Vox Popoli

I went over the text of Kerry’s speech. All it proved, in my opinion, is that if the American people are foolish enough to vote for this man, (or for his primary opponent, for that matter), they will deserve precisely what they get.

John Kerry is an astoundingly dishonest man whose ultimate goal is to be the same sort of symbolic tool that George Bush is by birthright. George Bush at least has the lineage and so has done only what was expected of him, while Kerry has enthusiastically sold his soul to reach the same point of usefulness to the PTBs. Useful enough to be given the reins in November? It is increasingly beginning to look that way.

We always value that which we acquire more than that which comes to us naturally.

From Elliott Wave International:

For many years, the credit-card industry wanted you to be able to use your plastic to buy your burger and fries at the drive-through. But the fast-food industry always politely said “no way,” since its business depends on how quickly their servers get you in and out. Making cashiers punch card numbers and hand you slips of paper to sign is no way to shave seconds off the average wait time per customer.

Yet the card industry was willing to bargain. It offered to waive the signature requirement and even to reduce the transaction fees for fast-food merchants. That’s enticing, but if you’re wondering why McDonald’s Corp. really agreed this past March to accept cards throughout its restaurant chain, you needn’t wonder any more:

“McDonald’s found the average transaction jumped from $4.50 to $7 when customers used debit and credit cards instead of cash,” according to a recent piece in The Wall Street Journal.

I wonder how much of the increase of the C component of GDP can be accounted for by that plastic effect. It’s no secret that debt has been funding our GDP expansion – it’s almost all G, which is always debt hence the imminent raising of the debt ceiling again – but it’s factored into C as well.

These levels of debt have never ended well in the past. I still wonder what is so new and different about computers and Greenspans “productivity miracle” leads adults to think it will be any different this time. I wonder just how low the NASDAQ has to go before people will start to wise up.

The Fraters Libertas pull no punches:

Now take a listen to retired Navy Captain, Charlie Plumly, who had Kerry, “under my command for two or three specific operations before his rapid exit.”

Plumly is even less charitable to your new bud than the admiral. His quotes on Kerry’s service include these colorful expressions, “Devious, self-absorbing, manipulative, disdain for authority, disruptive.”

And then he gives us this little jewel, “But the most common phrase would have been requires constant supervision.”

Apparently Plumly must have let him off his leash, as John Francois managed to film his Homeric epic, where, like wrathful Achilles, he descended upon the banks of the River Min-ko to wreak havoc and death upon the multitudinous foe.

Kerry is clearly a creepy self-promoter of the sort to put even Bill O’Reilly to shame, but that being said, I don’t doubt that his Vietnamiad made for a better film than Brad Pitt’s Troy. I carry no water for Bush, but it astounds me that even a single true-believing, mouth-breathing Democrat would embrace this phony. Howard Dean was a Leftist lunatic, but he was an honest Leftist lunatic. If Kerry had been a Texan, I have no doubt that he’d be a loud and proud Republican.

For Pete’s sake, even Doonesbury saw through this guy decades ago. Fortunately, as we learned with Clinton, those who seek power for its own sake seldom have any particular notion of what to do with it. It’s those who see it as a means instead of an end, like Lenin or Mao, that you really have to worry about.

From CNN/SI:

The Charlotte Bobcats and WNBA Sting are entering a partnership with the YMCA of Greater Charlotte to provide a number of promotional and educational initiatives. The Sting also announced that since its name no longer makes sense with the departure of the Hornets to New Orleans, the franchise will be renamed the Charlotte Bites.

Yeah, working closely with the YMCA should help convince everyone that the WNBA isn’t a bastion of freakishly tall homosexuals. Maybe they can get the Village People to do their new theme song if the Indigo Girls are busy. If there was ever any doubt that the number of individuals with their wires crossed in the population is nowhere near the 10 percent reported by Kinsley, it is the total failure of the WNBA. The WNBA has been embraced more fervently by lesbians than anything since the invention of the vibrator, but despite their enthusiasm and the nonstop advertisements crammed down a hostile NBA audience’s throat, it remains in its own weird little quasi-sporting ghetto with an average attendance less than 60 percent of that of US sporting powerhouse, Major League Soccer.

Madden 2004 probably has the best music of any video game ever. Good rock, solid rap, and the one track by Bone Crusher gets you more fired up for an approaching NFL season than anything recorded since the Monday Night Football song. I can’t even think about it without starting to tremble with anticipation like my dog when he sees me tearing a strip of fat off the ham while I’m making a sandwich.

Thank God for European soccer, because without it the spring/summer offseason would be unbearable. I usually don’t let myself play Madden or think about football until August 1, but one of the guys in our fantasy league is getting married so we had to move our draft up. Last year, after no less than four straight years of finishing first or second in the regular season then getting upset in the first round of the playoffs, the Choker King finally collected the championship that had so long eluded him. The White Buffalo made the playoffs for the first time since his championship-winning year in 1996, so he’s hoping it won’t be another eight years between postseason appearances. I bounced back from a bottom-dwelling 2002 but failed to make the playoffs for the third straight year myself.

As for the real league, I’ll confine myself to considering the NFC North today. The Packers are, as always, dependent upon Brett Favre, who can beat anyone except the Vikings. The Vikings have added some solid defensive players to go with the league’s top offense, but as always, the question is if the coaching staff can get them to beat the weak sisters. They would have won the division easily if not for choking against the Giants, Chargers, Raiders and -erk- Cardinals. People are getting way too excited about the Lions – remember, Matt Millen is still running that ongoing train wreck from Pennsylvania – and if they improve by more than two games, I’ll be shocked. The Bears won’t be as bad as last year now that Mr. Interception is history. What they were thinking, I’ll never know. As Big Chilly said: “when even your effeminate, got-to-be-gay waiter in San Francisco is wondering what the Hell is wrong with the Bears GM, you’ve got to figure it’s going to get ugly.”

Prediction for the NFC North: Vikings, Packers, Bears, Lions

I don’t usually make this sort of email public, but I’m doing so for three reasons. First, MM is a semi-regular here, so I thought some of the regulars might be interested in his opinion and the topic wasn’t likely to come up for comments since I don’t often post on it. Second, he’s not a Christian, and I am always interested in learning how non-Christians view the books. And third, I’m ordering the books this week, so if you’d like to place an order with Digital Cowboy, please feel free to wander over to voxday.net and do so.

I post semi-regularly on your blog. But I just got done reading “The War In Heaven” and I want to congratulate and thank you for writing it. I’m unsaved, but it touched me. I like the warrior aspect of Jesus quite a bit. Your portrayal reminded me of (I think) Jefferson’s quote “I tremble when I think the Lord is just.” Christopher came off as quite the bastard. I’m looking forward to seeing how you deal with him in the later books….

I also think it’s a shame that your book was put only in the Christian section. I love the integration of fantasy into a Christian novel and think it should be done more often. I haven’t read any other Christian fiction, but I’m put off from reading it as I’m worried it may be too preachy and clean to be entertaining. Like you said elsewhere, the events don’t have to be lily-white to be a Christian work, just written from the viewpoint that Christ is real and should be portrayed as the Savior. I think Hollywood should exploit this. They could do some great things with a screenwriter working with a POV similar to yours. But I won’t hold my breath.

I will certainly recommend this novel to anyone that will listen and I wish you great success with the third installment.

I’ll be interested to see how the third one does too. It’s definitely not like any other book of its type.

In case you’re wondering why I’m not commenting on this, that’s easy. I haven’t watched a moment of it. There’s no need to. Political conventions aren’t interesting, unless you’re there, and even then it’s basically like a crowded frat party except the drinks are of a higher quality, as are the women. At a Republican convention, anyhow.

I did think that the gang over at NRO was doing their usual bloviating about the speechifying. I like their stuff, except for the fact that they will inevitable say that George Bush “hit it out of the park” every time he steps behind a microphone, which is ludicrous as he is the worst public speaker I’ve ever seen as President. Even his father had a certain patrician elegance to his tortured elocution that the current President lacks.

Kerry’s pretty bad on the stump too. What a nightmare it would be, to feature a Lincoln-Douglas style debate between the two of them. Of course, since their disagreements tend to be matters of degree instead of substance, they wouldn’t even have much to debate. I’d sure like to see one of them forced to take on either Peroutka or Badnarik, but that isn’t going to happen, at least not this election cycle. C’est la vie.

My new machine arrived today. It’s a beast, fast and loaded, if not exactly portable. I’ve already got Fedora Core 2 installed, in fact, I’m typing this in on Opera running on Fedora. My first impressions of the two operating systems are as follows:

Windows is NOT as easy to get going as I expected. What is this registration nonsense? I can use XP, on sufferance, for 30 days, after which point apparently I am deemed unworthy. Sure, I’ll put in completely fictional information, but one’s system is still identifiable by Microsoft over said Internet, and presumably the serial number can be tracked back to the original purchaser. I’m wondering how difficult it is to remove XP and replace it with Windows 2000, or if that’s even possible.

Fedora is not intrusive, but its strange discomfort with wireless access is annoying too. I popped in my PCMCIA card, got the Internet working on the first try, then, when I rebooted just to check things out, the Internet was no longer working. I had to remove eth0 – a built-in network card – then create a new eth0 (which had been eth1) for the wireless card before it would work again. I rebooted to verify that this fix had taken; sure enough, I’m fully operational.

Now, here’s the problem. I can network to the other Windows machines in the house. But for some reason, I can’t get SWAT going, JAGS does not show the other Fedora machine, and to copy things from one to the other I have to pass them through one of the Windows machines. This makes no sense. Why is it easier to network to Windows than it is to another Linux machine? Anyone have any suggestions?

Still, even with the headaches, it’s well worth it. The tank isn’t exactly what I would call under complete control, but at least we’re not scaring the livestock anymore.

Don’t know about Wisconsin, but Minnesota regulates deer hunting by dividing the state into zones. Some zones are restricted to archery, handguns, and rifled shotgun slugs (NOT buckshot).

I don’t know where some of you are coming from on this. Obviously I know that shotguns can be, and are, used to hunt deer, hence the reference to rifled slugs. However, I also know that shotgun hunters are a small minority compared to rifle, bow and black-powder hunters, so the fact that Kerry mentioned a double-barrel shotgun in coordination with crawling on his belly cast serious doubt on his hunting experience.

I have been hunting far more times than I ever wished, as I am the son of a man who is an excellent marksman and a voracious killer of animals. My brothers and I are all good shots – I once outshot a Force Recon sniper with a .357 Magnum at the range – and my brother impressed the Marines at Quantico with his ability to paint it black at distance there when he was still in high school. We bought Dad a bow for Christmas last year, as he nailed four deer on the first day of the season claimed that the deer have gotten so plentiful that it’s too easy. Personally, I suspect he’s finally figured out that it’s warmer during bow-hunting season.

In fact, when my father was the Scoutmaster, we used to be the only pistol-packing troop in the area. We’d go off into the deep woods in January, without tents or much food, and have to build lean-tos and kill rabbits for food and shelter. I even got my Zero Hero when I was ten, which required being camping out by yourself without much in the way of supplies for 24 hours in below-zero weather up North. I think I had a sleeping bag, a thing of matches, a Swiss Army knife and a pound of raw, frozen hamburger. (I smuggled a pair of books in my sleeping bag, of course.)

So, you see, I know how to survive in the wilderness, I just don’t understand the point of subjecting yourself to it unnecessarily.

Mark Steyn observes, with some disbelief:

[Kerry] was in Wisconsin the other day, pretending to be a regular guy, and was asked what kind of hunting he preferred. “I’d have to say deer,” said the senator. “I go out with my trusty 12-gauge double-barrel, crawl around on my stomach… That’s hunting.” This caused huge hilarity among my New Hampshire neighbours. None of us has ever heard of anybody deer hunting by crawling around on his stomach, even in Massachusetts. The trick is to blend in with the woods and, given that John Kerry already looks like a forlorn tree in late fall, it’s hard to see why he’d give up his natural advantage in order to hunt horizontally.”

First, not many hunters use shotgun slugs to hunt deer. Second, you don’t crawl around on your belly, you get up at an ungodly hour in the morning, climb into a tree stand you constructed prior to the season, wrap yourself in a sleeping bag, and then sit there and freeze your extremities.

And my father wonders why I hate hunting. I didn’t mind killing the overgrown horned rats, but since we had them all over our backyard, I simply didn’t see the point in getting up at 4 AM just to see if you could shed blood before your own froze in its veins. One night, about twenty minutes after Dad and the gang had departed for points north in order to slay some quadrupeds, I nearly ran over three of them wandering down the street about 150 feet from our driveway.

If gutting them wasn’t such a painstaking mess, I would have run them over and strung them up, just to see the look on Team Gunga Din’s collective face when they returned. Did I mention I was driving a Suburban? Well, I was. Anyhow, if God meant for us to kill our own food, he wouldn’t have invented farmers. And restaurants, for that matter. What’s the point of civilization if you’re not going to use it?

But I digress. Kerry isn’t just a sleazeball, he’s a phony sleazeball. Fortunately for him, his core crowd is too ignorant to see how full of it he is. If the president was even marginally competent, he’d have this thing sewn up by now. I’m starting to suspect that both of them know that Wave 3 is going to hit with a vengeance in the next term and neither one wants anything to do with it