"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
Author: David
Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
13 of my Thursday non-work-related (i.e., “my time”) to-do list tasks, unordered as to priority, simply listed:
1. Write my T-13 post. 🙂
2. Remove ECM from parts car for car #1 (for mechanic to use in car#1).
3. Make chili for dinner.
4. Feed the animals. Again. *sigh* 😉
5. Scan through a few blogs.
6. Call parents. “duty” call. *heh* Let ’em know road trip their way is scheduled for Saturday (fair warning: weekend bloggage will be virtually nonexistent). Subnote: learn their new phone number. Speed dial ain’t gonna make it.
7. Clean or replace idle air control valve car #2.
8. New battery car #2 (beginning to see a pattern to my Thursday to-dos?)
9. Clean n prep car#2 for trip.
10. Play chauffeur for Wonder Woman’s “running around to clinics when the kids have school off day” (yeh, pretty much eliminates a lot of work, today. ‘S’all right, though). Note; Her car’s at the mechanic and she doesn’t drive stick.
11. Tape Smallville for WW. (Even though it’s gotten almost too weird to watch. Once was pretty fair show, but now, I dunno. I’ll save my commentary about how bad TV has improved my reading list for another time.)
12. Pre-post a coupla days’ posts.
13. Get to bed early, cos tomorrow’s even more filled with non-work-related extras.
Liberals always act shocked and astonished that conservatives believe that an organization claiming to be the guardian of religious liberty is actually is actually America’s number one religious censor. They will spout off token cases where the ACLU veered from its normal path of hostility toward Christian religious expression to defend free speech. They have a handful of cases they try to convince us with. However, the ACLU’s history can easily be looked at and the cases against religious expression far outweigh these token cases. If the ACLU were consistent in its positions on religious liberty despite the religion their defense on the issue would be much easier. However, many cases point out that it isn’t religion in general the ACLU fight, but the Christian religion in particular.
When the Tangipahoa Parish School Board in Louisiana opened its board meetings with a prayer like they had for 30 years the ACLU sued. After the ACLU won that case and the School Board ignored the court ruling, Louisiana ACLU chief Joe Cook called for them to be jailed and compared them to terrorists. Mr. Cook is currently leading an attack on plan for a Katrina memorial paid for with private funds to be erected on private land simply because it is in the shape of a cross and might offend some sensitive passerby. When valedictorian of Foothill High, Brittany McComb, decided to share her faith voluntarily at her graduation cermony the ACLU said it was the right call to pull the plug. And of course we are all familiar with the ACLU’s crusade to eliminate the Mt. Soledad war memorial because it is a cross that might offend some atheist.
It has become a tradition for the ACLU to attack Christian nativity scenes every Christmas. They has already started early this year. We have all witnessed the ACLU’s hatred of Ten Commandment displays across the nation. The ACLU sue city counsil after city counsil over praying in Jesus name. They don’t sue to stop all prayer, but in every case the target has been Christian prayer. They even fought for the right of a Wiccan to pray at a counsil meeting. Many times it doesn’t even take a lawsuit. They just type up a threatening letter and that does the trick.
There is no doubt that the ACLU are overzealous in their quest to secularize America and erase its Christian heritage. The good news is that there are organizations out there fighting them, and people standing up to protest against them. Currently they are attacking Lakeview Elementary School for promotion of a Prayer at the Flagpole event, a National Day of Prayer event, the activities of a “Praying Parents†group, teacher-led voluntary classroom prayers, and a Christian theme and overtly religious songs at a Christmas program. The school is not denying these charges but asserting that Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu students have “a constitutional right to pray or to read their scriptures at school as well. They did not cave in to the ACLU’s threats but gathered a group of over 600 people to protest the ACLU in a prayer vigil.
The prayer rally, organized by two Mt. Juliet commissioners, drew hundreds, with about 200 stuck in a 1.5-mile traffic jam. The event, which also attracted some local politicians and pastors, took place outside the school recently named in a lawsuit for alleged constitutional violations.
It is encouraging to see people standing up to the ACLU in defense of their rights that they feel are being threatened. However, this will not stop the ACLU from proceeding with its attacks. On the other hand it will ultimately be the power of the people and their desire for freedom that will have to put a stop to the ACLU’s attempts to criminalize Christian free speech through the courts. One effective way to assert this power is to get out and vote for people that oppose the ACLU’s anti-Christian agenda.
Everytime the ACLU wins a case against these small schools and local governments they are awarded massive money in attorney’s fees through your tax dollars. Often this is used to threaten these cash strapped schools and local governments to surrender before the case even goes before a court. There is current legislation, the Public Expression of Religion Act, that seeks to put a stop to this extortion. It has already passed the House and will be up for vote soon in the Senate. It is very unlikely it will pass if liberals take control. Put an end to this abuse. Get out and vote for people you know will support this much needed legislation. Cut the ACLU off from the government teat.
Well, PC Magazine’s sticking it’s nose in the air again. I dunno… where do they think their major readership is from?
Dialling in Dual Phones is a decent enough article, but the title just about gave me a rash. Who do they think they are giving the term a British spelling? An American invented the rotary dial, from whence the term “dialing” came into general usage… especially “dialing in” referring to phone usage, so using the British spelling of “dialing” is doubly irritating.
Yeh, yeh: picky, picky, picky. So? When in America, spell as Americans do.
Oh, and don’t try speaking Spanish to me, either. I’m trying to forget whatever I learned in my years of Spanish classes and living on the Texas/Mexico border. Let ’em all speak and write American English if they wanna be here. Yeh, not even Brit English, as long as they’re writing for a mostly American audience.
On my way to a busy day mostly away from access to twc, so if y’all trackback or comment here and your tbs/comments don’t show right away, just hang in there; I’ll be back to pull things from my moderation queue later.
Meanwhile, a quick lil cat health tip.
Our largest (most, urm, “assertive”) cat had a weight problem. She’d bully the other cats away from the food bowls and scarf things down until her “sufficiency had been surrensified” as my ole pa used to put it “back in the day.”
Soooo… after long time working at various solutions: bowls of cat food in widely separated places only helped a little. The other cats seem to “snack” at their food, so she’d go raid those bowls between scarfs of her own; putting down less food simply penalized the other two. What to do?
After multiple experiments, I think I may have finally hit on a solution. I found a food (a combo of two foods) the other two like but that she does not. Oh, when she’s truly hungry enough, she’ll eat it, but otherwise, she turns her nose up at it, while the other two eat to their hearts’ content.
Big girl has lost weight and stabilized at a more healthy configuration. The other two seem fine.
Now, when I serve them their food, I can do it all in one handy (for me) location. Big girl simply looks at me with disgust and walks away after a few sniffs and/or, grudging nibbles… but she does come back later when she’s really hungry.
I wonder how that would work with people? Purina Monkey Chow? An “All you can eat” diet. Complete nutrition but too disgusting for even chubbos to want to eat…
This is an open trackbacks post. Link to this post and then track back. If you want to host your own linkfests, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance.
Also note the other fine blogs featuring linkfests at Linkfest Haven.
See Chaotic Synaptic Activity’s crosspost here for more detailed analysis of some of the presenting problems/opportunities of the Iraq War, and then… and then there are my lil semi-incoherent ramblings…
It seems to me that the Iraq War presents us with a set of unique advantages we did NOT have in Vietnam :
The tribal, religious and cultural divides (Advantage? Yes, but only if someone in the feddle gummint with real influence has both the brains and the balls to take advantage of these factors)
A growing awareness of the lies of the Mass Media Podpeoples’ Hivemind culture among more and more Americans
The simple fact that a partitioned Iraq would create more problems for Islamic terrorists while at the same time going a long way toward providing a potential for some sort of peaceful resolution to the area… at least for the Kurds (leaving aside for the moment the problem of Turkey–a real but handleable problem for the Kurds, who, after all are still Saracens at heart. *heh*).
The problem with these factors is that there is literally no one in the feddle gummint who is in a position to use them AND has the simple intellectual horsepower to recognize them AND the balls to take advantage of them and run with them.
Paul Bremmer set the stage for a very real potential for American failure by disbanding the Iraqi Army (90%+ of whom were not rabid Baathists), ignoring (insulting) tribal leaders and playing proconsul. Of course, the fact that he did so with the full knowledge and support of the Bush administration compounded his sins.
But all we need is for one voice in the feddle gummint–one voice with real influence–to stand up and call the emperor’s butt-naked behind what it is. Could you say steamroll? I think public opinion could really burgeon in favor of a partitioned Iraq if all the facts were clearly explained.
“OK, kids. Since you can’t play nicely together, go to your separate rooms. No soup for you.”
Then, if they wanna keep on fighting, they can play Kilkenny Cats until the cows come home and it’s not be a threat to us.
“We tried to help, but these folks are just too backward and savage for a civilized solution.”
Until this last weekend, I was pretty much stumped as to how, in this age of access to incredible amounts of information, without even laving your home or office, a significant number of people in this country could continually claim the US Government was behind the 9/11 attacks.
I have long held that the images coming out of Hollywood have had an undercurrent of an effect on many parts of society, particularly with the tend to show all adults as either stupid, ignorant, or corrupt (or any combination of those) and only children were capable of seeing the real danger, finding the real criminals, or knowing the truth. That has sent a subliminal message that anoyone of authority can’t be trusted, and, we see the results in the legal system.
This past Saturday, I was channel surfing and the last 30 minutes of “The X-Files” movie was on. I settled back on the couch and then a “BFO” (Blinding flash of the obvious) hit me. I didn’t know for how long, but I knew that series had been aroound a long time. I just looked it up: Begun in 1993, and ran through 2002. The movie was out in 1998.
The popularity of this series, which showed not just the US, but a world shadow organization, was cooperating with the aliens, and doing what ever they needed to do to keep this alliance a secret.
From Wikipedia:
The X-Files was one of the network’s first major hits, and its main characters and slogans (“The Truth Is Out There,” “Trust No One,” “Deny Everything,” “I Want to Believe”) became pop culture touchstones, simultaneously tapping into and inspiring a plethora of conspiracy theories, paranoia about the U.S. government, and belief in the existence of extraterrestrial life.
The “Generation C” types have grown up with a well done fictional series, and have failed to discern between truth and fiction.
I think this may help explain the vast numbers of our citizens who believe the Government is behind all of the GWoT, because, we all know….The truth is out there.
Neurons randomly connecting. Shorting. Grounding out (but not to third).
I haven’t been able to listen to the whole thing to discover just how it all comes out (I can only listen to just so much–about 30 seconds at a time–of the the over-produced, derivative crap that is contemporary “country” music), but Eric Lee Beddingfield may be onto something here. (Hint: click on the “Listen” link on song number 6.)
The joys of google: I was looking for something else, but this link looked interesting. I’m awarding the author my own PhDBS.* He deserves it more than I. The degree’s in the mail, bub.
If you want to explore a pop/contemporary genre of music, Pandora might be your cuppa tea. It’s an interesting, but extremely limited, idea. It seems to think “music” means only things written/performed in the last few years. “Classic” jazz, to it, is something about 5 years old (or less). Still, if you want to set up an internet radio station to play a wide selection of a limited number of genres with songs from recent years, it might just suit you.
Sharp Left Turn: My definition of bad coffee used to revolve around a high school band trip to Mexico. Some of us roomed overnight at one stop at a convent school (it was during a school break for the girls, so keep you imaginations in your pants, guys). Breakfast was… interesting. The coffe at least tasted fresh ground. I swear they’d just dug it up outa the graveyard next door. But recently, I had to revise my definition of bad coffee. I had the “opportunity” to taste a sippa coffee from the break room at my wife’s work the other day. The words “Wolverine piss” sprang readily to mind as I spat the stuff out… (Sippin’ some good stuff, now.) I’d sooner have some day old brewed by me than get within spittin’ distance of any more of that stuff from Wonder Woman’s workplace.
There is an old conundrum in queueing theory that goes like this. A passenger arrives at a bus-stop at some arbitrary point in time. Buses arrive according to a Poisson process (i.e., completely randomly) at the bus-stop on average every 30 minutes. How long can a passenger expect to wait for the next bus?
Go figure.
And last (at last!)
Lost Pirates
An idea whose time has come… and gone. (Go here for more of this sort… )
Using My Powers for Good reminds us that we can celebrate the Turkey Testicle Festival in Ft Myers, FL, and that there are 12 other celebrations nationwide that use the word “testicle” in their names.
As UMPFG says,
“How could that not make me feel at least a little better?”
I guess the other testicular festivities also include the Orchiectomy Delectomy? The Monad’s Gonad? And of course, the venerable Ball Ball…
Is appreciation of these “testicle festival” female humor?
This is an open trackbacks post. Link to this post and then track back. If you want to host your own linkfests, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance.
Also note the other fine blogs featuring linkfests at Linkfest Haven.
If you live in the New England area and flew on United Airlines on or about October 9th or 10th [and lost your iPod].Then contact David Berlind. He has your iPod.
Well, maybe. There could have been several (hundred?) folks who lost iPods under those circunstances, but the photos and music selection stored on the thing ought to make identifying the ownder easy enough… if the owner sees one of these blogposts and comes forward, that is. And that’s kinda the idea of this lil experiment.
If this isn’t a test for how the blogosphere can get things done, I’m not sure what is. As a part of this test, if you happen to read this blog entry and you have a blog, please spread the word and let’s see if the viral nature of the blogosphere can help this iPod find its owner.
Well? Gonna post about this for your readers, too?
