Virtual Illusions

When Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on December 27th it was a tragedy as the death of anyone would be. I don’t claim to know enough about the complexities of Pakistani politics to know whether she would have moved the country in a positive direction or if she would have used her power to reward cronies and increase corruption. But she came to a tragic end and misplaced traditions have it they we pretend that dead people have no faults or flaws.

As it happens it isn’t her that has me scratching my head at the moment so we can presume that she was perfect. What has me confused is the fact that her supposed pro-democracy party is in all real senses a monarchy.

The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) was founded by Benazir Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1967 and he became it’s first chairman. In 1979 Zulfikar was accused of ordering the assassination of a political rival. I do not claim to know the veracity of those charges, however the courts of Pakistan found him guilty of those charges and sentenced him to death.

This is where the PPP starts acting odd, though not really odd yet. After the death of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto his wife, Nusrat Bhutto, succeeded him as chairperson of the PPP. A few years later, 1982, Nusrat Bhutto, ill with cancer, left Pakistan. In her absense, her daughter, Benazir Bhutto takes of the mantle of acting chairperson. By January of 1984, Benazir Bhutto is being called chairperson and at some point becomes chairperson for life. As such she was the chairperson at the date of her death, December 27th, 2007.

In short the PPP has been around for some 40 years and in all that time it has never had a chairperson who wasn’t of the Bhutto family. The PPP finding itself without a chairperson stopped acting like a political party and became a monarchy.

By all reports there were a number of capable political leaders the PPP could have tapped to fill the void. An obvious and technically correct choice would have been Makhdoom Amin Fahim, who is the senior vice chairman of the PPP and has all the right credentials. News reports also bandied about the possibility of choosing Aitzaz Ahsan, the leader of the lawyers’ movement.

Instead by some machination or another Benazir’s eldest son, the 19 year old Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, was chosen. Bilwal hasn’t spend any time in Pakistan since he was a young child and any political experience would be indirect at best. He intends to finish his history degree a Christ Church College, Oxford at which time he claims his lineage makes him a natural leader of Pakistan.

In the mean time, his father, Asif Ali Zandari will act as regent. I assume he can’t become chairperson himself because he isn’t of the Bhutto bloodline. Either that or the fact that the Pakistani people consider him largely corrupt. He spend eight years in prison taking bribes when is wive was in charge of Pakistan and laundering them through Swiss bank accounts.

When one BBC journalist asked Bilawal, “What on earth do you propose as a 19-year-old who has hardly lived in the country, what do you propose you can offer Pakistan, a country of 170 million people?” his only response was, “They asked me to do it.”

Taken as a whole it seems a lot more like a monarchy than a political party.

Politics

I saw Live Free or Die Hard, the latest installment of the Die Hard series over the weekend and it was awesome. Awesome in the sense that it had plot holes big enough for the 18 wheeler being chased by jet fighter to easily fit through but thoroughly entertaining. I usually don’t go in for the purely action movies and so threw it in while I was doing other stuff figuring occasional explosion in the background would keep me entertained.

I completely failed to do any of the other things I was intending. It was a quality rollercoaster ride. Keep in mind that I’m a computer person and they bent tech over and did some unseemly things things to it to create their story and I still enjoyed it greatly.

I’ve been reading Spirit of the Century in preparation to possibly running it and I think Live Free or Die Hard has a lot of similarities to the pulps which the game were based. You have your two fisted hero doing increasingly improbable things. You had jeopardy to his loved ones and quite a number of ticking clocks. More property damage than you can shake a stick at and generally awesome fun.

The only thing that was missing, that I thought really should have been there was one of the times the Big Bad declared McCLane dead his hostage daughter needed to at least once say something to the effect of, “you don’t know him very well, do you?” It wouldn’t have matter if she believed it or was just saying it for bravado, it was a missing trope.

I sort of thought that there was bit of footage involving the daughter that got left on the cutting room floor. But since I thought the movie was great for what it was perhaps I shouldn’t question that decision.

If you’re looking for an action move Live Free or Die Hard delivers.

Media

In the old layout I had a series of pages which were copies of a column I had written for my dorm’s news some 15 years ago. The most recent iterations of these pages were done in php. All the php really did was control the layout and such but instead of converting them by hand I figured I’d write a python script to do all the heavy lifting. It was fairly successful.

import os, os.path, re, datetime
import MySQLdb

srcDir = '/tmp/working'

db = MySQLdb.connect(host='xxxxx', db='xxxxx', user='xxxxx', passwd='xxxxx')
c = db.cursor()

for root, dir, files in os.walk(srcDir):
  for file in files:
    date=editor=volume=number=None
    fileNum = file.replace('zen', '').replace('.php', '')
    try:
      # Eliminate files which aren't the ones I'm trying to convert
      fileNum = int(fileNum)
    except ValueError, e:
      continue

    # The Slug
    name = 'zen-%s' % fileNum

    text = open(os.path.join(root, file)).read()

    # Extract the Date (or a string of any sort) from a variable
    matches = re.search('$Date/s*=/s*["']([^'"]+)["']', text)
    if matches != None:
      date= matches.group(1)
    elif date == None:
      date = 'September 1, 1992'
      date = datetime.datetime.strptime(date, '%B %d, %Y')
    # Extract a number
    matches = re.search('$Volume/s*=/s*([/d]+)', text)
    if matches != None:
      volume= matches.group(1)
    # Snip volume and other extractions

    title = "Sir High Lord Zen - Volume %s, Number %s" % (volume, number)

    # Pull off the header
    text = text.split('WriteNavControls', 1)[1]
    text = text.split('?>', 1)[1]
    # Pull off the footer
    text = text.split('?>')[-1]
    # In the wordpress db n (linefeeds) mean something so I need
    # replace them with spaces in the source text.
    text = text.replace('n', ' ')

    #print text

    sql = """
      insert into wp_posts
      (post_author, post_date, post_date_gmt, post_content,
      post_title, post_status, post_name, post_modified,
      post_modified_gmt, post_type) values
      (2, %s, %s, %s, %s, 'publish', %s, %s,
      %s, 'post')
      """

    c.execute(sql, (date, date, text, title, name, date, date))

So the only real problem is that no category is created. Opening the created post and saving it will add the post to the ‘Uncategorized’ category. You can always add it to another category at that point instead.

There is probably some sql that could be written to automatically add an entry to the wp_post2cat table for any post that lacks such and entry but after five minutes I couldn’t think of simple way of doing it and since it was only a few dozen posts I just opened and saved them all.

insert into wp_post2cat (post_id, category_id) values (412, 22);

Will add a single post. If you have a large number of posts to add my script it would be pretty easy to write a script to generate a number of sql statements to populate the wp_post2cat table.

Tech

The Senate is taking this opportunity to take back some power stolen by President Bush who believes himself Emperor. It’s a small thing, but it is important. Technically the Senate didn’t take a recess for Thanksgiving or Christmas. It would be understandable if you missed the important work they did during this time and were sure you saw them back in their home districts.

Senator James Webb, a Democrat from Northern Virginia, alone stands vigil. He enters the Senate chamber gavels the session to order. Maybe he determines there is no quorum or maybe he just gavels out immediately. In either case, the senate comes to order, which means it isn’t in recess. If the senate isn’t in recess there can’t be recess appointments.

Throughout his presidency Bush has used the power of the recess appointment to appoint extreme right wing idealogues whom the American people would cringe at if they looked at any great detail. In some cases he has even given recess appointments to people who the senate has rejected or who’s name he had withdrawn because it was clear they would be rejected.

In his belief that checks and balances shouldn’t apply to him and that they are quaint ideas he has used the recess appointment to effectively remove the Senate’s confirmation power of advice and consent. The senate is taking reasonable action to reclaim their constitutionally mandated role in political appointments.

The American people eventually wisened up and voted in a divided government. When politicians acted as individuals of conscience, it might have been acceptable to have all the branches of government under the power of one party, but since now politicians are merely extensions of the party and don’t seem to vote against the party, we need a divided government. It is through that divided government that we ensure the president can’t just stack the government with the worst kind of extreme idealogues.  In my opinion the president does not deserve deference and giving it to him because he was elected ignores why we elected the Senate.

Bypassing those checks and balances voted in by the American people is the sign of someone who wants to be a dictator, not a president.

References: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/23/AR2007122301708.html

Politics

When doing an apt-get update on my debian machine and recieve and error like this:

W: GPG error: http://www.debian-multimedia.org etch Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 07DC563D1F41B907

As root doing the following fixed it:

# gpg --recv-keys 07DC563D1F41B907
# gpg --export 07DC563D1F41B907 | sudo apt-key add -


Maybe I’ll remember next time.

Tech

This was the First New Eve where I didn’t seem to have any friends to invite me over to some sort of party or similar event. Not sure how it happened exactly. It saddens me. I went out to the Dogfish Head brewpub. Had a bottle of Pangea which I recommend highly. Toasted in the New Year with a glass of 90 minute. I’m not a fan of champaign so the last few years I always look for a quality brew to toast the new year. I did 90 Minute last year, since I was at Dogfish Head anyway, I went with the 90 minute again.

So I think the toast for this year is,

“To friends forgotten, friends of the past, friends of the present and friends of the future. May we each have each other and find a year of belonging, a year of prosperity and a year of glory.”

To everyone…

Throwing in Neil Gaiman’s traditional New Years wish:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

Beer, Life