The Last Ephor

Frank Calls for Major Defense Cuts, 'Eventual' Tax Hike"Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said Democrats will push for a stimulus package after the November election, and called for a package reducing defense spending by 25 percent while saying Congress will 'eventually' raise taxes." He must be a Rove plant. The man's reach is phenomenal! Maybe this is why there were exactly zero questions on any military matters during the debates.

The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid : "Today on my way to lunch I passed a homeless guy with a sign that read 'Vote Obama, I need the money.' I laughed. Once in the restaurant my server had on an 'Obama 08' tie, again I laughed as he had given away his political preference--just imagine the coincidence. When the bill came I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Obama redistribution of wealth concept. He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need--the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed from my sight. I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10 and told him to thank the server inside as I've decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy was grateful. At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment I realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I ga...

I know this is like the third one in a week but bear with me. I've installed Ubuntu on the ancient tower I have and have been having trouble with tarballs. I've downloaded some .gar and .gpz files but I cannot unpack them. The download window shows them but I cannot double click to launch the unpacking utility I have to navigate there but I can't find "there". Do I have to do this through the admin console? Also, do I have to recompile the kernel after installs? I've been RTFMing but haven't found an answer on when I have to recompile let alone how I do that. -N00b Update: Ha! It appears I'm in good company. Linux is making me insane.

Dear Reader(s), As the election draws to a close the rhetoric is going to reach a fever pitch and I can only predict that the elbows are going to get sharper. When it's all over can we agree to refrain from gloating? Seriously. We've had a year of slander political campaigning and this election is one of the most hotly contested races in living memory. Lord Byron once said life was "nasty, brutish and short". Our political campaigns have become two out of three of those. I've made no bones about my opposition to Obama. While I think he would help bridge the racial divide we have I don't think he's ready and I think his policies would exacerbate the problems we have and even create new ones. Especially on the foreign policy front. That said, if (and hopefully when) he loses I will not gloat. It is unseemly and unhelpful. Mostly I'll be relieved it's over and if anyone takes this matter to court I'm going to flip the @#$% out. This i...

BailoutSleuth is calling it The End of Bailout Transparency Already? The audacity knows no bounds. We're paying over two trillion dollars in public money for use that has nothing to do with national security and they're hiding it? Call me hyperbolic but I always wondered how Stalin made General Secretary into the de facto head of state. Now I can see it. Secretary of General Affairs anyone?

Here's hoping

"People should try to connect with others, to be active, to take notice of their surroundings, to keep learning and to give to their neighbours and communities, the document says." Here again is another study by scientists that could have been written by any grandmother in the country. You wonder why I think the government is wasting money? This is exhibit A. (Yes I know the study is from the UK but we release all sorts of stupid studies like this all the time)

Ron Paul in 1999 on the Current Crisis . He was right then and he's right now. He was derided as crazy and wacky and so on. If the GOP is staring down a crushing defeat maybe they'll realize they have something in Ron Paul. His appeal across the aisle is far broader than anything either Bush or McCain could hope for. I don't agree with all his policy positions but he's the closest out of the whole filed of original presidential candidates. I know I'm pissing in the wind when I say that I hope that some day people will realize that less government is better than what we have now. People will not be starving in the streets. Prostitutes will not crowd every corner and drugs will not be readily available to high school kids. If anything, they'd be harder to get. I don't really have the heart to finish this post. Apologies.

Frank Biden was involved in a hit-and-run accident in California in 1999 where the single father of two girls died in the crash. Frank Biden, according to the story, was hit with an $800,000 civil judgment in the case that has yet to be paid. There will be long indignant posts about how this is the right wing smear machine and has no bearing on the candidate and it was years ago so what difference does it make etc. etc. etc. I'm not a fan of this kind of crap. Democrats set the rules and now have to live by them.

h/t: Treacher

Finally. Undeniable proof that exists and He does indeed love us.

"Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world." - H.L. Mencken

Epic parenting fail.

Taxpayer Bailout Gives Hollywood $470 Million Tax Cut So Hollywood is un-American I guess? I keep hearing about how CEO's who "ship jobs overseas" (how one ships a job is never explained. What do they load at the docks exactly?) are un-American. They're greedy and evil and and and. None of this somehow gets attached to the movie industry. Indeed the charges of being "grossly overpaid" are never applied to actors, producers or directors. Why is that? What is the average income of the people in the movie industry? I'll wager the salaries of those stars, directors and producers is much further out of balance than the CEO of a bank vs. his employees. (I'm talking direct comp not stock). Hypocrisy, thy name is Hollywood for moving productions to Canada et al. Hypocrisy, thy name is GOP for passing this mess.

My favorite bunch of crazies at Lew Rockwell have a gem called " Environmentalism is Racism ". Generally I find them to be an odd mixture of excitability and defeatism. The author makes a compelling (if not convincing) case that environmental laws are frequently tied to racially bias laws. Sometimes this is referred to as NIMBY or "environmental racism." This article seeks to simply equate the two rather than use one to qualify the other. One quote stuck out for me: David Foreman, founder of Earth First!: "Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental." David? Lead by example, will ya? From the language corner, a list of phrases we need to retire for a while. From the same corner is a list of nearly untranslatable words. I've found that words that convey whole ideas like this give some insight into the cultures that came up with them. Things like that require their own word so it has to be pretty sign...

Drudge is reporting that Oprah wants to product a 30 minute tongue bath campaign commercial for Obama. This is the same woman who didn't want to use her show as "a platform for political candidates" when it came to interviewing political candidates. I guess if you're building a new platform for them it's not quite the same. Either way this falls a little flat.

"No brain scans in released Biden medical records" Cause they'd be blank anyway!!!!!!!11111111!!!ELEVENTY!!!111!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! *ahem* now back to our regularly scheduled slog of programming.

OK, I've been seeing serious performance drain of late on my aging PC. I've cleaned the hard drive and registry which seemed to help but mostly the lag is for the interweb. It's plugged into the modem directly so it's not a question of a crappy wireless connection. Is it possible that my modem itself is the problem? (PC is several hundred years old and modem is standard crap given to you when you sign up from Evil Incorporated Comcast.)

Drama - and conflict - behind the $250 billion banking deal - International Herald Tribune

Biden balances his faith with social responsibility . Joe makes some uh...rather interesting points here. He's all over the road in typical Joe fashion so I'll try to unpack it. "We have mortal sins, venial sins, well, up until Pius IX, there were times when we said, 'Look, there are circumstances in which it's wrong but it is not damnation. Along came Pius IX in the 1860s (Ed -this was Joe's first term in the Senate) and declared in fine doctrine, this was the first time that it occurred that it was absolute human life and being at the moment of conception." Joe's playing fast and loose here. Abortion has always been a grave sin. The idea that it was somehow less of a sin because mortal and venial sins weren't codified is silly. Sort of like saying beating someone to death and beating someone are the same thing because they're both felonies. "It's always been a debate. I take my religion very seriously." No, it hasn't....

Deldem has his knickers in a twist over Sarah Palin praising people as pro-America . Interesting that he (?) automatically thinks that makes him un-American. That probably says more about his frame of mind than intended. Note that the quote says the people are "very pro-American". He's dropping the "very" part and assuming that anyone not in the crowd is axiomatically anti-American. There's some back and forth about which sections of America are anti-American. I was going to post something on this but Michelle Malkin has done the heavy lifting. This will be met with a sputtering response that those are the rarest exceptions and do not represent the left wing of the country. I would agree except that the team at DL has conflated non-existent threats against Obama at McCain rallies as irrefutable proof that Republicans are enraged bloodthirsty killers or something. I also find it telling that Mrs. Palin is described as "white trash". I don...

Gaming by the people, for the people - Citizen Gamer Microsoft has uncharacteristically decided to break it's own monopoly. They've been very tightfisted when it comes to licensing the game engines and charge the developers zillions for the privilege of creating games for their platform. This is not entirely greed. They do lose money on every unit they sell and generally make their money on licensing and games produced in house. They have figured out that they need to foster community to build brand loyalty. Very wise. They're in a tight race with Wii and PS3 and they took a hit when BluRay beat HDDVD in the format wars. This will probably bear fruit and given that they're granting developers something like 70% of the revenue for the games you'll see people quitting their jobs to make simple, playable games as a primary source of income. All it takes is one Tetris and you're set.

Why is everyone saying "fail" all of a sudden?

Whoa. I've seen some good ones but this is insane.