Rag Hand

Did you know that Woody Guthrie lifted the melody of “This Land Is Your Land” essentially note-for-note from “When the World’s on Fire,” a Baptist hymn recorded by country legends the Carter Family ten years earlier.

Did you also know that “This Land is Your Land” was a protest song.
Here are two verses left out of the “safe” version as recorded by wanna be protesters like Peter Paul and Mary:

This one is referred to as the “relief office” verse:
In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I’d seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?

This verse is on one of the recordings at the Smithsonian and is referred to as the “private property verse.”:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing;
That side was made for you and me.

See the lyrics copyright 1956 here.

Protest music in the “folk” tradition has effectively disappeared from the mainstream media, usually as a victim of political correctness. But if you look you will find that there are a few left.

Here is the Nightwatchman, an old school acoustic protest artist, I was recently introduced to.
The site freely offers both lyrics and tablature for all his songs.

I found this on Covertress’ blog: Over the Counter Intelligence as part of her blog on Islamic Jihadists and Free Speech

American flag $25. Gasoline & lighter $5.
Catching yourself on fire because you are a terrorist asshole… PRICELESS!

First and foremost:
While I am a registered Republican, there is no way I can vote for McCain.
Anybody who thinks that Reganomics (the trickle down theory) is a good idea must already be rich. Since only the rich profit by this strategy.
It failed during the Regan years and it will fail again. We currently have a Neo-con administration and look at what they’ve done to our country.
I doubt that we could survive another one without going into a full blown depression.

I would ask if Hillary is going to continue the lies and deceit of the first Clinton administration?

Clinton sent Al Gore to Kyoto and signed the treaty knowing that it would never pass congress. In fact it was never presented to congress. This makes it just more political posturing and general dishonesty.

When Clinton left office the first thing their pet general did was take the black berets away from the rangers and give them to the regular troops.
This was nothing more than an excuse to give his number one Chinese supporter a fat contract.

And why won’t Hillary release her documents from the Whitehouse years?

Obama is a relative unknown who says he will change the world.
I doubt that he the political clout to make himself King like W.

The Dems are not as organized as the Republicans. People like Harry Reid and Daniel Inoue would have to give up some of their power, and as we’ve seen from the back peddling on their promised reorganization that occurred the day the Dems took over. That just ain’t gonna happen.

Without a great deal of cooperation by both houses any changes with Obama in office will be primarily window dressing.

I do not want another war mongering, make the rich richer, Neo-con in office. So that lets out McCain.
Based on the record of their administration and the current bout of incessant lies I do not trust Billary.
Therefore Obama is the least offensive of the three, but I strongly suspect that that is simply because we don’t enough about him.

In case you were feeling like M$ isn’t so bad:

Microsoft makes no secret about the fact that Windows Vista is gathering information. End users have little to say, and no real choice in the matter. The company does provide both a Windows Vista Privacy Statement and references within the End User License Agreement for the operating system. Combined, the resources paint the big picture over the extent of Microsoft’s end user data harvest via Vista.

The Redmond company emphasized numerous times the fact that all information collected is not used to identify or contact users. But could it? Oh yes! All you have to know is that Microsoft could come knocking on your door as soon as you boot Windows Vista for the first time if you consider the system’s computer information harvested. Microsoft will get your “Internet protocol address, the type of operating system, browser and name and version of the software you are using, and the language code of the device where you installed the software.” But all they really need is your IP address.

I use a personal firewall on my machine that limits what goes in or out. However, anytime I want an update for my os or drivers I have to let it call home. Which defeats any attempt at privacy.
This started with the guid, which M$ says contains no personal data. Neither does your ssn. Until it’s linked to information in a database.
If you register your product with M$ your guid is recorded and undoubtedly linked to your personal data. Ad-Infinitum.

The entire article I took the first paragraphs from is here.

I just relocated this blog because it was loading at the speed of glaciers.
This is the response I received from tech support:

Thank you for contacting Online Support. Your site does appear to load a
bit slowly but I’m not showing any issues with the server that you are
on. If you try loading any static content on the page (such as images,
plain html documents) you will see that these load very quickly so it
appears that the issue is not with the server but with the code on some
pages. Additionally, the traceroute does not show anything unusual once
it hits our network and the server you are on at this time is responding
quickly. The best solution in most cases is to optimize the code for
efficiency to ensure it loads as fast as possible. (If your site uses
databases, check those as well. Make sure all database connections are
closed at the end of query.) If that is not an option, then you may want
to consider purchasing a server for quicker loading times.

with this in the second paragraph:

As you are on a shared hosting environment, there can be times when the
load can spike and cause your site to load slower than normal, but this
is not something that can be entirely avoided using shared hosting, and
if you do find that load times are unacceptable during peak times, you
may want to considering using a virtual dedicated or dedicated server in
order to host your web site. I apologize for any inconvenience.

“Additionally, the traceroute does not show anything unusual once
it hits our network”
I ran several traceroutes and they all contained this:
11 25 ms 25 ms 26 ms *****************
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 27 ms 27 ms 25 ms *****************
Notice hop 12 — no matter how many traces I ran I got “Request timed out.” — Nope, no way it could be anything on their end.
It must be the software. The fact that it runs fine everywhere else. Including one domain that still sits on one of their servers. Is a moot point.

I left out the server names and ips because, I’m so used to “it’s not our fault” from support that if they don’t pass the blame I wonder what they’re up to.
—- I’m not angry, so much as disgusted that this no longer surprises me.

I tried wiping the database tables and deleting the program, then reinstalling a couple of times. It was so slow that I felt a good reinstall was virtually impossible.

I then moved it, lock, stock, and barrel, to this server and voila, it works.

You will notice not one but two attempts to upsell to a more expensive server.
(What a nothing blog like this could possibly need more than a properly functioning network is beyond me.)

This is what support has become.
— The motto of tech support is now, don’t bother to figure out what’s wrong, it’s always the customers fault, so sell them something else.

I still intend to buy my domain names from them, but I cannot imagine having them host a new site.
———————————

In all fairness, not all support is like this. It only feels that way.
I had to contact Dell support the other day and the response was pleasant and professional.