I saw Gogol Bordello tear it up live on Friday at Lupo’s in Providence. Incredible show. Everything you’ve heard is true. Bawdy, sweaty, shirtless, unpredictable and engulfing. They played for a little over an hour, but when we called them out for an encore they played for another 30 minutes. Nobody had any energy left by the time it was over.

Equally impressive was the opening band, a group I hadn’t heard before–Flobots–who pwned the stage. The viola was haunting, the bass and drums were rock-solid, the lyricism was sharp and the band’s presence was a cross between The Roots, Rage Against The Machine and an Obama rally.

Flobots’ performance of Handlebars was intense and moving, and their cover of Happy Together was just plain fun. They carry a political message: organize, work for change, support peace, make the world a better place, vote Democrat. But they carry it without the heavy-handedness or patronizing tone so often heard in “political music”.

Messages of peace and renewal sell pretty well to the 18+ crowd in Providence. It doesn’t seem they sell as well to Russia right now.

This mess in South Ossetia was a long way coming, but somehow still surprised people. A friend pointed out to me that the US media would rather talk about terrorist fist jabs than cover international news, so most Americans probably didn’t realize there was a war brewing until there were massive casualties.

He also wondered, isn’t starting a war during the opening ceremony of the Olympics sort of a global party foul? Probably. But what’s a kegger without the guy who pees in the kitchen trash?

I’ve listened to a lot of hand-wringing on the radio about what America should have done differently to avoid this. In the end, our contribution to this conflict was one of mismanaged expectations. We’ve sent such a strong message of support to Georgia–if only because they are a fledgling democracy–that their President failed to understand the limits of our actual support.

Given the Kremlin’s rhetoric over the last several months, nobody should have expected Russia to respond with anything less than overwhelming force. We even gave them the precedent when we backed Kosovo’s independence.

In love with the notion of supporting global democracy, wherever it might be found, America’s leaders seem oblivious to the realities of Russian influence. For just a couple thousand Georgian troops in Iraq, Bush suggested NATO membership. Condoleeza Rice and Dick Cheney seem genuinely surprised that this should irk Moscow, even as they extend with their 1980s-style missile defense network.

Our leaders have needlessly provoked a resurgent adversary and misled a friendly nation into thinking the mere offer of NATO membership equated a defense pact.

Maybe in another world, where we do not need Russia’s cooperation–on oil, gas, Iran, North Korea, nuclear proliferation, global warming and human trafficking–we could insist on putting Western peacekeepers into the conflict zone. Even that is a gamble, because the possibility of a destabilizing escalation that pulls in the entire region (or continent) is a hard pill to swallow.

But it’s not going to happen, and–because our President has valued the politics of ideology over developing solid international policy–nothing America can do now will keep Russia from pushing this as far as the Kremlin sees fit.

I wrote earlier about Obama’s problems with the Left. He has a core of followers so idealistic, so devoted and so passionate that they are reacting to his (inevitable) moderation like an army of spurned lovers.

We should be so lucky with McCain. I’ve yet to see him spurn anyone with an RNC card, although he doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of their cash.

McCain’s website extols the need to overturn Roe v. Wade, to protect the Second Amendment and to elect more constructionist judges. Most of that is probably honest. Yet he’s also moved away from campaign finance regulation, faltered in his stand on immigration and even reversed his opposition to FISA-style warrantless wiretapping. At what price does he finally win the loyalty of his base?

Republicans have lost focus. Moderates are stung by Bush’s failure to fix Social Security or reform immigration. Religious activists are frantic about attacking reproductive rights. Social conservatives are working hard to keep science out of schools. Economists have had the rug pulled out from under them. Hawks want to bomb Iran while aggravating Russia. Nobody in the GOP has a clue how to fix health care. Nobody talks about the every day diplomacy going on in America which undermines generations of good will.

The Republican coalition is fragmenting, and it is unclear to me how anyone can keep it all together. But if McCain is to succeed, he will not do it by pandering to those who want to keep fighting the culture wars until the bitter end. Abortion, immigration and evolution have nothing to do with what’s damaging America today. Moralism, protectionism and creationism are all it will take for America–not just the GOP–to tear itself apart.

McCain needs to put things in perspective for his party. He’s been successful in defusing the “Can we trust him?” question that was all over the news just a few months ago. If he speaks out, they should listen.

It’s time for the presumptive GOP nominee to tell his party that science is a fundamental part of education, and no amount of home-schooling or vouchers will help bring high-paying technical jobs to a nation that thinks the Earth is 4,000 years old.

It’s time for someone to tell Pat Buchanan that we have a moral obligation to help the poor and feed the needy. Every dollar spent protesting Planned Parenthood is one less dollar spent funding AmeriCorps. What would Jesus donate to?

It’s time that a Republican stood up to the broad trend of isolationism that is soaking the Right, and announced a plan to start welcoming skilled foreigners back into what has become “Fortress America”.

John McCain should prove he’s the reformer they all say he is. He can start with his own party. Find a way to fix the GOP, and maybe we’ll trust you to fix the nation.

Barack Obama has been taking a lot of heat lately from his own. They have their reasons. After turning down public campaign funding, refusing to speak harshly against the Court’s gun control decision, and voting for the (heinous) FISA domestic spying bill, Obama has plenty to explain. Those who voted for him are fuming and hurt at what they perceive as quick betrayal; the rest of us are wondering whether this is indicative of a political slickness that will only get worse if he wins.

There are plenty lining up to call Obama a “flip-flopper”, and the Washington Post lists some compelling Obama back-and-forths beyond what most media are reporting. I’m sure he is tempted to justify and equivocate, and he’s proved himself capable of such empty eloquence before. On some of these–notably FISA, over which the EFF and ACLU are rightfully suing–I agree with his internecine critics that he’s playing politics on the weak side of a moral issue. But there will be more controversies, and at times, his baying supporters on the Left will be wrong.

The GOP will surely continue to throw around accusations of being wobbly. He can withstand these, I believe better than Kerry, so long as he is able to articulate the basis of his beliefs. But if Obama does not address a growing sense that he is untrustworthy–that he is entirely capable of ditching his commitments as soon as it’s politically expedient–America will stop listening.

My advice to Barack: don’t look back. This country needs a centrist and a reformer; pragmatism and openness have been sorely lacking these past eight years. If he is to occupy that centrist space better than McCain, he will need to show he is capable of challenging the Democratic base on some of its own core principles.

Obama needs to explain his FISA decision, not let his apologetic supporters do it for him. He must continue to challenge the status quo on politically sensitive issues. Most importantly, he must show that he is not above voting against the vested interests of his own party. Obama has yet to show America that he is truly the change in national politics we’ve all been hoping for. Real change involves sacrifices from both sides, not just the party that’s leaving the White House.

Next up: To Hell with the Right.

I wanted to see George Carlin when he came through Boston a few months ago, but I couldn’t round up any friends willing to go. In retrospect, I wish I had just gone alone. I remember the first time I heard the Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television, and I felt it was the work of a genius. I still think it is.

But I didn’t appreciate, until today, how truly insightful George Carlin could be. NPR’s Fresh Air had a piece, Remembering George Carlin, where they played clips from older interviews of his. I was floored by how well-spoken, insightful, and thought-provoking he could be talking about his own intellectual development in the decades following the 1960s. In his discussions on religion, morality, humor, pain, trust and humanity, there is a lot of truth. He’s worth listening to.

As with so much in this world, I didn’t really appreciate the man until he was gone.

I got a curious comment to my last post about the potential harm Hillary would do on Obama’s ticket. At first blush this comment looks like one of those rambling half-drunk comments that you are inclined to mark as spam but decide to allow only because you don’t get enough hits to be selective about your readership.

Then I clicked on the link to his page, found more of the same, and saw… more links. To more blogs, all in the same layout, all written in the same manner. Each one looks like a regurgitated melange of Clinton pamphlets and regional-newspaper Obama news clips. They’re all signed the same way, and none of them really make any sense.

So I’m wondering: is this a person at all? Is this some new form of spam bot that I haven’t seen before, which grabs a topic (like “Hillary Clinton vs Barack Obama”), plagiarizes enough web content to fill a few blogs, and goes on a comment-spamming, cross-linking rampage? It’s starting to seem plausible, except that these blog sites don’t have any ads. It’s a conundrum.

Of course Hillary didn’t concede. How could she? Anyone who’s invested this much time, energy and cash is not going to walk away quietly. Well, hang on. Mitt Romney did just that–he conceded almost prematurely, and the common wisdom was that he was gunning for the VP spot with McCain. Thankfully, we’ve moved past that.

Hillary is doing the same. Her husband has been going on for a couple weeks about how she should be VP, and now the news media is gushing about a “unifying ticket” that would bring Democrats together. It sounds nice, but Barack, don’t do it.

The first Clinton administration was notoriously divisive. Not in a partisan sense; I mean it was rife with internecine power struggles. The common wisdom is that an Obama/Clinton ticket would unify the Democrats, and maybe that’s true. But it would divide the administration between two camps that have fought a razor-sharp campaign against each other, and still see each other as rivals across a generational gap.

Obama won’t have much problem unifying Democrats. Sure, there may be some who are still willing to tell exit pollers that “race was a factor in the decision to vote for Hillary” (read: “I don’t trust black men”). And some of those voters might not mobilize, or even (gasp!) vote Republican. But he doesn’t need them anyways.

Obama has enough clout with young voters (who have already shown they can mobilize very well) and with centrists (as long as he steps back from this anti-trade stuff) that if West Virgina wants to walk, they can walk. He doesn’t need Hillary Clinton in the White House for the next four years, nipping at his heels and playing as active a role in shaping policy as Dick Cheney has done for the last eight.

Don’t do it, man. You can do better. If the Dems really want a “unifying ticket”, how about unifying Hispanic voters? They’re fuming at the Republican party over the nativists’ victory in the immigration battle. Does anyone have Bill Richardson’s phone number?

It’s been a busy weekend for the home server. After I installed a fourth drive, the motherboard failed to post anymore. The CPU fan would spin, network LEDs would light up, but not a damn thing coming out the video card. Take all the memory out and it’s still dead silent. Fried.

I’m still stumped on what I did to kill it, but life is short and I need to watch the last season of The IT Crowd right now! The board was an old Socket 754 with a single-core Sempron, so Micro Center damn well isn’t stocking any replacements. Fast forward to me burning my cash on a new board, CPU, and memory stick.

Having spent more of this weekend than I’d really like to admit installing the new dual-core mobo and CPU, rewiring all the drives (since I’m now short by one IDE connector), searching for how to get my RAID5 partition to eat up the fourth drive, wasting my time on out-of-date Internet howtos, desperately cursing the man page for not having step-by-step instructions, and finally settling on something that might work (but might also nuke my data if it’s feeling pernicious), it dawns on me I haven’t yet searched Google for “mdadm grow raid5“.

Well. There it is. I quit.

I got caught a while ago sending spam. A veritable flood of Cialis solicitations and Nigerian phone scams bursted from my domain. Thankfully, the registrar I used (GoDaddy) sprang into action and shut down my account. To ensure I would not return to my dastardly ways, they asked me to pay the $80 fee before they would reinstate my account. I declined. Another evil spammer shut out from the web by the Knights of Self-Governance.

Thing is, I wasn’t sending spam. Someone else was. From one of my domains.

As it turns out, the DNS service I was using (FreeDNS) has a very interesting business model. It’s a subscription platform, like many other things on the Internet. But how do you hook people to pay money? Well, you do that by giving away their domains.

The default behavior for FreeDNS is to allow anyone else who uses their system (free or otherwise) to register subdomains of your domain names. That means if you use them to manage DNS for, say, ying.li, I can create a subdomain called 0wned.ying.li. It’s so easy!

To their credit, FreeDNS lets you put your domains into “private” mode, which ostensibly means you have the ability to shut off any subdomains that other people register. To their discredit, Glyph never received an email that I’d registered a subdomain of his. Also, once he did put his own domain into public mode, we could not figure out where the hell to delete my spammer subdomain.

This is what happened to me a long time ago. Because the default behavior of FreeDNS is an open-door policy, like a bakery that uses the honor system, anybody can come take what they want. Glyph had 44 unauthorized subdomains (just off the one domain). When mine got shut down, there were hundreds.

As I post this, 0wned.ying.li is still cached in DNS (somewhere) to point to my server.

Are we having fun yet?