Foley File Update

An email correspondent (ID withheld to protect the guilty :-)) sent me this:

Priest Who Fondled Foley Probed by Diocese

You don’t have to follow the link to see how very wrong this is!

Urm, well, yeh. And the point is, exactly?

*heh*

(You’ll note that since my correspondent clipped the headline, Fox has amended it somewhat… )

RANT: ON

Still, Foley’s attempt to remanufacture his image as a victim is reprehensible. No matter what his boyhood experiences, it is he who is responsible for his adult behavior and no one else. One of the chief ills of our society today is the “blame the other guy” syndrome. Flip Wilson used to play that as “the devil made me do it” but modern society plays it as “anybody but me is at fault”. Whites are to blame for lazy, beligerant blacks; men are to blame for shrill harridans (are you listening, Maureen Dowd? No, of course not; your gums are too busy flapping) complaining that they just can’t get a man; the U.S., the most productive society in this hemisphere, is to blame for Mexico’s wealth being concentrated in the hands of the ricos and millions of its people pouring North to escape the poverty imposed by its ruling elite.

Everybody’s a victim.

Yeh, yeh. Bushwah.

IMO, Foley’s just another in a long, long line of lying, illegitimate, fake, phony, fulla hot air bullshitters claiming victim status. If you want justice and amelioration of the wrongs done Foley, we need a law to castrate the pedophile priest, but make Foley the next in line. Then we need another crime and punishment on the books for fake victims. Maybe give the cat their tongues?

*feh*

Off with their heads, the lot of them. It’s the only way they’d be a benefit to society: as mulch for killing kudzu.

RANT: OFF (? Maybe…)

I wonder what Sam thinks about alla this…

Ubuntu… again

It’s the little things, ya know? Just right-clicked on my Ubuntu menu bar and unlocked it, moved it where I wanted it and set it to autohide. Did the same for my taskbar.

Just like on all my Windows boxes.

“Aunt Tilly” would probably be just as happy with the Dapper Drake (6.06.x) release of Ubuntu Linux as with Windows or just about any other GUI-oriented OS. It’s remarkably simple to navigate around the Ubuntu GUI, invoke apps, etc. Connecting to the internet was as easy as running the connect wizard. The default browser(Firefox) is just so-so, but at least it beats the heck out of Windows’ default browser (although IE7 is almost caught up to last-generation modern browsers in most areas, and is caught up in a very few).

By default, an Ubuntu install already has all the office type apps most people need right out of the box. Open Office 2.x is a very, very capable office suite. My Wonder Woman is still stuck using M$ Office 2003 for some classes (required software), and it sometimes surprises me how it sometimes seems to lack usable features (like generating pdfs from within the app, natively–a very useful feature for me) compared to Open Office. Yeh, Microsoft is adding soe of those real world features to M$Office now, too…

Evolution Email/calendaring? I’ve looked at it and it seems quite capable, though I still use Opera for my email client and am still stuck on a Windows machine for my calendaring cos I’ve not found a good (enough) replacement under Linux for my Palm Desktop software, though I will probably give KPilot a tryout this weekend. Confessrion: What I really need is a good linux app to convert plain text to Palm eBook format. Yeh, yeh, I know I can keep on doing that on the Windows machine I now manage my Palm from, but if I can get it all on an Ubuntu box…

Graphics, music, video: it’s all there, although that is one area where maybe “Aunt Tilly” might need help getting started with Ubuntu (although I do a lot of comp ed client calls to folks more comp literate than “Aunt Tilly” helping out in those areas, anyway).

It’s fun, but I’m still missing a Windows emulator that is close enough to allow me to run the ONE program I cannot run without a genuine Windows install (and no, it won’t work well under a Virtual Machine, either). So, no matter how much of my computing I switch to Linux boxes, I’m still shackled to Windows, probably for life, until someone makes a Linux program that will do?-and do as well–everything that Encore (music transcription software) does… and read and write Encore files.

But for most folks, highlyspecialized software barriers simply won’t matter. Plain beige boxes (or, what the heck, paint ’em any colrs you want!) without any MessySoft software at all would do ’em as well (or better) in their emailing, web surfing and other common computing tasks, as long as it’s running software as well done as Dapper Drake.

Weekend Mini-Roundup

Just a (very) few of the things that caught my eye this week.

Night over Korea. Kim Jong Il is sucking the light outa the North, eh?

The regime in the north is so short of electricity that the whole country is switched off at 9 p.m. – apart from the capital of Pyongyang where dictator Kim Jong-il and his cohorts live in relative luxury.

h.t. Creechman

(Old) News for the Chicken Littles out there: the Sun is dimming. (And so are your pronouncements about human caused global climate crisis.)

Cancer-killing virus. 90% successful in mice. Be sure and get this word to all mice fed phytoestrogen-laced food that you know, eh?

Wal-Mart: $4 Generic Drugs And d/l the list of $4 drugs here.

Strategy Page: Austin Bay comments on Mark Stein’s “America Alone”

Old news, but… beam me up, Scotty: first teleportation?

So why aren’t you on the White House speed dial list? Rachel is.

h.t. Bou

Is it too late?/Weekend OTA

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On American “conservatism”…

“What was the restricted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting [note the 19th Century usage, indicating “pretending”] to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.”—R.L. Dabney

Yes, there is little difference—in substance: both are tax-and-spend appeasers, for the most part, for example—between most Democrat politicians *spit* and most Republican politicians *spit*. But there is still enough of a difference to favor the Republican candidates over the Democrat candidates… just. Barely. After all, approaching a precipice at 50mph is better than doing so at 90mph, right? (Still a better chance of braking juuuuust in time. Maybe.)

But. Is it too late for the pusillanimous pussyfooting politicos of the Republican’t leadership to explain to the electorate just what ceding control of Congress to the even worse leadership of the Democrappic Underpants-dominated absolutely NON-liberal Left?

I submit that it may very well be too late. Republican’t leadership has again and again ceded the public arena to the screeching moonbats of the faux-liberal Left, to the degree that any presentations of fact countering the memes promulgated by the faux-liberal Left and their allies in the Mass Media Podpeople’s Hivemind have little chance of being heard for anything but the weak protestations they would be.

The War in Iraq? I thought it foolish at the time, although I supported President Bush’s actions and defended his decision against the lying memes of the faux-liberal Left. I was proven more right than I wanted when Bremmer *spit* was appointed proconsul *heh* to Iraq. What an idiot. Since then, the whole endeavor has hung on a thread.

But leave now and cede Islam a victory that will result in encouraging further adventurism against the West and its allies? Foolish indeed. Foolishness of an entirely different order of magnitude, one that could haunt the U.S. to its end, I fear.

There are solututions to the Iraq mess that would allow a victory and a defusing of that area as a hotbed for recruitment of anti-West terrorists. The simplest (thank you, William of Occam) would be to partition Iraq to allow the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shiites to administer their own peoples. Interdict/control air traffic with U.S. resources. Guard/protect ONLY the oil resources with U.S. military and ensure and equal sharing of those resources among the partitioned peoples.

It. Could. Work. And much more easily than putting a million-man army on the ground to proceed as we are now (which seems to be about the only answer within the current paradigm).

If the republican’t leadership were to offer such an understandable solution were offered for the Iraq War to the electorate, follow it up with clear, unequivocal attacks on the hypocrisy of the Democraps (for example: at least Mark Foley resigned at the behest of the Republican’t leadership; Gerry Studds, censured by the House for having sex with a 17-year-old page, was allowed to continue serving by the Dem’s leadership) and show rthey had at least a little smaller yellow stripe down their backs, then a disatrous Democrappic House leadership scenario might just be averted.

But will the Republican’t leadership say “We can!”?

Somehow, given the character of these cretins, I doubt it.

*sigh*

Oh. Well.