Month: October 2006

…plus c’est la même chose

No, really. 🙂

Meanwhile, flying in the face of modern precedent, SCOTUS gives a big (temporary) “Nanny, nanny, boo-boo” to the ACLU. Arizona can too require that voters identify themselves as, well, actually qualified to vote, as in, have valid IDs showing they are, well, americans, at the very least.

Oh! Gasp! Some crooks and zombies and wetbacks (Oh! My!) might actually be “disenfranchised” (cluebat upside the head for the ACLU: to be “disenfranchised” one must first, well, be legitimately qualified to exercise the franchise, ya know. Dumbasses.)

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…

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.

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

This is an Open Trackbacks Alliance post. Link to this post and then track back. If you want to host your own linkfests, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance.

Also note the other fine blogs featuring linkfests at Linkfest Haven.

---

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.

Diane, of Diane’s Stuff, has been having difficulty recieving trackbacks, recently soooo…. she bailed on her WordPress installation and has been importing everything (in bits n pieces throughout the day) over to… Moveable Type.

Yeh, I’m afraid she has gone over to the Dark Side.

*heh*

Does Ubuntu Linux (60.6–“Dapper Drake”) have the coolest screensavers “right outa the box” or what?

Really. Sitting here blogging on one comp and taking time out every now and then just to watch the show over on the Dapper Drake “Tucks” comp.

Smiles. It’s a simple thing, but nice.

The next, 9.1, release of Opera browser will feature enhanced frad protection, but as with nearly all things Opera, thinking differently is apparently important.

Unlike Firefox 2 you won’t need to activate real-time protection, and depend on a 3rd party like Google, nor will it make use of Microsoft’s database. Instead Opera decided to create their own database out of privacy concerns of their users and allows them to easily activate and deactive the feature to send no information at all.

Opera already warns of hinky site certs and “display[s] the name of the certificate owner in the right end of the address field when you’re on a secure site.” With Opera 9.1, however, what you will see when you try to nav to a suspect site will be this:

CLICK on image for larger size

Again, it’s designed to just plain work. WITHOUT depending on MessySoft or Google. It’s in a near-release beta, today, and I expect a weekly release will be out tomorrow.

Internet Exploder 7 is an improvement over past Internet Exploders. In fact, from what I have seen, it almost catches up to modern browsers in many respects. Still a second-class browser, though.

Firefox is a scrappy lil competitor, but it still has far, far too many rough edges for me. And when exactly are we going to see a stable Firefox 2? And while some may find the “managing information channels” paradigm the Firefox 2 roadmap points toward, I’m not too sure what the buzzwords will result in. And it seems it’ll still retain the bug-inducing extensions concept. I know, I know, lotsa folks like all the

Yeh, I think I’ve found A Better Way in Opera. Extensions? We don’t need no stinking extensions!

*heh*

BTW, Click the link in the para above the graphic for info directly from the Opera Desktop Team.

Continuing in the more curmudgeonly vein of T-13, 1.1 and T-13, 1.2, here is my T-13 list of “13 Things Our Socisty Has Too Much Of.”

In no particular order of ranking:

1. Rap “music”–one example is one too many.

2. Politicians. See comment on #1 above.

3. Mass Media Podpeople. Ditto from #1 and #2 above.

4. Colleges and universities. Too many kids who are better suited to training for a trade are ending up in colleges and universities. Colleges are dumbing down academics to–among other things–maintain their finances and kids are getting cheated all around: those suited to academics are cheated of a quality education (as if 12-13 years of abuse in “public schools” weren’t enough) and those suited to training in trades/skills are cheated of that as well.

5. Academia Nut Fruitcakes. Professors of everything from English to “Education” experimenting on youthful minds and brainwashing them with useless crap.

6. Publicly-funded “art”. What? “Crap on a Crucifix” by Whu Flung Dung wouldn’t get NEA funding and would have to actually compete in the marketplace of ideas if public funding of sewage-posing-as-art were cut? This would somehow be a bad thing?

7. “Reality” TV shows. Even the totally clueless ought to have felt the cluebat whack ’em upside the head on this one when a “reality cartoon show” began to be promo-ed.

8. News, so-called. Really, who needs to be told incessantly that the world is going to hell in a handbasket? Especially since most of the tragedy, crisis and woe is patently manufactured for sheeple fodder? Gimme a break.

9. Cell phones. In churches. In movie theaters. In public toilets. While weaving down the road. C’mon! If cell phone users don’t start exercising lil common sense and common courtesy, they’ll start feeling their phones ringing from where they’ve been shoved… where the sun don’t shine…

10. “Celebrities”–who needs a stupid and subliterate singer, actor or whatever pontificating about [insert damned near anything]? You can easily find more sensible thought in a preschool play yard. Who CARES what someone who’s famous for their looks, sound (I won’t say singing or music there) or ability to parrot the words of someone more literate than themselves thinks? Yeh, right: sheeple.

11. Sheeple. Yeh, the great unwashed. Brainwashed, but of unclean (and unsound) mind. Easily swayed by Academia Nut Fruitcakes, politicians *spit*, Mass Media Podpeople, Celebs, and the guy at the watercooler who’s an even bigger idiot than themselves (if that were possible). Yeh, this society has far, far too many sheeple.

12. Pubschool administrators (and their evil mentors, education professors and remote educrats). Can no one rid us of such subliterate, stupid weasels? *sigh* Hard labor on chain gangs is too good for these parasites.

13. Lawyers. Yeh, there are two or three good lawyers. Perhaps even more (my sample set may be skewed *heh* ;-)). But we have far, far too many lawyers and far, far too many laws, lawsuits and people in prisons* (and people putting people in prisons, and often for the most assinine of reasons, see The Martha Rule, below the fold).

Well, that’s T-13, 1.3. See here for more T-13s. And read more below the fold about my T-13 today.

Continue reading “T-13, 1.4”

Crossposted from Stop The ACLU

This week the ACLU held its 2006 membership conference. Over 1,500 moonbats from across the U.S. gathered to listen to the ACLU alarmist exaggerations and lies. The event was televised on CSPAN and there were some interesting moments such as when Justice Scalia slam dunked Nadine Strossen in a debate about the bill of rights.

One of the more humorous highlights of the ACLU’s conference this week was when Bush signed the Military Tribunal Bill into law. The ACLU came up with one of its most clever and cute full page ads to date in which they claimed to be “the most conservative organization in America.” [Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater rolled over in their graves–ed.]

To highlight concerns with the act, the ACLU took out a full page advertisement in today’s Washington Post, calling itself “the most conservative organization in America.” Since its founding, the ACLU has fought to conserve the system of checks and balances and defend the Bill of Rights.

I guess this claim is technically true. They do more work to “conserve” political correctness, protections for terrorists and traitors, and judicial activism than any other organization out there. I guess it all just depends on what one is trying to conserve.

One thing the ACLU is not trying conserve is a Conservative majority in Congress. As a matter of fact they are actively working against this. One of the most honest moments of the ACLU conference was when Caroline Fredrickson came out in reference to a pending NSA surveillance bill and rooted for the Democrats.

The eavesdropping bills’ fate in the short, post-election session that is set to begin next month hinges on whether Republicans lose their leadership in either chamber, ACLU Washington Office Director Caroline Fredrickson said in an interview. “If Democrats take control, they won’t let a bad spying bill get jammed through,” she said.

As if putting out over a dozen political ads opposing particular candidates wasn’t enough to show their partisanship, Caroline just comes out and says it. What happened to the ACLU’s proud claim that they are “wholly non-partisan, neither liberal nor conservative, Republican nor Democrat?” Nevermind that old cliche slogan, the ACLU now claim they are the most Conservative organization. So lets look at some of the things they are trying to conserve this election season.

One thing the ACLU is working to conserve is voter fraud. Conserving the right to vote for illegal immigrants, convicted felons, and dead people goes right along with the ACLU’s agenda to get dhimmicrats elected this election cycle. The ACLU expressed its disappointment when the House passed the Federal Election Integrity Act of 2006,” requiring voters to present a government-issued photo ID in order to vote in federal elections. In Missouri at least 16 St. Louis area Democrats were found guilty of election crimes in the last year and a half and now there is even more fraud going on. When Republican Gov. Matt Blunt signed a law requiring voters to provide I.D. the ACLU represented a group of Democrats to challenge the law. It was successful in striking down a similar law in Georgia and with the help of the 9th Circuit Arizona as well. They also fought voter ID laws in New Mexico, Michigan, and Indiana. Unfortunately for the ACLU they may not be able to pull things off in time over in Indiana.

A federal appeals court judge says the panel is unlikely to rule on an Indiana law requiring people to show government-issued photo ID at the polls before the November seventh election.

The Seventh US Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago heard arguments in the case Wednesday.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana is asking a three-judge panel to overturn the state law.

ACLU attorney Ken Falk says there’s no evidence of the vote fraud that the law is aimed at eliminating. He says Indiana’s requirements to obtain identification are too cumbersome.

But Thomas Fisher of the Indiana Attorney General’s office argued that the ACLU and the Indiana Democratic Party failed to find a single person who would not be eligible to vote under the law.

Yes, I guess it is difficult to get dead people to show up at court.

What the ACLU is really seeking to conserve is a 9/10 mindset for America. They hope to conserve privacy rights for terrorists. They want a Democrat controlled Congress and they are not ashamed to admit it. They know this is the only way they can be successful striking down the NSA legislation and other important terror bills and tools that come may come along. They fear legislation currently pending in the Senate to strip them of their taxpayer funded attorney’s fees in Establishment Clause cases, and they know a Democrat controlled Senate is the sure fire way to kill it.

Concerned with illegal immigration? If you think we are not making any progress now, just imagine the slow down with the Democrats in control. The ACLU will be right their lobbying against every effort to secure the border. The ACLU’s agenda is pushed by more than just the courts. Want more conservative judges put on the bench? Let the loony liberals gain power and you can kiss that goodbye as well.

One sure fire way to help the ACLU progress its agenda against America is to stay at home during election time. Discouraged by the polls? Dan Riehl can help you put things back in perspective. Don’t get discouraged and allow the liberals to gain power. Get out and vote.

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 200 blogs already on-board.