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Gribbit has a post published today that I feel is essential reading for those of us who are more than merely fond of the basic liberties the Founders fought and bled and died for and that generations beforfe us have preserved by the same means.

Once Upon A Time When America Had Christmas

GO READ IT.

Then, after you have read it, come back and read my further response, below the fold.

Trackbacked to the following linkfests via Linkfest Haven Deluxe

Trackposted to The HILL Chronicles, Pursuing Holiness, 123beta, The Uncooperative Blogger, The Uncooperative Blogger ®, Woman Honor Thyself, Pirate’s Cove, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, Outside the Beltway, Adam’s Blog, The World According To Carl, The Right Nation, The Amboy Times, Perri Nelson’s Website, Blue Star Chronicles, Madman Returns, The Renaissance Blogger, Is It Just Me?, The World According to Carl, Conservative Cat, Stuck On Stupid, Planck’s Constant, The Random Yak, and The Bullwinkle Blog, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

My response to Gribbit’s post:

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Continue reading “Lovers of Liberty: Essential Reading”

I have plenty of “stuff” and my wish list, such as it is, is mostly for things to do to my Wonder Woman’s house for her, but I do have a few things that kinda linger on my wish list. I just added another that will not stay on the list for ling, because the new Celtic Woman CD/DVD will be out January 30, 2007. (Preorder at Amazon.com)

Yeh, caught the chopped-up PBS presentation of it tonight. (And yeh, I like the fundraising PBS season, cos those interruptions begging for $$ give me plenty of time to make snack runs and “pay my water bill,” etc. :-))

Sure, most of the folks in the audience were my age (and older). But that’s likely because most of them could recognize and reproduce pitches themselves (unlike a majority of young folks today), and during much of the performance, folks were singing along. (And yes, I can tell by watching if someone’s likely to be on pitch. Comes with experience and training.)

But the music. *sigh* Solos, duets, all the way up to four and five-part harmonies in the major voices (with instruments and chorus on many). A cappella. Triple over duple rhythms (and vice versa). And more. Complex, yet maintaining simplicity. Artistry. Some singers and instrumentalists with real chops developed from talent forged into artistry by some serious study, training and discipline.

A far cry from the contemporary pap and crap of top 40 junk.

But Celtic Woman has been that way from its inception in 2005.

Good stuff. Highly recommended.

Here’s a real quickie. Another difference between Islam and the West: a difference between Christians and Muslims.

If you’ve claimed to be a Christian but then recant and choose to leave the church, Christians will tell you that when you die, you’ll go to hell (heck, most Christians will say you never were a Christian if you can recant).

If you’ve been a Muslim and recant, though, Muslims won’t just tell you that you will go to hell when you die, they’ll get in line to punch your ticket.

See the difference? If you don’t, then you’re probably a CNN/Al-Reuters mush head fake liberal.

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[Note: I’ve had the material reproduced below for years and have no recollection of whence it came. It’s reproduced here for the edification of my gentle readers… ]

Some years ago, while the Soviet Empire was still a creaking franchise of the bankrupt Marxist ideals, a Russian couple was walking down the street near Red Square in Moscow one night, when the man felt a drop hit his nose.

“I think it’s raining”, he said to his wife.

“No, that felt more like snow to me”, she replied.

“No, I’m sure it was just rain,” he said.

Well, as these things go, they were about to have a major argument about whether it was raining or snowing. But just then they saw a minor communist party official walking toward them.

“Let’s not fight about it”, the man said, “Let’s ask Comrade Rudolph whether it’s officially raining or snowing”.

As the official approached, the man said, “Tell us, Comrade Rudolph, is it officially raining or snowing?”

“It’s raining, of course”, he replied, and walked on.

But the woman insisted: “I know that felt like snow!”

To which the man quietly replied:

“Rudolph the Red knows rain, dear.”

Humbly submitted to the Christmas Alliance HQ Homepage.

Running short on time, so this is a very quick drive-by post. Dig a little on yout own for more info.

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MsUnderestimated points out a Hannity/Colmes interview of Hashim Nzinga, December 6 (yesterday), where Hannity tried manfully and politely (but insistently) to get Nzinga to respond to a simple question about former North Carolina State University professor Kamau Kambon’s rant about solving the world’s problems by exterminating white people. Specifically referring to Kambon’s serious proposal to exterminate white people, Hannity asked Nzinga, “Are you going to support this?”

Nzinga refused over and over again to answer the question, instead repeatedly referring to the “fact” that ONLY white people commit mass murder, and implying again and again, in line with Kamau’s thesis, that whtes are actively seeking to exterminate blacks.

Oh, really, Mr. Dumbass Nzinga? One answer would suffice to completely invalidate both Mr. Kambon’s and Mr. Nzinga’s argument that whites and whites alone aremass murderers (especially of blacks): Rwanda. That’s right, some of the most horrendous mass murder episodess of the last few decades weren’t even committed by Saddam Hussein’s regime, as bad as those were. It was black on black mass murder, both government sanctioned democide and “revolutionary” reprisals, in Rwanda.

But that’s not all, of course. Any reasonable, moderately literate person could do a quick search and turn up

“On April 6, 1994, Hutu extremists unleashed a genocide in which perhaps 800,000 people were murdered in one hundred days.”

And how many of those 800,000 or so black Rwandans were murdered by whites, Mr. Nzinga?

*crickets chirping*

I thought so. Your assertion that whites are “the only” (as I recall your rant) mass murderers, and especially of blacks, is simply false, and making assertions based on your wilfull ignorance (anyone with more working synapses than a head of cabbage has is unaware of black on black crime in this country, ongoing tribal atrocities in Africa, etc.) is nothing but sheer racist bigotry.

Now, go away or I shall taunt you a second time.

FbL sent out a link to Valour-IT, Milblogs Give Hundreds of Laptops to
Wounded Soldiers at the PBS Mediashift website, highlighting Valour-IT.

Mark Glaser opens his post with this:

As I sit here and type this blog post, I pause for a moment to consider how important my fingers and hands are to me as a blogger and writer. If I should be injured or lose the use of my hands in some awful accident, what would I do?

That hypothetical situation is very real for some American soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, where body armor helps protect them from getting killed from the blasts of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) ? but injuries to extremities are common. In the summer of 2005, when Army Captain Charles ?Chuck? Ziegenfuss, a military blogger, was severely injured by such an IED, he asked his blog audience to help him get voice-to-text software, Dragon Naturally Speaking, for his laptop.

Take a few moments to read and consider the story, which I now know began in August, 2005, the “brain child” of two people, who connected via the Internet, several thousand miles apart physically, yet of one mind, and each had the puzzle pieces to get the Valour-IT program started.

Here we are, 15 months later, at least $350K in the books and 650+ units in place, headed towards 850 in place by Christmas this year, and funding for more as a result of this year’s fund drive. Here’s some insight from Mark’s article:

Neither FbL or Ziegenfuss make any money themselves from the project, which has zero overhead and is completely volunteer-run , just like Soldier’s Angels, which offers all sorts of services for wounded soldiers. FbL, who prefers to keep her real name out of the spotlight and off her blogs, told me how amazed she was by the power of the blogosphere to organize for a cause and come together virtually.

Please, keep reading….. Continue reading “Valour-IT: PBS Takes Notice”

This in my inbox from eWeek:

Microsoft has issued a zero-day attack alert for its ubiquitous Word application. The unpatched flaw can be exploited when a user simply opens a maliciously rigged Word document,
and there are no pre-patch workarounds available, Microsoft
warns.

Why do I use OpenOffice, again? I mean, beside the fact that it’s FREE? Oh, yeh. More secure. Riiiight.

And though half of businesses unable to “upgrade” their computers to Windows Vista, maybe that’s not such a bad thing… since Microsoft’s “shrinkwrapped beta to the desktop” programs ALWAYS need patching the day they’re rolled out. *sigh*

Oh, and the Rio Grande is now somewhere North of Redmond?

Alla y’all who “refreshed” Internet Exploder 7 just before Thanksgiving to get the latest security patch discovered that Microsoft apparently thought we’d already changed the name of the country to “Los Estados Unidos de América,” cos the package for the U.S. English version tried convert a buncha folks’ IE7 to a Spanish language version. WTG, MessySoft. *sigh* It’s “fixed” now, though. Well, as fixed as Internet Exploder can be, I suppose. Look for more securrity patches monthly on that monster. (Meanwhile, Opera’s managed less than 2 security patches needed a year, for the past several years… and all of those were released within a day or so of the discovery of the need for them. Even Firefox development has been better than MessySoft there.)

Well, I suppose I could continue this lil poke in the eye, but MessySoft does that to itself enough to make any jabs I make in its direction superfluous.

Still, I do use Windows, though I am transitioning my personal use to different flavors of Linux (still have to use Windows for ONE application and for familiarity so I can rag on those who call on me to fix Windows-related issues. *heh*). “Different flavors of Linux”—*LOL* “Yum! Puppy!” Ymmier: Puppy on a stick! 🙂

With all the aches and pains users must experience upgrading or simply maintaining Microsoft’s products—especially in the last few years—Microsoft seems to be making its mission statement, “You only hurt the ones (whose money) you love.”

😉

See the report here, along with the video recorded by MSUnderestimated –see the citation of STACLU on the picture of the “Nativity” display. (WTG, lady! And WTG STACLU!)

13 Things I Love About Christmas

1. The smells: crisp wintry air, evergreens, baked goods.

2. The (non-musical) sounds: bells (ok, approaching musical), wrapping paper tearing… you can imagine a host of sounds with me.

3. Long lines at checkout (yeh, really: folks to play with; 🙂 “captive” audiences *heh*)

4. If I’m lucky, icy, snowy weather. The better to watch all the people who should have their cars taken away from them skid, slide and generally reveal their inability to walk and chew gum at the same time, urm, reveal also their inability to drive in any sub-optimal road conditions. Yeh, I like having my view of humanity validated that way… (What can I say? I am a curmudgeon, after all! :-))

5.) The music of Christmas. Unfortunately, there’s notalotta secular stuff (and hardly any popular contemporary or even popular traditional) that’s any good. But the carols and hymns can be awe-inspiringly beautiful. And who can imagine a Christmas season without at least one hearing of St. Olaf’s choirs singing “Beautiful Savior” a cappella? Well, I suppose any choir would do (though I also like a particular SSA arrangement. :-))

6.) The lights.

7.) The greetings of strangers smiling, “Merry Christmas!” or even the ocassional “Bah, humbug” curmudgeonly response (with the sheepish, almost secret smile lurking underneath).

8.) Heck, I’ve even been known to break my semi-rule of “Gatherings larger than five or six people are anathema” rule and attend a Christmas party *shudder* during this season.

9.) The presents. Not the getting of them. I have more stuff and junk than I need (actually, it’d be a gift to me for folks to take some-a my junk off my hands, if you know what I mean). The giving of them. Fun. But I’ll control myself. Too much fun can be deleterious to one’s financial health, my inner tightwad warns. 🙂

10.) The foods. More the cooking than the eating, now, since I find myself strangely unable to eat as much as once I could. No, I’ll not bake, but I will make different foods than usual for the holidays. Sometimes simple meals, sometimes a more complex menu. Sometimes, it’s just having everyone in the kitchen working at once that’s the wonderful part.

11.) The memories. Of family, children, extended family, friends.

12.) And remembering them, renewal or strengthening of contacts and bonds of love.

13.) The One whose birth we celebrate this time of year (even those who do so unaware).

Check out more TTs at the Thursday Thirteen Hub.

*ISG=Idiotic Silliness Gone (over the top) (pdf file)

Read it yourself. A group of “Run away! Run away!” Dems and “Neville Chamberlain” Reps have redefined “success” in Iraq as “The U.S. needs to be just like us: runaways and appeaseniks able to play well together.”

Huh?!?

Well, that’s what their report really boils down to.

But what can ya expect of a bunch like that? Not one of them has any more expertise on the dynamics–the hisotry, the culture, the social-geographical landscape of the region than I do. And from the text of their report (warning: PDF file), it appears they have less understanding of the region than I.

And I’ve never even set foot there.

Of course, their actual experience on the ground there is less useful than my non-physical visits, since they actually just touched base there in the very briefest of manners, just to add it to their puffed up creds (and to pad the expenses) for their report. Kind of a “touch and go” landing… And they didn’t even do a “touch and go” in the areas controlled by the Kurds, where they might have gotten a hint (if their ossified brains could grasp it) of what is going wrong in the two provinces of Iraq that are troublesome.

Nope. They apparently, from the evidence of the report, went into this with the idea of avoiding such “buzz words” as “victory” because… Well, I can’t figure any positive reason why they’d avoid looking for a road to victory, can you? And their idea of success is really just a way of defining success down to a level that is meaningless.

The only things I can find that they got even close to right are the delineations of mistakes made in the prosecution of the peace. And even there, I strongly disagree with their priority and even some of the list itself–nortably absences from the list and the failure to out the disasterous Bremmer. But their silliest remarks were reserved for analysis of the various “options” that they presented. For example, partitioning garnered this fatuous comment:

Continue reading “ISG* Speaks (Now, if they’d just shaddup already)”