Once again, Al-Jazeera is airing video tape of an innocent victim pleading for her life. And in what has become the standard procedure, her captors are demanding that troops be removed from Iraq in exchange for her life. This won’t happen, of course, and she’ll end up being murdered, very likely in a gruesome beheading. So far, they have made these same demands of American troops, Japanese troops, Polish troops…

Now, it seems to be perfectly logical that no country could comply with these demands. In fact, compliance would simply validate this method to reach their means, and they would continue doing it. I suggest that the proper response would be the exact opposite. What would have been the effect, do you think, if the response was instant and unequivocal? “We received notice today that the terrorists have demanded that we remove our troops immediately. In response, we’ll be shipping 5,000 additional troops to the region today.” Every single time these animals kidnap some poor innocent person (most of whom, by the way, are simply there to try to help the Iraqi people), the country faced with the demand to remove troops immediately sends an additional 5,000 soldiers. To me, that seems the proper response to these animals.

One thing is certain, if Kerry wins the election, there’ll be no shortage of things to talk about with the new First Lady.

Last week we learned that, though she earned more than $5 million last year, she paid an effective tax rate at about 12%, less than the majority of Americans. From the Wall Street Journal: The top 50% of all federal filers contributed 96.1% of all federal income taxes in 2001, and they paid an average income-tax rate of 15.9%. That’s 3.5-percentage points more than Mrs. Kerry paid in 2003.” At the “very least, Mrs. Kerry’s tax returns are a screaming illustration of the need for reform to make the tax code simpler and fairer. But they also show that Senator Kerry’s proposed tax increases are much more about a revenue grab than they are about tax justice.” (See the story.)

Then there was news about her recommendation for treating arthritis: “You get some gin and get some white raisins — and only white raisins — and soak them in the gin for two weeks,” she said. “Then eat nine of the raisins a day.” (And this revelation, by the way, was delivered in the midst of a presentation about Kerry’s health care plan.) Looking at her photo from the speech, I’d say she’d already had her daily quota of white raisins and gin. (See the story.)

Yesterday, in an interview with USA Today, Teresa slammed both Laura Bush and all stay-at-home Moms in one swoop: “Well, you know, I don’t know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her eye, which is good,” Heinz Kerry said. “But I don’t know that she’s ever had a real job – I mean, since she’s been grown up. So her experience and her validation comes from important things, but different things.” Though she later recanted and apologized to Bush, she left hanging the notion that women who stay home to raise their children aren’t doing “real” work. I would submit that these women are doing some of the most important work available. (See the story.)

Last Thursday, I arrived at the office to find a panicked message on voicemail from a client who couldn’t get their email. “I try to connect but I keep getting a message that I can’t connect to the server. Help! If I don’t get my email, I’ll likely die a slow and horrible death!” (Or something to that effect.) I verified with her on the phone that she was, in fact, connected to the Internet, she just couldn’t get to the mail server. Interestingly, she also couldn’t connect to an account on a different mail server. It was exceedingly odd.

So Ben and I headed over there to hunt down the problem. After a extended battle with her laptop, we finally determined that she was being blocked from sending packets out over port 110, the port needed to receive email. Through some amount of serendipity, we finally realized she had a virus, rooted in a file called bawindo.exe. This nasty little number had infected almost 350 files on her computer, was able to copy itself to other computers on the network, and installed a “sniffer” program that monitored keystrokes and sent them remotely to another computer. (You can interpret that last as being the same as someone standing behind her copying every single key she typed. Passwords, account numbers, correspondence was all compromised. Like I said, this is a nasty little guy.)

You might want to perform a search on your harddrive for a file named “bawindo.exe”. If you find it, visit the Symantec site to download a removal tool called Stinger.

From Morning Edition, October 18, 2004 –

An Oregon purchased a new Toshiba flat-screen television with a built-in DVD player. For reasons that mystify the manufacturer, the set was also apparently transmitting signals on the International Distress Frequency. Chris Van Rossman had no idea until rescuers from the U.S. Air Force showed up at his door. They told him to shut of the television or face a $10,000 fine. Toshiba has promised him a new set.