Category: Fun Stuff

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“Enstupiated” Americans

h.t. to Hugh, again (Man! Get yourself a blog! Tho, admittedly, I appreciate your tips, especially recently wile I’ve been a bit swamped 🙂

Fred Reed again, this time in almost perfect complement to John Stossel’s “Stupid” schools program on 20/20 last Friday:


“I’m going to start a rickshaw factory. It’s so our kids will have a way to make a living, now that America is pulling out of the First World. Maybe I’ll put an iPod socket on the poles or a little tiny television, made in Japan. That way our puzzled offspring won’t inadvertently start thinking. Tradition provides an anchor in the circumambient chaos.

See, what’s going to happen is, all the design work and programming are going to Mumbai, except the part that already has. Manufacturing is pretty much in China already, Mexicans do all the scutwork, and blacks work for the government or not at all, or both at once. That leaves whites as midlevel bureaucrats supervising each other. Thing is, whites are getting so they can’t read either, so they’ll need rickshaws to pull, in case the Chinese engineers want to go somewhere.

It’s over, I tell you. The United Steak has turned into a mess of pale-faced bushmen mumbling in pidgin English, the young anyway, with Orientals as missionaries trying to civilize us. Yes, friends and neighbors! Ain’t it exciting? All the professors in America of anything practical are already Chinese or Indian. Or getting that way fast.”

Read the rest. (Surely no regular reader of this blog is a part of the nearly 40% 60% of adult Americans who are subliterate… )

Reading America the riot act at Conservative Cat (get that sheepskin, Ferdy! 🙂 and TMH’s Bacon Bits.

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On Being Grateful for Teddy Kennedy

I am sooooo thankful for Ted Kennedy. Were it not for his assinine bloviations at the Alito sessions, this is the stupidest thing I would have seen all week…

(WARNING: I am NOT responsible for any gagging, retching, seizures or any other negative consequences of you viewing the stupidest audiovisual to be released this week. Or if you click the link and see the next-most stupid thing I’ve seen/heard this week, either.)

Assaulting the masses at Basil’s Blog.

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What’s for lunch?

Serving up…

Symantec:

Symantec Corp. has fessed up to using a rootkit-type feature in Norton SystemWorks that could provide the perfect hiding place for attackers to place malicious files on computers.

The anti-virus vendor acknowledged that it was deliberately hiding a directory from Windows APIs as a feature to stop customers from accidentally deleting files but, prompted by warnings from security experts, the company shipped a SystemWorks update to eliminate the risk.

Although I used to use Symantec security software quite extensively, I’ve disliked Symantec security programs for several years now. Part of that is due to the fact that almost ALL of the systems I get calls on to resurrect from malware attacks are “protected” by Norton/Symantec security products. YMMV.

Update your AV products. Oh, and if you use the Microsoft Anti-spyware “beta” do note that you need to jump through the validation hoops again for another six months’ license.

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Not a petty annoyance

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Found via The English Guy,

“Create an e-annoyance, go to jail”

Yep. Anonymous, otherwise unaccountable trolls may face federal jail time and fines. But, really, who needs the feds in the middle of this? After all, kicking trolls can be fun (if sometimes boring). And cyberstalking–which the law referenced is aimed at–is more than just being annoying… but the law singles out “annoying” behavior as a federal crime, now, punushable by fines and jail time. To be sure, it also strengthens actual anti-stalking provisions, but even there, is that really a federal issue?

Oh, well. It’s law now. *sigh* Might as well start using it as a club for playing Troll Golf.

FORE!

Semi-anonymously graffiti-sprayed at Basil’s and The Conservative Cat.

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Off-the-wall/0PEN P0ST

Every now and then, offbeat questions come to my mind (I know, I know–some of y’all already think that’s the only kind I ever entertain). Like, how many people can recognize their own neighborhood in aerial photos? I’d suspect a few more than can read a map accurately, but absent some academia nut somewhere weaseling some of YOUR money (and mine) from a spendthrift government, I don’t imagine we’ll have a fair ballpark guess on that any time soon.

Mystery01-b

0PEN P0ST for Monday—a few hours early. Link here and trackback. If you don’t know what to do, drop me a line or a comment and I’ll try to help you out. Note: for those of y’all still stuck on using the antiquated Internet Exploder, The World’s Crappiest Browser (hey, I understand: some folks are so conservative as to be positively reactionary in some areas. I have some of those areas, myself. :-), I understand scolling down to where IE has chopped up posts cos it can’t read the CSS specifying the cneter column size can be a pain. So, here’s the Trackback URI (right-click and copy, unless you have one of those even quainter one-button Mac mice, then it’s “Splat/options key+Click”–maybe, depending on your browser and how you hold your mout—heh). Or just copy and paste this: http://haloscan.com/tb/mnmus/113677098423922307 . The URL for the post itself is: http://thirdworldcounty.blogspot.com/2006/01/off-wall0pen-p0st.html

Can’t find the blogosphere with Mapquest, but Conservative Cat (who also has a—serious—DIRE WARNING from Ferdy about an email virus) can probably give you directions to current hotspots.

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An Answer to Murtha “Dhimmi-crats”

Michelle Malkin made the following video available for download. She also includes this snippet, as well as a link to the full transcript of the Murtha/Moran townhall meeting designed to elicit anti-war (really, anti-Bush and anti-victory) thetoric last week.

“… I think it’s a disgrace when members of our Congress –just as they did in 1975 when they sold out the south Vietnamese–are selling out our soldiers today in Iraq!”

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And just in case you missed it, in an earlier post, Michelle Malkin also provided the following clip of Sgt. Mark Seavey speaking to Murtha and Moran. (She has more from Sgt. Mark Seavey at her blog, linked above.)

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Warp Speed! (0pen Post)

Open Trackback Alliance

(Yeh, this is Friday’s Open Trackback Alliance post, slapped up Thursday night.)

Is interstellar travel on the horizon?

Maybe. And if so, it may be at “warp speed”.

The Department of Energy and the Air Force are funding research into a magnetic bottle/gravitational field drive that would in effect be the “hyperspace drive” of science fiction. But unlike most of the science fiction “hyperspace” drives, this one’s envisioned as being usable within the solar system, as well.

Man. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to vacation on Mars?

Yeh, yeh: I know they’re still working on building the tools to make the test beds to test the theory. But at least it’s a Step Farther Out.

h.t. Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor

Oh, also: Open Post. If you don’t know how to link to this post and trackback, drop me a note in comments.

Open Trackback Alliance

Dilithium crystals excited at Bloggin’ Outloud (where PUNishment is meted out unmercifully) and Stuck on Stupid (dig the new, uh… digs).

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“If you k new Wiki like I know Wiki…”

“Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems”

You may have noticed that I sometimes link to Wikipedia articles. What you will not have noticed is that I only link to those Wikis that I have first read and verified to contain at least some accurate and useful material, and always the material that’s germane to the reason I link them. I’ve felt that in context, that usually works.

But along the way, I have read a LOT of Wikipedia articles that are pure balderdash.

Click the link above to read a very brief article on the weaknesses of Wikipedia, and an admission of one of its founding lights.

Be careful out there. While a Wikipedia article may have useful information, there is usually more reliable information to be found elsewhere. And there is always more complete info to be found outside either a Wikipedia article or the more traditional dead tree encyclopedia. More information is a Very Good Thing when attempting to resolve conflicting views on any topic. Dig in. letting yourself be spoonfed info is a poor way to develop a world view.

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ACLU: Shooting themselves in the foot

Stopping by to check my mail, I found this, and try as I might to NOT comment, well, if you know me by now, you know I had to at least touch on it anyway…

ACLU’s Full Page Propaganda In NY Times Part II

My take? Investigate away!

By carefully and wittingly conflating classes of behaviors in some cases and making false distinctions in others, the ACLU and its ilk seek to tar this president with the “spying on Americans” brush.

it won’t fly with most Americans. While many American’s brushed away the Clintoon perjury with “It’s just about sex,” it’s more difficult to brush this issue away with “It’s just about life and death–maybe mine!”

While the Clintoonistas get a bye for more serious and flagrant beavior spying DIRECTLY on Americans for economic and political reasons, quite outside the parameters of any legal authority, Bush is excoriated for exercising his Constitutional responsibilities by intercepting and surveilling communications with foreign agents KNOWN to be enemies of the U.S.

That’s not “spying on Americans”. It’s spying on terrorists’ communications, whomever they may be.

And that legitimately scares the bejazus outa the ACLU, especially since it has regularly engaged in active support of terrorists and may well be in a few terrorists’ rollodexes…

Note: what follows is a WAG (Wild-Assed Guess), pure speculation.

Frankly, I wonder (note again: COMPLETE SPECULATION in absence of any facts to date) if the ACLU’s lawyers aren’t worried that some of THEIR treasonous contacts (again, speculation) with terrorists may not have been monitored.

As I plainly said, I have NO WAY of knowing if this speculation has ANY basis in fact, but you know what they say about a stuck pig…

END WAG.

Now, a reasonable person might reasonably infer that the ACLU has lost its collective mind and has entered totally into the reality-based fantasyland inhabited by the denizens of Demoncrappic Underpants and the like And that such behavior will not endear it to millions of Americans who want the Islamofascist S.O.B.s who are intent on killing Americans dead, dead, dead.

It might also be reasonable to think that the ACLU may well fall prey to the Law of Unintended Consequences in ways it least expects…

I’m just waiting for the ACLU to shoot itself in the foot often enough that institutional gangrene sets in. Let’s see, by its actions, the ACLU has already said, “We want pedophiles free to promote having sex with your sons,” “We want you religious people to STFU!” and now, “We want to use the legal system to assure that terrorists bastards are free to make their plans to kill you.”

Expanded from a comment at STACLU.

[Edited a couple of the typos. Not going to look for the rest, though I’m sure they’re there.]