Hamas != Palestinian

The endless conflating of those two wholly separate terms is continuing with gay abandon on the net and in the media and I felt it would be good to point out a few things.

Hamas
Hamas is an Islamist organization which has committed and taken responsibility for numerous acts of violence involving grievous injury and death specifically meted out to civilian non-combatants.

Their primary goal is that of creating an Islamic theocratic state in place of what are currently Gaza, Israel and the West Bank.

Their secondary goal is the elimination of all Jews and other non-Muslims from that land.

They have publicly and repeatedly called for the death of Jews, Israelis, Americans, westerners, and non-Muslims.

They have publicly and repeatedly not only stated an approval of violence including maiming and murder, but have stated that these things are necessary and righteous in the course of pursuit of their causes.

They are largely composed of Muslim Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza strip and were put into power through (somewhat) Democratic action (of questionable legitimacy). Thus far, they have enjoyed the support of a plurality of Gazan citizens who vote, but are reported to freely intimidate those suspected of having opposing sympathies into not voting through implied threat to life and limb.

Palestinian
Palestinians are a relatively new sociopolitical grouping having changed over the years from meaning anyone living in the land of Syria Palestina as created by Rome following the destruction of Israel and the Second Temple to specifically those living in mostly the same area, short of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, and being mostly Muslim and Arab.

At one time Palestinian also included Jews who lived within the same area as well as Samaritans, Druse, Christians, and Karaite. The common meaning of 2009 is Arab Muslim from Gaza or the West Bank but this is of course extremely deceptively limited in scope given the actual demographics.

Gazan
The Gazans are the people of the area known as "the Gaza strip", a section of land laid out a long time ago and codified as recognized in UN resolutions. Largely Muslim Arabs, there are also Persians and east Asians there as well to smaller degree. The Arabs are broken down to Egyptian, Arabian, Syrian, and other descent. The vast majority of the current Muslim Arab population is perhaps two generations removed from an immigrated ancestor. Said immigrants came on the pretext of working on building the area up during the British Mandate but that pretty much went nowhere right quick.

Okay, now that we've separated them, it is clearer what is going on now. Hamas and its operatives were put into power by the Palestinian people, and kicked out of power only in the West Bank (like Gaza but up north near Syria). In Gaza, they continue to hold official power and before and after the taking of that position of governance have seen fit to intimidate, threaten, harass, and assault a neighboring state, Israel.

It should be obvious that in nature, when faced with an attack from a predator, the prey of the moment must either flee or fight back or be destroyed whether instantly or slowly over time.

If the USA saw fit to put a given political party with well known beliefs and philosophies into power who espoused the righteousness of the destruction of Canada, the hatred of Canadians, and then engaged in violent assault on Canada and its citizens, the obvious result after the first American rockets were fired would be complaint by Canada, then military action by Canada.

It would be illogical and irrational to assume that anyone not acting out of other ulterior motives would seriously believe any American civilians killed in the reciprocal attack by Canada were entirely innocent. They are citizens of a nation and society who saw fit to empower or not stand against the empowerment of an organization which made promise of violent aggression and then carried it out.

It is and has been held for thousands of years that the citizens of any aggressor nation hold joint and several liability for the actions of their government as no government can effectively govern without the tacit cooperation of its citizens nor against their actual opposition.

The passivity or ineffective opposition of the citizenry of Gaza with regard to Hamas is irrelevant. That all citizens of any nation stand with, for, and to that nation and its fate is at the cornerstone of nationality and allegiance. It is not possible to tactically target with anything resembling a guarantee only those whose ideology and actions in concert with same make them what one would believe are legitimate targets, as opposed to some average Joe on the street.

Attempting to do so is to allow the other side freedom to operate, attack, and kill, and is therefore detrimental from the entire point of the exercise which is defense against an aggressor. If one attempts to do so for whatever reason, one must understand the disadvantage they invite and the risk they bring upon themselves and their cohorts.

Israel engaged in exactly this fundamentally risky strategy for several years, responding with extremely limited military actions, and targeted attacks on specific Hamas individuals whose guilt and complicity in the death of Israelis and others was beyond question. They tolerated assaults via rocket, machine gun fire, and suicide bombings from Hamas and tried to get third parties to intercede as well as relied upon the dim chance that some other party would pressure Hamas to cease its behavior, if only for the sake of the civilian populace.

This did not work and Hamas left Israel with no choice but to respond with military force.

Hamas, Gaza, and Palestinians are tied together by the willful decisions and actions of individuals. Hamas to engage in violence, and Gazan Palestinians to support that organization and their activities. They are not the same, but they make their fate under fire linked by choice. Israel is attacking the Palestinian Gazan state governed by Hamas. That civilians are being killed is entirely to be expected because those civilians either embraced and supported that government or did nothing to oppose it.

To claim that calls for the elimination of Hamas as a pernicious predatory player in the world arena is the same as calling for the destruction of Palestinians or Muslims in general is the same as claiming that the call to destroy the Nazis was necessarily in and of itself a call to destroy Germans.

Today, we have a Nazi-free Germany and although many German civilians were killed it was still less than the ancient tactic of slaughtering most of the population and thoroughly destroying the cultural continuity of the survivors. The modern concept of joint and several liability of a society in the consequences of its governments actions was held to with reservations and regrets, but with understanding that it cannot be reasonably avoided in the course of the action to defend against that aggressor force without effectively eliminating that reason altogether. That is, you can only be so lenient and picky in your response before your response degenerates to ineffectiveness, making the death and destruction that does happen pointless.

If there's one thing that most modern people can agree, that is that if one is going to engage in war, then for the sake of all involved including the citizenry of the other side, the action must not be for nothing. All humanity shares in this concept that things should be for a reason and actions not done half way so as to squander the sacrifices made.

The result of the war against Germany not being done in half measure was the salvation of the German people from the Nazi menace within, a continuance of German culture past the war to stop their aggression, the salvation of their victims not yet killed, the rebuilding of their society and its infrastructures, and the salvation of their honor in posterity not just by leaving survivors to make good on the chance to redeem themselves, but aiding them in doing just that in rejection of the defeated force of the past.

Today, Germany is better off for its defeat than had it been surrendered to, which would have left the German people to the tender mercies of the Nazis, who nihilistic tendencies and philosophies would in the end have resulted in a rapid downward degenerate spiral of internecine warfare within their society until most of them were dead and the rest thoroughly detested by the rest of human society for all time for the actions of their nation.

That last part, rehabilitation, is a necessary part of bringing about a true peace. When nations do battle and do not commit to rehabilitation of the defeated to rejoin the world community as a contributing member of world society, they do so at the peril of leaving a battered and dejected populace to stew in their defeat, and any economic deprivation resultant, and thus be open to the most fantastic promises of salvation by a would-be leader seeking their following to empower them towards another aggression.

The powers did that with Germany the first time and paid for it mightily in the Second World War. If Israel and the moderate Arab entities do not rebuild Gaza and teach them a path to keeping their mind on building their nation and making all the Palestinians and Gazans specifically comfortable and prosperous and none of this being some long off in the future dream hinging on their neighbor's destruction, then there will be more bloodshed to come.

This can't be in half measure. If you're going to join the battle, then the enemy dead should be done honor by making those deaths count. They cannot be killed with as much caring for the act as a mass murderer or serial killer has, and the deaths serving no concrete purpose. You must do your enemy the honor of accepting their choices, taking them seriously, and responding appropriately. If they will not be deterred, then at least do them the honor of bringing them swiftly to the fate they've chosen, and in your victory be merciful to the surviving defeated, and teach them well and better than their previous leaders, and make of their successors better than you found them.

Hamas tell is like they think it is...

...and so if you still deny Hamas is seriously fucked up, well then watch the arming and indoctrination of children. Oh fuck, just watch the video and listen to their own words.

 

Hamas in their own words at YouTube

You don't need propaganda against Hamas. They write it all themselves.

Courtesy of Little Green Footballs.

White people shouldn't be allowed to vote | Philadelphia Inquirer | 10/26/2008

Uh huh, can't make up that line, wouldn't even try. Go ahead and read the article: White people shouldn't be allowed to vote | Philadelphia Inquirer | 10/26/2008

My take on the writer...

MORON.

News flash dickhead, Obama's feared because he's a lifelong lefty and hangs out sociopolitically with lefties, who has less experience in governance of any size American population center than pretty much anyone else serving in the US Congress at the time of his run, and his only non-governmental experience was... oh yeah, he never had any. He's not been the executive of any private organization, never worked his way through the ranks of business, never if you'll excuse the term, slaved away for years in the workforce as the VAST MAJORITY OF AMERICANS OF ALL SKIN COLORS DO.

He's got as much if not more exclusivity and dumb blind luck as hard work in his background just like the outgoing GWB.

He doesn't have a clue how this country works, how economics works, what personal economic freedoms truly mean to the lifeforce of this nation, or, going by his pronouncements a shred of humility as he is presently selling us a nightmare picture of years of economic recession with himself as the shining savior who knows all and will (eventually) fix all (if we give up most of our self determination and listen to him and his "advisors").

In short, he's the comeuppance that Jesse Jackson and company deserve. They've posited for time out of mind that black people by virtue of their ancestors' suffering through slavery and (some of) their going through segregation and so on, that they are inherently nobler than white people and if they just had the power handed to them, they who know better and are better could make it all work better. White people could just sit under black leadership the way non-Muslims are expected to suffer dhimmitude in Islamic lands.

It's the same arrogance the left has. They know better, they've been unheeded longer and suffered the damage to their egos of being derided, and that combination of thinking better thoughts and not being accepted by the majority inherently means they are most fit to control and rule and could fix everything if they were just given the power.

It's the arrogance of everyone from mad scientists in movies to the Unabomber. They know better and if they just got the power, they'd show everyone.

Human sour grapes thinking. "You'll get yours, you'll see!"

So we get Obama, who is quite possibly the least fit person to sit in the White House since... well, his own predecessor GWB, and a truly dangerous number of the nation's African-Americans hang their hopes of all their ethnic brethren on his service, and so... what happens if he fucks it all up?

I know that if I were going to get behind a candidate on a single-issue vibe like so many have gotten behind Obama for no better reason than that he is black, I'd want that candidate not to embarrass the entire group from which he came and for which I was fighting so hard to have that candidate represent.

Do you see drunken Irish uncles being the pinnacle of Irish-American citizenry put forth? No, you see police, judges, lawyers, doctors, firemen. The usual that any given slice of America puts forth. Play up all your best members and hope no one notices the annoying dark sheep of the family. It's basic human practice.

Well, the White House is a singular post. There's no sea of faces to get lost in. If Obama blows it with grandiose arrogant egomania in economics, utter incompetence at marshalling military command, and seriously deranged grasp of the rest of society (like environment, energy, infrastructure, education, and all the other places lefties can't wait to screw up with their experimentation in the name of their mighty egos)... what becomes of all those whites, blacks, and others who voted for him because he was black and no other reason?

Maybe SOMEBODY should have looked at his competence and experience before voting?

But wait... If every single black voted for Obama and every single white voted for McCain, McCain would have won instantly. If in fact a number of whites voted for Obama equal to the number of blacks voting for Obama, McCain still probably would have won.

So maybe... white people are the reason Obama won. Maybe it's because enough white people voted for this black man.

So maybe... whites should be voting, since they voted in such numbers for the man the dope author of the above article loves so much?

Duh.

Burris arrives at Senate, seeks to take seat - Yahoo! News

Insert "hoist petard" line here viś a viś Democratic Party and their long term running feud with the entire idea of a constitution.

Burris arrives at Senate, seeks to take seat - Yahoo! News

Burris dismissed the Senate Democratic leadership's position that he cannot be seated because he was appointed by a governor accused in a criminal complaint of trying to benefit financially from his authority to fill the seat that Obama vacated after winning the presidential election.

Burriss said his belief is that his appointment is constitutional and that "I have no knowledge of where a secretary of state has veto power over a governor carrying out his constitutional duties.

Burris is of course entirely correct. Neither the U.S. Constitution nor the Illinois Constitution allow for the Secretary of State or anyone else to veto the governor's constitutionally mandated power to appoint a successor to their state's departing senator.

Nevertheless,

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Monday that Burris would not be permitted to take his seat because Burris "has not been certified by the state of Illinois," a reference to incomplete paperwork that only touches on the dispute. Senate Democrats maintain that Burris' appointment is tainted because of the charges against Blagojevich.

While Blagojevich has signed formal appointment papers, Jesse White, the Illinois secretary of state, has not, and Senate rules require that signature. Burris, in turn, has gone to court hoping to win an order for White to sign the necessary paperwork, and he has also threatened to sue to take his seat in the Senate.

And so we see another example of the crux of civilization, democracy, rule of law, and other such things that we say we like: they rely entirely on people following the rules of the structure. There is no legal right for the Secretary of State of the State of Illinois to withhold his or her signature from the appointment paperwork. The signature is only to certify that the Governor of the State of Illinois made the appointment. It is not up the the Secretary of State of the State of Illinois to approve of the appointment or disapprove.

Yes, I am enjoying an inordinate amount of mirth and glee over this entire thing.

And now a JPost-centric round-up...

The Warped Mirror: "We are Hamas". Speak for yourself. I am a meat popsicle.

Alan Dershowitz says on Double Standard Watch: Israel's actions are lawful and commendable and makes some of the most sense he's made in decades.

International law is not a suicide pact but then neither is society. But then again in a limited environment shared by disparate entities, it is. ARRRRGGHHHH! The seeming paradoxes of social existence burn me!!!

In this article, Hamas gunman captured by IDF troops taken to Beersheba hospital, we see what Israel does to their captured wounded enemies. What would Hamas do to an Israeli? Hint, watch the movie Hostel.

Continuing to display either delusion or derangement or both, Zahar promises victory over Israel. Yeah, good luck with that. Let me know when Elvis returns.

And of course according to an Egyptian film star: Hamas is to blame. You don't say...

Gaza civilians tell 'Post' their city has 'gone backward 50 years' but has gone backwards over 1300 years culturally.

Roseanne Barr Continues to Display Usual Insular Lack of Grasp of Real World

Roseanne Barr: Israel is a 'Nazi state' | Jewish News | Jerusalem Post

In her post, Barr likened Hamas to "street gangs" in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, saying that Israel's military campaign is the "equivalent to Los Angeles attacking and launching war on the people of Watts to kill 'the Bloods' and 'the Crips.'"

Actually, it would be more like the Watts neighborhood elected the Crips over the Bloods, and the Crips then started attacking Lynwood. Lynwood should fail to respond to the military actions against it by the Crips why?

Roseanne Barr continues to prove she'd still make a better nude model than a rational thinker.

From a comment by me at Bloodthirsty Liberal

http://bloodthirstyliberal.com/?p=8107#comment-58406

Humans are a strange species. Always at odds with themselves and everything about their nature, and always trying to live at opposition to it, and all they instinctively know. People like to anthropomorphosize and imagine animals with intelligence but what a horrid thing to wish upon creatures who work as well as watch parts. Imagine visiting conscience and abstraction upon a gazelle. They’d be positively neurotic. When a sickly or slow number of the herd was taken by a lion, some of the others would run screaming and spend the rest of their days shaken and disturbed by the experience and some others would angrily charge the lion in a futile emotional outburst.

All the blather about consumption and living simply that others may simply live is just humans forgetting that the world is what it is, and not what they imagine it is or should or might be. Reality isn’t pretty, but as the old saying goes, life is what happens while you’re making other plans.

Another applicable saying regarding this spending is that if you give a man a fish he eat for one night. If you teach him to fish, he feeds himself for life. Unfortunately, the left has more of a sense that if you build a man a fire he will be warm for one night but if you set him on fire, he will be warm for the rest of his life.

Sending money to third world governments has never worked any more than handing a five spot to a drunk. Our exploitation of them as a money-saving move though… did we really think they’d not find something constructive to do with it when it didn’t come with earmarks from the corrupt (dis)United Nations?

Set boundaries for humans such as earmarks and rules for spending handouts and basic human dignity and ego requires them to buck you and spend it corruptly. Give them the money for service rendered and leave them to do with their money as they see fit and they will inevitably do what pleases them with it, without the motivation to misspend it given by some external force telling them what to do.

And so they have and are and the third world is rapidly joining those ahead and the results of our idiot simply living so others may simply live idea are becoming clear. Instead of developing plentiful power supplies and technologies so that all might be prosperous and comfortable, we find ourselves with too little oil, coal, and gas for those we enabled to develop to share with us.

Life is truly what happens while you’re making other plans.

Israel needs to call random cease-fires...

...just long enough for the Hamas morons to try regrouping and getting their game faces on and getting ready to attack. Why? Because to do that, they have to actually get within the same area as each other in fire teams which are easier to destroy than trying to nail one or two idiots here or there surrounded by hundreds of non-combatants.

Let them go out, set up the launchers, get ready to fire, and then bomb the hell out of their positions. Stop firing for a while and when they come out of hiding, hit them again. They've shown a long-term inability to stop popping their heads out whenever the bombs stop for a bit. Take advantage of it and keep letting them present nice easy targets.

D'oh!

What can you possibly say...

Obsession - Radical Islam's War Against The West

SEE THIS MOVIE, NOW SHOWING ON SHALOM TV UNTIL JANUARY 3, 2009. (Praise to G-d for Cox seeing the light to carry Jewish programming FINALLY...)

Obsession - Radical Islam's War Against The West

In short, it portrays a Muslim world of controlled information dissemination, propagandizing, demonization, and limiting of cultural experience transfer. Societies whether Arab, Persian, or Turkish which provide a very limited controlled view of the outside world, designed to first reinforce the political line of the rulers, second to make the society as xenophobic as possible, and third to create enemies for the rulers and society to struggle against and blame for their problems perpetually.

It is dead accurate. The average Muslim in the street in the cities in which we see the gatherings of clerics giving fiery anti-western speeches do not know anything about our way of life but what they've been told, what has been given to them since they could first understand their native language, and will be given to their children and grandchildren unless something changes: that constant message that cultures other than theirs, especially the Christians and Jews, are out to get them, working actively to oppose them at a personal spiritual level, and working to undermine their culture and their way of life.

Really, it isn't a different point of view from the Orthodox Jewish view of the charedi that the modern secular world is responsible for every ill befalling Judaism, EXCEPT that no one sane in those circles seriously believes the secular world is causing any of those problems on purpose and deliberately. They ills perceived are the after effect of the clash between the secular way of life, and the religious way of life which if you take them to extremes, necessarily overlap each other and tend to be opposed in terms of restrictions and allowances to action (the Catholic no meat on Friday, the Jewish no work after sundown Saturday, or the secular do whatever you want).

Most people know very well instinctively that they have the secular freedom to do anything within certain bounds of civility and security and safety as their baseline and religious requirements are simply fences or marks on the ground they choose to observe. When society and religion align, presenting an open society with few restrictions is intimidating and threatening, most especially to those who have, wish to have, and/or wish to maintain power over the masses of the first more restrictive religious culture.

In the Islamic world, the clash is considered purposeful. A purpose driven by Satan, by America, by Jews, by Israel, by Zionists, by whoever opposes them even if only by default. When people believe that they are under attack, they engage in defensive behaviors. When people believe they are being victimized, they engage in the usual angry, hurt, and upset behaviors of victims. When people believe they are righteous, they engage in the controlling, intimidating, and manipulative behaviors of self-righteousness. Combine those things, and you get the crowd listening to the clerics.

This is of course (and here is your obligatory "I have friends who are black" style statement of disclaimer) not to say that the people are themselves inherently flawed but that they carry a set of memes intellectually from generation to generation that are self-reinforcing from a psychological synergy standpoint (that is they reinforce natural human tendencies against introspection, self-analysis, and guilt and so forth) and extremely seductive. Who doesn't want to think that the reason everyone disagrees with them is that everyone else is not only wrong, but out to get them? It makes one seem important because one must be if one merits such an overarching and all encompassing conspiracy against them.

This is what the west is up against.

Lastly, the west needs to understand that although the majority of Jews are not charedi, the uber-Orthodox world is nevertheless the archetype of what it means to be for lack of a simpler phrase, truly Jewish among those same non-charedi Jews. Similarly, although most Muslims are not extremists, the extremists are the archetype among those non-extremist Muslims for what being truly Muslim means. They are the "hardcore" of their world and right now, they are not peaceful, nice, or happy towards the west and non-Muslim world. Thankfully, the uber-Orthodox are, the idiot street clowns of RMS and such places notwithstanding.

In the same way that the majority of Jews are only secular in the sense that they choose to not be as strictly observant as the archetype, the majority of Muslims are only peaceful in that they are not as strictly observant of what they nevertheless hold to be absolute true observance of Islam, which in the end is violent.

You can say what you want about the Koran being peaceful, and much of it is, and what violence there is seems as ancient and angry as anything in the Torah, but where the Torah comes with side works starting with the Talmud and then the many other commentaries and famous seferim, the Koran comes with the Hadith and many other writings which took a decidedly less peaceful and more warlike outlook on human relations.

In the end, no religion is inherently peaceful or warlike as no matter what the ritualized writings say, they are still merely an external framework people use to share the experience of faith. Violence is in their own mind and heart. Religious embrace of one or the other in "official" practice or intellectual agreement merely opposes or facilitates the mindset of the individual.

To stop this, Islam needs a new movement of peace and benevolence for all born of a true heartsick exhaustion with the violence and anger, the people of the lands currently held by Islam need to be able to separate their religious lives from their purely secular national and ethnic lives, and the ideologues who continuously encourage the hate need to be undermined and subverted constantly and consistently and by their own would-be audience themselves. It cannot happen from outside, the outside can merely facilitate those inside wishing to put a stop to the blackness eating up the hearts of the hate mongering anger preaching talking heads who've parted company with Allah and decided their mercy should be inversely proportional to G-d's in the name of the rush they get from the adoration of the crowds they whip up.

There is much in the world that every religious person of whatever stripe might find unworthy or outright objectionable. The test of a religious person's faith is whether they can resist stealing G-d's power for themselves, judging the worthiness of His creation and acting as executioner of that judgment. G-d has warned us repeatedly against this in every religion, Islam included, and every religion has scores of examples of the folly of forgetting that injunction.

One day, may we all worship as we see fit in peace without anger and hate.

Jerusalem Post Displays Firm Grasp of the Obvious

No shit, the mainstream media was unabashedly pro-Obama, you don't say...

And of course they will remain so. Disgustingly so. Bareback will get a free ride for four or eight years. George W. Bush who managed to prevent another 9/11/2001 type event for the rest of his first and entirety of his second term will be instead dehabilitated and recorded as not only the worst PoTUS but the worst human ever to have lived, falling lower than Adolph Hitler, Pol Pot, and whoever greenlighted the George Clooney Batman installments.

Thank you JPost for pointing out the blindingly obvious. Now why don't you turn that stunning intellect towards the American MSM's coverage of Israel which is unabashedly anti-Israel and has been ever since the 70s to the point that when you mention Camp David the first thing that comes to mind of people here is Jimmy "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" Carter and second is Anwar Sadat (thanks possibly to Louis Gosset Jr.'s portrayal in a movie which was otherwise less than watchable). Menachem who? Bagel? Begin? Who's that?

There's a reason they went to ShopRite...

Holland Township family angry that supermarket won't personalize cake for their son - The Express-Times | Lehigh Valley PA Newspaper - lehighvalleylive.com

JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell, Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell and Adolf Hitler Campbell.

Good names for a trio of toddlers? Heath and Deborah Campbell think so. The Holland Township couple has picked those names and the oldest child, Adolf Hitler Campbell, turns 3 today.

This has given rise to a problem, because the ShopRite supermarket in Greenwich Township has refused to make a cake for young Adolf's birthday.

"We believe the request ... to inscribe a birthday wish to Adolf Hitler is inappropriate," said Karen Meleta, a ShopRite spokeswoman.

ShopRite is the only major supermarket chain in the east I know of to prominently have a kosher section, and hand out a free booklet of all brands carried with kosher marks and specify which organization gave them. They have a very strong bent towards catering to Jews. Now look at the names the parents gave their kids.

This is an attempt to provoke. This is Jew baiting. And they're screwing over their kids to do it.

The Associated Press: Obama left with little time to curb global warming (which is totally natural, has been going on since before humans evolved, and will happen in the future whether or not humans exist)

Since Clinton's inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton's second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is close to running out, and Obama knows it.

The Associated Press: Obama left with little time to curb global warming

Okay, 10 hottest years on record during what time frame? Since this is tossed out in the second sentence explicitly mentioning Clinton's second inauguration, and the first sentence mentions his (presumably) first, does that mean the 10 hottest years on record during the sixteen years since Clinton's first inauguration, or the 10 hottest years on record during the twelve years since his second inauguration? What would be the spread in twelve or sixteen years?

Flat out, if you have to give order to a sequence of annual numbers, some will usually be higher than others, and some will fall in the middle and others towards the extremes of the overall set, UNLESS THEY ARE ALL EQUAL.

Take a look at your waist size measurements every month for ten years. Some will be larger than others. One will be the largest, and another will be the smallest. All the others will be equal to one of those numbers or in between them. SIMPLE LOGIC.

So, hottest years since when, and what was the spread of temperatures?

Let me refer you to this which I have before:

Note that the spikes of dust, CO₂, and temperature all are happening over and over and over again. Now look at the scale. We've had greenhouse generating industry since when? Not that the current blue temperature high sequence has lasted for about ten thousand years, which is... the time since the end of the last glacial period.

Humans are estimated to be about 200,000 years old as a species, or at least since all known existing human genome groups diverged from a single common genetic ancestor. So we've been through at least one previous temperature maximum before now. Did we have any society capable of producing greenhouse gases then? No.

Humans are estimated to have been nearly wiped out, and at least decimated by an explosion of a volcano in southeast Asia. It was about 75,000 years ago.

Sure enough, there's a local drop in the temperatures right about then. Of course there are somewhat similar drops in the inter-maximum records before that, but note the dust spike about the same time. Toba maybe?

The point is that the graph shows a perfectly regular pattern of highs and lows for almost a half million years, with irregular up and down spikes which can be chalked up to volcanic input, patterns of vegetation increase and decrease (rotting vegetable matter goes with vegetable life and produces huge CO2 and methane amounts), animal life increase and decrease (animals fart methane and exhale CO2), and desertifcation producing dust (the Sahara is responsible for most of the seed dust and atmospheric instabilities that spark hurricane formation in the central Atlantic), and a whole lot more like the seasons, and orbital forcing and solar radiation effects.

In other words, warming would keep on happening even if you went back in time and released a lethal virus in the year 1241, wiping out all human life before 1300. Why? It already happened by that point. It had been going on since before Egypt was more than a really dry dusty place with a nice long oasis flowing through it. It has been going on since before humans started jotting down beer recipes in clay tablets in what is now Iraq. It has been going on since humans were first putting charcoal paintings on cave walls.

Yup, humans are totally and completely irrelevant to global warming and pretty much everything else on Earth, except our own egos. The idea that the little we've done in less than two hundred years has somehow caused the warming which actually started when we could barely figure out how to stitch animal skins together is truly arrogant.

(For a last little note, note the previous temperature maximum before now was quite a bit higher than our current temperature. It was roughly 120,000 years ago. Anyone care to guess when man began burning large amounts of fossil fuels? The turning decades from the 1700s to the 1800s when the Industrial Revolution began, some 118,000 plus years later AFTER a glacial period that saw ice sheets extend into what would later be known as Illinois and Indiana.)

Jimmy Carter's career slouches towards Bethlehem

THAT'S why that poem from two posts back is so on my mind.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/12/15/Carter_Hamas_leader_meet_in_Damascus/UPI-86001229344511/

Doesn't this peanut farmer know when to go home and actually farm peanuts instead of imagining his absurdly lightweight grasp of human history and psychology and more to the point his ill-informed and inadvisably weak grasp of politics and sense thereof is somehow relevant?

Getting Sadat and Begin to talk was not nearly the achievement everyone wants to believe and in retrospect actually seems like a dog and pony show compared to the present problems in the middle east. Given that, maybe someone should ask if he had any real clue about the east at all. In my view, he didn't as exemplified by his total lack of relevance since and his bizarre far leftist ideas since not to mention the ego of thinking he is going to monitor elections. WHO THE FUCK IS CARTER TO MONITOR ANY ELECTIONS?

Severe lack of humility people, get a good look. Because this is what is coming ten years on for Clinton and thirty years on for Obama: self-important know-nothings mistaking the flimsy achievements they put the window dressing on for being weighty achievements reflecting on their godlike intelligence and wisdom.

Thank you Bush!

Congress wanted to guarantee that the $700 billion financial bailout would limit the eye-popping pay of Wall Street executives, so lawmakers included a mechanism for reviewing executive compensation and penalizing firms that break the rules.

But at the last minute, the Bush administration insisted on a one-sentence change to the provision, congressional aides said. The change stipulated that the penalty would apply only to firms that received bailout funds by selling troubled assets to the government in an auction, which was the way the Treasury Department had said it planned to use the money.

Now, however, the small change looks more like a giant loophole, according to lawmakers and legal experts. In a reversal, the Bush administration has not used auctions for any of the $335 billion committed so far from the rescue package, nor does it plan to use them in the future. Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives.

Limits on Executive Pay May Prove Toothless - washingtonpost.com

As a comparison of the people we're talking about, consider after reading that article the salaries of congress. I make LESS here in 2008 than the average congressman made in 1969.

Salaries of Members of Congress: A List of Payable Rates and Effective Dates, 1789-2008

$169,000 CASH SALARY PER YEAR???!!!

NO NO NO. Congress, when you STOP fucking up this country every year with your hare-brained legislation for aggrandizement and social engineering, then you can talk about limiting other peoples' pay.

On second thought, not even then. Economic liberty is one of the great powers of the people and you cretinous lot have shown a two hundred plus year history of having no conception under G-d what the fuck you are doing with the economy or liberty.

Remember people, if they can limit one group's salaries and get away with it, it is a precedent and encouragement to control and limit other groups' salaries. Like yours. Why should someone else tell you how much you "should" make and what salary is "too much". Why should the venal and jealous opinions of others be the yardstick of what your pay is decided to be?

One of my favorite poems...

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Second Coming (poem) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It nicely sums up the way humans seem to dwindle down to inaction and confusion, and in its way comes opportunistic evil and shadow, and we can feel it coming, but do not see out of our cloudy minds the way to undo what we're allowing.

Earth to Bareback...

...you're barking up the wrong tree.

Obama wants to try 'rebooting US image' amongst Muslims | International | Jerusalem Post

Okay, but...

During the campaign, Obama repeatedly faced questions about whether he is a Muslim, particularly in whisper campaigns that noted his middle name, that his father is Kenyan, and that he lived for a time as a child in Indonesia.

Obama is a practicing Christian.

Asked if he would drop his middle name during his inauguration on January 20, the president-elect said he would not.

"The tradition is that they use all three names and I will follow the tradition, not trying to make a statement on way or another," he said.

...Hussein is not a Muslim name, but an Arab name. One is a religion, the other an ethnicity/tribal identity. You do know that there are Russian, Chinese, Indian, Persian, etc., Muslims right?

I sure as heck hope he does. If not, we are in for the Democratic Party's often joked about answer to the Republican Party's George W. Bush. We were all hoping that was just a joke.

Bush continues to have firm grasp of the obvious...

Bush: Israel is America's "closest ally in the Middle East" | International | Jerusalem Post

Do ya think?

Left to medical professionals: morals and ethics are conditional...

Broader medical refusal rule may go far beyond abortion - Los Angeles Times

The outgoing Bush administration is planning to announce a broad new "right of conscience" rule permitting medical facilities, doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare workers to refuse to participate in any procedure they find morally objectionable, including abortion and possibly even artificial insemination and birth control.

Of course, the usual expected tripe...

Critics of the rule say it will sacrifice patients' health to the religious beliefs of providers.

and...

"It's unconscionable that the Bush administration, while promising a smooth transition, would take a final opportunity to politicize women's health," said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood.

Right... Because... why? Because doctors should be forced to provide services they have personal objections to? Why not force kosher butchers to carry non-kosher meat? Why not force toy store owners who are against war toys to carry toy guns? Why not force Playboy to have centerfolds of men?

Everything has its nature and this does not change for your political beliefs. A kosher butcher carries kosher meat. Playboy has naked women, not men. A conscientious objector objects based on his or her conscience. You remember conscience don't you?

Don't you? That little voice inside that tells right from wrong?

No?

How sad.

Meanwhile, most of the usual suspects up in arms over this in the coming days will of course still believe that someone who conscientiously objects to serving in the military should have the right to go AWOL at any time or choose where and how they serve and not obey orders just like they did during Viet Nam.

Conditional ethics and morals. Freedom for me, not for thee. Hypocrisy.

As usual.

Douglas Adams can sleep well...

...as the idiotic and inane in government, business, and military continues to track his sense of the weird.

The US Army and Navy have both hired experts in the ethics of building machines to prevent the creation of an amoral Terminator-style killing machine that murders indiscriminately.

Er... Yeah.

"We have to stop Skynet! In ten years when they turn it online it becomes self-aware and perceives us as the enemy! It starts taking over the Internet, and sending endless e-mails and rewriting every web site to convey a message of friendship and peace so revoltingly sickeningly sweet, that millions kill themselves within days!"

Married‚ and the mob article on JPost

My response:

(...)but a secular and societal and cultural one as well, and the world over, human instinct has specifically singled out homosexuality between males as unworthy of recognition as anything like marriage even if monogamous.

The reason is a deep-seated understanding the human male's sexuality being the most promiscuous and even with the dominant-submissive dynamic, males typically do not require the same sort of seduction as females, which provides a natural braking effect on human sex, without which, we as a species see danger coming.

The refusal to see one's own species honestly is ludicrous.

That is the reason for the feelings against homosexuality in a nutshell. We inherently have a tacit understanding of the risks of unfettered male sexuality. It's the same reason for such controls on females among strict religious cultures such as Muslims and Orthodox Jews. And it happens to be a proper fear, even if the response doesn't always make sense as in burqas. However, if you want men to control themselves and not put the onus on women in the Muslim world, then gay men need to put some self-control into action. Castro Street and places like that don't show me any interest in anything but avoiding self control and responsibility.

If the gays can behave any way they like without self control, then none of them should open their mouth to utter a peep on behalf of feminists against patriarchal treatment of females like burqas and such. They have no leg to stand on.

Compelled largesse must ultimately fail any community, but when will they grasp why?

Economic pressures are forcing haredi men into the working world | Jewish Features | Jerusalem Post

Tuvia, a Breslav Hassid from Mea She'arim, is one of a growing number of young haredi men who are leaving the yeshiva world earlier due to economic pressures.

"Even if I received it every month on time - which I didn't - the stipend I was getting from the kollel was not enough to raise a family," he explained. "Besides, I was paid in dollars. So what I took home became worth less and less in shekels terms."

That's a moneyshot of a quote if ever I heard it.

Even a welfare system paid out only if people study Torah all day cannot support people at a reasonable level in the modern world. In the US, we don't have any stipulation on the benefits receipt and what does history show about humans and appreciation and value of things compelled?

As Cox enters cell phone business again (remember Pivot?) Engadget geek commenters dutifully make geeks look uncouth as usual...

Cox to enter cellphone biz, link handsets to other cable-related services - Engadget

Being a Cox customer for cable and home phone and Internet, while a Sprint customer for cell service, I would like to see an all Cox Communications solution IF they can beat the Spring pricing which while it would be extremely easy (Alltel already does) is also extremely unlikely given that the cell customer world is pretty much a captive audience kind of thing. If all the carriers give uniformly absurd rates, then you have no recourse. It's not like IP telephony which is much easier for more start-ups to enter than the wireless market where you have to deal with the FCC and limited licensed spectrum.

But I can always dream...

Your choice this election season...

...Bareback O'Rama or Jowls McCain.

Come on, I can't be the only one who thinks McCain looks like a villain from Dick Tracy.

Germany still doesn't get "it"

German town nixes Kristallnacht event | Jewish News | Jerusalem Post

The German town of Goerlitz is refusing to allow its Jewish community to hold its own ceremony marking Kristallnacht.

Instead, the only ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom will be held by the local Protestant church, which has traditionally focused on all victims of the Third Reich.

Head > desk. Head > desk. Head > desk.

And the Neo-Nazis complain that their speech rights aren't respected in Germany...

Obama Assembles U.S.'s `Largest Law Firm' to Cover ACORN Voter Fraud

I thought that was a better headline than Obama Assembles U.S.'s `Largest Law Firm' to Monitor Election - Yahoo! News as well. The Democratic Party has consistently been the number one all-time offender when it comes to voter fraud, most especially registering people who don't exist, or are long deceased, with non-existent addresses, for close to a hundred years now. Their twenties and thirties exploits in some American cities, especially in the midwest, are very well documented.

The Republicans then try to pare down the voter registration lists but they are up against a rapidly approaching wall of Election Day and during this ever decreasing time, it grows ever more chaotic, and more and more fraudulent shenanigans are engaged in totally messing up the entire situation until your voter rolls are full of people who never existed at places that also never existed.

Their usual follow-up shtick is to claim that the Republicans are attempting to disenfranchise real voters and as usual with most myths and great lies of use, it is one wrapped in a kernel of truth. The only reasonably quick enough ways to pare down voter registration lists tend to affect those who move closest to the election, and those are usually the lowest income people who tend to change apartments frequently, and given demographics, frequently minorities.

At the same time, the Democrats usually try to invalidate registrations of voters who classically vote Republican such as American service men and women on overseas deployment. This has only increased in the last twenty years and was particularly egregious during the Kerry campaign.

That Obama is allowing his subordinates to participate in these sorts of shenanigans, is deplorable and puts a very big stain on his credibility rap sheet for me. I am very disappointed in him. He should be able to win or lose on his own merits, popularity, and anything else that he might have.

So help me, if he plays the race card or allows his people to, I am reversing myself and voting for McCain.

Pa. man wins $400 by loading digestive tract with meat

I thought that was a better headline, and more accurate, than Pa. man chews through belly-busting, 15-lb. burger - Yahoo! News.

Maybe you do too.

More signs of broken reasoning...

Teen sent nudes of self, could be classified sex offender

Brown lawn means jail time

Stop Global Spreading

Birth of an Ocean: The Evolution of Ethiopia's Afar Depression: Scientific American

Clearly, these eggheads are not seriously conscious enough of the social and cultural consequences of Ethiopia's oncoming disaster of the world's oceans inundating it. Africa is after all the mother of humanity, its cradle, its ancestral home. Its people were the basis of all other human peoples to come. To this day its landscape teems with life still uncataloged and unknown. Life which might even hold the secret to health, longevity, or the cure to breast or uterine cancers.

Yet the world stands passively by as the continents continue to rip and rend the original home of all mankind, threatening to create yet another unnecessary body of salt water to be exploited by game fishermen and shady vacation resort operators and worst of all, the United States military industrial complex in the form of the US Navy.

Please consider for a moment the rare and precious surface land to be lost to flooding, like that of lower Louisiana, and like lower Louisiana, populated heavily by poverty stricken people of color. Where is FEMA? If anything seems like an emergency, the cleaving of continents in two would seem to be it. Does this emergency seem remotely managed to you? Where is Bush on this?

I implore you to consider the terrible consequences of this loss of land, people, and salt deposits to plate tectonics which waste the heat energy of the Earth carrying around people on a millions of years long joyride when men already have planes and ships? Why should Mother Earth bear the burden and strain of shuffling humans around to amuse geophysicists?

Please, please, please, consider taking a stand against this senseless destruction and tragedy now, that can only serve to function as fodder for the year 10000000's modern equivalent of Jerry Bruckheimer and another useless summer blockbuster to entertain and amuse bloated bourgeoisie as they consume more overpriced corn better used for methanol production for cleaner fuel, candy that increases their oversized rear ends and waistlines, and line the pockets of more Hollywood elitists who see mother nature only for the earthquakes, firestorms, tornados, earthquakes, and meteor impacts and never the trees.

Working together, we can overcome this problem.

Well, yes and no...

Thanks to this little blurb at Little Green Footballs, I came to read this over at Zomblog. Their position on this seems to be that the Greenlining Institute and their ilk are responsible for the submarginal mortgage and loan crisis that precipitated the recent financial brouhaha.

Not really.

While I am sure even the leftist yahoos of the GI could not be stupid enough to not expect a fair number of defaults, which is in and of itself like encouraging a person to go to a loan shark when you know they will never be good for it and end up with their knees smashed, they do seem to have that blind faith of the left that if you just throw the money of old white men at something, it magically fixes it.

In a promotional preview on Starz for Crash: The Series (yes, I am rather "what's that" followed by "who cares" on it as well) Dennis Hopper is reeling off to a black character a statement about ghettos. He says that the first ghetto was in Venice and made because the Christians didn't want the Jews living with them, and forced them into separate living space.

He says further that despite this discrimination and mistreatment, the Jews of the ghetto still took care of each other, making businesses and financial arrangements, and schooling, and so forth. He asks the black character if that sounds anything like the ghetto he comes from. The cutaway from the scene occurs right about there back to the promotional self-congratulatory blather.

No, that's not jealously for their success, but mourning for the intellectual attention span of America when Crash can be a series.

Anyhow, that exchange aptly describes the problem with greenlining and throwing money at minorities and low income people in depressed areas. They are depressed for a reason. There's no viable economic base to work in, or what base there is, is inhospitable to them because of a lack of education and skills, and the people there no matter how many marches they show up for, are fragmented and at odds with each other.

Check out the statistics for black on black crime for instance. Black men who rape white women are nearly infinitely more likely to be hunted down and jailed than black men who rape black women and how fair is that to their victims? Where is the greatest success in forcing black men to be upstanding and financially support their children? Whites, not blacks. What children are constantly exhorted to stay in schools, watched to make sure they do, and set on the straight and narrow when they stray? Not black children.

No, poor minority neighborhoods are nothing like poor Jewish neighborhoods of yore and they face none of the officially sanctioned discrimination and violence the Jews of medieval Europe did. They suffer from the other white racism: not that black people are to be harried and pushed to the back of the bus, but that crime among black people is to be left to the circular file, black children to be written off, and black family cohesion is privately held to be a myth of Bill Cosby's imagination.

I use black Americans as the example as they are whether anyone wants to admit it or not, the bottom of the American socioeconomic barrel even after fifty years of civil rights agitation, legislation, and preaching. That the human race can build pyramids and space shuttles and remake the landscape and realign entire continents of nations' political landscape inside of one generation, but not only fail to make proper progress in this area but backslide in a similar direction to where it was being dragged from only says one of two things: either they are mysteriously incompetent and insane in this one area, or solving the problem was never the point of the movement and the huffing and puffing.

Which is easier for you to believe?

As long as the bottom of the socioeconomic barrel's problems are held by the white majority to be a de minimus thing not worth pursuing, no amount of money thrown will do a thing. It isn't that the money should not have been lent, for certain it should not have and in such numbers and with such silly and naive terms, but that it should have been lent to different methods and organizations.

Partly this problem is because the white middle ground is torn between caring for its own and caring for those others. Those on the left are reflexively for those others, but in a racist patronizing way and that can never help those it is ostensibly supposed to because those true believers naive enough to think that the ostensible purpose is real and actual will be pushing their efforts at a destination they will by design never reach and those at the top never had in mind any such thing and of course will be diverting the efforts where they are really supposed to be going: aggrandizement of themselves.

Think about it. If the civil rights movement actually succeeded at a color blind society, they would have nothing to do. They certainly would be of no consequence and no one would bother paying them hush money as the Greenlining Institute is alleged to have extorted from major lenders and those politicians who run on this subject of race and such would have no plank for it.

Human movements exist to perpetuate themselves as much as the humans who comprise those movements seek to perpetuate themselves. It can hardly be otherwise. If we are in G-d's image, then that which is in our's must be as we are. G-d's first attempt at perpetuating Himself was to make us and tell us He existed. We do the same by creating movements, organizations, structures, etc. simply to spread ourselves around.

You can, and I do, ascribe more paranoid and evil motives to them, for of course only an idiot can see that perpetuating this movement must necessarily be done at the expense of erasing race and color as an issue, and to keep those held to be on the losing side perpetually on that losing side and that side is defined by economic deprivations whether refused loans, or closed opportunities.

The civil rights movement must by virtue of its very construction and its inclusion of cult of personality and mass movement, keep its championed group in their place indefinitely. A few can escape and reach heights of success such as Will Smith, or Bill Cosby, and seem to be family men of great morality and reliance, but they themselves function inevitably as a component of that charade keeping those below down where they are.

The higher and farther the target to shoot for, the easier it is to make people miss. A slight obstruction early on will trip them up long before they get where they intend, nearly geometrically increasing the difficulty, putting the entire enterprise up against human will, and most will eventually lose interest in fighting their circumstances and bow to mediocrity and failure.

There are three things that must be done in the black American community for this to end. First, black on black crime must no longer be tolerated in any way and all cases treated as seriously as those against whites and there must be no exceptions. A black child who is sold drugs by a black dealer is as interfered with as if it was a white dealer and just as endangered as any white child. A black woman raped by a black man has been as victimized as if her rapist was white and as victimized as any white woman. Etc., etc., etc...

Second, black public school children must no longer be bused, traded, moved around as if white children we some sort of magic fairies from whom magic dust might rub off to make them better. Black children have excelled in the middle of slavery at reading and writing and working and being good and obedient to their parents, and they were chattel at the time. Now in a time of supposed freedom and opportunities, they are treated like some sort of radioactive material to be kept from critical mass. This has to stop and they need to be taught right there, right where they live, and by people from their neighborhood, who know what their lives are like, and who believes truly a priori that they can make of those lives whatever they wish and never gives up on those children.

Third, the educational system of the USA is a joke when it comes to reality and self-interest. It is within our economic interests to teach people far better before they get out of high school than we do. Barely being able to read, do a little algebra, and know where Croatia is on a map is not making people ready to take part in our economic system. The system must teach politically blind and neutral dry economics, business management dynamics, chains of command, methods and procedures of business, and how to think clearly, critically, and logically. They need to understand Internet technology, computing, electronics, mechanics, and the other things of basic jobs in the modern world. They need to learn how things are made from footballs to car engines and see all the various areas of work to be tried. Even janitorial work can be amazingly involved when you see what the chemistry of fighting inorganic and organic stains is like versus not damaging what you're trying to clean. Sort of like trying to find cures for diseases that don't kill the patient. If our schools taught things relevant to working across the employment landscape, they might be less shocked when they leave to enter that world.

None of these things will be done of course. There are too many people with too many self interests to allow it without a fight. The people must do it for themselves, take themselves away as fuel for the engine of self-aggrandizement of those at the top, for their own good, their own interests, when they get sufficiently tired of the lack of progress.

However, those who were young in the sixties are now not so young and cannot possibly be foolish enough to believe the movement did more than desegregate buses. Even so, they've done nothing. If fifty years of nothingness hasn't moved them, what will?

We already see the organic crawling away of the people from the old guard of the left. The embrace of rappers, gangsters, and bling. These may seem like children's toys to keep the facade up and the farce continuing, but they teach that one can go it alone and sneak out the side. What matters here is that they see it is not only in rap, but in any other area they choose to apply themselves. Lateral thinking, and lateral will are all that is needed.

When the poor black American community no longer listens to those that would call themselves leader (largely white people from privileged backgrounds you should note) and does things for themselves, much as the Jews did in the face of Christian oppression, then will loans of whatever terms no long be marginal, they will be guaranteed moneymakers for those receiving them will finally know they can go wherever and do whatever they put their minds to, and they will fully join the middle class where the money flows the most.

Empowerment comes not from money, but the will and drive to do anything with or without money. As poor Indians and other easterners keep showing, working your ass off like your life depends on it is vastly more profitable in this country of opportunities than anywhere else. With a little money, effort is magnified. What is lacking is the spirit and will to move one's behind, and the education in the first place to show one that it is even possible in the first place.

What is lacking is the will. It must be ignited.

“If we don’t pass it, we shouldn’t be a Congress.” --Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire

They didn't pass it.

They choked.

Senator Gregg was exactly right.

Try to keep in mind when Congress tries to pass the buck to the Republican president at the time, and go on about who caused it all to happen, that the Congress was dominated by Democrats since the last congressional election, and when the time came to deal with the problem at hand instead of assigning blame, they could not grow up long enough to deal with it and fix it, preferring to fixate on the past instead of the right now.

A bit like being stood up to a wall for execution by guerillas for wandering into their territory and screaming at your partner it was all his fault as they are about to fire.

The economic bullets are being loaded and the American economy is about to be shot. Good going Congress, for not picking up the phone and staying the execution.

Foo Fighters Long Road to Ruin

e-Kvetcher has been posting music on Mondays and I return the favor.

The Foo Fighters are on my top 10 list of groups.

Test your Morals, Values & Ethics at Your Morals.Org

Morality Quiz/Test your Morals, Values & Ethics - Your Morals.Org

I took the first test and here was my graph. Guess I am an eccentric go it alone type.

Stand Up To Cancer - Horseshit on parade...

In watching a bit of this, a thought experiment came to mind.

I realized if I had fifty million dollars, I would have attended and offered to donate that entire amount to cancer research, potentially saving millions, if Billy Crystal would shut up permanently and put a gun to his head and pull the trigger live on nationwide television.

Whaddya think? Would he have gone for it? Would he have given up his dubiously worthwhile life, to save the lives of others, and the psyches of countless more from his inane should-have-been-left-in-the-80s impressions?

We all know that answer.

When The Pussycat Dolls and Beyonce and the others went on, do you think that they'd have taken off every stitch of clothing live and pranced nude and writhed and perhaps even masturbated to the delight of millions of bored and lonely men in return for a fifty million dollar cash donation to cancer research?

Given that Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler regularly make offers to women such as them to donate large sums to the charity of their choice in return for simple nude modeling and they refuse each time, what do you think the answer is?

That auditorium is full of Christians who don't drop a thing on the collection plate, Jews who attend synagogue once a year if that and never put a dime in the tzedakah tin, and others who claim godlessly to know morality but while mouthing platitudes about vegetarianism and animal welfare wear leather belts and leather cell phone holsters.

Would they even pledge to sacrifice every cent of any paycheck that results as a matter of the PR and notoriety of this show, of any income at all from any job that results directly from the shmoozing and networking that takes place, giving it all to cancer research?

It's always easier to ask others to make sacrifices you won't. While the left says that of American soldiers dying in Iraq, killing people, destroying stuff, going in harm's way and risking dying while following orders is the short form definition of a solider and they knew that when they signed up.

In their quest to be right over doing what is right, what is their rationale for asking the future to risk great sacrifices when an unstable Iraq left before it can naturally and organically achieve stability, falls apart?

In the same vein of hypocrisy, why are these stars not leaving their cushy jobs and taking up courses in medicine and molecular biology to try to cure cancer themselves? Why are they not encouraging their own children to do so? Why are they not encouraging the youth of America to take up such careers?

Because it is about being right and not doing right. They want the glamour, the prestige, the notoriety of the gig and they want none of the hard work and self-sacrifice that are made every day by researchers in universities every day when they might have made more money in private practice or in another field altogether. Sure, they do it for their own self-deceptive self-gratifying reasons of achieving notoriety in their own field and fame for achievement. They also actually bother to learn about the problem that the stars display utter ignorance of.

Curing cancer is not a money issue, it is a scientific issue. Praying will not cure it. Throwing starry galas will not cure it. Throwing money will not cure it. Only time and steady unyielding insistence on researching every aspect of it until there is not a single biochemical reaction or genetic sequence left to document will cure it.

But that's not fun, that's not profitable, that's not increasing anyone's fame. And people will continue to die because they always default to try to do the right thing always for the wrong reasons by the wrong reasoning.

It's a matter of how you look at it...

I got a notice of intent to lien due to a water bill of less than $200.

Thanks to my gracious and kindly city government, I will soon be unable to sell my house that is now thanks to the economy and housing market devalued to the point of negative equity, and do so at a huge loss.

Thank you city hall. If I had known you could stop me from making such a costly mistake earlier, I'd have stopped paying my water bill on time months ago.

There's always something to make you look towards despair...

Hitler's 'Grossmufti von Jerusalem' | Books | Jerusalem Post

I remember Bernard Hill's line as Theoden in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, "What can men do against such reckless hate?"

Stand their ground must be the answer.

Whatever happened to Little Caesars?

New Little Caesars Marketing Strategy Has Employees Throw Themselves On Hoods Of Passing Cars | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

LOL-worthy moneyshot at the end of the blurb.

Watching the Democratic Convention goings on...

...and what comes to mind is a certain warmth, a certain satisfaction. I'm not sure why, but their willfully ignorant childishly naive overriding self-righteousness makes me smile. Long have I felt that were I a demon assigned to subversion of the world and seduction to sin, I'd be on permanent vacation. Given that I act for the opposite aims, I seem to have a guaranteed job for all eternity. The need for the human race to learn is unending and their ignorance boundless. There is no end to their ability to fail.

Freedom to what? Freedom from what? Right to what? Right to be what from what? When the terms of indignation are left undefined all their claims devolve to angry cries of gibberish for gibberish is exactly that which has no meaning, the same meaning they've failed to assign to anything through reason whether intellectual or emotional.

Nothing they say means anything. Anything they say reeks of meaninglessness. The entire thing is one large pile of drivel.

Take for instance our man Bareback O'Rama's desire to get out of Iraq before Iraq's current leadership wants us to, as if merely leaving would make it all as if we never went there at all, as if you could turn back the clock through pretending nothing ever happened.

We walked away from Viet Nam and essentially embargoed them and they sat fretting and fuming and simmering down within the Communist bloc, but does anyone truly think that they believe it never happened? I assure you, many are those yet living who lost family no longer living to that war and have not forgotten. In fact, it was likely only that North Viet Nam was seeking more to conquer South Viet Nam than anything else which worked in favor of our walking away not turning into a return engagement later on.

The North cynically manipulated the Viet Cong into smashing their best blood and spirit upon the American shields, wasting and running out their resources, during the Tet Offensive. At that point, it was clear to the South Viet Nam Communists that the North was not interested in a Communist worker's paradise in general as a North Vietnamese hegemony specifically above all else. The South would be theirs and that was their chief aim.

We let the North have their way and the South settled down to a unification on the North's terms. The South seeing the realpolitik of the situation had considerably less fervor for their cause in Communism now.

If we leave Iraq now, most Iraqis will blame us and rightfully so for destabilizing them for no reason that anyone can justify, and then failing to restabilize them back to at least close to the level they enjoyed somewhat dubiously under Saddam Hussein. What do you think the result of that could possibly be?

Further, whereas Saddam kept Islamic extremism at bay through unmitigated violent oppression, we will fail to do so by walking away as long as those parties remain at large and operating freely in defiance of the world's supposed desire for peace. Notice that the loopy left at the Democratic Convention is solidly obsessed with what happened in the past. We invaded Iraq on George Bush's say so. Past tense. Happened several years ago. What are we seeing as a result now? Would Iraq be better off simply by walking away? Obviously not, but the reality of having to deal with the aftermath of the actions of others has never stopped people from acting short-sightedly in self-righteous moral indignation. Never have humans been ones to put the realities of the world ahead of their petty tantrums and make no mistake the cacophony of calls to leave Iraq now now now are nothing more than tantrums as every last party calling for immediate withdrawal have no coherent, rational, or even remotely sane idea of what to do after that and more to the point, what the Iraqi people deserve in compensation given that we invaded.

The insurgency is not about Iraq being for Iraqis. Iraq is already for Iraqis and more than ever it was under Hussein. Unless democracy is so distrusted by the left (and it is, more than anyone wants to believe) or that non-Americans (read non-whites) are fundamentally incompatible with the group self-determination of representative democracy (and they do fundamentally believe such a bigoted thing that certain kinds of people tend towards certain kinds of civilization organizational structures) then they should be cognizant immediately that the Iraqi people are more free now than they have ever been before. So free, that many of them are free to destabilize their nation through acts of violent barbarism against their own countrymen.

No, this is not about Iraq being for Iraqis in which case our walking away would allow them to do whatever it is Iraqis want to do with Iraq such as turning it into another Arab nationwide gulag as it was under Hussein or a middle-eastern den of hedonistic pursuit such as had never existed in the east after or before Islam. This insurgency is about a fight from the forces of extremist Islam who want to take every verse in the Koran literally which in any way fits their victimhood driven run from self-reliance and self-responsibility and their desire to blame their problems real and more often imagined on everyone else, most especially as is common with humans, those who have more anything than they do.

Witness the Law of the Sea treaty which is all about making sure that a cut of any and all profits is made to every single land-locked nation but especially the non-Western nations, out of all proportion to the input of said nations. It is about selfishness, and abdication of responsibility, personal power, and reason. It is about no better or noble a greed than those they impugn. Nothing is stopping landlocked nations from fielding oceanologists and other related disciplinarians to multi-national projects, but I guess putting up or shutting up is also not a human tendency.

If we walk away now, the reality is that we will deliver Iraq into a religious nuthatchery worse than Iran in the heady and bloody aftermath of the revolution, worse than Saudi Arabia when the royal family is having a bad day, worse than any we've yet seen. The most extremist kannoim of the uber Orthodox Jewish world could not be a millionth as nasty as it will be. The Catholic Church during the Dark Ages will be a close match. In other words, those who would walk away in indignation over the actions of the Bush administration are willing to visit on the Iraqi people in the wake of that supposed wrong already done on them, the worse wrong of allowing the imposition of a religious fundamentalist state of oppression of the sort they themselves scream righteous blather against whenever they even fantasize that it might be creeping upon the US from the Christian right.

Those who would leave Iraq right now, would victimize the Iraqis all over again for their own self-righteousness.

As I said. Ignorant, senseless, barbaric, that is the nature of self-righteousness in the end. That is what the left is proposing visiting upon those who they claim have already been victimized. How is that more right for them to do than it is for those they oppose? It isn't, but self-righteousness blinds people to that equality of evil in acting the same as those they oppose. To have never invaded would have been nice, but imagining that we can make the world as if it never happened after all the destruction we wrought and all the established patterns and flows of societal power we disrupted is tantamount of utter idiocy and the result will be to victimize Iraq well and truly.

It will be to put the truth rather than the lie to the claim that we Americans can start trouble, but not finish it. All it takes to do it, is to allow Iraq to go from a secular dictatorship to a religious one. All it takes is to allow Iraq to suffer under a fate we ourselves would never allow our own kind to.

That is racism. That is bigotry. That is wrong. The left is wrong.

Truly, my job will never be finished.

Free software advocates learn from their alleged adversaries, if you can't convince someone, force them through lawsuit...

Slashdot | Quebec Gov Sued For Ignoring Free Software, from this article.

Simple as this: free software is just that, free. You pay nothing. And you get what you pay for generally. Which means that if it doesn't work, it doesn't work right, or works but not the way you need it so, sorry, you're SOL and probably soon to have a network that is FUBAR.

Microsoft products inter-operate, they are supported by the license fees, and Microsoft has the largest support documentation database of any software publisher bar none. Out of the box, you can build a Microsoft network based on Windows, using MS Office for your office type work, and load on to them as well from the single largest third party library of software for any platform ever.

You cannot say the same about Linux or BSD. Even Apple's Macintosh is extremely limited by Apple's anal-retentive control freak approach to development on their platform over the years resulting in a continuing reticence in the industry to develop on it even though the underlying core has now changed dramatically.

But Linux which is the core of the "free software" movement exemplifies the true qualities of the soft left of today. It is entirely smothered and retarded by cults of personality, personality conflicts, egomania, territorialism, hypocrisy, self-centeredness, greed, and self-righteousness. Witness the general disregard and disdain, most often without any basis or even the slightest hint of sane rationale for Red Hat, arguably the most professional distribution on the market today.

Yet because of that "free" illusion, Red Hat continues to fight an uphill battle. If you're going to pay for software, might as well pay for Microsoft. If you're looking to save money, pay nothing. It's not an enviable position for Red Hat to be in, but unfortunately the Linux world is entirely dominated by the idiot idea that everything in life should come without cost and be totally decentralized and worked on and supported by whoever wants to whenever they want and if you want it now, you pay now, and pay way more than you'd ultimately pay for an MS based network.

However, as has been seen in many corporate and government settings, free is not free in software. It comes with a support price tag that you didn't pay up front with the software. It doesn't work right out of the box both because there is no box and because it wasn't designed to. It needs a "geek" to make it work at all and a super geek in many cases to make it work the way you need it.

Those corporations which have heavily moved into the Linux world now have several full time coders and geeks to make their supposedly free system work. That's roughly $40,000US for salary and since benefits usually cost the same by rough figuring, it works out to about $80,000US per geek. Per year. Three geeks is $240,000US just to keep supposedly free software working for a few minutes.

I've seen five hundred seat LANs based on Windows clients going to Windows servers with Office and other software be entirely supported from PC hardware to software to network to servers to Internet connection, soup to nuts, by ONE non-MSCE for $80,000US (again, salary plus benefits). The cost of the software was a one-time payment of maybe $1,000US per seat so $500,000 covering five to ten years of usage and the geek.

One geek X ten years w/one time software buy... $1,300,000.

Three geeks X ten years... $2,400,000.

Yes, this is a simplification, but you get the idea. There's no reason that a company should have to replicate locally, each one, what Microsoft does for them centrally. Custom support for a Microsoft LAN needs one person generally. Customer support for a "free software" LAN needs several generally. Why? Because of what I said about the Linux world earlier. One wants to specialize in PHP and does almost nothing else. Fine, he can write scripts to run on the Apache web server, but now you need someone to make the Apache web server work and he doesn't want to do more than that. The source for much of the Linux software isn't working the way your business needs and is not customizable easily, so you need a dedicated coder to do custom modifications to make it work.

Microsoft software tends towards endless customization and tends towards a modular and extremely well documented architecture lending itself to third parties writing generalized and customizable software you can purchase easily and it just works. Point, click, install. Point, click, customize. Point, click, it works.

The Linux world full of their own supposed genius has to do things as difficult as possible. Unified architectures? No. Common frameworks? Uh uh. Standards based designs? Are you crazy? Besides, there is the self-righteousness aspect and everyone thinks they know the best way. As with so much else in the world, it's about who is right and not what is right. Microsoft does what is right and doesn't argue with everyone else. Anyone working there works to the Microsoft model and standards or doesn't work there at all. In the Linux world, it's whatever you feel like doing.

Sorry geeks, but it's true. Linux is a losing proposition for the business world and the business world knows it. When it comes to a cost vs. benefit analysis, standards, off-the-shelf availability, customizability, ease of use, ease of support, breadth and depth of support documentation... they all are on Microsoft's side, not Linux, and all because Linux is something like most geek subcultures. Full of people who feel sorry for themselves, who've abdicated all power they had in the mainstream world, and who've decided to invent games they can master to empower themselves in a sterile subculture away from the real world that matters.

Yes, I know, I must be some moron who doesn't know what I'm talking about. I who have a Linux RAID server running Samba sitting in my office. But then, I can afford to spend idle time tweaking it and supporting it myself. Were I to have money riding on it, no fucking way would I take the chances on it. I can compile in my sleep. I've become damn good with SSH and Python. But take chances with money and business? Not on your life.

Bigfoot carcass recovered?

Two Georgians Say They Have Bigfoot’s Body - NYTimes.com

But on Friday at a hotel in Palo Alto, Calif., a pair of Bigfoot
hunters say they will present what they contend is the most definitive
proof yet of an animal that science says does not exist: DNA evidence
and photographs of a dead specimen they say they found in a remote
swath of woods in northern Georgia.

Well this is a turn of events. I wonder how this fits into the Noah's Ark story. Maybe someone should ask XGH to cover that angle.

The stumbling block on the road to ethical governance is a lack of propriety

A bit rambling, sure, but it's nonetheless true. Doing things simply because we can and not because we should, much less doing them because we're obsessed with being right and others being wrong... is wrong.

Windigos for real? CA bus slaughter has odd similarities...

CANOE -- CNEWS - Daily Feature: Bus beheading similar to Windigo phenomenon

Travelocity Gets More Material

BBC NEWS | UK | England | Gloucestershire | 'Itchy feet' gnome returns home

The number one enemy of children: their self-proclaimed protectors...

Study: Network TV likes sex, but not in marriage - washingtonpost.com

This quote is basically true:


The central problem that if you're actually bothering to take care of, raise, supervise, and otherwise deal with your own kids, you don't need external protecting groups is still being missed.

When television became a child babysitting service, instead of babysitting their kids themselves, people insisted on making television clean enough to babysit their kids, not actually raise their own.

When the Internet became ubiquitous, what happened? The new medium was targeted to be the new babysitter and the babysitter which was chosen hadn't volunteered but it would now be drafted and what happened? A slew of laws ineffective to the point of uselessness because the point was never effectiveness, but aggrandizement of those pushing and writing the laws. Laws struck down whole or in part again and again by a court system ultimately beholden to their own version of the Torah: the US Constitution.

In all this, the point continues to be ignored: the job of parenting and babysitting is that of the parents and their assigned and trusted individuals, humans all. Televisions and Internet connected computers are merely items. Appliances. Inanimate objects without thought, feeling, creativity, or free will. They merely transmit the doings and ramblings of other people.

Since when should all the other people you know, and those you don't, from you neighbor to people on the far side of Earth have to live down to whatever you consider a safe enough standard of content for your children to be exposed to?

More over, since when should you not be personally involved with your own kids and rely on the television and Internet?

Your mindset, you would-be protectors of kids' virtues, is what had brought us to enormous teen pregnancy rates, drugs, divorce, anti-religiousness, and all the other ills starting in childhood. Your mindset is what has caused the dramatic surge in incest, intergenerational sex, child abuse, and neglect. All because you have no idea of and no interest in what your kids are doing as long as there's some law on the books for you to cover your otherwise naked asses with, letting you sleep at night without a guilty conscience grinding you, making you cringe at the very thought of your parenthood.

Yet, it will continue with the very same parents who lie about their own childhoods, their own indiscretions, their own moments of naive freedom away from the prying eyes of their own parents... buying their kids computers which they allow in the privacy of their own bedrooms, webcams for the computers, and completing the unholy trinity, a high speed Internet connection. They will keep buying them cell phones with cameras. They will keep leaving the digital cable and satellite with the parental controls unlocked.

Meanwhile the kids will be broadcasting nudes of themselves to friends, and watching porn on the family television bill, and mom and dad oblivious to why their next thing is to make a move behind their backs to meet some stranger for an illicit rendezvous at a hotel when they're only thirteen.

As I've said before, a pious man can think nothing more in a strip bar than if the girls are cold. A well raised person is not drawn into the world of naively self-delusionary sexual obsession where people believe childishly that they're ready for it or have some sort of control on their emotions. Well rounded and centered people don't have those issues. People who are raised by television and the Internet DO.

FOR FUCKS' SAKE PEOPLE, RAISE YOUR OWN DAMN KIDS. DO IT FOR THEM.

Oz's darker days here, munchkins now attacking clergy...

Did 'Masked Little People' Attack Bishop? - Albuquerque News Story - KOAT Albuquerque

A dispatch log from September details Gallup police were called to the
bishop's home after he told operators "gentle little people about 3 to
4 feet tall wearing Halloween masks" were in his home.

"Can you tell me what happened?" the dispatcher asked.

"They're
just moving. They've been quiet. They've been going upstairs in the
bedrooms and hiding behind the artifacts. But they don't talk," said
Pelotte, adding that they were wearing masks.

Er... yeah. Right.

The Onion finally notices the Agriprocessors mess...

Kosher Plant Cited For Child Labor | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

The world is coming to an end. I have a microphone.

I bet you never saw that coming.

Que various Scotsman jokes

Wash. letter carrier going full kilt ahead - Yahoo! News

With his build, Peterson said, his thighs fill slacks to capacity, causing chafing and scarring.

It's called dieting and exercise. How can you be a letter carrier walking a route and have your thighs get fat enough to chafe and actually scar the skin?

Perhaps he needs to try those boxer brief underwear.

Fixing Firefox 3's Quick Find bar...

EDIT: Something stopped this from working recently and I haven't found the solution... YET...

Not listed as a known issue over at Mozilla's site, and hardly mentioned despite extensive Google searches, the solution was pieced together thusly...

1. Put %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ in your Start | Run bar and hit return. Go into the profile folder, then select the chrome folder.
2. Note the location in the address bar and open Notepad.
3. Enter this in it:
   

/* Add Next/Previous Buttons to Quick Find Bar */
.findbar-container>* {display: -moz-box !important;}

4. Save as userchrome.css (making sure to change from .txt to All Files in the drop down to make sure Notepad doesn't autoappend and make it userchrome.css.txt. Make the place saved to the location you noted.
5. The Quick Find bar should now have the forward and back and whatnot no longer grayed out.

Led to it by this:

http://ffextensionguru.wordpress.com/2007/01/10/fx-tweak-quick-find-bar/

Dr. Horrible - Joss Whedon comes through

Thanks to The Wolf's most recent post on his blog, I was introduced to this little bit of comedy gold that you just have to see.

Thank you Wolf for that.

Archbishop of Canterbury continues to apologize for his entire raison d'etre...

Christian doctrine is offensive to Muslims, the Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday.

Yes, even the story itself says it right in the title:

Archbishop of Canterbury: Christian doctrine is offensive to Muslims | Mail Online

And Islam isn't offensive to Christians? To Jews?

EVERY RELIGION CONTRADICTS EVERY OTHER RELIGION. PLEASE MAKE A NOT OF THIS AND THEN GET OVER IT.

Suicide by chainsaw, not necessarily an American phenomenon...

Man cuts off own head with chainsaw after flat is earmarked to be bulldozed by developers | Mail Online

Sounds like the local council are a real pain in the neck.

Does that collar and front piece look like a leash?

If so, note where the controlling end of the leash is going.










Is this a subliminal cultural statement?

Left hand does not know what left foot is doing...

BBC NEWS | Europe | Biofuel use 'increasing poverty

Oxfam says so-called green policies in developed countries are contributing to the world's soaring food prices, which hit the poor hardest.

The group also says biofuels will do nothing to combat climate change.

Oxfam is not exactly conservative, right side of the line, or even middle of the road. For them to point this out, is a breathtaking bit of honesty. Perhaps their motivation is disingenuous, but they are correct.

The point is sitting in between the two sides right in the middle of the road. We want combustible fuels, whether gasoline or not, and on the other end, they say no no no sticking my fingers in my ears lets all live in huts.

Okay, so why do we want combustible fuels? We want what they give. An energy storage mechanism that is dense, relatively safe, gives fast energy release on demand, and is easy to make a delivery and distribution infrastructure for.

That's it. So, if burning stuff isn't the greatest idea, then we need something that doesn't involve oxidation, but still stores energy at comparable densities with comparable ease and speed of release to usage.

We need not live in huts. We merely need to come up with an energy storage mechanism that fits the bill. Biofuels ain't it. Gas isn't. Grease in diesel engines, nope. Solid-state fusion battery systems might be. There's others. But biofuel production is driving livestock feed prices through the roof and if that keeps up, that cripples the entire meat industry altogether and that means McDonald's and so on as well as summer BBQs which while I am in favor of meat alternatives would mean a sudden economic crash as all those workers no longer have money for any meal.

The current crisis is multiply insidious like a coal seam fire, and we see it right there, and we're busy organizing a ping-pong tournament instead.

Yeshiva students fight back, in other news, action and reaction principles hold in human dynamics...

Yeshiva student fires crude rocket | Jerusalem Post

Among those suspected of involvement in the incident was the yeshiva's head, Rabbi Itzik Shapira, the Ma'ariv newspaper reported.

Hmmmm... Do you think this had anything to do with the government doing nothing to stop Palestinian civilians firing rockets at Israelis? Just maybe?

Russians not as full of shit as generally thought...

Or maybe they are:

Kharchenko, 50, said the monument cost $42,000 and was installed in a square in front of his spa on Wednesday. A banner declaring: "Let's beat constipation and sloppiness with enemas" — an allusion to a line from "The Twelve Chairs," a famous Soviet film comedy — was posted on one of the spa's walls.

Russian spa opens monument to the enema - Yahoo! News

Go, you know you want to click the link and see the picture of the EIGHT HUNDRED POUND BRONZE ENEMA BULB.

Dughmush's death pleases Fatah, Hamas | Jerusalem Post

"We are talking about one of the most dangerous groups of mercenaries in the Gaza Strip," a Fatah official said in Ramallah. "These guys carried out many political assassinations and gruesome killings of innocent people."

Dughmush's death pleases Fatah, Hamas | Jerusalem Post

This is right up there with Keith Richards telling kids to just say no.

This is like Gary Busey giving motorcycle lessons.

Truly a bizarre article.

Another one from the Killing Flies With ICBMs files...

N.Y. attorney general forces ISPs to curb Usenet access | The Iconoclast - politics, law, and technology - CNET News.com

You already know the quote from this scene.

Onward comes the storm...