Learn Hebrew

Learn Hebrew is a simple but very nice Flash based web site from Jacob Richman which I first began using some months ago now.

First, you can choose what amount to Flash flash cards (er, possibly redundant but... whatever) mousing over the text of which and left-clicking will cause a very clear voice to intone the selection.

Second, the voice used is very clear. Did I mention that? Okay, it bears repeating. Also, the pronunciation is in the modern Israeli Sephardic style. Shabbat is pronounced with a definite T sound and not an S. So this won't help you follow the Charedi community with the heavy Yiddish infusions, but you can figure it out.

Third, there are many different categories of cards to choose from, not just Aleph, bet, etc.

My only real problem with it, and I have this problem with every single other free Hebrew site is there is no clear set of rules and variances taught for when to use a yod or vav to indicate an extended vowel intonation or which nikkudot mean which intonation based on which letter they are used with. Shin, bet, tav is very clearly shabbat. However, why the choice of how you are suggesting the vowel sound be "ah"?

Similarly, the choice of tet or tav, vet or vav, is left unexplained. As it is somewhat strangely in the Hebrew for Dummies book. Put together, you get the problem of the spelling of vet. It starts
with a vet with tsere under it followed by a yod then a tav. I assume Israeli kids get some sort of explanation. Can I have one?

Other than that, this is a great site to start off with learning the letters. I expect more to come from Jacob's site so will be watching.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Sex lessons for 'cranky' miners

Australian coal miners are being given lessons in foreplay and the menopause in an attempt to boost productivity.

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Sex lessons for 'cranky' miners.

Remember, when your boss tells you to get fucked, he might only be thinking of you. What swell bosses I’ve had.

JS Online: Jury finds man, 83, guilty of soliciting, but case not over yet

And reflect that whatever misfortune may be your lot
It could only be worse in Milwaukee.

JS Online: Jury finds man, 83, guilty of soliciting, but case not over yet.

(innocent whistling)

'God Hates Fags' Church Owes Man $10.9M - News Story - KPTV Portland

A grieving father won a nearly $11 million verdict Wednesday against a fundamentalist Kansas church that pickets military funerals out of a belief that the war in Iraq is a punishment for the nation's tolerance of homosexuality.

'God Hates Fags' Church Owes Man $10.9M - News Story - KPTV Portland.

 

HALLEIGHLUJAH!!!

The silent refusal of the bulk of Christianity to vehemently disavow this sort of group is as odious as the bulk of Islam refusing to vehemently disavow Al Queda and one of the things that drove me away from believing the church had one clue as to what was going on in G-d’s creation.

THEY MOCK THE FAITH FOR NO OTHER PURPOSE THAN TO SOW HATE AND DISCORD AMONG G-D’S CHILDREN FOR THEIR OWN SHRIVELED SOULS’ AMUSEMENT. Who more than they needs to be disavowed?

Letting Phelps and company get away with claiming representation of ANYTHING having to do with G-d is like opening a whorehouse at 770 Eastern Parkway. NO SUCH MOCKERY OF LOVE SHOULD EVER BE TOLERATED BY ANYONE OF CONSCIENCE. How shameful that it is the secular courts who ultimately may be the loudest voice to cry “shame on you!”

A voice of society’s disapproval is you federal jury! Go you!

If I seem upset, it is because hatred masquerading as love is one of the greatest sins one can partake of for it is a direct willful fully meant violation of opposition to the golden rule from which all else follows. It makes me roar with anger, howl with pain, and scream with outrage. You can do nothing more unG-dly than to do the opposite of the golden rule with all forethought and intent to do so knowing full well what you do except perhaps to give the aura of approval to those who do by being silent for all that evil needs to succeed is for good people to do nothing.

Teenager in go-kart leaves police standing - Yahoo! News

BERLIN (Reuters) - A teen-ager speeding through a German town in a go-kart with seven squad cars in hot pursuit managed to give the frustrated officers the slip, police said on Friday.

 BERLIN (Reuters) - A teen-ager speeding through a German town in a go-kart with seven squad cars in hot pursuit managed to give the frustrated officers the slip, police said on Friday.

Amatures. The GEICO kid would have not only lost them, he’d have put them in the wall for good measure first.

Ananova - Police chief ready for zombie attack

"People can feel confident, if zombies start invading, we'll know how to close the streets. We can get chainsaws too.

"If a swarm comes in on I-496 westbound, we'll block off the exits so they miss the city."

Ananova - Police chief ready for zombie attack.

Welcome to April of next year.

Man who had sex with bike in court - Telegraph

Man who had sex with bike in court - Telegraph

He is not the first man to be convicted of a sexual offence involving an inanimate object, however.

Karl Watkins, an electrician, was jailed for having sex with pavements in Redditch, Worcs, in 1993.

Now that is doing things the hard way.

What is up with the mixing of religion and bullshit here?

I will tell you, if you must know, and yes you must because I am the Tr1v14l Spud that I am. Or merely I must tell you. One of those.

For long long spans of time, people have sought out the meaning of their lives. Most found nothing like whatever it was Morpheus was blabbing about except colored pills might have been involved. They aren't involved with me. Those people or the pills.

What is the meaning of mine? Well, it isn't in Catholicism or Christianity. Or wasn't. Or won't be. One of those.

I was struck from a very early age with the smell of bullshit in the water coming from the directions of my parents and well, we sharks, or kids, one of those, can smell bullshit in the water and we go for the kill. Mine being that I was no longer going to go on Sunday to do the knee-board calesthenics of the Catholic church we attended because well, I was really not hip to the whole trinity thing since Jesus himself liked to contradict the church's positions on him every chance he got.

It took a lot of years to get past literalism and find the plastic reality of existentialism without sliding down the slope to self-indulgent dadaism for the sake of attention and hellraising. Along the way I was startled, depressed, angry, sad, violent, virulent, and truculent unto myself by turns until I had traipsed through my life in all directions and lost all the footprints I'd left, most especially His when He carried me.

I've not come to any sort of peace with myself and yet have achieved total inner serenity. I've railed against my drive for complacency and stood steadfast against my desire for change for the fuck of it. I have united the opposites in a mutually canceling harmony and achieved the perfect sound of silence.

Of course, as soon as I did, He spoke up and said, "I thought you'd never pick up..."

So my religious posts are moving on to...

On the road with You-Know-Who

The American Spectator

The Current Crisis: The Merry Sage of Broadcasting Excellence

"This is more fun than I've ever had in my life," Rush declared on Hannity & Colmes during their October 18 show. By then he had sixty or so bids, the highest for $851,000. He was faced with writing the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation a personal check for almost $1 million. Nonetheless he was laughing. Later he laughed even more when one of his supporters bid $2.1 million for the Democrats' epistolary assault on the First Amendment. Now Rush is out an equal amount, but all to a good cause. He can now claim responsibility for a $4.2 million fund drive for the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation. What has been the Democrats response, a matching grant? Actually Senator Harry Reid lumbered out onto the Senate floor and heaved up yet another exhalation of guff.

What Democrat has done such an act of personal charity of such potentially and in the end realized high cost to their finances like this? Anyone?

For those who don’t remember, this is Henry Waxman:

If he looks familiar, it might be because you saw Scanners.

 

In Soviet Russia...

...Slashdot probes you!

Oddly, this firewall entry:
Date: 10/25 00:27:30 Name: spp_portscan: portscan status from 66.35.250.150: 13 connections across 1 hosts: TCP(13), UDP(0)
Priority: n/a Type: n/a
IP info: n/a:n/a -> n/a:n/a
References: none found

Led to:
[someone@somebox ~]$ host 66.35.250.150
150.250.35.66.in-addr.arpa is an alias for 150.0/24.250.35.66.in-addr.arpa.
150.0/24.250.35.66.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer slashdot.org.
[someone@somebox ~]$ whois 66.35.250.150
[Querying whois.arin.net]
[whois.arin.net]
Savvis SAVVIS (NET-66-35-192-0-1)
                                                                    66.35.192.0 - 66.35.255.255
VA Software SAVV-S234813-4 (NET-66-35-250-0-1)
                                                                    66.35.250.0 - 66.35.250.255

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2007-10-23 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.

They port scanned no less than 17 ports. Don’t believe me?

[someone@somebox ~]$ host slashdot.org
slashdot.org has address 66.35.250.150

So, anyone want to posit what the fuck they think they’re doing sending unsolicited traffic at my firewall having nothing to do with web surfing?

Slashdot | Humans Not Evolved for IT Security

So sayeth Bruce Schneier, expert!

I know how right this is. Getting my firewall installed took years of education and indoctrination by religious, educational, and parental institutions.

On TV: Networks will lose big if there's a writers strike

In layman's terms, the people who write your favorite TV shows and films are at a standoff with the people who write their checks.

No_way. What kind of G-d would let the stuff on TV happen through conscious willful rational choice??? These writers cannot possibly exist. No one is so supremely balanced between mediocrity and evil as that. Even the government can’t manage it. I could not manage it.

If this turns out to be true, that someone really concocted this crap on purpose, then we are damned and doomed, all. You could not possibly sell your soul to the devil, it would be already spoken for. Which says volumes about the gullibility of the lower realms.

“Oh great, American television viewers are in line to come in. Will someone get the pit fiends to move the 10,000 units of George Foreman cookers to the warehouse? We have new customers on the way. Whose idea was this wardship of evil anyways? We got cheated, I know it. There’ll be Survivor t-shirts littering the locker rooms now.”

Police Horrified By Grisly Remains Of Taco Bell Meal | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Though there are still no leads on who is responsible for the gruesome mess or what their motives may have been for entering the restaurant in the first place, police say they believe the incident occurred sometime between 1 and 2 a.m.

FOURTH_MEAL_THIS!.

 

First Orgy After Brian's Death Very Solemn | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

FAIRFIELD, CA—Lacking the exuberance, spontaneity, and airborne bodily fluids of previous all-night fuckfests, the first orgy since the passing of group-sex enthusiast Brian Hodge was a solemn and subdued affair, heavily lubricated sources reported Monday.

First Orgy After Brian's Death Very Solemn | The Onion - America's Finest News Source.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!!

9NEWS - Article - Sidetracks - Another town bans saggy pants

The ordinance, passed unanimously Monday by the Port Allen City Council, requires pants to be secured at the waist so they do not fall below the hips, expose underwear or create indecent exposure.

9NEWS - Article - Sidetracks - Another town bans saggy pants.

WHERE IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY WAS THIS MOVEMENT TO REGULATE PUBLIC DRESS WHEN BELLBOTTOMS WERE DE RIGEUR?

And where were these baggy pants when all the hot girls were big on wearing thongs???

I truly live on Planet of the Morons.

American kids, dumber than dirt / Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history

He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that, because of all the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced to incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year, there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High. As one of his colleagues put it, "It's like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it."

American kids, dumber than dirt / Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history.

any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life

Absolutely. Thanks to watching television since before I could walk, that entire school report I did in fifth grade about the relativity of the Hubble constant to actual observation vis a vis the ongoing expansion of the universe and the implications of localized and macroscopic spatial distortions affecting red-shift in terms of spatial stretching as well as inherent modification of frequencies by changing electrodynamic interaction with intergalactic plasma was entirely a put-on.

Furthermore, my accuracy with a BB gun was just a fluke. Thanks to television there is no way I should have been able to keep a one inch shot group with 75% or better accuracy at 200 feet. My spatial distortion should have given me a real Ted Striker drinking problem.

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I can still spell just fine…

Back-seat toilet to end mishaps in traffic jams - Yahoo! News

But prospective customers will have to hang on until November 15, when the firm begins selling the new product online.

Back-seat toilet to end mishaps in traffic jams - Yahoo! News.

I’m not sure I can cross my legs and hop around til then.

Why not just replace the seats with toilets? Drop your pants, get in and sit down. Hair-raising near-miss? Fear not to lose composure and control. With every seat replaced by a privy seat, and a constant negative pressure maintained, farts need not be a problem in a car with windows rolled up ever again. Get pissed off at bad drivers for real. Bonus: all effluent can be used to generate methane to help power said car and keep the world green.

Prior Permission From Government to be Required for Each Flight - 10 Zen Monkeys

But it's never too late to express your outrage... against another act in the continuing project to turn the United States into North Korea.

Prior Permission From Government to be Required for Each Flight - 10 Zen Monkeys.

It is exactly this kind of dramatic over-reaction and over-blowing that makes the DoHS and TSA idiocy so dangerous. No one will be listening to the cries when the wolf finally comes round, will they?

Good going.

Singapore relaxes sex law but not for gays

Singapore on Tuesday legalised oral and anal sex between heterosexual couples but retained a law which criminalises intercourse between gay men.

Singapore relaxes sex law but not for gays.

In other news, flights from Southern California to Singapore rose over night to unprecedented levels. Singapore customs officials are said to be utterly perplexed that so many people can afford such expensive camcorders in such numbers.

Rapidshare administrators reached for antacids.

After Fight, Airport Embraces SUX Code

City leaders have scrapped plans to do away with the Sioux Gateway Airport's unflattering three-letter identifier — SUX — and instead have made it the centerpiece of the airport's new marketing campaign.

After Fight, Airport Embraces SUX Code.

“This airport sucks.”

“Yes, it is.”

“You mean yes it does.”

“What?”

Motorcyclist's horrific death brings call to ban 'cheese-cutter' barriers - 22 Oct 2007 - NZ Herald: New Zealand National news

He could recall no previous deaths of motorcyclists hitting wire barriers and did not believe they would have much more of a chance against traditional W-section steel guard-rails.

Motorcyclist's horrific death brings call to ban 'cheese-cutter' barriers - 22 Oct 2007 - NZ Herald: New Zealand National news.

Yeah… like slamming bodily into a steel barrier at highway speed is less lethal than a wire barrier. It’s either slice or smash, when you go off a motorcycle at high speed.

Want a cheese grater, fly off of a bike on a steel grid bridge and go sliding 200 feet… It HAS happened. Not pretty…

Home-made helicopters hit northern Nigeria - Yahoo! News

We don't reward talent in this country," he lamented.

Home-made helicopters hit northern Nigeria - Yahoo! News.

 

That’s okay, we don’t either. I suspect that is why phishing and scams are so common in bother countries.

Every time I get ready to write something really good...

Oh look! Shiny!

Wait, what?

Damn.

Sometimes, comparitive examples are needed to make a point...

This image was found at Judaism.com at this page.














Would the Israel Baseball League think this was an okay image for them?








Other than that, I got there because I found this after remembering this post by RR.

Oh well. I hope their teams don't take the field vowing to kill the apikorsim...

Kosher cat is...

Lolcats are where you find them.

Dogs and Rabbis - Daily Life

There's something that make us both objects of trepidation. And it's not the facial hair

Dogs and Rabbis - Daily Life.

I loved this.

In response to Party of Values at DovBear et al...

The Democrats need not proclaim "family values" or any other silly slogans. Forever now, or at least for many decades, they've positioned themselves as the holier-than-thou more-humanitarian-than-you bunch and fall miserably short of it.

You cannot provide for the poor by stealing it from someone else using the police powers of the state to enforce that theft. I was in the welfare system as a child and it is a disgraceful system that seeks to keep people in it, ignorant, unable to get or keep a job, so they need to keep getting those scraps off the nation's table by the Dem's kind largess. (Why does that sound so familiar...)

Oh thank you, Democrats, for your welfare system. I always wanted stale cheese and my mother to have just enough money to shop at the Salvation Army while the people you appoint to administer the program are getting big paychecks and living in nice houses and eating in fine restaurants.

Don't even get me started on their marketing of horrid self-destructive ideas guaranteed to disrupt and wipe out one's family to the poorest and least powerful. You don't see rich white couples being told to have sex with abandon, use contraception if you remember, and use abortion like you would a trash can when your purse has a rip and doesn't match your outfit.

Anyone who tries to be good and decent never mind righteous among their poverty cattle are derided and denounced. Publicly if Christian, privately if Jewish, patronizingly if Muslim, in line with political correctness.

I guarantee you the first people to ban your religious freedom if they had total unchallengeable power would be the Democrats for their religion is politics and given government runs on that, they have no need of any other religion. Government is their church, their synagogue, their temple. When they harken back to Kennedy's famous line, they mentally replace "country" with "government". What you can do for your government is not question their nobility and humanitarian holiness. They are better than you and they went to a good liberal arts college so they know more than you. Trust them. Question nothing.

And I guarantee you that they privately had no problem with remarks about Joseph Lieberman's faith and level of observance and his commitment to Israel in the most snide and anti-religious ways not to mention questioning his allegiance and his very humanity for being a Jew so openly. As if being a Jew should be something one should hide. I know, I was in the middle of an extremely Democrat town during his victory by the people over the left's pundits.

The antisemitism and reflexive anti-Israel on every issue nature of the radical left has been very much on display.

Dov, the whole point of politics is to conserve power to those at the top. WHOEVER wins, we lose. They should ALL be considered fundamentally corrupt from the start and have to prove themselves otherwise by their actions. In that, nearly every politician fails miserably of whatever party.

I've found my picture!

I have mixed feelings over this, but one does what one must...

Matisyahu leaves Chabad

"What we do is not at all about Judaism and not about Chabad. It's much bigger than one religion or another," he said. "It relies on something real that can speak to anybody. It's about truth and memory."

I am now preparing to slog through blogs which wildly cheer this or boo this on both sides of the affiliation and observance fences by getting my psychic football helmet on.

Though, it isn’t as though I didn’t foresee it in a sort of paranoid worrying way. Young and estranged to begin with, then jumping headlong into Chabad seemed like trying to make peace with your self-doubt by joining the USMC.

I want Chabad people and Chasidim in general to understand I do not intend insult by that comparison. Structure and discipline are not easy and sometimes they are at odds with some people and their needs. G-d go with Matt and his search for peace with himself.

SSDD Ad Nauseum In The East

Abbas wants return to pre-1967.

Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisin declined to comment, saying she did not want to prejudice negotiations. But the Palestinian demands appear to exceed anything that Israel would be willing to offer.

You don’t say.

Well, for those dreaming that Abbas would be the man to stand up to the internal pressure cooker of his people’s politics and be anything like reasonable… well, you’re probably already too delusional to let this change your mind or even slow you down a little.

Nevertheless, you might want to remember Aesop’s fable about the dog that lost a bone when he barked at a reflection of himself in the water. Losing what you have to get what you won’t is not a wise trade. Israel is the only side that has done any bending, and given the last time they bent till they broke ended up in the Holocaust, I rather think the drive to survive will not allow another break.

So what happens when spring steel is bent back until it can’t be pushed farther? Well, you keep it there and if you relax your grip for one second, it pushes back and flattens you.

Like I said, Aesop’s fable…

What I am drooling over now...

ArtScroll.com -- COMPLETE FULL SIZE SCHOTTENSTEIN EDITION OF THE TALMUD ENGLISH - 73 VOLUMES.

I can smell the exciting learning from here, and that is NOT sarcasm.

An Un-Orthodox Divorce

Sieger’s close-quarter domestic skirmishing has escalated into a legal war that raises disturbing questions about the rights of Orthodox women, the integrity of the rabbinic courts, known as the betei din, and the ethics of a number of ultra-Orthodox rabbis, who stand accused by Sieger of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to issue her husband the religious divorce ruling he wanted.

An Un-Orthodox Divorce.

Every time I read this I want to cry.

I resist.

I go read The Light and Fire of the Baal Shem Tov by Yitzhak Buxbaum and pray to G-d for enlightenment like his to come again. What happened to chesed?!

All of it reminds me of the disappointing scandalous mistreatment of some of the weakest people by various churches when I was young. What happened G-d?

Defendant does push-ups in court; charges against him dropped | IndyStar.com

"It wasn't anything this court would require anybody to do."

Maybe not, but it’s a less salacious kind of drop and give me fifty sort of story than one usually expects with the justice system.

Especially ours which just the drop and give me part suggests something like… well, you know…

At our learnin' center, we'll learn ya!

Employees alleged that teenagers were doused with cold water while tied up on a concrete floor and denied access to bathrooms. One girl was forced to sit in a tub of urine, and a boy was tethered to a four-wheeler and dragged on a sand track, according to the allegations. Thayer’s owners have denied all charges.

Abuse allegations, apathy show need for ‘boot camp’ regulations.

 

This next part has me all googly-eyed.

Despite the serious concerns about Thayer, the Missouri legislature continues to resist calls to require such boarding schools to be licensed and inspected.

Are you fucking joking? We practically do anal inspections of mailmen to make sure they aren’t thinking about maybe someday porking our underage daughters in the whole Pedomania of today, but people who are holding children against their will for forcible re-education should not be licensed and inspected???

I am truly living on the planet of the morons.

Several GOP House members denounce Islam

Several GOP House members denounce Islam

Several GOP House members denounce Islam.

This is noted by the Department of Redundancy Department because of its extremely repetitive inner meanings.

Also, why don’t we get equal coverage when Democrats mouth anti-semitic remarks? Oh that’s right, the press agrees, and the Democrats are smart enough not to do it that openly. The Democrat are the SS to the Republicans’ SA. The former is craftier and the latter is street-brawler enough to make themselves obvious.

Memo to the above parties. You’re both making us look like twits. SHUT UP.

So much for religion in the public square - The Carpetbagger Report

The Family Research Council didn’t see it that way. The group flipped out, said Samuldrala’s prayer could lead to “moral relativism and ethical chaos,” and explained its belief that religious liberty “was never intended to exalt other religions to the level that Christianity holds in our country’s heritage.” In other words, as the FRC saw it, minority faiths are separate and unequal, First Amendment be damned.

So much for religion in the public square - The Carpetbagger Report.

It's this kind of thing that has made my blood boil since I was old enough to go to Sunday school. This is not, never was, by design not, a Christian nation and the most religiously observant Christians among the founders specifically did not want it to be.

It was a nation largely of Christians, but was for all, and despite the goofs, gaffes, stupid mistakes, and hateful blunders, was supposed to remain. Out of all the religions of Earth, only Christianity in America lets you become a Christian simply by saying you are. All are welcomed to the Father openly. How horrid to subvert that into the most closed of thinking and hardest of hearts like this.

Great idea, bad execution as they say. Or to steal from tech support, divine intelligence is no match for mortal stupidity.

One boob shows off two more

What else do you call it when a state pol shows off a rack in front of a school class?

My take: why the fuss over seeing titties and none whatsoever over watching war movies in history class? Death good, sex bad?

If you can't beat them in the market place of ideas

Then run away and form a new nation???

When was anyone ever promised the world would go their way and when did someone teach them that anyone else getting their way was automatically be extension them not getting theirs?

Morons.

What I believe part x of y

1. G-d exists.
   This is the fundamental assumption based on my gut feelings.
2. I exist.
   How else would I write this?
3. G-d has a nature He did not make for Himself.
   How can the Uncreated Creator make a nature for Himself? That which is, is.
4. G-d made me in His image.
   That means I have his nature, not that He has two legs and two arms nor that he likes blue jeans, although He might.
5. G-d made me to help Him figure out what His nature is.
   If you want to know what you look like, you look in a mirror. If you want to understand a crime scene, you recreate the scene. If you want to know yourself, study those like yourself and in His case, create them if you have to.

What is the first principle of His nature? The second?

1. He has no power greater than Himself and hence has ultimate free will to do whatever He chooses.
2. He has a nature that circumscribes His will and directs His will.
3. He has a free will that circumscribes His nature and enables or obstructs it by choice.
4. He made me with this nature.
   I have free will and a nature which complement and both reinforce and oppose each other.
5. Good or evil depend on free will choices to do or not do.
   That which is compelled has no value. If G-d made me do a thing, then I could not be blamed for G-d chose. If G-d said I should do a thing and I didn't, I chose.
6. Therefore, G-d will not make me do anything.
   G-d cannot make me do anything without abrogating my free will without which He cannot judge me as having made the choice as opposed to him.

It would, and has, taken books and books worth of print to even come close to explaining my reasoning here. It's just something you feel.

What do you do when you open mouth and insert foot in NYC?

Obviously, you then shoot yourself in the foot.

A Jewish educator who can't utter a phrase of Arabic has been tapped to head the city's controversial Arabic-themed school, officials announced yesterday.

Why?

(...)who resigned under pressure last Friday because of her remarks to The Post defending "Intifada NYC" T-shirt.

Way to go. Intifada actually IS an Arabic word, herein spelled out in English and not Arabic script because, well, I don't speak a word of it either but have the good taste not to pretend otherwise nor give a display of really poor taste (not without there being serious heartfelt humor in it). Feel free to look it up.

I knew I felt a disturbance in the force. It was as if a great many souls, Jewish or not, slapped their foreheads all at once and went "Oy!".

The biggest threat to peace isn't the Prez or Israel... it's NYC government's lack of oxygen to their collective brain cells which by now must number less than rabid fans of the great works of Uwe Boll. As an added bonus, this Arabic language school is named for a Lebanese Christian who wrote some of the most beautiful and moving poetry of our times. The Prophet was one of the books on my bedside shelf.

Is it just me or does NYC have an obsession with incongruities that ultimately serve no purpose other than to perpetuate a total lack of progress on the part of humanity?

Am I taking crazy pills? Robots needing rights? Now?

1. Our present AI research (non-classified, publicly disclosed, for the tinfoil hat crowd) is nowhere near conscious self-awareness. Let me repeat: NOWHERE NEAR.
2. Our present robotics research can barely produce walking robots, Japanese eye candy notwithstanding. We cannot produce anything like the mecha of Japanese animation. CAN NOT. We are NOWHERE NEAR being able to.

These two things in concert tell you what about the article? Read it... and then ask yourself, where are Dr. Paul Moller's personal flying vehicles we were breathlessly told would be in our garages by the mid 80s?

Yeah, technological reality isn't nearly as sexy as fantasy, but let's not keep selling fantasy as reality to a public that cannot be bothered to tear itself away from bustanutingrannysbut.com long enough to actually use one of the plethora of online mapping services before they go on a trip.

In a recent /. article...

...there was a reference to an article and the reference was called:

Subpoenas Issued Over NSA Warrantless Wiretapping

and so I respond:

It's this simple... despite the idea often held by some cultures that corruption proceeds from the top down, it is rather the other way around. The people themselves are inherently corrupt and weak. They don't want to take responsibility for themselves, they don't want to take the blame for anything that goes wrong in their lives, don't want to acknowledge their fallibility. Yet deep down, they would have to be positively not human to not know and accept all of the above, but it terrifies them. So they bide their time keeping busy until something comes along to absolve them of all that and make them feel better.

While in past times these were some other ethnic group, some other nation, the devil, etc. we have today the modern political system. Someone else has wronged you, someone else got what should have been yours, you and yours have been held back by they and theirs. All these things are open to interpretation convenient to the subject audience to which the political/avaricious/power-hungry/self-deluded are preaching. They dress up with fun-house mirror magnifications of real issues mixed with non-sequitr reasoning and provide them to the people with the dual benefits to the seller of giving the audience the needed scapegoat du jour to avoid dealing with their fallibility and culpability, as well as providing an ultimately open-ended and thus never reachable hopeful land of opportunity to permanently right all of these probably non-existent wrongs against them.

We the people let this kind of thing happen because we the people buy into this kind of thing. They aren't selling us anything we didn't buy from them. If we didn't buy it, they'd have sold us something else, probably equally odious in the end whether or not it was as obvious as this or not.

While our collective modern intellectual and psychological exhaustion with trying to make sense of our truly warped world and the people who made it and the horrors of what that says about us may not always work well and probably will not, we can at least thankfully point to that and say it is thanks to this we have the modern sense of cynicism that gives us a chance to grab the reigns solidly, and pull back from disaster. Our collective history shows we won't, but perhaps a self-derived deceptive and deluded false hope is better than one sold to us by someone else. At least when it all falls apart, we can blame it on a conspiracy of one, headed by the person staring back at us in the mirror.

We have met the enemy, and probably wondered if we needed a shave when we looked at them.

From the "Why didn't they realize how bad they suck 20 years ago?" file...

Copeland started the show off on the wrong foot, literally. He tripped as he took to the stage, and then banged his gong at the wrong time so that "the big pompous opening to the show is a damp squib."

He did not hear Summers' opening riff to "Message In a Bottle," and Sting in turn misheard Copeland's drum intro -- "so we are half a bar out of sync with each other. Andy is in Idaho."

Even their fans knew how awful they were decades ago. Maybe being that close to the speakers really does cause brain damage and deadening of discriminatory abilities like... taste, and musical timing...

Another new post of mine on /.

But have you given thought to the slippery slope?

Those "powers" will be in place for the next White House occupant.

I've said this for years and no one ever believes it. They believe the liberal claptrap that only Republicans ever violate our rights and the principles of this nation. NO SUCH THING IS TRUE. ALL politicians seek to conserve power to themselves, to attract power to themselves, to serve themselves. It is simply that the liberals have a better sounding pile of claptrap to sell. The end result is always the same: every weakening of our system in favor of statism over the individual results in an opening to further weaken it by the next opportunistic self-aggrandizing set of idiots.

The liberals are anti-porn for the political correctness angle from their feminist branch. The conservatives are anti-porn from the moral correctness angle from their fundamentalist branch. BOTH sides have horribly anti-freedom ideas that have great amounts in common and they all boil down to them, the politically avaricious, being in power and us being with none. And they do it by selling us fear. Fear of terrorism, fear of sexism, fear of immorality, fear of racism, fear, fear, fear. Above all, they sell us a way to avoid taking responsibility for our lives. They sell us guilt. They sell us the idea that the world is full of evil things, that we caused it all, and that if we just hand over the power to them, they will hide our guilt, at least until the next time they need to use it against us.

Global warming, pornography, tobacco, crime, hunger, terrorism, etc. You name it, everything brought to you in the way of rule by crisis and fear thereof is a an evil lie and myth wrapped in convenient facts and seasoned with half-truths from someone else's point of view.

They sell us temporary absolution and enable self-denial.

We don't take care of our kids, teach them about sex and death and the world, and we let the state raise them in the public schools. We let the television raise them at home. And we encourage each other to believe that we do the best job possible under impossible conditions with their tacit cooperation. We simply find scapegoats de jure to blame for it not actually working right. We clap ourselves on the back saying the spate of Internet predators is someone else's fault and not that we have handed off our nation to a Lord of the Flies existance. All in the name of we the people not holding on to the responsibility that goes with the power of individual will and self determination and they the avaricious gaining the power, for if you will not accept the responsibility, you will not hold the power with which it goes.

Yet another /. post of mine...

That's what we're becoming. So totally wrapped up in the idea that we have some sort of "right" to exist that after engaging in hundreds of years of logical scientific inquiry, finding mountains of evidence that the planet's weather is dynamic, vibrant, and above all fickle, that there are regular up and down periods of cold and hot, we then turn a blind eye to it and against everything we just spent all that time digging up, and proclaim that the world should always have been exactly as it was on June 17, 1931, in Passaic, NJ or something to that effect, and that we must move Heaven and Earth to make it stay that way.

Of course, I'm sure the ancestors of the present day people thought that as they watched the Earth begin to thaw from the last ice age, and the oceans rose to cover the continental shelves and give rise to the planet-wide myths about a globe covering flood. Except, they didn't have scientific evidence in huge piles of books showing that this sort of thing happens all the time regardless of what the bipedal monkeys are up to.

It has been warmer than this in the past. Much warmer. It has been colder than this in the past. Much colder. We know this for a fact. We know that this happens with or without our activities. And we know that there is NOTHING we can do at our present technological level about it. So why do we insist that we are the ones causing it when for over half a million years it happened several times and we've only had this supposedly evil technology for only less than

.0003 of that time?

Because the global warming is real and there are people in this world and always have been who want the masses to hand over power over their lives to them. And so they trot out to us a false premise, that we are totally responsible for an actually natural occurence in the long span of planetary history, and another one that they can save us from ourselves if only we give them the reigns of power. Seems like the phoney-baloney oil crisis that never happened in the 70s, the phoney-baloney global starvation crisis that never happened in the 60s, the phoney-baloney Communist scare of the 50s that was horsehockey, and ten million other crises.

It seems on the surface that we are supremely full of ourselves and yet in truth we are terribly dubious, completely without hope, and utterly given to embracing our own fallibility. There is no faith in ourselves in this idea that we caused global warming and still none in the idea that we can stop it. Only false hollow beliefs put forth to enrich the power of others.

Have faith in our progress and our natures that we are not so bad as we would think and as others would posit. We have greatness unknown and unmatched simply waiting to be explored. Once we dreamed of exploring the universe and doing so in style and comfort where now we dream simply of returning to primitive conditions lest Mother Earth shrug us off in anger over our insolence. Mother Earth is a nonentity and the physics of the world merely uncaring and indifferent to us. We cannot make the world stay in steady state, we can only live around it, and we are supremely capable of doing it. It was never of question if we can, but if we will.

There are problems with how we treat the environment, but growing the power of the state over the power of the individual, regressing to dreary primitive states, embracing inanities like hemp and bio diesel, and forgetting all the wonderous things we've thought up in the past to overcome each problem in turn, is to turn our back on being human, and all the best things about that. We can solve the problems and there need be no doom and gloom, and the solutions need not involve handing more power over to those who have far too much already and not nearly the wisdom to know what to properly do with it.

The world will shrug. We will move with it.

More evidence that our reasoning is seriously fucked up

(Solicitor General Paul) Clement also argued that the appeals court was correct in holding that aliens outside the United States have no rights under the U.S. Constitution.

And yet, when you go to a foreign nation where the age of consent is different and lower, if you have sex with someone of the proper age of consent in that jurisdiction, the fact that you are an American citizen means in the eyes of the US government, that you are bound by American laws and NOT the laws of the nation wherein the conduct at issue occurred.

In other words, American citizens are chattel, owned by the US government and beholden to it no matter where those citizens travel. Foreign citizens are chattel whenever captured. The ONLY difference: the US Constitution is held not to apply to them. Let me repeat, the ONLY difference between US and THEM is the federal government's whimsical interpretation of the moment as to whether the US Constitution applies to you or not.

THIS is why Guantanamo is BAD.

This is coming from a conservative Republican mind you.

From the "What possesses you, Microbrain?" file...

You cannot make this stuff up. You could try, but without an article with quoted names, no one would believe you. They watched for a half hour before calling the cops mind you and didn't pay her a dime.

What cheap bastards.

An Inconvenient Truth

Well, did you really expect him to be less of a total hypocrite than all the other politicians?

Me, I'm sitting back waiting for further warming, which has been long coming, so we can see a brief resurgence of the wine industry in south England before nature being her cyclical self goes cold again. It's happened before, it will happen again, with or without us.

So power up Al Gore!

Sort of like how Iceland is in the northern hemisphere between Alaska and Sakhalin

quoth the stupefied from the article: "The electromagnetic spectrum runs from long-wavelength radio at one end to high-energy, short-wavelength X-rays and gamma rays on the other. Between microwaves and X-rays, lie T-rays, or terahertz radiation."

In reality, also between microwaves and X-rays are infrared, visible light, and ultraviolet and in fact, these come after T-rays. T-ray sit beyond far infrared.

Did you know that New Mexico sits between California and South Carolina?

Cruel and Unusual Punishment for Fish

What a crappy way to treat your scaly friends. Sure the water will keep them from smelling the odors but the last thing they need to see is your sweaty soiled behind as you go to wipe. Bonus Problem: your average immature male will be tempted to give them a shower when they go for a whizz.

Where's Betty White and PETA on this?

Sometimes they jump out at you...

"You can disagree with me about Iraq all you want, but you gotta admit I got some big ones. Even Condi here thinks so."

From the We Couldn't Get This Lucky Department...

Well, I think this makes sense in a weird way...

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA-Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.

BBspot - Internet to Observe National Holidays

BBspot - Internet to Observe National Holidays

Further Not Getting The Point Admissions

This yokel is yet another inductee. Farenheight 451, a book about a future where books are banned and burned, is protested for having dirty language in it. Quote: "If they can't find a book that uses clean words, they shouldn't have a book at all." Exactly the sentiments of the government burning books in Farenheight 451.

Duh.

Further Idiocy, Re: Disturbed Covers Land Of Confusion By Genesis

What the heck is this stuff? Well, I can only surmise some people have played way too much Monopoly, watched way too much History Channel, and gotten way too high on some serious drugs.

Yup, common folks are victims of some pasty white cigar smoking guys behind a lot of murderous mutant soldiers bringing war and death on the people. Little girls who look like Dora the Explorer are being urged to strap bombs on themselves by strange beardy guys. And when the revolution comes, there will be more murderous violence by the supposed downtrodden and in the end it will all be about money.

Does anyone else remember the war of San Ysidro when the US Empire opened fire on milling starving Californians, leaving a bloody mess of Jordache jeans and Birkenstock sandals? No? Me neither.

I hear Dora is nicely unexploded as well.

Handicapped Safety in Meriden

This was an impulse shoot as I left Meriden City Hall. In a city that hassles homeowners for minor infractions regarding the conditions of their houses and yards, especially poor neighborhoods like mine, I thought this was priceless. South side of Meriden City Hall, improperly installed, and completely defective current state. Put full adult weight down on this laterally as one might do in a fall, and it will go down. Note the improper Sonotube® usage. First, they are too small and guaranteed to crack with any appreciable lateral force. They should have been eight to ten inch size instead. Second, the posts must be properly centered for maximum strength. These are basics known to anyone who has ever installed a new mailbox post. How did this construction crew miss it? More to the point, how did this pass inspection? Welcome to the dystopia.

My take on... D&D Online Stormreach

This is very preliminary so I'll make it quick.

After my first evening of the 7 day free trial my verdict is: VERY GOOD, KEEP IT UP!

It was very quick to register, my cable modem got a workout downloading the 1.7 GIGABYTES of data to start, and then I waited another half hour for it to update after installation on first run. Thereafter, smooth, no crashes, pretty straightforward.

Single biggest problem: movement controls. I HATE those mouse+keyboard systems ala Doom and always have. That will never change. The ubiquitous nature of twin joystick gamepads is something they needed to take into account for a first person/third person ghost run around game like this. Why is it that the only game making proper use of a gamepad on a PC that I've yet tried is Rayman 3? One stick to control camera, another to move, several buttons to control and fire and jump. This game cries out for gamepad compatibility. I'll have to try creating a Logitech profile for this game.

As I said, VERY GOOD. I intend to buy the full game by the end of the trial. Seems worth it for the sheer amount of things to do. There's literally a quest around every corner.

My take on... Neverwinter Nights

I picked this up after seeing it on the shelves at a mall store. I'd recently gotten into playing games again when they were to be found at Best Buy for $2.99 to $5.99. Demon Stone, Silent Hill 4, so on. Not too shabby. One of the games was Baldur's Gate II, Shadows of Amn with Throne of Bhaal and I liked them a lot. They were somewhat complex to the uninitiated but I got used to them. I beat Demon Stone in two nights of after work play by the way. I highly recommend it.

Anyhow, I decided to try out Neverwinter Nights after seeing a blurb in Baldur's Gate II that you could import characters from there to Neverwinter Nights. Well, they did plan it at the time. Didn't turn out that way. They figured that since the initial module reset your character to level 1 and no inventory, why bother? Still, it would have been nice for the modules that didn't reset it. They didn't consider it at the time.

So I bought the Diamond edition and eagerly tore into it.

Whoa. Nice game. Magic weapons easily gotten, good armor, decently matched enemies and a storyline not too insulting to my intelligence.

So I beat the first adventure, finishing at level 16. Played into some of the others like Hordes of the Underdark and then went on to Infinite Dungeons and have since downloaded and installed the newest one. Go check it out for yourself, I won't tell you anything, not even the name. Two words though: rideable horses.

If you want more, just search out the site hosting tons of player made modules. I personally recommend Dances With Rogues, a really well done ADULT module centered on a female player character.

Yeah, it's short, so sue me. I never said this would be a big write-up, just my take. That take is: BUY NEVERWINTER NIGHTS. PREPARE FOR NEVERWINTER NIGHTS 2 COMING AT THE END OF THIS MONTH.

A couple things that caught my attention...

Jack Thomspon still sucks. Like this wasn't a no-brainer. One wonders when someone will come up with a game where the target is to assassinate the most ambulance chasing lawers with a stunning likeness of Jack included. Thompson you moron, Pac Man was considered GAMBLING in my home town and by local ordinance they banned arcade game playing by those under eighteen. So we rode our bikes from our (somewhat) nice suburb into the nearby nasty drug and gang infested city to play instead. Did I turn into a gambler? No. Did I become a monster for all the blowing up and shooting things during decades of playing? Did I become a murderer because I play AD&D? Or a Satan worshipper? Self-righteous fuckers never understand and only help spread the idea that we aren't responsible for ourselves whatsoever and need someone to think for us. No thanks, I can think for myself.

Smokers less well treated than other parents? Yup. I grew up with a father, stepmother, stepfather, and sister who all smoked cigarettes. I smoke pipes and cigars. Did they cause this? Fuck no. Anti-smokers encouraged me. If there's anything I hate, it's being told by totally obvious hypocrites what to do and what not to do in a patronizing "you're too stupid to think for yourself" way. Tell me porn is wrong? Well, I'm downloading that bisexual orgy video. Drinking is wrong? I'm cracking a 40 my man. Tell me I can't smoke? I'll puff in your face. If they wanted to convince me not to smoke, self righteous assholeness was not the way. Come to think of it, that's one of the big turnoffs I see in the environmental movement. Not surprising that they and the left in general are so well liked by people who can't wait to wallow in hypocrisy themselves like youthful twits who dress in black and whine and moan all day about the lack of niceness in the world, but treat other people with discourtesy and rudeness at the mall. Not me. When I saw some anti-semitic claptrap the other day, I immediately thanked G-d I married into a Jewish family. Tomorrow, I think I'll spend lunch smoking and revving my gas guzzling SUV's engine while farting methane. After that, I'll go home and eat a 2/3 pound burger and burn some leaves and inhale the smoke. Fuck off you self-righteous twats.

Global Warming Caused By Man?

According to this Yahoo news article, we are now nearing the warmest point we've seen in one million years. Of course, Earth HAS been warmer, much warmer over its FOUR BILLION plus year history. Not just during the hellish earlier phases either. Are CO2 levels being caused by man? Going by the venerated Vostok ice cores, used as and when convenient by the chicken little global warming brigades, I'd say not. Check it out for yourself. Note the graph on this Wiki page.

Note the regularity of the graph? Did mankind somehow send CO2 back in time to cause previous spikes? Or could Earth simply have a regular cycle of CO2 buildup, washout, and rebuild? Oh no, we can't consider that. We are the supreme creatures of the universe and all that happens must somehow be caused by us. Look for continued attempts to find a link between mankind and the SE Asian tsunami, Mt. St. Helens, and extragalactic supernovae for that matter.

EDIT: This just in! Whoa, when did we, mankind, cause this one? Did we send nuclear waste to the sun? Did the Enterprise make a booboo? Oh, that was TV. Right. Nevertheless, look for blame to be laid on the avaricious west and straight white Christian male hegemony. Save the sun!

Today's Long Lost Post

The Alliance for Sweden wins the Swedish general elections. This sounds better than the Alliance for Fresno winning, so... good job. Well done.

In another dramatic turn of events, the Pope recently referred to a more than six hundred year old interfaith religious discourse which trotted out the FOURTEENTH CENTURY idea that Islam was a violent faith. Taken aback, aghast, and otherwise flustered, Muslims around the world gave the response that this was not true. They were a religion of peace, and if the mention by the Pope wasn't taken back, throats would be slit, Rome and the Vatican would be destroyed, and all infidels would drown in a sea of their own blood. We of the Unified Effort for Equal and Identical Fighting Against Conformity welcome them to the Not Getting the Point Club. They join our other major religious member, the born again Christians seeking to stop killing at abortion clinics using firebombs to kill everyone at the abortion clinic.

In the area of music, tastes and brain power continue to lessen. Not content with allowing Metallica to obliterate all of what little artistic credibility there was in Bob Seger's original version of Turn the Page, which included a fleeting shot of Ginger Lynn Allen shoving the business end of a dildo up her nether regions, the music world now gives us Disturbed covering Genesis. You may begin your betting pools on when Alien Ant Farm will cover Eye in the Sky.

Let this be a lesson. Quiet ignorance of Murray Head is not a solution to that damn song and if we'd only been a little less negligent, maybe this could have been avoided.

In closing, I wish to put in my two cents on the old question, What is America's favorite pasttime? The number one pasttime is avoiding responsibility. The number two pasttime is excoriating everyone else for the first one.

Hot juicy beef with a generous helping of sauce

Say that title while holding a fresh cooked burger from McDonald's or Burger King and people will think you're doing a commercial joke and not a very good one. Say that while holding your crotch and leering, and you're likely to be punched out.

It is in that spirit of noticing differences being dependant on circumstances and context that I note the new Burger King BK Stacker sandwich. A quadruple bypass meal of up to FOUR beef patties, cheese by the truck, and a good helping of bacon on their usual seeded bun; this new concoction might constitute your daily recommended calorie intake for a week and your fat intake for a month.

Did I mention the "Stacker Sauce"?

Feel free to write your own porn jokes.

Addendum: Go look up and see how many people in the USA have the last name Stacker with a first initial of B.

Internet Dickery

Is Internet Dickery a justification for requiring people to strap on a stun-gun circuit attached to their PC before posting online? Most days, the Internet certainly makes you think so, doesn't it?

Of course, the worse dickery to me is in the abject hypocrisy of the embracing of the blogging phenomena by people who abuse the shorthand "tl/dr" which means "too long/didn't read" everywhere else, and often enough in replies to blogs be they Blogger or Live Journal.

One wonders what will become of mankind when in the modern western world attention spans have shortned to less than those of a chihuahua on amphetamine at Starbucks when to actually think and then act on that ability by communicating what one knows has become a target for idiot dickery and insults. When the mere ability to think is regarded by the shallow and superficial as showing off, and the conveyance of one's intelligence is regarded as subtle bragging, then something has clearly gone wrong.

Of course, we knew that years ago. I guess the Internet is just good at reminding one that thinking, speaking, writing, and other endeavors requiring any sort of intellectual labor are ill regarded these days and that brainless thoughtless gliding through life is celebrated.

Oh well.

If anyone in my huge readership of two or four people are paying attention, you will have noticed that I've replaced the Emo Philips banner with an RHCE quiz. Why? Well certainly not because I like Emo any less. Emo Philips I mean. Emo music I detest. The reason is that I intend to have Linux+ certification by the first of August, LPIC I certification by the first of September, and LPIC II certification by the first of October. By the first of December I intend to have RHCE and by spring of the following year, RHCA. Ambitious for me, less so for some, more than for others. In the middle of all that I also intend to get Network+ and Security+ and maybe A+ along the way.

One needs goals I think even if we don't reach them. The true goals are the journey to the goals we make up for the journey.

In the name of the environment and saving mankind, mankind negates what makes it special: democracy and free will

At what point did the energy efficiency movement abandon the principles of a democratic republic that power flows from the people to government and not the other way around, and that government exists for mutual needs in concert with individual rights?

Taxes are now accepted as a way of *forcing* other people to do what we want now? Not by me.

It is the job of the technologists to come up with solutions to problems, the job of businessmen to find what will sell, the job of social-public writers to convince people of free will to make changes, but it is not the job of any one group of people to get the government to impose its police powers on the people to force them into compliance with a given set of ideas.

Even less so when those ideas are on the level of faith and beyond discussion or argument which much of the energy efficiency sector's behavior demonstrates and has since the sixties. It comes down to: "Earth will die if people don't do as we say, don't argue, do what we say."

This flies in the face of rational scientific exploration never mind democracy. History has many times heard the argument that doing/not doing X will result in Y hence our solution Z must be implemented or catastrophe will result. None of them ever ends well.

To demonstrate the ramifications of this insistance on abuse of governance to force specific economic and political beliefs, what do you think would happen when the tax suddenly nuclear skyrockets the cost of doing business for cable, satellite, phone, electrical, and other utilities' field services?

Will a simple five minute truck roll costing $200 be worth it to you? Put *your* money where *your* mouth is. If you truly believe a milage tax is okay, start adding a little extra to your utility bills today. Do it at the store too because everything came by truck. And tip everyone you do anything with because they'll be paying more.

I have faith in science and human tendency to come through in the end. I will not be cowed by nonsense pop-environmentalism and fear of catastrophe into giving up on that. We heard dire warnings in the 70s that were supposed to have finished us off by the 90s. I call bs on this and am confident that mankind will overcome.

I think it sets a new standard in irony that arrogant anthrocentrism is leading towards saving humanity by annhilating democracy and free will without which humans are no different than an internal combustion engine.

Fedora Core 5 Verdict

Not that anyone was asking for this, but I feel obligated to say it. With a little over two months of work with it, I have to give Fedora Core 5 an A+++. Excellent repos, much improved stability on KDE, and automatic installation slickness that rocks.

Right now, I have FC5 on a P4 2GHz box w/768MB RAM, and 2x250GB drives as software RAID 0, w/Ext3 on LVM. Samba took only the usual minor configuration to make work as an NT4 PDC for a Windows LAN. I now have what looks like a very stable household file server that kicks some serious ass.

My hat is off to the Red Hat and Fedora Core people on a job well done.

I would only like to request that FC6 contain an option on install to use an encrypting file system with LVM and software RAID to increase security as well as some sort of Gnome/KDE gui goodness to make Samba sit up and bark without tedious smb.conf editing.

Ghost in the Shell thermoptics getting closer

One can hardly wait to go out in one of these for a game of touch football.

I must be taking crazy pills

I must be taking crazy pills
As the gas prices in the USA continue to rise, the political hot air does too. More deadly than a methane clathrate release, this hot air seems to be headed for doing what the sun cannot, and that is slowly baking us to death. Ideal time to be a Montgolfier if you can get close enough to collect some.

I listened to NP(Z)R and their All (NO) Things (Logic) Considered. I watched the nightly network news. I listened to the radio. I read the newspaper. I threw up in my mouth.

IS ANYFUCKINGONE ACTUALLY THINKING LOGICALLY AND CLEARLY AT ALL??? I feel like Mugatu in Zoolander being the only one noticing that every one of Derek Zoolander’s looks is the same one look.

1. Oil Prices
   We’re not out of oil, we’re not running low, and we’re not running into problems getting to it and recovering it. We’re watching yet another market manipulation by OPEC and non-OPEC oil producing nations no different than the so-called energy crisis (that never was) of the 70s when we had even-odd license plate number rationing.If you believe the news, the shortage is being purposely caused by “Big Oil”, which in all cases is defined as strictly American oil companies.


2. Additives
   We’re requiring additives, neither of which are in proper supply, and given the long term supply picture and well known seasonal variations, the suppliers don’t have much of a choice on pricing.We could stop requiring the additives and eliminate a big chunk of the problem and you would think a looming economic disaster as a result of this collective unfunded mandate-a-thon on the people would spur someone to consider it. Well, you’d think that if you were maybe something other than a human from this point in history. The present inhabitants don’t notice this simplicity.


3. EPA Regulations
   Thanks to a congress that has for decades ignored the Constitution and simply delegated their authority away to various executive branch agencies which should not be a problem in the first place since those delegations are to enforce and dream up new regulations which neither branch should be doing under the theory of “government being the lesser competent of the two, the other being the people, they should do as little as possible”, we have an environmentally unhealthy obsession with fact and science free environmentalism where we make up regulations based on politics and not on science and logic. This didn’t work for Mao with the Chinese agricultural system and it won’t work for us.
   
   We have allowed the EPA and the various state environmental agencies to make a simple cost benefit analysis on the subject of renovation of oil refineries to modern EPA standards something so simple, your dog could do it. I’ll spoil it so don’t wait for the cable version: it’s pure profit due to ever increasing demand and obviously decreasing supply to close them down and pure loss to comply.


4. Consumption
   Unless you’re working out of your home, chances are you have to drive to work. I know of no business that wraps its schedule around some group of ninnies’ idiocy about the environment which is becoming yet again one of those lies that people always fall for like “it’s for the children”, “it’s to stop terrorism”, “the check’s in the mail”, and “I won’t come in your mouth”.
   
   Also, since we are becoming more affluent, we are more and more being able to afford to drive to work. If you live within walking distance of work, you either work out of the house or you have a really low end job for all places outside of downtown Manhattan and working in Manhattan can be its own punishment anyhow.
   
   We cannot simply stop driving to work, build ninety mile subway systems, knock down thousands of houses to put in new rail systems, infringe at will on others’ freedoms simply in the name of theories and social engineering.


5. TAXES
   Goodness knows we already pay too much money so the government can bribe us to vote them back in with our own money. In ancient days, robber barbarians noted that if they didn’t totally sack the agrarians, they could sack them just a little each year and then later on sack them a constant basis in return for not actually sacking them in the classic sense. You paid them to protect you from other robber bandits which they’d do anyways since you were their livestock, and if you didn’t they’d sack you themselves.
   
   Thus was born government and other protection rackets.
   
   One of their wonderful slow blood lettings is to hit us for money at the pumps every single time. Federal and state, there are taxes on the gas which serve only to make the situation worse.The government would have it that if it eliminated the taxes that it would be like a shoe horn and have done its job of expanding your wallet enough for that extra room freed up by the tax elimination to be taken up with increased oil company profits. The average consumer is apparently just stupid enough to believe this.

The best the politicians can do is to scream at each other and scream at American oil companies. They pose idiocy such as INCREASED taxes (SAY FUCKING WHAT?!) to force a change in consumption (as if you have a choice in driving to work or roller skating instead), INCREASING the ethanol/etc. blend requirements as if the supply problem that already exists at lower demand levels will magically eliminate itself and supply twice as much additives as they already cannot, TAXING the oil companies and thus giving a big FUCK YOU to countless Americans whose 401K plans invest in those companies, and giving you a $100 rebate check which at the current rate of increase will fill a single SUV in southern California in about one week from now.

Solutions are obvious. Eliminate as many taxes as possible on the gas in this country and give fair warning that taxes on the oil and gasoline companies will follow in retribution should they take up the slack by jacking up the price. Relax the regulations and declare an emergency and stop requiring additives that are in short supply and do everything possible to encourage increasing refinery capacity rather than discouraging it with insane environmental policies which make no sense because as a whole, they are dragging us to economic and social collapse and collapsed societies no longer care about the environment; they only care about survival and that means fuck the environment.

I keep hearing Princess Leia’s words in my ears about the tighter the grip and all. We seem to be locked into a crazy world of crazy people who are truly believing against all logic to the contrary that their actions will the opposite of what logic dictates. Counterproductivity. Inefficiency. Misdirection. Self-delusion. We’re drowning in a sea of idiocy and believing it’s holy water. If only it were gasoline.

What an Easter

What an Easter…
     So, was I the only gentile in a 2-1 Jewish home who got the double holiday?

     It began on Good Friday with my wife telling me about the weekend special dinner. I replied, “we’re not having naked horny guys with furry goat legs over for dinner.” She of course screamed, “that’s seder, s-e-d-e-r, NOT satyr!”

     Yeah, I knew, but it’s a yearly tradition. The only bitter herb I know was on WKRP and she threatened to throw a bottle of horseradish at me.

     So anyhow, we watched The Ten Commandments. Twice. Two different versions. I was aghast at the realistic portrayal of violence in the newer version, and at the future people of Israel being led around by the president of the National Rifle Association in the older one.

     My wife as is her skill waited until the last second to put up the roast, and then kicked it into maximum. Inside of two hours, it was about as tough as an old carpet and about as tasty. All oils had been removed and now encircled the meat in the cooker and the moisture boiled off like spit on an Arizona highway in July.

     Overcooked beef, beef drippings, water, crock pot and seasonings… beef soup.

     We couldn’t afford a lamb bone. Oh well. We couldn’t find candles until the second day of Hanukkah either. I think we got our Christmas tree up within a week of the day and bought Halloween handout candy on October 31.

     (insert rolling eyes emoticon here)

Odds n Ends

Odds n’ Ends
     Well, over this weekend a lot of things got done, and a lot of other things did not. Most importantly, the much needed cleaning and renovation did not. After the mortgage payment, there’s not much left over. Here’s hoping a family member moves back home with some money to kickstart things.

     What also did not get done was to find a good adoptive home for the five brand new kittens gracing our place. Well, sort of new. Old enough to eat like voracious… things that eat a lot. Beautiful gray tigers and one black kitten. Need to get to the vet to get some referrals to adoption centers she trusts. Don’t want them going to some asshole to use to train fighting dogs.

     What got done was my decision to move past shock, anger, and denial at the loss of data on an ext3 Linux partition holding my main Fedora Core 3 workstation’s data. I’ve used that box and abused that box for a year, but I made the spectacularly bad decision to remove an old unused Windows XP Home partition and move and resize the Linux partition using Partition Commander. Should have used Qtparted from a Knoppix boot CD instead. Managed to fuck things up so bad that between fdisk, parted, and fsck nothing could be done to retrieve it.

     This experience did teach me though that the majority of that partition was Linux stuff. Stuff that I installed as part of the full DVD install with everything including the onions, chilli, and the kitchen sink. I lost some PGP keys which I probably backed up to someplace or not. I lost some source code from dozen projects that I can resurrect from memory and improve on them when I do. I lost pr0n that I can download again anytime I want to get aMule up and running again.

     Now into acceptance phase, I decided to go back to experimenting. The FC3 boot disk will allow an FTP/HTTP install no problem. The FC5 disk not. WTF?! Hmmm… I shut down and swap out the cheap CNET Ethernet adapter with a 3Com which I have a case or two of on hand and suddenly the install goes right.

     I went out to do some shopping like buying a cheap USB2.0 external HD case to make use of a spare 40GB drive I had on hand which came with a used Dell into which instead went an 80GB drive from the previous Fedora box which had received a 250GB drive before it was rebuilt from Windows to Linux. When I got back, most of the network install was completed.

     Things like Really Slick Screensavers don’t want to install due to dependency Hell issues, but sooner or later I’ll manage. The new gnome-screensavers paradigm requires a .desktop file and a .xml file to go with each screensaver. Though I did find a nice way to make the skyrocket screensaver my desktop backround. I can get them on my box, just not where the screensaver preferences tchotchke will notice them, and yes, they’ve been copied to the right places and the .sh migration script run. Oh yeah, the new Gnome interface in FC5 doesn’t allow advanced manipulation of the settings for each screen saver. No advanced tab. Not as my normal login and not as root either.

     Oh well.

     I got the WinXPPro box to work, fileshare to work, and the USB external HD. Now I can shovel things about without problems.

     Meanwhile, the anti-stress pills prescribed for me after a stint at the hospital for chest pains are only making be drowsy and dizzy, not lowering my stress level. No, my heart is fine. Supposedly. Docs bombarded me with radiation and hooked up wires to my nipples, I felt so damn kinky. I was still pulling those sticky tabs off parts of me for two days.

     I should, if I can find the interest, start writing more.

VMWare Works

Well, after you spend two days fighting with Windows XP Pro to get that set up right to where you need and want it. Once that is out of the way, no problem.

So far I've gotten CentOS and Ubuntu to work and am going after Fedora Core 5. Windows tchotchke apps and Linux open source stuff all at once. I am in nerdvana...

Python code example for the heck of it...

Can anyone guess what this is?

def routerGet(ip):
     def snmpGet (ip, oidSpecific):
          from os import popen
          return popen("snmpget -v 1 -c public -O qv %s .1.3.6.1.2.1.%s" %(ip, oidSpecific)).read().strip('\n')
     
     def ipAdEntAddr(ip):
          from os import popen
          return popen("snmpwalk -v 1 -c public -O qv %s .1.3.6.1.2.1.4.20.1.1" % ip).read().splitlines()
     
     iAEA = ipAdEntAddr(ip)
     for walk in iAEA:
          if walk[:-1] <> '127.0.0.' and walk <> '0.0.0.0':
               ipAdEntIfIndex = snmpGet(ip, '4.20.1.2.'+walk)
               iAENM = '4.20.1.3.'+ walk
               iD = '2.2.1.2.' + ipAdEntIfIndex
               iT = '2.2.1.3.' + ipAdEntIfIndex
               iS = '2.2.1.5.' + ipAdEntIfIndex
               iIO = '2.2.1.10.' + ipAdEntIfIndex
               iOO = '2.2.1.16.' + ipAdEntIfIndex
               collect = map((lambda arg: apply(snmpGet, (ip, arg))), [iD, iT, iAENM, iS, iIO, iOO])
               ethlist = ['EN1', 'Eth', 'eth', 'ETH', 'ie0']
               wanlist = ['WAN', 'fra', '106', 'wan', 'ATM', 'FR-', '159']
               if collect[0][:3] in wanlist or collect[1][:3] in wanlist:
                    iftype="WAN"
                    if walk[:3] == "10.":
                         iftype="WAN Management:"
               elif collect[0][:3] in ethlist or collect[1][:3] in ethlist:
                    iftype="Ethernet"
               print iftype
               print "IP Address:", walk
               print "Subnet Mask:", collect[2]
               print "Interface Speed:", collect[3]
               print "Octets In:", collect[4]
               print "Octets Out:", collect[5], '\n'

It’s a script for extracting basic router network info from a router, namely SDSL/IDSL routers.

Slashdot post of mine, feeling frisky and ticked tonight

Simple solution(Score:3)
by suitepotato (863945) on Monday March 27, @07:24PM (#15007488)
Design a computer with tcp/ip, http, ftp, etc native onboard with a basic interface. It connects and downloads whatever OS you want and installs it without an OS already being onboard beyond the "super bios" skeleton OS there for doing the aforementioned primary OS download. That ends the chicken and egg argument as to having to have one OS already on there to download the OS you really want. No more "Windows tax", no more preloaded PCs unless you order them that way. Everything is bare.

DRM? Fine, put it on there so that OSes that require authenticity of initial downloaded files have it to check themselves on install. Those OSes that don't, can ignore it. No other shenanigans linking the thing to only those OSes (cough, Windows, cough) that rigidly adhere to the dogma that the PC user should be the b*tch of an **AA organization.

We could have done this years ago with a simple thing like QNX onboard and finished all this crap. No muss, no fuss, no tears. Simple, easy, even a Geico caveman could do it.

Need an architecture to allow the formatting? Fine, default to FAT16 and put the primary files needed there, boot to them, they extract and build and reboot and then connect out to whatever secure servers are needed to get the rest, and finish the customer partitions and formats. This is not hard to do people.

Why does this sort of obviousness keep missing people? MS can do f-all about bundling. I don't care. I actually like them to bundle. F knows I DON'T want to have to deal with a mini-VS to compile every frigging Windows app I want to add. I like it being done already. I like having things already bundled compiled on Linux and being able to add whatever later.

Want to open a can of worms? Which serious Linux user ain't been farked by the distro coming by default with code bases that are completely wrong for something we want to use? Like the wrong net-snmp version to use with yapsnmp? Okay, uninstall, remove, reinstall, rebuild, fail that thirteen times, write off certain other things, make do. I never have to deal with this on Windows. No such thing. I'm reasonably certain writing a wrapper to put SNMP functions in Python or any other language would be a lot easier on Windows than on Linux where the slightest change in files totally fouls everything up.

Okay, I've ranted enough. The quick and dirty and ultimately best solution is right in front of us. Make the average personal computer "smart" enough to be able to go get an OS of the user's choice whenever they need. The standards and frameworks are already on the shelf. We would rather not do it in favor of bashing Microsoft and wrapping our Linux using selves in victimhood. Whatever. Not my bag. I have a night of recompiling to get to.
--
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)

Forget Lords of Acid

Pussy is into Beastie Boys.

My cats were whining and meowing and I couldn't figure out why. They're fine, their bedding was washed recently, their food and water was full. Exasperated, I belted out, "whatcha watcha watch want? Watcha want? Tell me watcha watcha watcha want. Watcha want."

Who knew that cats like the Beastie Boys?