Author: VD

So it looks like the government courts, having decided that it’s just fine to murder unborn babies, have now made the long-predicted next step of approving involuntary euthanasia by starving Terry Schiavo to death. And if you don’t think depriving someone who can’t feed herself is murder, then just don’t feed an infant for a few months and see if you’re charged with a crime – not that Dr. Peter Singer thinks there’s anything wrong with that. Apparently it’s been decided that we’re to go the way of Holland, where the doctors of death have been creating their own mini-massacre behind closed doors for almost 20 years now:

Euthanasia in The Netherlands is “beyond effective control”, according to a report which shows that one in five assisted suicides is without explicit consent. British opponents of assisted suicide say that the figures are a warning of the dangers of decriminalising euthanasia, as Holland did in 1984. By 1995 cases of euthanasia and assisted suicide in Holland had risen to almost 3 per cent of all deaths. The Dutch survey, reviewed in the Journal of Medical Ethics, looked at the figures for 1995 and found that as well as 3,600 authorized cases there were 900 others in which doctors had acted without explicit consent. A follow-up survey found that the main reason for not consulting patients was that they had dementia or were otherwise not competent.

Doesn’t anyone else see that there is a connection between these cardinal beliefs of the American left and their globalist counterparts?

1. There are too many people: (environmentalism, overpopulation worries, etc.)

2. Abortion must remain legal. (kill the unborn)

3. Irresponsible homosexual behavior must be indulged. (kill the queers)

4. Suicide and involuntary euthanasia must be made legal. (kill the incompetent and the unfit)

It makes sense, of course. If there are too many people, then why not just kill off the weak, the sick and the unproductive. Think of it as intelligent evolution in action, plus, it would surely keep Social Security solvent for another decade or two. And eventually they’ll get around to those pesky Jews, like they always do.

Joe Farah, as he so often does, hits them hard and hits them where it hurts. He’s absolutely right, too. If you care even a little bit about your kids, if you have any regard for them whatsoever, get them the (insert your favorite noun here) out of the public schools. Or, as they should more properly be called, the soulless, mind-killing, cog-in-the-machine-programming, government-run propaganda factories.

There’s a reason why Hitler, Marx and Lenin were all big fans of the public school concept, after all.

I just turned in next Monday’s column, a passionate screed on OS migration. I considered holding off on it until the column was running in the Dallas Morning News, but then I decided that it was perhaps a bit too technophilic for the poor unsuspecting readers of the Dallas editorial page. At least WND’s readers are used to me and my idiosyncracies by now.

I don’t mean to sound cruel, but I have to admit that despite my near complete disinterest in baseball, I’m kind of glad that the Cubs lost. From an outsider’s perspective, it would seem kind of a shame to cast aside such a long and distinguished record of failure. As for the Red Sox, the only question is whether the Sports Guy – may he live forever – would be more suicidal if they A) lost to the Yankees in Game 7 of the ALCS; or B) went on to the World Series and lost to the Marlins.

I’m going with (B). Florida is still an expansion team in the hearts and minds of baseball’s purists. You’d think, as a Vikings fan who can still remember crying his eyes out when the Vikes lost their fourth Super Bowl to Oakland, I’d have more sympathy. But I don’t.

By the way, did anyone else think it was funny that Tom Clancy matched up the Vikes against the Broncos in The Sum of All Terror? Of course, the joke has lost its punch now that Denver has two wins under their orange-and-blue belts. Tom, you know you should have gone with the Bills! I bet it still annoys him that he didn’t.

John Derbyshire of National Review writes an interesting account of his brief clash with fame, when he appeared as a bit character in a Bruce Lee movie. I tend to agree with his opinion that Bruce Lee and jeet koon do were basically one and the same; it’s not a fighting style so much as it’s the way a uniquely talented fighter fought. You can train one hundred fighters in exactly the same discipline, and they will still fight one hundred different ways.

Except, that is, for tae kwon do. Take one hundred tae kwon do fighters chosen at random, and not a one will know what to do with his hands or bother to guard his head.

There is simply no excuse for this intentional slight of Israel. Thanks to DG, who brought this State Department map of Saudi Arabia to my attention. Notice how State was able to find space for labeling the tiny little island of Bahrain, but somehow, they just couldn’t fit the six letters that make up the name of the only Jewish country in the vicinity on the map.

I am not Jewish. I am not particularly fond of Jewish culture. I dislike the quasi-socialism that has made up Israeli government policy for the entirety of its existence. But I have nothing but contempt for the Arabists at State, who would like to help their murderous proxies finish what the National Socialists started by wiping out what they consider to be a “s—– little country”.

There has got to be a spiritual component to this irrational, illogical Jew hatred. There’s simply no other credible explanation for two millenia of rabid cross-cultural antipathy.

I have never understood why the Palestinian murderocracy is permitted to play whack-a-Jew while the State Department cheers them on and lobbies for the PA to receive more financial support from the U.S. government. What really infuriates me, though, is that Arafat and his bloodthirsty gang are again being permitted to murder Americans with total impunity. Arafat has killed Americans before, and I have no doubt that he will do so in the future until President Bush finds a backbone and shows more resolve in shutting down the monster than did his predecessors: Clinton, Bush, Reagan, and Carter. You can’t tell me that Arafat believes we’re going to strike back, when we jump all over Israel every time they justifiably hit back at the poor, defenseless murderers. I have no doubt that later today we’ll hear plenty of somber condemnations worded in the harshest possible terms. Whatever.

I have many doubts about the so-called War on Terror, but chief among them is this: if we are truly fighting against terror, why is the godfather of terror, the creator of modern terrorism, left in peace?

Why not? Here’s my three votes:

Father Joe’s Corner…

Inspiration

NOVAK KNEW BETTER THAN TO BURN VALERIE PLAME

Blogspot was acting up for about two hours. I couldn’t view it, either via the general Internet or from within Blogger itself, and while I could see and edit posts, I couldn’t publish. At first, I assumed it was something I’d done – sign of an inveterate tinkerer’s guilty conscience – but after checking out other blogs in the Blogosphere, I was relieved to discover that whatever it was wasn’t of my making. Which would have been hard to credit anyhow, considering what a plain vanilla blog this is… and will remain. The text is king!

On the Redhat front, some fortunate poking around revealed this important message with regards to kernel upgrades and Linksys drivers:

A final note to remember. In the future, whenever you need to upgrade to a newer kernel, you’ll also need to reinstall these drivers. These files are compiled specifically for your current kernel version/arch, so they won’t work with upgrades. For this reason, I always check that driver site to see if a new set of drivers has been released before I upgrade to newer kernels.

In other words, don’t trust your friendly neighborhood supertechnical stud programmer who guesses that the low-level changes are unlikely to mess with your PCMCIA drivers. Or rather, trust, but verify. Anyhow, I’ll definitely wait for Saint Tim to get around to updating the kernel RPM before upgrading the kernel now.

Linux is not a digital paradise, as yet, but we’re getting there. One of the biggest annoyances I’ve run into thus far is the package dependency problem. I wanted to download a newsreader, but XNews doesn’t run under Linux, so I did a little research and learned that Pan is considered to be roughly equivalent to Agent, one of the more popular Windows newsreaders. Then, after downloading Pan’s installation package, I learned that I needed eight other packages in order for it to install properly.

Fine, fair enough, since the new version of Pan is quite a bit newer than the Redhat 8.0 discs from which I installed Linux a while back. I downloaded five of the eight packages, installed two of them, and then learned that the third required two additional packages. Hmmm. So I downloaded those two, installed the first, and then learned that the second required an additional package. Grrrrrr. It was rather like a mixed drink: two-parts cracking open those increasingly smaller Russian dolls and one-part fighting the Hydra sans a fiery brand for the regenerating stumps.

At that point, I gave up, assuming that there had to be a better way. Sure enough, there was. Ximian’s Red Carpet is a little like the Red Hat update agent, only it works a lot better. Not only did it have the Pan interdependencies worked out, downloaded and installed in minutes, but it also resolved a package interdependency issue that had caused the Red Hat update agent to throw in the towel. Very impressive! So much so that I went ahead and upgraded Ximian Evolution, the email program I’m using, without even bothering to read the new features list. Good on ya, Monkey Men.

Unfortunately, Evolution Pilot doesn’t seem to recognize my Dana. But my list of Windows-necessary functions is now down to three. Adieu, sweet Bill….