I ran into a problem installing some COM+ components today. The installer was using Regsvcs.exe to register each COM+ component. I noticed after a while that the installer wasn't making any progress and that my dual-proc system was stuck at 50% CPU utilization. I attached a debugger to the offending process, regsvcs, and found that it was stuck in the following infinite loop (disassembly courtesy of Reflector):

 internal void System.EnterpriseServices.CatalogSync.Wait()
 {
   if (this._set)
   {
     RegistryKey key1
       = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey("SOFTWARE\\Classes\\CLSID");
     while (true)
     {
       int num1 = (int) key1.GetValue("CLBVersion", 0);
       if (num1 != this._version)
       {
         break;
       }
       Thread.Sleep(0);
     }
     this._set = false;
   }
 }

There are two severe problems with this code.

1. The loop should time out. There must be some reasonable limit after which you can incontrovertibly say that something must have gone wrong, and throw an exception. There has to be some way to terminate a loop.

2. Never use Sleep(0) in a loop. Sleep(0) yields the processor only if there's a runnable thread. If there isn't, Sleep(0) will return immediately. If the code is sitting in a tight loop, the net effect is that it will maximize the CPU until the thread's quantum is exhausted. There are no other runnable threads, so the scheduler immediately starts this thread again. This code will run until your CPU burns out.

(And, yes, I have committed both of these sins in shipping code. Why do you ask?)

I don't know what the calling code is doing or why CLBVersion isn't being altered by some other thread or process. I had to use RegEdit to modify this value to get the loop to terminate, whereupon RegSvcs immediately did its work and terminated. And then it started all over again, with the next invocation of RegSvcs on another COM+ component. I don't know if the components are really installed properly. I had to leave at that point.

As I mentioned last month, I participated in this year's AIDS Walk on Saturday.

I raised over $1300 online, handily exceeding my goal of $1,000. I also raised another $300 in cash and checks at the fundraising barbecue that we threw on September 1st.

I've lost count, but I believe that in the last 15 years, I've raised about $10,000 for charity. Most of it has been for the Northwest AIDS Walk. The last few years that I was at Microsoft, I raised $2,000-$3,000 each year, thanks to the power of Microsoft matching, which doubled the amount of money that I raised. I've also raised money two years running for Ugandan orphans sponsored by Vim: Microsoft Vim Users raised $2650 for orphans in Uganda.

Go me!

Nine-Eleven. The date burned into everyone's brain. One of those dates where everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news. Emma and I awoke to the radio telling us that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. We went downstairs and watched the TV in horror.

For a time, an all-too-brief time, the country pulled together in a show of unity and grief. The world joined us in an outpouring of support.

There are many reasons why history will condemn George Bush, but one of the most serious is his squandering that good will for quick partisan advantage. A better man could have built a bipartisan consensus to tackle terrorism in a serious way. Ask not what your country can do for you -- just go shopping.

He should have finished the job in Afghanistan. Instead, his attention turned to fomenting the irrational, immoral Iraq war, which turned the world against us.

In many ways, the terrorists have won. This country slides slowly towards a police state, as Bush arrogates imperial powers to himself. Bush and bin Laden have a symbiotic relationship. Bush has turned Iraq into a recruiting ground for Al Qaeda. Bin Laden is the ever-threatening boogeyman to scare the American people.

MoneyCentral is reporting that our Video On Demand product is running a major pilot:

Cable television operator Sunflower Broadband and MTV Networks today announced that they are launching a market-leading campaign to dynamically insert national advertisements into on-demand cable television. Sunflower will begin dynamically placing ads into MTV Networks on-demand programming this week. The first campaign, created and managed by the agency Mediaedge:cia, promotes the theatrical release of Paramount Pictures' and MTV Films' major motion picture "jackass number two", in theaters nationwide on September 22. Ads for the movie will be inserted into Comedy Central On Demand programs at the moment that viewers request the free on-demand shows.

more ...

My colleague, Greg, and I spent all day debugging a build break in some unit tests that exercise a webservice interface in legacy .NET 1.1 code. Last night, the tests stopped working on our CruiseControl.NET build server. We couldn't understand it. The tests had been working for months. Now we were getting timeouts in SOAP. The tests essentially mock a SOAP service using the soap.inproc transport and a stub implementation that signaled an event to acknowledge a method being called.

The only thing that had changed in the code tree was that another colleague, Pavel, had discovered that two of our .csproj files somehow shared the same GUID, and had repaired that. But that could hardly have any effect on the WSE2 runtime. Could it?

Turns out that it was the cause of the break. NAnt 0.85 rc2 and rc3 silently failed to build the NUnit assembly because of the duplicated GUIDs. The assembly was not getting propagated to the directory where all the other NUnit assemblies are placed. The CC.NET task that ran the tests never noticed the missing assembly because the test was couched in terms of *.NUnit.dll. And we never noticed that the test hadn't been run in months because we have ~20 such NUnit assemblies, and the NUnit summary output goes on for several screens in CC.NET.

Morals of the story

1. Use NAnt 0.85 rc4, which detects the GUID collision and treats it as a fatal error.

2. Create .csproj files through the IDE, not by taking an existing file and hacking on it. (At least, that's we assume happened.)

3. Assumptions can bite you. We assumed that the code was being run all along, so it took us several hours to draw the connection between Pavel's checkin and the failing NUnit assembly.

4. Don't mock a webservice by implementing a dummy SoapReceiver, hauling in the WSE runtime and a boatload of non-determinism. (Instead, make fun of its dress sense.) For our newer code, we've been taking an approach like this, using partial classes and Rhino Mocks.

5. We have also taken to including our test fixtures in the same assemblies as the code they test. I have mixed feelings about this: it offends my sensibilities to have all this test code compiled into production code. But it would certainly have been hard to miss the build break in production code.

In mid-July, most of the Atlas Solutions developer teams moved from our old offices at Fifth and Jackson in the International District four blocks west to swanky offices in Pioneer Square. The new offices are at the State building on the corner of Occidental and Main, the pedestrianized block with the antique stores and art galleries. Occidental Park across the street has been refurbished. There are three coffee shops within two blocks, and Elliott Bay Books is one block west of us. It's all very pleasant, with the exception of the large number of homeless people.

The only thing that I miss from the old offices is that we're further from the large number of Asian restaurants in the International District.

I move back to 5&J the week after next. Two developers from my team, Atlas OnDemand, are being loaned to another team for a few months.

The picture of me on a milk carton arises from the email exchange after the loan was announced. Our boss said that he would post pictures of the two of us so that the OnDemand team wouldn't forget what we look like. I demanded to see my picture on a milk carton and, lo, that was arranged forthwith.

I spent far too much time on Friday trying to make log4net work in a COM+ application.

Someone else had done part of the work necessary, by creating an application.config for the COM+ application and setting a custom Application Root Directory. This was enough to ensure that most of the managed code in the application got their configuration settings; log4net being the

It took some additional work to realize that we needed to add two assembly attributes:

[assembly: log4net.Config.Repository("unique-name")]
[assembly: log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator(ConfigFile="application.config")]

The repository name just needs to be a unique string. We used the name of the assembly.

From Scott Hanselman, I learned about Microsoft's new blog posting client, Windows Live Writer. I've played around with it and it's definitely the nicest free blogging client that I've used.

Here are instructions on configuring it to post to dasBlog. I'm showing how to set it up for Emma's blog, since she's running dasBlog 1.8. I'm running a recent build of the as-yet unreleased dasBlog 1.9, which supports Really Simple Discovery, which makes the first part of this exercise simpler, as WLW can infer that it's dealing with Metaweblog API, just by pointing it at the root of the blog.

Launch WLW and Add a Weblog Account. Choose Another weblog service.

Next, enter the URL of your blog and the username and password that you use to log in.

Select your provider, Metaweblog API. The remote posting URL is the blog homepage URL + /blogger.aspx:

You are now ready to post text to your blog:

Create a test post. Be sure to include an image. When you try to Publish it, you'll get a dialog like this:

Use an FTP program to discover the FTP path to your blog's content/binary directory. Here's the relevant area in FileZilla:

Note that the leading parts of the path are quite different to the corresponding HTTP URL (and peculiar to Emma's site). Fill out the FTP Settings dialog with the appropriate settings:

You're now ready to upload images via FTP:

Go for it.

This post was of course created with Windows Live Writer. I did have to set the Image Size to original for each image, or they would have been squished down to an unreadable size.

Update: I had a hell of a time when I first posted this. None of the images showed up. Instead I was seeing fragments of raw HTML. I tracked it down to the dasBlog configuration filters, which (by default) rewrite the word dasBlog as a link to the dasBlog website. That's more-or-less fine in plain text, but it plays havoc if the word dasBlog appears in the middle of one of your image URLs.

This year is the 20th anniversary of the Northwest AIDS Walk. A whole generation has passed. Twenty years ago, AIDS was considered a gay man's disease and a death sentence. The U.S. government was just beginning to acknowledge the existence of AIDS, half a decade after it had first been recognized by health authorities, and thousands had died.

AIDS is still a serious problem, but the development of antiretroviral drugs a decade ago means that people with HIV are living longer, healthier lives than before. More than 1 million Americans are now living with HIV/AIDS: 9,000 of them in King County. 40,000 people are infected every year in the U.S., and most new infections are among African-Americans. The U.S. is getting off relatively lightly: about one-fifth of the adults in southern Africa have HIV! Nearly 40 milllion people are living with HIV around the world, and another 25 million are dead.

The Lifelong AIDS Alliance provides a variety of services to those living with HIV/AIDS in Washington State. I've walked in the AIDS Walk every year since 1992 and I've raised thousands of dollars for AIDS services and awareness.

Please help me meet my fundraising goal of $1000 this year by sponsoring me at my AIDS Walk page. I will be walking on September 9th.

I thank you, the Lifelong AIDS Alliance thanks you, and the people you help thank you.

Update: Go to http://www.georgevreilly.com/aidswalk to sponsor me.

Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, who was fired for speaking out about Karimov's use of torture, writes about the UK terror plot:

I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine....

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms....

In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.

Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.

Via AmericaBlog.

My brother David sent me this photo earlier today, of me, him, and Michelle. I'm guessing that Michelle is less than a year old, so it was taken sometime in 1971, which would make David four and me six. (Our youngest brother, Mark, wasn't born until 1973.)

Emma thinks we're adorable and has already made this picture her desktop background on her work computer.

Mark has another photo of the four of us, taken in 1978 on his website, alienresident.net:

I came across a very long interview with Saul Alinsky (24,000 words), conducted by Playboy in 1972, in a FireDogLake thread about the book 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Fight the Right.

Saul Alinsky was a longtime radical activist, starting in the Great Depression. He moved from labor organizing to social organizing in the late 1930s, working in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago that was made famous by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle. He is generally considered the father of community organizing.

Shortly before he died, he published his most famous book, Rules for Radicals

As a graduate student in criminology, he spent a couple of years hobnobbing with Al Capone's mob in Chicago:

PLAYBOY: Didn't you have any compunction about consorting with -- if not actually assisting -- murderers?

ALINSKY: None at all, since there was nothing I could do to stop them from murdering, practically all of which was done inside the family. I was a nonparticipating observer in their professional activities, although I joined their social life of food, drink and women: Boy, I sure participated in that side of things -- it was heaven. And let me tell you something, I learned a hell of a lot about the uses and abuses of power from the mob, lessons that stood me in good stead later on, when I was organizing.

Another thing you've got to remember about Capone is that he didn't spring out of a vacuum. The Capone gang was actually a public utility; it supplied what the people wanted and demanded. The man in the street wanted girls: Capone gave him girls. He wanted booze during Prohibition: Capone gave him booze. He wanted to bet on a horse: Capone let him bet. It all operated according to the old laws of supply and demand, and if there weren't people who wanted the services provided by the gangsters, the gangsters wouldn't be in business. Everybody owned stock in the Capone mob; in a way, he was a public benefactor. I remember one time when he arrived at his box seat in Dyche Stadium for a Northwestern football game on Boy Scout Day and 8000 scouts got up in the stands and screamed in cadence, "Yea, yea, Big Al. Yea, yea, Big Al." Capone didn't create the corruption, he just grew fat on it, as did the political parties, the police and the overall municipal economy.

Later, he worked as a criminologist at the state prison in Joliet:

'll tell you something, though, the three years I spent at Joliet were worth while, because I continued the education in human relationships I'd begun in the Capone mob. For one thing, I learned that the state has the same mentality about murder as Frank Nitti. You know, whenever we electrocuted an inmate, everybody on the staff would get drunk, including the warden. It's one thing for a judge and a jury to condemn a man to death; he's just a defendant, an abstraction, an impersonal face in a box for two or three weeks. But once the poor bastard has been in prison for seven or eight months -- waiting for his appeals or for a stay -- you get to know him as a human being, you get to know his wife and kids and his mother when they visit him, and he becomes real, a person. And all the time you know that pretty soon you're going to be strapping him into the chair and juicing him with 30,000 volts for the time it takes to fry him alive while his bowels void and he keeps straining against the straps. So then you can't take it as just another day's work. If you can get out of being an official witness, you sit around killing a fifth of whiskey until the lights dim and then maybe, just maybe, you can get to sleep. That might be a good lesson for the defenders of capital punishment: Let them witness an execution. But I guess it wouldn't do much good for most of them, who are probably like one of the guards at Joliet when I was there -- a sadistic son of a bitch who I could swear had an orgasm when the switch was thrown.

The Great Depression:

PLAYBOY: How close was the country to revolution during the Depression?

ALINSKY: A lot closer than some people think. It was really Roosevelt's reforms that saved the system from itself and averted total catastrophe. You've got to remember, it wasn't only people's money that went down the drain in 1929; it was also their whole traditional system of values. Americans had learned to celebrate their society as an earthly way station to paradise, with all the cherished virtues of hard work and thrift as their tickets to security, success and happiness. Then suddenly, in just a few days, those tickets were canceled and apparently unredeemable, and the bottom fell out of everything. The American dream became a nightmare overnight for the overwhelming majority of citizens, and the pleasant, open-ended world they knew suddenly began to close in on them as their savings disappeared behind the locked doors of insolvent banks, their jobs vanished in closed factories and their homes and farms were lost to foreclosed mortgages and forcible eviction. Suddenly the smokestacks were cold and lifeless, the machinery ground to a halt and a chill seemed to hang over the whole country.

People tried to delude themselves and say, "None of this is real, we'll just sleep through it all and wake up back in the sunlight of the Twenties, back in our homes and jobs, with a chicken in every pot, two cars in every garage." But they opened their eyes to the reality of poverty and hopelessness, something they had never thought possible for themselves, not for people who worked hard and long and saved their money and went to church every Sunday. Oh, sure, poverty might exist, far off in the dim shadowy corners of society, among blacks and sharecroppers and people with funny names who couldn't speak English yet, but it couldn't happen to them, not to God's people. But not only did the darkness fail to pass away, it grew worse. At first people surrendered to a numbing despair, but then slowly they began to look around at the new and frightening world in which they found themselves and began to rethink their values and priorities.

We'll always have poor people, they'd been taught to believe from pulpit and classroom, because there will always be a certain number of misfits who are too stupid and lazy to make it. But now that most of us were poor, were we all dumb and shiftless and incompetent? A new mood began stirring in the land and a mutual misery began to eat away the traditional American virtues of rugged individualism, dog-eat-dog competition and sanctimonious charity. People began reaching out for something, anything, to hang on to -- and they found one another. We suddenly began to discover that the ruthless law of the survival of the fittest no longer held true, that it was possible for other people to care about our plight and for us to care about theirs. On a smaller scale, something similar occurred in London during the blitz, when all the traditional English class barriers broke down in the face of a common peril.

On getting people on to your side:

Now, it's always been a cardinal principle of organizing for me never to appeal to people on.the basis of abstract values, as too many civil rights leaders do today. Suppose I walked into the office of the average religious leader of any denomination and said, "Look, I'm asking you to live up to your Christian principles, to, make Jesus' words about brotherhood and social justice realities." What do you think would happen? He'd shake my hand warmly, say, "God bless you, my son," and after I was gone he'd tell his secretary, "If that crackpot comes around again, tell him I'm out."

So in order to involve the Catholic priests in Back of the Yards, I didn't give them any stuff about Christian ethics, I just appealed to their self-interest. I'd say, "Look, you're telling your people to stay out of the Communist-dominated unions and action groups, right?" He'd nod. So I'd go on: "And what do they do? They say, 'Yes, Father,' and walk out of the church and join the C.I.O. Why? Because it's their bread and butter, because the C.I.O. is doing something about their problems while you're sitting here on your tail in the sacristy." That stirred 'em up, which is just what I wanted to do, and then I'd say, "Look, if you go on like that you're gonna alienate your parishioners, turn them from the Church, maybe drive them into the arms of the Reds. Your only hope is to move first, to beat the Communists at their own game, to show the people you're more interested in their living conditions than the contents of your collection plate. And not only will you get them back again by supporting their struggle, but when they win they'll be more prosperous and your donations will go up and the welfare of the Church will be enhanced." Now I'm talking their language and we can sit down and hammer out a deal. That was what happened in Back of the Yards, and within a few months the overwhelming majority of the parish priests were backing us, and we were holding our organizational meetings in their churches. To fuck your enemies, you've first got to seduce your allies.

PLAYBOY: How did you win the backing of the community at large?

ALINSKY: The first step was getting the priests; that gave us the right imprimatur with the average resident. But we still had to convince them we could deliver what we promised, that we weren't just another do-gooder social agency strong on rhetoric and short on action. But the biggest obstacles we faced were the apathy and despair and hopelessness of most of the slum dwellers. You've got to remember that when injustice is complete and crushing, people very seldom rebel; they just give up. A small percentage crack and blow their brains out, but the other, 99 percent say, "Sure, it's bad, but what can we do? You can't fight city hall. It's a rotten world for everybody, and anyway, who knows, maybe I'll win at numbers or my lottery ticket will come through. And the guy down the block is probably worse off than me."

The first thing we have to do when we come into a community is to break down those justifications for inertia. We tell people, "Look, you don't have to put up with all this shit. There's something concrete you can do about it. But to accomplish anything you've got to have power, and you'll only get it through organization. Now, power comes in two forms -- money and people. You haven't got any money, but you do have people, and here's what you can do with them." And we showed the workers in the packing houses how they could organize a union and get higher wages and benefits, and we showed the local merchants how their profits would go up with higher wages in the community, and we showed the exploited tenants how they could fight back against their landlords. Pretty soon we'd established a community-wide coalition of workers, local businessmen, labor leaders and housewives -- our power base -- and we were ready to do battle.

PLAYBOY: What tactics did you use?

ALINSKY: Everything at our disposal in those days -- boycotts of stores, strikes against the meat packers, rent strikes against the slumlords, picketing of exploitive businesses, sit-downs in City Hall and the offices of the corrupt local machine bosses. We'd turn the politicians against each other, splitting them up and then taking them on one at a time. At first the establishment dismissed us with a sneer, but pretty soon we had them worried, because they saw how unified we were and that we were capable of exerting potent economic and political pressure. Finally the concessions began trickling in -- reduced rents, public housing, more and better municipal services, school improvements, more equitable mortgages and bank loans, fairer food prices.

I'll give you an example here of the vital importance of personal relationships in organizing. The linchpin of our struggle in Back of the Yards was unionization of the packing-house workers, because most of the local residents who worked had jobs in the stockyards, and unless their wages and living standards were improved, the community as a whole could never move forward. Now, at that time the meat barons treated their workers like serfs, and they had a squad of vicious strikebreakers to terrorize any worker who even opened his mouth about a union. In fact, two of their goons submachined my car one night at the height of the struggle. They missed me and, goddamn it, I missed them when I shot back. So anyway, we knew that the success or failure of the whole effort really hinged on the packing-house union. We picketed, we sat down, we agitated; but the industry wouldn't budge. I said, "OK, we can't hurt 'em head on, so we'll outflank 'em and put heat on the downtown banks that control huge loans to the industry and force them to exert pressure on the packers to accept our demands." We directed a whole series of tactics against the banks, and they were a little wobbly at first, but then they formed a solid front with the packers and refused to give in or even to negotiate.

We were getting nowhere on the key issue of the whole struggle, and I was getting worried. I racked my brain for some new means of applying pressure on the banks and finally I came up with the answer. In those days, the uncontested ruler of Chicago was the old-line political boss Mayor Kelly, who made Daley's machine look like the League of Women Voters. When Kelly whistled, everybody jumped to attention, from the local ward heeler to the leading businessman in town. Now, there were four big-city machines in the country at that time -- Kelly's in Chicago, Pendergast's in Kansas City, Curley's in Boston and Hague's in Jersey City -- and between them they exercised a hell of a political clout, because they were the guys who delivered the swing states to the Democrats at election time. This meant that Roosevelt had to deal with them, but they were all pretty disreputable in the public eye and whenever he met with them he smuggled them through the back door of the White House and conferred in secret in some smoke-filled room. This was particularly true in Kelly's case, since he was hated by liberals and radicals all across the country because of his reactionary anti-labor stand and his responsibility for the Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago in 1937. In fact, the left despised Kelly as intensely in those days as they did Daley after the Chicago Democratic Convention [1968].

Now, Kelly was a funny guy; he was a mass of contradictions -- like most people -- and despite his antilabor actions he really admired F.D.R.; in fact, he worshiped him, and nothing hurt him more than the way he was forced to sneak into the White House like a pariah -- no dinner parties, none of those little Sunday soirees that Eleanor used to throw, not even a public testimonial. He desperately wanted acceptance by F.D.R. and the intellectuals in his brain trust, and he really smarted under the second-class status the President conferred on him. I'd studied his personality carefully, and I knew I'd get nowhere appealing to him over labor's rights, but I figured I might just be able to use this personal Achilles' heel to our advantage.

Finally I got an audience with Kelly and I started my spiel. "Look, Mayor," I said, "I know I can't deliver you any more votes than you've already got" -- in those days they didn't even bother to count the ballots, they weighed 'em, and every cemetery in town voted; there was a real afterlife in Chicago -- "but I'm going to make a deal with you." Kelly just looked bored; he was probably asking himself why he'd even bothered to see this little pip-squeak radical. "What've you got to deal with, kid?" he asked me. I told him, "Right now you've got a reputation as the number-one enemy of organized labor in the country. But I'll make you a liberal overnight. I'll deliver the national C.I.O. endorsement for you and the public support of every union in Chicago. I've arranged for two of the guys who were wounded in the Memorial Day Massacre to go on the radio and applaud you as a true friend of the workingman. Within forty-eight hours I'll have turned you into a champion of liberalism" -- Kelly still looked bored -- "and that'll make you completely acceptable to F.D.R. on all occasions, social and political."

Suddenly he sat bolt upright in his chair and his eyes bored into mine. "How do I know you can deliver?" he asked. I handed him a slip of paper. "That's the unlisted number of John L. Lewis in Alexandria, Virginia. Call him, tell him I'm here in your office, tell him what I said, and then ask him if I can deliver." Kelly leaned back in his chair and said, "What do you want?" I said, "I want you to put the screws on the meat packers to sign a contract with the union." He said, "It's a deal. You'll get your contract tomorrow." We did, and from that time on victory for Back of the Yards was ensured. And I came out of that fight convinced that the organizational techniques we used in Back of the Yards could be employed successfully anywhere across the nation.

PLAYBOY: Were you right?

ALINSKY: Absolutely. Our tactics have to vary according to the needs and problems of each particular area we're organizing, but we've been very successful with an overall strategy that we adhere to pretty closely. For example, the central principle of all our organizational efforts is self-determination; the community we're dealing with must first want us to come in, and once we're in we insist they choose their own objectives and leaders. It's the organizer's job to provide the technical know-how, not to impose his wishes or his attitudes on the community; we're not there to lead, but to help and to teach. We want the local people to use us, drain our experience and expertise, and then throw us away and continue doing the job themselves. Otherwise they'd grow overly dependent on us and the moment we moved out the situation would start to revert to the status quo ante. This is why I've set a three-year limit on the time one of our organizers remains within any particular area. This has been our operating procedure in all our efforts; we're outside agitators, all right, but by invitation only. And we never overstay our welcome.

... 

PLAYBOY: How does a self-styled outside agitator like yourself get accepted in the community he plans to organize?

ALINSKY: The first and most important thing you can do to win this acceptance is to bait the power structure into publicly attacking you. In Back of the Yards, when I was first establishing my credentials, I deliberately maneuvered to provoke criticism. I made outrageous statements to the press, I attacked every civic and business leader I could think of, and I goaded the establishment to strike back. ...

But over and above all these devices, the ultimate key to acceptance by a community is respect for the dignity of the individual you're dealing with. If you feel smug or arrogant or condescending, he'll sense it right away, and you might as well take the next plane out. The first thing you've got to do in a community is listen, not talk, and learn to eat, sleep, breathe only one thing: the problems and aspirations of the community. Because no matter how imaginative your tactics, how shrewd your strategy, you're doomed before you even start if you don't win the trust and respect of the people; and the only way to get that is for you to trust and respect them. And without that respect there's no communication, no mutual confidence and no action. That's the first lesson any good organizer has to learn, and I learned it in Back of the Yards.

On co-optation:

ALINSKY: No. It's the eternal problem, but it must be accepted with the understanding that all life is a series of revolutions, one following the other, each bringing society a little bit closer to the ultimate goal of real personal and social freedom. I certainly don't regret for one minute what I did in the Back of the Yards. Over 200,000 people were given decent lives, hope for the future and new dignity because of what we did in that cesspool. Sure, today they've grown fat and comfortable and smug, and they need to be kicked in the ass again, but if I had a choice between seeing those same people festering in filth and poverty and despair, and living a decent life within the confines of the establishment's prejudices, I'd do it all over again. One of the problems here, and the reason some people just give up when they see that economic improvements don't make Albert Schweitzers out of everybody, is that too many liberals and radicals have a tender-minded, overly romantic image of the poor; they glamorize the povertystricken slum dweller as a paragon of justice and expect him to behave like an angel the minute his shackles are removed. That's crud. Poverty is ugly, evil and degrading, and the fact that have-nots exist in despair, discrimination and deprivation does not automatically endow them with any special qualities of charity, justice, wisdom, mercy or moral purity. They are people, with all the faults of people -- greed, envy, suspicion, intolerance -- and once they get on top they can be just as bigoted as the people who once oppressed them. But that doesn't mean you leave them to rot. You just keep on fighting.

... 

Over and over again, the firebrand revolutionary freedom fighter is the first to destroy the rights and even the lives of the next generation of rebels.

But recognizing this isn't cause for despair. All life is warfare, and it's the continuing fight against the status quo that revitalizes society, stimulates new values and gives man renewed hope of eventual progress. The struggle itself is the victory. History is like a relay race of revolutions; the torch of idealism is carried by one group of revolutionaries until it too becomes an establishment, and then the torch is snatched up and carried on the next leg of the race by a new generation of revolutionaries. The cycle goes on and on, and along the way the values of humanism and social justice the rebels champion take shape and change and are slowly implanted in the minds of all men even as their advocates falter and succumb to the materialistic decadence of the prevailing status quo.

On dogmatism:

I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what judge Learned Hand described as "that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right." If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide. The great atomic physicist Niels Bohr summed it up pretty well when he said, "Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question." Nobody owns the truth, and dogma, whatever form it takes, is the ultimate enemy of human freedom.

Now, this doesn't mean that I'm rudderless; I think I have a much keener sense of direction and purpose than the true believer with his rigid ideology, because I'm free to be loose, resilient and independent, able to respond to any situation as it arises without getting trapped by articles of faith. My only fixed truth is a belief in people, a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they'll generally reach the right decisions. The only alternative to that belief is rule by an elite, whether it's a Communist bureaucracy or our own present-day corporate establishment. You should never have an ideology more specific than that of the founding fathers: "For the general welfare." That's where I parted company with the Communists in the Thirties, and that's where I stay parted from them today.

I'll let you read the story of the O'Hare "shit-in" for yourselves. Not to mention the "fart-in".

Almost by accident, he invented the tactic of getting proxy votes to attend (and disrupt) shareholder meetings, and as a means of social and political pressures against the megacorporations.

Via Peter, a site full of "inspirational" posters drawn from Star Trek in the vein of the satirical ones at Despair.com.

This poster of course plays on the trope of Kirk/Spock fan fiction, where Kirk and Spock are portrayed as lovers. Emma has long been a fan of slash, particularly pairings such as Solo/Kuryakin (Man from U.N.C.L.E.) and Jack O'Neill/Daniel Jackson (Stargate SG-1).

I found this opinion piece on bisexuality by Matthew Parris in The Times of London:

In my Notebook column in The Times I have been recording, in an occasional way, candidates for inclusion in a speculative list of truths or nonsenses staring us in the face that we somehow cannot see: things future ages may dismiss with a snort — just as we look with incredulity at our forebears’ faith in the theory of the four bodily humours or possession by demons. Here is another modern candidate: the idea that there is a set of males called homosexuals, and another called heterosexuals, plus a handful in the middle called bisexuals who can’t decide. This, we shall one day realise, is a distorting glass through which to look at male sexuality.

... 

Make a horizontal line whose left margin represents a sexual orientation so completely heterosexual that such men have never felt, however fleetingly, any sexual attraction to another man; and whose right margin represents gay men utterly unteased by any other interest. Mark 30 million dots between these two poles, representing each of us men in Britain, located towards left or right depending on the balance of the attractions we’ve felt in our own life. How will the resulting scatter look as a shape?

If popular talk is to be believed, the shape would trace the silhouette of a wine glass lying leftwards on its side: long, thin stem in the middle, opening out to a big bowl on the left and a small base on the right. The large cluster (at least 80 per cent, the bowl) would be the “straights”. A much smaller but distinct cluster (perhaps 5 to 10 per cent, the base) would be the “gays”. The stem would be a thin scatter of “bisexuals”.

But if only we knew it, the true shape, I believe, would be closer to that of a champagne bottle lying rightwards on its side, its base to the left, tapering gently towards its mouth at the right. I think a substantial preponderance of men are more heterosexual than homosexual, but scattered fairly evenly between 100 per cent and half-and-half; and that the smaller number who think of ourselves as gay are likewise quite evenly distributed along the spectrum from the halfway point.

... 

If I am right, why have both the gay and the straight worlds so fiercely resisted the ambivalent and perhaps fluid analysis I propose?

... 

Secondly — and this is very important — the idea that many of us have a potentially variable sexuality opens up the uncomfortable possibility of personal choice; and we gays have lived in a transitional era in which we have very much wanted to believe and claim that “God made us” like this, and “we can’t help it”. Whether or not this is true, it is comforting for those troubled by suppressed guilt, and has provided a knock-down argument against those moral conservatives who say we could choose, and therefore should choose, not to be gay. It has also seemed to rebut the complaint that homosexuality could be “promoted” or that gay men might “corrupt” potential heterosexuals. What, however, has not yet dawned on still embattled crusaders for equality is that true equality — equality of self-regard as well as public esteem — will have arrived when we are as careless as a blond or a redhead might be whether or not we were made that way.

Does “I can’t help being black” strike you as a self-respecting argument against racism? That “I can’t help it” is a subtly self-oppressing argument for acceptance does not seem to have occurred to supposedly liberated gay activists, for whom it has always been the easiest way of ending the argument.

But it is intellectually sloppy (would you accept it from a child molester?), calculated to close off troubling thoughts about might-have-beens, and no answer to the Christian evangelists’ insulting talk of cures for our “affliction”. We retreat into a simple, bipolar world of can’t-help-it straights and can’t-help-it gays. We push these feelings and people into closets marked “latent” homosexuality, “in-denial” homosexuality and “confused” homosexuality.

I think sexuality is a supple as well as subtle thing, and can sometimes be influenced, even promoted; I think that in some people some drives can be discouraged and others encouraged; I think some people can choose. I wish I were conscious of being able to. I would choose to be gay.

I do think that sexual orientation is largely innate. How we express our sexuality is a matter of choice. We should indeed be able to make an unfettered choice of which consenting adults we wish to love, to share our lives with, and to fuck.

It is wrong to discriminate on grounds of inborn characteristics (race, gender) and on chosen categories (religion, political affiliation). Religious identity is clearly a matter of choice, although far too many people uncritically accept the religion of their parents.

Like Parris, I don't care for the I-was-born-this-way defense of sexual orientation. We should be arguing for the freedom to live our own lives as we see fit.

Joe Lieberman, the 2000 vice-presidential nominee, lost the Democratic primary for his Senate seat tonight. He has said that he will run as an independent. In effect, he will not accept the will of the people.

Lieberman lost, in part, because of his continuing refusal to admit that the Iraq war is a disaster, and in part because he has been a leading enabler of the Republican agenda. Good riddance!

AmericaBlog suggests contacting your senators and demand that they come out in support of Lamont and that they strip Lieberman of his Senate committees.

I sent the following email to Senators Murray, Cantwell, and Reid:

Ned Lamont won the Democratic primary in Connecticut. I urge you to express your support for him publicly. He is a good man and he will make a good Senator.

Joe Lieberman has declared that his ego is more important than the Democratic party. You must repudiate him. You must strip him of all his Senate committee seats. You must shun him like a pariah.

If Lieberman runs as an independent all the way to November, he will be the big political story, not the failure of the Republican leadership, not the need for change.

I got an email earlier today from one of my relatives who has ties to South Africa, which read:

Last week a 3 year old girl (in South Africa ) was beaten and raped. She is still alive. The man responsible was released on bail yesterday. He is walking the streets. If you are too busy to read this then just sign your name and forward this on. The Government is planning to close the child protection unit and this is a petition against it. This is a very important petition. It is an essential part of the justice system for children. You may have already heard that there's a myth in South Africa that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. The younger the virgin, the more potent the cure. This has led to an epidemic of rapes by infected males, with the correspondent infection of innocent kids. Many have died in these cruel rapes. Recently in Cape Town, a 9-month-old baby was raped by 6 men. Please think about that for a moment. The child abuse situation is now reaching catastrophic proportions and if we don't do something, then who will?

Kindly add your name to the bottom of the list and please pass this on to as many people as you know. If you are signature no.: 120 please forward the mail-list to childprotectpca@saps.org.za

Please don't be complacent, do something about the kids of South Africa. You can make a difference. That child is fighting for life. This is just 1of the million cases of child abuse, so please pledge your support and help keep CPU (CHILD PROTECTION UNIT) open. Please give your support to the petition and ensure that it goes to as many people as possible. Please don't just leave it, make a difference. In order to write your name copy this messege and paste it in a new mail (compose). Or click on forward and add your name to the list and send it on to others.

Again, if you are number 120 please send this to childprotectpca@saps.org.za

[Lots of forwards stripped, as well as 97 signatures from South Africa, India, Nepal, the UK, and Australia.]

My immediate reaction was that this has to be a hoax. It has all the hallmarks:

• Alarmist subject matter

• Unsubstantiated assertions (but see note below)

• Pass this letter on to everyone you know

• No dates, no end dates

• No provenance

Admittedly, many well-meaning but incompetently written petitions share the same problems.

Here's what I wrote back to everyone whose email address I could mine out of what I had been sent:

Stop! It's a hoax. Do NOT uncritically believe everything you get in email.

First thing you should do when you get a chain letter urging you to send email to everyone you know, is to Google around to see if it's horseshit. Nine times out of ten it will be.

The first link that shows up when you google for "childprotectpca chain letter" is this:

http://www.joewein.net/hoax/hoax-saps-child-protection-unit.htm

Which led me to the South African Police Service:

http://www.saps.gov.za/_dynamicModules/internetSite/faqBuild.asp?myURL=242

Snopes.com is the go-to site for all Internet hoaxes. Here's what they have to say about this one:

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/babyrape.htm

If you read any of these links, read this one. Then look around the Snopes website and get a feel for some of the crap that's out there.

Now, please go and forward THIS email to everyone you forwarded the previous email to, and also send this email to everyone who sent you the chain letter in the first place. Stamp it out before it spreads any further.

(Note: Snopes indicates that some of the rape stories mentioned in this letter are true. A nine-month-old girl really was raped, though it turns out that it wasn't the six men who were initially arrested, but the ex-boyfriend of the mother.)

I later followed up with the somewhat softer:

Let me just add this.

Hoax chain letters are a bad thing because some twit thinks it's fun to cause trouble and spread lies. This one has been circulating for four years. I'm sure it will still be turning up in four years' time.

About their only redeeming feature is that they get good-natured, if naive, people such as yourselves to do a little something in an attempt to make the world a better place. If these hoax letters actually achieved something constructive, I wouldn't mind nearly so much.

I've shot down a few chain letters before. Every single time, Snopes has already written up an extensive page about it.

Raven is now Doctor Raven. She successfully defended her doctoral dissertation in biomedical informations this morning. Six long years in the making.

Dr. Raven and Mr. Raven came over this evening for Games Night, a twice-monthly get-together we have for our friends to play board games. Emma and I had been given a bottle of Dom Perignon '92 for our wedding that we had never quite found a suitable occasion for until now, so we chilled that in anticipation of tonight's celebration. I generally don't care for champagne, but that went down nicely.

Congratulations, Raven!

Well, fuck! The Washington State Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited decision today on the constitionality of the state's Defense of Marriage Act. Somehow, they found that it didn't violate the state constitution's Equal Protection clause.

No same-sex marriages in Washington state anytime soon.

I attended the rally at the First Baptist church earlier this evening. (Find me in the photo!) Some anger, some disappointment. Mostly upbeat. The young Latina couple were very affecting. The Serkin-Pooles invited everyone to join their club, as they announced their formal engagement to each other. One speaker pointed out that even if the court had handed down a favorable decision, the process would not have been over.

Tomorrow we fight another day. I've been supporting same-sex marriage since 1993, when I heard of the Hawaii Equal Rights Marriage Project. I didn't expect the war to end today, though it would have been nice to win this battle.

The LMA have more on what it all means.

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate ably skewers the court's decision in Rational Lampoon:

If you vote to uphold the ban, on the other hand, you'll get to join your colleagues on the New York and Nebraska courts, who just did the same thing. You'll also find yourself in the warm embrace of your buddies on the Georgia and Tennessee courts (who ultimately ruled against gay marriage in recent weeks on narrower, more technical, terms). Nobody will excoriate you in the op-ed pages. Instead of causing widespread fury, you will unleash, at most, widespread resignation.

Still, you feel bad. You hold no personal animus toward gay people. You even think there is something slightly mean-spirited behind your state's Defense of Marriage Act. You talk it over with your wife/husband/clerks. It's a pickle. Months pass.

Until you hit upon the solution: Shift the blame. Make the legislature the bad guys. Find a way to frame the ban on gay marriage that makes it impossible to strike down. Rule that unless the ban is utterly insane, it's constitutional. Suggest that as long as the legislature passed it, it must be rational. Use the word "deferential" six times.

The key to appearing reasonable will be to vilify the dissenters. You'll want to use your majority opinion to emphasize that judges who vote their "personal views" are behaving like "legislators." Quote liberal lion Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens for that proposition. Then condemn—without quite using the words "judicial activist"—the dissenters for having been "uncharacteristically … led to depart significantly from the court's limited role when deciding constitutional challenges."

Be sure to tell your "readers unfamiliar with appellate court review" that your state's decision to ban gay marriage is solely the fault of the legislature. Because you yourself, of course, still love everyone.

Sometimes spammers can be taken in by their would-be victims. Here's a hilarious, if long, story of just such a case.

It's even funnier if you're already familiar with the character of Derek 'Del Boy' Trotter.

I hadn't really planned to visit Ireland this year, but then my sister Michelle phoned the other day to say that her boyfriend, David Bowles, had just proposed to her. Not a big surprise. They had moved in together earlier this year, and we were all assuming that it was a question of when, not if.

They plan to get married quite soon, as his father has been given six-to-nine months to live, and they want him to be at the wedding. I don't know if the date is firm yet, but the latest that I'm hearing is November 11th.

At SIFF 2004, I saw an acclaimed trilogy from Hong Kong, Infernal Affairs, Infernal Affairs II, and Infernal Affairs III on three consecutive nights, Yan is a cop who's been in deep cover for ten years, infiltrating the triads. Lau is a triad who joined the cops about ten years ago, rising to the rank of inspector. Only their respective bosses, Superintendant Wong and Big Sam, know who they are. Each becomes aware of the other about the same time, and the chase to find the moles is on.

It's a tense and complex thriller and a meditation on good and evil. Yan has long blurred the line between cop and gangster. Lau is having second thoughts about being beholden to his old gang boss. Both men are in quiet agony, hating the deception and the danger.

I just watched the first movie again on NetFlix, and it holds up well. The other two movies are further down our queue. IA II is a prequel, showing Lau and Yan as young men just setting out on their long-term infiltrations. IA III is a sequel to IA I.

Martin Scorcese has remade IA as The Departed, due out later this year.

I read a piece in yesterday's New York Times about some useful lessons learned from animal trainers.

So, like many wives before me, I ignored a library of advice books and set about improving him. By nagging, of course, which only made his behavior worse: he'd drive faster instead of slower; shave less frequently, not more; and leave his reeking bike garb on the bedroom floor longer than ever.

... 

I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.

The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.

Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.

I was using what trainers call "approximations," rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can't expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can't expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.

... 

On a field trip with the students, I listened to a professional trainer describe how he had taught African crested cranes to stop landing on his head and shoulders. He did this by training the leggy birds to land on mats on the ground. This, he explained, is what is called an "incompatible behavior," a simple but brilliant concept.

Rather than teach the cranes to stop landing on him, the trainer taught the birds something else, a behavior that would make the undesirable behavior impossible. The birds couldn't alight on the mats and his head simultaneously.

At home, I came up with incompatible behaviors for Scott to keep him from crowding me while I cooked. To lure him away from the stove, I piled up parsley for him to chop or cheese for him to grate at the other end of the kitchen island. Or I'd set out a bowl of chips and salsa across the room. Soon I'd done it: no more Scott hovering around me while I cooked.

I followed the students to SeaWorld San Diego, where a dolphin trainer introduced me to least reinforcing syndrome (L. R. S.). When a dolphin does something wrong, the trainer doesn't respond in any way. He stands still for a few beats, careful not to look at the dolphin, and then returns to work. The idea is that any response, positive or negative, fuels a behavior. If a behavior provokes no response, it typically dies away.

... 

I adopted the trainers' motto: "It's never the animal's fault." When my training attempts failed, I didn't blame Scott. Rather, I brainstormed new strategies, thought up more incompatible behaviors and used smaller approximations. I dissected my own behavior, considered how my actions might inadvertently fuel his. I also accepted that some behaviors were too entrenched, too instinctive to train away. You can't stop a badger from digging, and you can't stop my husband from losing his wallet and keys.

Hmmm...

I found an interesting piece on the NPR website about the modern anti-abortion movement:

In the 1980s, in order to solidify their shift from divorce to abortion, the Religious Right constructed an abortion myth, one accepted by most Americans as true. Simply put, the abortion myth is this: Leaders of the Religious Right would have us believe that their movement began in direct response to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Politically conservative evangelical leaders were so morally outraged by the ruling that they instantly shed their apolitical stupor in order to mobilize politically in defense of the sanctity of life. Most of these leaders did so reluctantly and at great personal sacrifice, risking the obloquy of their congregants and the contempt of liberals and "secular humanists," who were trying their best to ruin America. But these selfless, courageous leaders of the Religious Right, inspired by the opponents of slavery in the nineteenth century, trudged dutifully into battle in order to defend those innocent unborn children, newly endangered by the Supreme Court's misguided Roe decision.

It's a compelling story, no question about it. Except for one thing: It isn't true.

... 

Let's remember, [Paul Weyrich] said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.

... 

"What caused the movement to surface," Weyrich reiterated,"was the federal government's moves against Christian schools." The IRS threat against segregated schools, he said, "enraged the Christian community." That, not abortion, according to Weyrich, was what galvanized politically conservative evangelicals into the Religious Right and goaded them into action. "It was not the other things," he said.

Excerpted from Thy Kingdom Come, by Randall Balmer.