“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.