Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

Three Good Things: 11-29-2006

Chili. Gadgets.

We were going to have tacos for dinner tonight. My mother decided she wanted chili. So this afternoon she and my wife went grocery shopping and brought home beans, peppers, onions and spices. We already had the meat. I cooked chili for dinner. A big huge steaming pot of mild chili for the family and a small pot of hot, spicy chili for me. I love chili. I love making it almost as much as I love eating it. One of these days, when I get the recipe perfected I might share it with you all.

While my mother and my wife were out my mother decided to spend some of her money on me. She bought me a new cell phone. There wasn't much wrong with my existing cell phone, but the new one is pretty slick anyway, and I like it a lot. I spent about 45 minutes transferring my contacts list from the old one to the new one. I love fresh gadgetry. And I love my new phone.

It's not an MP3 player or a video phone or anything like that. It's a camera flip-phone. Sure, it's not the latest, hottest techno-gizmo, but I'm not about to pay the service fees that are required for one of those anyway. What it is is small, compact, easy to use, paid for, and it has a much longer battery life than my old phone.

I told you a couple of days ago that my mother loves me. I know better than to equate material things with love, but it was a pretty nice expression of the emotion anyway. And I'm very grateful.

OK.  That's two. Thinking of a third one is a challenge. The requirements on one of my recent projects at work just changed. Drastically. At 9:00 PM on the day before the system is supposed to be ready for a client preview. That'll put a damper in your day. Except that I'm confident that with a bit of hard work in the morning I'll be able to make things work. I think I did enough work on the back end that I can accommodate the changes with just a few tweaks, but the schedule's going to be tight.

And, I guess, that's three. You see, I love a challenge. Sometimes it's frustrating when it comes at you this way, but if it was easy, anyone could do it, and it wouldn't be much fun would it?

So there you are. Three good things for today, 11-29-2006. Chili, Gadgets (cell phones), and Challenging work.

Life is good. Now if only I had room for another corn muffin... :)

A plea from Yid with Lid

I received the following posting in email. I have decided to post the entire item here. You can view the original posting at Yid With Lid's blog...

The UN has decided to go with a different Jew Hating/Israel Bashing Bigot Desmond Tutu, to head a United Nations fact-finding mission to the Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun, where an Israeli artillery barrage killed 19 civilians earlier this month. I guess the Peanut President wasn’t biased enough. This bigot named after a ballerina's dress is not just Anti-Israel, he is a card carrying Anti-Semite
For those who don’t remember the Tutu’s record, let me take the opportunity to refresh your memory.

People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God’s world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust (Source:Monday April 29, 2002, The Guardian UK)
The Israeli daily Ha’aretz (April 29, 2002), reporting Tutu’s remarks at a recent conference in Boston, quoted him as saying: “Israel is like Hitler and apartheid”: “I’ve been deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa
Tutu accused Jews of exhibiting “an arrogance—the arrogance of power because Jews are a powerful lobby in this land and all kinds of people woo their support,”(Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin, Nov. 29, 1984)
Tutu “urged Israelis to forgive the Nazis for the Holocaust” (Jerusalem Post, Dec. 31, 1989), a statement which the Simon Wiesenthal Center called “a gratuitous insult to Jews and victims of Nazism everywhere.” During the visit, Tutu remarked, “If I’m accused of being anti-Semitic, tough luck,” and in response to questions about his anti-Jewish bias, Tutu replied, “My dentist’s name is Dr. Cohen.” (Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Response magazine, January 1990)
Speaking in a Connecticut church in 1984, Tutu said that “the Jews thought they had a monopoly on God; Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings.” In the same speech, he compared the features of the ancient Holy Temple in Jerusalem to the features of the apartheid system in South Africa. (Hartford Courant, Oct. 29, 1984)

Folks its time to act QUICKLY we must write our governments, call the UN, alert the news. This is what the Blogisphere is for! This man is full of Jew hatred and we must alert the world to the facts before he begins this sham of an investigation!

Cross posted from YID with LID.

TexasFred’s EMAIL to Blogrolling.com

The following is the text of an email message Texas Fred sent to blogrolling.com. I know he's not the only one experiencing problems with their service of late.

I have several blogs on my account and I have 2 fairly well ranked blogs, http://thetexasfredshow.blogspot.com/ is one of them… 

It’s called a SHOW because I have an Internet Radio Show, Conservative talk radio, and YOU are going to be my MAIN topic of conversation from 9AM to Noon CST tomorrow, Thursday, Nov 30th if I don’t get some kind of response other than your automated message…  

Look, I understand ‘net problems, we ALL deal with them, but YOU have chosen to provide a service, a service that MANY people have come to rely on, and YOU owe it to the users to provide some kind of explanation to us, the users, and especially to folks like ME, the ones that were willing to PAY for your service…  

I don’t want to go on a rant AGAINST you and your service on my show tomorrow, but I will…  

This has gone on for long enough and this email WILL be posted to BOTH of my blogs, they are listed above…  

Sincerely, 
TexasFred 
http://TheTexasFredShow.blogspot.com/
http://TexasFred.net/

Source: TexasFred’s » Blog Archive » My EMAIL to Blogrolling.com

I wonder if they'll get the message. I sure hope so, their service has been pathetic lately, especially at night. I've taken to caching all of the blog rolls I present on my site, and only retrieve them once every ten minutes or so. It helps my pages to load faster, but the blog rolls aren't quite as fresh.

Of course, when blogrolling.com doesn't update in response to pings, freshness doesn't matter much anymore. I use my blogrolls to see who's got fresh content. When blogrolling.com doesn't update it's pretty hard to tell who's updated their blog.

At least Technorati favorites work, but I don't want to put that many blogs on my favorites.

Radiation found on London-Moscow route planes

The Associated Press reports that British authorities found traces of radiation on two planes that flew the London-Moscow route.

(CBS/AP) Authorities found traces of radiation on two British Airways jetliners, and the airline appealed Wednesday to tens of thousands of passengers who flew the aircraft to or from Moscow to come forward as investigators widened the search for clues into the poisoning death of a former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko.

Meanwhile, an Italian security expert who was one of the last people to meet with the former KGB agent who fell fatally ill said Wednesday that tests cleared him of radioactive contamination.

The airline said the "risk to public health is low," adding that it was in the process of contacting tens of thousands of passengers who flew on the jets.

Two planes at London's Heathrow Airport tested positive for traces of radiation and a third plane has been taken out of service in Moscow awaiting examination, British Airways said in a statement.
The airline said it was contacted by the British government Tuesday night and told to ground the planes and allow investigators looking into Litvinenko's death to test them for radiation.

All three planes had been on the London-Moscow route, British Airways said. In the last three weeks, the planes had also traveled to routes across Europe including Barcelona, Frankfurt and Athens. Around 30,000 passengers had traveled on 220 flights on those planes, said Kate Gay, an airline spokeswoman.

It seems more and more likely that the source of the Polonium 210 that poisoned Litvinenko came from Russia. The trace radiation detected could be the result of an individual carrying the Polonium into London, poisoning Litvinenko and then returning to Moscow.

Russian politics sounds even worse than the infighting between Democrats and Republicans here in the United States. At least here we don't try to silence our critics by giving them a lethal dose of radiation.

Linked at The Bullwinkle Blog.

Texas ethics panel demonstrates lack of ethics

Once upon a time having good ethics meant more than just doing what is legal. It actually meant doing what is right. Apparently this is no longer the case, even in Texas. From the Houston Chronicle:

AUSTIN — A Texas official who receives any sum of cash as a gift can satisfy state disclosure laws by reporting the money simply as "currency," without specifying the amount, the Texas Ethics Commission reiterated Monday.

...

"The question here is whether the description of a gift of cash of over $250 is required to include the value of the gift," the Ethics Commission opinion said in part. "The term 'description' is not defined in Chapter 572 of the Government Code, nor is it defined anywhere else in the Government Code."

"In our opinion, the requirement to describe a gift of cash or cash equivalent may be satisfied by including in the description the following: 'currency,' or a description of the gift, such as 'check' or 'money order,' as appropriate," the ruling stated.

In Texas, apparently, campaign finance disclosure laws are meaningless. This is the first time I've heard of an ethics commission twisting the meaning of ethics quite so badly though.

Just because it's possible to find a loophole in a law doesn't make it ethical to exploit that loophole. The spirit and intent of the law is violated whenever a Texas official follows this "ethical" recommendation. How do you like that?

Corruption is now ethical. George Orwell warned us. He just got the date wrong.

Linked at Rightwing Guy, The Bullwinkle Blog.

Three Good Things: 11-28-2006

Snow. VPN Tunnels. Family.

It snowed a lot last night. I woke up today to the sound of children yelling, laughing and otherwise having a good time. The schools were closed and they were outside playing in the snow. Because of the snow the office was closed. I took the opportunity to enjoy a "casual Tuesday".

For several years now I've had a broadband connection to the Internet at home. This has given me the chance to see what the Internet can be like at decent speeds. It also has given me the chance to work from home when I have to, thanks to VPN clients. I spent a good part of the day working from the computer in my bedroom using a broadband connection.

It was a little slower than working directly at work, but not too much slower. Without the drive-by meetings I managed to get a decent amount of work done too, although not quite as much as I wanted. Even so, there's a good chance that all of my projects at work will come in on time this week.

Tonight, after my incredibly long commute home from the office upstairs I enjoyed a hot meal that my wife cooked for us from scratch. I've never exactly mastered the ingredients list for scratch, but one of them must be magical because Betty never fails to cook a wonderful meal when she does this. Tonight we had spaghetti with homemade sauce and meatballs.

While we were eating, we sat down to watch a movie on DVD. Tonight we watched Annapolis. It was a pretty decent movie, but it was fun to sit and watch it together too.

Snow. VPN Tunnels. Family. Three things that helped to make my day today a good one.

Media Wages War of Words with White House

The media has been calling the conflict in Iraq a civil war for months now. NBC and MSNBC insist on calling the conflict a civil war despite evidence to the contrary. The Washington Post claims to have made no policy, but their reporting seems to indicate that they want it to appear as if the situation is a civil war.

To people dying in the streets of Sadr City, it may be just semantics. But the White House fiercely resists the phrase out of fear of its impact in both Iraq and the United States. Defining it as civil war, some strategists worry, could accelerate the conflict and encourage Iraqi factions that remain on the sidelines to join the struggle. And acknowledging that it has become a civil war, they fear, could collapse the already weak support for the mission among Americans.

But the risk for the White House, analysts said, is that once again it will appear out of touch with reality over there and with public perception here at home. For months after the invasion of Iraq, the administration denied there was an insurgency. Then it resisted the notion that there was sectarian violence. Now polls show that about two-thirds of the American public think that Iraq is mired in civil war.

It could be that the reason for this continued escalation in terms has a lot to do with the story line being pushed by the media. The vast majority of media elites are registered Democrats. The Democrat party has long had an interest in weakening support for the war on terror among Americans.

Pushing the notion that the fighting, largely confined to Shiite terrorists and Sunni terrorists in parts of Baghdad is actually a civil war furthers that interest.

The issue of terminology has arisen periodically for months, especially since the February bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra touched off round after round of attacks between the once-dominant minority Sunnis and the majority Shiites who now control the government. The debate has flared more intensely in recent days amid the bloodiest assaults of the war in the Shiite slum of Baghdad known as Sadr City...

...

The decision by NBC News on Monday to use the term despite White House objections prompted a fresh examination by many in Washington about the nature of the conflict. As MSNBC began flashing the logo "Iraq: The Civil War," other news organizations staked out positions. The Los Angeles Times noted that it has been calling the violence a civil war since October. The New York Times said it will use the term, though sparingly. The Associated Press said it is still debating the issue, while The Washington Post has made no policy.

The recent behavior of the media enhances the notion that they have a vested interest in calling the violence in Iraq, which actually decreased during the month of November, a civil war. NBC and MSNBC have apparently decided that discrediting the war on terror is a good thing. The Los Angeles Times has been doing this for months.

The Associated Press has actually been seeking out fraudulent sources to further the impression that the violence is a civil war and that the Iraqi military is incompetent to handle the situation. Their recent story about 6 Sunni worshippers being burned alive has been pretty thoroughly debunked, and even keeps changing as new information comes to light.

It isn't the Iraqi government that appears to be under attack in the current violence. Rather it appears that the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, a bunch of terrorists that had originally pledged to support the fledgling government after negotiating a truce with coalition forces and Sunni terrorists loyal to Saddam Hussein and his Baath party are fighting with each other.

And it appears that the White House is under a continued assault by the media. Not only a war of words over the terminology, but an actual campaign to discredit the administration.