Category: Uncategorized

AW writes from Mexico: Pretty outrageous of Bush, that speech of his. What with the “crusade” omission and the “not the expression of a religion” absurdity. And another zinger- Bush spoke of the war against the “ideology of terrorism”. But terrorism isn’t an ideology – it’s a method ! It’s like FDR saying WWII was a war against the “ideology of blitzkrieg”. Amazing, simply amazing. But have you noticed he’s still hated by Muslims as an enemy of Islam? The guy panders and it still does him no good. Another example, he’s pandered to Mexico more than any president in history. But here in Mexico, the media calls him an illegitimate president and likens him to Hitler. Will the guy ever learn?

I don’t know if I’d characterize the speech as outrageous so much as dispiriting. It’s been clear for over sixteen months that retreat from financial empire was out, and for nine months that decisive war is also out. I’m hoping that we’re not soon going to see another Pearl Harbor that will provide the impetus for kickstarting the latter option, but time will tell. Then again, one can never be too cynical where geopolitics are concerned.

As for the president, more and more he appears to have a relationship with his various foes that resembles a co-dependent battered woman. “Love me, love me,” he cries. “See what I do for you?” And all that gets him is another punch in the face. This is not a model of leadership, political courage or strength of character in my view.

Of all the remembrances of Ronald Reagan now being written, I think Joe Carter’s is perhaps the most significant.

The most appropos act of tribute to the late president, however, belongs to George W. Bush: “The federal government will be closed Friday in honor of former President Ronald Reagan, the White House announced Sunday.”

I can’t think of a more fitting way to honor the passing of this great man. Too bad the closure won’t be made permanent.

RD writes: Everyone in the world, who is not in denial, Christian and Muslim alike are holding their breath hoping that the coming World War, that everyone fears, can be delayed or prevented by partial war and appeasement. When it comes, It will be unlike any war in the history of civilization and hundreds of millions will die and it may continue for at least fifty years. Some believe that Armageddon is upon us. Most hope and pray that it is not, including President Bush.

It is a clash of civilizations that is over a thousand years old. And the three major religions all predict an ultimate conflict. The forces at work are beyond the control of anyone. It is not of our choosing and our only choices will be to become Muslim, to fight or to die. Still, there were few who believed that the conflict with the Soviet Union would not ultimately result in a nuclear holocaust. It was the singular courage of Reagan that won that conflict without a war.

I agree that we are potentially dealing with a great clash of civilizations here, but I don’t believe that the American people are well served by a dissembling leadership. The American people are being lied to about the nature of the enemy, the sacrifices that they may be forced, (not asked), to make as well as the dangers to their liberties that they face, from within and without. Meanwhile, the administration takes steps that actually place the people in more danger, even as they fail to prepare them for the potential conflict.

It is not too late for the West to avoid open war. Pulling back our quasi-imperial outposts and expelling the alien fifth column would likely lead to the collapse of the dollar’s global financial hegemony and have a terrible effect on our economy, but far less than full-scale conflict between the Dar-al-Harb and the Dar-al-Islam, and America would remain intact and prepared for decisive action. Those European countries wise enough to follow our example would do well – the Netherlands is already taking steps in this direction – while others, like France, will not do anything until it was too late for anything but the usual European solution, vicious government persecution of the disfavored minority.

This is a subject on which the national debate should begin, but since we live in a land where the people have given up their sovereignty to a cabal of professional bureaucrats and politicians concerned primarily about reelection, that seems unlikely. So, we’ll soon find out if George Bush’s half-measures will suffice.

But for those who still consider the president to be a great martial leader, ponder this. Both Churchill and Reagan spoke long and loud about the primary danger posed to their respective nations, to such an extent that they were both considered Johnny One-notes, long before either of them were elected to office. And once in office, neither was shy about working towards eliminating the danger.

Naturally, some left-liberals have gotten their panties in a bunch about my suggestion that women’s suffrage has been disastrous for the nation. And as you’d expect, none of them actually bothered to offer any argument that this is not in fact the case, but consider angry name-calling, senseless sputtering and otherwise affecting the vapors to pass for devastating response.

The expected comparisons to Saudia Arabia and the Taliban popped up; apparently the distinction between limited voting in a constitutional republic and no voting at all in a hereditary monarchy is too fuzzy for these handicapable brains to absorb. In other words, Thomas Jefferson = the House of Saud. Yeah, good luck with that one.

It’s a simple question, actually. Is the nation better off or worse off as a result of women’s suffrage? If so, how? It’s a tough case to make, unless you want to argue that divorce, illegitimacy, homosexuality and falling real wages are the historical signs of a healthy society. Of course, these are the same sort of people who, in the past, have tried to argue that masses of women entering the work force had NO POSSIBLE EFFECT on wage rates, so I wouldn’t put it past them to give it the old sophmoronic try.

The amusing thing is that these people, presumably small-d democrats, are so clueless that they don’t realize that this nation is not and has never been a democracy. We could actually have a real democracy now, as the technology is possible, and yet it never crosses the tiny little minds of these “democrats” to call for one as they support yet another plutocrat in the Bush-Clinton-Bush Yale line.

Voting is not a God-given right as delineated in either the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights. Liberty, in fact, denies universal democracy, (or mobocracy as it was known), a fact that anyone who has read the Federalist Papers would know the Founding Fathers understood very well. The dichotomy of a libertarian favoring limited suffrage is only an apparent contradiction to the ideologically and historically ignorant.

E perche “popoli” invece “populi”? Perche parlo italiano, non latina.

For some time, I’ve been disappointed that there isn’t a good Palmbook reader for Linux. This is strange, since some Palm-equivalents actually run on a Linux OS, but I’ve finally found a solution to my liking.

WINE, the Windows emulator, is a good program but not the easiest to comprehend or manipulate. In my case, it was almost unusable because every time I ran it, it would take 3-4 minutes to run the fonts through some process or another. After a little digging, I learned that I had to tell WINE how to find a place to load the Windows fonts automatically, which, since I run a dual-boot machine, is in the Windows Fonts directory.

I told it how to find them by going into the WINE configuration file, which is done by using the terminal to go into /home/user/.wine and running GEDIT CONFIG. I only had to change one line, (the italicized line below), and remove the semicolon that commented it out.

; the TrueType font dirs you want to make accessible to wine

[FontDirs]

“dir1” = “/mnt/windows/winnt/Fonts”

;”dir2″ = “/usr/share/fonts/truetype”

;”dir3″ = “/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TT”

;”dir4″ = “/usr/share/fonts/TT”

Palm Reader then worked without the excruciating delay, but I was getting an error saying that Windows 98 or better was required, so I made one more change, (again italicized below).

[Version]

; Windows version to imitate (win95,win98,winme,nt351,nt40,win2k,winxp,win2k3,win20,win30,win31)

“Windows” = “win2k”

; DOS version to imitate

;”DOS” = “6.22”

Finally, for ease of use, I created a launcher by first creating a little text file called winpalm, which does nothing more than change the directory to the one containing Palm Reader and call WINE PALM READER.EXE. The launcher command is simply SH WINPALM. Pick an icon, and you’re reading .pdb files in Linux. I don’t do much reading this way, preferring my Dana most of the time, but it’s a nice option if you’re going to sit down and have a sandwich while you’re reading.

From WND: Some 80 percent of the 816 GIs killed in Iraq have died since major combat operations were declared over in May 2003.

This is the percentage equivalent of America suffering an additional 1.17 million fatalities after hostilities ceased in WWII. (There were 292,131 American battle deaths from 1941-1945). From this, we can conclude at least one of two things:

1. The current war was never truly about Iraq or Hussein per se and is thus not over.

2. The Japan/Germany post-war model is not relevant to the present situation.

My belief is that both are true. I have no doubt that tomorrow’s column is going to infuriate a lot of people, including some regulars here, but I would encourage you to seriously consider what I am saying in light of the established facts, not your instinctive emotional reaction.

There are those who consider George W. Bush to be carrying Ronald Reagan’s torch. I find the suggestion laughable. The man who did not fear to demand that the leader of the world’s second most powerful military force “tear down this wall!” would never have uttered the infamous “religion of peace” line.

Rhone writes: think it would be very interesting to see WND’s response to a column like that. Prediction: they won’t like it; moreover, they won’t like it Big Time.

Manatee adds: No way will WND allow him to write that piece.

Sure they will. They’ve only ever refused to publish one column of mine, on the close etymological relationship between a homosexual slur and a political ideology, and they were probably right to do so. I’d be shocked if they demurred or even commented in any way on a column about the voting electorate.

That being said, there’s only one way to find out. If someone can email me the results of the post-1920 presidential election results broken down by sex, I’ll write it. I bet I can not only make a case for it, but one with which many women will agree as well as presenting an alternative that even outraged feminists will find hard to refute.

May he go with God, into light and glory everlasting.

Anonymous writes: I’m female, and retired military (which for those of you who never served means at least 20 years in uniform). I cannot abide discussing political issues with most women (there are few exceptions) because they are not willing, and in some cases are not able, to think. So why did you guys give women the right to vote?

I assume our forefathers gave women the right to vote for much the same reason that many men abdicate their position as head of the household. They figure, well, at least they’ll finally shut up about everything, and really, how bad can it possibly be?

A few years later, while writing an alimony check that exceeds the rent for his studio apartment that is one-tenth the size of the house in which his ex-wife is living with the kids he hasn’t seen for a month, the man dimly begins to realize that somewhere along the way, he went wrong. Most men wrongly place all the blame on the woman at this point, little realizing how they were complicit in their own demise.

Alex writes: Vox=”That’s just bizarre. How does this make sense when Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are usually described as neocons, considering that none of them are Jewish?”

This is made clear in the very next sentence written by VDH… really, Im surprised at this kneejerk blog. VDH makes strong arguments and has done the research to back them up. You jump too quickly to damn when things don’t make sense to you, perhaps b/c they rub brusquely against your assumptions.

VDH=”Cabal” and “Nazi-like” are also used by others and with increasing frequency to promote the old idea of crafty, sneaky people pulling the wool over honest naifs (no doubt aw-shucks, unsophisticated folks such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice).”

Alex, surely you’re not so poorly read that you don’t realize VDH simply made that up wholesale, echoing fellow NROniks Mowbray, Frum and Goldberg. No one thinks anyone is pulling the wool over Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice. Name one person who does – VDH certainly doesn’t. Indeed, it flies directly in the face of the usual caricature of Cheney pulling Bush’s strings from behind the scenes. The vast majority who oppose Rumfeldian neoconservativism have never heard of Wolfowitz, Perle or Feith, much less Leo Strauss.

In fact, VDH goes so far as to specifically disavow the two primary definitions of neoconservative used by the neocons themselves – a particularly stupid thing to do – and echoes Mowbray’s silly hit piece that tried to pin anti-semitism on General Zinni, who, as I pointed out in a previous column, never identified a single neocon in the interview with the Washington Post that so riled the neocons and their friends. A strong argument? VDH’s uncharacteristically lightweight assertion doesn’t even rise to the level of an argument at all!

What we’re seeing here is the neocons clumsily attempting to silence their critics in the same manner that the ADL attempted to shut down The Passion of the Christ. I expect the tactic to work about as well, too.