Michael's Mind

Wisdom From Steel

Best bumper sticker I've seen lately:

OBAMA = One Big Ass Mistake America

Error trying to validate certificate using OCSP - unauthorized request

If you get this error in Firefox after the latest update, and don't understand why it's happening, go to Tools-Options-Advanced-Encryption-Verification and check the box for "Do not use OCSP for certificate validation", it seems to use OCSP by default.

Microsoft Does It Again

Add to the Vista Disaster a new chapter: the XP Service Pack 3 disaster.

The Ice is Coming Back

If you want to know which way the climate is going, watch the ice.

Tell me northern hemisphere ice is not headed for a minimum in September above 4 million square km. (Dare I think above 5 million square km?)

Tell me southern hemisphere ice is not headed for an October maximum above 17 million square km.

(That is a long shot, but the trend seems to be there. The southern peak ice has increased every year for the last five.)

Trying the New Things

Okay I'm making this entry with my Dell Vostro 1500 laptop, which I have had for a few months now. I ordered it with Windows XP to avoid all the grief associated with the blight known as Vista (or Fistula, in some quarters).

However, now I am trying something new. I have a new command available, and when I run it, I get this:

Linux hecate 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 07:42:25 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

I have crossed over into the light, by way of Ubuntu 7.10. I am amazed at how much of the Dell hardware worked right away, with no further effort from me - the video is great, the touchpad works as it should, sound worked after a little research and tweaking. I just downloaded Skype and it works very well, including video, which is astonishing.

The movie player worked on a DVD I threw in the drive, but it wasn't a late issue commercial movie so I'm not sure if it can handle movies yet. The wireless card is running and detected by the system but I haven't configured it for my router yet.

I accomplished all this the safe way: I replaced the original WXP drive with a new Seagate SATA 60GB drive so I can go back if I need to. Dell puts funny partitions on their drives and I didn't want to get tangled up in repartitioning right off the bat.

But I am getting all the Vostro hardware and features working, one by one. I'm not sure how long before I will need to put the old drive back in.

More Global Warming News

The Associated Press: 2,000 Travelers Stranded in Colorado

DENVER (AP) — More than 2,000 travelers were stranded at Red Cross shelters in the Colorado high country Monday as a threat of avalanches closed a stretch of Interstate 70 west of Denver.

Deep snow drifted into more than two dozen narrow ravines in the mountainsides — known as avalanche chutes — raising the danger of potentially deadly snow slides cascading onto I-70.

High winds and blowing snow forced the state to close the highway overnight. There was no word on when the busy thoroughfare through the mountains would reopen.

10 Things the Movies Know About the Internet

1. The complete blueprints, electrical wiring diagrams, plumbing, air ducts and security diagrams of every building in every city in the world are on the internet. And these diagrams are up to date.

2. Elite hackers know where to find #1. And most blueprint systems also conveniently include real-time infrared sensing of all movement within the building.

3. Every building in every city in the world has high-resolution video surveillance cameras in every corridor and lobby, pointed so that they are most useful for observing the building security personnel on their rounds, and they are all on the internet. And elite hackers know where to find them.

4. Every high-security system in the U.S. Government: military, intelligence, medical, police, air traffic control, highway traffic control, and especially the justice department, is on the internet. And elite hackers know where to find them.

5. Every high-security system will allow virtually unlimited brute-force attacks on their login without anybody noticing that an attack is underway.

6. Elite hackers can penetrate high-security sites with a brute force attack within 30 seconds, in every case. And they always announce their success by saying "I'm in."

7. Elite hackers have home systems that have at least three high-definition monitors, because the more monitors you have, the more powerful your PC.

8. Notwithstanding (7), elite hackers can penetrate any system using a cell phone.

9. Elite hackers always attack systems by writing attack programs on the fly, usually in C, while they have the system under attack viewed in a browser. Elite hackers can write powerful virus programs from scratch in 60 seconds or less and upload them to any system anywhere in the world.

10. Every system can be hacked by staring at the screen with a serious expression on your face and typing furiously fast on the keyboard. The faster you type, the quicker you will get in. And then you will say "I'm in."

WTF?!?!? (Networking Division)

A router that I administer is getting connection attempts from 172.21.29.13, 172.21.29.39, 172.21.53.3, 172.21.30.29, 172.21.29.15, 172.21.30.21, 172.21.30.24, and 172.21.53.18 tonight.

The thing is, these are IANA reserved networks, and these attempts are coming from the internet (as far as I can tell).

So, WTF???

Rick Perry's Incompetent Reign

If you need more evidence of the disaster Rick Perry (Governor Blowdry) has been for Texas: Texas pulls expected college aid at last minute | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

The Ice is Coming Back

Weather kills three on French island of Corsica

"Two hikers froze to death and a tourist was killed by a giant wave as freak weather hit the French Mediterranean island of Corsica,..."

Froze to death? In the Mediterranean? In MAY? Global warming my ass.

I See the Home Town is in the News

Racial demons resurface with nooses on Louisiana tree - Yahoo! News

Pathetic

The egregious Jimmy Carter, apparently far gone in senile dementia and still a shameless shill for anti-semitism, makes a fool of himself yet again: Carter attacks Blair for 'blind' support of US in Iraq

And now he grows even more pathetic: Carter says comments were ‘careless’

It's pathetic when the worst president in U.S. history tries to lay that title off on someone else. It was Carter whose ineptitude gave us islamism when he abandoned the Shah of Iran to the mob and the ayatollahs. It was Carter's total screwups later that empowered the mob in Teheran, making islamist fanatics into a serious power. That is Jimmy Carter's legacy.

It's past time that this national embarassment was put in a nursing home.

Microsoft "Innovation"

Just in Case You Didn't Already Know Gore is Full of Crap

Climate change hits Mars-News-UK-TimesOnline

Nightmare Vista

So - my wife keeps telling me to buy a laptop ( so I'll quit complaining about not having one), but everytime I think I might have decided to get one, I come up against a stark brick wall that stops me dead:

They only come with Microsoft Vista.

The stories of Vista user horror stories are multiplying on the internet like the mosquitoes in the rain puddles in my back yard, and I am not going down that path, ever.

I am going to have to sit down and decide what apps only run on Windows, and how I will live without them when I get my new Macbook.

Update: Dell is now offering systems with XP preinstalled, a breathtaking reversal of longstanding Microsoft policy. Michael Dell must be very sure of his position to go against the Beast from Redmond.

So Predictable

Early U.S. Daylight Savings a bust in power savings | US News | Reuters.com

Badger Glory

Bravo, Wisconsin! Bravo!

joegratz.net » University of Wisconsin Stands Up to RIAA

Tricking the Trickster

The jihadi site, Global War, which has been in the news lately for purportedly being authored by a Kent State professor, has had hijack code added to the page to flip it to a U.S. military site.

I think it's safe to assume that the global-war author didn't do this. I wonder who did? Firefox seems to think the page was modified today (3/2) around 9:30.

I will leave it to the author of the page to figure out what happened. But it's pretty funny.

Update: it turns out the jihadi jerkoff was stealing a graphic from another site, one decidely not sympathetic to his views.

And that site owner has taken steps.

Still funny.

Update, 3/8 Global War is gone. Even though it is listed as one of the "most popular" blogs on the main bloghi page, it is shown as "Moved Permanently".

More Global Warming Sanity

An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change-News-UK-TimesOnline

Key passage: "Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported."

"Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter’s billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean. "

Another Look at Global Warming

Cosmic rays blamed for global warming | International News | News | Telegraph

More Reasons to Get Vista (Not)

Microsoft lists Vista high points

My prediction: as Microsoft realizes Vista is being passed up in favor of retaining XP, they'll "upgrade" XP in the middle of the night so it becomes less competetive with Vista.

Yes, one morning you'll find your system has rebooted and is slower than before (if possible), to the extent that the slick malware called Vista seems almost better in comparison.

Permission to Continue

So the primary security method in Windows Vista is so annoying that instructions on disabling it are showing up on the web: Windows Vista Tip: Disable annoying "Need your permission to continue-" prompts - Lifehacker

That should make things interesting in a few months.

More Anecdotes About Jimmy Carter's Anti-semitism

WorldNetDaily: Jimmy Carter: Too many Jews on Holocaust council

Carter is becoming an embarrasment even to his supporters. He is clearly a bigot and anti-semite, and they need to repudiate him.

Hugh Roolz!

Hugh Hewitt shows Joe Rago ("Blogs are written by idiots to be read by imbeciles") as the 23-year old bitch-ass pussy he is: Hugh Hewitt

In Case You've Run Out of Things to Worry About ...

Yellowstone's caldera rising

Be Gone

It's a little early to be celebrating, but I seem to have banished referrer spammers from one of my sites. Spam accesses dropped from several hundred a day to none today by making a change in the htaccess script that controls the site:

All the nasty drug, gambling, and insurance refer spams disappeared after I put this in my htaccess.

Of course, it may just mean that this particular spam run has ended and they will be back again.

Pournelle is trashing Firefox again; it must be Sunday

Current View

Firefox did it to you? How about stop installing every half-baked extension that God-knows-who has written (yes, I am looking at you, Google) and then moan about how Firefox has screwed you. I have several extensions that I have had to disable because they wouldn't play well with others and several that Firefox itself disabled for similar reasons.

Firefox is not perfect by any means. It wants to open some network connections when it starts, before it has a visible pane, and if the network is down it gets all freaky amd either won't come up, or comes up with a grossly enlarged status bar with nothing in it. I suspect this was supposed to have diagnostic text for debugging, but it got turned off and now the area for the debugging text is there but not the messages.

But I will keep Firefox with all its idiosyncracies over the malicious product of a vicious monopolist who has proven manifold times to be morally bankrupt and ethically deficient.

More Innovation from the World Leader

Microsoft shows how great they are at innovation: » Five cool tech gifts, and two to avoid | Rational rants | ZDNet.com

They tried to copy the iPod and screwed up royally. The Zune music store is difficult to install, understand, and use, and their scheme of selling "Zune points" in $5 increments instead of selling individual tracks is just silly.

Way to stay consistent, Microsoft.

Senator Inhofe, You Rock!

U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works

Same Old, Same Old

I'm looking over the broadcast TV schedule for tonight (Thursday) and I see the networks are playing the same bullshit games they started last year.

The end of Grey's Anatomy on ABC overlaps the start of ER on NBC.

Rather than go head to head, which is easily solved with a VCR or PVR, they play these stupid one-up games with the schedule.

They wonder why there are fewer viewers each year, too.

Governor Blowdry Caught Lying

Star-Telegram | 08/30/2006 | Perry pushed for Tarrant County parks land auction

Big surprise that our sleazy male model is caught in a lie.

Early Day

4:30 AM. Entryway light is still on, which means my son hasn't come in yet. Or has he? A noise may be him bumping around in his room, sometimes he forgets to turn out the light when he comes in. I listen, silence. Not home then.

I lie in bed, wondering where he is. I debate for a while on getting up, not wanting to wake my wife.

4:45 AM. I get up, taking the cellphone with me. My wife wakes, wants to know what's wrong. "Nothng", I say. I go into the kitchen to call him. She follows, asking why I'm up, realizing he's not home.

I call his cell, no answer. I repeat this ritual for another 30 minutes, call, get voice mail, hang up. No answer. "Where was he going?" she asks. He was going out to play pool with friends, I begin to have dark visions in the corners of the mind that I suppress for now. I call a few more times. No answer.

"You have to go look for him", she says. I say I don't know where I would start, but get dressed. I drive to the pool hall, closed. I drive by his friend's, his girlfriend's, no car. It's getting on to 6 AM and no idea where he is. I start imagining what may have happened. There's a place on the other side of the city he went to once and liked, did he go there? It's fine during the day but has a reputation of a rough crowd later. I start seeing his car on the side of the freeway, wrecked out. I imagine him lying in the back of a poolhall parking lot, bleeding. Where is he?

I go home. His mother meets me at the door, frankly worried. "He's never done this before", she says. I know, I say.

I am becoming convinced that the reason he doesn't answer is because he can't answer. I wonder how our lives are going to change in the next ten minutes, ten hours, ten days.

I call again. He answers, sounding sleepy. Where the hell are you, I ask. At a friend's house nearby. He fell asleep on their sofa.

He's angry that we were so worried about him. I tell him he has to be in before 11 the rest of this week. "You treat me like a child", he says. You are my child. An adult doesn't stay out all night without letting his family know he's all right. Someday you'll know what we've been through. Pray it turns out okay, like tonight.

Don't ever do this to us again.

Good night.

Riding in the Rain

USATODAY.com - Landis fires back at cycling hierachy

Here's my take:

1. Floyd won it, no matter how much that pisses off the French,

2. Greg Lemond should shut the fuck up. You're a loser Greg, and all the bitching about better riders won't change that one bit. So have the grace to shut up.

Attorney Out Laws

On TV, lawyers are noble, self-sacrificing, righteous, altruistic, great human beings.

In real life, lawyers are opportunisitc, bloodsucking, scumbag, lowlife shitheels devoid of ethics, morals, integrity, and human emotions.

Maybe some day I'll tell you where that came from.

Microsoft Fined by EU for being Microsoft

GROKLAW: FSF Europe's Statement on the EU Commission Fine on Microsoft

Boiling it down, it says Microsoft is a bunch of evil fucks.

Keep fining the bastards, EU. Bleed the fuckers dry.

On Religious Discourse

ScottishTankerHooligans explains all you need to know about Islam. And I do mean all.

Fast, Pussycat, Die, Die!

Anti-war protesters begin July 4 fast | Reuters.com

So Cindy Sheehan is going to stop eating until the troops come home.

You think she'll start to look like Ann Coulter before long? She needs to lose some of that lard she carries on her ass, for sure.

With any luck, Cindy will be just a bad memory when the war ends.

More Gore is a Bore

Don't Believe the Hype
Al Gore is wrong. There's no "consensus" on global warming.

Like any more Gore debunking is necessary. The "scientific concensus", which is a ridiculous concept on its face, is bunkum anyway.

I imagine you could get a concensus among scientists on any number of topics, but that does not make the result a scientific conclusion. The fact is, that the "concensus" story is all these loonies can use, because they have no science to back up their crazy claims.

And for an ex-tobacco farmer and left-wing screwball to claim any expertise in climate science is the height of insanity.

Quote of the Day

On liberals: "These people are a cancer eating us from the inside, actively seeking our deaths." - Shorty at Perpetual Shorty

Amen, dude.

Dixie Fix

Natalie Maines is an ignorant slut.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Karma's a Bitch

The inconvenient truth about "An Inconvenient Truth" - it's all BS: Scientists respond to Gore's warnings of climate catastrophe

Another One Bites the Dust

Here's the happy happy joy joy dance .... BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Wanted militant dies in Gaza raid

I love this part:

So just a disembodied face, right?

(Disembodied - get it?)

Another stinking evil murdering terrorist given a one way ride to hell.

Happy happy joy joy indeed.

Heh

DenverPost.com - Chill out over global warming

Sea Tale

Here's a strange story: After four months at sea, ghost ship with 11 petrified corpses washes up in Barbados

Some Observations on Last Night's TV Programs

Has House, M.D., jumped the shark? They resolved Foreman's case by revealing it to be Naegleria amebic meningitis, and used the biopsy as the episode cliff-hanger. Will House find the pathogen first, or will Cameron cut open Foreman's brain?

They dismissed the meningitis with the throwaway remark, "He's been started on anti-parasitics".

The problem is, in medical history through 2002, only seven (7) people have survived Naegleria meningitis. The diagnosis is in 90% of cases made post mortem, and in the other 10%, pre-mortem, except for the lucky seven.

Here's a description of Naegleria meningitis:

So Foreman should have been toast. And Cuddy should have allowed autopsy of the cop, which would only have confirmed that Foreman was toast.

I am of two opinions on the return of the final episodes of Alias:

1 - I am grimly determined to stick it out to the end; and
2 - thank God these are the final episodes.

Lost? Lost jumped the shark when the 2nd group turned up. Last night's episode where all but one of the cute girls were massacred was just piling on. I am guessing that this is the final season of Lost unless they're planning on crashing another plane to replenish the cast.

Traitor

Why Isn’t She in Cuffs?

She divulged classified information which materially aided enemies of the United States in wartime. That is the definition of treason. Now I don't think she should be executed for this, although the treason laws permit it, but she should be given, say, 10 years to think over the wisdom of working for an intelligence agency and then running to reporters when things don't go her way.

My own feeling is that she should be prosecuted for a felony, and all the CIA employees who were sympathetic to her should be escorted to the gate. That they could find anything to sympathize with just shows they're in the wrong line of work. Intelligence work is not neat and tidy, and if you can't stomach what the work requires, you need to leave.

TSA Screwup Follies

'No-fly' list delays Marine's homecoming - Conflict in Iraq - MSNBC.com

TSA idiots flagged him because of gunpowder residue on his boots at a past boarding, something Marines might be expected to have, being warriors and all.

But explain that to the retarded bureaucrats at the airport gates. They have all the power and no need for sense, common or otherwise.

Reportedly, we were born free.

More ROP* Fun, Part Dieux

Who Protects Freedom Of Speech?, on Comedy Central's decision not to show Mohammed on South Park:

Like I said, bug-fuck crazy.

Spastics Spaz Out over Tiger's Spaz Remark

Tiger Under Fire

Hey don't get all spazzed out, it was just a comment.

Future Appliance Buy

Amazon.com: Cuisinart GR4 4-in-1 Griddler Does It All ! GR-4: Kitchen & Housewares

I have become crazy about press grilled sandwiches, since I tried a Cuban sub at a local place (Cuco's, 6650 Glenview Dr, N Richland Hills. 817-284-1692).

Yum-o.

Clueless Idiot Harasses OS Provider

Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over 'renegade' Linux maker | The Register

CentOS operating system: free
Support call to CentOS: free
Looking like a total idiot to the entire internet: priceless

Here's to Jerry Taylor, City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma: Clueless User of the Week:

22 years of computer expertise gone to waste.

As Dan Quayle said, "a mind is a terrible thing to lose, or it's a terrible thing to lose your mind, or something like that."

They Get a Day All Their Own

Don't forget -- this Saturday is Texas Legislature Appreciation Day!

It might be your legislature's Appreciation Day too!

Gravity Generator at Last?

ESA Portal - Towards a new test of general relativity?

If this holds up, the implications are dizzying.

Nut Job Anti-Gay Group Regroups

Kan. Church to Stop Picketing Funerals

They claim deaths of soldiers are God's punishment for tolerating homosexuality.

They carry signs at service members funerals reading "God Made IEDs ".

(That's Improvised Explosive Devices, in case you were wondering.)

I keep thinking, if they like IEDs so much, somebody should make one for them, and leave it where they can enjoy it.

Like in their "church", for example.

Then they could ask God directly if he really does hate fags.

Dirty Politician, Dirty Politics

Nonprofit: IRS audit spurred by DeLay ally was abuse

Don't piss off Rep. Sam Johnson, or he'll sic the IRS on your ass.

Can you say "abuse of power"? I knew you could.

Continuing Nonsense

Peggy Noonan has a point: oppose the takeover of the ports by the U.A.E., if only to piss off Bush, who foisted this evil, incompetent, pointless airport screening regime on us.

A Plea for Mercy

Killer of 11-year-old girl asks judge to spare his life

Boo hoo hoo, I'm sorry judge. I didn't mean it. I was high so it's not my fault. I tried to get rehab but the mean old system wouldn't let me have it. Please, judge, I'm sorry I stalked this little girl, kidnapped her while she was walking home, brutally raped her and then murdered her. Really, it's not my fault.

I hope this monster gets death. The easy death of lethal injection is way better than he deserves. If it were me, I'd drop the son of a bitch into a chipper.

Feet first.

Amazing Photos

Aerial Photographs of Mexico City (English)

This is an amazing collection of aerial photos taken of Mexico City and surroundings by a helicopter pilot.

Found on BoingBoing

What a Moron

Governor Blow-dry proves what a total moron he is: Perry may put school reform on back burner

Eye Test for Alzheimer's?

This is interesting: Wired News: An Eye Test for Alzheimer's

To Hell

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Iran's message to the west: back off or we retaliate

I wish somebody would just kill these fuckers. The sooner they're in hell the better.

Fair exchange, given that they've turned Iran into hell on earth.

Screw Google

Dean's World -

It really boils down to this: you can come down on the side of Right and Good, or you can come down on the side of Wrong and Evil. Microsoft is selling vacation home lots over on their side. Google has decided which side they would go with.

Screw Google.

Shedding light on utter incompetence

Squabbles hindered rescue efforts

FEMA has been run as a rest home for lazy bureaucrats for so long that when an actual crisis came, they were frozen like deer in headlights. The only instinct that was operating was turf control.

Pathetic.

Why Britain is No Longer a World Power

Students ban Christians in row over gays

Echoes from the Future Wasteland

The world is running out of copper: Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Measure of Metal Supply Finds Future Shortage

We are using up this planet at a dizzying rate, condemning future generations to a life too much like that of former ones: a life spent in a world illuminated by fire, spent within the distance a person can walk, eating only what can be grown on one's own property.

Disturbing item

MercuryNews.com | 01/19/2006 | Feds after Google data

So in order to prove that the Child Online Protection Act doesn't violate the 1st amendment (which it clearly does), the government is ... violating the 1st amendment!

Perhaps Google needs to rethink their broad data-mining strategies that create such a tempting database for the Feds to go after.

Chinese Takeout

Looks like the world depicted in Firefly and Serenity is getting closer: BBC NEWS | Americas | Chinese nanny state takes root in US

In the series, Whedon's characters were equally proficient in English and Mandarin.

Can we agree on this?

danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: And the dumbest thing said by a Senator is.....

Okay, we can all agree that the performance of the Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee was disgraceful, right? Good. Now can we also agree that the boneheaded voters who keep sending these idiots back to the Senate are a big part of the problem? Yes, of course we can.

Cronkite Surrenders Again

BREITBART.COM - Cronkite: Time for U.S. to Leave Iraq

Not content with having lost the Vietnam war, Walter Cronkite now tries to lose the Iraq war.

Fortunately, no one much listens to has-been leftist talking heads.

Even So, Arlen Spector is STILL a Douchebag

Antionline annoyance law may have no legs

I Don't Want to Annoy Anyone, But Arlen Spector is a Douchebag

Create an e-annoyance, go to jail | Perspectives | CNET News.com

First amendment? I don' care about no steenking first amendment!!

Just Stay There

Belafonte Calls Bush 'Greatest Terrorist' - Yahoo! News

Harry Belafonte, syncophantic left-wing admirer of dictators, opens his mouth and again removes all doubt that he is a fool.

"Millions"? Name two that weren't with your little group of cluster fuck moonbats, you washed up two-bit asshat.

Millions of Americans recognize Chavez for what he is: a megalomaniac anti-semitic fucktard who undoubtedly will one day get the same retirement most South American dictators receive: a bullet through the skull. Hope that day comes soon.

Stupid Things Network Executives Say

Two NBC affiliates throw book at 'Daniel'

And you paid how much for those promotions you are now instructing people to ignore? Idiot.

Microsoft - Communist Tool

Microsoft faces backlash after site of prominent China blogger is deleted - Forbes.com

Microsoft caught yet again aiding Chinese Communist security forces.

Apparently the concept of freedom of exchange is not one held in high value at Microsoft.

But we already knew that.

How do you people sleep at night? Are you that immune to the precepts that made this country possible? I guess if it helps the bottom line, it's all right with you.

Coming Home to Roost?

Chron.com | Abramoff pleads guilty to federal charges

Now we wait for the next shoe to drop.

Intelligent Design Loses Again

Chron.com | 'Intelligent design' barred from biology classes

Of course, had Judge Roy Moore been the presiding judge in this case, the outcome would probably have been quite different. Caveat emptor.

Repent, For Your Doom is Nigh

BBC NEWS | Technology | Sony BMG repents over CD debacle

"Sony BMG repents over CD debacle". Crocodile tears, anyone? The ones who should be repenting right alongside Sony are the antivirus software houses who cut a deal with Sony to let this atrocity slide by without warning.

Anti-virus/spyware/adware detection should be totally honest in reporting when some sleazy vendor is trying to slip something onto your system without proper notification, even if that sleazy vendor is one of the biggest media comapnies in the world, or some newly minted spyware cum "browser helper" scumball like Claria (formally Gator, one of the most reviled spyware perpetrators in the business).

The fact that these anti-virus companies are willing to give a pass to malware if the company pushing it is big enough (or, in Claria's case, litigious enough) puts their integrity and products in serious doubt.

But the one thing that stands out is this: all these schemes rely on Microsoft products being the weak link to allow your system to be invaded. If you don't run Redmond Crapware, you have little to worry about from these bad actors.

Linux is free; life is good.

Not Nearly Enough

Here's an odd and sad follow-up to the murder of Johnny Flobeck that I just noticed: News 8 Austin | 24 Hour Local News | LOCAL NEWS | $79 million judgment against Ryan Grady

A promising life cut short by an act of rage and stupidity.

Stupid Law

BREITBART.COM - Subway Rider Busted for Selling a Token

Transit Dicks

Jim Schutze tells a story about what dicks the Dallas transit cops are: dallasobserver.com | News & Features | Schutze | Bus Gestapo | 2005-12-08

UConn Stupidity

BREITBART.COM - Hecklers Cause Coulter to Cut UConn Speech

Never Underestimate the Power of Large Numbers of Stupid People

Remember the scene in 2001 - a Space Odyssey when the apes react to the monolith that appeared in their presence? Well, that scene is being reenacted in Alaska: Wired News: The Cyclotron Comes to the 'Hood

Day After Tomorrow Scenario Real?

New Scientist Breaking News - Failing ocean current raises fears of mini ice age

Just like the Europeans, they want to keep the ice age all to themselves.

Sorry, guys. If (when?) it happens, it'll be a hemispheric thing.

Doesn't a 30% reduction in current imply a 30% reduction in ocean-transported heat? Shouldn't there be an effect from losing that much energy? So is Europe seeing an early or harsh winter?

1992 and 1998? Well, can't blame that on the present Bush.

Apparently Living in Canada Makes You Nuts

Former Canadian Minister Of Defence Asks Canadian Parliament Asked To Hold Hearings On Relations With Alien "ET" Civilizations

Parade Blues

Just had the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade on, but turned it off. I can hardly imagine why any high school band today would want to be in this parade. The main reason for being in the parade is the TV exposure they would get, but that is a thing of the past.

Today, parade "coverage" consists entirely of a few passing glimpses of floats, interminable sequences of self-absorbed talking heads who are the titular "correspondents" covering the parade, and long shots of lip-synced performances by faded celebrities desparately hoping to get their names back in the spotlight for a few more minutes.

Behind the talking heads, you can see band after band going by unacknowledged while the commenters go on with their inane chatter. Aunt Mary is watching in Sioux City? Tough break, the Sioux City Mudhen band passed by while the commenters were complimenting each other's hair styles. Maybe next year.

Treasures in the Closet

We found this picture while cleaning out a closet. It was brought to this closet from another closet in another city, and had been there for who knows how long.

It is printed on old style paper, possibly in a silver process. It is at least 60 years old, and probably much, much older.

Back on Your Hands and Knees

... coffee break is over: Court rules state school finance system unconstitutional

So the two specials that resulted in such crap legislation as the "Defend Marriage Amendment" which may have, as a side effect, outlawed all marriage in Texas, and which did absolutely nothing about school finance, are going to be rerun in the spring. Good job, morons.

The court voted 7-1 that Texas school funding is unconstitutional.

Here's an example of the state's finest legal minds at work trying to influence the judges:

That's the way to make friends on the court, tell the to keep their noses out of your business. If Texas wants to ruin their school system, it's nobody's business but theirs.

I think I may just live in the world's largest insane asylum. Outside of California.

God's Debris

Highly recommended: Scott Adams' God's Debris.

Are you an avatar?

And Here's More Good News for Sony

There's a blog for boycotting Sony products: The Sony Boycott Blog

These guys are idiots. It's like, some people steal cars, so we're going to put a boot on all cars. To prevent theft, don't you know.

Effing morons. Antagonize and alienate your customer base, you know, the ones with the money? The ones whose money buys your whores and nose candy? Really smart move, Sony.

Sony Woes Continue

Chron.com | Texas sues Sony over spyware on music CDs

$100,000 per violation times "thousands of violations". I can hear the AG licking his lips from here.

This is on the Houston Chronicle site, which has been redesigned. The site loads so slowly, I have to assume the purpose of the redesign is to get people to go back to reading dead tree news while they wait for the website to load.

So, way to go Sony! And way to go Chronicle!

When They Looked Back, They Said This Was the Beginning

of the end: GM to Cut 30,000 Jobs, Close 9 Plants

Recession coming? (Hint: yes)

Great Quote of the Day

"One thing is for sure, in the aftermath and devastation of Hurricane Katrina we can truly dispel the notions of the X Files and right wing militias that FEMA was secretly trying to take over the country and the world. What a crock of hilarious shit. These people couldn't take control over their own orgasm."

GulfSails

Lying Congressmen on the Take

HoustonChronicle.com - In casino dispute, lawmakers backed tribes that paid them

"Just a coincidence" that the letters opposing Indian casino expansion in Louisiana were either closely preceded by, or closely followed by big donations from the lobbyists opposing the new casino.

Yeah, right.

Crooks.

Ah, Peaceful Islam

Saudi Teacher Sentenced to 750 Lashes

Schutze Poop

Jim Schutze of the Dallas Observer, whose writing I normally enjoy, steps in the poop with dallasobserver.com | News & Features | Schutze | Mapesgate | 2005-11-10.

The apparent thesis here is that we are supposed to love Mary Mapes, the CBS producer who brought down CBS news, Dan Rather, and herself with forged documents in a blatantly partisan attempt to swing the election, because she likes dogs.

And, oh yes, because Mary Mapes says the documents aren't fake. That makes how many (leaving out the MoveOn and Democrat Underground moonbats)? Let's see. Ah. One. One person who believes the documents aren't fakes. That would be a good beginning if it weren't instead a bad end.

And the picture that accompanies the article doesn't look like someone who likes dogs, it looks more like a cornered pit bull.

I guess left wing idealism is a really bright light. It must be, to have blinded so many otherwise seemingly sensible people.

Sony Fallout Grows

Sony sued over DRM

Ha. Go get them.

What Everyone Needs in the Kitchen

or anywhere else, for that matter.

Music Industry Greed

Way to go, SONY: Techworld.com - Sony faces police investigation into DRM code

Told you so

Porncasts Appear on Video-Playing iPod

Ha! Told you.

A new age of unreason

Intelligent Design is discussed in New Statesman - A new age of unreason.

If the ID folks want to go to their churches and say "they can talk about evolution all they want, WE know what really happened", that's just peachy. But when they drag their superstitious baloney into the public schools and call it "science", they've gone too far.

You can believe any sort of myth-based tripe you want, but don't stick it my face and call it "science", because it isn't. And I really don't care how many credentialed imbeciles you can drag up to parrot your crap. Evolution is established science, as any dog, horse, or cow breeder can attest. Intelligent design is religious myth.

"Darwin said it, I believe it, and that settles it."

Making a Statement

If any of my three readers happens to live in Texas, here is my recommendation for the nine proposed constitutional amendments:

Vote no on all of them.

Proposition 2, the "protection of marriage" amendment is a no-brainer: this is a naked attempt by cro-magnon bigots to institutionalize second class citizenship for gay Texans. Rick Perry is a big booster of the amendment. That should be enough by itself to vote "no".

Along with the rest of them, these execrable extrusions are the product of one of the least intelligent, least productive, and thoroughly disgusting legislatures that has ever disgraced a state house in this country. Voting no will let them know that maybe things won't all go the way they want.

(Update) I have little hope that Proposition 2 will be defeated. One thing Texas has in ample supply is yahoos and knuckle draggers who like to go howling across the landscape after the goblins that terrify their tiny minds, and the idea that people who are similarly plumbed might share aspirations of recognized legal status with them is their main goblin-du-jour.

And it really doesn't help that the biggest knuckle-dragging yahoo in the state is also the governor.

Bastards

Microsoft couldn't logroll the Massachusetts decision on Open Document Format their way so they've decided to cheat: » Is Massachusetts' OpenDocument decision on the rocks? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Hardly surprising for a company with business ethics that would make a Jamaican posse leader blush. They couldn't bluster Massachusetts into accepting their flawed version of XML, so they went and bought a few legislators; standard Microsoft practice.

Why innovate when you can steal? Why compete when you can bribe a few state officials to swing your way?

Bastards.

No Porn on Video Ipods?

Wired News: No Porn for You, Video IPod!

So, basically, they're saying that sleazeballs will honor this "gentleman's" agreement not to market porn to owners of video ipods?

Why is it that "sleazeballs" and "honor" don't seem to jell? Is it just me?

This will last, oh, I give it maybe a day.

Tops.

Porn is probably the biggest "I got mine, screw you" industry on the planet. The idea that scumbags will pass up their profit because their brother porn dealers might get heat from government or citizens groups is a joke. It's kind of like a Palestinian "cease-fire": it won't last long enough for the ink to dry on the agreement.

Separated at Birth?

I'm just sayin...

Greedy Bastards

Here (
Biggest Wi-Fi Cloud Is in Rural Oregon) is an example of what can be accomplished when greedy telephone companies are not in the picture.

They tried like hell, through their trained lap dog, Phil King, to outlaw municipal wireless in Texas, but were beaten back, for now. But one constant in life is the overweening greed of these companies, so they will be back. They always come back.

And the thing is, if they had won, they wouldn't be out there putting in wireless service. They just don't want anbody else doing it. That's how telcos do "innovation".

In the DFW area served by Southwestern Bell, if you wanted a DSL line before cable modems became common, all you would get from SWB was a runaround. They had no interest in doing residential DSL until the cable companies started getting market peneration.

Now they've bought themselves a law that gives them an advantage over the cable companies in distributing video, but if you are in an area that doesn't already have cable, don't look for them on your street. Serving areas that don't have cable doesn't advance their plan to put the cable companies out of business.

It's Official

Okay, I officially hate people who download a file on Bit Torrent, and when it's done, bug out and don't leave the torrent open for those less fortunate.

I am at 42%, and so is every other member of the swarm, just waiting for someone to drop by who has more of the file available.

Right Wing Wrongs Rights

Now that the Democratic Party has decided to go baying at the moon, off on a left-wing wild-goose chase that alienates them from the mainstream, Republicans are showing what bad, stupid legislation they can come up with, with no one across the aisle to keep them honest: Shield Law Sponsor Lugar: Bloggers 'Probably Not' Considered Journos

I swear to god, I think I hate all of them.

Karma will get you

Remember the imams saying the tsunami was Allah killing infidels in Thailand, and Katrina was Allah killing infidels in New Orleans?

Looks like Allah decided to balance the scales: Earthquake Kills 1,700 in 3 Asia Nations

This one hit in the Muslim world, no infidels in sight.

Another Day in the R.O.P.*

8 killed in shooting at mosque - The Boston Globe

*Religion of Peace

Smoke'em if you Got'em

"Smokey" Joe Barton, who never met a polluter he didn't like (or take campaign donations from) is at it again: Star-Telegram | 10/07/2005 | Bill to help build refineries would weaken clean-air laws

Smokey Joe is the U.S. House member from TXI. And don't you forget it.

See this movie. Go now.

I just came back from seeing Serenity.

My god, this is why movies are made, or at least this should be why movies are made. Do I really need to point out that this blows George Lucas and all his muppet infested crap out of the water? No, I didn't think so.

SEE THIS MOVIE.

I am so getting this when it comes out on DVD.

Sucking Up to Monsters

First of all I wish Google every success in their war with Microsoft. Given Microsoft's nasty behavior, Google is reacting like a cornered wolf, which Microsoft will soon realize to their displeasure. The Sun collaboration in particular may be very distasteful to Microsoft.

But given all that, Google's posturing towards China is disturbing. Try entering "Taiwan" at maps.google.com for an example. Or "Tibet". Google is so obviously prostrating themselves to the Chinese regime, it's disgusting.

Google Maps - Taiwan

Here's a clue, Google: Taiwan is a free country, not a "Province of China".

We were born free. Our freedoms made companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google possible. Now those companies are willing to turn their backs on that to suck up to one of the bloodiest dictatorships on earth for a few bucks. Sad.

Proof Positive

... there are a lot of idiots in the world: BBC NEWS | Africa | Mandela wins BBC's 'global election'

Noam Chomsky??? George Soros???

What are these people on, anyway?

Media Whores

Twenty congressmen proudly proclaim that they are Hollywood's whores: Politicians want to raise broadcast flag | CNET News.com

As far as I can tell, they're pretty cheap whores, too.

Man killed by police Taser in Austin

HoustonChronicle.com - Man killed by police Taser in Austin identified

No ambiguity there, is there: "Man killed by police Taser".

Now it's up to the ME to come up with a cover story so the Taser is, once again, blameless.

Because we all know the Taser is just a harmless little fuzzball of fun and joy.

Archos Fun, Cont.

I am listening to my Archos Jukebox Recorder 20 as I write this. It has been playing for about 10 minutes or so, with only some decoding problems on a track right after I started it up. Now this is after it sat in a desk drawer since my last entry about the JBR, a week or two ago.

I plugged in the charger after 3 or 4 tracks, and it is working fine right now. This is the same unit that would get a disk error after running for just 2 or 3 minutes and stop cold. It is up to track 7 of Rilo Kiley's More Adventurous with no problems. To cap everything else, it's running the original batteries!

So I'm thinking poltergeists. Maybe an exorcism is called for? I really want to move this thing out to my car and play it through an adapter into the car audio system so I can have my entire music collection available without searching for CDs in the visor.

31 minutes playtime, still going good. Beats me what's up.

Is Posse Comitatus About to Come to an End?

Bush offers Pentagon as 'lead agency' in disasters - Nation/Politics - The Washington Times, America's Newspaper

If posse comitatus is repealed, I don't think I want to live here anymore.

After all, there are dozens of tinhorn military dictatorships to pick from.

And the scary thing is, I'm not sure Bush understands what this means.

President Hilary Clinton and no posse comitatus scares the living hell out of me.

Moonbat

Cindy Sheehan continues her unceasing quest to insure her son's death will be dishonored by her actions

Damn Spam

I am still getting attempted comment and trackback spams. I beat back about half of it with a line in my htaccess file that denies access if the HTTP_VIA tag is set. But I haven't found a way to deny the rest, as yet. They are pointless, because the comment and trackback scripts are dummies that call a honeypot script so I can study what they are doing to better block them.

Let me be clear. If you are a comment or trackback spammer, you are a maggot. You are trying to profit off the efforts of other people, people whose shoes you aren't worthy to lick crap off of. If I hear one of you has died, like that Russian who was beaten to death, I celebrate the event. I frankly hope all of you die.

Soon.

Get Smart - Gone

Newsday.com: Don Adams of 'Get Smart' Dies at 82

Got to Love This

Blast at Hamas Rally Kills 10, Injures 85

Morons blew themselves up. Oh, but that's what they do, isn't it?

Nobody Ever Went Broke Overestimating the Stupidity

... of the Public.

Independent Online Edition > This is global warming, says environmental chief

No, it's not, you moron. This is well within normal variation for tropical storms.

What a Maroon

Did Alan Alda just tear up his acceptance speech when William Shatner won? Well, wah, wah, wah. Jerk.

Personally, I Think Kenny Just Dodged a Bullet

ABC News: Zellweger Explains Legal Terms of Breakup

Never Ascribe to Malice That Which is Adequately Explained by Incompetence

Can we declare Blanco a failed governor now? Not yet? Okay, give it another week.

Microsoft from the Inside

Too much good stuff to recap, just go here and keep reading: Mini-Microsoft

Michael Brown Resigns from FEMA

Star-Telegram.com | 09/12/2005 | FEMA head steps down

More Proof Microsoft is Run by Infantile Morons

as if the world needed more proof of that.

Microsoft employees refuse to say "Podcast"

According to a commenter they can't say "firewire" either. I wonder if their lunches have "red tree-borne fruit orbs".

Archos Fun

I have been having lots of fun lately with my Archos Jukebox 20 Recorder. I've had it for 3 or so years, so there's no question about warranty - it's out of warranty.

I accidently left it on "charge" over a long weekend, recently, and since have been having problems getting it to boot. Search the web for "Archos Jukebox HD register errors" to get an idea of what I've been fighting.

Figuring I had somehow ruined the original batteries by charging them for so long (even though the charger seemed to have shut down when the charge cycle was complete), I invested in 4 new NiMH AA cells with an external charger. Later I found out that the JBR is prone to damage from frequent removal/insertion of the batteries because the battery terminals are on the printed circuit board in the unit, and can be cracked from the flexing necessary to get at the batteries.

Needless to say, the new batteries worked for about 10 minutes, then I was back in the "HD error" situation. Following the instructions at Archos' website, I error checked the hard drive (after some difficulty getting it to mount under USB), then eventually did a full backup (8 GB of music! ach), reformat, and restore to the HD. Worked great - for 20 minutes this time.

It's working now, sort of, after I completely disassembled the unit (thanks to this website), error checking the HD again in a USB enclosure, and reinstalling everything.

I can use this technique someday to make it into a JBR 40 or JBR 60, provided I can get it to run for more than 4 or 5 minutes at a time. Having 1000 hours of music on a device that will only play one or two tracks without dying is kind of lossy, you know?

(It just died again. If you see one of these on Ebay, give it a pass. It's not worth the frustration.)

Please disregard...

... my last entries about the director of FEMA. I heard that Nacy Pelosi is saying he should resign or be fired, and I'd rather give him life tenure at FEMA than appear to be giving in to the Queen of the Moonbat Left. So just disregard all those posts about him leaving, okay?

And it goes on

Horror stories from New Orleans, accentuating FEMA's cluelessness:

NOLA.com: T-P Orleans Parish Breaking News Weblog

When will Brown resign? He should be so shamed by this he wouldn't want to continue. Where is the integrity?

Overlooking the Obvious

The obvious, in this case, is the wretched performance of FEMAm and especially FEMA leadership, in the hurricane disaster in Louisiana and Mississippi. And the obvious is also that, in everyone's eyes but those of our addled president, the director of FEMA needs to offer his resignation (and have it accepted), or be asked to resign as soon as possible.

It was just painful watching Ted Koppel ask Brown, "don't you guys watch television over there?", when Brown claimed to have just found out how bad conditions in the Superdome and convention center were, days after the rest of the country knew. Bush should have demanded his resignation that same day. Hell, a director with any integrity would have tendered his resignation right after that interview went on air.

Bush has a serious flaw in that, having appointed someone to a job, he seems unable to fire them when they screw up. This is a bad quality in a leader. This is the flaw that left us stuck with Tenet, Freeh, and Mineta, years after they should have been shown the door. So it is with Brown.

Idiots

Hey, poker/phentermine spammers - I don't take comments or trackbacks here so quit sending your crap at me.

Of course, you won't. You are morally bankrupt morons who never read the weblogs you spam, because that would resemble real work too much. I bet your mother is really proud she raised a worthless parasite for a child. Why don't you get a real job, or better yet, just kill yourself and save the world the oxygen you've been wasting. Do it in a place where your body can provide nutrients to the vegetation as it rots. That way you will have made at least one contribution that was actually worthwhile.

This Just In

Breaking news -- Cindy Sheehan is a nut case: What Cindy Sheehan Really Wants - Now imagine if she gets it. By Christopher Hitchens

Imagine my surprise to find this out.

Wow, Just Wow!

I am making an exception to my customary policy of never linking to the hate-filled leftwing loons because this offering from Markos Zuniga is just breathtaking in its honesty and forthrightness: The calm before the storm

Kos rants about the Democratic Leadership Council's defense of patriotism as a virtue, clearly delineating his brand of Democrat from any other:

In other words, anti-Americanism is exactly what he and his ilk are all about. They sneer at the DLC for warning against the far left moonbat fringe of the party, and are vowing to make the moonbats the main wing of the party.

I wish him every success. I hope he gets exactly what he wants. I well remember in the 70s that the British finally got fed up with their "loony left" and their incessant demands for more and more handouts, excuse me, "entitlements" and the result was Margaret Thatcher and the return of dignity to the British Isles. I expect that if "Screw Them" Kos has his way, the Democratic Party will be little more than a bad memory in a few years.

Requiescat in Pacem, moonbats. Good riddance.

Not Enough to Worry About Dept.

Saw this at : Reuters Health Information (2005-08-12): Idaho probes outbreak of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

Okay, wtf? Natural CJD occurs at a one per million population per year average, and Idaho (population 1.4 million) may have 6?

Onward to the Future

Kansas moves to stem role of evolution in teaching

School board members have tenatively voted to give creationism equal footing in the teaching of biological sciences in Kansas.

The policy will not be implemented until a final vote, which will probably take place after school board members conduct their customary ritual of sacrificing a virgin on an altar and offering her warm, still-beating heart to the god of rampant stupidity.

Sending a Message

So Kenny Rogers gets reinstated after only 13 days of his 20 day suspension. That certainly sets an example, doesn't it? Assault a cameraman who's only doing his job and get a slap on the wrist, and then half the slap is overturned by some pissant arbitrator.

Hicks should have fired this clown the day this happened. Hopefully the criminal case will be a lot clearer on what is permissable.

And there's this.

When Stars Attack:

Photographer Shot at Britney Spears' Home

Way to GO, Guys

Here's a big shout out to my homey, Herman Frietsch, who took my $5/share stock to .005 and filed for bankruptcy. Great management skills, Herman! You really earned that $290,000 per year, there, guy. I'm sure your resumé qualifies you for a government management position, now.

I even know an agency that would probably jump at the chance to hire you, but I can't say which one (yet).

What Brave Men These Are

(This originally came from Fred on Everything)
What brave men these are that man the Fresno Police Department. What stalwart soldiers in the war on crime, going unafraid against the forces of evil in their town, as seen in the following: BBC NEWS | World | Americas | US police pursue girl over stone.

When faced with this out of control dangerous predator on society, these brave warriors responded with three (3!) squad cars, and a helicopter.

To take into custody an eleven-year old girl.

Eleven.

Not twelve.

Not, thank the stars, a teenager. They probably would have needed a S.W.A.T. team if she had been thirteen.

"We responded. We determined a felony assault had taken place and the officers took the actions that were necessary," said Fresno Police Sergeant Anthony Martinez.

I have a question for Fresno Police Sergeant Anthony Martinez: ¿Donde están tu cojones, señor? ¿Con tu esposa?

I can imagine a Fresno cop coming home from work and his wife asking him "What did you do today, dear?"

"I arrested a dangerous 11 year old girl."

I recommend any real felons who think they may be more dangerous than, say, an 11 year old little girl, try Fresno. They probably don't have enough cops on the entire force to stop you from doing anything you want.

A suggested motto: "FRESNO: City of Big Pussies"

Hey, Katie!

Before it's TOO LATE, ask Tom Who is Xenu?

Jimmy Carter Comes Out in Support of Saddam Hussein, Torture Regime

Carter: Guantanamo Detentions Disgraceful

Quote:

No surprises, here. Carter is a moron.

62.193.231.242 - spampest

Okay, I know 62.193.231.242 isn't a real person but an open proxy, but some pest asshole using that proxy is hitting one of my sites constantly, and it's annoying.

Naturally I have blocked 62.193.231.242 with htaccess, but it's still annoying.

Here's an interesting item ...

Hollywood sock-puppet senator faces tech insurgency | The Register

Steve Urqhart is running against Orin Hatch for Senate in Utah. Hatch is a total disaster for techies, so if you are a conservative techie, consider throwing some money Steve's way. (Links in the article.)

And if you're not a conservative techie, cosider throwing some money Steve's way anyway. If Hatch loses, his successor won't have all the seniority positions that Hatch holds, and there's no way a Demo(c)rat is going to be elected in Utah, anyway. So think of it as an anti-Hatch move. And anti-Hatch is pro-tech.

Holy Cow!

Russians REALLY don't like spam: Russia's Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered in Apartment - NEWS - MOSNEWS.COM

More on Cisco and China

Rebecca MacKinnon has more information on Cisco's China trade: RConversation: My conversation with Cisco

Words, words, words

Just to be perfectly clear, the word picnic has no racial associations.

Hang him

Kenny Rogers, the immature bully of the Texas Rangers Baseball team, had to bond out of jail today on the assault with injury charge he's facing.

I hope he gets a judge and prosecutor who aren't dazzled by his "celebrity" and has to do some jail time.

Science behind abrupt climate change

Ocean & Climate Change Institute - Abrupt Climate Change - Rate of Ocean Circulation Directly Linked to Abrupt Climate Change in North Atlantic Region

Give These Guys the Finger

Wired News: Give Your DVD Player the Finger

This is all about how "University of California at Los Angeles engineering professor Rajit Gadh is leading research to turn radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags into an extremely restrictive form of digital rights management to protect DVD movies."

Obviously, the content providers (i.e. movie studios) think the consumer will put up with literally anything to get access to their product. I mean, first you have to go buy an entirely new DVD player so that you can play their DRM-crippled disks, and then everytime you buy (or rent) one, you have to give up your privacy by giving a fingerprint (how long before police agencies start trolling those records for wanted persons?), and then you have to give your fingerprint again before it will play.

My question is, who's funding this moron? Who in hell actually believes people will put up with this crap just to watch "Jackass the Movie" or some such crap? The "content providers" need to just look at the falling theater revenues and get a clue -- we don't need your crap. If you lock it up like this, we just won't buy it. And then what will you do to buy your floozies and nose candy?

Read This

More on Cisco in China: Barnes & Noble.com - Losing the New China: A Story of Commerce, Desire, and Betrayal

As long as you make a dollar, it's all right, right?

(I won't link to Amazon's entry -- Jeff Bezos can take his one-click patent and stuff it.)

China Gets Real

FT.com / World / Asia-Pacific - Top Chinese general warns US over attack

Yes, they are the enemy. The sooner we start acting like it, the better. (Hint - Microsoft? Cisco?)

The End of the World is Coming

... just get ready for it: CDC - Influenza (Flu) | Recent Outbreaks in Asia

This winter flu season is going to be a doozie.

Love Those Special Effects

Battlestar Galactica -- distant future, unimaginable technology, so why do they plan their battles on a situation board that looks just like the ones used in World War 2?

And why do they need corrective lenses, can't they cure astigmatism yet?

Does Anyone Out There Still Trust Microsoft?

Microsoft Downgrades Claria Adware Detections

That's Claria, also sometimes known as Gator, one of the most insidious purveyors of adware/spyware/malware ever. There are rumors circulating that Microsoft is about to buy Claria, and now they have given Claria software a pass in their "anti-spyware" app.

Now one must have confidence that when you install anti-spyware software, it will actually, you know, detect and remove spyware, and will not suddenly stop doing that because its parent finds it convenient to join forces with the bad guys.

But of course Microsoft operates outside all normal ideas of ethics and proper business behavior, so they see nothing remiss in turning off detection of some of the most obnoxious spyware in circulation.

Microsoft is a rogue company that should never be trusted with anything. Learn this now or regret it later.

Forward to the Past

Running out of oil? FT.com / International Economy / Oil - Saudis warn of shortfalls as oil hits $61

Monsters

Scotsman.com News - Top Stories - Hundreds of casualties in London rush hour terror attacks

One thing I am fairly sure of: the British are not big pussies like the Spaniards; the jihadi may have just bitten off a lot more than they can chew.

Creeping closer

Avian Flu in Geese Signals a Possible Route to Europe

Green, Green, etc.

Here's an analysis from last year on New Zealand's carbon problems. Problems the Kyotophiles in the government ignored: 5/11/2004 -- NEW ZEALAND: Kyoto tree planting credits won't be much help

So it was known a year ago that the magic tree wasn't sufficient to save NZ from Kyoto costs. "... not to ratify Kyoto would be to set fire to a very large cheque." Wow, that sure didn't work out, did it?

"New Zealand treaty negotiators pushed for this stipulation to be written into the 1997 Kyoto Protocol at a time when new areas planted in trees in this country was at its peak, at about 100,000ha in 1994. Regrettably, the rate at which land was switched to commercial forestry has declined rapidly ever since, to an estimated 15,000ha last year. "

Bureaucrats always seem to think that a commercial trend, like forest conversion in this case, will continue unabated for the imaginable future, ignoring all economic incentives for it not to do so. It certainly didn't help that the NZ Kyotophiles caught NZ at the absolute peak, rather than a median point, so their numbers were hopelessly optimistic. Now they get to pay for their folly.

Green, green, green no more

New Zealand is a good left-wing, environmentalist country. They were in a rush to sign the Kyoto treaty, and save the planet, and besides, as a net carbon absorber, they are going to make a ton of money selling carbon exchanges to the rest of the world. Right? Wrong: Kyoto's price - $88 a year from each of us

You can't make stuff this funny up.

Big Fizzle - Little Impact

Here's a hearty screw you going out to NOAO for not planning on enough bandwidth to accomodate more than what, four or five connections during the Tempel I impact event?

I mean we've only known about the slashdot effect on the web for what, five years?

So, really good planning there, guys. I was really entertained all night by the "Timed Out" alerts popping up.

Morons.

Apparently, Microsoft learned how to suppress freedom from Cisco

So it seems from this entry by Rebecca MacKinnon: RConversation: More on Cisco in China

Why these corporations believe they can aid the enemies of America without any consequences is beyond me. Oh, wait, they can.

WTF??!!??

Chip Salzenberg, noted member of the Perl community, protested his employer's unethical web practices and was arrested in retaliation!

Cool Stuff

This is cool: Live View of the Deep Impact Mission to Comet Tempel 1

The image will update every 45 seconds around the impact time, 12:52 AM CDT on July 4.

30 Days

I just finished watching "30 Days: Muslim in America".

Verdict? I liked it. I think Spurlock probably cherry picked his interviewees for maximum effect, but it's his show, so he can do that. The main message was that "ordinary" Americans don't know much about Islam, which is certainly true, and that Muslims in the U.S. are a pretty ordinary group of people themselves.

The subject of the episode, a devout, conservative Christian fellow named Dave Stacy who agreed to live as a Muslim for 30 days, was treated with respect and dignity with no sidebar comments on his faith. And the instructional segments were pretty well done, albeit very simplified.

He spent his 30 days with a Pakistani couple, so the issue of Wahabbi extremism never came up. This is reasonable since the Wahabbi sect is not a majority among Muslims in the U.S. So the Muslim experience was kind of boiled down to scenes of exotic (and delicious looking) dishes served for meals, and lots of attendance at prayer in the mosque, something that Dave had serious problems with.

Dave felt that total participation in Muslim prayer might compromise his Christian faith, but in the end participated in a juma, holding a crucifix in one hand.

I had to wonder if the airport scene, with Dave in his Muslim role for barely an hour being stopped for a search by security, wasn't staged for the camera. He maintained that he had never been stopped for a search before, but I have been searched numerous times and I don't look anything like a Muslim. So perhaps there was some stagecraft at play in places.

Overall, it was an entertaining hour. Serious questions about Islam and America were glossed over, but the presentation of a West Virginia hillbilly learning about what it's like to be Muslim in America was well done.

Spurlock seems to be avoiding the errors that Michael Moore made with that dreadful movie of his, carefully steering a neutral course and letting the story tell itself. I hope he can keep that up.

Disaster? I didn't even know her.

All right, class. We've looked at asteroid collisions, supervolcano eruptions at Yellowstone, and biblical-sized tsunamis from the collapse of Cumbre Vieja.

Now let's look at another apocalyptic scenario: the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Eugene Linden ANTARCTICA: endangered animals, rapid climate change, global deforestation, fragging

And at the other end, geographically speaking, we have the collapse of the North Polar Ice Cap and the coming Super Winter: An Ice Age From Global Warming. And another take on it: How Global Warming May Cause the Next Ice Age.

So apparently we're doomed. We just don't know yet what will get us. But with the Bird Flu coming this fall/winter (too many references, just Google for "Avian Influenza"), there won't be too many of us left to worry about it, anyway.

Update: that chilly goodness just keeps coming: Britain faces big chill as ocean current slows

If you can't play nice, you shouldn't get to play at all

More sophomoric, infantile bullshit from Microsoft: Libervis.com - Latest Microsoft Oppression - Featured News - Featured News

They have disabled right-click functionality at MSN - but only for Netscape and Firefox users.

Guys, that is sooooo 6th grade. Most people pretty much grow out of that type of infantilism by, say, age 16?

So what is taking you so fucking long to show some maturity, you worthless pukes? This is the behavior of a software company that we're supposed to trust? A company that can throw a tantrum anytime they feel out of sorts and try to disable functionality of rival browsers?

Can't you idiots even get a clue: that's why nobody likes or trusts you! Except for your crew of toadies, like Wallace and the fun bunch at SCO.

Grow up, Microsoft. Or die. Your choice. Works the same for me, either way.

Update (July 2): MSN is playing nice again. Right clicks are allowed to act normally.

Ewww, weird...

Boffins create zombie dogs | The Other Side | Breaking News 24/7 - NEWS.com.au (27-06-2005)

Might be useful on humans, after the government has seized your property for a shopping mall, they can freeze you until they find a place to put you.

No More Officer Friendly

Remember back when your parents would tell you, "if you are in trouble, go to a policeman, he's your friend and he will help you"?

Bullshit. I tell my kids to avoid cops like the plague because the best you can expect from them now is some time in jail; if you call a cop, somebody is going to be arrested. And you may just get TASERed for your effort, to boot.

Cops all over the country are out of control bullies who want total subservience from any citizens who have the misfortune to cross their paths; prevalence of TASERs has given them legal cachet to torture people and they use it with gusto.

See this, for axample.

And here's an example of legally sanctioned murder of an unarmed 18-year old boy: texascivilrightsreview.org - Dove Springs Speaks about Rocha: Who Will Listen? (From Grits for Breakfast)

And it just gets worse.

Batteries Not Included

Saw the reference to this at Commons Blog:
In Halls of Albany, a Decidedly Unsqueaky Pair of Wheels Get the Grease - New York Times

Here's what jumped out at me:

Uh, I thought the tree huggers thought electric cars were the bee's knees. Now, they show their real goal: take technology back to the late 1700's, when transportation ran on hay.

The problem is, technology is the razor thin shield that protects us from the way humankind lived for 30,000 years (and still does in parts of the world): short, brutal, dirty lives filled with disease and death, watching most of your children die before their 5th birthdays, a life expectancy of perhaps 45 years if you were unlucky enough to last that long in your miserable existance. Like the ozone layer thinning, technology can be broken so that we can no longer benefit from its protection and we will be back to using fire for light. And that's just where the environmentalists want us.

What Can You Say?

Not content to just be thought of as treasonous opportunists, the Democrats get in some practice being actual traitors: Democrats Play House To Rally Against the War

If we let the Party of Treason get the upper hand, this is what we can look forward to. If we let the Party of Treason get the upper hand, you'd better start learning Chinese. And the Arabic phrase for "I surrender" would be useful, too.

Oh, and Senator Dick Durbin is still a moronic fucktard moonbat twit who couldn't find a clue with both hands and the instructions pinned to his ass.

(Hat tip to Varifrank)

ID, I see

Here's a wierd item: ABC7Chicago.com: Identity theft victim steals suspect's identity

I mean, guy A steals guy B's identity, gets a bank account, and goes about his business. Guy B figures this out (probably because of some detrimental effect of guy A's activities), tracks down the account, which is in his name, remember, and takes some of the money out of his (stolen id) account.

And now he's charged with identity theft? For accessing an account that was created with his identity? WTF?

I think if someone "borrows" your identity, you should be entitled to the fruits of that borrowing. You are held responsible if the borrower does something evil with it, after all.

Big D means Dirty (with a capital D)

More reasons not to have a business, or for that matter, do business, in Dallas, Texas. (Hint: the cops are crooked, the city council is crooked, and the mayor is a queen bee who is concerned only with her image and not with the fact that she is presiding over a criminal gang)

dallasobserver.com | News | Stuff It | 2005-06-16

I Know I'm Embarrassed

Patrick Leahy says Guantanamo is an international embarrassment.

By odd coincidence, I think Patrick Leahy is an embarrassment. And a fool.

Not Right, Indeed

komo news | 'This Is Not Right'

We really need to kick these stupid fucking "screeners" out of our airports and take our chances with the terrorists. And throw the morons who made this possible in prison. When a bunch of supercilious imbecile "screeners" can threaten a 57-year old middle school principal with a felony record and a $500 fine over a 5-inch bread knife, something is seriously fucking wrong.

I used to fly quite often, but have cut it to the absolute necessary minimum since these idiots have been in charge.

My God, what have we done? We used to be free.

Playing With It

If the page looks strange for the next few days, with odd colors, lines, and such, I am experimenting with the style sheet to see if I can come up with something really cool. Since I am about as cool as a can of vienna sausage, this could be a challenge. But that's what's happening.

I will try to always leave the page in readable condition before I quit (give up) for the day, so that my two readers will still be able to read the blather.

Pathetic

Roger L. Simon: Democracy is Forbidden Speech to Microsoft

As if we needed another reminder of just how morally bankrupt and ethically challenged Microsoft really is.

Gots to Read

Loved this: Que Sera Sera: Dawn at Weehawken, if for no other reason than that she hates Bright Eyes just like I do.

Sweet.

Fun with Networks

I've been playing with Whoppix. I use an SMC2635W card usually, but that is an Atmel chip which doesn't come supported in the Whoppix distro. But my daughter's card is a Linksys which uses the Atheros chip and that is supported. It even finds it during boot probe.
I was able to get kismet running so I took a drive this evening:

And that's just the last page of four pages of networks. And there were three more factory configuration nodes in addition to the one on the screen.

Cowboy Spirit

Tonight's news had an item that shows just how big a man Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is.

Back in 2000, when the Cowboys were struggling, San Francisco wide receiver Terrell Owens sprinted to the midfield star after a touchdown, an in-your-face move that was not appreciated much. Shortly after, Emmitt Smith scored a touchdown and also sprinted to midfield where he kneeled on the star. His moment was captured by photographer Walter Smith, making for a dramatic picture.

Subsequently, on a visit to the Cowboys merchandise display at the state fair, photographer Smith saw his photo had been turned into a Cowboys jersey for sale. The problem was he had copyright to the picture and had never given the Cowboys permission to use it for the jersey, of which thousands had been sold for $20 to $30 each. When he pointed this omission out to the Cowboys, he was offered $1000 in Cowboys merchandise as compensation.

He wasn't exactly satisfied at the offer, and sought recourse in court. He settled for $275,000.

Here's the part where Jerry Jones' big heart comes in: Smith has been permanently banned from working in Texas Stadium when the Cowboys are playing. Way to show class, there, Jerry. That level of sophomoric petty vindictiveness takes real talent and effort to display. Sort of 'you can take the guy out of the trailer park, but you can't take the trailer park out of the guy', I guess. I suppose you really can't expect better of Arkansas.

Sometimes Style Just Isn't Enough

My two children got IPods last week, my son for his graduation, and my daughter who bought hers at Best Buy.

You know all those ads that show the silhouetted guy dancing with his IPod? It would be more realistic to show him suddenly stop and look at it in confusion when it suddenly freezes.

Both brand new IPods have frozen at least once in the one week since they were bought. I thought IPod was a mature device with all the bugs worked out?

My Archos Jukebox freezes, too, when the battery gets low enough, but a recharge fixes it. And if the battery is kept charged, it never freezes at all. It's ugly as sin, no style at all, but it works. And I can change the batteries myself, if I need to.

When Unions Go Wild

FAA looks, finds featherbedding at New York TRACON: N90_Ex-Summ.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Schumer, Clinton see no problem:

Note that Schumer is so clueless he refers to "one of the busiest towers in the country" when the report is about the New York TRACON, a totally separate facility. How about STFU, Senator, before you remove all doubt how big a fool you are? And Clinton's response is pure autopilot phone it in politi-garbage, per usual. She probably asked an aide afterwards, "What is the FAA again?"

They Eat Their Own

Democrats Criticize Dean Attacks on GOP

Ha, Demo-rats are starting to disavow the chairman's remarks. That's probably a good idea since Dean is demonstrably barking mad.

But he does make Terry McAuliffe look like an elder statesman.

Confederacy of Dunces

Al Gore declares world in 'planetary emergency'

He says in 15 years there will be no more glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro. Well, no, not if the locals keep cutting the forests off the mountain that provide the moisture that replenishes the glaciers. Duh.

Nobody in the room pointed that out, hence the title.

Gotta Laugh

In Shadows of doubt the Rocky Mountain News looks at Ward Churchill's evaporating credibility.

One thing I found hilarious:

My great-grandmother was Cherokee, born during the migration from Georgia. That makes me more Indian than Churchill!

Schwarzenegger has lost his mind

Schwarzenegger to Unveil Emissions Plan - Yahoo! News

Clearly, Arnold has lost his mind. Maybe the greenies put something in his drinking water.

And Now a Short Break

Just a short break from the usual stuff to bring you a picture of a hibiscus in our garden:

It rained earlier, but the sun has come out.

Sigh

I gave up on trying to work through Cingular's web site to add my feature, so I called customer service to order it. But, the feature I added doesn't work. CS was clueless about fixing the problem, and I decided to try emailing them (through the web site) in hopes that someone who actually knows something might read it.

And I got this:

God, I hate Cingular.

Tick...Tick...Tick...

Time is running out:

China takes emergency steps as bird flu found

Rights of Monsters

Paper Prints More Photos of Saddam in Jail

Interesting article.

Okay, Saddam in his tidy whities may "offend Arab sensibilities" but they're perfectly okay with pictures of their own guys cutting off people's heads. Right. Got it.

I am having trouble with the concept that a guy who ordered the use of chemical weapons against his own citizens, and who had people put into wood chippers, has a right to privacy.

Why Cingular So Often Sucks

I am trying to add to my plan, to give them even more of my money, and I get this:

This happens way too often at Cingular.

Update: it's now May 24 and it still gives me the same error. What kind of organization has a broken web site as their online representation? Cingular does. "Error in our systems"? Fix your damn systems, morons.

Big D

Some examples by Jim Schutze of how the city of Dallas is a corrupt cess pool led by an arrogant queen bee mayor and run by a criminal syndicate, known locally as the Dallas City Council:

Rent a Cop (or Else)

Bozo Rules

Kickback City

And Now a Message

Hey, Muslim world ...

Mething around

Mexico drug use soars as U.S. meth labs shift south - Yahoo! News

"Rogue suppliers"? Is that a euphemism for the Chinese government? I think it is.

Woo Hoo!

Court Blocks TV Anti-Piracy Tech Rules

Looks like FCC's earnest attempt to kiss the movie industry's ass has come to naught.

Confederacy of Idiots

At Pinkdome, some liveblogging of the disgraceful Texas house vote on outlawing suggestive dances by high school cheerleaders:

PinkDome.com: Finally we get to the Cheerleaders!

With all the problems facing Texas (school funding, children's health coverage, etc., etc.) these morons waste time voting on this. Some idiot house member got all offended because the cheerleaders at his alma mater laid some hootchie moves on him at halftime, so he's gonna show them who's their daddy!

God save Texas, because these asshats aren't going to.

Got to Love This

Technology - Why Google Scares Bill Gates - FORTUNE

Bill Gates once again reveals to the world that he is a raving lunatic with the emotional maturity of a three-year-old ("gimme that! that's mine!") and the ethics of an alley cat.

Look, asshole. You have umpty-fuck billions of dollars, you're richer than a fucking oil sheik, give it a rest already. Go screw your wife or something. The rest of us want a break from your fucking paranoid megalomania, let us enjoy the internet without you trying to screw it up with Microsoft shit. GO THE FUCK AWAY ALREADY.

Utah Steps Up

Utah steps up and shows some courage:

HoustonChronicle.com - Utah takes stand against No Child Left Behind

<Twin Peaks>It's Happening Again</Twin Peaks>

HoustonChronicle.com - Customer finds employee's finger in frozen custard

Only this time, there's an employee missing a finger!

Very Funny

Cute idea, having Bright Eyes on the Tonight Show.

Fuck you, Leno. Go to hell.

Che Che Shake that Thing

Courtesy of the inestimable Dr. Suarez, here is the best article on the Cuban butcher I have read:

Che Guevara: Assassin and Bumbler / Humberto Fontova / NewsMax.com - CubaNet News - Noticias de Cuba / Cuba News

Way to GO, Chloe!!

You go, girl! Kick ass!

School for Scandal

Okay I was reading Moxie's blog and she says "Go read Confederate Yankee" where I found this.

Okay, that's a parody page, right? I mean it is, right? Somebody please tell me that's a parody page.

Journalistic Integrity = Contradiction in Terms

The BBC sent employees to heckle at a Conservative campaign rally.

Here's a real whopper:

Oh, yeah, completely legitimate.

Mister Bluebird's on my Shoulder

More evidence that the lack of a serious opposition party has driven the Republicans insane:

Weather info could go dark

Rick Santorum wants the National Weather Service to stop giving away all that information for free. It's just not fair to people who want to sell you that info.

Is Santorum a tool, or what?

Update: I given it some thought -- yes, he is a tool.

And Barry Meyers, VP of Accuweather, the main beneficiary of the bill, gave $3,500 to the Republican Senatorial Committee. Accuweather is a Pennsylvania company. Santorum is a Pennsylvania senator.

Whatever.

Demo-graphics

"The Democrats are the party of big government in the service of big government and government service unions. They are not interested in enforcing the immigration laws. There is no party with actual political power that is interested in lower taxes, less government, and national defense without global expeditions. Most of their policies are reactive to the Republicans, and many of them make no sense under any set of assumptions." --Jerry Pournelle

"the lack of a credible Democratic party is damaging the Republican party by allowing it to expand into the void, all pretense of small government forgotten" --a commenter on Robbbbb's Livejournal

The Democratic party is a mess. It has no unifying purpose, other than to oppose anything the Republicans do. It is overrun with single interest groups who are united only by their lust for power and their hatred of Bush and conservatives. They have no abiding concern about the security of the country, and espouse policies that would act against the security of the nation.

Worse still, as Robbbbbb's commenter says, they are creating a vacuum that unscrupulous elements of the Republican party are exploiting to move us towards a one-party state. The Democrats are so far to the left that they have ceded all authority to counter the worst instincts of those on the right.

This country was much better off when the two parties formed a spectrum of opinions that reached across all shades of opinion, but those days ended in Chicago in 1968.

Phenter@mine, Anyone?

Texans arrested in Internet pharmacy crackdown

What? No more ci@l!s emails?

What Goes Around Comes Around Dept.

Hate mob attacks Galloway

The "Hate Mob" was composed of extremist Muslims, angered by Galloway's courting of the English Muslim vote. They told him they were setting up a gallows for him.

Galloway is known for his opposition to the Iraq war.

Ice, Ice, Baby

The Heartland Institute - Nature Study Debunks Kilimanjaro Glacier Myth - by James M. Taylor

A Google search for "Kilimanjaro icecap" gets hundreds and hundreds of listings about how "global warming is destroying the Kilimanjaro icecap", including more than a few that directly blame the United States for this situation.

There's just one small problem - it ain't true. Decades of tree cutting at the base of the mountain has depleted the moisture reservoir that the icecap depended on to survive in the impossibly arid climate, and now that the trees are gone, there's no moisture to replenish the snow at the peak. The natural outcome is evaporation of the icecap. Replace the trees, and the icecap will return.

So, sorry, Greenies. Once again, you are being fools.

It Still Sucks

AP Wire | 04/13/2005 | Microsoft set to unveil Windows in Brazil

I love this part:

What's that other OS that lets you run as many programs as you want, and has some of the most powerful networking capabilities around, and is FREE?

Oh, yeah. Linux.

And they're supposed to use a crippled, loser version of WinDoze why?

I think they left out networking so users of XP Non-Starter Edition couldn't use it to download Linux and get a real OS.

Moron says What?

Okay, what's wrong with this story?

"The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use,'' said Markey. Um, exactly where is this "more daylight" coming from, Congressman? Last time I looked, it still took 24 hours for the earth to rotate, so unless you have some secret daylight stash somewhere ...

Why do we keep electing these idiots?

Success !

Ha! It worked! Well, it worked after a lot of debugging, anyway. I'm not sure how much I'll use it, but it works.

--

Mobile Email from a Cingular Wireless Customer http://www.cingular.com

POP Blogging?

I am trying out Ian Barton's pop3-to-blog script, to see if I can (eventually) get text messages from my phone in to the blog.

Phoneblogging!

I am trying out phoneblogging. The Comcast nameservers are flakey tonight which makes things interesting.

--

Mobile Email from a Cingular Wireless Customer http://www.cingular.com

What We Really Need is Euthanasia for Worthless Judges

It's Happening Again:

Georgia Woman Being Starved and Dehydrated

Another stupid judge takes the side of death, but this time the victim is being killed in direct contravention of her stated wishes. I guess "living wills" aren't really all they're cracked up to be, if you have a relative who really wants you dead.

Update: Dorothy has been taken to a hospital and is receving nourishment.

Hmmm

Thai Binh Haiphong and Quang Ninh H5N1 Clusters

"The flu pandemic of 2005 has clearly begun."

We will see.

Spam Me No More Forever

No spam since Cornerhost moved to the Planet. I don't know if that's because I've been blacklisted by the Bulgarians (as Ann Elisabeth says) or if the hosting service is blocking them upstream.

Either way, it's nice to have logs that aren't crammed with spam.

Wacky Republican Fun

Key lawmaker calls for criminalizing TV indecency

Sensenbrenner wants to return to the good old days when the FBI persecuted "obscenity" merchants. Maybe he should dig up J. Edgar to help him out.

At least he's willing to make a distinction between broadcast and cable/satellite systems. Stevens wants to go whole hog and go after everybody. And Little Joe Barton is right there saying "me too, me too!", as always. Barton is a sock puppet clown, if you cut the purse strings of his big time polluter contributors, he would go back to being a small-town car dealer, or whatever he started out as.

If this moves any further along, I may look into investing in DVD porn manufacturers. If these guys actually drive "indecency" off the air and cable, DVDs will be a huge business, as well as (offshore) internet distribution.

Bottom line - adults will want adult entertainment, no matter how much these uptight prudes want it to be different.

Creeping creepy creeps

FEC to regulate blogs?

In the waning days of free speech as envisioned by the founders, I would just like to say:

Fuck you, Chris Shays, you worthless pile of shit. And fuck you too, Ed Meehan. Since you're a Massachusetts Democrat, it goes without saying that you're a worthless piece of shit. Don't you two great Americans need to detach your lips from the Pew Trust's ass long enough to take a breath, or have you achieved true symbiosis? Is this political, i.e. regulated, speech? I think truth is always a good defense, don't you?

And as long as I'm at it, fuck you, John McCain. Everybody knows you're only for campaign finance reform because you were so crooked in the 80s. I'm sorry you were such a crook that you had to shred the bill of rights to remove temptation to take payoffs again. Bastard.

And fuck you too, George. You should have vetoed this shit bill when it came in front of you.

The creep motif is from Mean Mr. Mustard.

Oh my God are patent examiners stupid or what?

Yes, yes they are. And they don't give a damn either.

PUBPAT News > PUBPAT Argues Against Patenting of Medical Facts

Peaceful death

One must hope, for the sake of the immortal souls of the husband, the lawyer, the judge, and the legions who supported them, that she really has been brain-dead for the last 15 years.

Because if not, this is anything but a peaceful death.

And if that's the way it's going down, some people are going to be uncomfortable for a very long time.

And see this ...

My question is, which is the murderer and which is the abettor, because this is murder. But is Michael Schiavo the murderer or is it Judge Greer? Greer could have prevented the homicide-in-progress of Terry Schiavo by simply following the laws in place, by not doing so he has insured that a homicide will occur, and the medical examiner should so rule. Systematic, intentional deprivation of nourishment resulting in death is homicide, if the ME rules "death by natural causes" he should be fired immediately.

Schiavo has spent years depriving his wife of the minimal care that would normally be provided to a person in her condition, has interceded to insure that care would not be provided nor tests that would settle with authority what her condition actually is. He has a direct financial interest in her death, he is the only witness to her supposed desire not to be kept alive through extraordinary means (and the only witness to the mishap that left her in this condition). He could have walked away at any point and left her care to her parents who are apparently willing to maintain care as long as they are able. That he did not do so suggests that his first interest is to see to it that his wife dies without any chance she might recover, and perhaps have something to say about that day when she had her accident?

And you may as well look at this, too. What exactly is going on here?

404 Not Found - or, Spam Fun

Okay, the most recent (and very prolific) referrer spammer is ws-op dot com (hundreds of hits today). Naturally, ws-op is registered with moniker, the spammer's favorite registrar. Naturally, it's a pinappleproxy script, so spampop kills it nicely. Which means, of course, that it is the child of the Bulgarian spammers.

The whois at moniker shows the usual bogus data:

Registered to Billy. Billy is so cool, so hip, he doesn't need a last name, which obviously doesn't bother the moniker folks in the least, since most of the Bulgarian spam sites have similar bogus registrations. Billy lives in uptown Manhattan, nice neighborhood. His admin/technical contact is one Miracle Lamont, of Vanmeter, Minnesota. Must also be an exclusive neighborhood, it isn't on any maps.

The name servers are interesting, too - ns0.zindagi.us and ns1.zindagi.us, which resolve to 62.1.3.1, as you can see. That is an IP block belonging to internet.gr, Athens, Greece. How did a Greek system get a '.us' tag?

zindagi was created by GoDaddy, and transferred to (who else) moniker. I suspect that's because GoDaddy actually checks the registration provided. Zindagi belongs to Kiya Kyler of Shelby, New Hampshire 87207. Also a very exclusive neighborhood, that zip isn't assigned.

For crying out loud, moniker, what the fuck are you doing here? Is the 18.99 each you get from these scum worth the pollution of the internet you are enabling? In my book, moniker is just as worthless as the spammers who flock to their registration service. Moniker is the crack house/whore house on the street, got a buck? We'll fix you up.

Bastards.

Spam Continues (also, sun rises in east, again!)

Spam continues unabated, mostly today from buy-2005 dot com, which is registered by moniker a shameless trashy spamhouse registrar, you should be ashamed you worthless parasites, where was I? Oh yes. That domain only exists in the fevered mind of the spammer and the mooney-grubbing accounts of its spam registrar, did I mention that it is moniker? It has no DNS entry. I'm sure it's banned by Google by now, they usually ban domains within a few hours of them showing up in referrer spams.

So what's the point, parasite? Nobody sees your crap on my site except me, no readers, no search engines, nobody. So why do you keep this crap up? I don't want to play p oker, I don't want any phony home loans, my equipment works just fine without any drugs. Just stop it, ok? No, I didn't think so.

Spam Flood

I have written a script which displays my logfile. Today I wrote a new one to throw out all the lines that contain "403", the http return code for access forbidden, which is how I handle referrer spam. That way I can more easily see who is really reading my page, instead of just spamming it. I can also see new spams that may get by my traps.

That's how I determined that 80% of page requests to my site are spam.

People, this is getting ridiculous. Somebody needs to kill a couple of these guys so the word will get out.

Another Pest

Okay, somebody from Covad likes to drop by every couple of days and download the same archived files each time. Now this doesn't make sense, and is annoying.

But he, whoever he is, isn't going to see this entry because I just banned his ass.

Spam is a State of Mind

A spam explosion today, from at least a dozen new domains. They are all being handled by Cindy's spampop script, so we know who's behind it, don't we?

Seriously, what is the point of all this shit? Google is banning these bastards as fast as they appear, so all their work can't be doing anyone much benefit. I guess when you are from a country that uses cow flops for currency, any little cash that comes your way looks good. It's sort of a third world shithole kind of deal.

He's Baaaack

doobu dot com has returned, as if from the dead. Although, I guess spammers never die, they just need to be killed.

Get out of my logs, you bastard.

Spam News

The strange and seemingly pointless referrer spamming of 12.163.72.13 has stopped and has been replaced by poker spamming for rohkalby dot com. They are registered with the spammer registar, moniker, of course, and are being rejected by my htaccess in such a way as to indicate that they are coming from the Bulgarians.

When is this crap going to stop?

Bravo Utah

Utah came within a whisker of being the first state to return to sanity and retake control of their education system away from the federal government and the inane, evil No Child Left Behind act. In fact, the only reason they stopped was to let President Bush know they were prepared to pass the act, which would give state standards precedence over those of the NCLB legislation.

I strongly suggest to Utah that they go ahead and pass the bill. The idiotic NCLB has done enough damage to the U.S. education system in the short time it has been in existence, and needs to be repealed. This New York Times article gives some background on the opposition to NCLB. Even Texas has resisted parts of the law, and Texas was the model for it. That should tell you just how bad it really is.

No news

The current spam run is for the benefit of 12.163.72.13, which doesn't seem to be online. So I am not sure what that is about.

I also had a couple of trackback spams for the benefit of an online poker site, sorry boys, they got stuck in the honeypot and went nowhere.

Absurd, indeed

U.S. Rejects Italy Journalist's Claims

It is extremely regretable that U.S. forces fired on a car speeding down one of the most dangerous roads in Iraq towards their position, refusing to stop, apparently doing everything they could to emulate a suicide bomber. But when this nutbag journo claims they were deliberately targeted "because the United States opposes Italy's policy of negotiating with kidnappers", she's just crossed the line.

Doesn't this idiot realize they could have killed all of them and made it look like an IED attack by insurgents?

I think if U.S. forces had "deliberately" targeted that vehicle, there wouldn't be enough pieces left to identify the make of the car.

Beware

Vietnam Nurse Infected with Bird Flu - Doctor

Well, it will. Influenza virii always mutate towards human pathogenicity, so it's coming. The only questions are, will it retain its lethality and what are we doing about it?

Different Day Same ...Stuff

Highprofitclub is gone but not lamented, replaced by doobu dot com. The king is dead, long live the king. Until next week, when another moniker-registered spamdomain starts pestering the blog world.

I also got a run of trackback and comment spams today, even though I have pointed both mt-comment and mt-tb to a honeypot script. So, hello, 216.195.44.106, thanks for stopping by. And also hello to you, 205.234.132.50, glad to see you visit. And you too, 217.66.3.82, please stay awhile, look around (I know you will). But, you, 194.222.14.129, if you need to clean up before you sit down, the washroom is in the back.

And of course all your friends are welcome, too. Enjoy.

Oh, jeez

Moniker dot com, the premier spam registrar on the internet, is upgrading their service offering:

Sort of a spammer's heaven, I guess.

I like that 1st one: "Even More Enhanced Domain Protection and Account Security". I guess the spammers are not pleased at Ann Elisabeth's forensic research on them, assuming that means what I think it does, stealthed domains.

I use a stealthed domain for this site, in case you looked.

If anyone is wondering about that "premier spam registrar on the internet", all the referrer spams I have received (nutzu, highprofitclub, learnhowtoplay, ronnieazza, musicbox1, isacommie, etc, etc) are registered through, guess who, moniker. So that makes them the top spam registrar from where I stand.

A Little Too Late

Dallas news is reporting that one of the cadavers found in a repossessed van is that of a barber who died in 2000 at age 93.

The thing is, his family was given ashes supposed to be him, which they buried in the family plot next to the grave of his wife.

So my question is, are all crematoria corrupt scams?

Funny?

The page cannot be displayed

That's what I get when I try to reach the New York Press page today, after it reportedly published an article on the '52 funniest things about the upcoming death of the pope' (Drudgereport)

Update: it's back, with the funny dead pope article. I should think up the 52 funniest things about Matt Taibbi being mugged and shot through the spine.

52. He would make a great 3rd base for a sandlot baseball game.
51. He could be a scumbag - in a scumbag.
50. You could throw him off a bridge and make bets on how long he floated.
49. Telling him he pissed his pants, and then yelling "Made you look!"

(to be continued)

Great Line

Best line I've seen today, talking about the new DNC chair:

From comments to
democracy guy: Howard Dean Should Resign

WTF???

What the heck is this:
61.35.238.77 - - [03/Mar/2005:02:20:00 -0500] "GET /homeContain/jsp/kor/common/error2_j_k.jsp HTTP/1.0" 403 ?

Am I mistaken or is this an attempted script exploit while referrer spamming?

Break's Over

The break was short-lived and highprofitclub is back spamming my logs, almost continously since midnight. A few are still getting 403s but the majority are being redirected to ... highprofitclub. So he is spamming himself.

Stand Down

After several days of near constant pounding by highprofitsclub spam, I altered my htaccess to redirect all requests back to the referrer.

Maybe it's just coincidence, in fact I'm sure it is, but the spam run ceased about an hour later, and no more visits from this particular pest since.

Now we're waiting for the next incarnation to show up.

Color Him Flung

Yes, my flinger script works. The spammer is now getting a 302 (target moved) code instead of a 403 when he accesses. So his spam is going back to his own page. Got to love that.

I still get the log entries but knowing that he is pestering himself is worth the cost.

The one thing I don't know is, is he getting my url as the referrer on the redirects? If so, I'm not sure if I mind that or not.

Update: Okay, it doesn't put a referrer in as far as I can tell.

Flinger script

I am experimanting with my htaccess to see if, when it detects a spammer, it can redirect the spammer to his own site by redirecting to the referrer.

I have seen several php scripts that do this, and I use redirects based on remote address in my site, so it should work. Having the proxy abuser hammer his own site with referrer spam is a neat idea, in any case.

Monkeys in the Mist, continued

All my trackback spams (25 so far) came from one IP address: 216.195.44.106. There seems to be only one domain hosted at that address. Here is the info on that domain:

Ha, yellow monkeys, indeed.

Monkeys in the Mist

After a quiet week, I find my mt-tb honeypot brimming full of Yellow Monkeys this morning. I am seriously tired of these parasites trying to ride my site to fame and money (oh and also several hundred or thousand other sites too) but I am at least insuring that their crap doesn't make it to public (i.e. googlable) pages.

Can't you guys go back to prostituting your wives and daughters, like you used to do for money? Thanks loads.

New Pest

Perhaps I should call them fungus since they grow in my logs.

Anyways, a new spam site is making referrer runs this afternoon: highprofitclub dot com, pointing (naturally) to online poker sites. Registered with moniker (naturally) and pointed at obviously bogus registrant info. Sam Spade's browse tool returns "No such server" and no DNS is returned, so I'm guessing they're spamming before the site is even operational.

First appearance in my logs was 22:02 GMT.

Ann Elisabeth is all over it already.

Dutch Treat

Trouble among the tulips.

Moron Loses Again

Ted Rall admits defeat in his moronic "right wing challenge".

He was apparently so rattled by what he found in his mail (when he finally got a clue and got it working) that he posted his admission of defeat three times.

Spam Sundae

After a couple of days warming up, musicbox1 and isacommie (what is up with that name?) are pounding me today. The script I got from Candy Genius is catching all of them.

My webhost has indicated that he is going to start suspending execution of mt-tb and mt-comments during major spam runs, since they are cpu intensive and during a major run can slow the whole server down to a crawl.

It's really a pity, since this could be solved easily by a soft-nose round through the foreheads of some of these guys.

Painless

This has been on my mind lately:

Through early morning fog I see
visions of the things to be
the pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see...

that suicide is painless
it brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.

I try to find a way to make
all our little joys relate
without that ever-present hate
but now I know that it's too late, and...

suicide is painless
it brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.

The game of life is hard to play
I'm gonna lose it anyway
The losing card I'll someday lay
so this is all I have to say.

Suicide is painless
it brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.

The only way to win is cheat
And lay it down before I'm beat
and to another give my seat
for that's the only painless feat.

Suicide is painless
it brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.

The sword of time will pierce our skins
It doesn't hurt when it begins
But as it works its way on in
The pain grows stronger...watch it grin, but...

Suicide is painless
it brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.

A brave man once requested me
to answer questions that are key
is it to be or not to be
and I replied 'oh why ask me?'

Suicide is painless
it brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.

'Cause suicide is painless
it brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.
...and you can do the same thing if you please.

Theme from M.A.S.H., Johnny Mandel, 1970

Hunter S. Thompson, R.I.P.

Heh

Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Heh. I'd guess he's getting more than he bargained for.

Update: site's back up. The shitwad says his challenge remains totally unanswered. I've seen some references on other blogs that the email address he provided bounces. So either he is giving out a bogus email address because he's a big fraud who doesn't want to see the responses to his "challenge", or he's too stupid to configure a popmail setting.

Either one is pretty funny.

Nanny Nanny Nanny

Salt Should Be Regulated Food Additive, Group Says

The food nannies are at it again. These are people who live every day in a rage that someone, somewhere, might be enjoying a meal, and by God, they're going to put a stop to it!

CSPI are a bunch of sour-faced busybodies who like nothing better than to mind everyone else's business. In fact, that is when they are happiest, or what passes for happy in the gray, bland, padded wall world they live in.

Screw off, jerks!

Make It Stop?

Seen on Ann Elisabeth's site:

Spammers Bet on Casino Affiliate Cash at Netaloid.

One of the commenters asks what about the pharma connection? And that's a good point: all the v1agra, c1alis, and ph3ntermine sites out there that spam like crazy are feeding these parasites too.

But I like the idea of letting the casinos know that if they use spammers to advertise, they are obviously not trustworthy enough to handle money.

Update: I emailed one of the casino sites being flogged by nutzu to see what response (if any) I get. Stay tuned.

Ho Hum Spam Day

Spamming from isacommie and musicbox1 is coming in, but it's sporadic, unlike nutzu which hammered my site almost continually for three days.

The server is sort of slow, though, which usually means someone is getting hammered bad. Probably an MT install with open comments.

So goes life in the brave new world.

Update: spoke too soon, naturally. My logs are now full of poker, drugs, and loan offer sites.

Break's Over

Well, it was a short break. musicbox1 and isacommie (what the hell name is that?) are starting spam runs against my site today, in spite of the fact that I don't publish my referrers.

My two-line htaccess rule that I got from Candy Genius ( a link is available below) is still giving these pests a 403 error. Guess they aren't very adaptable.

Busy Day in Bulgaria

gpshewandotcom » Blog Archive » Google spoofing

The same guy who crawled my site, did the same thing to gpshewan's site, with no better results, apparently

What is this?

Well, I know it's a spoon, but can anyone tell me what type? I have a wild suspicion what it might be, but it's so wild I don't want to jump right in and be revealed as a fool.

If you know, please email me (link below).

Balkan Intrigue

My site has been thoroughly crawled this morning by IP 82.103.65.225, which is probably familiar to anyone who follows referrer spam. Here's the IP--block data:

Now why is my little blog of such interest in Bulgaria? If you're (Bulgarians) reading this, please note that I do not allow comments, I do not allow trackbacks, and I do not publish referrers, so all your efforts just end up in logs that no one but me ever sees. They aren't accessible to Google or any other search engine, so your spam floods don't go anywhere.

So go back to your day job - pimping your daughters.

Assholes.

Spam Me Not

After a relentless onslaught that has gone on for the last five days, 24 hours a day, nutzu-dot-com has fallen quiet. They also removed the cloaking script from their site and if you browse to nutzu-dot-com, you get their registration page.

I, for one, wish I had never heard of poker.

So, is this the end? Or (more likely) are the Bulgarians tooling up for another client whose spam will start appearing in the next day or so? Video at eleven.

I'm Special

I feel so special Today I started getting my very first trackback spam (attempts). That must mean I've finally arrived in the blog world (or not, hehe).

In either case, mt-tb points to a honeypot script, not to the original MT script. I will have a file with lots of info on the spammers each time they try to post.

I still suggest that shooting them in the spine is the best idea.

Bulgarian Bull

Ann Elisabeth points out that the referrer spammers who are pestering the blog world these days are Bulgarians. I have been to the nutzu dot com page and found the obfuscated javascript that flings you to a bogus "account suspended" page, which puzzled the heck out of me until Ann Elisabeth pointed out that Google would not "see" the javascript redirect and would index the actual referred pages. And there are lots of pages. Lots and lots of pages.

It looks like nutzu wants to be the top ranked page in Google for anything to do with poker. WTF is the big deal with poker? No way I'm trusting these putrescent boils on the ass of the internet with any financial information, which is a given for internet gambling. You may as well send them the title to your house as well.

See this entry at Ann Elisabeth's also, for more analysis like what I was doing below. joatBlog spends a lot more time delving into shetef.com and the twisted connections of the referrer spammer's world.

For myself, I don't publish my referrers, like many (used to) do. It's pointless, now anyway, with all the spam circulating. I also don't have comments, for the same reason. My mt-comments script is actually a honeypot that gathers information on spammers when they try to ping it.

Joke Page, right?

Bill Gates is a funny guy. As pointed out by the CTO of Opera Software in this Register article, Gates' statement on interoperability is, well, a joke. The world leader in broken browsers, busted standards, non-compatibility, grabbing free and open standards and making them proprietary, is talking about interoperability. And doing it on a page that lists, at latest count (20:26GMT 14-Feb-2005) 42 errors according to the W3C validator.

And some of the errors are ridiculous, like having multiple <HTML> declarations in the page, stuff you should learn in high-school web page classes.

If you want a laugh, heres the page:
Executive E-Mail: Bill Gates on Interoperability

Bottom line? You can't trust these bastards, don't even think about it.

Hacking Fun

Okay, what's this?

Sun Feb 13 14:44:29 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.19
Sun Feb 13 14:44:29 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.17
Sun Feb 13 14:44:29 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.18
Sun Feb 13 14:44:28 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.19
Sun Feb 13 14:44:28 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.17
Sun Feb 13 14:44:28 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.18
Sun Feb 13 14:44:27 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.19
Sun Feb 13 14:44:27 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.17
Sun Feb 13 14:44:27 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.18
Sun Feb 13 14:44:26 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.19
Sun Feb 13 14:44:26 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.17
Sun Feb 13 14:44:26 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.18
Sun Feb 13 14:44:25 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.19
Sun Feb 13 14:44:25 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.17
Sun Feb 13 14:44:25 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.18
Sun Feb 13 14:44:24 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.19
Sun Feb 13 14:44:24 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.17
Sun Feb 13 14:44:20 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.18
Sun Feb 13 14:44:20 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.19
Sun Feb 13 14:44:20 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.17
Sun Feb 13 14:44:19 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.19
Sun Feb 13 14:44:19 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.17
Sun Feb 13 14:44:19 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.18
Sun Feb 13 14:44:18 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.19
Sun Feb 13 14:44:18 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.17
Sun Feb 13 14:44:18 2005 : Blocked access attempt from 170.224.33.18

Those are Sequent numbers (IBM).
Hmm.

403 means go away

The most astonishing thing has happened in my ongoing struggle with the referrer spammers. I put a two-line entry in my htaccess file, and now all the referrer spammers are getting "403 - Forbidden" tags.

Admittedly it's not the same as getting them all shot through the spine, but it's something.

If you want to know the secret entry, email me, or visit Candy Genius, where I found it.

Mystery Tour

I am getting a lot of referrer spam from subdomains of 6q.net, so I thought it might be fun to poke around to see what connections are under the hood.

Picking one at random:

65.165.84.11 - - [11/Feb/2005:13:51:33 -0500] "GET /weblog/archives/000128.html HTTP/1.0" 403 310 "http://party-poker.6q.org/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)"

Okay, that IP belongs to webshield.sulanet.net. The whois gives you this:

Registrant:
INSETEC (SULANET2-DOM)
25th AVE. S.W. 4TH STREET INSETEC
BUILDING
SAN PEDRO SULA, CORTES 144
HN

Domain Name: SULANET.NET

Administrative Contact:
CANAHUATI, JORGE (JCV153) INSETEC@NETSYS.HN
INSETEC
25 AVE. S.O. 4A CALLE
SAN PEDRO SULA, CORTES 144
HN
(504)552-2535

Technical Contact:
ALFARO, JOEL (JA9474) jalfaro@SULANET.NET
Sulanet
25th AVE S.W., 4TH ST
San Pedro Sula Cortes none, CO 144
HN
+504-550-1212 ext 1505 fax: +504-550-2542

Record expires on 03-Nov-2006.
Record created on 03-Nov-1999.
Database last updated on 11-Feb-2005 14:30:34 EST.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.SULANET.NET 65.165.84.2
NS2.SULANET.NET 65.165.84.3

If you browse that IP address, you get:

Error - 400

Requested URL is not valid

So, no help there, although I've seen that identical response enough times to begin to form a hypothesis of what's going on. (Hint: think "open proxies")

Okay, so let's browse the target, party-poker.6q.org. That gets me a brief look at what might be an online poker site before redirecting to www.6q.org, and a page saying:

This statement is permanently in suspension - Due to mis-proper use of the hosting account

ACCOUNT TERMINATED!

So, the authorities have caught up with the bad guys, right? Well, maybe not. The whois for 6q.org is no longer searchable, but was found to be registered by Moniker, a Chinese spam registar. The IP address for party-poker.6q.org is 219.150.118.16, which is in the Asian (RIPE) block.

On the "Account terminated" page is a form to

" Step up to fight unwanted client practices. Fill the form below so we can take appropriate action."

The action on this form is:

action='http://64.234.220.141/submitAbuse.php'

Now THAT ip address goes to shetef.com, and the whois for shetef.com is:

Registrant:
Shetef Solutions Ltd. (SHETEF-DOM)
10 Azmaut Street
Ness-Ziona, ISRAEL 74010
IL

Domain Name: SHETEF.COM

Administrative Contact:
Dascalu, Yonat (YD32) ziv@web2000.us
Shetef Solutions Ltd.
21 Tlalim street
Raanana 43568
IL
+972-9-7748832 fax: 999 999 9999

Technical Contact:
Inc., Interland, (DA6173-ORG) domreg@INTERLAND.NET
101 Marietta St
Atlanta, GA 30303
US
1.800.214.1460 fax: 1.678.365.2899

The IP block belongs to Webstream, Inc., in Fort Lauderdale. If you do a Google search of Webstream, you will find references to referrer spammers and porn sites.

So that's quite a tangled web. A proxy in Honduras (HN = Honduras?) points to a spammer site in China which redirects to a page that wants you to fill out a form that goes to a domain registered in Israel, hosted in Florida.

All I can think to say, is: WTF?????

Update: I tried the ip address 65.165.84.11 in the following format:

http://65.165.84.11/?http://www.yahoo.com/

and what do you know? I got the Yahoo! home page. So then I tried to proxy myself through them, thusly:

http://65.165.84.11/?http://mdwalters.net/

and much to my surprise got a cornerhost screen saying "This account is disabled". Holy cow! I quickly loaded my page normally, and it worked fine, so I'm guessing Michal has banned proxies that use my rather primitive proxy technique right at the gateway.

The server logs at cornerhost do not include the "HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR" field, so you can't see the proxies when they come in. I might email Michal and ask if that can be added to the apache log format line, so the logs will reflect proxied requests.

Say What?

Watched "24" last night. I had successfully avoided the first two (three?) seasons, in order to watch something on another network that was more attractive to me. I could tell that 24 was excellent, but I didn't want to get into the "watch this one, tape that one" fire drill that I sometimes fall into with competing time slots.

But this year I got hooked by 24 early on, and there's not that much opposite that can't be caught up on during rerun season. The Azar family are deliciously evil in their fanatical pursuit to damage the U.S., and as expected, C.A.I.R. came out with their usual complaints.

So it was a nice irony last night when Keifer Southerland did his spot on how "the American Muslim community stands with all Americans against terror" given this.

Yeah, shoulder to shoulder. Right.

Update Little Green Footballs noticed this, too. Ha.

Holy Cow

Uh, wow!
Yahoo! News - New 'Supercomputer on a Chip' Makes Debut

Linux. Heh, heh. Take that, SCO.

Bot this

So Microsoft is going to challenge Google in searchspace? Let me see, "to Google" something is pretty well understood everywhere in cyberspace as meaning to get comprhensive data on a subject through an internet search service. "To Microsoft", if it means anything at all, would probably mean to fuck over your competition and your customers by leveraging a monopoly to squeeze out competition and foist crappy software on your customers.

Google runs on Linux, Microsoft search runs on God knows what, although if they want it to work more than a few hours at a stretch, I'm guessing not Windows. That is a sort of metaphor for the whole situation: free and open source versus Satan.

So, in honor of the launch of Microsoft's new search service, I have edited my robots.txt file to tell msnbot to take a hike.

Sleaze Masters

I am being beseiged by referrer spammers at present, but I have written a rule for the htaccess file that flings them to a particularly disgusting porn site.

Something to do with a goat. :)

True Colors

Leftwingers at "Democratic Underground" show their true colors.

Increasingly, to be a "Democrat" is to be a friend of despots, tyrants, and fascists. Oh, yes, and terrorists. Anybody but Bush, right? Even murdering monsters who target civilians. Pathetic.

They turn on their own

Democrats start turning on their own:
Soros Says Kerry's Failings Undermined Campaign Against Bush

Crawl like a snake

Here's a big shout out to my newest reader, tecrep-inc.net. D'oh, that's right, that's no reader, that's a referrer-spammer using zombied systems, probably looking for an open comment link so he can really spam me. D'oh, too bad your host has shut you down, you human garbage. Why don't you look for an honest job, like pimping 12-year old girls, or something?

UPdate 2-18-05: they're not zombies, they're open proxies. Sort of a volunteer zombie, or something. Some of them are clueless sysadmins who have left proxying turned on towards the internet, when they probably meant for it only to work inwards towards their LAN. Some of them are gettin gelt from the spammers. Some of them just don't give a damn if their systems are abused.

Green, green, they say

In his Current View, Jerry Pournelle (a science fiction writer I still hold in high esteem) says we should be spending large sums of money building nuclear fission power plants to reduce our dependence on foreign petroleum.

I completely agree. There is at present no good substitute for petroleum as a power source for transportation, and using it for power generation is borderline stupid. Building non-petroleum power plants will extend the supply for transport use.

I also think that any enviromentalists who try to impede the construction of modern nuclear power plants (which are much safer than the old breeder designs) by illegal actions such as blockading work sites or sabotage should be jailed, or preferably, shot.

Disappointment

I read a lot of science fiction. One of my favorite authors was John Varley, author of Titan. I pretty much admired someone who could write such a richly textured world. I bought everything of his I could find, and I'm presently reading Red Thunder.

Then I visited his website.

And now I have no respect or regard for him at all. None whatsoever. The man is a leftist fucktard of the first order. I think I will finish reading Red Thunder, and then find all his books that I own, and burn them.

And in the future when I see one of his books for sale, I might just hawk up a nice loogie to decorate it with.

Feel the Love

Democrats share the love: JS Online: 5 charged in election-day tire slashings

Leftwing Follies

Leftist Fucktards in Action

Uh, what are you hippie morons going to do when the Chinese Navy shows up in Puget Sound? Throw flowers at them? The degree to which lefties are willing to make complete fucking idiots of themselves is astonishing.

I wish the recruiters had just called in the Rangers to take out these imbeciles.

Cingular - the Website, the Service, the Phone

So I figured out why the Cingular web site sucks so bad - it's simple really, if I had spent 10 seconds analyzing the symptoms. I use Firefox, and the wretched Cingular site, a collection of javascripts, mostly, is so IE-centric that on Mozilla it doubles up on itself like a dog trying to throw up a basketball. (This metaphor revised from the original Southern version, which is much more graphic.)

I am reasonably certain that this situation is unremediable, and that the Cingular webwraiths will not spend one millisecond thinking about trying to get their site standards-conformant. Why bother? The whole world uses IE, right?

So maybe I was hasty in deciding to switch to T-Mobile, perhaps Cingular deserves my business for two more years.

I looked at my bill today. Twenty dollars in overage charges, calls I don't even remember making, plus eight-fifty in messaging charges.

Bye bye Cingular. Hello T-Mobile.

When Animals Strike Back

There is an ongoing outbreak of animal rabies in Barnstable, Massachusetts.

Such Sweethearts

A quick R.O.P.(*) update, from the Houston Chronicle:

Now, how can anybody say anything bad about a religion like that? I ask you, how?

(*Religion of Peace)

Only in Louisiana

Only in Louisiana - the New Iberia mayor and city council demand stronger enforcement of a law banning low-cut clothing that exposes the underwear, conveniently ignoring the fact that the law was never passed by the legislature.

Too much bon temps down there.

Providence

Sometimes the hand of providence steps in to keep you from making a mistake.

My Cingular wireless account is going to reach its end of committment in a few months, and I want to get a phone with a color screen, like one of the Motorola V-series, for example. Since I have had this phone for 20 months, I can upgrade in the Cingular system with only another two-year committment.

So I go to the Cingular web site, and click on "upgrade my phone".

Then Providence steps in.

I hate Cingular. I hate the way the bill escalates astronomically when the allotted minutes are used. I hate that I get billed for roaming on accounts that have free roaming. I hate going to the Cingular customer service center to try to straighten out the bill.

But all of that is meaningless, in comparison to how much I hate, loath, despise the Cingular web site. My son's phone was switched from Cingular to T-Mobile a few months ago, and the billing on his account improved dramatically. And the T-Mobile web site is an absolute dream to navigate.

So here's the providence part: after clicking on "upgrade my phone", I was asked to log in so my account could be verified, after which I should have been offered phone selections and the opportunity to choose one, order it online, and have it in a few days, along with a shiny new two-year committment. I probably would have done it had the web site actually done that.

But what I got instead was a long wait and "connecting to myaccount.cingular.com" followed by the cheerful message "myaccount.cingular.com has unexpectedly terminated the connection". Three times. No frickin way it was going to let me in to buy something from them. And I remembered all the times in the past when that site did the same kind of thing to me, and all the rage and frustration I esperienced trying to get some information from it.

Bye bye Cingular.

Hello T-Mobile.

Ay Oh Ell Sucks

AOL has a neat twist if you decide to cancel your account - they block logins to their AIM service using the screen names from AOL. If you want to keep those names, they offer something called "AOL light" for 4.95 a month - sort of extortion money to preserve your screen name.

Oddly enough, I have a master screen name from an old AOL account that was cancelled, and it works fine. I am guessing this policy is a new one, implemented since they started hemorrhaging users.

Update: As if killing my screen name wasn't enough, now I am getting AOL telemarketing calls, trying to get me to come back. Uh, here's a clue - no chance.

Update: today (1/10) I received a nice letter from AOL which bigins thus:

Okay you lying sacks of shit, I did not agree to continue my AOL service. After spending 45 minutes on the phone with your vampire tech rep from hell convincing her that I really, really didn't want any of the 128 different plan variations you offer, there is no fucking way I would decide that I didn't mean it after all and you can keep leaching my bank account at $15 per month for a service I no longer use.

Keep it up, fucktards, and you will feel the wrath of my legal nazgul.

...And I'll Cry If I Want To

BUSH BASH BOOK BURSTS IN TIME FOR INAUGURAL

Christine Whitman proves the obvious - she's not a Republican, never was.

"...missed an opportunity to broaden his support in the most populous areas of the country"? How? By caving to the Democrats and left-wing extremists. Run play with the MoveOn crowd, bitch. We don't need you. Never did.

(The link above has died.)

Tsunam - what?

Glenn Reynolds spotted this first, and also updated the fact that these Tsunami pictures are bogus. They are pics of tidal bores on rivers in Asia.

Check the next to last photo. I think the Thai victims of the tsunami probably weren't laughing when the wave came in.

Update:

Return, Right

Found this: Return of the xxxx? while searching for something else. I'd guess the author is a Microsoft employee, since he talks about "returning to work on the Internet Explorer team".

Contemplating Microsoft starting development on IE, let me just say this:

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.....{deep breath} aaaahahahahahahahahaha.

Just get Firefox.

Update: Iliad has the same idea

Disaster - a Recipe

Take an area that is the traditional breeding ground and starting point for major epidemics (SARS, bird flu, cholera, typhoid). Wait until northern hemisphere winter, when some of the most dangerous contagions begin their spread.

Now add one major geologic disaster, killing tens of thousands, and displace millions into refugee camps with poor sanitation and bad nutrition.

Lastly, send lots and lots of people and planes into the affected area, and back and forth to the western world.

No, nothing to worry about there.

And now message fom our sponsor

Just a thought, sitting here after Christmas dinner, apropos of nothing,

Zantac 75 makes my life worth living.

Hmmmm

2004 MN4 Impact Risk

Okay, would you leave on a car trip, say, knowing in advance that there was 1 chance in 45 that you would have a head-on collision with an eighteen wheeler?

On the bright side, we have 25 years (less 8 months) to party down.

Watch that page to see if the odds get better, or worse.

And party on.

Oh, Crap

I have been in denial for the last week or so. I can not believe that that idiot jerkoff, Norm Mineta, is still going to be the Secretary of Transportation. In a sane world, he would have been drawing unemployment since no later than September 15, 2001. But noooo, he's still around, being an idiot jerkoff. And he's staying.

Crap.

UPDATE: Here is Michelle Malkin's take on Mineta.

Tried and True

FCC Won't Stifle Satellite Stern

In the time-honored tradition of American business, a broadcast executive, upon hearing Howard Stern threaten to "crush traditional broadcasters", decided to take action. Would he bring to the table vibrant, relevant broadcast content to take Stern's oxygen supply away? Hell, no. He'll ask the FCC to muscle in on the satellite services and turn them into nanny radio too.

In an ever rarer moment of clarity, the FCC declined to intervene. I expect Mr. Levine will now go back and plan better content for his stations? No, I expect him to shower his congress whores with cash and try to get them to carry his water to the FCC, and demand that the FCC regulate satellite content.

Wait and see.

Global Alarming?

Okay, I thought they said the ice caps are melting, so what's this (CNN.com - Iceberg threat to penguin chicks - Dec 14, 2004) then?

Trawling Through the Inbox

Some sample subjects from today's mail:

1. Are search engines include you website? (No, are they include you?)

2. May Cause DROWSINESS when TAKING THIS MEDICATION
(This one includes the immortal prose: "We run a Cannadian Pharmmacy that will save you thousands of dollars each year on the exact same mediciine you buy in the United States
- Vicoodin, Xanaax, Vaalium, and Ciaalis and more"

Try to learn to spell the name of your country, eh?)

3. Earn a 6 Figure Income Online! - 100% Automated System! (Yeah, right)

4. fire CIAL11S, XAANAX, /ALI1UM, /1AAGRRA, AMBIIEN at CHEEAP black guard (don't really know where to go with that one)

5. Comprehensive healthcare is too expensive? deoxyribonucleic (let's say it again! deoxyribonucleic! come on, everybody! deoxyribonucleic!)

Irritations

1. The wireless card in my Linux server died, so now it is offline. I can't find a PCI card that is supported in Linux to replace it.

(Listen, you damn vendors -- in spite of Microsoft, Linux is going to be around a while, and I don't think it would hurt you to provide drivers for your damn cards.)

2. Weber apparently no longer makes or sells the cast-iron cooking grids for their grill. Now you have to buy the ceramic coated grill, and the cast-iron one made stuff taste so good.

3. SCO is still hanging on, in spite of their case being basically in shreds now. Their stock has even been laddered up above $4 again.

Google This

WTF is up with Google today?

Arrrrgh

I am trying to rescue the hard drive from my son's laptop. It started failing to boot about a week ago, reaching the "Starting Windows XP" screen and then restarting after a while. Wouldn't boot into safe mode either.

It would, however, boot from a SlakLive CD into Linux, and I used that to backup all the critical data files over the network.

I talked to Toshiba Technical Support, who advised that only a system restore would work at this point. Unfortunately, system restore found errors on the drive and won't finish running.

So I went to Fry's and picked up a USB enclosure, and I'm trying to format the drive using that. We will see what happens, but I think it ultimately will have to go to the service center for a new drive.

Update: No go so back to Toshiba it goes. Apparently the drive is fried.

Pathetic

Oh my god. When I read this, I didn't know whether to pee my pants laughing or throw up in disgust.

My father was a Marine who fought in the Pacific during World War 2. I am trying to picture him engaging in this kind of pathetic, whining, cry-baby bullshit over an election, and I just can't see it. From the greatest generation to this, in 60 years.

Here's a clue why your guy lost: he's one of you. A pathetic whining loser. Thank GOD you people lost, I would wake in the night screaming to think that the defense of this nation was in the hands of such a bunch of loser pussies.

Oh and their "group therapy" is FREE. Christ, what is this coming to? Pathetic crybaby whining pussy losers who won't even pay the freight for their own therapy. Here's some therapy: Florida is a peninsula. Start walking either east or west and keep going till your hat floats away.

Pussies.

Paper Fooled

HoustonChronicle.com - Teen bracelets carry hidden sexual meaning

The Houston Chronicle buys into an Urban Myth, hook, line, and sinker.

Snicker.

Hmmm

Okay so Jack in the Box is saying for the holidays, if you buy one of their hamburger meals, they will give you, free, a reindeer ball.

Ick.

Beginning of the End of a Small Town?

On November 23, 2004, a tornado struck the town of Olla, Louisiana, in north LaSalle parish. Of the 587 homes in the town, 163 were destroyed, either totally, or beyond economical repair. One person was killed. The high school building sustained major damage, and classes for the rest of the year are being held in a nearby factory building until the school can be rebuilt. It is not known whether the existing building can be repaired, or if a new structure will be built.

Here is what the Free Dictionary says about Olla:

The high school I attended (many years ago) played football against LaSalle High School in the parish rivalry. We were a 3A school, they were a 1-A school, but the rivalry was intense enough that either one could prevail in any year.

Olla was the first town in the parish to open a recreation center with a 3-lane bowling alley and pool tables in a youth center setting, rather than a pool hall, where the tough kids went to smoke and hang out. I learned to play rotation and eight ball on the pool tables in the Olla Rec Center. My own town built a rec center of its own a few years later, in part I believe because they were somewhat shamed by Olla's being the first to do so, and because a lot of parents were fretting about so many kids making the 18 mile one way drive to the rec center.

Most of the industry and support businesses in Olla have closed up in the last 20 years, and employment for the residents of Olla is primarily elsewhere, with commutes averaging 20 miles. There is a real danger that, without outside assistance to rebuild damaged and destroyed homes, financial considerations will force many of the town's residents to relocate closer to their jobs. This will further weaken the tax base of the town, and could easily spiral to the point where Olla will no longer exist as a viable town.

Olla was the center of oil exploration and production in Central Louisiana starting in 1938 and for many years afterwards. Olla was incorporated as a town in 1899, but settlement in the area goes back at least to the 1870's when riverboats visited the nearby sulphur springs.

I personally find the possibility of Olla's demise as a town to be a horrifying prospect. I have many memories of the time I lived in LaSalle Parish, and a lot of them involve Olla. The idea that it might not survive because of a storm that lasted less than a minute is a tragedy beyond words.

Here's hoping for the best for this town.

Happy Thanksgiving

Well, hope you had a happy Thanksgiving, at least! I did, enough so that I am a day late wishing you one too.

Scary News

Most disturbing headline I've seen lately dept.:

Air Force turns to Microsoft for network security

Steal This Car!

Call 911

The irreplacable Jim Schutze explains why, in Dallas, Texas, you are much better off stealing a car than having a car stolen.

FCC - Fatally Corrupt Commission?

Here is a scary item, about just how the FCC does business:

The shocking truth about the FCC: Censorship by the tyranny of the few - BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

Roach Motels? Gotta Love It

Here's a great post on what's actually happening in Iraq (as opposed to what the weasels in the MainStreamMedia would like you to believe):
2Slick's Forum: Roach Motels and the Big Picture

Have Fun With Some Body

West Bank fun:

Emphasis mine. What a fun place that must be to live.

A Tale of Woe

I used to have a Handspring Visor Deluxe. Due to an act of incredibly stupid carelessness (by me) it was lost. All the data is completely backed up in a Palm Desktop on my PC, so there was no actual information lost, but the loss of the device is extremely annoying and inconvenient. I encounter 3 or 4 things per day that I need my PDA for, and not having it handy is frustrating.

So I'm off to the store to buy a new PDA. My main ground rules are:
it has to cost less than $200
it has to be at least as capable as the lost Visor.

That narrows the field considerably. All the PocketPC devices are eliminated, which I don't mind in the least. My office co-workers went through a frenzy of buying iPaqs last year, and I have enjoyed a year of watching them break down one by one while my little Visor just kept working. Of the Palm family, only the Tungsten E and the two lesser Zires make the cut. So they are the field of choices. Due to the price, I am favoring the Zire 31.

Best Buy: doesn't stock the 31, only the 72. The Zire 72 in the store has severe wear on the case from handling, not a good sign. I notice the calculator in the $249.99 Zire 72 is a simple 4-function with memory, nowhere near as nice as the multi-function scientific calculator that the Visor has. Not A Good Sign.

Off to CompUSA. They have a 31 available to look at. Same 4-function calculator. Did the inclusion of the mp3 player use up all the memory that used to hold the calculator? Does anybody even want a PDA that plays music? I have a 20GB Archos that outclasses anything a PDA could do, so the mp3 player is not a buying decision item. I also notice the case on the 31 is kind of cheesy soft plastic, nothing like the Visor's hard case. Not A Good Sign. I briefly look at a Zire 21 and discover it to be a Toys'R'Us conception of a PDA. The screen contrast is so poor it isn't readable in the bright store light. In sum, a piece of crap. The 31 is a slightly nicer piece of crap. The 72 is an overpriced, over accessorized piece of crap, but I'm not looking at it anyway.

That leaves the Tungten E. At $199.95, it just makes the price cut. I turn it on to check out the ROM based apps.

No calculator. None. Not even the pathetic 4 banger that the Zires have. And the E is a cut down version of the T series, without all the whizbang stuff that makes the Ts worth having (SDIO, BlueTooth, etc). The case is definitely styling, but the guts are stripped to nothing. 32mb of memory to support 12 ROM based apps. Just how stupid does Palm think we are?

I return home, depressed. The PDAs I would really like to have are the Tungsten T3 or the Clie PEG-J33 with Wi-Fi, but at over $300, it ain't happening.

Hmm. eBay has a Visor, like new, with stylus and cradle, for buy-it-now $44.99. Problem solved. Email receipt says it wll ship within 48 hours. To Palm may I just say, "Screw You!"

He's Dead, Dead I Say

CBS just announced that Yassir Arafat is dead.

Have a nice stay in hell, you bastard.

I'm Sorry (So Sorry)

Suppose there was a bunch of pathetic losers who were so stupid they couldn't find their asses with both hands?

Suppose they felt so really, really bad they were such pathetic losers that they felt they should apologize to the rest of us for their pathetic loserness?

There is, and they have.

Fried Chicken

Oh, yes, I almost forgot in all the excitement -- Hey Dixie Chicks! Eat me!

Customer Disservice

Cingular is starting to seriously piss me off. I used to have three phones on the "family plan" but it turns out it's more like "family bankruptcy plan" so I moved one phone to T-Mobile (highly recommended, by the way).

So with only two phones, the monthly bill should go down, right? Right? Wrong. Overage charges are killing me.

And, to top everything off, the Cingular web site is all but inaccessible, most of the time. If you can get the portal, you can't get to the account site.

I expect T-Mobile (did I mention that I highly recommend them?) is going to get even more business from me, soon.

Run While You Still Can

Pssst... Lefties! All that stuff you heard was true. They're building huge concentration camps out on the Texas - New Mexico border. They're going to start rounding you up any day now. Get out of the country while you are still able to travel. Go tonight. Pack light. Travel by night.

God speed.

Hell Gets a New Tenant?

Various sources are reporting that Arafat has died, or, as News24 is reporting, is "brain dead".

Of course, in the latter case the question is, how can you tell?

Either way, imagining his greeting in hell is an interesting thought experiment.

Update 11-09-04: that old asshole is still hanging on. They probably have him wired up to the French power grid to make sure he doesn't die on them and then the Palis will go all jihad on their French asses.

Morning in America

My country has come through again. Sweet. I heard that Michael Moore's head exploded at 5 AM, but it's probably not true.

Downturn

It looks like Cynthia "I am not insane" McKinney has been elected to the house from Georgia. Get ready for more trademarked McKinney loonieness.

All Hallows

November 1, 2004 - the Feast of All Saints.

If you haven't voted yet, think long and hard about what you are about to do. A vote for John Kerry, at this point in history, would be an act of unimaginable stupidity and moral cowardice.

Ave

Happy Samhain, everybody!

After Me the Deluge

Channelnewsasia.com
reports that Arafat may have a fatal blood disease.

Meanwhile, the entire West Bank is awaiting the chaos which will follow his death.

It would seem the sorry old bastard wouldn't name a successor because he knew that any successor would eventually assassinate him in order to gain the top spot.

Murderer-in-chief over a tribe of murdering barbarians. What a great job that must be.

Doctor, Doctor!

If only we had a health system like Canada's. That's what the single-payer gurus have been saying for years, most especially that noted expert on medical matters, Hillary Clinton.

Well, what about this?

Yeah, if only.

Radio Dazed

It seems like RFID, the little tags that can be hidden in merchandise and read by a scanner from a distance, may not be as big a threat to privacy as feared, at least not at first:

Of course, they are working on fixing the readers so they don't get confused by stray RF, but the devices aren't the end of privacy as we know it.

Baloney

Bush exploits suffering of 9/11, says Carter

Carter is an old asshole who is still trying to deflect attention from the fact that he was the most ineffective president of the 20th century, says me.

Notice where he got that story published: the Guardian, which ran a column that asked: 'John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?'

Sweet guys. Listen up, limey faggots, we don't need your advice. Next time we'll just let the Germans beat your sorry asses.

Here's another quote from me: "Europe? Fuck Europe."

Update: it seems the Guardian was a little embarrassed by that column, so now what you get is an apology for the "offensive" language.

What, a columnist can't even call for the assassination of the leader of the free world without taking flak? What is this world coming to?

Weapons Loaded, cont.

Yahoo! News - Israel May Have Iran in Its Sights

It's kind of a roundabout - Israel knows that Kerry will be a big pussy about Iran so they will feel they have to protect themselves, and their action will justify Kerry being a big pussy about the whole thing, and will also justify him turning his (our) back on Israel as an intransigent state, something he will need to do in any case so he can suck up to the French and Germans. He is a disgusting piece of work, any way you look at it.

If he should be elected, God have mercy on us and Israel for what will follow.

Keep your weapons loaded

Here's a betting pool question:

If John Kerry is elected president (God forbid), how many hours will elapse after the announcement before Israel bombs Iran's nuclear facilities into dust?

I'm guessing 48 at the outside.

Microsoft's Nightmare = Dreams Can Come True

Business 2.0 :: Magazine Article :: In Front :: Microsoft's Worst Nightmare, an article about the development of FireFox (Get it!), the best thing in browsers since Netscape tried to set the internet free, only to be crushed by the Beast from Redmond.

Seriously, Firefox is reaching critical mass, and is fully compliant with CSS and HTML standards, which IE is most definitely not. If you like working with style sheets, Firefox is for you. You will still have to write the dumb IE workarounds for those unfortunate or brain-dead souls still chained to IE, but watching a styled page render in Firefox can bring tears to your eyes.

Valor, Honor, Duty - (What are three things John Kerry knows nothing about?)

From National Review:

What was that quote about fear the legion? Oh, yes:

Something for both candidates to keep in mind, but I think Bush has much less to fear. Kerry, on the other hand, is on thin ice with the military.

Man Bites Dog, Paper Bites Dust?

The Iconoclast, of Crawford, Texas (President Bush's home town, for the terminally news deprived), which made news by endorsing Demo-rat John Kerry for president, seems to have disappeared:

Did somebody forget to mail the check to the hosting company?

I'm Done

I am done, baby!

Rejoice!

Woohoo! Mean Mr. Mustard is back!

Global Pest

Vote for Kerry, get this guy as the uber-president:

Do you really want Kofi to have veto power over our defense?

Demo-rat Thugs

Getting Physical
Union thugs target Republicans.

John Fund documents some of the Demo-rat hooliganism. The most they can come up with is some missing yard signs, while their thugs are physically assaulting Republican campaign workers. O brave new world!

Rock the Vote My Happy Ass

From the Houston Chronicle and LA Times:

Nonpartisan, my ass. Rock the Vote is as left liberal as you can get. And the whole draft issue started when two Demo-rat congress smucks introduced draft bills in a cynical attempt to politicize the Iraq war, and now the Demo-rats are trying to scare stupid booze soaked halfwit college students into voting for Kerry. I guess their grasp of history is insufficient to realize that every draft this century was instituted by Demo-rat presidents.

But nobody ever went broke by overestimating the stupidity of America's youth.

Dave Kopel weighs in on this. Link from Instapundit.

What do you call 100 spammers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.

From MSNBC the following cheerful news:

Yes, folks, they are using their stupid "opt-out" links to infect your PC with trojan zombie software so they can use your PC in their zombie spam network.

Naturally a lot of the blame for this belongs squarely on the back of a certain predatory monopolist software company which I wll not name, but the fact remains that when spammers who do this are caught, they should get a soft-nose round through the back of the head.

Twenty or thirty like that might actually get a message out to the rest.

More Fun from Microsoft

From News.com

Microsoft puts out crappy, buggy, hole-ridden software which they want to lock you into forever, so they can extract a Microsoft Tax on everything you do with a PC.

Why do we have to put up with a predatory monopolist? Oh, yeah, because the stupid Justice Department rolled over. Great work, guys.

Liars and Damned Liars

Another CBS source calls them out for lying. Does anybody even watch CBS "News" any more?

Where is Scoop Jackson?

Here is the face of the Democratic Party:

Protestors Ransack Bush/Cheney Headquarters In Orlando
2 People Receive Minor Injuries During Protest

Thugs and hooligans. For some historical perspective on the Democratic Party as it is today, see here

Update: More Demo-rat hooliganism discussed here and here

Birthday News

A big happy birthday to my daughter who turned 20 last Monday. No more teenage for her. We are extraordinarily proud of her, and she has made Dean's List every semester at college.

Happy Birthday, sweetie. We love you!

Shut Up or the African Gets It

According to the Guardian, the Episcopal Churches in the USA have told the Archbishop of Canterbury that, in the spirit of the love and ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ on Earth in his Body the Episcopal Church, if you don't shut up about the gay guy we're going to cut off the money for the churches in Africa:

Now go in peace.

A Tip About Slow XP Samba Printing

I have a Samba server that I use for print services. If you are trying to use Samba for printing in a Windows XP network, and the printing is r e a l l y s l o w, (if it's happening, you'll know what I mean), go into swat and turn use spoolss off.

You'll thank me, I guarantee it.

C -B.S.

One of CBS's experts calls them out for lying.

These people have zero credibility. As a news organization, they are a bad joke.

No Punishment Too Great

Note to file:

Find out what genius made the office email system remember and reject the last 50 passwords you used and drag him behind your car.

Cut Your Losses

Dan Rather, it's time for you to go. Try leaving gracefully, please.

Gone?

Okay, in fairness, adros.net is conspicuous by its absence from my logs today. Whether that is due to Mr. Wolinski finding his conscience and deciding to stop trying to spam comments in weblogs (ha!) or some action by EV1 (ha! ha!), I do not know. I am happy to not see all those annoying cross-post attempts, though.

Update: Spoke too soon. He's back. No response from abuse@ev1.net. I wonder what's taking them so long? Hmmm.

Pests

All you searching for 66.98.210.44, that site is hosted at EV1.net. Try an email to abuse@ev1.net. It won't do any good, of course, because EV1, in addition to being almost the only scumbags to pay SCO's extortion money, counts on all the porno sites for their bread and butter money.

And adros.net has a buttload of sites hosted at EV1, all clearly in violation of EV1's AUP, but, like I said, as long as the $$ come in, they are willing to look the other way.

Make It Stop

Holy shit. I just looked at my router/firewall logs from earlier this year (my router forwards its intrusion log when it fills up) and back then it was sending 3 or 4 a day. Today since 2 PM it has sent 26!

That's a lot of evil traffic.

Another Pest

Everybody using MT please IP-ban 66.98.210.44. This is the address of adros.net, hosted at EV1.net (big surprise, there) and it loads a referrer which drops you into a porno site.

This guy is using or trying to use the mt-search and mt-comments scripts to cross-post comment spam. I get entries from that IP that are referred by someone else's mt-comment script followed by a POST aimed at my archives. I do not allow commenting so as far as I know, he's not leaving any tracks in my system, except for the log entries. He must be doing something to someone, or he wouldn't be so persistent with these attempts. I am sure I am far from the only one he's trying to exploit.

I sent a note to abuse@ev1.net, and fully expect that they will give their usual attention, i.e., none. EV1 is a nest of porno pits and Jihadi sites (look at haganah to see how many Islamist jihad sites are hosted at EV1). They are also the scumbags who paid SCO extortion money.

Questions, Questions

Here's an interesting news item which brings up more questions about Kerry's, shall we say, fitness for office?

Make no mistake: I would not vote for Kerry if you sent me an mpg file of Bush having carnal knowledge of Satan. I think Kerry is a fraud, a liar, and an opportunist of the worst kind. This item just heightens that perception.

Here We Go Again

MSN Music: It's really about Windows announces Microsoft's long waited entry into the digital music download arena, to compete directly with Apple's iTunes.

Expect iTunes for Windows to be mysteriously broken by Media Player 10, as well as RealPlayer.

Expect Walmart to decide they really don't want to sell downloaded music after all.

Expect, well expect all the monopolistic bullshit that Microsoft has become so beloved for.

Above all, if you like music, be afraid. Be very afraid.

This article in the Register discusses getting hydrogen from, of all places, sunflower oil.

Not scalable, either in cost or quantity. The quote from the article:

is unadulterated bullshit. The fuel that will replace oil has not been invented yet, and all the screwing around with hydrogen doesn't change that one bit. Hydrogen is not a source of energy, it is a method of storing energy that came from somewhere else. The best of all alternatives involving hydrogen is to make it using nuclear power, and you can do that with rainwater, not sunflower seeds.

If the planet runs out of exploitable petroleum sources before an alternative is available, a possiblity that seems more and more likely, the citizens of earth will get to spend an eternity living like their pre-industrial revolution ancestors did: a world lit by wood fires, the farthest place you will ever see limited by how far you are willing to walk, no meaningful medical care, no transportation that can move faster than a horse.

In other words, the world that the Green Party wants now.

They're Back! Or .... Not

BugMeNot is back up!

Update: Spoke too soon. The front page is back but nothing works as of 20:58 Zulu.

What's going on here?

I suspect a drive crash, and restoral from backups is going slowly.

Update 2: This is getting decidedly weird. BugMeNot now forwards to micetrap.net - a racist hate site that sells Nazi merchandise.

This is one of the wierdest situations I have seen.

Update 3: Here is an explanation. But they haven't caught on to the forwarding to the Nazi site yet, apparently.

Update 3 (and last, I hope ...): BugMeNot is back in operation and explains everything.

Another One Gone

WTF!!!??! Now Stacy Carlson's excellent Picture Publisher graphics site, Webattitude, is gone. I hadn't checked in there for a while, and I was shocked when the webattitude.com address took me to a French site. A Google search turned up an IP url for Stacy's site, but now that page does a redirect to the frog site.

I have been a fan of Stacy's work for years, so I suspect her site predates the frogs. I am at a loss as to why she has to redirect her wonderful site to those America-hating cheese eaters.

Here's one of her pages from the Wayback machine.

Horrible News for News Readers

BugMeNot is broken.

Update: It looks like it's more than broken, it looks dead. Where once there was a front end into a database full of logins for all those news sites that follow the odious practice of requiring intrusive private information before they will let you peek at their content, there now is only a naked directory with only one accessible file, and that is a piece of Microsoft boilerplate.

I don't have the whois info from BugMeNot from before this terrible thing happened, so I don't know if the site has been hijacked, or if it has just had the meat stripped from its bones. Either way, the result is ugly. None of the PHP scripts that drove the former site are there any more. I find myself thinking in conspiracies: did one of the big news sites drive BugMeNot off the web? Did a hacker from the media get in and delete all the files?

I have a feeling that the death of this site, if the facts become known, could be a newsworthy item. I find it inconceivable that the people who ran the site would leave a naked index, with no explanation whatsoever, while they revamp it or whatever.

Where is BugMeNot? What have you done with it? The world wants to know.

Close Encounter?

This is interesting:

Who Lied?

Kerry's acquaintance with the truth grows still more distant.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result

Russian morons using the trojaned IP 200.62.136.145 are still trying to spam my comments system, days after I shut it down and turned commenting off.

Some people can't learn. Maybe I'll put a honey pot CGI in place of the comments system to see what they're trying to spam, so I can ridicule them more.

It's Happening Again

Another slam-dunk death penalty case, times four.

Justice would have them all beaten to death, slowly. The needle is an easy out for these animals.

Border Problems

This is disturbing.

The woman was caught, but only just. Apparently, she was in a disheveled state that suggested she had entered McAllen in the time-honored way - by wading the Rio Grand. And she was traveling on a South African passport - perhaps one of the hundreds, or thousands of passports reported stolen? And, her name is on a terrorist watch list, but she was arrested because she had no U.S. entry stamp in her passport, it was only later that they found out she was on the watch list. If nine get through for every one caught (very optimistic estimates, some say ninety-nine to one, ask any drug mule), how many of her traveling partners are out there right now, renting a U-Haul in Lawrenceville, Kansas, or renting a safe house in Arlington?

Naturally, her U.S. lawyer is "concerned" that his client hasn't been released on own recognition yet. She's got business to do so she needs to be out and about it, right?

McAllen is one of dozens of small-town border crossing points where the main attention is on drug smugglers and illegal Mexican immigrants. I think it is telling that this woman was not arrested trying to enter the country, she had already successfully done that. She was arrested trying to board a flight at the airport before she tidied up enough to look less suspicious. Perhaps she was in a hurry, and didn't get her fake ID before trying to board, and was left trying to talk her way onto the flight using her South African passport that had no evidence of her entry to the U.S. Are the terrorists that stupid, or do they assume we are that stupid? Or both?

Viva la Raza

This article in City Journal reveals how Aztlan is coming to pass by default. Mexico and other Latin American countries are taking over areas that were historically Spanish (i.e., California, Arizona, Texas) by assimilation. Driven out by U.S. military forces in the 19th century, they are sending an army of immigrants who never really assimilate into U.S. culture to take the territory back.

In 20 years, you will have to speak Spanish to conduct routine business in most of Texas and Southern California. Some communities in south Texas have already declared Spanish as the official language for municipal business.

It will only get worse.

Just Stop It

Here's a few minutes capture from my firewall:

Sat Jul 31 17:30:44 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 81.214.175.250
Sat Jul 31 17:30:40 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 67.68.68.225
Sat Jul 31 17:30:29 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 68.190.93.220
Sat Jul 31 17:30:26 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 65.243.184.240
Sat Jul 31 17:30:24 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 151.213.147.251
Sat Jul 31 17:30:24 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 67.84.209.20
Sat Jul 31 17:30:24 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 81.214.175.250
Sat Jul 31 17:30:22 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 172.169.18.223
Sat Jul 31 17:30:21 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 65.243.184.240
Sat Jul 31 17:30:19 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 67.84.209.20
Sat Jul 31 17:30:18 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 151.213.147.251
Sat Jul 31 17:30:18 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 68.190.93.220
Sat Jul 31 17:30:18 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 65.243.184.240
Sat Jul 31 17:30:18 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 81.214.175.250
Sat Jul 31 17:30:17 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 24.203.9.158
Sat Jul 31 17:30:16 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 67.84.209.20
Sat Jul 31 17:30:16 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 151.213.147.251
Sat Jul 31 17:30:16 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 172.169.18.223
Sat Jul 31 17:30:15 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 67.84.209.20
Sat Jul 31 17:30:15 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 81.214.175.250
Sat Jul 31 17:30:13 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 172.169.18.223
Sat Jul 31 17:30:12 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 68.190.93.220
Sat Jul 31 17:30:12 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 67.84.209.20
Sat Jul 31 17:30:09 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 68.190.93.220
Sat Jul 31 17:30:08 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 81.214.175.250
Sat Jul 31 17:30:07 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 67.71.52.133
Sat Jul 31 17:30:02 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 81.214.175.250
Sat Jul 31 17:30:01 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 67.71.52.133
Sat Jul 31 17:29:59 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 81.214.175.250
Sat Jul 31 17:29:58 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 67.71.52.133
Sat Jul 31 17:29:53 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 68.190.93.220
Sat Jul 31 17:29:50 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 216.96.120.191
Sat Jul 31 17:29:46 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 68.190.93.220
Sat Jul 31 17:29:45 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 84.65.3.26
Sat Jul 31 17:29:44 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 68.190.93.220
Sat Jul 31 17:29:42 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 65.243.184.240
Sat Jul 31 17:29:41 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 65.10.255.118
Sat Jul 31 17:29:36 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 65.243.184.240
Sat Jul 31 17:29:35 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 67.84.209.20
Sat Jul 31 17:29:34 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 65.10.255.118
Sat Jul 31 17:29:33 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 68.190.93.220
Sat Jul 31 17:29:33 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 65.243.184.240
Sat Jul 31 17:29:32 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 65.10.255.118
Sat Jul 31 17:29:29 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 67.84.209.20
Sat Jul 31 17:29:27 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 68.190.93.220
Sat Jul 31 17:29:25 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 151.213.147.251
Sat Jul 31 17:29:24 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 68.190.93.220
Sat Jul 31 17:29:22 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 67.84.209.20
Sat Jul 31 17:29:22 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 172.169.18.223
Sat Jul 31 17:29:18 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 151.213.147.251
Sat Jul 31 17:29:16 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 172.169.18.223
Sat Jul 31 17:29:15 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 151.213.147.251
Sat Jul 31 17:29:13 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 172.169.18.223
Sat Jul 31 17:29:10 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 24.34.91.109
Sat Jul 31 17:29:09 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 81.214.175.250
Sat Jul 31 17:29:08 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 68.190.93.220
Sat Jul 31 17:29:04 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 24.34.91.109
Sat Jul 31 17:29:03 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 81.214.175.250
Sat Jul 31 17:29:02 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 68.190.93.220
Sat Jul 31 17:29:01 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 24.34.91.109
Sat Jul 31 17:29:00 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 81.214.175.250
Sat Jul 31 17:28:59 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 68.190.93.220
Sat Jul 31 17:28:54 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 67.84.209.20
Sat Jul 31 17:28:49 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 65.243.184.240
Sat Jul 31 17:28:48 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 68.190.93.220
Sat Jul 31 17:28:42 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 67.84.209.20
Sat Jul 31 17:28:42 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 68.190.93.220
Sat Jul 31 17:28:40 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 151.213.147.251
Sat Jul 31 17:28:39 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 68.190.93.220
Sat Jul 31 17:28:38 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 24.26.64.129
Sat Jul 31 17:28:38 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 172.169.18.223
Sat Jul 31 17:28:38 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 24.74.149.28
Sat Jul 31 17:28:36 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 67.84.209.20
Sat Jul 31 17:28:34 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 151.213.147.251
Sat Jul 31 17:28:32 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 24.26.64.129
Sat Jul 31 17:28:32 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 172.169.18.223
Sat Jul 31 17:28:32 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 24.74.149.28
Sat Jul 31 17:28:31 2004 : Blocked access attempt from 151.213.147.251

Persistent bastards, aren't they? I don't know if these are active attacks or zombied PCs but I wish it would stop.

The Way It Was

I am watching "The Manchurian Candidate". The real one, not the lefty imitation that just came out.

It stands up very well.

Comment Fun

After seeing other weblogs' comment threads, I made what I believe to be the wise decision to disallow comments on this site. It's my weblog, I don't need a bunch of lefty loons putting up insults in the comments.

But, I carelessly left comments enabled in the archives, and today I got a huge spew of comment spams. They came from a variety of IP addresses but they all pointed to the same porno site.

I have deleted them, and turned comments off in all the archive posts. But just for fun, and for probably a short time, I am going to leave the comment feature enabled in only the last post. If that results in a spam spew, I will turn comments off again.

Slam Dunk - Final?

Anthony Quinn Francois has been sentenced to death. (See Slam Dunk, cont., below.)

Unfortunately, justice has one more obstacle to get past: the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, sometimes known as "He's Such a Nice Boy, Let's Let Him Go". The wise TCCA will release anybody for almost anything, so even though the jury stepped up and did the right thing, it's not a done deal unless the prosecutors were extremely careful not to commit any reversible errors during the trial.

Fingers crossed. If anybody deserves the needle, this guy does.

World's Best

Lance Armstrong has won his 6th consecutive Tour de France. The official "Lard-ass Sportswriter 'Cycling Isn't A Sport' Watch" is now begun. Who will be the first loser to publish the opinion that this is no big deal, because "cyclists aren't real athletes".

It happens every year, so it shouldn't be long. Some beer-soaked clueless sportswriter somewhere will opine that bicycle riding in skin tight suits is for sissies and real athleticism consists of 300-pound millionaire coke addicts trying to beat each other to death in a stadium. As always, the sportswriter will be someone who can barely haul his fat hulk up one flight of stairs, incapable of grasping what an extreme sport ultramarathon cycling is.

'Shall we finish it off?'

From CNN, reporting on the 9-11 commission's findings on Flight 93:

But it had nothing to do with religion.

Slam Dunk, cont.

Man convicted of killing ex-girlfriend's 3 sisters

Next up: penalty phase. Don't blow it now.

UPDATE: He has been convicted of murder in the past, but was a juvenile at the time, so was released after serving time in the juvenile system.

UPDATE: He has been sentenced to death.

A 36 year-old man dates a 16 year -old girl, who breaks up with him and starts dating a 17 year-old boy. For that, he killed her three sisters, and shot her and her mother.

Animal.

Slam Dunk

Here's a slam dunk death penalty case :

Teenager recalls how attacker shot her, her mom, her sisters

If the jury can't give this scumbag death, we may as well give up on jury trials.

Say What?

Sudan warns US against sanctions

Uh, or what? You're going to cut off your shipments of camel shit?

That's why it's called the third world, guys.

Trying Out a Netscape Patch

I am trying this Netscape/Mozilla patch for MT out to see if the buttons work.

I didn't know until today that the pristine version of Movable Type couldn't render the shortcut buttons in the edit form.

Looks like the patch works. A patched version of edit_entry.tmpl is available here.

Thanks, pinder!

(Back up the original just in case.)

Signs of Intelligence

A refreshing sign of sanity in Europe.

I, Ro-what?

So, okay, I read the Asimov novels when they came out so I know the movie has only the most tenuous of relationships to the books. Making a movie from the original series would be a challenge, since the books were more about the philosopical assumptions of society than hard science fiction.

Still, it looks like a fun movie if you pretend that the Asimov novels never existed.

Just Rude

I have the Google toolbar installed in all my copies of IE, and have the pop-up blocking feature enabled, because I really hate pop-up ads. This is sort of like at your house, you lock the door and have a sign that says "No Salesmen".

Certain sites are using Javascript tricks to bypass pop-up blocking software. This is sort of like they come to your door, find it locked, see the "No Salesmen" sign, and sit down and pick the fucking lock.

What part of "NO" is it you don't understand, you assholes? I put the blocker there because I don't want to see your crappy ads, not as a technical challenge for you to work around. Stay the fuck off my screen!

Workers of the World Unite

Dame Clinton has been busy:

That pretty much says it all. A regular robbing hood.

Springtime Fresh

Contemplate this.

Hot Chick

Pat LaMarche, the Green Party vice-presidential candidate is s good-looking woman. If she lost about 80 pounds, she would be really hot. Too bad she's a real lefty moonbat.

Constitution, Shmonstitution

The California Court of Appeal has repealed the 1st amendment.

Bored with Gore

"Digital brownshirts"? Keep it up, asshole. Keep reminding us what a bullet we dodged when we sent your sorry, worthless, leftwing, moronic ass back to Tennessee.

What a disaster this cretin would have been as president.

Rex Reed is a Moron

Rex Reed just creams himself over Farenheit 9/11.

God, I am going to just gloat when Bush wins reelection. I hope all these fucking lefty assholes have cerebral hemorrhages and die when the returns come in.

Now go change your underwear, Rex.

Food Fight

Another food nazi, Bruce Taylor Seeman, writes for Newhouse News Service about how we're all just poor victims of the nefarious food industry and advertising, and Steps Must Be Taken.

He has scary quotes from such objective observers as Margot Wootan from CSPI (if it tastes good it will kill you), and the odious Marion Nestle, reigning queen of the food nazis. The sane reaction to any article which uses quotes from Marion Nestle in any way except to heap ridicule on Marion Nestle is like that of a coal miner finding a dead canary -- it's time to get the hell out. For an example of an article that uses Marion Nestle is an appropriate way, try here.

These people are so crazed for power and control that they will seize on any issue and try to twist it to their own evil ends. CSPI should be shut down for the RICO organization that it is, not quoted on the news. And Marion Nestle should be where we, in more sensible days, put dangerous lunatics: locked up for her and our protection.

Pack Your Bags

An "Anonymous source" has written a book critical of the Bush administration's policies in the war on terror.

He thinks an attack on the U.S. will come during the campaign season, with the intention of keeping the Bush administration in power:

My immediate reaction is to round up every Muslim non-citizen in the U.S. and send them back to the third world toilets they came from. That should cut back on the ability of Al Qaeda to mount any significant attacks. If you have one hundred alien Muslims, and one of them is a fanatic terrorist, isn't it better to kick out the hundred than to let the one remain?

And as far as "Anonymous" is concerned, I would expect him, since he knows so much about bin Laden's whereabouts, to be dispatched to Waziristan to provide personal expertise in the search. Up close and personal.

IE Does What?

I have been playing with the style sheet for the weblog, making small changes and looking at it with IE and Netscape, and a funny thing happens:

In Netscape, the text alignment (from the style sheet) is consistent from top to bottom, ruler-straight.

In IE, the text drifts towards the left side of the pane, off by at least 15 pixels at the bottom relative to the top.

In technical terms, WTF?

Update: This seems to happen when borders are used, and does not happen if borders are not used. Hmmm.

Blindingly Obvious Department

Hewlett Packard has applied for a patent on internet shopping:
...................................................................................................
United States Patent Application 20040107145

Method and system for making purchases over a computer network

Abstract
A method of making purchases over a computer network includes accessing an agent site on the network, retrieving product information from at least one supplier site on the network, and recording information regarding products designated for purchase from supplier sites in an electronic shopping cart resident at the agent site.
.................................................................................................................
Uh, hasn't this been pretty much done since the internet went public? Won't the internet pretty much die if these bastards keep patenting everything in sight? Is the patent office totally staffed by idiots who live in caves? Stay tuned.

Factoid

As many as 5,000 people are thought to be members of satanic cults in Italy with 17- to 25-year-olds making up three quarters of them

Running on Empty?

In "The Coming Energy Crunch", New York Press writer Aaron Naparstek looks at the growing evidence that the oceans of oil that modern economies depend on is beginning to dry up.

Having two children who are just reaching the age where they can start looking at being out and on their own, I have been pondering the inevitable time when the availability of fossil-fuel energy starts to decline. What sort of world is coming for them and their children in 2010, 2020, 2030?

Naparstek's article postulates that it won't be a very pleasant place to live. As energy and transportation costs become a larger percentage of the national economy, the impacts on daily routines and expectations will become significant. In a market which has moved more and more into a model which depends totally on rapid and cheap transport of goods over long distances (think Wal-Mart), rising fuel costs will have a dramatic effect. Expect the shelves to empty of items which have to be moved in from distant sources (something which I have already been seeing at the local SuperCenter), followed by shortages in more mundane items (like milk? Milk prices have increased 60% here in the last 60 days, most of the increase due to increased transportation expense).

Naparstek runs off the rails a bit at the end with this bit:

"Kerry could use rising gasoline prices and spiraling violence in the Middle East as a way to create a sense of urgency around energy issues. He could propose a Manhattan Project for energy independence. Such a project would include converting our blackout-prone electrical grid to wind power, incentives for high-fuel-efficiency automobiles, rebuilding the nation's passenger rail system and re-designing American communities for less automobile dependency. "

Uh, isn't Kerry one of the ones who is opposed to the Hyannis wind project? In any case, wind power is notorious for undependibility, and inability to scale to the level needed. Huge tracts of land are taken up for relatively small results. It's sort of like converting your whole house to a solar cell to light a flashlight.

And, as Steven Den Beste has pointed out before, there can't be a "Manhattan Project" when you don't know what you're looking for.

I recently read an announcement that some university had discovered some alga that could be tickled into producing a bio-diesel-like substance which could be refined for automobile use. There was the implication that this is a promising line of research for future energy independence.

Well, sorry, but it's not. Biodiesel is promising only if you reduce the energy requirements of about 70% of the earth's population to zero. And if you can pull that off, you don't need the alga. You can just turn that 70% into biodiesel directly.

"Soylent Green is people".

I will believe in biodiesel from alga as soon as one municipal unit, i.e. village, town, county, starts meeting all its energy requirements from biodiesel made from alga.

Ronald Reagan, R.I.P.

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Liberal Nonsense

Office Politics Give Liberal Radio a Rocky Start

Air(heads) America Radio is having financial troubles.

Al Franken is working without a salary in an attempt to establish a permanent manned outpost on the left side of the spectrum.

It won't work.

The problem is, they need conservative management. They need management that understands how to run a radio network for a profit. They need to understand markets, demographics, strategic placement of hosts to suit the listeners, how to attract real advertisers based on a strong track record of ratings.

They won't get that because the place is run by left-wing moonbats who think that the message is all they need, and advertisers shold buy time because, well, because they Hate Bush. After all, doesn't Everybody Hate Bush? This collection of utopian socialists, guild unionists, and Bush Haters couldn't run that operation as a business if their lives depended on it.

Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.

Microsoft Sucks (Still)

This item on C-Net tells how Microsoft paid the developers of the Opera browser $12 million to avoid having the case come to court (some lingering anti-trust worries?).

Opera developed some devastating evidence that the scamps at Microsoft had designed their MSN portal to only display properly when viewed with Internet Exploiter, I mean Explorer, thus giving the impression that other browsers were flawed. This is an on-going prank at Microsoft, and so 6th grade. I first came across it years ago with a CD of Java training software which used flawed HTML (that IE ignored) to flog Netscape browsers as being broken, when in fact, the code was purposely broken so that only IE could display it properly.

And they are still pulling the same crap today. Look, guys, fraternity pranks were rilly kewl in college, but this is the business world, and ADULTS DON'T THINK THIS SHIT IS FUNNY. And I hope you have a good explanation why your little prank cost Chairman Bill 12 big ones.

Morons.

Oh, and check this:

"Having used its desktop operating system monopoly to help trounce its primary rival Netscape, Microsoft has effectively abandoned significant browser development efforts. That's left companies with negligible market share such as Opera and Netscape's Mozilla open-source project to lead innovation in the field." (My emphasis)

Remember during the anti-trust trial when they kept whining about all the innovation they did? Such bullshit.

The Al-Quaeda Vote

U.S. Warns Of Al Qaeda Threat This Summer
Agents in Country Said To Be Planning Attack

Also, this: "...al Qaeda operatives are pleased with the change in government resulting from the March 11 terrorist bombings in Spain and may want to affect elections in the United States..."

Okay so which candidate would most benefit from an attack on the U.S.? Remember, this is from the terrorist's point of view, after Spanish voters wimped out and elected the opposition party following the attack there.

So we know who has the endorsement of fanatic Islamists.

I would hope that, in the actual event of such an attack, the last thing anyone would want to be on this planet is a fanatic Islamist, seeing as that should be a de facto death sentence.

But if Senator Gigolo Chicken Heart gets elected, who knows?

Be Afraid

Here's some scary shit: DHS and UK ID card biometric vendor in false ID lawsuit

Their supposedly "unique" fingerprint ID, isn't. So if you are fingerprinted and the print is coded with this system, you just might inherit felony convictions of some other person whose print ID happens to match yours. Police agencies are notorious for trusting completely in their identification systems, and will not believe you are who you say even when it is impossible for you to be who they say.

This is some seriously scary shit.

Justice Denied

Grady gets four years in prison

In a stunning miscarriage of justice perpetrated by a jury of mentally-deficient Austinites, Ryan Grady, who brutally murdered Johnny Flobeck two years ago in an argument over a parking place, was acquitted of murder charges.

He was convicted of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. How can someone assault another person with a deadly weapon, resulting in that person's death, and not be convicted of murder?

Grady received a sentence of four years and will most probably serve prison time, if the judge isn't as big an imbecile as were the jurors.

I sincerely hope, and fervently wish that Mr Grady's last sight on earth will be several large convicts standing over him in the shower as they beat the living shit out of him. That will give him a taste of what Johnny Flobeck suffered that night in the parking lot.

Gotta Love It

JOHN KERRY'S QUIET COLLAPSE

And this guy is the best the Dems have to offer.

Liberal?

Janeane Garafalo is going on and on on the Tonight Show about liberalism. One gem: she says this country was founded on the "principles of enlightened liberalism". That is, of course, true. However, it was what is now known as classical liberalism. Modern liberalism is actually statism, and classical liberals would be appalled at what liberalism means today.

This shows that Garafalo either has no clue what classical liberalism is, or knows perfectly well and is just speading the Big Lie.

Personally, I think she's clueless.

Spain Goes All Wimpy

New Spanish P.M. orders troops out of Iraq

Spain continues it's transition to the Pussy Nation of Europe, replacing France. Way to show the terrorists who means business, you cowards. I guess Franco must have eliminated all the Spaniards with cojones, eh?

Fucking wimps.

Another One Bites the Dust

Hamas leader, 2 others killed in Israeli attack

The IAF is getting better at this.

Terminate With Extreme Prejudice

"The mission of the U.S. forces is to kill or capture Moqtada al-Sadr," Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq, said in a video conference from Baghdad with reporters at the Pentagon.

Daisycutter the bastard.

Music, Music, Music

Music Sales Continue To Fall
"Record company executives blame the decline on illegal music downloads and a consumer spending shift from CDs to video games and DVDs. In the last four years, global music sales have fallen about 20 percent overall. "

Music sales are up
"Online music file-sharing and other forms of piracy haven't gone away, but a gradual turnaround in U.S. music sales that began in the fall has picked up in the first quarter of this year, resulting in the industry's best domestic sales in years.

Overall U.S. music sales – CDs, legal downloads, DVDs, etc. – were up in the first three months of the year by 9.1 percent over the same period in 2003, according to Nielsen SoundScan."

I guess it depends on which message you want to get out.

A Modest Proposal

If the Iraqis in Falujah like playing with dead bodies so much, I think we should give them lots to play with. This will do the job.

Thoughts on the Brouhaha

1. Richard Clarke is a lying asshole.

2. Al-Quaeda grew into a full-fledged terror organization during the Democrats watch. That they are trying to blame the Bush administration for their fuck up is the epitome of hypocrisy.

3. Nothing will be settled until the Democrats learn to love their country more than they hate George Bush. I am not optimistic that this will ever happen.

Take My Advice

Note to John Kerry:

Keep harping on that "foreign leaders like me" meme. People (especially Southerners) really like and respect politicians who depend on the French for approval. Just look at Jerry Lewis, for example. I really think you need to keep emphasising that you have the direct support of the government of Iran to show what a broad-minded, cosmopolitan guy you are. Oh, and mention that North Korea has endorsed you. Steelworkers like the sound of that.

Oh, and one more thing. You really made a big hit with farmers, housewives, and people who attend church when you called that Secret Service guy a "son of a bitch". You need to punch up that angle in your future appearances. Like, pretend to bump into one of your security detail, see, and then say really loud, "Get out of my way, motherfucker! I'm JOHN KERRY!"

That will really get the middle American demographic excited. You'll win in a walk.

Birds of a Feather

Spain's Leader: Iraq Occupation a 'Fiasco'

'The International Herald Tribune recently quoted Zapatero as saying, "We're aligning ourselves with Kerry. Our allegiance will be for peace, against war, no more deaths for oil, and for a dialogue between the government of Spain and the new Kerry administration."'

Sort of a "Coalition of the Cowardly", I suppose.

Not Ready for Prime Time

All Robots Break Down in Pentagon Race

BARSTOW, Calif. (AP)--A $1 million race across the Mojave Desert by driverless robots ended Saturday after all 15 entries either broke down or withdrew, a race official said. Two of the entries covered about seven miles of the roughly 150-mile course while eight failed to make it to the one-mile mark. Others crashed seconds after starting.

Keep It Simple ....

7,000 Orange County Voters Were Given Bad Ballots

Part of the Electronic Ballots at Any Cost movement. Here's an idea: put the names of the candidates on a piece of paper and have the voter make a mark signifying which one he would like to vote for.

Then you count the marks for each candidate. Radical, no?

With Friends Like These

Wow, John Kerry, presumptive Democrat nominee for president, is really racking up the endorsements. First it was the mullahs of Iran (although that one might not count, since he practically begged them to endorse him), now it's that world famous philanthropist, Kim Jong Il!

Or is that misanthropist? Oh, never mind. An endorsement is an endorsement.

Stupid

I am getting "Mortgage Rate Reduction" S.P.A.M. Naturally, they use the usual stupid tricks to get through the Bayes filters on the email, like spelling "Mortgage", "Mort.ga.ge", and such idiocy.

Here's the deal: I don't want some moron handling my mortgage account, given that things like property taxes and insurance have to be paid promptly or I risk losing my house. So why would I trust some fool who goes to such ridiculous extent to get past the filters I have set in place to keep such shit out of my mailbox?

In the same vein, why isn't it legal to kill these stupid assholes when they're caught? Lots of people would support the "Can SPAM Forever Act".

And Now, On A Lighter Note....

Bird Flu Spreads in China, Experts Ring Alarm Bells

Population and conditions in China and Southeast Asia mean that for the remaining time that humans have on earth they will be the petri dishes for every fast-spreading contagion (especially the influenzas) that will come along. "Bird Flu" is just waiting for a cross infection with a human already infected with one of the more common human varieties so that it can pick up the gene for human-human transmission, which is inevitable. When that happens, it could very well mean the next pandemic.

Nasty, Unethical Web Service Strikes

My daughter called me from college to tell me her PC no longer would connect to the internet, and what should she do? Retracing the events just before the failure yielded the information that the virus checker had tagged some files as viruses, and she had deleted these, and that's when the problems started.

More research, and several efforts to get things working by telephone, revealed that the problem was caused by removal of a spyware program related to the "Webhancer" system (also known as Webcancer). This spyware is (nearly always) installed without the user's knowledge or permission, and then...

Well, lets just quote from their web site, shall we?

"Knowing the key business questions you need answered is the key. Questions like:
What other sites are my customers visiting? Before? After? Where are they buying?
What impact does page performance have on my conversion rate? What site affinities do my customers have - are there partnership opportunities I'm missing?
Do my customers convert more at a competitor's site than my site?
If you can answer these and other questions, you are well on your way to actionable customer intelligence."

"What other sites are my customers visiting?" None of your god-damned business, motherfucker! This is an ethically-challenged corporation that is going into my firewall's blackhole list.

But wait, there's more:

"webHancer Approach

webHancer's data collection method is simple. The millions of desktops that comprise our global desktop panel have a small piece of client software running in the background recording browser behavior and performance data as users surf the web. " (My emphasis)

Millions of unaware, unwilling desktops whose PCs have been hijacked by these assholes, that is. My first impression from my daughter's description of her problems was that the ethernet NIC on the motherboard of her Toshiba had failed, and I had her buy another adapter as a remedy. Time, and money, wasted because this jerk-ass ratfuck company doesn't have the balls to ask permission before they install their crapware.

"Each click is recorded and deposited in one central repository. Our combination of user behavior and performance data from end users provides unique value unequaled in the industry -- value not available from log files or from audience measurement systems.

Once installed, the Customer Companion runs in the background without interacting with the user. To ensure the most effective collection of statistics, installed Customer Companions anonymously query webHancer for configuration and software updates on a periodic basis. "

My experience suggests that this is either not true, or the permission to install is buried under a clickthrough license that obscures the actual effect of what is being installed.

Here is what cexx.org has to say about webhancer:
' The majority of users running WebHancer are not aware they are running it, unless they have noticed system side-effects or unusual data transfers from their machine. WebHancer, like "Comet Curse", falls into the category of "everything-installs-it-can't-get-rid-of-it" foistware, with completely unrelated software secretly installing the WebHancer product on the user's system. (Given this, I think the program should be more aptly called "WebCancer" :) In one of the most user-hostile moves I've seen in a while, the clandestine WebHancer install will alter critical Registry keys relating to Windows Sockets, causing the system's Internet connection capabilities to break if the user dares to try uninstalling the spy. WebHancer's makers claim not to modify system files (which is, technically, true) although they have confirmed that attempting to remove it will break your system. '

cexx also has a description of the processes to look for to detect an infection by this malignant software. Ad-Aware can remove it, get the most current version.

Baby It's Cold Outside

Here's a cheerful scenario: sudden global climate change.

The movie from Fox would only be effective if it's in the "12 Monkeys" vein: apocalypse now. If Dennis Quaid actually saves the world, you won't know what it was he saved it from.

Global warming triggering an ice age: sort of poetic natural justice, I suppose.

Get Wired

The I.T. manager for my agency sent out an order which we received today instructing all facilities to immediately discontinue use of any wireless networking systems until further notice.

It seems he read a magazine article that discussed "hackers" breaking into wireless networks, and got scared.

This is an example of the "bozo factor".

Be Careful What You Ask For

The Rittenhouse Review, a weblog which mostly resembles excrement-on-a-stick, is mad at Wonkette. Apparently she has made a disparaging remark about Media Whores Online (which also resembles excrement-on-a-stick), so Rittenhouse is saying "if you link to "Wonkette" through your blogroll you cannot and will not enjoy, for what that might be worth, a link from The Rittenhouse Review. "

Accordingly, I am adding Wonkette to my links list immediately.

TV Sucks

God, I hate reality TV. It's kinda like when you leave food scraps on the counter too long, and then you turn on the lights and there are all these cockroaches everywhere.

So, who left the scraps lying around for all the cockroach TV shows?

Anxious Moments

Spent the afternoon yesterday with my daughter in the Emergency Room. She woke up with an excruciating headache which progressed to nausea and vomiting, and the doctor's office recommended that we take her to the ER for evaluation.

Several hours and a CAT scan later, she is fine, all tests negative for any serious conditions. Best guess is migraine, which is bad enough, but the really bad stuff was ruled out.

Looks Like a Winner

From the email today:

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From: eaas2003@tiscali.co.uk
Subject: CONGRATULATIONS YOU ARE A WINNER(REPLY A.S.A.P)
To: eaas2003@tisacli.co.uk
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Status: RO

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French Fried

Journalist Lambasts French War Coverage

and gets fired for his effort.

Why do we even pretend the frogs are our allies? The surerender monkeys have wished the U.S. nothing but ill since 1911.

Almanacs?

FBI urges police to watch for people carrying almanacs

The FBI is not doing its reputation any good with stuff like this.

I Know I'm Mad

Okay, so you have a cow that suddenly starts showing signs of severe neurological disease, so what's the first thing you think to do?

Right, you send it to a packing plant to be processed into steaks and hamburger.

Mmmm, yum, let's have some more of that beef from a cow that died of an unkown neurolgical disorder, it's delicious!

French Idiots

Official: U.S. Hoped To Trap Terrorists Before Cancellations
"Homeland Security Officials Frustrated News Of 'Security Concerns' Got Out"

Fucking French.

More Excellence ...

... from Michael Crichton.

Aliens cause global warming. Gotta love it. (Read the paper to see what that means.)

Baby, It's Cold Outside

Is the sun going out?

Are these the Last Days?

It will be small satisfaction, but if this is true, we'll get to watch all the "global warming" fools tie themselves into knots trying to reconcile this with the Warmist religion.

"...the scientific record now shows several other research papers published during the 1990s on the subject, all finding that light levels were falling significantly. Among them they reported that sunshine in Ireland was on the wane, that both the Arctic and the Antarctic were getting darker and that light in Japan, the supposed land of the rising sun, was actually falling. Most startling of all was the discovery that levels of solar radiation reaching parts of the former Soviet Union had gone down almost 20% between 1960 and 1987.

The problem is that most of the climate scientists who saw the reports simply didn't believe them. "

Of course they didn't believe them. Religion demands belief without question, and these reports called their faith into question. So they just ignored them.

Space measurements show that solar radiation reaching the earth has not diminished, however, suggesting that the dimming effect is a phenomenon of the atmosphere, decreasing the amount of visible and infrared light reaching the surface. The mechanism producing this effect is not understood.

But these things can become self-sustaining, in a positive feedback way. A decrease in light at the surface could cause increased ice-pack, reflecting still more heat back into space, causing more cooling until we have a full blown ice age under way.

I think I'll go buy some Polartec outfits before the prices start to rise.

It's going to get cold outside.

Stupid School Administrator Tricks, Part 278

Plano, Texas school administration gets an "F" in knowledge of the constitution.

As Eugene Volokh points out, this situation has been ruled on by the courts before, always going against the administrators.

However, Plano district administration stupidity is legendary, and they will probably need a good bitch-slapping in the courts before they admit that they do not, in fact, trump the U.S. constitution.

Patriots?

Orson Scott Card gives a nice summation of where the party of treason is headed, and why.

Truth

Michael Crichton, speaking to the Commonwealth Club:

"So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven't read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don't report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn.

I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong. "

Rat in a Hole

Saddam has been captured. Guess now he's a "Miserable Failure", too.

Give Me A Break

The recent announcement by the U.S. that nations that did not contribute to the Iraq effort would be excluded from contracts to rebuild Iraq have the lefties in a tizzy.

"Bush, who desperately needs to repair America's standing in the international community, is only trashing that standing further as he acts like some little Mafia don in the handing out of territory."

Oh, please. Do we really need to go begging forgiveness of a bunch of near-bankrupt European nations who act like the brother-in-law you can't stand, sleeping on your couch, eating your food, and criticizing everything in sight?

I think the Europeans need to apologize to America for being such pin-headed twits, and understand that if you behave like an enemy of the United States, don't expect to be invited to the table when the meal is served.

They sound like the "Miserable Failure" we all know they are.

Idiot School Administrators

Raid at High School Leads to Racial Divide, Not Drugs

The infamous Goose Creek, S.C. drug raid at the high school contines to have repercussions, including a class action suit against the police, the school district, and the principal, George C. McCrackin.

One of the students describes his experience this way:

'For many of the students in the sweep, the raid is a humiliating memory. Rodney Goodwin, a 10th grader who came to Stratford this year, said he was in the cafeteria when the principal pointed him out, along with other students at his table, to three police officers, who told him he was under arrest and put plastic handcuffs on his wrists. Mr. Goodwin was taken to the main hallway, where, he said, a police officer pointed a gun at him as the principal patted him down and reached inside his pockets.

"I really don't know why they did what they did to me," he said. "I didn't do anything wrong, but they arrested me." '

"... a police officer pointed a gun at him as the principal patted him down and reached inside his pockets." That alone shows that it is an outrage that this moron is still employed.

Another "zero tolerance" nightmare story. Instituted in theory to keep criminal activity out of schools, "zero tolerance" mostly catches the innocent, because the real bad guys are too smart to be caught up, leaving the innocent to be swept up witout even knowing what they did wrong.

"Zero tolerance" really means "I can look like I am keeping drugs and guns out of my school without having to do any real work, and the school board will back me up even if I look like an idiot for doing it."

Fools, Bigger Fools, and Damn Fools

Congress has passed an "anti-spam" law, which among other things requires you to give your email address to spammers in order to be on a national "no-spam" list.

This mainly proves (once again, ad infinitum) that our elected representatives are clueless fools who have not even the slightest idea what they are doing when they pass these stupid laws.

A better idea would have been to provide that any one caught spamming would be publicly hanged, drawn, and quartered. That would be the minimum punishment that might convince these parasites to modify their behavior.

Update: remember those "Miserable Failures"? They are still "Miserable Failures".

Munchies

When you have a craving for salty snacks, sweet snacks won't do.

When you have a craving for sweet snacks, salty snacks won't do.

It's a mysterious universe.

Stupid is as Stupid does

More "zero tolerance" idiocy.

Somebody should put up the money so the parents could sue.

Cracks in Earth's Defenses Let Space Storms In

This Yahoo news report says there are holes in the magnetic field of the earth.

How long before the lefties blame SUVs or freon or something for this?

WTF??!?

Judging by the TV commercials, the main result of using Microsoft Office 2003 (tm) is insanity.

Screw Them

Drudge is reporting on the Dems "Hate Bush" confab in Beverly Hills last weekend.

Basically, there can be no peace until Democrats learn to love America more than they hate Bush.

I am not hopeful.

Update: lefty blogs have been linking the phrase "Miserable Failure" to George Bush's whitehouse biography, so they can tell their hip sophisticated lefty numbnuts asswipe friends "type miserable failure into Google and see what you get". Because these aforementioned hip sophisticated lefty numbnuts asswipe friends are complete morons who wouldn't know a Google bomb from a Guava bomb, this causes many titters around the coffee table.
Since this is such a kewl idea, I figured I should be in on the fun. So I am doing it too. Except when I link "Miserable Failure", I link it to a much more appropriate target.

Irritations

Why is it that Quicken, which can remember with perfect clarity a check I wrote two years ago once, can't remember that when I print checks they are always wallet size, and when I make a loan payment it is always made from my checking account? The defaults for these things are wrong, and there is no way to change the default behavior.

Quicken used to be neat, quick, and convenient. Nowadays it seems what they mostly want to do is advertise all their add-on services while irritating the hell out of you with quirks in their software.

Random Acts

Apparently, the Houston police have declared war on the city's children.

Next time think twice

Girls pummel man who exposed himself

"more than 20 girls chased him down the block. Two men from the neighborhood caught him and the girls took their revenge.

"The girls came and started kicking him and punching him, so I wasn't going to stop them," neighbor Robert Lemons told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Susanto was later treated for injuries at a local hospital. Police said he would be charged with 14 criminal counts including harassment, disorderly conduct, open lewdness and corrupting the morals of a minor"

Those Catholic schoolgirls pack a punch.

Well, Whaddaya Know

The real "Nigerian Scam", live and living in Houston (for the moment).

"Sussman said his client denied allegations that he conspired with Mohammed Abacha, a son of the late Nigerian strongman Gen. Sani Abacha, to illegally transfer hundreds of millions of government dollars to offshore accounts."

Hey, where's my share? I want my share!

If you catch it, let it go

New Whale Species Announced by Japanese Scientists

In related news, excited Japanese whalers announced plans to locate and kill every member of the new species.

Never say Never

'Nigerian' Scam Robs Central Fla. Man Of $400,000

A fool and his money ... oh, well.

How to Make a Fool of Yourself, Education Division

Principal Bans Jelly Bracelets For Sexual Innuendo

Urban legend hooks school system, news at 11.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Dennis Francione, well on the way to a 4 and 8 season at Texas A&M, showed what kind of class he has last year.

Somebody stick a fork in this turkey. He's done.

Don't Screw With Us

Clear Channel stations in Cleveland, Raleigh, and Houston started a fire-storm with on-air comments advocating running cylists off the road, hitting them with car doors, or throwing objects at them.

"After the Raleigh and Houston broadcasts, Cowan mounted an Internet campaign against Clear Channel that created a national nightmare for the company. Clear Channel still faces complaints filed by bicyclists with the Federal Communication Commission, which grants radio licenses. "

"The company explained that after the Houston and Raleigh broadcasts, a producer in Houston was fired and the Raleigh morning team was suspended. In Cleveland, after a meeting with Cowan, Clear Channel officials apologized on air to bicyclists, broadcast public service announcements about sharing the road and donated $10,000 for bike advocacy. "

Clear Channel radio stations are all too often overflowing cesspools of filth, modeled after the "king of all media", the head potty-mouth Howard Stern. I would like to think that the individuals involved in these events are no longer working in radio, but I'm sure other stations, hungry for the ratings that filth always brings, hired them within days.

But if they decide to try to come down on cyclists again, they'd better watch their backs.

Life Is Good, cont.

I finished (mostly) the Linux box today. It now will boot up, load the ADM8211 card driver, configure the encryption, and get an IP address by DHCP. The main issue I had to deal with was getting it to ignore the missing keyboard and stop complaining that Linux is a virus. (What the heck is that all about, Trend?)

I installed webmin, turned on swat, and was pleased to find that it loads ssh by default. I also started apache.

I have it sharing a directory to the Windows PCs with read/write access, so I am almost there. The neat thing is I can plug the system into a wall outlet anywhere in the vicinity and turn on the power switch, and 60 seconds later I have a file server/webserver up and running on my home network.

Cool.

Linux is Free, Life is Good

I took a day off from work today to do a little painting and to work some more on my Linux system. I have Slackware 9 installed on a 40GB drive and I want to make the box wireless. I had picked up a TrendNet TEW-223PI PCI card a while back for about $30 and downloaded what was purported to be the driver for it, an Atmel driver package. Alas, that is not the right driver for this card. A Google search turned up the right driver from the ADM site, which compiles into 8211.o, which modprobes very nicely and turns on the card just fine. (Here is the ADM8211 Linux driver.)

Update: where the heck did ADMTEK go? Here is a local copy I saved. It worked for me, your mileage may vary.

Still to do is to edit the scripts to run iwconfig to put in the encryption key and ifconfig and dhcp to get an IP address from the router, configure Samba so the other systems here can see it, and it should be ready for prime time. I figure about another two hours should do it.

The next iteration will be a fast mobo/CPU combo in a new ATX case, but that's down the road a bit.

This required a little research on the internet to get some tips on how to configure a wireless card under Linux, but the information is out there and the software/drivers are freely available. Life is good, Linux is free. (Fuck you, SCO.)

Run Amok

US crackdown on bioterror is backfiring

An astonishing percentage of federal agency managers are imbeciles who should not be allowed to wander around in public. Apparently the FBI has a particularly high concentration.

This stupidity is causing the loss of actual knowledge, but the morons enforcing this are checking boxes on their resumés and could care less about the long range effects of their actions. That attitude neatly sums up that of at least 80% of the federal managers I have known in my career. Every position is a stop on the way to the next position, possibly a contract job after retiring from federal service. They are so intent on checking the right boxes for the next position, they hardly take the time to learn what the present one is.

When I was much younger and very naive, I believed that those in charge were put there because they were wise, competent, and caring. Mostly, they are none of those things.

Next Time, Aim Better

Lawyer shot outside courthouse

From an update:
"Strier's civil attorney, Steven Trolard, has said his client injured three disks in his back last year in a car accident and won a $100,000 settlement, which was kept in a trust fund administered by a court-appointed trustee and attorney.

Strier's doctor recommended surgery to repair the disks, but the trustee, Evelyn Murphy, and Curry, who was Murphy's attorney, would not release the money, Trolard said Sunday in a telephone interview.

At a hearing just before Friday's shooting, Murphy was removed from the case, but not before she and Curry were authorized to withdraw more than $6,000 from Strier's trust for their work, Trolard said. "

Next time visit a shooting range first to sharpen your skills. If there ever was someone who needed shooting, this lawyer and the trustee certainly qualify.

"Heads Should Roll"

Zell Miller, demonstrating that it is still possible, though increasingly unlikely, to be a Democrat and a patriot.

Don't look for him to stay in the party of treason much longer. If he doesn't leave in disgust, his "colleagues" will stick a knife in him for endorsing George Bush.

There used to be Democrats who were also proud Americans. Zell Miller is one of the last of the breed.

Give'em an Inch Dept.

The Patriot Act used to go after local crooks? Now, what was the road to hell paved with again?

How long before the Patriot Act is used to go after shoplifters, red light runners, overdraft check writers, etc.?

Tantrum

A screaming liberal TV critic throws a tantrum in this "feature" column titled 'CBS - the cowardly network'.

I guess McGinn is a tad bit upset over the cancellation of the mockumentary, The Reagans. He should take a pill before he chokes on all that bile.

Dental Cruelty?

Dentist accused of cruelty for the second time

Just Rewards

Linda Tripp Gets $595,000 from U.S. in Privacy Suit

Days Go By...

While waiting for the car to be repaired, I spent the day getting the Suburban (the wheel-losing Suburban) washed, stripping some wallpaper, and building a Linux box.

It's running the 2.4.18 kernel. (Hey SCO! Up yours!) Had to replace the CD-ROM drive before I could get a complete install, but after that, it went well. One odd thing I noticed is that X-Windows and KDE take a long time to come up, at least compared to what I am used to. The CPU is a 500 MHz AMD K6-2, which should be speedy enough.

Stripping wallpaper sucks. I don't recommend it as a hobby.

Road Wars, part deux

Another of my cars (#2 of 3) had a "Check Engine" light when we returned from our trip. This is a '94 model with 101,000 miles, so I was not optimistic.

My pessimism was well justified. The bill to turn out the light was $1007.98.

This same car required a 4-wheel brake rebuild a month ago, for $950.

Double bummer.

Road wars

Just back from a two-day 700-mile roundtrip to west Texas. I am beat. The trip was uneventful, thankfully, except for a wreck (not involving me) near Ranger. The involved vehicle was ripped wide open, with the roof completely gone. I have never seen that much damage to a car before. I doubt any occupant could have survived.

The timing of this trip meant that I completely missed the ARRL CW sweepstakes contest. Bummer.

Maybe next year.

Wrong, wrong, wrong

LA Times A&E writer Geoff Boucher spends three paragraphs getting it all wrong about the band Eisley. That's not the family name, it's a (part of a) name from "Star Wars". The family name is DuPree.

The band originally went by the name "Moss Eisley", but had to shorten it after the movie studio threatened legal action. Putting out bad movies and threatening legal action is the main business of studios these days.

When cops go crazy

9-year-old arrested for waving toy gun

In the neighborhood

There is an armed police standoff going on on the next street over from mine.
Responding to a shots fired report, police have surrounded a house a block from where I am and are calling for the resident to come out. They do not seem to be getting any response from inside, which does not sound promising.

Update: as I feared, upon entry the police found that the owner had killed himself.

Getting close

The Marlins just ended the 8th inning with a double play. They are ahead by two runs going into the 9th.

Update: Florida Marlins win the world series in 6 games, final score 2-0.

Report: UN Security in Iraq Dysfunctional, Sloppy

"UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A chilling report of the August bombing of U.N. offices in Iraq says some lives might have been saved if a 'dysfunctional' and 'sloppy' U.N. security system had heeded advance warnings and followed its own rules."

The UN poobahs were nervous about being associated with the U.S. forces, so they demanded that the U.S. remove their tanks and road obstacles, and dismantle an observation post on the roof of the Canal Hotel, where their headquarters was located.

Shortly after these things were done, against the advice of the U.S. authorities in Iraq, the UN headquarters in Bagdhad was attacked by a truck bomb, killing 22 people.

Sometimes stupidity is its own reward.

Losing a wheel

Remember I said I lost a wheel? Here's the pic.


That's the wheel hub lying by the wheel and tire. There's a certain intensity of focus you get when you see one of your wheels pass you on the road.

Wow, wish I'd said that

Wow. Henry Sheehan has a powerful and incise analysis of the 7th AL championship game

Minor Annoyances

While traveling from Fort Worth to Lubbock, the right rear wheel of my 99 Suburban came off. Just came right off the vehicle, no particular reason. This necesitated $1400 in repairs plus $100 in car rental to continue the trip.

The water company just installed a new water meter in our line. Now every faucet in the house sprays in funny ways from all the grit in the strainers.

This laptop quit loading image files until it was restarted. No particular reason, it just wouldn't load images of sites anymore.

And, oh yeah, my old web host changed hands and the new owner pulled the plug on all the existing accounts, and wants everyone to sign up with a new agreement that would cost twice what the old one did, without most of the features I had before.

Starting Over

I have started my weblog over on this spiffy new host (Corner Host) because my old host, metronet.com, got a new owner who decided to cut all his old subscribers loose when he took over.

I had not made any entries to my weblog on metronet, (No Pundits Here), for over a month in any case, because the databases had gotten corrupted by high load levels on the server. On Friday the 10th of October I checked my email around 4:00 before leaving work, and then tried again around 8:30 that night. At 8:30 there was no response from the server, either on the web or by secure shell login. It continued that way through the weekend. On Monday I posted a question asking what had happened to metronet on the dfw.internet.providers newsgroup, and learned from the replies that metronet had been sold, and there was little likelihood of the old site ever coming back.

After a few days to convince myself that this was the case, I started looking around for a new hosting service, and here I am on Corner Host. MT installation went reasonably well by ftp (didn't spring for the shell account), save one vexing problem with getting the entries to actually appear (default entry mode is draft -- not publish. D'oh!!)

I originally intended to import my last backup from the old weblog here and just continue as before -- same name, same styles, same everything. But I looked at the Google cache of the old site and it looked kind of tired, not really what I want to present any more. So let the other site die in dignity, I guess.
And here I am in my new home. I expect I will continue to look for news and links that are quirky, outrageous, or generally interesting to post here with my take on them. I mean, that's what a weblog is for, right?

As for the name, one phrase that I seem to have heard a lot in my life is, "What was in your mind when you ...". So maybe this is what is in my mind.

I am sure it will take a while for my (12-20) readers to find me again, but I will post away just as if this were a topgun blog. Bon appetit.