Maybe this is a bit premature, but it seems odd to me that neither CNN, MSNBC nor Fox News (no surprise on that one, I suppose) is reporting on the hundreds of thousands of anti-war protesters who gathered at Washington D.C. over the weekend.

Even considering that these mainstream media outlets are biased and inaccurate, how can such a massive protest be ignored? Am I missing something?

Isn’t this newsworthy??

Update: I’m still looking for verification on the actual number of people. The truthout video is the source of that estimate, while other sources claim it is in the tens of thousands.

I stayed up late last night to watch Steve Jobs’ keynote at MacWorld. Once again I felt a new sense of awe and wonder at technology—now embodied in the iPhone.

If it came to a choice between Vista and OS X, can you guess which one I’d advocate?

I’ve been watching Ron Paul for about a year now—reading his weekly posts and listening to his speeches on the floor of Congress. If there is anyone I can say I would trust with the mantle of President of the USA, this is the man. Yes, even above Barack Obama. The news I just received is that he’s begun his presidential exploratory committee to gauge interest and raise funds. I am so thrilled!

Why has he so clearly won me over? I will list a few points:

• Ron Paul was one of only 6 Republicans to vote against the Iraq War. He maintains a non-interventionist foreign policy.
• He voted against the Patriot Act, a deceptively named bill that successfully diminished our rights and redirected power to the White House for an indefinite period of time, the period we call the “War on Terror”.
• He is an economist from the good ol’ days. He supports the gold standard (the only thing that keeps the ultra-rich honest). He is fiscally responsible—and unlike most politicians who make the same claim, Ron Paul is actually a minimalist when it comes to government policy, so I believe him when he says our government can and ought to have a balanced budget. (By the way, have you seen the historical debt and deficit charts lately?) Basically, his views align with recently deceased Milton Friedman, a Nobel prize-winning economist who advocated the Free Market.
• Ron Paul supports a truly independent re-investigation the national tragedy that occurred on September 11th, 2001.

If you’d like to see Ron Paul on film and listen to some of his economic positions and thoughts, there’s a 20 minute clip on Google Video from The Korelin Economics Report that was worth the watch for me. Here are some quotes I took from this video, from Rep. Ron Paul:

[I was an] obstetrician. I delivered 4,000 babies, so I was very busy, and enjoyed it too! Matter of fact, getting in to politics was sort of a lark. I didn’t expect to be elected.

I think what has happened is that we’ve lost respect for the rule of law. We’ve got a good constitution and it’s very important, but we’ve abused it. … we don’t follow the constitution, and that’s how we’ve gotten ourselves in to trouble.

We’re running our welfare and our warfare on borrowed money that we created out of thin air.

I have an account at the Computer Science department at BYU where I go to school. I recently started a subversion repository there so that I could work on some class projects within the safety net of version control. That worked well until I realized it would be nice to work on a certain project at home. To accomplish this, my first thought was “How do I access my subversion repository from home?” Alas, it appears there is no centralized location at BYU for this sort of thing. CVS, yes; SVN, no. Back to square one.

My next thought was, “Well, alright then, I’ll just host my repository somewhere else.” No go. Unfortunately, outgoing packets on non-standard ports are (apparently) being dropped. Using the svn client to get an external repository just hangs.

Plan C—using a 2-hop ssh tunnel to access my private repository—turned out to be the winner. It was, however, more difficult than I thought. Especially since I didn’t know what a 2-hop ssh tunnel is.

So here’s a run-down of the process if, in an oddly similar situation, you’d like to do it as well:

• Create a 2-hop tunnel to your account. This was necessary in my situation since the BYU Computer Science lab has a gateway machine to the internal network.
  

  ssh -f -N -l <ssh username> -L 51526:racquetball:22 -2 cs.byu.edu
  

  Where racquetball is the hostname of the computer on the inside of the network (the “end” of the tunnel), and cs.byu.edu is the gateway machine. Replace <ssh username> with your own ssh username. The “51526″ is the port number on your local machine to which you will connect from now on. This is the “beginning” of the tunnel.

• Add a tunnel config entry to your .subversion/config file. If you’ve ever used subversion on your own machine, then you will already have a .subversion/config file in your home directory. Find the “[tunnels]” section and add your own protocol. This is what mine looks like:
  

  byussh = ssh -l <ssh username> -p 51526
  

  Once again, replace <ssh username> with your own username.

• Finally, use the svn client to access your repository. Note that the path is the full path on the destination machine (e.g. racquetball in my case).

  svn ls svn+byussh://localhost/users/guest/d/<username>/subversion
  

  Replace <username> with your account user name.

In the above scenario, I am telling svn to ssh to a local port (localhost:51526) as another user (me, on the other network). The local port listens for ssh connections and tunnels them directly to the racquetball end point. At that point, the “svnserve -t” command is executed and the subversion repository is accessed almost as if it were a local file:/// style protocol. Note that there is no other svnserve daemon required in this case—it’s created on demand.

I just received word that the small-cap gold and silver mine that I mentioned previously spiked today. Word is that trading for this stock was halted on the Toronto Stock Exchange, due to the 4-fold overnight increase. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that I can’t seem to get a reading on it today.

The source of this information said the price per share spiked to $5. We’ll see what news tomorrow brings.

So I bought Barack Obama’s book, “The Audacity of Hope” a couple of months ago, and I must say that I’m quite impressed with this guy. I’m no Democrat, but Obama’s got a sharp head on his shoulders—and an ear for listening, too. He might just be the one to bring this country together again. Or so I hope.

In the Nov. 13th edition of Time Magazine, Eric Murr wrote to the editor:

“I am a christian and conservative Republican, but I can’t help hoping that Obama will become our next President. I believe he is wrong about abortion, but he has acknowledged in a refreshingly Socratic way that he can’t just dismiss the views of those on the other side. That may be politicking to earn my vote, but if a pro-life Republican ultimately sends us into a third world war with status quo Republican rhetoric, a pro-life position is kind of pointless.” —Eric Murr, Greencastle, Pa.

I think Barack Obama’s life experiences have prepared him to lead a grassroots return to the America we were all proud of. His dad wasn’t a senator. His mom wasn’t a governor. He grew up in an average income home. He knows what it’s like to climb from the bottom to the top. My sense of Obama is that he, like few of the politicians in today’s scene, is a people’s politician—that rare breed that actually takes seriously the role of representing the people who elect him. He can sit between two fiercely divided ideals and actually make both sides feel understood.

I’m crossing my fingers in hope that his black and white roots help rather than hinder his campaign. In my world view, a white president is just as good as a black one. But I know that in some parts of the USA, things like what color of skin you have can still sway votes. If all goes well, the blacks who care if he’s black will see what they want, and the whites who care if he’s white will see what they want. In this sense, and with a little luck, he could be doubly able to heal the divide and bring our country together again.

Browsing through some code a few days ago, I couldn’t resist.

render(:nothing => true, :status => "201 Created")

See also the San Francisco Tea Party video (held Dec. 16, 2006). The speech starts at about 2 minutes in.

Aaron Krowne, a math whiz and economic blogger, writes that the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is between 9% and 13%—more than twice the official headline of 4.5% that was recently announced—due to factors such as the shuffling of unemployment categories and the enormous prisoner population in the US (2.2 million).

What does this mean? I think that the recent surge in the value of the U.S. dollar is inflated and temporary, based on shoddy statistics. While 4.5% may be a nice number to party about for the new year, it’s not going to hold for long.

Some commodities may still be in for a downward spike, such as oil (crude) and copper, according to Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis. Gold and silver are still looking good, in spite of this week’s setback, however.

I just installed Spam Karma 2 in the hope of reducing some of the spam load coming from the ol’ blog here. For some reason it’s become more popular to advertise viagra in the comments. No thank you.

Apologies to anyone whose comments may have been lost in the recent surge. It should be easier for legitimate commenters to get through now (let me know if you experience any problems).

I agree with this pointed opinion piece by Molly Ivins on CNN.com: It’s up to us to stop this war

… let’s keep in mind that when the Army arrived in Baghdad, we, the television viewers, watched footage of a bunch of enraged and joyous Iraqis pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein, their repulsive dictator, in Firdos Square. Only one thing was wrong. The event was staged. Taking down the statue was instigated by a Marine colonel, and a PSYOP (psychological operations) unit made it appear to be a spontaneous show of Iraqi joy.

Like her, I feel shame as I acknowledge the actions of this down-trending empire:

What happened to the nation that never tortured? The nation that wasn’t supposed to start wars of choice? The nation that respected human rights and life? A nation that from the beginning was against tyranny? Where have we gone? How did we let these people take us there? How did we let them fool us?

I hope that if you feel the weight of this on your shoulders too, you’ll write to your representatives and let your will be known. In Ivins’ words, “it’s up to you and me, Bubba.”