This was the first time he said he was going to block me. The second was for my "questionable morals." Lol.

M and me are blocked by Adam Baldwin on Twitter. I shit you not. It happened awhile ago, and he deleted all his tweets to us before the end of the day. I’ve got all sorts of screenshots, but when it comes right down to it, it’s just not worth all the trouble. So, you get that one up there, and that’s it.

It was over that situation with the Marines, said to be members of an elite squad of the “best of the best”, who pissed on dead Taliban members, videotaped it, and then put the video into circulation.

Before I get into my opinion, let me remind you that my dad has worked for the government in some way, shape or form since before I was born. Two of the jokes-that-weren’t-completely-jokes most heard around our house, growing up? “I work for the government. I’m here to help you.” and “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” But his longest job – and probably what I’d consider his only actual career – was as a member of the U.S. Military.

I am a patriot in my own way. I love our country. I support our military wholeheartedly. I don’t hold against them the assignments they’re made to carry out, because I know what can happen to them – and in some cases, should happen, if we were to follow the full letter of the law as it was intended – if they’re insubordinate.

It’s not like when you ignore your boss at the office, or blow off your manager at the box store, or curse your foreman out at the mill. Soldiers can be issued a court martial for insubordination. At best, they’re dishonorably discharged if they’re found guilty, which can sometimes make it difficult to find a civilian job. Some insubordination warrants a stint in military prison, which I hear is even worse than a civilian maximum security prison. And other instances of insubordination are considered treason. You can be shot for treason.

I also support our military’s code of honor. Each branch says it a little differently, but when it comes down to it, they’re pretty much the same. Respect, protect and serve your country with honor and courage.

The U.S. Marine Corps claims to have three core values. They are honor, courage and commitment. These values are defined further in many places and many ways. About.com’s article on the Marines’ Core Values defines “honor” in great detail.

Honor guides Marines to exemplify the ultimate in ethical and moral behavior; to never lie cheat or steal; to abide by an uncompromising code of integrity; respect human dignity; and respect others. The quality of maturity, dedication, trust and dependability commit Marines to act responsibly; to be accountable for their actions; to fulfill their obligations; and to hold others accountable for their actions.

Respect human dignity. I’d say an honorable person would respect human dignity. And peeing on dead bodies, regardless of who they were when they were alive, is not, at all, respectful of human dignity.

The excuse I’ve heard most for those Marines is that we’re at war. Worse things have happened during war in the past (and still occasionally do) than a few dead bodies getting peed on. The opposing sides do everything in their power to debase and demean their enemies. It’s the nature of the beast.

Adam Baldwin says to protest the treatment of “barbarians” (he later started calling the Taliban “savages” because Roland Hulme explained that barbarian originally meant “anyone who is not Greek”) is to prove yourself an enemy of your country. M told Mr. Baldwin he objects to the Marines’ behavior because it goes against their code of honor and is disrespectful not only to the dead people whose bodies they desecrated, but also the country to which they pledged their service. So Adam Baldwin blocked M for “defending barbarians.”

When I pointed out that M wasn’t defending barbarians, but was, in fact, defending The honor code the Marines say they hold dear, he said he was blocking me for defending barbarians. He didn’t, though.

Oh, and by the way? Only people who are pro-choice would have a problem with what the Marines did. Yeah, I haven’t figured the connection out, either. That’s when Adam Baldwin told me he was blocking me for the second time. When I told him I was pro-choice. I think I’m misunderstanding how this whole blocking someone on Twitter thing works, cause I can still see his profile and tweets.

Thing is, Americans are supposed to be more civilized than that. Or, at least, that’s what we like to think about ourselves. Until it’s our boys out there peeing on dead bodies. Then some of us get all caught up in the, “Yeah! Piss on the Taliban!” aspect, and completely ignore the fact that we’d turn an entire country into a really big lake if they ever did the same thing to even one of our soldiers. Hell, if a lot of us had our way, our government would openly assassinate every adult member of Westboro Baptist Church, and all they’ve done is protest at soldiers’ funerals. If one of them peed on one of those soldiers, instead of just screaming propaganda and hatred, we’d probably take matters into our own hands.

Well, they probably do that and worse to our dead soldiers. It just hasn’t been publicized.

Doesn’t make it right.

We’re motherfucking Americans, god damn it. We always take the moral high road, building it as we go when we get into situations about which we’re unsure. But we can’t have our cake and eat it, too. Either we’re civilized and enlightened, or we’re not. Either we live by a “more righteous” moral code than our enemies, or we don’t. Either it’s okay to pee on dead bodies, or it’s not.

But besides that, a man in the military raised me to hold our men and women in service (and especially those who’ve earned the right to be considered “elite”) to a higher standard than I would the average Joe. He told me that anyone who joined the military could be trusted implicitly to look out for me and my countrymen. He told me military personnel worth their salt would never do anything to embarrass our people or our country. They are trained to be respectful of all people, including their enemies, and to maintain professionalism even in times of war. Maybe especially in times of war.

I wouldn’t exactly call peeing on dead bodies “maintaining professionalism.” Matter of fact, I’d venture to say peeing on dead bodies is decidedly unprofessional. And dishonorable. Not to mention inflammatory and embarrassing. I am humiliated by the actions of those Marines.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no respect for the Taliban. I don’t feel they deserve anyone’s respect. Their tactics (and many of their beliefs) are disgusting. I understand that they think we’re the terrorists, and I get that many of them are doing what they think is right. (That’s one of the biggest problems with fanatics. Their logic is fucked, and there’s no way you’re gonna change their mind.) But even if they’re right, that whole “Anyone not like me is evil!” mentality is something I’ve never been able to get behind.

However…

Whether or not the Taliban deserves respect is not in question. There are very few Americans who think the Taliban deserves respect.

What is in question is the behavior of our Marines. Was their conduct unbecoming a U.S. Marine?

Personally, I feel it was. I don’t care that we’re at war. I don’t care that I can’t fathom what it’s like to be in the thick of it. I don’t care that the culture on a Marine base is different than anything I’ve encountered. And don’t give me that shit about gang mentality. Those Marines knew what they were doing, and they thought we’d be proud of them.

I was proud of them. Veryproud. Right up until the moment they filmed themselves peeing on dead bodies and posted the footage online. And if that makes me a barbarian defender, then so be it. At least I can now say my convictions got me blocked by a celebrity on Twitter.

The craziest shit happens to me.

There is some information in the ZoneMinder wiki on compiling and installing ZoneMinder on Centos 6, but these instructions are incomplete, and will not work. After helping a coworker get it up and running, and finding little information out there for Centos 6, I decided to turn it into a blog post.

The following procedure will allow you to compile and install ZoneMinder 1.25 on Centos 6 64bit with all options enabled. All actions should be done as root.

Procedure

1] Install Centos 6 using the 64bit minimal install DVD. I highly recommend using the minimal install, but you can probably use disk 1 of the full install if you want.

2] Run updates:

yum -y update

3] Disable SELinux by editing /etc/sysconfig/selinux and changing the SELINUX line to disabled:

SELINUX=disabled

4] Reboot

5] Install RPMForge yum repository:

rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
rpm -ihv http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm

6] Install needed dependencies:

yum install gcc gcc-c++ wget mysql-devel mysql-server php php-mysql php-pear php-pear-DB php-mbstring \
bison bison-devel httpd make ncurses ncurses-devel libtermcap-devel sendmail sendmail-cf caching-nameserver \
sox newt-devel libxml2-devel libtiff-devel php-gd audiofile-devel gtk2-devel libv4l-devel ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel \
zlib zlib-devel openssl openssl-devel gnutls-devel php-process perl-Time-HiRes perl-CPAN pcre-devel libjpeg-devel \
perl-Date-Manip perl-libwww-perl perl-Module-Load perl-Net-SFTP-Foreign perl-Archive-Tar perl-Archive-Zip perl-Expect \
perl-MIME-Lite perl-Device-SerialPort

7] Install Sys::Mmap module if you want mmap enabled. Also install MIME::Entity and X10 camera support, if desired. Just hit enter to accept the default for any question you’re asked. Do each of these separately, one at a time (ie, don’t just copy and paste the following three lines in one go, do one at a time).

perl -MCPAN -e 'install Sys::Mmap'
perl -MCPAN -e 'install MIME::Entity'
perl -MCPAN -e 'install X10::ActiveHome'

8] Download Zoneminder install:

cd /usr/local/src
wget http://www2.zoneminder.com/downloads/ZoneMinder-1.25.0.tar.gz
tar xzvf ZoneMinder-1.25.0.tar.gz
cd ZoneMinder-1.25.0

9] Run configure. NOTE: The database username and password specified in this step are also used in step 13.

CXXFLAGS=-D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS ./configure --with-webdir=/var/www/html/zm  --with-cgidir=/var/www/cgi-bin --with-webuser=apache \
--with-webgroup=apache ZM_DB_HOST=localhost ZM_DB_NAME=zm ZM_DB_USER=YOURZMUSER ZM_DB_PASS=YOURZMPASSWORD ZM_SSL_LIB=openssl \
--with-extralibs="-L/usr/lib64 -L/usr/lib64/mysql -L/usr/local/lib" --with-libarch=lib64 --with-ffmpeg

If you don’t want mmap support, add “–enable-mmap=no“:

CXXFLAGS=-D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS ./configure --with-webdir=/var/www/html/zm  --with-cgidir=/var/www/cgi-bin --with-webuser=apache \
--with-webgroup=apache ZM_DB_HOST=localhost ZM_DB_NAME=zm ZM_DB_USER=YOURZMUSER ZM_DB_PASS=YOURZMPASSWORD ZM_SSL_LIB=openssl \
--with-extralibs="-L/usr/lib64 -L/usr/lib64/mysql -L/usr/local/lib" --with-libarch=lib64 --with-ffmpeg --enable-mmap=no

10] Compile and install:

make
make install

11] Start mysqld for the first time:

service mysqld start

12] Set your root mysql password by following the instructions in the output:

/usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'NEWPASSWORD'

13] Create your Zoneminder database and user, and give the user access to the database, and reload privs. NOTE: YOURZMUSER and YOURZMPASSWORD need to be the same as in the configure statement in step 9. When prompted for the password for root, use the one you set in step 12.

mysql -u root -p
create database zm;
CREATE USER 'YOURZMUSER'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'YOURZMPASSWORD';
grant CREATE, INSERT, SELECT, DELETE, UPDATE on zm.* to YOURZMUSER@localhost;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

14] Load in initial SQL data for ZoneMinder:

mysql -u root -p zm > /usr/local/src/ZoneMinder-1.25.0/db/zm_create.sql

15] Copy the start script to /etc/init.d and configure it to start on boot. Also set other services to start on boot:

cp /usr/local/src/ZoneMinder-1.25.0/scripts/zm /etc/init.d/
chmod +x /etc/init.d/zm
chkconfig zm on
chkconfig mysqld on
chkconfig httpd on

16] Copy Cambozola jar file:

cd /var/www/html/zm
wget http://www.zoneminder.com/sites/zoneminder.com/downloads/cambozola.jar
chown apache:apache /var/www/html/zm/cambozola.jar

17] Edit php.ini and set:

short_open_tag = On

This is off by default.
18] Start Apache and ZoneMinder:

service httpd start
service zm start

19] Browse to your web interface using http://YOURIP/zm. You should see the ZoneMinder Console web interface.

Troubleshooting

If you are not able to pull up the web interface, check the following:

Iptables - Centos 6 comes with a restrictive set of iptables rules. If you’re providing firewall through some other method (ex, a hardware firewall), you can shut iptables off and prevent it from starting on boot by doing the following:

service iptables stop
chkconfig iptables off

If you need to use iptables for firewalling, edit /etc/sysconfig/iptables and add a line just below the line for port 22 (SSH) to allow web (port 80) connections:

-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

Then restart iptables:

service iptables restart

PHP Short Open Tags – Check your /var/log/httpd/error_log file. If you have error messages like the following, redo step 17.

PHP Parse error:  syntax error, unexpected $end in /var/www/html/zm/includes/functions.php on line 2437

After editing the /etc/php.ini file, you must restart httpd:

service httpd restart

Next Steps

Once you have the web interface up, you’ll want to click on Options in the upper right.

The System tab will allow you to turn on authentication. By default, ZoneMinder does not require any username and password.

Under the Images tab, click the check box next to OPT_CAMBOZOLA to use the Java streaming client for better refresh rates.

On the main page, click Add New Monitor to start adding cameras to monitor.

The best stories usually start out that way, huh? This time, it’s just a little funny.

So we’ve got this friend! He’s a year younger than me. He got married a year or two ago. Naturally, being the typical American couple, that means they’ve just bought a house and had a baby.

Our friend went to <unnamed box store> and had the baby seat sitting on the child seat in the cart. He made the common new dad mistake of putting items in the child seat next to the baby seat.

You know where this is going, don’t you?

So New Dad goes through the line, gets all his stuff on the conveyor belt, rings out and pays. He heads back out to the car, unloads the cart and picks Baby up to put him in the car, and there, staring at him from the place Baby’s seat just was is a bottle of mouthwash.

“I had to take it back and pay for it,” he said. “I couldn’t wash my mouth out with those lies.”

Okay, maybe you had to be there. I’m still laughing.

Even WIRED magazine was outraged at this bill, reporting:

Senate Wants the Military to Lock You Up Without Trial

…the detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”

I get it. We all get it. It’s winter. You want snow for the holidays. And there are even some tasteful ways to put snow on your website. For example, Picnik’s got unobtrusive, non-page-killing snow on their homepage. That’s some nice snow.

FIX YOUR DAMN SNOW! Or take it down. Either, or.

I know it’s new. I know Google+ isn’t as big as Facebook. But honestly? I like it better.

But the +1 button isn’t just for social networking, y’all. It’s for relevancy in a Google search, too! Gimme one and I’ll click it. YOU’RE WELCOME!

So remember good ol’ A#8 from the post about why people are killing each other in Schenectady? Let me get you up to speed.

The guy spent a night screaming to a mutual friend of ours that the reason we don’t get along is because “if I shit too loud she calls the landlord.” Apparently we’re just being unreasonable. It’s perfectly acceptable to play your music so loud you have to scream to be heard over it from midnight till 6am.

So, against our better judgment, because he gave a clear reason for having an issue with us, we apologized. And that’s when things got worse.

He became completely fixated on me, until we had our mutual friend pass along a message that M would not just stand idly by while he attacks me. So he turned his obsessive anger on both of us.

He spends entire nights convincing his friends that we are assholes and they should help him attack us. He yells that he’s going to burn the building to the ground. He says he’s going to kick in our door and beat the fuck out of me. He’s going to kill us both. And on and on and on. Until we were finally treated to a night of ranting about the real reason he hates us. We’re white.

White people are the devil. White people are holding him down. White people are the cause of all his problems. And I mean all his problems. And we are the white people he’s chosen to focus his anger on.

Then, suddenly, it was silent upstairs every night. Occasionally he’d talk loud or turn his radio up a little louder than we’d prefer, but the threats stopped. The stomping stopped. Then it started again.

We’ve probably waited far too long, but we went to the police and filed a report. They offered to arrest him for harassment. We decided to wait until we have proof. No sense having him arrested without proof so he can say we’re lying.

We’ve bought a digital recorder and will be setting it up at night when we go to bed. And the next time, we’ll be off to the police station with him on tape.

The officer tried to allay my fears with the usual reassurances the authorities give abused women. Usually their bark is worse than their bite. Generally speaking, if they have to put forth effort, they won’t do it. Blahblahblahwords.

Now I find myself wishing he’d start screaming so we can get it on tape and get it over with. And of course he’s silent.

found on Bordom.net

If you’ve Googled as often as I do, I’m sure you’ve noticed that while the results often bring you to relevant sites, they don’t always bring you to the information you’re looking for. Chances are the sites you find have the information, or can at least lead you to it. But if there’s no search feature, it could take you hours to sift through all the articles.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have time for that. So I click away. Please! Put a search feature on your site!

Let’s start with the fact that he doesn’t screen his tenants. There hasn’t been a single tenant in this building who wasn’t some kind of asshole. You’d probably respond to that with, “Everyone’s got a little asshole in them.” and you’d be right. Hell, I’ve got a lot of asshole in me. I ain’t too proud to admit that. But the people who have lived here really take the cake.

Don’t believe me?

Assholes #1: These two were relatively quiet when they lived in the downstairs rear apartment, aside from the occasional kerfuffle and rare car wash days (when he cranked his POS stereo), but we’ve all got those days. Imagine our surprise when they moved into the apartment beneath ours and almost rattled the pictures off our walls by body-slamming each other around the house every three days like clockwork. Then we discovered he was a crack dealer and she was a conniving cunt who blamed all her bullshit drama on everyone else. They moved out on their own after an argument with the landlord over how our parking lot was plowed.

Asshole #2: This lady really wasn’t so bad. The only really annoying things about her were that she is a complete feminazi, a little racist and didn’t take care of her cat in what I would consider the best way an animal should be cared for. But those things can be mostly overlooked. She moved on her own when she realized the landlord was never going to do anything about the cookouts A#3 were throwing in our parking lot. Which were never anything more than a normal cookout: a bunch of people hanging out, playing cards, tossing back a few beers and talking.

Assholes #3: This couple was nice most of the time. But Jesus, would they turn on you on a dime. They got money off the rent for taking care of the grounds, but they’d complain because no one else took the garbage out to the road. And every Saturday and Sunday morning the radio would start blaring at 8am. Around noon it would go off. They moved on their own because he had to have hip surgery and couldn’t do stairs for a while. For about five minutes, this place was quiet.

Assholes #4: The Crackhead and her crew. There were drug dealers and johns (who were often the same people) running in and out of our shared hallway which was our only exit. And if it weren’t for the guy who walked around our building with a sledgehammer screaming about smashing all the windows in the place, or the one who was constantly leering at me and making disgusting comments as if I were one of The Crackhead’s other crackwhore friends, or her creepy stalker who almost got into a knife fight with A#3, I probably wouldn’t have cared. Eventually they’ll kill themselves and the world will go on a better place without them. But it became painfully obvious that having them here put us in danger when they started having knife fights in the hallway. Course, the landlord only evicted them because she was late on the rent.

Asshole #5: An older gentleman, probably in his forties or fifties, moved in with a sob story about hard times in his marriage and his wife living in Syracuse. It wasn’t long before it became obvious that the reality was he was a crackhead, fresh from some program, trying to show his wife he could stay sober. Then he met The Crackhead. He moved out on his own when he realized how far down he’d fallen. The last time I saw him, he’d been gone a month. He was back here trying to score some crack.

Assholes #6: A girl in her late teens, early twenties moved into the apartment we live in now with her boyfriend. She was pregnant, overdue and had an inducement scheduled for a couple weeks after she moved in. Two days before she went in to have the baby, she was in The Crackhead’s apartment. Naturally, when she took the mandatory drug test the state gives every mother about to give birth, she failed and lost the baby. Once the baby was gone, the party started. Then the boyfriend left, and the party went somewhere else. While a 200lb pitbull was locked in the kitchen. Sometimes for weeks at a time. Guess who cleaned up that mess? Once again, the landlord only kicked them out because they didn’t pay the rent.

Assholes #7: These folks were a couple young guys. I’m not really sure if they were lovers or friends. There’s a girl living there now with the one who’s been evicted but has yet to move out. The front window’s broken because they got into a fight and he put her head through the window. The landlord hasn’t fixed it. It’s been at least two weeks. The sheriff has yet to come to follow through on the eviction. It’s been at least a month since the landlord started the process. So he’s not getting paid, and he’s not really making any effort to get rid of the guy, either.

Assholes #8: A girl and a guy. I think. As far as I know the rest of the people who’ve been there are just visitors. But, dude, seriously? Who the fuck goes to someone’s house and helps them fuck with someone they’ve never even seen, so much as met, and can’t possibly have an issue with them?

The first time they were too loud we thought, “No big deal. It happens.” But then they got increasingly worse. Apparently, not calling them on their bullshit was an invitation to be assholes. So finally, after spending a night listening to their insane antics that swing sharply from one extreme to the next, we called the landlord and complained. Two weeks later, they got (what we thought was) out of control, only this time, they paced the house screaming “I don’t give a fuck who has a problem with my music this loud. I’m gonna listen to it how I want.” for an hour or so. Later, they were yelling about how they were going to blow the building up and kill everyone in it.

The landlord’s response? “Call the police. They’ll do something.”

Well, we called. The first night we called less than ten minutes after we made the call, they turned the music off. The second night we called, the same thing happened.

Last night, they didn’t turn their music on. Not once. Instead, they literally bounced off the walls and the floor all night long. So hard that the ceiling showered us with plaster powder and our pictures (including the sand painting M brought home from Africa when he was thirteen) rattled so hard I thought a frame cracked. Around 4:30 this morning, his company left and we thought we’d finally be able to go to sleep. But our bedroom door makes noise when you open and close it. And every time he heard the door open, he’d jump from one end of the apartment to the other for twenty minutes. He finally stopped around 6am.

There is no doubt in my mind that he is intentionally torturing us.

This morning, after hearing him talking to more company (that was here pounding on the back door so loud it was rattling our windows at around 10am) and telling them he’d intentionally kept us up all night, M called the police. Who said there is nothing they can (or will) do. They won’t even give the guy a ticket for violating the noise ordinance. They called it a “quality of life” issue and said it’s far too low a priority to send an officer to address the situation. “But file a report, and get it on file. That way if something happens we know who to look at.”

Gee. Thanks. So if the guy kills us, you’ll have a suspect, and our deaths might be avenged. That’s a huge load off my mind. I’m so glad we called you.

On Tuesday, I’m calling every housing authority I can find a number for. Tenants Rights, NYS Housing Authority, Code Enforcement … whoever I can find. If the police won’t do anything, and the landlord won’t kick him out, maybe we have some civil recourse against the landlord. We could own this building! But you best believe we’ll be selling it if the judgment does come out in our favor.

But I really wish there was something that could be done about the police’s picking and choosing of which laws to enforce. I mean, I get it. With an average of one teenager being shot a week, someone being loud really isn’t that big of a deal. But the problem is that at this point it’s not just someone being loud. In any other situation this would be considered an attack. The more we complain, the worse they get, and the more threats we hear them screaming over the music.

It’s an attack on our sanity, if not our physical well-being. Though many more sleepless nights and it’ll be an attack on our physical well-being as well.

And this is how violence in the ghetto starts. Person A harasses Person B for some perceived offense that may or may not be real. Person B tries to get law enforcement to do something about Person A but law enforcement refuses. Then finally, at his wits’ end, Person B loses control and does something to Person A. And the cops blame it on the neighborhood, or the drugs, or poverty when the reality is they refuse to step in until the situation has erupted into violence, and someone’s hurt or dead.