"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."
WARNING: This may be too geeky and “inside baseball” about connectivity for some. If so, move along. These are not the ‘droids you are seeking. The geeky voices in my head are just all jabbering too loudly for me to ignore them completely.
Continue reading “ISP Meddlers, Bumblers and Cretins, Oh My!”
This is a drive-by post, cos today’s scheduled up.
Breakfast today: toaster oven pizza served up on a “paper plate” quickly manufactured with 9 staples and the box the pizza-like “food” came in. Could have done w/o the staples, but at least this way it was sturdy. and eminently tossable.
Well, at least it was semi-tasty and filling. And fast.
Joe Sobran:
I’ve never understood… why Darwinians are so militant about spreading their faith — wanting it taught to children in public schools, for example, with competing theories banned. Isn’t this the one idea, of all ideas, that ought to be able to take care of itself, without official support and coercion?
Hmmm, Darwinianism is anti-darwinian: can’t survive competition? Apparently that’s what contemporary Darwinians believe. Strange, that.
“Let [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter.” –Milton, “Areopagitica,” 1644
Or, as that 19th century proponent of Classical Liberalism, John Stuart Mill put it in his famous essay, On Liberty,
“[T]he peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
So, why then do Darwinians get their panties in a twist about Intelligent Design (not to be confused or conflated with so-called “Creation Science”–as both disingenuous Darwinians and disingenuous Fundamnmentalists are wont to do–and no, I did not misspell “Fun-damn-mentalists”)? If it’s the bunkum Darwinians say it is, then a lively debate on the merits of both Darwinianism and Intelligent Design would be good for classrooms, since, IF the arguments of Darwinianism hold water, then ID shouldn’t have a chance in a fair fight.
But, as the Sobran quote illustrates, apparently Darwinians’ faith in their theory is not really all that strong…
Just an obseervation: much more often than not, when one voice in an argument seeks to exclude another voice from arguing at all, the one seeking to censor speech often has a weak argument. See: The Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming or the Obama White Cafe-au-lait (Grande, with a twist!) House.
As for me, I’ve always found such hand-waving and shouting down of opponents to be an incentive to dig into their opponents’ arguments to learn WHY such unfair or disingenuous actions are being taken against them.
And as form Darwinianism, that chief exponent of survival of the fittest, “Isn’t this the one idea, of all ideas, that ought to be able to take care of itself, without official support and coercion?”
Hmm, must have a weak argument.
BTW, for some of the “weak links” in Darwinian arguments, see chapter three in “Kicking the Sacred Cow” by James Hogan.
Now that The 0! is hitting roadblock after roadblock in enacting his agenda to remake America as a third world banana republic–heck, even Repugnican’t congresscritters are taking a hint from a million+ Tea Party protestors and looking at conservatism as a viable option for the first time!–his White Café-au-Lait (grande, decaf-with-a-twist!) House theme song is probably
And it seems like that’s a common statement after the fact whenever someone engages in some form of jackassery.
[Toyota Spokesman Chad] Harp said Toyota cannot discuss the legal aspects of the case, but marketing agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi are always thinking of new and innovative ways to attract consumers for clients like Toyota.
Well, it didn’t work very well in this case.
Lawsuit Claims Woman Believed She Was Being Stalked Thanks to Toyota’s Marketing Prank
Oct. 9, 2009—
A Los Angeles woman is suing Toyota for $10 million over a marketing campaign that she claims “punked” her into incorrectly believing she was being stalked.
The bright idea of the advertising campaign was to “punk” people into believing exactly what this woman came to believe. Looks to me as though she has a good argument. Kinda stupid to fall for it, but then it was aimed at stupid people, apparently.
Methinks the consumate slippery, lying pol is a tool turning in the hand of The 0! Better watch out 0! You lose your grip on this tool and Crazy Uncle Joe just might wound you…
Biden says Obama had to sell him on the vice president job
He says he initially rejected the offer flat-out. That tale is at odds with the account he gave earlier.
Step down from America’s Third World County into the land of our 42nd president:
Of course, the lovely lil village of Weiner (feel free to revert to junior high humor and snicker to your juvenile heart’s content) is several steps up from the sewers that bred our 44th “president” (who, strangely, is still running for office… ).
h.t. to JS for pointing this out to me.
*heh* The LA FBI office is going to come under some scrutiny from its D.C. masters, and if the caller in the video below is representing a factual response from that office, heads will almost certainly roll…
‘S’all right, though. Probably 90% of the laws the FBI is involved in “enfarcing” nowadays have no real constitutional justification. (I have no actual figures, but it’s a fair shirt cuff guesstimate given what the congress and federal bureaucrappy have been up to for at least half a century.)
Gotta love my Wonder Woman. Relating a news event (no, real news) that someone in our neighborhood had been shot, she correctly used “contretemps” in her dialog (yes, I was her interlocutor; I had a few questions as the news unfolded).
Well, as it turns out, the news was one of those good news/bad news situations. The guy who was shot had kicked in a door and entered a home uninvited. He was shot by a guy who lived there. So far, good news. The bad news? The guy who nailed the attacker is being charged for his possession of the gun. Yeh, he’d been convicted of a felony in the past, and so under the laws of our state was denied a firearm as a means of self-defense.
Absent any clear information on what sort of “felony” he was once convicted of, and given the growing prevalence of criminalizing behaviors that were once simply the domain of free men, I have to tentatively label his arrest for unlawful possession of a firearm “bad news”.
Oh, and how I missed the huhurah? *pshaw* I hear gunfire all the time. Guys tooling up for deer season and whatever. (We do live w/in a couple hundred feet of “city” limits and there’s no county ordinance against the discharge of firearms on ones own property–as is rightly so.) We also live just a few short blocks from the county ambulance service (it’s based at the one 24-hour emergency clinic–a new thing–in the county), so I’ve also come to pretty much ignore sirens. And the local LEOs rarely use their horns, so I’d probably not have even heard them arrive. Heck, once, when I made a report of a disturbance next door to me (during the gladly brief years of “the bad neighbors”), six county mounties showed up with nary a peep between ’em.
So, good news/bad news that I might not have heard about for a couple more days were it not for my literate and very well “plugged in” Wonder Woman cluing me in.
Oh, and on top of the news, I got to hear a word I rarely hear in conversation, used appropriately–and pronounced correctly to boot. Gotta love her.
…when it is not dreaming of electric sheep, the Mitt Romney android is getting some decent programming:
“I’ll bet you never dreamed you’d look back at Jimmy Carter as the good old days.”–Mitt Romney