Month: July 2005

She gave me permission to post her “Celtic horoscope” here

WW Is A Poplar Tree

People tend to look up to you, and it’s a bit lonely at the top. Inside, you are not always self confident, but you show great courage. Mature and organized, you are reliable in any situation. You tend to have an artistic or philosophical outlook on life. You are very choosy in love and take partnership seriously.

Pretty darned close. You can easily tell that I “married up” eh? 🙂

I have just been INFORMED that it is time to "Go pick up our reserved coppy of the new Harry Potter before it's that
last one"

So, we will go haring off to the "Big City" where we have a pre-purchased copy supposedly on reserve. Well-written on the micro-level, I nevertheless have found the Potter books to be little more than the same plot over and over. Changing clothes, the story remains the same. *Yawn* Nevertheless, I'll probably read the thing if for no other reason than to be fair to it.

Oh, and the others have been “well-written on the micro-level”-dialog, descriptive narrative, action scenes, etc. are all well within acceptable (or better) levels of writing to be interesting. The plots are just sooooo predictable.

But that's OK, and well within parameters for the genre: contemporary children's literature that includes such well-written (but boooorrrring plotwise after the first book) series as the Lemony Snickett books. Even the older children's series that were very well-written such as the various Edith Nesbit books depended on predictable, repeatable plotlines, so I don't really hold that "defect" against the Harry books.

Well, off we go!

Update: Back again. Since Wonder Woman’s reading Eragon right now, I have been selected as the “designated reader” of Halfblood Prince. So far, so good. A completely avoidable continuity problem (dialog continuity) in the first 10 pages, but a little more interesting than the last X number of HP retreads, so far.

Found at One Happy Dog Speaks, another blogthing quiz: the Celtic Horoscope

You Are A Chestnut Tree

You are a born diplomat with a well developed sense of justice. And even though you’re impressive and intimidating, you’re also fun to be around. You can be irritated easily, and you sometimes act superior. Nevertheless, you are sensitive of others feelings and very loyal. Sometimes you feel misunderstood and are fiercely close to those who know you best.

Gee. This thing’s better than the MMPI-3…

As best I can recall, this will make my first post anywhere about the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame kerfuffle.

After the 9/11 Commission roundly took Joe Wilson’s “version” of his mission and report—and the circumstances under which he performed his mission to Niger—to task, all he had left to whine about was his complaint that “someone” in the administration had “outed” his wife, whom he claimed was a covert CIA agent at the time, and thus broke the law against doing so simply by revealing her name… oh, and the fact that she had arranged for his Niger junket, not the Vice President, as Wilson had claimed.

Well, it turns out Wilson knew he was lying about his wife being a covert agent, too. From CNN’s “Wolf Blitzer Reports” July 14, 2005:

BLITZER: But the other argument that’s been made against you is that you’ve sought to capitalize on this extravaganza, having that photo shoot with your wife, who was a clandestine officer of the CIA, and that you’ve tried to enrich yourself writing this book and all of that.

What do you make of those accusations, which are serious accusations, as you know, that have been leveled against you?

WILSON: My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.

Of course, the law prohibiting revealing the identities of clandestine or covert agents does state that revealing a covert agent’s identity within five years of an overseas assignment is a crime. And guess what? USA Today finally got up to speed yesterday with what most people knew two years ago: Plame had been out of the field living and raising a family, working in the U.S. at Langely for six years by the time Bob Novak mentioned her in 2003.

In The Politics of Truth, former ambassador Joseph Wilson writes that he and his future wife both returned from overseas assignments in June 1997. Neither spouse, a reading of the book indicates, was again stationed overseas. They appear to have remained in Washington, D.C., where they married and became parents of twins.

Six years later, in July 2003, the name of the CIA officer — Valerie Plame — was revealed by columnist Robert Novak.

I mention this before even attempting to address the substance of Joseph Wilson’s charges against the administration (about its mention of Saddam Hussein’s reported attempts to obtain yellowcake in Africa) to point out the fact that quite apart from the 9/11 Commission’s gentlemanly labeling of Joseph Wilson as a liar (in typical political mush-speak), his harebrained charges against the administration—and flailing accusations against Karl Rove in particular—turn out to be based on circumstances that Wilson knew in advance disprove his assertions.

His character impeached by his own actions, there is simply nothing he can add to any discussion of policy, ethics or law concerning… anything.

Now, can we leave aside the breathless jabber about who knew what, when and from whom about a non-covert non-operative CIA employee and talk about the complete lack of moral fiber in the Mass Media Podpeople and their fellow travelers in the Moveon.org-dominated Democratic party, as well as the spineless, testosterone-deprived, gutless wonders in the Republican Party who don’t have the stones to tand up and call a liar a liar in plain speech?

Both the phony, non-liberal reactionaries on the left and the pseudo-conservative liberal wannabes on the right disgust me. Who was it who said that they believed in a two party system but that they wished we had two different parties to the ones we have? Whoever it was, I’m with him.

Posted also at: Balanced News

Update #1 Gee I wish I’d said that. Jerry Pournelle, commenting at his Chaos Manor in Perspective, Current View, said (in part):

“In my judgment the attention being given to Mr. Wilson, given the track record of his achievements in his CIA assignment, is a bit odd. Why should I care what a Kerry staffer recommends about Republican strategists? Is it unpredictable?”

Update #2: The AP is still lying about the whole thing by telling a partial truth:

“Federal law prohibits government officials from divulging the identity of an undercover intelligence officer. But in order to bring charges, prosecutors must prove the official knew the officer was covert and nonetheless knowingly outed his or her identity.”

Note the specific lapse: the time frame and description of what an “undercover operative” is that the law describes (and circumscribes). Keeping the description of the applicable law mushy, indistinct, serves to aid in keeping the story alive for the AP.

Leaving out significant chunks of pertinent information doesn’t speak well of the AP, now does it?

Or how about this? Also from an AP report (reproduced in the WAPO),

“Bush has said he would fire anyone found to have leaked Plame’s name.”

Now, that’s a bald-faced lie. What President Bush actually has said is this:

“There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. There’s leaks at the executive branch; there’s leaks in the legislative branch. There’s just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.” [emphasis added]

That differs significantly from “Bush has said he would fire anyone found to have leaked Plame’s name.” In point of fact, Bush has said no such thing. It’s a lie.

And that’s why I hate (and it’s not too strong a word) the Mass Media Podpeople, the moveon.org-dominated Democratic Party and the ball-less, spineless worms in the Republican Party: on the one side, any lie is permissible and on the other no lie is open to exposure. THE primary characteristic of evil is a culture of characteristic, habitual lies.

A pox on them all.

…over at One Happy Dog Speaks

It’s hot in Phoenix, so Christine features Apricot Peachtea Delight at Morning Coffee & Afternoon Tea. Sounds about right for sweltering days in America’s Third World Countyâ„¢ too.

Lotsa good chicken recipes this week (including my own Chicken and Dumplings). I know I’ll at least add the Bacon wrapped stuffed Chicken Virgil at the Redneck Gourmet came up with.

Tons more including some Eggs Benedict recipes and ALa’s Apple Streusel Muffins. Just go check ’em all out, would ya?

So sue me. 🙂 I was a tad busy when the Webb City R-7 School District caved in to pressure from the ACLU on June 24, 2005…ACLU Drops Censorship Suit, Webb City Allows T-shirts

[N.B. This is the first of a series I plan on the ACLU's assault on the brakes on barbarianism that form the bulwark encouraging civilized behavior. Yeh, it’s a multi-mixed metaphor. Have the ACLU sue me, OK?]

It’s yet another case of the barbarians inside the gates winning over civilized order. Is it really a censorship issue when rebellious teenagers are told what they can and cannot wear? Or is it yet another case of “Let the little barbarians say and do darned near anything they want”?

Poor babies: they wanted to wear t-shirts promoting a homosexual lifestyle. Can no one see that promoting sex period is simply not proper behavior in school? Homo- or heterosex. Neither are appropriate things for kids to wear promotional billboards for in school. Where are the adults? (Especially the parents—oh, that’s right, the parents are the ones breeding and raising the barbarians…)

Ah, but since it’s already OK, as far as society as a whole is concerned, for girls to dress like prostitutes in school and boys to dress like gangbangers, what’s a little promotion of sexual promiscuity, let alone sexual perversion? (Well, the ACLU thinks those are all positive values: after all, it promotes NAMBLA activities and pornography as supposedly Constitutionally protected behavior… )

And in fact, the ACLU is consistent here: while the First Amendment was specifically written (according to its authors) to protect religious speech and practice and political speech and press, the ACLU has been at the forefront of convincing judges and, with the conivance of the courts and the media, most of America, that the First Amendment also applies to burning flags, to displays of crucifixes in urine and to promotion of a homosexual lifestyle in public schools.

None of which can remotely be understood by any rational person as political or religious speech or press.

*sigh* Do we have to stupidly let them continue to rewrite the rulebook to suit themselves?

And the ACLU’s adding of the argument that the harassment of the Webb City R-7 School District was also based on the Fourteenth Amendment is beyond ridiculous. Here’s what Justice Black said in 1971 about a similar Fourteenth Amendment argument (concerning a case that was brought a few years after I graduated from Coronado High School where the “cause” of the case originated). The argument brought forward was that Due Process and/or Equal Protection (14^th Amendment)clauses were violated when the school refused to allow a student to attend class because he refused to comply with the dress code, specifically referencing hair length for male students:

“I refuse to hold for myself that the federal courts have constitutional power to interfere in this way with the public school system operated by the States. And I furthermore refuse to predict that our Court will hold they have such power. It is true that we have held that this Court does have power under the Fourteenth Amendment to bar state public schools from discriminating against Negro students on account of their race but we did so by virtue of a direct, positive command in the Fourteenth Amendment, which, like the other Civil War Amendments, was primarily designed to outlaw racial discrimination by the States.

There is no such direct, positive command about local school rules with reference to the length of hair state school students must have.And I cannot now predict this Court will hold that the more or less vague terms of either the Due Process or Equal Protection Clause have robbed the States of their traditionally recognized power to run their school systems in accordance with their own best judgment as to the appropriate length of hair for students.” _1_

It would seem to me that requiring haircuts would be more intrusive than clothing requirements, and so other courts have held over the years. _2_

Nevertheless, by threatening and actually filing costly lawsuits, the ACLU has been effective in quelling discipline in public schools, hampering the in loco parentis authority of teachers to the point that the inmates are pretty much running the sanitariums, now… (Well, between students who know that teachers have little or no authority and administrators with no balls-and even fewer brains to back up their eunuch state-it’s no wonder our public schools are in the toilet… but that’s another topic.)

Just ask the question the ACLU doesn’t want you to think about:

Is wearing suggestive clothing really a First Amendment right?

If so, does it apply to minors in a public school environment where the pubschool acts legally *in loco parentis*?

Only in the minds of the Loony Left Moonbat Brigade, the Mass Media Podpeople’s Army and their Felow Travelers and Useful Idiot Cohorts in the courts… Thanks to the Amerikan Communist "Liberation" Union and their ilk.

See also this post on ACLU vs. civilized dress codes in school at Stop the ACLU-Oklahoma

Crossposted from Stop the ACLU-Missouri

Found this over at Soliloquy… one writer’s thoughts

You are a Black Coffee

At your best, you are: low maintenance, friendly, and adaptable At your worst, you are: cheap and angsty You drink coffee when: you can get your hands on it. (Ain’t that the truth!) Your caffeine addiction level: high

Yeh, yeh, everybody does this from time to time...

I finally decided about an hour ago to look into this “RSS Feed” thingy. heh Yeh, yeh, I have a ton of feeds I subscribe to. After all, Opera makes it almost painless—just click on the lil RSS/Atom/XML tag in the address bar and I’m subscribed. But I’ve never pinged any of the places that (sorta) track RSS feeds or done anything to maintain or promote my feed, so…

…Read a coupla articles, pinged a couple servers, whatever. So, what happens next is in the hands of the server widgets (they’re kinda like brownies, only ya don’t have to put milk out for ’em).

Now, if only I could figure what’s making blogger change my fonts as I upload a post… I see the changes in the html made AFTER I upload, just can’t figure what’s doing it. The file stays the same on my computer, just changes somewhere between there and blogger… stranger and stranger…Still haven’t caught the culprit. Let’s see if editing the html directly using the blogger “crappy interface” works…

A Precision Guided Humor Assignment from The Alliance of Free Blogs: How can you tell if someone is a terrorist?

Now, admittedly, I’ve modified this a bit to exclude waning IRA terrorists and others by narrowing the assignment further to islamofascist murdering savage SOBs, but I think I may be forgiven for that. If not, what’s the Alliance going to do? Send a splodydope to America’s Third World Countyâ„¢? We’d welcome one or twelve. There are always stumps to clear from fields, you know, and some fish just won’t bite and need to be persuaded to “come to papa”—heh. The idea that an islamofascist murdering savage SOB terrorist could slip by the Third World Countyâ„¢ detection system is laughable.

The Third World Countyâ„¢ Profiler’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Detecting an Islamofascist Murdering Savage SOB Terrorist.

See a suspect? Maneuver to get the wind on ’em. (Scent’s your first clue apart from the fact that the guy looks like an Ay-rab.)

Step 1.) Does the goober smell worse than… well, Goober? If so, he’s either a Loony Left Moonbat or a islamofascist murdering savage SOB. Bag ‘im either way.

Step 2.) When you perform a “cranial echo test” (whack ‘im on the head with an axe handle) does a “thunk” or no sound at all procede from his pie hole? If a “thunk” then it’s a Loony Left Moonbat and good for catfish feed or for bait for wild boar. If no sound at all issues, then there’s nothing inside (sound doesn’t travel in a vaccuum, you know) and you have a splodydope. Remove any useful explosives and see uses for Loony Left Moonbat, above. If the critter attempts to bite the axe handle, it’s an osama and should be doused with gasoline and burned (after removing any useful explosives for later use fishing or blowing stumps).

Do bury any remains of an osama in pig manure and turn the compost frequently. Use this compost to kill kudzu.

Short shrift day

John Stossel notes the “open mindedness” *cough* of so-called “liberals” over at Townhall.com (and even hangs a John Stuart Mill quote around their necks. Heh).

Also at Townhall.com, Victor David Hanson pegs the liberals as reactionaries as only Victor David Hanson can.

And Ann Coulter, as vitriolic a polemicist as ever, nevertheless makes some clear legal arguments in layman’s language about the Rove/Plame kerfuffle.

Meanwhile, a contributor to Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor Current Mail page notes some interesting mortality rates… followed by an observation from Dr. Pournelle about National Guard mortality rates.

Discovery a No-Go. NASA: job security for government bureaucrats. Space exploration? Nu-uh! (We need more than Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites space efforts, folks, but NASA ain’t the answer… )

London bombers noted noted here and here and here, among many places.

And oh, wahhh! Poor baby! (Anyone find the world’s smallest violin? If so, break it into splinters before playing a sympathy tune for this loser.)

Pope Benedict XVI pulls a rabid rabbit outa his mitre with his complaint against Harry Potter. Will someone give the guy a wedgie? Cancel that. His knickers are already in a twist over nothing at all. Lighten up Bennie.

Joe Wilson, serial liar (see Ann Coulter article above for a few of Wilson’s lies), calls on Bush to fire Rove. *YAWN* And this just in: Sun rose in the east today and somewhere dog bites man.

And, in answer to Joe Wilson and his ilk, I’d like to point you to an essay by George J. Esseff, Sr that Alan Woody has posted at Woody’s News and Views. (Sorry this didn’t go in this post earlier, and thanks, Woody, for showcasing this essay! Prime cut.)

It’s a wild, wild, wild, wild world out there folks. Y’all be careful now, y’hear?