the frig blig

Discussing U.S. - Pakistan relations with a friend the day after Bhutto’s assassination, I said the U.S. has an opportunity to support Musharraf’s democratic opposition. He noted Musharraf’s supposed working relationship with the U.S. and questioned the wisdom of supporting democracy in a country where “lots of people hate America.”

I said that most Pakistanis are probably more concerned with the state of their economy, and with restoring their freedoms; foreign policy issues would take a lesser priority.

Supporting democracy in Pakistan would give their citizens one less reason to hate this country. They hate Musharraf, and the U.S. supports him. It looks similar to U.S. support for other unpopular dictators in the recent past, such as the Shah of Iran. Just because foreign heads of state do our bidding doesn’t make them the best leaders for their own people. And if the U.S. supports democracy only in countries with governments we like or leaders we control…that is dissing entire countries. This kind of politics will make more enemies for those who practice it, and expose U.S. support of democracy as an opportunistic sham.

But for the U.S. to shift its support from Musharraf to the democratic opposition would take a state department or executive branch which actually cared about democracy. Why should they start now?

Personally I think it was somebody working for Musharraf. And I expect the Bush administration to continue to back his administration fully while spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about anyone but him running Pakistan’s government. Alas. He’s about as undemocratic as it gets, and the country is screaming for democracy. Sure looks like an opportunity for regime change to me.

I shot this short video of waves crashing against the rocks in Vernazza, Italy in April 2005. This morning I uploaded it to youtube:

Saw this on the way to meeting JJ for lunch in Chinatown this morning. Kind of captures the heart of downtown, don’tcha think?

Ignoring overwhelming public opposition at half a dozen public hearings all over the country, the Federal Communications Commission voted to allow media companies to own both newspaper and television or radio stations in the same community.

Democratic commissioner Michael Copps, who cast one of the minority votes against the new rule, was quoted in the New York Times as saying “In the final analysis, the real winners today are businesses that are in many cases quite healthy, and the real losers are going to be all of us who depend on the news media to learn what’s happening in our communities and to keep an eye on local government.”

“Despite all the talk you may hear today about the threat to newspapers from the Internet and new technologies, today’s order actually deals with something quite old-fashioned,” Mr. Copps said. “Powerful companies are using political muscle to sneak through rule changes that let them profit at the expense of the public interest.”

Makes one wonder, what was the point of the public hearings?

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports this morning that the Crocodile Cafe has closed its doors and told its employees not to return to work. Thus ends another classic Belltown establishment; I recall similar feelings of shock and dismay when Sit & Spin closed, and the 211 Club.

Fun bands I saw at the Croc over the years include the Model Rockets, Huge Spacebird, and Martin Sexton. The joint will be missed by legions of music lovers.

Giant rat discovered in PNG, of course. Let’s just hope it stays there.

Iran:
theocratic republic
population: 65 million
religion: 98% muslim
literacy: 77%
GDP (official exchange rate): $193.5 billion
Discontinued nuclear weapons program three years ago; no nuclear weapons.
U.S. imposed economic sanctions and is making plans for invasion.

Pakistan:
federal republic; constitution suspended 3 times in last 30 years (most recently, last month)
population: 164 million
religion: 97% muslim
literacy: 49.9%
GDP (official exchange rate): $124 billion
Has had nuclear weapons since at least 1998.
U.S. sends $1.6 billion in economic aid a year.

It could have been so beautiful…but read it and weep.

I created a shell script and after successful testing, copied it into /etc/cron.daily but strangely it never ran. It runs without problems when invoked from the command line. I checked the log files and found audit errors referencing the script.

Aha: this machine runs selinux. ls -Z showed that my script had a different selinux signature than all the other files in /etc/cron.daily — clearly the source of the problem.

A little reading divulged that I could edit the appropriate selinux config file and recompile the policy via ‘make load’. I added a line for my script in file_contexts. But then I discovered there is no selinux Makefile on my system! In fact there is no src directory under /etc/selinux/targeted.

So it appears that I’m dead in the water until I can get the selinux source files with which to recompile my policy.

checkpolicy is installed in /usr/bin. But I’m hesitant to run this tool directly, especially since I’m an selinux n00b.

A support forum post on this problem has yielded no replies at the time of this blig entry. (Hence this entry, a support plea to the blig’s many technically superior readers.)