Month: July 2015

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Confederate Flags – Symbols of Hate or Heritage?

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Stop the insanity!

Taking down a flag, or a monument, or stomping out a cultural identity is wrong. Isn’t it?

I’m sure that Native Americans could weigh in on that statement. Or for that matter African Americans?

Lets face it, Dylann Roof is NUTS! That’s pretty obvious, let’s call it what it is.  Roof claims that his attitude changed during the Travon Martin insanity.

Roof claims that he kept hearing about it, he got curious and after looking it all up on the internet he decided that a race war was necessary.

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Okay, so why aren’t we banning the internet, or the news media? Obviously roof is a special kind of nuts to boot. What kind of psychopath can sit in a room participating in prayer then kill the people he was worshiping with?

All that aside, would we be banning the American Flag or the Gadsden, or the flag of the Union if he’d been photographed holding one of them?

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I agree that the Confederate flag should be removed from various statehouses and government buildings.

In point of fact I thought the Confederate flag HAD been removed from those facilities decades ago. It’s well past time. I was surprised that any state buildings were still flying it. States like Mississippi will have a bit more trouble not flying the Confederate flag but only until they redesign their state flag

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I don’t however agree that the Confederate flag be stricken from all sales outlets, or erased from history. Yet that seems to be exactly what is happening. I really have a problem when monuments to southern leaders, are being defaced, and confederate flags are forbidden in games, or over confederate burial sites.

Being raised in the South I remember seeing the Confederate flag but it wasn’t all over the place. It was mostly a point of heritage, pride in the South, more like a celebration of southern culture. Which as many people who’ve visited the South discover, is pleasantly different from other areas of the country.

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I was at an event last night where I met a California Native who’d just returned from their first visit to the deep south. They were gushing about how polite people were. They were impressed that even the panhandlers were nice and didn’t curse at passersby who didn’t put money in their collection hat. Yeah, it’s become common in LA that panhandlers get nasty if you don’t give them money. Go Figure!

The point is, when someone visits the South they’re often amazed at how different the reality of the place is from their preconceived notions. Sure the South has problems, and stupid people, and even crazy people. But it also has charm, grace, and history.

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As a southerner I have zero patience for those who bash the South having never been there.  I may live in California, but my heart is still southern, when folks start painting the South with that broad brush saying things like; “Everyone in the South are bigots. Well, you know how ignorant they are down there.” I tend to get a bit spun up.

Civil War

I’ve visited confederate sites all over the South, does that make me a bigot, a hater, a racist, or a potential murderer of a bible study group?

NOPE! It makes me a person who visited those sites and who saw battlefields where hundreds, or thousands of men died. These are places of sorrow. Not because the South lost, but because of the waste, and the bitterness that precipitated the civil war.

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Contrary to popular belief it wasn’t ONLY about slavery. There were other components; like states rights, federal over-reach, business, and commerce. Slavery was a part of it but not the only part.

As a southerner visiting these sites it’s painfully obvious that secession was ultimately wrong because that action led inevitably to war. I’m really offended when someone says, “The South Lost, get over it.”

I’m offended mainly because you don’t need to tell a southerner the outcome of the civil war, anymore than you need to tell a black person they’re black or a jew what happened at Auschwitz.

Southerners know that confederate money isn’t going to come back in vogue, the South isn’t going to “Rise Again” and slavery was wrong. We know these things through the lens of history. In fact most of us aren’t looking behind and living in the past, we’re looking forward and trying to forge a future.

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The KKK is… or was, dying. I suspect that in less than a generation it wouldn’t have been able to sustain itself because it is considered even in the South to be just wrong and it hadn’t been gaining converts. That all may change now.

This change might not be due to renewed racism, but due to folks who believe they’re “our betters” once again telling southerners what they are, (racist, evil, stupid, bigots), and then trying to tell southerners how to live and think while continuing the “stupid southerners, racist southerners” chant.

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I can’t get over the Orwellian direction our country has apparently taken. Are we really wanting to “Memory Hole” anything and everything  that we don’t like? If we do and become a “Society of the NOW” won’t we be opening ourselves to repeating the mistakes of the past?

As a Southerner I can tell you, in my life and the lives of most of my peers the confederate flag exists in our psyche in its proper context.

It is not a rallying cry for racism. It’s a symbol of a place in common, a point of origin that is different from every other place in the country.

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A unique place where thunderstorms, red clay, water skiing, boats of all shapes & sizes, and fireflies dancing on a warm evening breeze, live forever in our memories. We come from a place where being polite is important and where we call Steel Magnolias, “Mom”.

Taking the flag out of our sight will not change those who are racists, nor will it change substantially the character of the South and is therefore an empty gesture.

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However, since so many people are all about erasing the Confederate battle flag I propose one of  these two flags as the new flag of Southern Heritage. These flags are clean, inoffensive, and exemplify the new realities of our “Brave Society”.

Just a thought…

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Technology is such a %^##&!

Satellite Dish

First of all let me start by saying;

Under no circumstances should you consider HughesNet satellite services.

When we signed up for HughesNet it was awesome, we were pleased and totally happy to get rid of Verizon.

We were so pleased that after the first month we upgraded our service. 

BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ, Danger “Will Robinson”, WARNING, WARNING, “Antimatter containment failing, Warp Core explosion will occur in 3 seconds”

HugesNet Dish

And that’s when it went to hell.

We opted for the super duper premium plan, the fastest, bestest, razzle dazzle plan they offered. Which still cost less than what we’d been paying the bastards over at Verizon.  

Unfortunately, this move resulted in a degradation of the service to almost total un-usability instead of an improvement.

One of the things you don’t consider when you think about communication satellites is that the satellite is essentially a reflector (That’s seriously inaccurate but for the purposes of illustrating this point, it will do.  For those of you that might not remember… Radio, & Microwave is all part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The practical upshot of this is that a lot of stuff in the EM spectrum acts like just like the flashlight you played with as a kid in your backyard.) 

Picture a flashlight pointing at the sky, in say, New York. If you wanted that light to fall in Los Angeles you could put a mirror in orbit and then reflect the beam down onto Los Angeles. It’s just a big triangle. But if you have heavy storms or cloud cover over either the source, the destination, or both, then the light falling in Los Angeles is likely to be obstructed or dim.

EMSPectrum

When the same model is applied to satellite service it’s easy to see why there will be good days and bad days. Satellite Internet has the added problem that all data requests are being sent from a little dish to the satellite, then being bounced back down to the HughesNet station, then put out on the internet, then the requested data is returned along the same path.

After explaining all of this to the other half and that we should expect that sometimes there will be transient problems. The other half said, “Oh that makes sense.” Which is why when we started noticing that the service was slower than it had been, we looked at the weather reports across the midwest saw all the storms and said, “meh,” it’ll pass. 

It wasn’t until later when we noticed things like our data allocation being chewed up when we weren’t home, that I started the investigation.  At first I thought someone had managed to compromise our WiFi password. No problem, I changed it to something a bit tougher. Now it’s a stone bitch to enter on some of our devices. 

Answers

After running through every single possibility and accounting for all devices on our network. I concluded that something else was going on. 

Even when we’d purposefully disconnected the satellite box from the rest of our network backbone and left the house, we still saw our network allocation disappearing, thats when we started asking questions.

The answers we got from HugheNet were not acceptable. 

To date we’ve been told:

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“Your router is always transmitting data to our network.” (Uh not really, a router doesn’t work that way. It may check daily for software updates but it’s not sucking up gigabytes of data by itself.)

“You should only have your computer connected directly to our satellite box.” (Oh?? Then why do all your commercials show families with their tablets and computers and games? That’s more than one device, would you care to walk us through the configuration???)

“Too many people are using the service right now.” (Really? So you’ve oversold your service to the detriment of all, instead of telling folks there’s a waiting list, while you increased service capacity?)

“We’ve been having problems with the “super duper premium plan, the fastest, bestest, razzle dazzle plan” (Then why did you allow us or anyone else to change to that plan knowing that it wasn’t working properly? And why when you’ve changed us back are we still having problems?)

The sound of silence, then suddenly, we got a month free. Even then the system is running the monthly allocation of data down in a matter of days.  They claim they’ve got us in a two year contract. I contend that because the service is not working properly, and is not functional for common activities that they advertise their service is fit for, like:

Netflix

Streaming media such as Netfllix, Hulu, Apple TV rentals, etc

Accessing the management console of my domain

Email with graphics such as family photos, not downloading or taking hours to download.

Constant disruptions to email retrieval

Web pages that are being apparently blocked.

That their two year contract is toilet paper.  

They’re in breach as they are not providing the services they’ve promised to provide.  No matter. The other half is dealing with it.  I figure at some point there’s going to be an attorney letter and HugheNet will be out here removing their dish from our roof. But I’m staying the hell out of it.

For right now I’m being a good little network technician and connecting or disconnecting the satellite from our network as requested, because I’m over it.  I’m sick of technology or maintenance of technology becoming all consuming. My internal shit is working just fine.

I’ve written and posted this blog as a warning  and follow-up to a previous post about the conversion to satellite. Bottom line…

DON’T go HughesNet.

As an aside, since the satellite connection has become so wonky I’m using my phone hotspot more often than ever before.

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It’s a little bit of a pain in the ass, but when I want email or web access I just connect that way.  Most of the time the one bar of 4G signal on my phone is faster than the satellite. So I’m running in “Burst” mode. I’ll queue up stuff and transmit it when I connect my computer to the internet via my phone. 

It’s interesting because I’m spending less time mindlessly surfing the internet. I’m not reading as much of the news and generally I’m happier. Oh there are things I’m reading that are mindboggling and I’ve got a lot to say about them but reading these pieces on my phone somehow diminishes the likelihood that I’ll write about them.