The title of my blog is the title of my blog…

Did you hear? The President gave a speech to school children. Isn’t that terrible: the “leader of the free world” lecturing your kids on how to live? Oh, yeah, that was George HW Bush in 1991, opps, no, that was Ronald Reagan in 1988, or was it Richard Nixon.

The ugly names being hurled at President Obama can be nothing more than thinly disguised racism. Get over it, America! We’ve finally elected a President that most of the rest of the world admires, and some of us are acting like he shouldn’t be allowed in the Big House.

And by the way. Leave your damn guns at home before you hurt somebody.

So now the conservatives are concerned that the recent court decision against former AG John Ashcroft will result in government officials being too timid to act for fear of being prosecuted for criminal acts performed while in office. One shrill voice heard on NPR worried that officials will all have to have lawyers — an onerous burden, no doubt.

Let’s think about this.

1. First of all, Ashcroft is a lawyer as are many public officials. Reminds me of (FL Secretary of State) Katherine Harris’ being so ignorant (or contemptuous) of the laws she was supposed to supervise that she failed to resign on time to run for Congress.
2. In fact, lest we forget, he was the Attorney General of the United States. Are we to believe he unaware of the potential criminality of his action while AG?
3. Are we still under the Nixon delusion that when a government official does something “it’s not illegal?”
4. Do we think that a millionaire can’t afford a lawyer to defend himself against criminal charges? Well, if so, he could always get a public defender. Of course he’s bound to make a little from the $52million dollar
5. And what about the $750,000 per month that he got for his firm’s involvement in the Zimmer case?

There’s a much simpler solution to the problem. Government officials like Ashcroft, Cheney, Bush, etc. could just obey the laws they’re sworn to uphold.

The Republicans can certainly sink pretty low when trying to protect their privileged status and the totally unrealistic expectations they foist on an uneducated population. Their application of the “socialist” label to President Obama’s attempts to reform health care, save the economy and encourage school children to do what every good teacher encourages them to do is simply an attempt to mask their racism. Of course, they can’t call him a “nigger” like they would have forty years ago (still do in some parts of the country) so they call him a “socialist.” Counting on the general public’s total misunderstanding both of the meaning of socialism, and the fact that we’re already a socialist society, they use the term to generate fear and mistrust.

Let’s think about what our country would be like without “socialism”:

• The Interstate highways would be privately owned and operated toll roads. At the average national rate of $0.10 per mile your drive across the US would cost around $300 in tolls. Higher for trucks which would drive the price of all of our non-locally produced food and goods (which is basically everything) higher.
• Half of our elderly population would be living below the poverty line without their social security supplements.
• One third of the home owners in this country would not have mortgages. This is the share of the mortgage market that the FHA now holds.
• Of course, without “socialism” we’d have no War Department of Defense nor, what I would like to see — a Department of Peace. At any rate, that would put three million more workers in the job market.
• Ten percent of the construction projects in our country would not take place.
• Without “socialism” our spending on education would drop by close to one trillion dollars – an effective budget cut of 10%.

Of course, there would be benefits to a country without “socialism”:

• Tax payers wouldn’t be paying over one-half of their elected officials’ health care premiums.
• DC wouldn’t have the $1.4 millon per day pumped into its economy by the health care industry’s lobbying efforts.

Socialism? I’ll take it any day over greedism.

Boot your Mac with a Linux LiveCD or run Linux in a virtual machine.

The the rest of these steps are done in the Linux environment.

1. Install Linux on the USB drive (assume it is /dev/sdd1)
2. sudo apt-get install grub2
3. The following mounting steps may be acheived simply by double clicking on the name of the flash drive on the Linux desktop. If not:
   1. sudo mkdir /media/disk
   2. sudo mount -w /dev/sdd1 /media/disk
4. Replace “disk” with the actual mountpoint Linux (or you) assigned to the flash drive.
5. sudo mkdir /media/disk/boot (not nec with ubuntu install)
6. sudo mkdir /media/disk/boot/grub(not nec with ubuntu install)
7. sudo cp /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/* /media/disk/boot/grub
8. grub-install –root-directory=/media/disk/ /dev/sdd (note: no number after the base)

New directions after installing Ubuntu (9.0?) on flash drive

1. double-click on drive icon on linux desktop
2. do a df to find its mount point (assume here /media/disk)
3. sudo -i
4. chroot /media/disk
5. apt-get grub2 (some errors are reported about stdin, etc. ignore them?)
6. Choose to load grub2 directly to MBR

Edit Linux Command Line as follows

1. do nothing, just press return at this prompt.

Update, September 9.

Well, I’ve had to put this aside for a few days to work on other things, but I’ll be getting back to it soon. “Stay tuned.” Give up — Never!