third world county

No, really, a dream. In this dream, all the hyphenated Americans were barking and snarling and having a big old dog fight. You know, kind of multiculturalism writ plainly.

“Dalmation Pride!”

“Jack Russell Terrior Pride”

“German Shepherd Pride”

yadyadayada

On the periphery, jackals from the ‘”muslim pride” were picking off strays and Chihuahuas (those long-legged rats originally–I kid you not–bred for the stewpot) were eating all the hyphenated dogs’ food… Yeh, politicians *spit*

Mutts with no pretensions to being purebred were looking on and thinking all those phony purebreds (so-called) were forgetting that they were all just dogs and were getting picked off by the jackals and stolen blind by the fake dogs (the Chihuahuas) with tiny minds who’d never done a lick of honest work in their lives.

Disjointed, chaotic, all too real? Well, it was just a dream, wasn’t it?

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Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Right Pundits, The Virtuous Republic, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, Perri Nelson’s Website, The Random Yak, Maggie’s Notebook, basil’s blog, Stuck On Stupid, The Amboy Times, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, sissunchi, Allie Is Wired, , stikNstein… has no mercy, The World According to Carl, The Pink Flamingo, High Desert Wanderer, Right Voices, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

A quick “Thirteen Things in My Front yard That Have Decided It’s Spring Already”

1. Dafodills

2. Clover

3. Volunteer Elms (RIGHT where I can’t have ’em)

4. 2 lil maple trees

5. Roses (well, the bushes, at least)

6. Mint

7. Two “Bald” Cypresses

8. An unidentified tree my Wonder Woman brought home from an Arbor Day thing a few years ago. I dunno what it is, but it’s purty.

9. Volunteer garlic

10. Wild onion.

11. Some weird viny plant (it makes decent ground cover in some shade)

12. The “possum” grape that’s sneaking around the side to the front

(Haven’t seen grass mentioned yet, have you? That’s cos our bermuda mix greens up late every year–and I don’t care, cos that’s just later for me to have to start mowing–*heh*)

And, although they’re not at their glorious “walk down the runway to wild applause” stage yet,

13. Dandelions! *Yipee!*

Noted at the Thursday Thirteen Hub

oxymoron: “a figure of speech by which a locution produces an incongruous, seemingly self-contradictory effect, as in ‘cruel kindness’ or ‘to make haste slowly.'”

A few favs:

Congressional ethics (this needs a comment?)

And two related oxymorons: Democratic Party and Republican Party. The Democratic Party is no more democratic than the Republican Party is republican.

Journalistic standards (As in “CBS: all bullshit all the time” or Al Reuters, etc.)

Moderate Mohammedism (used in the sense of “non-violent Islam”–another oxymoron, since anyone genuinely giving honor to Mohammed by following his words and deeds must be a murdering, pedophilic, thieving, lying sociopath, by definition. Anything else is, appropriately enough, a lie.)

“Proud Mexican” (when said by/referring to someone who will pay any price, subvert any law to escape Mexico to live in America. Now, what kind of pride is that?).

Federal Justice System/Law Enforcement (Scotter *sigh*, Scooter Libby, Martha Stewart, Ramos and Campeon, Waco, Ruby Ridge… and the list goes on and on and on… Many different acts with many different levels of anarcho-tyranny, but the message is the same: anyone and everyone can be targetted and made a “criminal” if someone in the system wants it–heck, I’m just waiting for the jackbooted thugs to knock on my door to convict me of exercising my First Amendment rights.)

Anthropogenic Global Warming Scientists (No such critters. The only “scientists” pushing that particular political agenda are dogmatists in the Church of AGW.)

Like I said, a few favs…

by loboinok

CitizenLink.com

Officials in Thomasville, N.C., voted 6-1 Monday to ignore threats from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and allow prayer at city-council meetings.

Mike Johnson, senior legal counsel for Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), provided the council with a proposed policy in compliance with the U.S. Constitution.

“It’s amazing that, in a country founded on religious liberty, the right to open a public meeting with a prayer would be under attack," he said. "But that is exactly what the ACLU has been doing the past several months – using its familiar tactics of fear, intimidation and disinformation to force municipalities into passive compliance with its agenda to eliminate our First Liberty, religious freedom.”

Councilman Dwight Cornelius said he hopes other municipalities will stand up to the ACLU.

“This is a freedom of speech issue, pure and simple,” he said.

ADF offers assistance to any municipality that’s under attack for “simply continuing a practice that the Supreme Court knows is 'deeply embedded in the history and tradition of our country,” Johnson added.

Nothing would please me more than to be able to post articles like this one, every day.

Warning: those of y’all dropping in for another of my rants about society, politicians *spit*, Mass Media Podpeople, et al, just shuffle on down the page; there’ll be some of that somewhere there. This is a compgeeky post.

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It’s so obvious. I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for several years, but just never got A Round To It. *sigh*

Little things can make a whale of a difference when having to work on computers. Besides just having a wealth of knowledge (and knowing where to get more :-)) and a minimal talent for working one’s way through puzzles, the right tools (hardware and software) are critical to doing things well and quickly (and easily).

So, what’s the tool I’ve meant to get for some time but just (for no good reason at all) hadn’t before? This:

There’s more to it than that–a power supply and a couple more cables to allow it to work with SATA drives–but being able to just slap that lil puppy onto a bare drive (OK, pulled from a problem computer) and plug the thing into any USB 2.0 port and just whale away at it with diag tools is a BIG plus, as opposed to slapping it physically into a test system or attempting to work on the drive while it’s in the dead/troubled computer.

Bang on easy. And it’s so cheap, I have no excuse for not buying the thing a long time ago.

Right now, I’m using it to wipe a drive of ALL data (35 passes of semi-randon 0s and 1s over each and every part of the drive) for reuse in another system. Connected to THIS computer, while I continue to just go about my normal affairs. *heh* Didn’t even have to fire up a “bench” comp just for the gig.

So, while I’m kicking myself for not picking one of these lil tools up before, I’m glad I finally did. MUCh better (for me) even than having a portable USB-enabled case to plop drives into. This I can just place a drive on (the inside of an opened) ESD case, plug it in and take off.

I found mine here (and no, I’m not an “affiliate” nor do I get any kinda rake off; it’s just where I bought mine). Neat lil toy tool.

Taking a break from a more than usually productive day, I stumbled across this:

Have a Messy Desk? Congrats, You’re More Productive

Of course, it’s not quite that simple, or else I’d have a gross yearly product greater than most FIRST world countries… *heh* The “study” semi-cited isn’t a well-controlled study but a competition to discover the messiest desk (and why was I not informed? I’d have won hands down!) in order to use the competition to promote a book, “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder,” by Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman.

Still, the most productive people I know (excepting myself, of course) have perennially cluttered desks, so despite the “study’s” genesis and design as a promo tool for a book, I think I’ll latch onto it as an excuse for my mess.

Feel free to do the same.

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Noted at The Trouble With Angels Wednesday OTA and Trackposted to The Virtuous Republic, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, Perri Nelson’s Website, The Random Yak, Big Dog’s Weblog, Maggie’s Notebook, basil’s blog, Shadowscope, Stuck On Stupid, The Amboy Times, The Bullwinkle Blog, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, Conservative Thoughts, Rightlinx, Faultline USA, stikNstein… has no mercy, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, Overtaken by Events, The Pink Flamingo, Renaissance Blogger, and Dumb Ox Daily News, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Yeh, yeh, a linkfest. You know what to do. See more below the post.

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From last month (Feb 5, 2007), this interview at Frontpage Magazing (h.t. Joanne Dow): The Study of Political Islam

The Center for the Study of Political Islam is a group of scholars who are devoted to the scientific study of the foundational texts of Islam—Koran, Sira (life of Mohammed) and Hadith (traditions of Mohammed). There are two areas to study in Islam, its doctrine and history, or as CSPI sees it—the theory and its results. We study the history to see the practical or experimental results of the doctrine.

It’s a long and relatively info-dense (for net magazine copy) article, but well worth reading.

From The Random Yak: A Modest Proposal…and an OTP (No, no h.t. to Jonathan Swift :-))

Congressmen must henceforth send their children to public school in the districts their constituents live in.

One of several Good Ideas proposed by TRY. May I add, “Mexicans” who proclaim they are proud to be “Mexicans” should be sent home to be real Mexicans, instead of phony ones living here and enjoying the advantages of Americans while playing at being “Mexicans”.

While I’m touching that base, let me direct your attention to NumbersUSA and IllegalAliens.US. Get some facts to counter politicians’ lies and then get off your duffs and harass your congresscritters, folks!

Michael J. Totten writes (h.t. Joanne Dow)about the one unalloyed success from the Iraq War: Iraqi Kurdistan:

Sunni Arabs were once the oppressors of Kurds. Now they are reduced to the same low status as migrant Mexican workers in the United States.

Well, Michael, there is a significant difference between Mexican migrant workers in the U.S. and Sunni Arab workers in Iraqi Kurdistan: the Kurds require the Sunnis who want to enter Kurdish controlled areas to at least be cleared by internal security (as Michael does note earlier), unlike the current U.S. government policy of surrender to invading hordes…

That’s all for now. happy clicking!

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In today’s society or ever more oppressive and intrusive “law enforcement” and ever more nonsensical and oppressive judicial activism, I was pleasantly surprised to read this:

Homeowner had ‘a right to resist’

SARASOTA — John Coffin won’t spend any more time in jail for beating up two sheriff’s deputies inside his house, striking one in the head with a Taser gun he took from the other.

Circuit Judge Rick De Furia said at Coffin’s trial Tuesday that he doesn’t condone the violence against the deputies.

But Coffin, 56, had a right to defend his family and property because the deputies had no right to be in Coffin’s house in the first place, De Furia said.

Well, knock me over with a feather. Someone–a judge, no less! In Florida!–actually taking the side of what’s right against police abuse of power. Maybe there is a small ray of hope that the trend of anarcho-tyranny (the prime example of which is “law enforcement” and judges making criminals of any citizen they choose, damn what’s right) might abate.

But then there’s Congress. *sigh*

h.t. Chaos Manor Musings

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One of the issues threatening our society is manifested in the “reality-based community’s” fantastic belief set and the chilling effect on rational thought that such a belief set imposes as its psychotic delusions are presented as inarguable fact.

Consider: when those who argue against the fantasies of global warmists are labeled as “global warming deniers” and are threatened, compared to Holocaust deniers, censored, etc.; when rational (let alone highly emotional, though still reasonable, rhetoric) arguments for sane immigration policy and border control are shouted down as racist or argued against with outright lies (“jobs Americans won’t do”–President Bush, et al); when the “flying Imams” claims of racism and religious oppression are even considered or given more than an inch of ink, one time, then we are in serious trouble, because all of these are examples of irrational behavior, disconnected from reality.

Can a society that is dominated by psychotics* long survive? When reality-based fantasists claim to “speak truth to power” what they are doing is attempting to impose their loss of contact with reality on others.

Reality: an order of magnitude more real scientists do NOT believe there is any compelling evidence of anthropogenic global warming. It is these people who want serious research, unhindered by AGW dogmatism, into the causes (and effects!) of climate change. IOW, real scientists haven’t stopped asking serious questions. The now infamous (should be famous, but AGW fanatics are spinning their fantasy machine overtime to carp about it) British documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle might be a good place for uninformed minds to start a search for honesty in this area.

As to sane immigration policy, well anyone not caught up in fantasyland can easily see that a country that doesn’t defend its borders is soon invaded and conquered. See some of the posts here at twc under the “Guard the Borders” topic, visit NumbersUSA or watch the Immigration Gumballs video by Roy Beck. For that matter, for those who think amnesty for illegal aliens is a way to stem the tide of hordes of alien invaders, just consider what message legalizing rape would send to potential rapists.

And for the idiocy of listening to CAIR or giving the “flying imams” claims of racial or religious oppression any consideration whatsoever, let me simply refer you to this.

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*psychosis: “a severe mental disorder, with or without organic damage, characterized by derangement of personality and loss of contact with reality and causing deterioration of normal social functioning.”

I think I’m going to like Looking Glass as a GUI front end for Ubuntu, but…

…NOT on the Ubuntu box I initially tried it out on. OK, here’s the deal: Looking Glass is a Linux desktop environment GUI that depends on LOTS of Java. In fact, just installing the thing requires three of four signoffs on Sun Java development licenses. IOW, there’s a pretty high overhead. Maybe not as high as with “Vista Oo-La-La” version *heh* but much steeper hardware requirements than the box I tried it out on. OK, so it was a relatively “old” box–1.3Ghz Intel, 384MB RAM and only a 16MB vidcard. Pretty low hardware specs.

But keep in mind, those “low” hardware specs are plenty good enough to drive Ubuntu 6.10 (Well, Xubuntu, Ubuntu using an Xfce Desktop environment, which is less hardware-demanding than straight Ubuntu using either GNOME or KDE), almost blazingly fast. And the Xfce desktop environment has some pretty snazzy visuals, easily matching or exceeding the best GUI look/feel that WinXP can offer and as nice as Apple OSX desktops I’ve seen.

But if someone wants to have the cool GUI look and feel of the most expensive, hardware-demanding new Windows Vista, without donning the Windows Vista straightjacket, the Looking Glass environment running on your favorite Linux looks like the way to go. IF your box has the hardware to run it. The box I initially tried it out on loaded the environment nicely, and the 3D graphics, neato-keano 3D file folders, desktop navigation, transparent folders, menus, etc., all displayed, but navigating/using those elements was painfully slow.

However… on an old, old PIII-500 with 512MB RAM and a 64MB vidcard, running plain old Ubuntu, Looking Glass was usable. Unfortunately, that PC is a workhorse Win2K box I use for most of my Windows testing, service, etc., so I don’t often have it running Linux (Although I have thought of slapping another IDE controller in it along with another DASD to use in a multiboot config).

But the fact that Looking Glass is usable on a system with such low hardware specs tells me that just a little more memory and a better vidcard (with the 64MB vidcard, LG is usable, but I suspect more video memory would be better) would be about all it’d take to give me all the “Gee-whiz” factor of Windows Vista Premium desktops I’ve played with, without having to have a GB or more of memory and a whopping huge frypan of a vidcard.

Advantage: Linux. 🙂

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