Day: January 26, 2006

Want to know how to win the war on Islamic jihadist butchers? Jerry Pournelle points out some strategic steps we NEED to take in order to win this thing the smart way… Not the whole answer, but absent what he advocates, the task will be much higher in blood and treasure, as well as a lot less sure.

The Iraqi War continues, but we don’t do anything about the underlying causes of the war, which is our dependence on the Middle East for vital resources. If we were independent of Middle Eastern Oil, the Arab world would have to develop a real economy, learn to make things and sell them, and in general live with the rest of the world, instead of supporting people with too much time and too much money. They might actually learn to extract the oil themselves, which would require that they develop some actual capabilities other than bomb making and persuading young people to blow themselves up and kill policemen, or sit on the floor learning the Koran, or turning out Wahhabi preachers.

Read the whole thing, would you? OK, another teaser from Dr. Pournelle’s post:

I said back in A Step Farther Out that there were three great examples of the futility of vast centralized bureaucracies: the Soviet system of agriculture, the American System of Education, and NASA. One of those has crumbled, and while the Ukraine has not returned to its pre-Stalin status as the breadbasket of Europe, production is higher than under Communism. There is no longer one big central Soviet system of agriculture. In America, though, the education establishment, and NASA/Aerospace Industry are even more centralized and accomplish even less than when I first wrote all that.

Setting up the chess board at TMH’s Bacon Bits

Just read The Real Ugly American’s post, Commie Radio Comes Crashing Down! Yeh, it’s about a radio station, but really about so very much more. As I read it, I saw the obvious parallells even before Rick drew the straight black lines connecting the dots…

eWeek carries the warning today about “Blackworm”—

The worm, which uses the lure of sexually explicit Kama Sutra photographs to trick e-mail users into executing an attachment, is programmed to deliver the destructive payload on the third day of every month…

…At 5:00 p.m. on Jan 24, more than 700,000 computers had already been infected by the worm, according to a stats counter used by the worm author.

Keep your anti-virus software updated.
Do NOT open unexpected email attachments.
Do NOT open attachments that you have not MANUALLY scanned with an up-to-date antivirus software.
Nuh-uh. Don’tcha do it.

Let me try that again:

Keep your anti-virus software updated.
Do NOT open unexpected email attachments.
Do NOT open attachments that you have not MANUALLY scanned with an up-to-date antivirus software.
Nuh-uh. Don’tcha do it.

Please believe me: “What I say three times is true.”

Keep your anti-virus software updated.
Do NOT open unexpected email attachments.
Do NOT open attachments that you have not MANUALLY scanned with an up-to-date antivirus software.
Nuh-uh. Don’tcha do it.

And last, but not least,

“…the [“blackworm’s”] payload is capable of completely destroying important documents on an infected machine…” so don’t come crying to me if you infect yourself.

Nanny-nanny-boo-booed at Customerservant.com and Quietly Making Noise

I never even imagined imagining an embouchure like this guy demonstrates!

(But I’d not want to be the one to clean his trumpets… )

h.t. to DNW for the link to this amazing display (again, via email).

blown at Conservative Cat

Actually, the “System Administrator Song” is… priceless.

(No, really: priceless. View/listen for free! *heh*)

h.t. to DNW for the link (via email)

Sung out at Basil’s Picnic.

Carol Platt Liebau, in a brief post, A Plank in the Eye, on Hillary being portrayed as someone leading “… the charge against corruption and incompetence in government…” invokes an analogy you simply must not miss.

Yeh. It’s a day later and it still makes me grin.

WTG, Carol!

While you’re there, read some of her other posts. You’ll find her pithy commentary addictive.

OK, so operating on my Tightwad Modus Operandus, I’m giving WordPress a shot at the relatively new WordPress.com freebie site.

It’s not bad, but the freebie site so far doesn’t let me upload my own template, has a very, very cumbersome means of adding links (hence no real blogroll as yet), doesn’t let me directly edit my template, has the same 9or similar) clunky text/quasi, sorta, half-assed WYSIWYG editor as another WordPress site I’ve been given guest posting priviledges on (almost identical to the Typepad web interface–*blech*), and I don’t have a plugin or separate app for posting to the site that’ll be better, as far as I know.

It’s workable, and the new importer feature did seem to import all my TWC blogposts and Blogger comments (though it couldn’t import something like 1,600+ haloscan comments and even more tbs). Ahh, how much work could it be to export alla those from Haloscan, upload ’em to a separate page in the WordPress blog and then link alla those comments/trackbacks back to their respective posts?

Not much at all at all, huh?

*heh*

Not gonna do it. Nuh-uh.

Oh. Well. It’s HERE for whenever Blogger locks me outa posting again. Yeh, yeh, I know I’m muddying the water having another blog with the same name. So? Confusion to all!

😉

This guy almost had me. First paragraph I saw on his blog:

If you have i.e you will have noticed the formatting problems, i`ve been trying to sort this but no success so far (if you can figure out the problem all advice welcome Calvin dot Jones at gmail dot com). Alternatively to get away from this problem, get yourself a decent browser like Firefox or Opera!

OK, so he has a healthy view of Internet Exploder (and an interesting disregard for capitalization :-). *heh* But then I read his other posts and saw he was hawking the same old envirocultist dogma about impending doom from a new ice age (’70s enviro-cultist)/global warming (90s enviro-cultist) in the new cant of “climate change.”

How hard is it for these folks to actually look at just the historical record and see that, even through the course of recorded history, the rule for climate has been change—in more extreme amounts than we currently know. Seems this guy, among others, wants to play the part of King Canute instead of actually seeking to understand the underlying causes of climate change (the only constant about climate).

“Nope. Having none of that, thank you,” says the enviro-cultist. “Just give me my pet theories, ‘backed up’ by computer models that cannot ‘post-dict’ previous known data. Using these fake data, we can beat up developed countries in our real goal: the total annihilation of Western Civilization.”

Or so it seems to this observer who simply looks for the unstated consequences of enviro-cultists’ desired outcomes.

Does man contribute to climate change (remember: as recently as last year the buzzword phrase was “global warming” from these enviro-cultist bet-hedgers)? Maybe, even probably. To what degree and in what ways?

No one knows. Seriously. Enviro-cultist arguments are all smoke, mirrors and computer models that cannot take 1900 data and “predict” 1950 climate.

Until we know how and how much mankind affects climate, taking actions prescribed by enviro-cultists is stupid.

Originally posted at the “other” third world county, since Blogger seemed to be down (for me, at least) for its “30-minute” maintenance event for over 13+ hours… And yeh, I’m still griping about it. *heh*)

This in from Jay at Stop the ACLU

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Crossposted from Stop The ACLU Convincing liberals that the ACLU is leading us down a dangerous path is about as productive as talking to a rock. Perhaps this is because I mostly deal with far left liberals who share the same insane views and have the same radical agenda as the ACLU. Anyone who believes that the ACLU is there to purely defend the Constitution is naive at best. Surely there are some moderate liberals out there that can concede that the organization is in need of reform. A balanced society can not survive resting in the fringe. A Nation only concerned with security will drift toward a police state, and one that follows the absolutist views of liberty like the ACLU will drift toward anarchy. The ACLU proudly display a banner that states, Keep America Safe and Free, but any honest person will admit that the ACLU have done nothing for the safety of America. As a matter of fact, all evidence leads to quite the opposite. The ACLU are always ready to put the security of America at risk in the pursuit of its absolutist views of liberty. Many of the ACLU’s former leaders have noticed the irresponsible shifting of the ACLU away from true civil liberty protection into a much more dangerous agenda. For example take the words of this former Executive Director of the ACLU

The right to express unpopular opinions, advocate despised ideas and display graphic images is something the ACLU has steadfastly defended for all of its nearly 80-year history. But the ACLU, a group for which I proudly worked as executive director of the Florida and Utah affiliates for more than 10 years, has developed a blind spot when it comes to defending anti-abortion protesters. The organization that once defended the right of a neo-Nazi group to demonstrate in heavily Jewish Skokie, Ill., now cheers a Portland, Ore., jury that charged a group of anti-abortion activists with $107 million in damages for expressing their views. Gushed the ACLU’s press release: “We view the jury’s verdict as a clarion call to remove violence and the threat of violence from the political debate over abortion.” Were the anti-abortion activists on trial accused of violence? No. Did they threaten violence? Not as the ACLU or Supreme Court usually defines it, when in the context of a call for social change. The activists posted a Web site dripping with animated blood and titled “The Nuremberg Files,” after the German city where the Nazis were tried for their crimes. Comparing abortion to Nazi atrocities, the site collected dossiers on abortion doctors, whom they called “baby butchers.” … This is ugly, scary stuff. But it is no worse than neo-Nazi calls for the annihilation of the Jewish people, or a college student posting his rape fantasies about a fellow coed on the Web, both of which the ACLU has defended in the past. None of the anti-abortion group’s intimidating writings explicitly threatened violence. Still, the ACLU of Oregon refused to support the defendants’ First Amendment claims. Instead, it submitted a friend-of-the-court brief taking no one’s side but arguing that speech constitutes a physical threat only when the speaker intends his statement to be taken as one. …Before anti-abortion zealots started getting sued, the ACLU had much more tolerance for menacing speech. Few of the 20th century’s great social movements were entirely peaceable. The labor, civil-rights, antiwar, environmental and black-power movements were an amalgam of violence, civil disobedience and highly charged rhetoric. But to gag fiery speakers who call for harm to the establishment because others in the movement pursue their political goals with fists, guns or bombs would do terrible damage to strong, emotive pleas tot social change. It is something neither the ACLU nor, thankfully, the courts have countenanced in the past. That’s why in 1969 the ACLU helped defend a Ku Klux Klan member who had called for violence against the president, Congress and the Supreme Court. At the ACLU’s urging, the Supreme Court ruled that speech advocating violence was constitutionally protected unless it incited imminent lawless action and was likely to produce such action. This case was later used to defend the speech of black militants. The ACLU also applauded a 1982 Supreme Court decision that found that speeches promising violent reprisals were protected by the First Amendment. During the civil-rights movement, a leader of the NAACP called for “breaking the necks” of blacks who violated a boycott of white-owned businesses in Mississippi, and published a list of those who did. Some of the boycott violators were beaten. The court ruled that despite the atmosphere of fear, all the speeches and lists were part of a debate on a public issue that needed to be “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”

I would argue that the Constitution doesn’t protect all of these extreme positions of the ACLU, but that isn’t the point he is trying to make. The issue is the ACLU’s curious commitment to “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” free speech when it involves things such as virtual child pornography, but not when it involves a something like a boss making racially offensive statements. Unfortunately, there are some people who are so hypnotized by the ACLU’s absolutist views and of the ACLU’s campaign for pedophilia and child pornography that they are prepared to defend an organization that has become a shadow of its former self–a group that lets its idealistic and skewed understanding of the establishment clause trump freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

Stop the ACLU had the opportunity last year of interviewing a former ACLU lawyer. He was concerned with much of the same things.

The ACLU played a helpful role in the civil rights movement defending these people, and I can’t turn my back on that. I have to give credit where credit is due.” “But….that being said, what they have done in the past is completely eviscerated by what they do in the present. The ACLU has become a fanatical anti-faith Taliban of American religious secularism.” “The ACLU is involved in the secular cleansing of our history. This is not just a fight about free exercise, but about the protection of our American history. The ACLU want to deny America the knowledge of their Christian heritage.”

It seems that the many of the ACLU’s greatest critics came from their very ranks. The division within the ACLU will continue as long as the ACLU continues on the irresponsible, hypocritical path it is on. America needs a civil liberties union, sadly the ACLU isn’t doing that job. If the ACLU succeeds in the dangerous direction it is steering America, they will ironically be putting in jeopardy the very liberty they claim to protect. This was a production of Stop The ACLU Blogburst. If you would like to join us, please email Jay at Jay@stoptheaclu.com or Gribbit at GribbitR@gmail.com. You will be added to our mailing list and blogroll. Over 115 blogs already on-board.

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See other posts on this topic at Stop the ACLU (linked above) and other blogs participating in the Stop the ACLU blogburst.

Communism, socialism, liberalism, pragmatism, utilitarianism and yes, even conservatism all inevitably wreck themselves upon the rock of Unintended Consequences, and their brightest ideals become “wasms.”

The reason why the highest ideals and practical decisions of human wisdom inevitably fail is because we can only guess at their outcomes. Pragmatism is perhaps the most glaring failure, because future events inevitably prove that our pragmatic choices depended upon making choices to create a future we cannot predict.

Better simply “…to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with [our] God.”

Ah, but being just is hard when the world abhors justice. Being merciful is difficult even when we embrace justice (and impossible without justice). And humility is impossible for those who reject both justice and true mercy.

Originally posted at the “other” third world county when Blogger’s “half hour” of downtime extended well into “sudden death overtime”…

Noted at TMH’s Bacon Bits’ open post.