Recessional

It’s been too long since I let “Kipling Tuesday” lapse at third world county, and while it’s not Tuesday, contemplating the morass of sins our government commits in the name of The People using the power an enstupiated, greedy sheeple electorate has given it, I thought his “Recessional” most apt.

Recessional
Rudyard Kipling

God of our fathers, known of old–
Lord of our far-flung battle line–
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine–
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget–lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies–
The Captains and the Kings depart–
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget–lest we forget!

Far-called our navies melt away–
On dune and headland sinks the fire–
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget–lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe–
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law–
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget–lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard–
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard.
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Amen.

Service? What Service?

Yeh, I’m back griping about my ISP again. *sigh*

So, service had been “fair to partly cloudy” since about late Sunday evening/early Monday AM. Not stellar, but mostly up and mostly adequate. Then I got this in my email:

We appreciate that you have chosen Xxxxxxxxx Online High-Speed Internet service, and we constantly look to bring you a better service
with new improvements.

We have just increased your download speed from 8 Mbps to 12 Mbps, and your upload speed from 52 Kbps to 1 Mbps.

All you need to do to get the faster speed is unplug the power cord from your cable modem, and then plug it back in to the outlet. That’s it!

“Really?” methought. “OK, I’ll just do that lil thing, since service seems slow today.”

Cycled my “modem” (it’s NOT a modem–“MOdulator/DEModulator”; it’s a specialized router, but who’s keeping score? Oh, I am, that’s who). Checked my connection. Yep. Still slow. In fact, checking with SpeedTest, the latency test timed out three times with three different servers before I could get a SpeedTest started. Then, when the download “speed” refused to go above 190kbps (WHAT?!?!), I canceled the thing and tried again. Yep. No matter what server I chose to test my connection with, the touted “12mbs” download “speed” was nowhere, mon frere.

So I called. Eight times. Seriously. And that doesn’t count the times the correctly dialed phone number refused to connect–either one of them. Why eight times? Disconnected when put on hold twice. Got a rude $%^&* named “Champale” (sp? What mother would name a child that?) once and hung up myself. The other five were cycling through attempting to find someone who would escalate the call to someone who knew something beyond just the first level diag chart, cos I’d covered all those bases in spades more times than the doofuses on the other end of the line have (and actually know what those things are meant to accomplish).

Once again I was told an upper level tech would contact me within 24 hours. Of course, when I’ve been told that before, it’s turned out to be false. In fact, the last person I talked to confessed to me that my record does not indicate an escalation has ever taken place.

Now? I’m back to a nominal download/upload speed–for now!–that is acceptable, but 1/3 less than the lying email I recieved today. And I’ll have an acceptable connection until… I don’t, if the record of the past couple of months is any indication.

Oh. Well.

Global Warming… Notsomuch

It’s a nice Fall day on September 3rd here in America’s Third World County.

*huh*? Fall? Doesn’t that come later? (Yeh, September 22/23 [Astronomical] or September 30 [Meteorological])

Well, the sycamore stands in our back yard seem to think so as they are shedding leaves. The 60-something degree temps outside seem to agree, and since the weather forecast is for cool weather and rain for the next week, I guess I might be forgiven for thinking it’s an early Fall, even though Persephone might not yet be packing her bags for her annual trip to Hades quite yet.

I do kinda hope this doesn’t mean we’ll be in for another ice storm like we had in January of ’07, even though that was the result of a cold snap that also flew in the face of the doctrines of the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming/Changism.

Oh, well. A couple of weeks without power weren’t all that bad, really. Dig out the ole campstove, candles and flashlights and LOTS of sleep if it happens again. 🙂 Still, even if it does, perhaps the power company’s learned its lesson. I do see that power lines are much freer of overhanging branches than they were in ’07… (‘Cos even the electric company doesn’t think the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming/Changism is full of anything but pure B.S.)

“Say What, Willis?”

Just got an email from a blog buddy that included the following comment summing up the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind response to every infringement of citizens’ rights: “Yawn. No big deal. You have to just trust Barry, cause he is just so cute and fuzzy!”

Hmmm, I told him he’d better take care or they’d accuse him of calling Obama, “That nappy-haired 0!”

Change

Stole Borrowed the graphic from Cathouse Chat.


“In a democracy (’rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”-third world county’s corollary to Santayana’s Axiom

…and stupidity.

change-Obama-style

You wanted change, dumbasses; you got it. Problem is, now the rest of the country has to live with your mistake.

Well, It’s Not West Virginia

…but invoking the shade of John Denver, it’s “almost heaven”–for now–after a couple of months of poor service from my ISP (which shall go unnamed to protect the guilty *heh*). I had a real difficulty getting up to full curmudgeonly “gripe ’em out” mode, since the last couple of months of on again-off again service from my ISP was the first time in six years with this ISP that I’ve had cause to really gripe. Finally, six business days after my full mode “take no prisoners” assault on my ISP’s support, another tech came out, metered the input on my line and got a definitive number on the poor feed from them–same as ALL THE OTHERS he’d tested in town that day–and someone apparently kicked some a$$ back up the line, cos my numbers for the past couple of days’ service have been consistently better, and service has been–apart from a complete outage early this a.m. around 1:00, when I suppose someone may have scheduled some additional service, and I ought to have been sleeping anyway–better since Saturday.

SpeedTestNet-01

(Heck, for much of the past couple of months, SpeedTest.net, when it would load at all, would time out testing my connection. That’s not good. And yes, I redacted the ISP’s name and the location of the test.)

It’s nice to–for now–have service that’s more like what I’ve been paying for. Nice that my repeated, pointed remarks about the ISP not investing enough in service (having too few service techs, as an example) seems to have resulted in TWO techs working the multiple calls in town last week, instead of the usual one, hugely over worked guy (it may have helped that I encouraged others that I know have the same ISP to list that in their gripes as well, ya think? *heh*). Also nice that, my repeated pressing for my ISP to “make me whole” also resulted in a rebate on at least a portion of the past two months’ service charges. Lesson: in today’s economy where companies are cutting back in the wrong places (not laying off or at least re-tasking useless management pukes but laying off, or not hiring, enough “boots on the ground” for example), rattling the cages of increasingly higher layers of support personel is sometimes the only way to get what you pay for.


Update: well after a mini-outage late last night and again this a.m., my current connection speed’s a slight improvement over yesterday… for now.

speedtestnet-o4

Will Rogers on Congress–Updated for the 21st Century

Will Rogers had a way of putting his finger on the pulse of the tension between a free citizenry and the political “elite” but he does need a bit of updating for our times, for example:

“This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as we do when the baby gets hold of a hammer.” – Will Rogers

Well, yeh, if the “baby” is 9 feet tall, weighing in at about 600 pounds, swinging a 25 pound sledgehammer and having 50 pounds of “diaper harvest” dripping all over the place… Yeh, that kind of baby with a hammer and a tantrum.

Smart People

I’ve stolen a small clip from one frame out of four panels of a Sluggy Freelance comic *whew!* to hint at something The 0! and his ilk know well: it doesn’t matter who you blame for a problem as long as you can pretend that “You’re dumb; I’m smart’ you’re little; I’m big…” (through the whole litany of excuses “Harry Wormwood” and “Agatha Trunchbull” used to oppress Matilda in the eponymous 1996 film–my personal fav DVD) and do something to make the problem into a “crisis” so you can “do stuff right now!” to make the crisis worse, so you can then… You get the idea. Why! Really all you have to do is pick something/someone to blame and stick with it, so why not just stick with…

smart-people-blame-pianos-cut


(To understand the brilliance of that concept, see that August 30, 2009 Sluggy Freelance comic. Of course *evil grin and a “bwa-ha-ha-ha”* to really understand that, you’ll need to check out the whole Sluggy Freelance background, but especially noting the character of Kiki and the background of the “Zombie on a Stick”. But that’s a “whole ‘nother” set of “issues”. *heh*)

Those Lying Bastards! or What language are they speaking, anyway?

Back in the day when Third World County had traffic, I penned the lil rant below. In today’s atmosphere of “Nazi” Pelosi advocating policies pioneered by the German National Socialist Party then accusing opponents of those Nazi policies of being Nazis, and other mind-boggling lies of the Left, I think it’s worth a repeat, warts, typos and all.


Over the years, I’ve noticed that the “reality-based fantasy” community of the Left has persuaded almost everyone else to play along with their lies, damned lies and leftist fantasies to the degree that not only are commonly used words now unmoored from any sensible meaning, but because of this unmooring–in part–those bastards can utter any damned* lies they want to and… no one can say them nay.

How about a short list of some of the commonly twisted terms?

Democratic–referring to persons of a party that pioneered legislation from the bench, instead of by ELECTED legislators; a party that is THE party of voter fraud (no one and nothing can approach the degree or depth of voter fraud condoned and directly sponsored by Democrats); persons whose elitist attitudes and condescension toward the unwashed, the stupid and those who are simply not of their class is unparallelled… (and the list goes on… )

Gay–what?!? A word meaning “happy, carefree” used to describe the angry, neurotic, spittle-spewing homosexual “activists” we all have known and loved? *heh* Pull the other one. I’m willing to bet there are more truly gay heterosexuals than gay homosexuals.

Welfare–to describe a process of engendering generational dependency upon handouts… of other people’s money (taken from thos e people by force or threat of force). Whose welfare is really being served here?

Compromise–Riiiiight: “Give me everything I want and get nothing but scorn and abuse in return.” That’s what Leftist “compromises” entail.

Liberal–one of the Left’s most-abused words, used to describe people and programs that are the antithesis of liberal: programs that squelch speech that leftists disagree with, deprive people of essential liberties and promote a nanny state mentality that “protects” non-essential, non-existant fake “rights” always at the expense of whomever disagrees with the leftist view. Let the FAKE liberals of today be condemned by the father of modern classical liberalism, John Stuart Mill, who held that lies could never damage society as long as people were free to speak the truth to counter them.

Speaking of quelling dissent,

Pro-choice–except when denying unborn children a choice about whether they want to be aborted or not… Hmmm… seems like in almost all (almost: yes, there are pregnancies that result from rape *sigh*) cases, the woman has a choice about whether to get pregnant. After that, doesn’t it seem fair to give the baby the next choice? Not to leftists for whom…

Fairness–means “completely unjust, unfair, inequitable” whenever the object of regard is an inconvnience, not a leftist or simply one who doesn’t matter… to the leftist.

Progressive–Used to refer to covert (or sometimes even overt!) reactionary communists/socialists. Wobblies in all but name. Progressive? So far behind the times they should be put in a coffin and interred as the dead men’s bones they are. (Even casual readers of the NT will catch the reference. Cultural illiterates will not. *sigh*)

Compassion–any time I hear a leftist start in on “compassion” my first impulse is to throw the bullshit flag. Want to impeach a leftisat’s “compassion” argument? Ask them who will pay for their compassionate program. If it is not themselves, then they’ll have to take the money from someone. Where’s their compassion for the folks they’ll steal from? Nowhere, mon frere. And what other unintended (or perhaps intended!) consequences are they concealing by their emotional pleas? (See “Welfare” above.)

Heck, when we allow leftists to twist any word to mean anything they want, it’s not hard for them to convince us to accept their appeals to emotion as reasonable argument. From there, it’s but a step to them ignoring the argument entirely and putting words in the mouths of their interlocutors–an all too common practice. In fact, almost weekly, in email or in comments–comments that usually do not make it out of moderation, cos then I’d have to respond and simply waste my time–some idiot leftist will

1. Take exception to something I’ve said
2. Proceed to “argue” with me by saying I said something I did not.
3. When responded to (email), IGNORE what was said, again accuse me of saying things I did not and
4. Think that constitutes a valid argument.

It boggles the mind how folks can get to the corner grocery store and back without killing themselves and a score of others when they are so incapable of rational thought.

And these are the intelligent, well-educated, moderately successful leftists. I shudder to think what the rest of that class is like.

The left today seems sadly populated by people who believe (sincerely or not) that lies, screaming and pounding the table, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth are valid arguments.

But the really sad thing is that those who know better largely let them get away with it day in and day out.

Of course, by now fewer and fewer people are able to discern when undemocratic Democrats, troubled, unhappy and downright angry “gay” people, reactionary “progressives” and tyrannical “liberals” are blowing smoke up their skirts.

*sigh*

Ever wonder why the schools are full of leftists? a. It’s the perfect environment for them and b. it allows them to enstupiate another generation of suckers.

*”damned lies”–no, I’m not using a profanity. I am making a considered theological assessment: those whose behavior proclaims them to be of their father, The Liar, are damning themselves.