Category: Uncategorized

Not long after the St. Paul Pioneer Press abandoned its register-to-read policy, the paper across the river, the Star Tribune, has initiated one. I won’t bother providing a link, since you can’t read it anyhow. As I am opposed to all corporate tracking measures that compromise Internet anonymity, I refuse to register for any online newspaper, which is why I no longer read:

1) The New York Times

2) The Washington Post

3) The Star Tribune

I don’t read them online, anyhow. There’s still nothing to keep me from picking up the office copy of the Star Tribune in the meantime, not until they manage to produce newsprint that bursts into flames and consumes the entire paper should it be touched by a non-registered biometric pattern.

True, I will probably be a little late to the next NYT-manufactured non-story, such as the massive Master’s protests that swept the nation – who could ever forget the rage – but I’ll survive and thrive nevertheless. I also predict that the Star Tribune will open up its content within six months as its Internet readership drops off a cliff. I’m not saying that they don’t have a perfect right to close off their web site to anonymous visitors, I just don’t think that culling one’s readership is a particularly smart move in this day of media saturation. I quit reading the Nando Times, an early web favorite, when they began to require registration, and it doesn’t look as if I was the only one to do so.

Registration is akin to a cable news show declaring: “you can watch us, but only if you first tell us who you are.” Yeah, good luck with that.

Okay, that’s not true. I recommended Red Hat because I’m using Redhat 8 and I know it works. However, I suspect that the many folks who recommended Mandrake 9.2 were doing so on the basis of its 9.1 release, not because they have used it themselves. Mandrake 9.2 is not looking so great at the moment, at least not for those with LG Electronics CD-Rom drives, which apparently are widely used in Dell machines. However, the statement from LG Electronics seemed to imply that the problem is a Linux incompatibility, not a Mandrake one, so clearly more information is needed before we can conclude either:

a) another distro would be a better option for beginners

b) Dell users can’t migrate to Linux

Now, (b) can’t be entirely true, as I’m typing this on a Dell Latitude CPx running Redhat 8. However, it’s pretty obvious that before you install Mandrake 9.2, and quite possibly any other flavor of Linux, you’ve got to make sure you don’t have an LG Electronics CD-Rom drive.

Neal Stephenson, technoprophet and quite possibly the finest writer of my generation, voiced prescient doubts that Microsoft would be able to wean itself from dependency on its operating systems in his excellent In The Beginning was the Command Line. He saw them as following in Apple’s footsteps, missing the opportunity to make a necessary self-transformation in a futile attempt to protect the increasingly less valuable crown jewels.

Microsoft’s latest move demonstrates that the dependency is stronger than ever, as after acquiring Virtual PC from Connectix – a means of running multiple operating systems on a single machine – they removed mention of Linux and a few other operating systems from the setup wizard. Jury is still out on whether the Microsoft “improvements” have altogether crippled the product. This is not only short-sighted, if one accepts Stephenson’s point of view, but borders on downright stupid considering that Microsoft has repeatedly denied that it buys other companies simply to shut them down and avoid competition. Not that Microsoft has a whole lot of credibility anymore. (Reader DZ points out that this isn’t the first time, either.)

One is reminded of Lenin’s famous quote about capitalists selling the rope that will be used one day to hang them.

Here’s a cheerful story for everyone who still has any doubts about the brainwashing element of the public school system. Don’t read. Don’t think. Take your test, accept your assigned place and be a good little cog in the socialist corporasphere. And if you’re not clear on the difference between a good little consumer and a bad little consumer, the MPAA, with the aid of Junior Achievement, will send special teachers to your elementary or junior high school to make sure you know right from wrong.

Not that there’s any such thing as right and wrong. All morals are relative. Except for what the people responsible for murderous bloodbaths such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Kill Bill tell you, that is.

“We’re really trying to teach young people to be responsible and to obey laws that they may not understand,” said David Chernow, Junior Achievement’s chief executive, apparently oblivious to the fact that children from 5th to 9th grade are seldom considered to be experts in intellectual property law.

Teach them to obey laws they don’t understand. Yes, that sums it up nicely.

Many states already require vaccinations before children are ‘allowed’ to attend government schools. Now, a government school is the first to institute universal radio tracking. I wonder precisely how long will it be before implanted RFIDs are required for children attending government schools. Yet another reason to keep/take your children out of the public schools.

“The EU has even described Switzerland’s position on future membership of the bloc as ‘controversial’. Commentators say Brussels has always seen the bilaterals as a first stage towards full membership of the bloc – a view certainly not held by the People’s Party. And they believe Brussels would be unwilling to continue negotiations if it thought Switzerland was reneging on this unspoken promise. ‘If this were withdrawn, it would be difficult to explain to the EU member countries why Switzerland had been working on special accords with the EU’, said a EU commissioner.”

Of course, when getting the first bilateral agreement approved, the Swiss government absolutely denied that its approval had anything to do with joining Europe Uber alles. And the Swiss people voted heavily against putting their necks in the Eurofascist noose, with 80 percent of the population voting against even holding discussions to join the EU in 2001. Which leads one to wonder just what that unspoken promise was, and by whom it was given, since all four of the parties in government were officially against joining the EU at the time.

But it’s clear now that three of them were lying, as less than two years later, the Christian Democrats, the Radicals and the Social Democrats are now all lobbying openly for Switzerland to join up. Which, no doubt, is exactly what has propelled the People’s Party from a distant fourth place to first. It’s not too hard to see how the other three parties might find common ground with the anti-democratic EU, though, since they are banding together to deny the People’s Party, the top vote-getter in the most recent national elections, a second ministry of the seven available.

This is not the first time that talk of the inevitability of European union has been heard in Switzerland. Target Switzerland is an excellent history of the Third Reich’s failed attempt to swallow the small Alpine country. Here’s hoping the new Fourth Reich will have no better success.

It seems that if those nutty Christians are against it, the ACLU is for it. We’re not talking about pulling the plug on machines keeping someone artificially alive, we’re talking about intentionally starving someone to death here. It just seems very strange that the ACLU would wish to support the right of someone to KILL HIS FREAKING WIFE! To show how absurd this is, what if instead of wanting to starve her, Mr. Schiavo wanted to hit Mrs. Schiavo over the head with a hammer? That would be faster, less painful and less cruel, though admittedly a little messier. If the court decides that husbands have the right to starve their womenfolk to death, doesn’t that give them free rein to beat them to death too? This seems to be taking us back to the day of the legally-defined thickness of a cane with which one could beat his wife, and then some.

Of course, since the ACLU also believes in the right of mothers to murder their babies, I suppose supporting the right of men to kill their wives is at least in keeping with their ghoulish philosophy.

Umberto Bossi, Italy’s Reform Minister, said Brussels was “transforming vices into virtues” and “advancing the cause of atheism every day”. He denounced the European arrest warrant as a step towards “dictatorship, deportation, and terror, instilling fear in the people, a crime in itself”. It would lead to a Stalinist regime “multiplied by 25”.

I’ve written warnings about the EU on several occasions. Now there are top European leaders warning you. Remember how when you first learned about the Holocaust and you wondered how Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists could possibly have come to power without anyone protesting or doing anything about it? Well, now you know. I’m just curious. Is it really better for a German government to team up with a French government in order to rule over Europe in a profoundly anti-democratic, freedom-hating manner than for a German government to militarily defeat a French government before teaming up with a second French government to rule over Europe in a profoundly anti-democratic, freedom-hating manner? Many of the people of the so-called member states won’t even be permitted to vote on the national death warrant known as the European constitution.

Fascism is not dead. The fascists were simply smart enough to abandon the swishy sado-masochistic uniforms, take their time and use politicians instead of panzers to take control over the people of Europe. I suspect there are those in the United States government who realize this, which is why they are so concerned about the threat that the Euro Army poses to NATO. Because if NATO is not there to keep the fascists new army under guard, it’s quite likely that one day the United States will be back in Europe, fighting that same army.

Daunte Culpepper, black quarterback:

QB Rating: 114.9. Completion Pct: 64.2. Minnesota Vikings 2003 Record: 6-0.

That other black quarterback that Rush Limbaugh said was overrated:

QB Rating: 51.1. Completion Pct: 47.9. Philadelpha Eagles 2003 Record: 3-3.

Skoal Vikings!

“Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates has slammed moves by political parties in Australia and elsewhere to legislate the adoption of open source software. In an interview with The Australian at the Microsoft Office System launch in New York, Mr Gates said any such moves by government were wrongheaded and would result in a reduction in public sector productivity.”

If reducing public sector productivity is not a reason to cheer for Linux, then I don’t know what is. Private sector productivity = good. Public sector productivity = everything from a drag on private sector productivity (not good) to the increased efficiency of mass murder (really, really bad).

Think that sounds whacked? Then perhaps you should note that 41 of the 191 UN member states have murdered at least 1 percent of their citizenry within the last 100 years. Everyone remembers Germany, China and the Soviet Union. But there’s also France, Mexico, Spain, Poland, Turkey, and Yugoslavia, just to name a few. For a human being living in the 20th century, the chances of getting offed by your own government were hundreds of times greater than the chance that you would be murdered by an individual criminal.