Category: Uncategorized

Is there anything more annoying that sportswriters who won’t stick to sports? Sports Illustrated has long been populated by squishy left-liberals, but old-timers like Dr. Z and Peter King usually keep their politics to themselves. But the new generation, all feelings and no brain, can’t resist sharing their horror when Terrell Owens essentially calls Jeff Garcia a fag, in one case because his Daddy left his Mommy for another man. Then another new SI-nik idiotically gives “props” to the first guy for condemning Owens’ “Neolithic comments” while simultaneously defending Carlos Delgado’s decision to make a point of not singing God Bless America, apparently during the seventh-inning stretch. (They do that? Why? And who knew?)

When another sportswriter points out that the fans booing Delgado have the same right to get on his case that Delgado has to make his little protest, the loser considers this an “overly generous” interpretation of the First Amendment. So it’s good for Delgado to stand up for his beliefs, but bad for Owens to do so? And I can’t help but notice that Owens’ belief in the undesirability of homosexuality is not only Neolithic, but Victorian, Edwardian, medieval, feudal, Renaissance, Enlightenment, 18th Century, 19th Century, 20th Century, Stone Age, Iron Age, Industrial Age and Information Age, spanning every time and culture with the exception of the media elite during our own little corner of the early 21st century and a few creaky historical societies nearing the final stages of collapse.

Gentlemen, for the love of the NFL, please stick to sports. You are embarrassing yourselves to the point that if it weren’t for the old school, I wouldn’t even bother reading.

RM learns not to put his trust in Microsoft:

I thought you might be interested to hear my little incident with Microsoft’s new SP2 for Windows XP…

SP2 seemed to be working fine for the last 2 days since I installed it on my home computer running Windows XP Professional . Then came Friday the 13th. I started up my computer after getting home from being out, and Windows froze on startup, apparently while loading the latest edition of Zone Alarm. (Remember now. I am an IT Technician. I keep a lean, mean computer free of viruses, spyware, and the like.) This was the first time that Windows XP has ever frozen on my home computer to the point where I had to shut down with the power button.

Upon restart, the new Windows Firewall came up with a warning telling me that Messenger was trying to access the Internet and asked if I wanted to give it permission. Thinking this was odd, considering that I had the Messenger service disabled and had opted to turn the Windows Firewall off since I am running Zone Alarm, I went ahead and clicked yes. Once everything loaded, I checked the Services under Administrative Tools in the Control Panel too see Messenger’s status, thinking that Microsoft must have turned these services back on. Lo and behold! Messenger was disabled. I then checked on the status of the Windows Firewall, and it said that it was turned off!! #$*@^(#!!!!!

Microsoft said that they spent $1 billion on SP2!!! What the hell is this? Some big prank that they are playing on the public and the business communities? Is this sheer incompetence, or has Microsoft totally lied to the public and “upgraded” XP into some Big Brother tool that runs processes despite the fact that the user completely disables them as services? If things continue in this direction, I can expect to be a Linux expert in about 4 years.

Never trust anyone who always insist that they know what’s best for you. The main impetus for my switch to Linux was an early version of Microsoft Messenger, which kept popping up messages giving me the option to (a) upgrade now, or (b) upgrade later. There was no option for (c) shut the hell up and leave me alone. I saw the writing on the wall, and now I barely use any Microsoft product at all. I’m forced to run a dual-boot system just to run our new software – yes, of course we’ll be porting it to Linux in the future – and to sync my Alphasmart Dana, but that’s about it.

You can always count on Microsoft to screw things up. Always. Big Chilly and I once made over a million dollars precisely because we knew that. We were developing a program for a very large technology company, but as small and insignificant fish, we were the last and least-important backup for a diamond-hard delivery date on a major project. It was the sort where if you miss by an hour, you’re out. All of our competitors were banking on Microsoft’s release of a certain toolkit, but when Big Chilly and I discussed whether we should trust their cross-my-heart-thrice promised delivery date or make use of an older, less flashy but still-usable DOS toolkit, this was the entirety of our high level technical discussion:

BC: “The Windows stuff is much better, but waiting for them would make the timeline so tight it worries me. I’m thinking it’s safer to go with DOS. What do you think?”

Vox: “When has Microsoft ever not been full of shit on their dates?”

BC: “Never… okay, it’s definitely DOS.

Six months later, Microsoft still hadn’t delivered, all of our competitors missed and we got the big check. Know who to trust, and more importantly, know who not to trust. I have a largely unused partition of XP Pro sitting on my new MTech machine – review to come shortly – and I never considered upgrading to SP2 for a second. I mean, it literally never even crossed my mind. Live free or else! Ride the tank. Be the Penguin.

Powerline sums up Chris Matthews’ questioning of a Swift boat vet:

Matthews’ main arguments were that the Navy gave Kerry medals, the people on his boat backed Kerry, and Kerry showed more courage than most. The first argument was not responsive to O’Neill’s central thesis that Kerry obtained the medals fraudulently by making false claims. The second argument was irrelevant with respect to those medals awarded to Kerry based on events that did not occur on his swift boat. The third argument was irrelevant to the central issue of Kerry’s credibility, a point that Matthews willingfully refused to grasp. Matthews seemed to become particularly upset when, in response to his browbeating style questions, O’Neill calmly conceded that Kerry had shown some courage in shooting “the Viet Cong kid in the back,” but not enough to deserve a medal. At that point, Matthews resorted to accusing O’Neill of being a Republican. But he couldn’t even make that stick. In response to questions about his past voting, O’Neill said he voted for Perot in 1992 and 1996 and Gore in 2000, and supported a Democrat for mayor of Houston, Texas, his hometown.

How stupid do you have to be to make an assumption about someone with whom you are going to be arguing on national television when it’s a matter of asking a simple question before taking the risk of making an ass of yourself. One of the reasons that the media is so bad is that people continue to watch, follow and believe them even after they’ve repeatedly demonstrated that they can’t be trusted in any way, shape or form. This summation of Hardball also summarizes why I don’t watch the mainstream news anymore, as it simply has no credibility with me.

The bulldozer style of debate is so difficult to defend against; I had it ground into my brain from years of living with two devil’s advocates, Big Chilly and the White Buffalo. Seriously, you couldn’t say that the sky is blue without finding yourself launched into a discussion of light, color, perception and ancient linguistics. As a result, I will seldom open my mouth to express an opinion on a subject without having at least a few solid supporting facts or intellectual references at my immediate recall. Assumptions and tangential hypotheses only get you in trouble. This doesn’t mean you’ll always be right, of course, as there may be facts of which you are unaware or complications you cannot unravel, but you’ll seldom make a fool out of yourself and your case will always be perceived as reasonable and defensible, even if other’s privately consider it to be outrageous.

I think at this point, I can safely say that Kerry is the worst candidate I’ve seen in my lifetime. The real race now is between John Kerry and the stock market, and the fate of the president’s reelection will rest upon whether Kerry or the social mood self-destruct faster.

Star Wars, in ASCII.

Freaks.

AFP: The unspoken issues of the 2004 presidential elections are the antiquated and useless policies of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Most Americans believe both major political parties are pandering for future Hispanic votes while avoiding the politically sensitive issues of immigration. If homeland security and the threat of foreign terrorists are such a major concern, why can’t we control immigration on the Mexican-U.S. border?

Badnarik: “Let’s be realistic: The U.S. has more than 95,000 miles of border and coastline, and the current immigration regime encourages people to slip through without the formalities. With millions of immigrants dodging our Border Patrol every year, it’s time to say ‘enough – this isn’t working.’

“My goal is to encourage legitimate immigration – people coming to the United States to live free and work hard – while defending the nation against enemies who come here to harm it and parasites who come here to live on government largesse.

“I advocate open immigration for individuals who are willing to enter at a Customs and Immigration station and submit to a quick background check to ensure that they aren’t criminals or terrorists. And except for extreme cases such as Cuban and Haitian boat refugees who don’t have much control over where they land, I advocate treating people who cross the borders elsewhere as what they are: invaders.

“A more open immigration regime, coupled with the elimination of welfare incentives, would greatly reduce the resources needed to provide real border security. And the proper agency for that security is the armed forces – once we’ve brought them home from Japan, Korea, Germany, Iraq, Afghanistan …”

Interesting. The Libertarian Party presidential candidate is for harsher border control than either the Republican or the Democratic candidate, neither of whom dare to mention the issue, still less do anything about it. Badnarik’s position is certainly not what most people imagine when they hear that libertarians support open borders.

In case you’re interested, I’ll be on with Northern Alliance crew again on the Patriot 1280 at 2 PM Central this Saturday. The good news is that if you’re so inclined, you can listen now to the audio stream at:

http://mainstreamnetwork.com/listen/?station=taxpayersleague. We may throw down on Newt as per the previous post, but we’ll probably spend a good bit of time talking about the gender gap and why it exists in politics as well.

If you enjoy it, don’t hesitate to send the Fraters gang a thank-you note.

From the Fraters Libertas:

At one point the issue of circumscribed civil liberties came up and Gingrich’s response was that it had to be a balancing act. He rhetorically posed the question, if there were reliable information that a terrorist nuclear strike on Washington DC was scheduled for inauguration day next January, would he favor the temporary retraction of all civil liberties in the country. Given the threat to the survival of the US government and the loss of over a million people, his answer was “unquestionably, yes”.

Since Gingrich believes the war on method will last until 2070, this definition of “temporary” is apparently a Clintonesque one meaning “longer than you will likely live.” In other words, once gone, they’re gone forever. I would rather lose a city or three than sacrifice “all civil liberties” and live in a military dictatorship – I thought the whole point of being Americans was that we were willing to make sacrifices for freedom, not of it. Isn’t sacrificing the nation’s freedom in order to save the nation tantamount to burning the village in order to save it? What are we hoping to save? A nation of frightened serfs slavishly grateful to their feudal protectors? Bah – what are sheep if not for slaughter?

As for saving the government, this country would be much better off if Congress and the White House both disappeared in a big bang. The scene in Independence Day, you may recall, was greeted with cheers across the country. We’d be faced with governing ourselves for a change – oh, the horror! And where is the limit drawn? We now know that a million lives justifies throwing out the Constitution in Gingrich’s opinion, (we’ll skip over the fact that this begs the question of whether it would do any good at all), where, precisely, does he draw the line. Do we throw out our supposedly unalienable rights and call in Marius to save us if 100,000 are at risk? 1,000? Ten? What if one little girl in New York City has a tummy ache, should we declare martial law then?

The rampant idiocy of this is the notion that embracing serfdom will protect us from anything. It won’t. I absolutely guarantee that, and I assure you that if we go down this path, the most that Gingrich and his poisonous ilk will ever be able to say is to make a baseless assertion that whatever ends up happening could have been worse. Even now, the central goverment is ENSURING that the situation is more dangerous than it need be – you don’t think NWA would ban Arabs in a heartbeat and advertise that fact if the Feds would let them? – and even if Gingrich is correct about the threats he cites, the centralized autocracy he advocates will cripple the economy and stifle individual initiative as it always does, making any future war harder to win, not easier. History is littered with centralized military dictatorships that have lost wars, whereas decentralized free nations are usually victorious. And no government, once having expanded its reach, can be expected to voluntarily give up the new powers it has claimed for itself.

We already knew the Democratic leadership is treasonous, but with their recent words and actions, the Republican leadership seems hell-bent on proving that they, too, are traitors to the republic.

Perhaps this is the apocalypse of which Dark Window is the harbinger. I’ve been tracking the decline of the market during what appears to be beginning of Primary Wave 3, and interestingly enough, as of the close yesterday, the percentage of the S&P 500 decline over the percentage of trading days/640 (the length of Primary Wave 1) came to a perfect 1. Seriously, the decline from 1163.89 in the 110 trading days since March 5, 2004 was 17.19 percent at yesterday’s close of 1063.23. 110/640 also equals 17.19 percent.

I’d say that’s about as close to being on schedule as you can get. Coincidence? As Big Chilly says, there are no coincidences.

A Vox nemesis expresses a desire:

If we keep saying such nice things about each other, people are going to start talking. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re already being compared to Carville and Matalin. Uh…you can be Carville.

Look, Pete, if you want to slip on Victoria’s Secret because it makes you feel pretty, no one’s stopping you, least of all me. I fully support your right to wear women’s clothing and call yourself Mary. I’m a libertarian, after all.

Oh, don’t be embarrassed, here, take this Cuddle certificate and you’ll be feeling more secure about your new identity in no time. Sure, I think the sheer pink chiffon would go over great with the Cuddlers. Just remember Rule Number 7!

From Instapundit:

The Kerry campaign responded, initially, that Mr Kerry had always said he was “near” Cambodia. Then a campaign aide said Mr Kerry had been in the Mekong Delta “between” Vietnam and next-door Cambodia – a geographical zone not found on maps, which show the Mekong river running from Cambodia to Vietnam.

Michael Meehan, a Kerry campaign adviser, told ABC Television: “The Mekong Delta consists of the border between Cambodia and Vietnam, so on Christmas Eve in 1968, he was in fact on patrol . . . in the Mekong Delta between Cambodia and Vietnam. He was ambushed, they fired back, he was fired upon from both sides, from the Cambodian side of the border and the Vietnam side during that day in 1968.”

This is like saying that because the Mississippi River runs south from Minnesota, you can say that you’re in Mississippi when you cross the river to go to a Vikings game at the Hump. I know Kerry voters, excepting the corrupt elite hoping to ride the gravy train, are generally low-IQ, but this defense doesn’t even rise to the level of pathetic.