David – Page 363 – third world county

November 10, 2007November 11, 2007

Anarcho-Tyranny in New Haven Connecticut

Is this what our veterans fought and bled and died to preserve?

The PC Wusses rule the roost and exact danegeld from their subjects in a town ruled by wusses who claim to fear the nonexistant and oppress the masses with their convenient “fear.”

Headline:

Men Cleared Of Charges In Flour Anthrax Scare

[Set aside the fact that those charged were a brother and sister; apparently, The Morning News–an Arkansas paper–cannot discern any differences in the sexes *heh*]

Here’s the background. Since 1938, Hash House Harriers have provided a social context for like-minded folk who like to gather–usually in pubs–for a few sociable beers after a game of hounds and hares. Many HHH’s characterize their clubs as “drinking clubs with a running problem”. *heh* The best description of HHHs is probably the one found at the link above:

“…the world’s most eccentric running club, the Hash House Harriers. Now with 1843 hash groups registered in the world directory located in almost every major city in the world and 178 countries, it is easier than ever for you to find fun, trail, and friendship where you live. The Hash House Harriers is a more social version of Hare and Hounds, where you join the pack of hounds (runners) to chase down the trail set by the hare or hares (other runners), then gather together for a bit of social activity known as the On In or Down Down with refreshment, humor, song and sometimes a feast.”

So, what does this have to do with the idiot tyrants of New haven Connecticut? Well, it seems that in August, a group of HHHs had a hounds and hare event on in New Haven and a brother and sister team were tasked as the “hares”. So, off they went laying a trail for the “hounds” to follow. Now, naturally, the “hounds” couldn’t follow by scent like real hounds would, so the “hares” laid the trail with a strange white substance that has been used for something like 70 years in these games: flour.

The New Haven Nutcakes went cukoo, and when Daniel Salchow–the brother–heard about all the fuss and went by to identify the substance, he (and his sister, visiting from Germany) were arrested and charged with “first-degree breach of peace”–a felony.

After a couple of months of legal wrangling (during which Dorothee Salchow “fled” for the relative sanity of Hamburg, Germany *heh*) the charges were dropped. When Daniel Salchow paid $4,000 extortion money to the New Haven People’s Board of Anarcho-Tyranny.

Funny thing: last month, Fayetteville, AR–not usually a bedrock of sanity itself–had a lil kerfuffle when another HHH group laid a flour trail (as they have done for decades) that included lil piles of flour, one of which was deposited in front of the Federal Building in downtown Fayetteville.

No arrests. No big tizzy. The flour was identified as flour and life went on.

But in the People’s Republic of New Haven, the Board of Anarcho-Tyranny had another agenda…

BTW–in an appropriate rabbit trail–something like 40 years ago, I wrote a piece for whistler choir and symphonic band in honor of the Hash House Harriers. Sad to see an American town now so scared of shadows that tyrannical rule is simply accepted at face value. All a part of the lessons taught by Homeland (In)Security, TSA goons, et al. Maybe a revival of the Hounds and Hares March performed by a local high school band–at every public function of City government for a year, perhaps?–would do New Haven’s tyrants some good…

Trackposted to Stop the ACLU, Nuke’s, Perri Nelson’s Website, Rosemary’s Thoughts, A Blog For All, The Uncooperative Radio Show!, Stix Blog, Right Truth, The World According to Carl, Grizzly Groundswell, Stuck On Stupid, The Pink Flamingo, Big Dog’s Weblog, Adeline and Hazel, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

November 9, 2007November 9, 2007

Chapping my gizzard

Torquing me off.

Turning my crank… counter-clockwise.

It’s that time of year again: the time when I see/hear such subliterate claptrap as I recntly recieved in email from a “traditional values” group that doesn’t know enough about the traditions they hold dear to even refer to them correctly.

“A Sunday School class from a church near Mrs. Arnold’s apartment comes every year to host a Hanging of the Greens…”

Yeh, and my thought is always, “What did the Greens do to merit being hung?” Or, “Oh, dear. Folks’d be better off eating their kale and spinach than hanging it… ”

The proper term is “Hanging of the Green” NO PLURAL “s”! *sigh* Cultural illiterates “protecting” so-called “traditional values that they do not know enough about can do as much harm as (sometimes more than) others who deliberately attack “traditional values” (whatever that term means).

As a small demonstration of the destructive nature of large numbers of cultural illiterates coupled with the proliferation of their dimwits via the internet, the correct phrase, “Hanging of the Green” tallies only 741 hits on Google, while the triumph of cultural illiteracy brings in over 28,000 for “Hanging of the Greens.”

Probably the same idiots who say/write “Daylight SavingS Time.”

*profound sigh*

That comes to about 38 dumbasses for each moderately literate person on the internet, by this measure. A remarkably better ratio than I run into in meat space on a day-to-day basis.

*heh*

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you have a linkfest/open trackback post to promote OR if you simply want to promote a post via the linkfests/open trackback posts others are offering, GO TO LINKFEST HAVEN DELUXE! Just CLICK the link above or the graphic immediately below.

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

Trackposted to Perri Nelson’s Website, The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Adam’s Blog, The Populist, Leaning Straight Up, Cao’s Blog, The Bullwinkle Blog, Pursuing Holiness, Allie Is Wired, Woman Honor Thyself, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Wolf Pangloss, The Yankee Sailor, Church and State, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe

November 5, 2007November 5, 2007

Call me crazy, but…

As the old dialogue goes,

“I talk with the voices in my head.”

“Yeh? What do they say?”

“They say I’m crazy? Me?!? Crazy?!? They’re the ones in! my! head!“

*heh*

I may be crazy, though, and if so, this may be why:

Brain imaging study find sleep loss leads to mental disorders

Harvard University Medical School and University of California-Berkeley researchers have explained through their study that sleep deprivation leads to irrational behavior, what is associated with psychiatric (mental) disorders.

According to the researchers, the emotional center of the brainÃ¢â‚¬â€located in the amygdala (within the medial temporal lobes)Ã¢â‚¬â€may stop its function (to deal with emotional reactions and feelings, such as aggression and fear) when a person is severely sleep deprived. When this happens, people find it much more difficult to control their emotions.

Yeh, well, this is just dotting the “is” and crossing the “ts” in what real world p-sychs have known for a very, very long time: sleep deprivation can literally drive folks around the bend–or at least cause folks to evidence all the signs of serious mental disorders, such as auditory and visual hallucinations, etc.

But this doesn’t explain how well-rested Loony Left Moonbats, Academia Nut Fruitcakes, politicians *spit* and Mass Media Podpeople come up with their wacked out worldviews… That’s going to require exploration much deeper into the thicket of human insanity.

Anyway, I need a nap. Continually.

🙂

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

November 2, 2007November 2, 2007

Inertia

ALthough I have boxes running Ubuntu and Puppy Linux (the latter on nearly any box in the house at any given time–exceptiing only Bubba’s Box and his XBox 360) and even PC-BSD, for many reasons, much of my day-to-day stuff is done on an old box running Win2KPro, which, yeh, I prefer to the WinXP boxes (in fact, I scrubbed WinXP off a hard drive recently in favor of having a fresh hard drive and Puppy Linux running in memory on that box, using the hard drive solely for storing the pup.sys file and data files–no OS on the drive at all).

The only things keeping me on this box for much of my browsing and other activities are

continued familiarity with typical Windows behavior (mousing, windowing, etc.) since most of my clients still use Windows.
inertia: so many apps have format-specific data saved on that machine and even were I to run ’em using WINE under Linux, the app-specific tweaks necessary to do so are creating a mental logjam of “Nuh-uh–don’t wanna do that just yet.” *heh*

But that may come to a screeching halt, soon. Recently, I had the opportunity to make the switch complete on this machine and let the inertia of data-associated apps sway me to stick with Win2K. Yup. A physical hard drive crash (some of y’all may recall the incident) resulted in a moment or two of waffling… but then I mirrored the crashed drive onto another one (presription: freeze drive; install as slave; mirror–quickly! before it warms too much and starts sticking again! *heh*). All data and configs since the last backup nicely saved to new drive. Repair install of Windows and all that was needed was… *sigh* twaeking of install cos program registration of some installed programs screwed up, naturally (all this took much longer than it sounds like–actually involved TWO “new” hard drives, but that’s another story).

In the time I took to have a functioning Win2K system back up and working as I wanted it to, I coulda had an Ubuntu system up, my data transferred over and WINE installed for those apps I really don’t want to do without.

But I let M$ inertia take over for that machine.

However…

As Windows keeps bugging me, I may just set that machine aside as a Windoze Buggy Box and do all the scut work of getting my data (and those apps I don’t find near enough open source Linux/BSD equivalents for to suit me) working on either an Ubuntu or PC-BSD box. In fact, the chief deterrent to doing that NOW is just some time crunch on other projects. Not the only deterrent, mind you; I’m still at least partially in the clutches of inertia, but those grasping hands are slipping.

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

November 1, 2007

T-13, 1.46: A Few of My Favorite Things

Feelin’ just a tad curmudgeonly–why! almost (relatively speaking) gay! *heh*–today, so while this list won’t be all “rainbows and roses and whiskers on kittens” it may not be as grumpy and sarcastic as such a list would usually be…

So, just off the top of my head, a few of my favorite things:

1. I love it when some doofus website designer sets the browser sniffer to tell me my browser won’t work for the site’s content. Ha! I laugh as such oafs! Set my browser to mask itself as the preferred browser for that site and screw the website designer. With a BIG, rusty screw.

2. Microsoft. It provides me with soooo much work via its bloated, buggy insecure-ware. Love it. Love to hate it. It’s a win-win for me. What’s not to like?

3. Zoom-zoom speeders. I love watching them zip by at unsafe speeds, knowing that it’s extremely likely I’ll pass them later at a traffic light (if not at the scene of the smoking wreckage). I frequently cheerfuly (sneeringly) wave as I pass… tootling along at the posted speed.

4. Crisp fall days; mouldy leaves; neighbors burning old sweat socks (well, it smells worse, but I’ve not been able to get the corrupt twc LEOs to bust ’em for meth manufacturing–if that’s what it is): the wonders of fall in America’s Third World CountyÃ¢â€žÂ¢.

5. Trick-or-treaters. Gives The Boys their fun workout barking their hearts out. Which cues the neighbors’ dogs to join in. Candy for T-or-T-ers? What? I should contribute to the growing epidemic of child obesity and juvenile diabetes? I’m not that cruel. I’ll scare the lil devils, but I won’t kill ’em with sweets. “Here, kid, have a peanut. Don’t hurt yourself cracking it open!”

*heh*

6. Gas prices. Heck, they’re only 10X (well, not even that quite yet) what they were 40 years ago when I was making 1/50 the $$/hour. What with that and my car getting more than twice the mpg that the car I had then was getting, I’m coming out WAY ahead!

7. Telemarketers. I love having someone that society, the law and my conscience gives me free rein to blast to my heart’s content. (Then I report them to our state’s attorney general for further harrassment. Man, I love this stuff!)

8. Stray dogs. Never can get enough target practice. (No, I live ~300 feet within “city” limits, so I don’t take the mayor’s advice and “mistake ’em for coyotes and shoot ’em”–firearm discharge w/in “city” limits is strictly regulated. No, no .30-.40*; I use my slingshot.)

9. Playing with the mess Windows networking makes of the simplest network. Yeh, yeh, this is a subset of #2, but it’s so special I had to give it a separate slot. Compared with SAMBA-enabled Linux boxes, Windows boxes are such a pain in the tuchous to manage that it brings in the $$. (I’m not sadist OR masochist enough to tout folks onto Novell’s networking products. Sure, it’d bring in lots more $$ for me, but the pain I’d inflict on others and the pain in the neck–really a MUCH lower pain–for me to maintain wouldn’t be worth it.)

10. Socks. No, no major negatives to rejoice in here. I just like wearing them. Laundering them and then mating them up later… well, that’s NOT a favorite thing. (Yeh, yeh: I’ve tried alla those lil tricks about securing pairs of socks together before washing: they do not work. Socks are escape artists, able to escape both the ties that bind them to each other in the wash and to another dimension, where they mate with socks from other pairs and produce weird hybrids like… ties!)

11. “…miles and miles of files, pretty files of your forefathers’ fruit”–the effluvia of years and years of not throwing out the junk family members dump on us. It keeps me living, I tell ya! (I just canNOT die before I’ve cleared out some of this crap! ;-))

12. Inkjet refill kits. Almost like playing with a kids’ chemistry set. I love exploring the chemistry necessary for removal of the inks from hands and clothes and keyboards and… *heh*

13. Pens. I must really love these things, even though I rarely use ’em any more. I know I must really love ’em cos I have drawersful, mugsful of ’em and they still clutter my desktop, keyboard drawer and I’m sure there are even some in my sock drawer (I just hope I don’t find some in my underdrawers). Of course, when I do need one…

Noted at the Thursday Thirteen Hub–join in!

And, Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, Right Truth, The World According to Carl, The Populist, Shadowscope, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, and High Desert Wanderer, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

*The Winchester Model 1895 that is usually called a “.30-.30” is rightly chambered as a .30-.40

October 31, 2007

Tempest in a Sandbox

Some corners of the blogosphere are all a-twitter about Laura Bush’s supposed donning of an abaya during a recent trip to Saudi Arabia on a diplomatic mission about “women’s issues”–specifically, breast cancer awareness. As oftn is the case, the twitterers are straining at gnats and passing a camel.

Context is important. Here’s a contrarian view from an American woman who was present at the “incident”:

“The controversial photo shows Bush donning a black headscarf decorated with the iconic pink bows signifying breast cancer awareness. It was the only time Bush covered her head during the trip and the episode lasted perhaps a minute.

“The scarf in question was a gift to Bush from a dozen Saudi women who shared their experiences fighting breast cancer with the first lady. The morning meeting was touching and intimate, the sort of bonding experience that opens hearts and minds in diplomatically useful ways.

“Upon receiving the gift, Bush did what any decent, well-mannered person would do. She demonstrated her appreciation by placing the scarf on her head. In Saudi Arabia, it was a sweet, wordless gesture of friendship and mutual respect.”

While I don’t appreciate the administration’s cozy relationship with the Saudis* (heck, not just the administration: the State Department and Congress are also filled with Saudi-holics), this may not be the incident to hang ones hat on. I would, however, agree with the characterization of Laura Bush’s action as thoughtless, automatic “good manners” that ought to have been dispensed with on two counts: it’s a head scarf, in Saudi Arabia fer heaven’s sake! Come on, Laura! While it certainly showed respect and appreciation for the women who gave it to you, it carries a weight of symbolism beyond the pink bows.

The incident to be outraged about is the whole diplomatic trip to Saudi Arabia thing. The only diplomacy the Saudis should recieve is at the end of a gun barrel. The kindest, gentlest “diplomacy” the Saudis have earned through their fake “friendship” with the U.S. would be to demolish their water desalinization plants, blockade the country and sell ’em water at $100/barrel.

The whole trip was a stupid, stupid idea to begin with. Laura Bush wearing a breast cancer awareness head scarf was just something for the ADD crowd to get in an uproar about.

*Do recall my name for Laura’s husband, “Fifi Mohammed I-never-met-a-Mexican-President-Whose-Lap-I-Didn’t-Like or a Saudi(*spit*)-‘Prince’-Whose-Hand-I-Didn’t-Love-to-Hold Bush”.

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

October 30, 2007October 30, 2007

Fred–on the issues

Read ’em all here. First up, National Security:

The first responsibility of government is to protect the American people, the homeland, and our way of life. Today we face the urgent threat of radical Islamic terrorists. Al Qaeda is committed to attacking us here at home, and wants to use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to kill millions. We must never give them that opportunity. We must defeat the terrorists abroad, and that begins in Iraq and AfghanistanÃ¢â‚¬â€the central fronts in this global war. We must show the world we have the will to fight and win. A weakened America – or an America that appears weaker – will only encourage further attacks. We must persevere. As Commander-in-Chief, the president must ensure the United States has the means to achieve victory. Presidential leadership requires talking to the American people about these stakes, mapping out a clear vision for success, and devising a comprehensive strategy for achieving it. I am committed to:

A larger, more capable, and more modern military that can defeat terrorists, deter adversaries, and defend the U.S. and our interests.
A missile defense system that can protect the U.S. and our allies from long-range ballistic missiles.
An enhanced intelligence community, with robust human-intelligence capabilities, focused on terrorism and proliferation.
A robust approach to homeland security that will protect our nation from terrorists and WMD, regardless of where they come from.
A strengthened system of global alliances to better combat terrorists, proliferators, and traditional threats to our interests.
A judicial system that deals with the realities of terrorists and unlawful enemy combatants.

What politicians *spit* so often lose sight of in our instand gratification, vote-buying, “gimme, gimme, gimme” society is that the primary purpose of government–the one without which no goivernment has any real legitimacy–is the protection of its citizens from outlaws. Fred seems to know this. Maybe it was his time spent as a feddle gummint prosecutor, or maybe it has something to do with his roots in Tennesee. *heh* (He was born in Sheffield, Alabama, but the family moved to Lawrenceburg, Tennesee soon after.) Whatever the source of that knowledge, he’s certainly on track with his national security comments.

See the rest of his position articulations at his site.

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

Trackposted to Blue Star Chronicles, Pirate’s Cove, Perri Nelson’s Website, , Big Dog’s Weblog, The Populist, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.