[yeh, fixed the typo in the title]
Check Michelle Malkin for the latest on this mess. Whoo-hoo! “Air America” losers, liars and lame-os, oh my!
Idiots! Dolts! Speech-impaired Piscines*!
(*Dumb Basses)
Who am I talking about? See this story (yeh, it’s all over the place).
Worm strikes down Windows 2000 systemsWASHINGTON (CNN) — A fast-moving computer worm Tuesday attacked computer systems using Microsoft operating systems, shutting down computers in the United States, Germany and Asia.Among those hit were offices on Capitol Hill, which is in the midst of August recess, and media organizations, including CNN, ABC and The New York Times. The Caterpillar Co. in Peoria, Illinois, reportedly also had problems…
Idiots. Dolts. Doofuses, one and all. I mean, what’s so hard about hitting “patch Tuesday”? The vulnerability this worm depends on was patched by all non-brain-dead Win2K users before this thing was ever seen “in the wild.” CNN, ABC, NYT and “offices on Capitol Hill” are to be expected to have idiots for IT guys, though. But Caterpillar? Gee, how can they stay in business if their IT department’s that incompetent?
Anyone in IT who, after years and years of “shrink-wrap betaware” from Microsoft and almost weekly discoveries of vulnerabilities in their products, does NOT take every opportunity to review and patch the MS products their company uses should be fired. With “extreme prejudice”. Removed from the gene pool as too stupid to reproduce.
Dumb. Simply too dumb to be allowed to pollute the gene pool…
A small number of computers in an administrative office at San Francisco International Airport also crashed, but they were not essential to the airport’s operation, spokesman Mike McCarron said._*_
“Crashed”—not a word you’d want to hear associated with ANY airport’s systems, is it?
Impact!
Expand your brain. Check out this info on meteor imacts over at Chaos Manor
Tell the Copyright Office to take a hike
But do be a tad more polite about it…
Rich, over at The English Guy, cites a Nikolaos S. Karastathis (NSK Blog) post about the plan the Copyright Office has to implement a copyright pre-registration site that will ONLY work with Internet Exploder.
Nikolaos links to the specific notification by the Copyright Office and suggests writing a letter (the Copyright Office won’t accept emails on this). Below is the letter I’m sending. They require five copies to be sent. May I humbly suggest sending eight? Five to the Copyright office and CCs to your congresscritters (representative and senators)? Oh, and do note the CCs on the copies sent to the Copyright Office…
🙂
Oh, and spread the word, eh? Locking a fedgov website down for ONE company’s product smacks of something a tad fishy. Maybe the Justice Department should look into the monopoly aspects. *LOL*
Office of the General Counsel
U.S. Copyright Office
Copyright GC/ I&R
P.O. Box 70400
Southwest Station
Washington, DC 20024-0400
Dear Reader:
At this Web address: http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2005/70fr44878.html I just read that the Copyright Office is planning to implement copyright preregistration via the web ONLY for those using Internet Explorer web browser.
Are you sure that’s wise? Internet Explorer is the least standards-compliant major web browser. It is also historically the least secure—in fact, Homeland Security has recommended people switch!— most “attacked†by malicious users and is available for use ONLY by Windows users. In fact,
“… market dominance is not the only reason for the Microsoft browser’s disproportionate share of attacks. Art Manion, Internet security analyst for US-CERT, the operational arm of the National Cyber Security Division at the Department of Homeland Security, says IE’s unique features increase its online vulnerability.†[PC World Magazine online, “Is It Time to Ditch IE?†October 2004)
Anyone who is competent can build a secure website that does not require the use of proprietary, non-standards-compliant software such as Internet Explorer. Standards-compliant (W3C-compliant) browsers abound, and standards-compliant websites can be read and interacted with by users of all popular web browsers, including Internet Explorer.
I urge you to maintain openess at the Copyright Office and eschew the use of unsafe, proprietary, non-standards-compliant software such as Internet Explorer as your benchmark.
Sincerely
Conspiracy of dunces, part X
Slip-slidin’ into my point. Just hold on…
I ran across the following statement in the comments section of another blog. I’m excerpting it here and removing it from the context of the discussion there for illustrative purposes only.
“Conservative blogs may counter the liberal MSM propaganda machine with facts and reason, but all you’re doing is preaching to the quire [sic].”
Now, this is more than just irritating; it’s an example of a lack of literacy. That’s “choir” not “quire”. quire: “24 uniform sheets of paper; a section of printed leaves in proper sequence after folding; gathering.” “Preaching to the choir” is the equivalent of attempting to convert those who are among the most faithful, the choir, in a church.
It could help “counter the liberal MSM propaganda machine” if the facts and reason presented are literate. Of course, in a society where reading is mostly limited to a different “echo chamber” filled with semi- and sub-literates produced by prisons for kids (AKA “public schools”), a characterization that sometimes fits the blogosphere as easily as it does the “MSM,” literate argumentation may well not be enough.
Now, is the material presented in what the writer above calls the MSM any more literate? No. The self-appointed media elite are almost uniformly subliterate manufactured morons who are unmoored from the history, literature and culture of 2,000+ years of Western Civilization. I say “manufactured morons,” because most of them have some basic native intelligence but are crippled by stupid schooling and a dishonest viewpoint that refuses to address its own preconceptual biases.
Here’s a simple set of filters to apply to any argument:
1.) Is it linguistically sub-literate?
2.) Does it rely on fallacies of reasoning?
3.) Does it ignore or twist history?
4.) Does it ignore or twist contemporary facts?
If any of the above applies, simply pass on by. There is simply too much informed and reasonable argumentation available to waste time arguing with people who refuse to reason. And people who refuse to spend the time and effort to learn how to argue honestly will waste your time daily if you let them.
(Interestingly, “quire” was once also spelled “choir” but “choir”—”a company of singers, esp. an organized group employed in church service”— in the sense of the phrase where “quire” is misused above has never been spelled “quire”.)
Nitpicking? Perhaps, but it illustrates a common problem: people with seriously hampered cultural referents and no desire to reason or argue their case from fact using fair and sensible rhetoric.*
Jeff Goldstein, speaking about the Cindy Sheehan circus, makes much the same point:
“…I long ago realized that these folks have traded in honest evaluation for an ends-justifies-the-means political worldview—one in which emotional talismans like Cindy Sheehan are used (in this case, voluntarily and actively) in lieu of argument to ward off the evils of Bush’s America.”
When scoundrels use dishonest means to affect those whose crippled mental and moral capacities are unable to see through—or seeing through, unable or unwilling to reject—their dishonesty to achieve their ends, what does this say of their ends? (Yes, I am speaking of politicians darned near universally, Mass Media Podpeople, Loony Left Moonbats and their cohorts in crime among such as the ACLU.)
*rhetoric: here used as “the art of making persuasive speeches; oratory; the art of influencing the thought and conduct of an audience.” It’s sad that the art of well-reasoned persuasive speech and writing is no longer thought of as rhetoric, since so many have come to use it to refer to the opposite, instead: overly-emotional bombast. *sigh* Indeed, that now seems to be the preferred definitions in some dictionaries, unlike the two-volume set I grew up with (and still have), in which persuasive, reasoned discourse was the preferred definition. Pejoration of terminology has, in this case at least, followed a pejoration of thought and practice.
(pejoration: depreciation; a lessening in worth, quality; semantic change in a word to a lower, less approved, or less respectable meaning)
Another one of those quiz thingies
I found this at Soliloquy… one writer’s thoughts. Hmmm… Nancy and I both tested the same on this lil quiz.
You’re Most Like The Season Winter…You’re often depicted as the cold, distant season. But you’re incredibly intelligent, mature and Independant. You have an air of power around you—and that can sometimes scare people off. You’re complex, and get hurt easily—so you rarely let people in if you can help it. You can be somewhat of a loner, but just as easily you could be the leader of many. You Tend to be negative, and hard to relate to, but you give off a relaxed image despite being insecure—and secretly many people long to be like you, not knowing how deep the Winter season really is.Well done… You’re the most inspirational of seasons 🙂
?? Which Season Are You ??
brought to you by Quizilla
Interesting. Oh, yeh, I did sub in a different winter pic for the one the lil quiz thingie had. Pop on over to Nancy’s and I think you can see why. Not me at all, at all.
🙂
Where’s the Beef
Check my sidebar: has John F. Kerry really released his records, yet? I didn’t think so…
Same story, umpteenth verse. Ya hoped it’d get better, but it only got worse.
Are we living in a Loony Tunes world or what? I feel like Pete Puma in “Rabbit’s Kin“. Ya know the schtick: “three or four lumps of sugar?”—”Nah, sugar gives me a headache.” Jean Fraud sKerry’s promised this and promised that and always fails to do as promised—usually by parsing plain English in so tortured a way as to “unpromise” what he’s said he’ll do.
I feel like Pete Puma. Jean Fraud sKerry’s saccharine sourpus gives me a headache. “No! No! I don’t wanna drink the KoolAid!!!”
*sigh*
Just give it up, John. Accept the fact that the legend that you are in your own mind is the legend of a loser. Just let those records go.
See Cao’s Blog for more, including this statement by Cao:
“Some of us still expect our elected officials and representatives to behave like civilized people with a moral compass. In other words, I still expect people to look at me and tell me something that’s the truth and not a lie. Do we as a nation have that strong of a deficit of decency that we’re becoming a nation of liars and it’s acceptable to lie?”
A serious question indeed.
Consider joining these bloggers in the Free Kerry’s 180 Blogburst. See Cao’s Blog for joining in.
Aaron’s cc
And Rightly So!
Atlas Shrugs
Balance Sheet
Cao’s Blog
Cathouse Chat
Christmas Ghost
Civil Issues
Conservative Friends
doubleplusgood infotainment
Doughnut Holes
Euphoric Reality
Flight Pundit
Fundamentally Right
Furry Press
GM’s Corner
Gribbit’s Word
House Of Wheels
i-imagery.com
Infinite Universe
International House of Conservatism
Jackson’s Junction
Jay Howard Smith
Kender’s Musings
Lifetrek
Moonbattery.com
My Vast Rightwing Conspiracy
NIF
PBSWatcher
Pirate’s Cove
Pooklekufr: The Kafir Constitutionalist
Power and Control
Private Radio
Progressive Conservatism
Ravings Of A Mad Tech
Reasoned Audacity
Republican Vet
Right in Philly
Rottweiler Puppy
Shades of Gray
Something…and Half of Something
Stop the ACLU
Tall Glass of Milk
The Babaganoosh
The Creative Conservative
The Dark Citadel
The Paragraph Farmer
The Pulpit Pounder
The Sunnyeside Of Life
Think About It
third world county
TMH’s Bacon Bits
Uncle Jack
Villainous Company
Web-Nuts
What Attitude Problem?
Where’s Your Brain?
Word Park Blog
Quick (Blog) Flog
Here’s a blog you oughta take a look at: Committees of Correspondence
Well-written, some clear thinking: a good read. Oh, and jump on the bandwagon he’s touting to boost Winds of Change‘s linkage above that of the Huff—ing.ton Pist, eh? (Yeh, I deliberately misspelled it to lessen the chances of a web crawler giving any boostage to the site.) And if you like what you read there, definitely blogroll him, ‘K?
BTW, as often as I’ve mentioned we may need a 21st Century “Tea Party” his blog’s title gave me a real belly laugh. Up the Revolution, man!
🙂
[edited 08/16/05]
Short Shrift Day
Day eaten by locusts. Check these out:
Bou’s Carnival of Kids entry. Boys. Believe it.
Cao links to a post at Iraq the Model answering Cindy Sheehan. Powerful. I’ve kept my finders from typing anything about this tarbaby… GM Roper has a solid piece on the Sheehan brouhaha, too, as does the Progressive Conservative at Balanced News Blog.
R’Cat’s piece on a passage from Philippians could offer most preachers I know a lesson in sermon-writing.
Diane has a post about a doper mom. read it and comment.
For a change of pace, how about You’ve Got Mail?
The English Guy learned something new today. 🙂
NIF rounds up the usual suspects.
Oh, and more dog-bites-man yawners from Howard Dean. Will someone please check his meds? I mean, when wacko pronouncements like “women will be worse off in Iraq than under Saddam” are just more predictable wackiness, someone needs to up his LSD dosage.
There’s a lot more out there, of course. I just don’t have the time to deal with it today.
Later.
Plus ça change…
…plus cest la même chose.
Ya think? I frequently bemoan the way that public “schools” (also known in my circle as “prisons for kids”) are churning out an increasingly stupid product. But it’s been going on for a long, long time. I don’t have the source material behind this quote from an article by Jonah Goldberg, but I’m sure he does:
“…Just this month, the ABA (hint: the lawyer thing, not the bunch with the red, white and blue basketball), released a poll that found that 22 percent of Americans think the three branches of government are Republican, Democrat and Independent. In 1991 another ABA survey found that one-third of Americans didn’t know what the Bill of Rights is. In 1987, 45 percent of Americans thought Karl Marx’s dictum “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs” was in the U.S. Constitution. In 1964 (!) only 38 percent of the American people knew the Soviet Union wasn’t in NATO.”
Yeh, and besides being blissfully unaware of critical facts about their own government or world affairs, “the people” are the expression of democracy’s wisdom at the polls.
One reason the Founders and Framers sought to limit the franchise was simply to eliminate as much of the “stupid vote” as possible. But pols today, of course, seem to want a stupid electorate. In fact, it’s their primary protection against removal from power.