Author: David

IMAO has a great sendup of Demo underground conspiracy theories. I particularly enjoyed this part:

Hacker1: Yeah, there’s no fooling those guys [the Democratic Underground]. They’re on top of everything. Luckily, Rove had a plan for them too.

Hacker2: What he did was get all these mental patients – total schizos – and brainwash them about how evil the Republicans are. Then he gave them internet connections.

Hacker1: Now the schizos that Rove planted totally rule the Democratic Underground discussion forum. They’re the most prolific posters. Instead of getting anywhere on all the evil plans we have, they waste time blaming a Democrat event being rained out on Karl Rove.

Hacker2: Which is stupid because our weather machine is only 60% complete…

[heh] Just read the whole thing.

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2004/11/blue_state_blue.html

Blue states “invaded” by red state Dollywood values. An excerpt:

” …In one recent three-week period, fourteen high school students in Portland, Oregon were suspended for distributing pork rinds; a Burlington, Vermont high school was briefly closed for decontamination after janitors found a bible hidden in a restroom; and forty-six undergraduate coeds at Swarthmore were expelled for staging clandestine Mary Kay cosmetics parties.”

Dangerous trend, indeed… [heh]

Yeh, well, I kid you not… Go download/see the answer to Michael Moore-onic’s Fahrenheit 9/11 that this guy’s posted at his site. (It just about darned near requires Windows Media Player [spit!], but it’s a telling indictment of the Moore-ons in the LLMB and MMPA.)

As he says, since it’s composed of actual comments made by LLMs,

“***Warning — NOT INTENDED FOR KIDS OR BOB JONES GRADUATES.”

[heh]

A sample post from “The Discoshaman” whose site motto is, “Gentrifying the Christian Ghetto Since 2003″–

“One thing you can say for Calvinists. . .

Anyone who says that man is totally depraved couldn’t be all bad.”

Oh, [heh]

🙂

…Launched from a site near Baghdad, the Predator UAV carried a Hellfire missile. Its crew and its video feeds were back in California. A few weeks earlier, the Watchdogs had employed Predator to hit a moving pickup with a mounted machine gun—one robot leading another robot to the target. NFL games on television allow the viewer to see the same play from different angles. But the digital pipes for battlefield imagery weren’t large enough to permit the Watchdogs and the Predator crew in California to see each other’s video. Instead, the Predator and Pioneer crews used e-mail chat and GPS coordinates to align their platforms….

Now, this is what Rumsfeld, et al, have been talking about when trying to pound sense about military transformation and the strategy of technology to the MMPA and LLMB, although, of course, Rummy tries to avoid the big words when speaking to the mental half-packs in the LLMB and MMPA… (h.t. to Bill @ INDC Journal)

“The Watchdogs of Fallujah

From: Bing West
Subject: How the Pioneer Robot Plane Helped Win an Artillery Duel
Thursday, Nov. 11, 2004, at 11:37 AM PT

…The two-story cement house where the insurgents were hiding between rounds had a dome roof, a large courtyard with an outside wall, and an overhang at the front door, where a sentry was posted. The Watchdogs had counted five men outside, assuming it was the same sprinters making the round trip to the mortar each time…

…The courtyard door opened, and a man walked to the truck and slowly drove away.

“Boot muj sent out to get the Coke. Luckiest bastard on the planet.”

Both video screens suddenly flashed bright white, as if a fuse had blown. There was a collective Damn! from the watching Marines. The center of the roof was now a huge black hole…

Now, that’s a transformation I can get behind: Predator crew in California teaming up with the boots on the ground = smoking hole in Fallujah. Sounds good to me. Can’t do that with draftees. (Well, you could, perhaps, but by the time they are trained it’s time they got out… and they’d likely leave as fast as they could.) Need to have highly-trained specialists, and that means all-volunteer, there for the full ride kinda guys. Not unwilling mutts dragged in off the streets.

OK, that should be “Blind Hypocritical Bigots to the Left of Me,” but that just doesn’t scan as well…

Betsy Newmark (OK, I’ve told you and told you to bookmark her Betsy’s Page blog. So when are you going to do it, already?) points to an article by George Neumayr that contains this nugget:

“The Democrats are far more interested in subduing Christianity at home than defeating militant Islam abroad. They can write acerbically about Southern Christians as jihadists, then eulogize real jihadists like Arafat as peacemakers. They can bring a very benign interpretation to Islam, insisting that the founders of Islam held the same liberal values and views as the editorial writers of the New York Times — watch PBS’s documentaries on Islam and you would think the early Muslim sultans were PBS liberals — but offer no such generous understanding to Christian teachings.”

James Taranto (Best of the Web, Opinion Journal) sees the following lil
epigram by Hillaire Belloc as applicable to Arafat:

Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

Hmmm... can anyone think of a few others that would fit? ("Git the rope, Ma.
A buncha us guys are going down to 'welcome' that  politician who came to
town, today.")  Brings to mind one of my favorite quotes by a famous Missourian:

"Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress.
But I repeat myself". Mark Twain

Of course, congresscritters do not, in the 21st century, comprise the sum total
of the class, "idiots," in our society, as Twain impies they did in the 19th century.
We have the rest of the LLMB and the MMPA to take up the slack, there.

No time to deal with this now. Just hie thee to the Belmont Club and read. I’ll include other links—and I must remember a few to Credenda Agenda articles on the subject, as well—later.

Who cares, anyway? It’s my blog, and I can noodle around any topic I want.

Web browsers. Recently, Mozilla Firebird has gotten a LOT of “ink”—almost all from computer wonks touting it as THE answer to crappy browsing with Internet Exploder, the world’s worst web browser.

Well , Firebird is pretty good (in fact, I’m using it right now to blog this comment), but it’s nearly as bad as Internet Exploder about some things. Sure, it’s MUCH better overall than Internet Exploder, but then, browsing the internet with pen and paper would almost be better than Internet Exploder, so that’s daming Firebird with faint praise. Much of the hoopla about Firebird’s wonderfuliciousness in computer wonkish press is simply, IMO, because ANYTHING that works is worlds and away better than Internet Exploder.

Sure it’s faster than IE. And because it doesn’t have deep, deep unfixable hooks into the OS, it’s inherently more secure. Yes, it does have (a lame, IMO) implementation of tabbed browsing and a few other nearly OK implementations of browsing enhancements.

BUT, it’s so damned hard to get it to look and work like I like. In fact, I have yet to discover a way to get some of the toolbar/menu features to work like I want/prefer. And the single most significant advance in browsing ease of use, mouse gestures? It doesn’t come built in! You have to choose among competing plugins to install after the fact. Dumb. “Add bookmark here”? Another plugin! Etc.

Why features that ought to be built in have to be downloaded separately, instead of being enabled/disabled within the browser itself, is a puzzle and an irritant to me.

And one really annoying “feature”—one that apparently cannot be fixed even with one of those annoying plugins: some sites that display line wrap fine even in Internet Exploder do NOT line wrap in Firebird. This is a real pain when changing text/display size on the fly (another thing Firebird doesn’t do any better than the lame Internet Exploder implementation).

In contrast, Opera, which has remained my primary web browser for some time, has mouse gestures, mouse wheel text resizing from 10% to 1000%, (which works well with line wrapping), and all those other features mentioned above (and more) built in. And it’s faster loading pages. AND I can put toolbars and menu bars any damned where I want. And using CSS is a snap, and…

Yeh. So, I use Firebird so I can be familiar with it. I use Internet Exploder when a site I absolutely HAVE to use has been put together by people who are so rude and stupid that they refuse to use standards-compliant html/xml coding and require IE (and I invariably send them emails about it until either they change their site or I can find a site that’ll let me do without their crap).

So, my take is that Firebird is mostly OK, especially when compared to the Lousy Browser, Internet Exploder. It does have popup blocking similar to Opera’s and a few other nice enhancements, and if you don’t mind just clunking along without the real browsing enhancements available (with Firebird) only through installing plugins, it’s pretty much Just Good Enough for now.

As to email clients… that’s another story. In spite of some feature lacks, I’m becoming sold on Mozilla’s Thunderbird email software as opposed to Outlook Express. Yes, Outlook Express is a more feature-rich free email software, but not by much. And the built-in junk mail handling in T-bird is nice, although a little quirky. In fact, the whole app is a little quirky, but still works well and is more secure by design than Outlook Express. T-bird’s definitely worth a look, IMO

Back to regularly scheduled snark in later posts.

Thanks to Betsy Newmark for the link to this article about a new feature exhibit at the National Archives. Wow. All that seems to be missing from this “Archives’ Magical History Tour” is sKerry’s magic hat. (But then, it’s a little hard to include a fantasy object in a history exhibit… or ought to be.)

BTW, if you haven’t bookmarked Betsy’s Page just do it. Right now.

Whizbang has a thread going on who the USA ought to send to Arafat’s funeral. Some good suggestions. Personally, I’d combine a few of them and send Michael Moore-on, the Clintoons and Djimmi Carter. It might be too much to hope that Moore-on would like to show “solidarity” with the PLO and go dressed as a suicide bomber… (“Hey! Is that Osama in the Moore-on fat suit?”) Still, sending Moore-on, Carter and the Clintoons to a send-off for a sorry sack of… feces is kinda like sending coals to Newcastle, isn’t it?

I have an idea. Let’s all show our “respect” for Arafat by setting aside a moment to take a dump during his funeral.

Nah. Too respectful. I’d hate to have that negative association formed with good, clean feces.

Update: Lileks has this to say (among other things) about Arafat’s death:

“I am content to know he is not in Hell. Nope. Arafat did not go to Hell. He boards the ferry, yes; he makes it halfway across the River Styx, yes. Then the ferry blows up. Ten times a day for eternity. For a start.”

Well, maybe. A little too mild, IMO, but maybe a start. Perhaps a fitting torment would be bathing with Hitler. Not that the Hitler part would be a problem for Arafat, but think of the torment of forcing a piece of filth like that to bathe at all… In fact, it’s almost a certainty that they each would be filthier as a result…