Category: Uncategorized

Does anyone know how to get rid of a ghost icon in Windows XP? Someone, who shall remain nameless, but is tall, blond and lawyerly, managed to mess up my Windows partition in less than five minutes of being helpful.

The icon has not one, but two dots in the filename, which appears to be the problem. The normal file is “XXXX.yyy“, but this particular icon isn’t a shortcut for any real file, as its name is “XXXX..“. It doesn’t cause any actual problems, but I can’t delete it or point it to something useful and change the name.

Any ideas? And yes, I am aware that booting into LINUX is one way to avoid the problem, but if I was interested in avoiding it instead of fixing it, I wouldn’t have bothered posting this request.

59 – Bucknell
55 – Arkansas

The three-point line is there for a reason, gentlemen. And if you can shoot .550 from behind it, you should probably go ahead and do so.

From the Star & Sickle:

Minneapolis Fire Chief Bonnie Bleskachek, already the subject of an internal investigation, has been accused in a federal lawsuit of repeated physical attacks against her former domestic partner, a Minneapolis fire captain, who said Bleskachek denied her the opportunity to advance in the department….

She said in the complaint that she was one of two firefighters to pass the first part of a test to become battalion chief, but that Bleskachek canceled the second part of the test.

Cornell claims in court documents that she and Kathleen Mullen, another fire captain, were the only candidates to pass the first portion of the test and that Bleskachek’s girlfriend was among those to fail the test.

Remember when people used to say that life would be better if only women were permitted to take charge? Remember? That was awesome!

I imagine that you’re as shocked as I am to learn women who want to do men’s work tend to be dykes and that performance tests would ever be altered in order to allow women to pass them. But what could top the humor of the fire chief calling 9/11 in order to pester her former “domestic partner”?

The lesson – besides the obvious one about the humor inherent in dykes – is this: never allow anyone who confuses the personal with the professional, much less the political, to have any power whatsoever over you. And that goes double for those who believe the personal is the political.

I still favor the traditional system where rich people run the country and convince the morons who live here that the voters are really the ones in charge. It’s not a perfect system, but no one has come up with a better one. And it’s fair in the sense that anyone could become rich and abuse the poor.

If a cartoonist can figure it out – admittedly, a very successful cartoonist, but still – you’d think that anyone could, especially with George Bush having spent the last six years governing exactly like a Democrat, only less spendthrifty.

And for those who would seriously attempt to argue that Democrats would never have been so bold as to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, I believe it should suffice to mention WWI, WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Somalia and Kosovo.

Fred Barnes declares the end of small government:

Political pundit Fred Barnes showed up at Grover Norquist’s Wednesday Group meeting this week and shocked some of the 100 or so conservative interest-group representatives in attendance by appearing to throw in the towel on limiting government, according to e-mails and phone calls from several persons who were present.

“President Bush thinks, and I agree, that we are not going to have smaller government,” Mr. Barnes said at the meeting. “Ronald Reagan tried to do it and gave up. Newt Gingrich did it and gave up. We are going to have a government of big size.”

In a separate discussion with Ralph Z. Hallow of The Washington Times, Mr. Barnes said he made those remarks at the meeting as part of his discussion of his latest book, “Rebel-in-Chief: How George W. Bush Is Redefining the Conservative Movement and Transforming America.” “I am a small-government conservative myself,” Mr. Barnes told Mr. Hallow yesterday. “But,” Mr. Barnes added, “it’s unrealistic to think it is ever going to happen in our country. Bush recognizes it. He’s going to use big government for conservative ends.”

I tend to agree. I wonder how much Fred paid for that hacienda he recently acquired. A margarita or three sounds pretty good about now. Vote or don’t vote, you’re going to get bigger government and you’d better accept it nicely or President Clinton version 2.0 (Extreme edition) will have to use the Patriot Acts against you.

UPDATE: In case you’re still dubious, you might wish to pay attention to the words of conservative Republican icon Arlen Spector. “The Republican Party is now principally moderate, if not liberal!” exulted Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), after the Senate — including a majority of Republicans — approved his budget-busting amendment to spend an extra $7 billion on domestic programs.

Peggy Noonan appears to have recently eaten of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil:

This week’s column is a question, a brief one addressed with honest curiosity to Republicans. It is: When George W. Bush first came on the scene in 2000, did you understand him to be a liberal in terms of spending?

The question has been on my mind since the summer of 2005 when, at a gathering of conservatives, the question of Mr. Bush and big spending was raised. I’d recently written on the subject and thought it significant that no one disagreed with my criticism. Everyone murmured about new programs, new costs, how the president “spends like a drunken sailor except the sailor spends his own money.” And then someone, a smart young journalist, said, (I paraphrase), But we always knew what Bush was. He told us when he ran as a compassionate conservative. This left me rubbing my brow in confusion. Is that what Mr. Bush meant by compassionate conservatism?

That’s not what I understood him to mean. If I’d thought he was a big-spending Rockefeller Republican–that is, if I’d thought he was a man who could not imagine and had never absorbed the damage big spending does–I wouldn’t have voted for him.

I’m no conservative, but I can answer that question. Yes, Virginia, I did know him to be a liberal in terms of spending. I did not vote for him, nor will I vote for the sacrificial lamb the Republicans offer up in 2008.

Voting is a sham, and if you cannot understand that after six years of the pig in the poke that is Bush the Younger, you simply aren’t paying attention.

Except, of course, of men bearing roses:

Cable news beauty Monica Crowley faced down her alleged stalker in court yesterday, telling a jury how a lovesick kook haunted her with disturbing e-mails and followed her around town – armed with roses.

“I was horrified, terrified to walk around the city where I live, to think this guy was following me,” Crowley said of suspect Ronald Martin, 41, in Manhattan Supreme Court.

Of course she was terrified. After all, those flowers have thorns on them, you know. She’s willing to face him down in court with plenty of police around, but Cthulhu forfend that she bother to tell the loser to get lost all by her poor little self.

What I find amusing is that the woman even admits that the guy never threatened her, either in person or via email. But the important thing is that she FELT threatened, so clearly the guy should be taken out and executed.

The fact that something bad could happen is no reason to assume that it will happen. Besides, if someone wants to take you out badly enough, they will take you out and it doesn’t matter if you’re a head of state with a massive bodyguard or a 95-pound woman without a family.

From the Washington Times:

Even the most liberal voices in the Netherlands now acknowledge that disturbingly high percentages of the local Muslim population have segregated themselves, ignoring, if not shunning, basic Dutch values such as women’s rights, separation of church and state and respect for different lifestyles.

And if the verdict signals a strong shift in the country’s attitudes toward countering terrorism, Holland has been rethinking many of its internal policies since that tragic November day. Immigration has been drastically reduced, with the stated aim of focusing on integrating the large and widely unassimilated existing immigrant communities. New residents must now undergo 500 hours of Dutch language instruction and 50 hours of social orientation. And in January Immigration and Integration Minister Rita Verdonk talked about a “national code of conduct,” a set of general rules to be applied to the public that emphasizes the equality of men and women, non-discrimination and the importance of the Dutch language.

Other measures directly target the Muslim community. Public funding for Islamic schools, often accused of perpetrating the self-segregation of the Muslim community, is under review. And parliament has already voted in favor of a proposal to ban the most extreme forms of veiling (such as the burqa and the niqab) in public.

It is important to remember that in every power struggle, as in war, the enemy gets a vote too. The Dutch Muslim community is not likely to simply shrug their collective shoulders at these measures, especially when this is the first resistance they have encountered in decades. I expect the initial reaction will be to ratchet up the pressure, with riots similar to those seen in France. A wiser move, of course, would be to wait quietly and let the demographic pressure exert itself, but I consider that option to be less likely.

In the eyes of the canonical feminist, men are superflous… until reality trumps theory and unpleasant work is afoot. I was disturbed from my morning cappucino yesterday by a full-throated canine chorus which indicated that we had an unexpected visitor approaching the door. It was a delivery man, however, it was our neighbor, who informed me that the dog on the next street over was out of his gated yard and the owners appeared to be gone for the day.

I didn’t have to ask her why she didn’t simply put the dog in the yard and close the gate, because this particular dog is rather fearsome in appearance, the terror of small children and nervous women alike. He’s a big German Shepherd with all the typical neuroses of the white variant and then some, and he barks and snaps wildly at everyone who passes by. He does this from behind the safety of the gate, though, a low one that he could effortlessly leap if he ever had any intention of attacking anyone. He looks like a ferocious white wolf and sounds very impressive indeed, but he has the heart of a particularly cowardly chicken.

Still, it is unwise to let a fearbiter roam free when the fearbiter’s jaws are large enough to take off a hand, and besides, I didn’t want the stupid dog to get hit by a car. So, I told our neighbor that I’d take care of it and sent her on her way, put the Ridgeback on a leash, grabbed an umbrella and headed out. I thought about putting on a pair of gloves, but reasoned that between the Ridgeback and the umbrella, the chances I’d actually have to manhandle him were negligible.

As it turned out, the mere realization that the Ridgeback and I intended to directly approach him sent the big bad German Shepherd into a panic, and before we had gotten to within ten feet of him, he turned tail and fled for the safety of a pine tree well inside the fence. The Ridgeback was visibly disappointed to have lost her potential playmate, but she was assuaged by much praise and many affectionate shakes of the snout. We headed home together with the deep satisfaction of a job well done.

hb needs to up the dosage to get herself through those tedious days with the kids:

The cost of opportunity would have been the sacrifice of raising healthy, happy, productive young adults. Can you look down on women through out history because they wanted to do right by their children and be a good parent? Do you think your mother was dumb and lacked intelligence because she decided to raise, teach, and protect you instead of making a new medical breakthrough. Hmmm. Who is the group driving women away from having and raising children again? It is you!

First, I congratulate hb for making the right decision to raise her own children instead of continuing on the fast track to Powerpoint mastery. I’m not being sarcastic here, indeed, the probabilities are very high that motherhood will be the one worthwhile thing she will accomplish before she passes from the scene.

What hb and all the idiot feminists forget is that only a very small fraction of a percent of all the men on the planet have contributed anything noteworthy to mankind throughout history – except reproduce. And the number of women who have contributed anything except to reproduce is a fraction of that fraction. How many women have made a medical breakthrough, ten? One hundred? Even if the number is one thousand, that’s next to nothing compared to the billions who have inhabited the planet.

Hb has it exactly backward, which doesn’t speak well for her ability to succeed in the marketplace once her children are raised and she is free to spread her wings and fly… straight into a window would be my guess. I am not driving women away from marrying and having children, that is being done by their mothers, fathers and teachers who encourage them to put their educations and their careers ahead of their family aspirations, by a society that has ensured that the default path is a barren one and by the feminists who consider increasing numbers of drugged-up women slaving away in cubicles all day to be a mark of social progress.

As for my mother, I consider proof of her intelligence to be that she stayed home and raised her children rather than wasting her time and effort reducing the wage rate and performing corporate busy work.