there are elements of the Livejournal comments mechanism that I do not have available in Movable Type (my blogging software), such as threaded comments, etc. I'm working to add that functionality via plugins, but for the time being, I do ask that if you want to comment on my postings, please click through to the original article, and comment there.

Wow, what a day.

Yesterday I buckled down and finally reconfigured the CONGO servers to support the new workstations I've been accumulating to replace my iOpeners. It took a couple hours of noodling with LTSP configurations and SSH keys, but in the end I now have a cluster of 4 flatscreen workstations, all booting completely off a central Athlon 2.8gig Shuttle box.

The new workstations are Gateway Profile 1.5 machines. These are all-in-one K6-2/400 workstations with fantastic 1024x768 LCD screens. They are SUCH an improvement over the iOpeners in so many ways, but htey do have one drawback. They're -heavy-. The iOpeners are maybe 4lbs each, and I can carry 6 of them in one carrying case without too much effort. The Gateways are closer to 13lbs each, and are larger, so they don't fit into any of the road cases I have. That's a challenge I'm postponing, but will have to address it at some point.

Part of the motivation for getting this stuff going was Tim's birthday party last night. I had agreed to bring some machines over to his house so we could have some LAN gaming going on. The Gateways are a lot better than the iOpeners for this sort of thing as well, since they have very good, fast screens. The trick was to get the games installed on the server before I had to pack up the cluster and head out. I got everything running about an hour and a half before I needed to leave, so that didn't leave much time. We ended up with 4 working Gateway Profile terminals, all booting properly off the network. Yay!

I rummaged through the Linux Gametome to get ideas, as well as asked some friends online about I should install. Of the 15 or so packages I finally ended up putting in place, a couple turned out to be real winners:

• Tenes Empanadas Graciela is a Risk clone running under GNOME. The turn based system was a little time consuming, but the game looks to be quite good. Need more playing


• Nethack is always the perennial favorite, even though it really -isn't- multiplayer, it got some use.


• By far, the favorite for the evening was Xpilot, which ran beautifully on the workstations. Ben did a great job figuring out the tweaks and fiddles to make the game runnable and we had a grand time chasing each other around.

The machines all behaved very well, and it was a great test of the new terminals. We had 4 running off the new Shuttle server, and everything just plain worked. Yay!

With thanks to Macthud, a jigsaw was found, and [de?]construction continued. Using a couple tricks I learned on various modding boards, I cut a 10"x4" window in the left side of the casing, and a 3"x3" window in the right side. This was done using 1/2" bit in a power drill to cut the pilot holes, and a single-speed jigsaw to cut the lines. I had already marked the lines in pencil, and masked out the rest of the case with duct tape to prevent the sliding jigsaw from damaging the finish.

The panels popped out fine, and I only had one bad moment of the jigsaw jumping around slighly denting the case. Next time I think I'll use a better jigsaw, but for now, this was fine.

The next step was using 1/4" clear plastic tubing for the 'framing' around the holes. That involved cutting the tube to lengh and slitting it lengthwise with an x-acto knife. I pushed that over the edge of the cut holes, and that gave me an interesting 'silicon putty' look around the edges of the windows.

I then cut 2 pieces of lexan to the right size (did you know that when after scoring Lexan with a carpet knife, breaking it sounds _Just_ like a rifle shot? Woke me up.)

A couple pieces of velcro on the inside of the case and the lexan was mounted. Voila! Looks great. Time to reassemble the case!

And there the problems happened. The tolerances inside a Shuttle case are -miniscule-. There's enough room on the left side of the case for the internal mountings, but the right side with the smaller window... nuh uh. The case is -right- against the bracing hardware and the power supply.

So, the right side window had to come out. I think I'll do an external mount on it, so it takes up no internal space at all. But for now it's an open hole. I'm keeping an eye on the heat in the case, just in case airflow has been a problem. I don't think it's been affected too much, but it's definately on the radar.

I really need to get a new camera so I can share the project pictures. Stay tuned for more exciting updates!

Well, my very first casemod project has come to a screeching halt. I decided to mode the case of one of my Shuttle PC's to give it a little more glitz and glamor. Since this machines are taken to shows regularly, and tend to be on display, I figure a little more whiz-bang would be good.

For those who don't know what a casemod is, it's a way of customizing your PC case using colored lighting, lexan windows, and other doodads to make it look cool. Some examples: a normal pc, and a Shuttle box like mine, but with a blue tinted case.

Game: Goldstrike
Language: Flash
Category: Puzzle / Arcade
Tested on: Debian Linux + Firefox
Rating: 3 out of 5
Offered by: Flash Arcade (link)

Goldstrike is sort of a cross between tetris and Frood. The object is to knock out continguous colored blocks in a wall that is slowly advancing toward you. Your character does this by skillfully flinging a pickaxe at the colored blocks. The more blocks you knock out, the faster the level is over, the more points you score.

This is a very simple game. What makes it so entertaining is the small improvements that just make it fun. The miner character does a little ho-down dance at the beginning and end of the levels, and the sound effects are cute and enjoyable. The game has a natural progression from 'slow and comfortable' up through 'good, now that one there, and those, yes, got that one, okay good!' straight through to 'ahhhh! too fast! nooo! I screwed up again!'. To me that's a mark of a well designed game. If the game gets unplayable too fast, it's no fun. If it takes too long to get into the groove, you won't want to invest the time.

Many many years ago when I was playing with AutoCAD I made an image that had an remarkably large level of zooms in it. You could zoom in on the picture and find even more pictures, then zoom in on that and there were more, an unending series of images that were small only relative to where they were referenced from.

Someone has to put together the ZoomQuilt, a Flash animation that lends far more artistry to this comment than I ever could...

Check it out...

(Thanks to Molly for the link.)

From Bioware's notes on the Linux client for Neverwinter Nights, under 'Things you will need..."

2. CD-Key: You will have to purchase a copy of the game to get a valid Neverwinter Nights CD-Key. Of course, with this purchase you also get a lovely Neverwinter Nights mapkin, a spiral-bound game manual, and three plastic-coated aluminum-reinforced W1nd0z3 brand coasters.

Being fairly active in the web-news-blog-chat-whatever community, it always amuses me to watch the general public spin itself into ever more complex and improbable situations, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. I guess people just have a hard time accepting that sometimes things are just what they seem to be.

Case in point. On November 22nd, 1963, John F Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas. This one event has been the target for ceaseless analysis, arguments, theories and other bruhaha. The question that always comes up is "Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone?"

Mouse wheels are cool.
And this kool-aid isn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

Okay, maybe not quite that bad.

Ya'll may have noticed that I've been posting some new reviews, and made a new section just for Linux and Mac playable webgames. I was getting tired of going to websites that advertise WEB GAMES! Play online for free!, only to find the links for the games are either ActiveX applications or simply a downloadable .exe file. The net is far from homogenous, guys, get with the program.

Anyway, as part of my fight against The Man, I decided to start collecting the best of the online games that are not windows-dependent. As I started working through them, I realized that my Flash player for Firefox was not working. While this doesn't affect Java based games, it really does limit access to some of the more entertaining stuff.

What followed was 3-4 hours of arguing with multiple Firefox installs trying to get the libflashplayer.so plugin to work. Firefox would recognize it, and 'about:plugins' would show it, but nothing would display. I'm still not running, so until I do, no more game reviews. (If anyone has deep insight in to configuring Debian Linux and Firefox to run this correctly, I'd love to hear about it.)

The other chaotic element is we're going to move all the MovableType based blogs off Homeport and onto Dwight's machine, which is a managed system located at Serverbeach. This'll give us greater bandwidth, better support, and less dependency on our home connectivity.

This will affect Planet Geek (Yours truly!), Emergent Chaos (Adam's fine blog!), HandsOffMyBag.com (Voice your rights!), and Stonekeep.com (Conferences are cool!). We're planning to do it in a way that will generate zero downtime, so even the people running the blogs shouldn't notice the change, but there may be a bump or two along the way.

Fun right here in river city!

If you met these two people on the street, would you be able to tell them apart?

My sister did a great post about my dad on veterans day. As part of it, she dug up an old picture of him in his uniform (she says 'Navy', I thought he was in the coast guard on tender duty, but I could be wrong). I actually haven't seen this picture before (or if I did, I forgot about it), and I was immediately struck with the "Hey! That's me!"

A little Gimp cutting and pasting, and there you have it.

Yes, I think this confirms it. I'm proud to say that man is definately my father, and I'm his son.

By the way, the source of the right hand side of that picture is this picture from when I was about 20, circa 1983.

Game: Cubis
Language: Java
Category: Puzzle
Tested on: Debian Linux + Firefox
Rating: 4 out of 5
Offered by: Yahoo Games (link)

Cubis is not a new game. I ran across it a year or two ago while trying to find games for my mom's Mac, noted it was a Java game, and decided to check it out later. Now, while collecting pointers to webgames that will run on Mac or Linux machines, I went back and tried it out again.

The gist of Cubis is sort of a mix of Tetris, Sokoban, and Bejeweled. You are trying to match up colored blocks, par usual, but you do so by sliding them across a playing field. Blocks can bump into other blocks, push them out of the way, break them, or slide under them. Navigation is done via the mouse, with helpful highlighting marks showing where the blocks will slide

This is a beautifully rendered game. Sounds, visuals, and gameplay are very very well done. It has all the bells and whistles you'd expect from a complete game, with pause, tutorials, puzzle levels you can select, and so on. I found myself working through the tutorial again just for a refresher course, and playing more of the initial puzzle levels without succumbing to confusion or frustration. The game is just plain fun!

This is an excellent example of how a game can be written to be multiplatform, emminently playable, and quite enjoyable. Bravo to to Yahoo for publishing, and FreshGames for skill in writing such a well designed game.

Language: Java
Category: Puzzle
Tested on: Debian Linux + Firefox
Rating: 2 out of 5
Offered by: Yahoo Games (link)

The world is full of gem-matching games. Since Popcap did their screamingly successful Bejeweled game lo these many years ago, zillions of folks have written similar "make 3 more of these thingies in a row" games.

Jewel Quest is a very simple adaptation of this game. It is well done, pretty, and easy to play, and in gameplay is identical to Bejeweled, except for one small change. To win the game, you need to turn all the squares in the game to gold. The squares change everytime you match up 3 or more jewels and score points.

I admit to being vaguely intrigued by the game because it had this interesting variation, which makes the game strategy more complex. You have to think ahead to find out what combinations will bring the little blinky skulls down to get rid of that last skull.

Alas, this small change to the basic structure of the game is not enough to hold the players attention more than a few minutes, and couple this with the games complete lack of any options whatsoever (you play or you don't. You can't pause, turn off the sound, change the skill level, or anything) makes this a quicky "Cute, but what else ya got?" game.

LOS ANGELES, November 9, 2004 - At 7:50 PM two armored tanks showed up at an anti-war protest in front of the federal building in Westwood. The tanks circled the block twice, the second time parking themselves in the street and directly in front of the area where most of the protesters were gathered. Enraged, some of the people attempted to block the tanks, but police quickly cleared the street. The people continued to protest the presence of the tanks, but about ten minutes the tanks drove off. It is unclear as to why the tanks were deployed to this location.

Video is available here: 5.8meg Quicktime (MOV) format

The video is disturbing to say the least. This was a peaceful protest. Why was the military called for a political rally? The only possible answer is intimidation. The question is, by whom? National Guard members? The local government? The police? The federal government?

Original article via LA Indy Media

This was sent to us as a potential cohousing community property (since we're looking for land for our cohousing group. I don't think the location would work for us (it's basically as far east in the US you can get without either hitting ocean or Canada :), but boy wouldn't this be fun?

Check it out..

This morning saw the release of Firefox 1.0, a grand day for browsers everywhere. While I haven't installed it yet myself (I'm still running PR1), we have been chatting about it online.

Firefox has as its default homepage "http://www.google.com/firefox" which in fact, brings up a modified Google search page that looks like Firefox's default theme.

Catching the scent of geekitude, we set about finding other interesting pages:
http://www.google.com/firefox - The first one we found, Firefox themed.
http://www.google.com/mac - Macintosh themed
http://www.google.com/windows - Windows theme
http://www.google.com/palm - Simplified view - which carries through to search results. Very handy
http://www.google.com/itunes - Not sure about this one, it automatically brings you through to Google Adwords.
http://www.google.com/linux - Tux goes Google!
http://www.google.com/ie - For that, other, less well known browser.

I wonder where Google is going with this? It seems incomplete and inconsistent. Unusual for Google.

Update 11/09/2004 12:55pm...
A few more fun bits were located by Tim and others...
http://www.google.com/bsd - Chuck has his own Google logo!
http://www.google.com/unclesam - For the patriots
http://www.google.com/universities.html - This one may not count, it's an HTML page (doesnt' work without the HTML), but it is a search interface to college sites.

Should be noted that Google has a webpage that mentions some (but not all) of these sites here.

According to Astraware, a new version of the extremely addictive game "Bejeweled" is due for release in December.

Dubbed Bejeweled 2, the feature set is rumored to include:

• Explosive new pieces: Power Gems, Hyper Cubes and Time Bombs
• Stunning special effects
• Awe-inspiring planetary backdrops
• Four ways to play: Classic, Action, Puzzle and Endless
• Five secret game play modes to unlock
• Explore a galaxy of hand-crafted brain-teasers in Puzzle mode
• Play for eternity and collect jewelry in relaxing Endless mode
• Enhanced sound effects and epic soundtrack

Going by how addictive the original game is, I should simply chalk off December and assume no work will get done at all.

This weekend blog goddess Lisa spent a couple hours and upgraded the blogging software that drives Planet Geek and my business site Stonekeep Consulting. It was a bit of a rocky upgrade, but tonight everything is up and running properly.

A HUGE thanks to her and all the work put in. Yay!

One sideline... MovableType can now use TypeKey to verify people posting comments on the site. This is a way to help cut down the amount of blog spam my site gets (hundreds of attempted posts per day). If you don't use TypeKey, comments postings will remain 'queued' until I approve them, so things posted may take a bit of time to appear.

I just got back from running registration at a customers event down in Washington, DC. Jonah generously agreed to be my second, as well as let us use his truck for hauling the equipment to and from the event. One of the nifty toys he has installed in the car is an XM Radio SkyFI receiver.

For the uninitiated, XM Radio is one of 2 satellite radio systems available that provide full time access to hundreds of radio stations from anywhere in the continental US. I had been intrigued by this concept for a while, but the cost of the receivers and the monthly fee (around $10) sort of scared me off.

Since this was a longish (7 hours) road trip each way, I had plenty of time to get a feel for the system.

I'm impressed! On the way south, we chatted a lot, so we left the receiver quietly playing 80s tracks. The unit rebroadcasts the reception via a local FM signal, so it was simply sitting on the dash playing through the cars stereo via the radio. The XM display would show what song by what artist was playing (in that nifty amber LCD display). Unobtrusive, no commercials (other than ones for XM itself), nice!

On the way back I did a lot of driving while Jonah slept, so I noodled around with the receiver, checking out other channels. The unit has a jog-dial on it that shows what station you're tuning to, and the title and content. Blues, various rock stations, a couple different Jazz stations... then it got interesting.

Various news feeds (MSNBC, CNN, etc), a couple comedy stations and... whoah! NPR!! There is a full NPR feed as part of the lineup. We listened to This American Life as well as some other shows. The signal was strong, clean, and we were able to listen to it from the middle of New Jersey all the way into Massachusetts - something you can't do with any local radio station, let alone NPR.

Okay, so that's pretty neat. But it just got better. XM Radio is preparing to release MyFI, a portable XM radio receiver the size and shape of an iPod. It's somewhat expensive ($349), and not out yet, but it's mobile, rechargeable, dockable, and pretty durned sexy.

If XM were to ever get Radio Paradise as an active channel, there would be no question, I'd be there in an instant. As it is now, I'm just screamingly tempted. Heck, just for the regular drives we do up to Maine during the summer, having regular, dependable radio reception from door to door would be wonderful. And with something like the MyFI, we could put it in any vehicle we happen to be driving up in.

Stormchasers is da weirdest peoplez, but they do take some damned cool videos.

(thanks to rmd for the link)

Off to an event down in Maryland for a couple days. Connectivity and posting will be sporadic... Ciao!

From: 	Order Notification (orders@TheMan.com)
To: 	unsuspecting populace (minions@unwashedmasses.com)
Subject: 	Your order has shipped (#011-412-1515) (fwd)
Date: 	Wed, 3 Nov 2004 11:50:38 -0500	
Greetings from The Great American Experiment.

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You can track the status of this order, and all your orders, online by
visiting Your Account at http://tinyurl.com/6272p
 
There you can:
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The following items were included in this shipment:
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1        5 Stages of Grief              $19.99   1      $19.99 

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The following items will ship separately, as soon as they're available:
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This shipment was sent to:

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The Great American Experiment

(Thanks to Adam Hirsch for this)

I'm totally putting the current election nightmare out of my mind and getting on with my life. We survived the last 4 years, we'll survive the next 4.

I did however get some very good news in my mail this morning. Keith Knight, the artist behind the K Chronicles, is going to be in Boston! He's doing a bunch of touring about, here's the info that went out in his mailing:

*K CHRONICLES/(TH)INK SLIDESHOW TOUR i'll be swingin' on through a few of the cities that run one or both of my strips. if you haven't seen my slideshow, ya gots ta check it out. favorite strips... censorship stories...shocking, controversial stuff..here's the info i've got so far:

*SALT LAKE CITY, UT 11/9/04 7:30pm @ Westminster College, 1840 South 1300 East- FREE, ALL AGES EVENT
*CAMBRIDGE, MA 11/20/04 2-4pm @ Million Year Picnic, 99 Mt. Auburn St. Harvard Square-FREE, ALL AGES EVENT
*NEW YORK CITY 11/21/04 8pm @ Jigsaw Gallery, 526 E. 11th St.(between A & B)- FREE, ALL AGES EVENT

I hope I'll be able to make it, he's a great cartoonist.

*UPDATE: Did you know that Keef has a blog? I didn't! He writes some good stuff.

" Blogs mix news, gossip and opinion and are viewed with skepticism by many media watchers for their overt bias."
- Reuters, via Yahoo! news. Thanks to Lisa for this link.

A while back I had a hard system shutdown due to a battery failure, which ended up trashing some of the setup in Evolution, my mail client. I got it sort of running again, and restored backups of my calendar and my contact list, but I was having abysmal performance problems. Things were just deathly slow.

I reverted to using Pine for a while, which was fine, but I found myself -seriously- missing my address book and calendar. I guess I've been successfully reprogrammed.

Anyway, this morning I sat down to figure out my performance problems. I do everything in Evolution via IMAP (as I believe all mail clients should). No folders or information is stored locally, except instructions to the mail client as to where to go to find the IMAP mailboxes.

One of the settings in Evolution tells it that whenever it does something, it shoudl not only scan the inbox for new messages, but also scan all my subfolders. I had inadvertently set this option 'on'. So everytime Evolution did something with the IMAP server, it scanned all my folders. And baby, I have a LOT of large mail folders.

Unchecked that option, and Evolution veritably -leaped- back into workable performance realms. I am a happy man.

I voted today.

Massachusetts uses the optical scanning voting machines for folks casting their ballots. They have the advantage of leaving an undeniable paper trail (everyone has a sheet of paper), as well as instant registration and counting (they are scanned immediately and data is collected right there and then).

Can someone tell me why these are inferior to 'touch screen voting machines', which have no paper trail, and audit capability is completely out of the hands of the people running the vote for the state?

Everyone at a site running the optical scan machines can pick up the votes, count them, and say "We have xxx votes recorded, if you give me af ew, I can even tell you who." I bet one in 10,000 volunteers at sites using touch screen machines could get any form of information from the touch screen voting machines.

I just don't get it.

I actually saw this on a bumper sticker this afternoon. Everytime I try and figure out what is trying to be said here, I get a headache and move on to something else.

Let me see if I can summarize these things a bit. First, who the heck is the ACLU, and what do they really do? According to their "about" page:

The ACLU is our nation's guardian of liberty. We work daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States. Our job is to conserve America's original civic values - the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Okay, sounds pretty good. So, these guys are there to defend the rights of the individual vs the centralized authoritarian government by providing a check and balance against unquestioned dictates. So, I suppose in some ways an argument could be made that they are in fact the enemy of the "state", in that they are there to counterbalance it. Note I say counterbalance, not overthrow, but I digress, which to me is an important distinction... but I digress.

Now, this particular bumper sticker replaces the 'C' with the symbol of the former soviet bloc, the 'sickle and hammer', representing, we assume here, the tenets of communism. The implication here is that the ACLU is a communist front, bent on overthrowing the US through it's anti-authoritarian (and, by implication, it's anti government) policies.

Okay, so lets look at what that means...

According to wikipedia, the definition of 'communism' is:

Communism, or communist society, is the name of the social formation that, according to Marx, would be a classless society in which all property is owned by the community as a whole, and where all people enjoy equal social and economic status.

I'm having a hard time connecting these two concepts, at least in the methodology that is implied in that bumper sticker. "Enemy of the state", okay, someone who wants to bring down the state power. ACLU, a body that opposes centralized authoritarian rule when checks and balances aren't in place... er, that's a stretch, but I guess I might see that...

But... this bumper sticker is offered up as emblematic of the views presented by the 'right wing' crowd. The ones who detest central authority over local issues and personal details. The very private rights tha the ACLU is sworn to defend.

I'm so confused.