I’m hardly what you would call a legal scholar–I took one class on constitutional law in my tenure as a University student–but it seems like everything interesting lately to me is happening in the courts.

First you have the decision by the Obama administration to finally bring 10 of the Guantanamo prisoners to trial, 5 in Civilian courts in New York and another 5 in modified military.  While it’s nice that we’ve decided to bring x number of the people we hold in a legal black hole to at least some semblance of a legal proceeding, I’m not terribly happy about the continuing of military commissions.  Though, on the other hand, I don’t really see how you can have foreign prisoners of war tried in civilian courts.  So if commissions and civilian courts aren’t appropriate, then you should give them a courts-martial right?

Oops!  Did I forget to mention that they’re *not* prisoners of war?  I think they’re enemy combatants, or unlawful combatants, or men from mars for all we know.  The important thing is that they’re not prisoners of war.  Despite the fact that we’re conducting a “War on Terror".  Confused yet?

It’s not surprising, that the handling of detainees has been so schizophrenic, given the precedents inherited by a declaration of war.  Which, in all honestly, is probably scarier in terms of legal implications for American citizens.  States of war tend to produce very sketchy behavior by the government towards civil liberties and press freedoms.  Compounded by the fact that we’ve declared war on an idea, which are notoriously hard to vanquish (see: racism, sexism, et al), you’ve got a perfect storm of totalitarianism.

Not to say that we’re actually anywhere close to that, but it’s unnerving to say the least; and who’s to say that another terrorist attack or credible threat won’t push us closer to that point.  At the beginning of the Summer, President Obama declared that “some detainees who are deemed too dangerous to release but too difficult to prosecute” will be held in indefinite detention.  Which as far as Western liberal democracies go, is a big no-no.  I understand the argument that:

1. They’re not US citizens
2. They’re probably f**king terrorists

To which I would answer that a) that’s a slippery slope, and b) who’s to say?  We already prosecute foreign nationals that commit crimes in the United States, or at least request their extradition.  But detaining them indefinitely flies in the face of rule of law and democracy.  It’s unfortunate that the Obama administration didn’t have the will to call an end to the war on terror in real policy terms, instead of merely renaming it to a “Overseas Contingency Operation”

Like most people, I have a list of things I wish I had seen and done before it became impossible to do so. I would have liked to see the Ramones in concert; meet Kwame Nkrumah; and to see a mock trial put on by a repressive totalitarian regime to liquidate political opposition. Well, this past week one of my dreams has been realized by the conservative Iranian regime rounding up about a 100 old men, dressing them in prison pajamas and beating them within an inch of their life to extract ludicrous confessions of foreign collaboration against the regime. It’s quite amazing really; I would have thought that in an age where Twitter was winning the war against repression, that something as antiquated as blood-stained confessions would be no match.

Alas, nobody informed the Iranian government, whose ‘cunning plan’ is likely to use these confessions to arrest bigger political figures in the reform movement. Foreign Policy contributor Daniel Drezner pointed out that televising these trials live is not nearly as effective as after-the-fact radio broadcasts or print propaganda. The consensus appears to be that few people are actually buying the confessions, which allege foreign collusion with the Reform movement to overthrow the Islamic Republic. Or something like that. Now, it’s one thing to get a political opponent to say that in a ‘official’ capacity; but it’s another thing when you see it delivered by a man whose lost thirty pounds and looks like his face had gone 5 rounds with a baton. If perhaps they Twittered their confessions, it would be immeasurably more effective.

“Khatami: @Ayatollah I totally lied about the elections and hate the Iranian Republic. Also, I love the USA and think that Islam is teh Suxz0r”

Right! Now that’s some propaganda! Guilty as hell, I say!. Now make him fans of the UK and the US Army on his Facebook profile and you’ll have the whole ‘Reformist’ (aka: Pro-Western Traitor) movement nipped in the bud by the end of the week. I just made this up, and I already believe it 100%.

Now, I’m not saying that I support the Iranian government; it’s just that if this is the only mockery of justice that I get to see in my lifetime, I want it to at least be done right. If not, then the whole sad tradition of fabricating false allegations against political opponents faces the threat of extinction. Take for example, the Stalinist trials in the 30’s; he was able to do two of them before most people started to even think that they might be a complete crock. From what I can tell, no one is taking the current trials seriously; except the Iranian government, (which is important, because they’re the ones with the firing squads).

But really, this is just another example of how the United States has fallen behind in yet another endeavor. It’s been nearly 60 years since we as a nation have engaged in an old-fashioned political witch-hunt. And no, I will not include tea-bagging, birthers, and Medicare beneficiaries screaming about socialism as “real” forms of political character assassination. The political right in this country is so terrible at this, their godless, communist, liberal enemy had to fabricate their spurious evidence for them. This is why nobody wants to buy a GM anymore America! I can only hope that in the future, our children will be able to live in a country, where the opponents to progressive change in this country will be able to meticulously and decisively trump up political accusations, use questionable legal practices and generally ruin the lives of their political foes. Sort of like this guy.

Got a new lappy the other day to replace the sad Toshiba.  It had developed a problem where sound events were causing the wireless card to fail (yes, I know that sounds crazy).  And I was generally unhappy with it’s overall heft and refusal to have power management capabilities.  I had originally looked at getting a Lenovo, but they were kind of pricey and didn’t seem anymore likely to work with Linux then the HP’s I was looking at.  So far everything is great with the laptop, though there were a few things I had to fiddle with:

Sound

The sound card didn’t work with the version of ALSA that came with Jaunty; though, there’s a lot of commotion about it not working real well with a lot of cards so upgrading was fairly well documented. I went here.  There’s also an option I had to set in “/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf”
options snd-hda-intel model=hp-m4 enable_msi=1
So far that seems to have done the trick, though sometimes on suspend/resume sound doesn’t come back; probably restarting alsa would do the trick.

Wireless

Mine came with a generic wifi card that required the ath9k driver.  I was real worried when I saw that because I had previous bad experience with the Madwifi/Ath5k drivers on the Toshiba.  However, the 9k series seems to be much better, and I haven’t experienced the dropped signals that can only reconnect after a restart that I was having witha the Toshiba.  You’ll have to grab a newer kernel then what comes with Jaunty by pulling from the backports:
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-jaunty-generic
Restart and you’re good.

Video

I agonized over this for days: The NVIDIA Geforce G 105M was unsupported by the binary drivers when I ordered the lappy.  I took a gamble that support would reach Linux soon.  Well, my gambit paid off and Nvidia added support in their latest beta release of the proprietary driver.  Follow this link to the NVNews forum and grab the highest numbered installer.  Installation is pretty straight-forward from there; shutdown X and run the install as root (you’ll probably need to run “chmod ugo+x” to grant it execution privileges).

And that’s pretty much it.  Everything else just seems to work, including the brightness controls and other random function keys.  I’m not too crazy about the keyboard, but I’m not a big fan of many laptop keyboards.  I highly recommend it to any Linux users

UPDATE:

There’s a funky issue with the battery “disappearing” after a resume from suspend.  It appears to be a known issue with the HP laptops and the kernel devs appear to have addressed it for another model.  If I get a chance I’ll try rolling my own kernel and seeing if the fix works for my laptop.

UPDATE of UPDATE

Weird.  I protected this post after I updated it.  Oh well, here it is again

My grandfather passed away two weeks ago.  A funeral and general revelry.  I will miss him, though in the end it was a passing that one can call a ‘good thing’.  I’ve successfully alienated my latest ex-girlfriend, though my personal opinion is that that the Great Cosmological Scoreboard is probably about even.  So it goes.

In more interesting news, I’ve decided to write a serial.  The first installment will appear tomorrow in this very place.  It will serve two purposes: Get me back into writing and take up my excessive free time.

The move is drawing to it’s inevitable conclusion, with both moments of triumph (I unpacked the kitchen and my office) and defeat(I haven’t unpacked much else, and I don’t have a washer).  But all said, a fine move.  My roommate is Otis, who pays his rent in kisses and nuzzles; my house is situated in a nice quiet part of Riverside*.&nbsp Such as it is, I am lord over my domain; and it is good.  Haven’t had too much of a chance to hang out, the burden of a move and associated costs plus a new project at work has kept me homebound and dull.  Though, I expect payday to bring an atypical amount of mischief with it.  I hope to wipe out the last of the moving/purchasing that the new digs have required (did I mention I needed a washer?) this weekend.  The folks have offered to send a little cash my way, which has been nice of them.  Moving seems to get more expensive everytime I do it.

I’ve rediscoved the joys of pipe smoking again, something that I’ve been off-again on-again with for some years (though it has remained something of “trademark", if you will).  I do forget how relaxing and enjoyable of a pursuit it is.  I had quit the last time because of headaches caused by clenching the pipe to hard with my teeth; but there really is nothing more satisfying then to sit at the computer writing, reading, or whatever while puffing merrily away at a pipe.  It has all the qualities of a Chris Brodt hobby/infatuation:

• It is something an old man would do
• It requires study, practice, patience and effort; wheras, it’s modern replacement requires a fraction of or none at all (look up double-edged safety razors for another example)
• I could fill at least 15 minutes expositing the finer points and vaguries of it over it’s ‘modern’ competitors

Which I guess seems strange for someone who is in the business of technology and such.  Well, if contradictions are a measure of character then I come through in spades.  But now to more pressing topics: a trip back to the motherland.  I’m thinking the 31st through the 4th or 5th.  I was thinking maybe a little sooner, but one of my team leads will be on vaction for the next two weeks so I figured the timing wouldn’t be that great.  I expect each and every one of you (and you know who you are) to drop any plans you have for that time and spend it with me.  I promise you won’t regret it

*Otis is a dog, in case you were wondering