My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

I thought they had cheated; it was inconceivable to me that they could have re-recreated my lectures so precisely without notes. My colleagues, however, informed me that this was regular practice: the students memorized everything their teachers said and gave it back to them without changing a word. p. 220 [Just as they learn the Koran, JH.]

It has reached the point where hardly a day passes without some news about yet another huge security hole. Not in our air or sea ports, but in our voting machines. From Freedom To Tinker this morning comes the lovely news that you can buy a key to the Diebold voting machines on the Internet. And after you’ve rigged the election?

The key opens the mini-bar in your hotel room too.

Like other computer scientists who have studied Diebold voting machines, we were surprised at the apparent carelessness of Diebold”s security design. It can be hard to convey this to nonexperts, because the examples are technical. To security practitioners, the use of a fixed, unchangeable encryption key and the blind acceptance of every software update offered on removable storage are rookie mistakes; but nonexperts have trouble appreciating this. Here is an example that anybody, expert or not, can appreciate:

The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine – the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus – can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet.

On Wednesday we did a live demo for our Princeton Computer Science colleagues of the vote-stealing software described in our paper and video. Afterward, Chris Tengi, a technical staff member, asked to look at the key that came with the voting machine. He noticed an alphanumeric code printed on the key, and remarked that he had a key at home with the same code on it. The next day he brought in his key and sure enough it opened the voting machine.

This seemed like a freakish coincidence – until we learned how common these keys are.

Electronic voting is a sieve. And those getting elected know it.

Everyone agrees there are socials cost to gambling. But until now I haven’t read a thoughtful analysis of what those social costs are. Ed Morrison at Cleveland 2.0 does a good job of laying out the $300 million cost for North East Ohio from pathological gamblers alone in Measuring the social costs of Cleveland casinos.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

The recurrent image in those days was that of an elderly, bearded, turbaned man call for unceasing jihad to an audience of adolescent boys with red martyrs” bands stretched across their foreheads.

These were the dwindling remainders of a once vast group of young people who had been mobilized by the excitement of carrying real guns and the promise of keys to a heaven where they could finally enjoy all the pleasures from which they had abstained in life.

Theirs was a world in which defeat was impossible, hence compromise meaningless. p. 209

On the hard days
I ask myself
if I ever will.

Also there are times
my body whispers to me
that I have.

From The Vast Ocean Begins Just Outside Our Church: The Eucharist by Mary Oliver.

On 8 December 2004, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) slipped Section 111 of Title I, Division J, of the Fiscal Year 2005 Consolidated Appropriations Act (Pub. L. 108-447) and a new national holiday into our collective consciousness: Constitution Day. Our Constitution is the single most important document in Human History; read it all.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Please keep reading…

There are a large number of additional resources. Here are just a few:

The U.S. Constitution.
Celebrate Constitution Day.

I never leave home without my pocket-sized copy of our Constitution.
Celebrate Constitution And Citizenship Day.
A Day Set Aside for the Constitution.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

“I hope you believe me now when I tell about the need to put something into these kid”s heads[, said Mrs. Rezan]. The revolution has emptied their heads of any form or thought, and our own intelligentsia, the cream of the crop, is no better.” p. 200

I’m bummed. I have no soundtrack. WOXY has gone silent and there’s no music playing. Now I have to decide what to do about the My Soundtrack feature. Do I keep it? Do I let it go? Is there an internet radio station in Cleveland I should be listing to? OK, readers, any of you have suggestions? What do you think?

And I was left with the children,
To feed and clothe and school them.
And I did it, and sent them forth
Into the world all clean and strong,
And all through the wisdom of Pope, the poet:
“Act well your part, there all the honor lies.”

From Mrs. George Reece by Edgar Lee Masters.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

In The Tragic Muse, [Henry] James explains that his goal in writing is to produce “art as a human complication and social stumbling block.” p. 198

Today is the last day for WOXY. I can’t begin to count the hours I’ve spent listening to the station. General Manager Bryan Jay Miller, Program Director Mike Taylor, Music Director Matt Shiv and DJ Princess Barb Abney have given us all a great musical ride. Thank you all and please let me know where everyone lands.

My Final WOXY Soundtrack: Kick Out The Jams by MC5 on WOXY.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

There is something peculiar about the way they wear their chadors. I have noticed it in many other women, especially the younger ones. For there is in them, in their gestures and movements, none of the shy withdrawal of my grandmother, whose every gesture begged and commanded the beholder to ignore her, to bypass her and leave her alone.

All through my childhood and early youth, my grandmother”s chador had a special meaning to me. It was a shelter, a world apart from the rest of the world. I remember the way she wrapped her chador around her body and the way she walked around her yard when the pomegranates were in bloom.

Now the chador was forever marred by the political significance it had gained. It had become cold and menacing, worn by women like Miss Hatef and Miss Ruhi with defiance. p. 192

My Soundtrack: Cross Bones Style by Cat Power on WOXY.

The green shell of his backpack makes him lean
into wave after wave of responsibility,
and he swings his stiff arms and cupped hands,

paddling ahead. He has extended his neck
to its full length, and his chin, hard as a beak,
breaks the cold surf. He’s got his baseball cap on

backward as up he crawls, out of the froth
of a hangover and onto the sand of the future,
and lumbers, heavy with hope, into the library.

From Student by Ted Kooser.

… It’s not a Florida problem. It’s a national problem. And if we don’t fix it, the United States is going to become History’s largerst, wealthiest, most powerful two-bit dictatorship ever. Democracy demands that not only must citizens exercise the franchise and vote, but also that citizens be secure in the rightness of the voting process.

That security is rapidly slipping away.

From USA Today:

Primary day turned chaotic in Maryland’s two largest population centers Tuesday, and not because of the candidates or the issues. In Baltimore, poll workers didn’t show up. In the suburbs of Washington, cards needed to operate voting equipment were missing.

The situation was similar in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County in May, when poll workers had difficulty operating new voting machines. The results of the election were delayed six days while officials counted absentee ballots by hand.

Chicago primary races went without winners and losers for several days in March because of the shaky mix of new equipment and poorly trained poll workers. States from Florida to California also experienced problems.

The glitches in this year’s primaries come as nearly one in three counties wrestle with new equipment – upgrades mandated by the Help America Vote Act of 2002. The law was intended to fix the type of problems that plagued the 2000 presidential election.

How long will it be before Mickey Mouse is elected president?

From The Center For Information Technology Policy:

We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks.

For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates.

An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities – a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine’s hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.

And for a continuing overview of our home-grown electronic mechanism for subverting Democracy, stay in touch with the Electronic Frontier Foundation

My Soundtrack: It Might Be Me by Captain Of Industry on WOXY.

That’s Kirsti on camera, Molly’s behind it. And don’t miss her turtle video.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

“Whoever fights monsters, should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” Nietzsche. p. 180

My Soundtrack: Mourning Air by Portishead on WOXY.

Last week the Cleveland Heights, University Heights Library system re-opened the doors on the main libary on Lee Road. If any taxpayer needed to see the what their money well spent, this is it. This is a another shot of the secnd floor looking southeast across the main stair leading up from the lobby. I love the spaciousness of this library.

Last evening the Cleveland Heights Socrates Cafe group met. We asked: are humans justifiably superior to animals so as to allow us free use of all creatures? For those who could not join us, please use the comments to offer your perspective. And for those of us who did take part, if you’ve had a morning-after revelation, please share it in a comment.

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the universe’s source of cheap plastic crap. On The Writing On The Wal — the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar — Jonathan Rees, Robert Feinman, Peter Sayles and I continue our work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

LEFT BEHIND IN CHINA… China, not Islamists or terrorists, is the 800-pound gorilla in the room and we in the Free World ignore that fact at our peril. Recently in his Dispatches From The New World Of Work, Peters” writes: You M-U-S-T read Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao”s: Keep reading…

BUYING GOOD PRESS… It looks as if the buying of good buzz on the Internet just isn”t working out as well as the Bentonvile Behemoth thought it might. Not that sock puppet bloggers aren”t churning out accolades, they are, but not enough people are reading. Keep reading…

SETTING THE AGENDA… Tom Peters” insight on all matters business remain on target. In a recent post he mulled over the importance of Tiger Woods and how Katie Couric might change the way America watches television news. And in his writing, he threw in Wal Mart. Keep reading…

COSTCO STEPPING IN IT… One of the most common complaints we hear from Wal Mart apologists is: why do you pick on Wal Mart? Why not Target or Home Depot? And our usual answer is: Because Wal Mart is the 800-pound gorrilla in the room. To affect change, go to where you do the most good. Keep reading…

SHE SAID… SHE SAID…
The Wal Mart-in-my-community debate is repeated again and again in communities around the world every day. People on both sides of the argument are guilty of not hearing what the other side is saying and focus on themselves rather than the bigger picture. Keep reading…

WANT DOWNLOADS…? HERE THEY COME… Last week in Wal Mart Speaks… You Listen… Robert wrote about how Wal Mart inserted itself into the video download market to prevent what it saw as a loss of revenue from hard copies of videos. Well now the Bentonvile Behemoth has shifted focus. Keep reading…

OH, THIS MAKES ME FEEL GOOD… Michael Farr and Keith Davis think Wal Mart”s stock is ready to catch fire. The two financial advisors touted the Bentonvile Behemouth”s stock six months ago and admit that share prices have risen only 1 percent since then, but they”re optimistic. Keep reading…

My Soundtrack: Spiritualized by Finley Quaye on WOXY.