aubreyturner.org

Mrs. du Toit has a great post up concerning some of the things for which we can thank Bill Clinton & Company.  This one, though, is the clincher:

16. The last and most important point—thank you for forcing Israel to let Mohammed Atta go free. Terrorist pilot Mohammed Atta blew up a bus in Israel in 1986. The Israelis captured, tried and imprisoned him. As part of the Oslo agreement with the Palestinians in 1993, Israel had to agree to release so-called “political prisoners.” However, the Israelis would not release any with blood on their hands. The American President at the time, Bill Clinton, and his Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, “insisted” that all prisoners be released. Thus Mohammed Atta was freed and eventually thanked the US by flying an airplane into Tower One of the World Trade Center. This was reported by many of the American TV networks at the time that the terrorists were first identified. It was censored in the US from all later reports. Why shouldn’t Americans know the real truth? What a guy!!

Update:  I’ve been told that this particular item is not true (according to Snopes, there are two different Mohammed Attas).  Anyway, there are 15 or so other items remaining, so the original point of Mrs. du Toit’s rant stands.

I just watched the season finale of The Sopranos and it seemed kind of flat compared to previous ones.  But what I found really interesting was what came on afterwards.  It was one of those HBO real life documentaries about a “cat house” in Nevada.  I set the Tivo to record it later, but I watched the first few minutes of it.  What caught my attention was that a mother brought her son to get him “devirginized”.  I’ve heard of fathers doing this kind of thing, but never a mother.  I actually felt embarassed for the guy.  It’s not bad enough that he’s at a whorehouse with his mother, but they had a camera in the room when he and his mother were initially meeting the woman he was to be with.

I just reread that last sentence and I realized that it sounds like I’m down on whorehouses.  As long as everyone consents I’m OK with it (it’s actually pretty practical in a way—but that’s probably a subject for another post).  I was really commenting on the fact that he was there with his mother.  Somehow, this just doesn’t seem like the kind of thing with which one’s mother should be involved (but then I guess I could be the one with the hangup).

It’s taken quite a while, but the cd ripping session has finally been completed.

Some statistics:
   Number of CDs ripped: 338
   Total number of tracks: 4333
   Elapsed time of all tracks: 302 hours 14 minutes 10 seconds (according to XMMS)
   Disk space used: 44GB (all tracks ripped at 320Kbps)

I stumbled out of the bunker at a disgracefully late hour today (the time involved numbers with PM after them) to pick up my copy of the Denton Record-Chronicle (which was surprisingly still there—it’s often gone if I leave it past noon).  On the front page, in the center, was this article(requires registration) about some agriculture students at Krum High School whose goats and lambs were wounded or killed by dogs on November 16th.  Normally I wouldn’t have thought much more about it, but there is a quote from one of the students in the article that had steam coming out of my ears. 

Since the article requires registration, allow me to reproduce the first few paragraphs for your edification:

Students mourn livestock tragedy

12/07/2002

By JOSHUA A. BAUGH / Denton Record-Chronicle

KRUM – Several students in the Krum High School agriculture department are recovering from monetary and emotional losses caused by a pair of dogs that brutally wounded or killed 11 goats and lambs.

Several students who went to the high school barn to feed their animals on Nov. 16 found many of their animals maimed and others dead.

“When I came in, it was a horror scene,” said Kara Arnold, a senior who was supposed to make her first appearance showing lambs at a Future Farmers of America (FFA) state competition later this year. “There was blood everywhere.”

She described that Saturday morning as a tragic day. People were crying and calling others on mobile phones to inform them of the bad news.

“For us, it was like a small version of Sept. 11,” Kara said. “We never thought this would happen.” (emphasis added)
…

I don’t know what the hell they’re teaching the students in Krum, but to equate a dog attack on a few animals with the deaths of over 3,000 human beings is utterly mindboggling to me.  It makes me wonder if this poor girl has been indoctrinated by those idiots at PETA, because this sounds like the kind of crap they’d spew.

Damn!

I was having a conversation with a coworker and I brought up the current unreset in Iran.  I mentioned that something like 2/3 of the population is under age 30 and it’s this part of the populace that is most tired of the Islamic government.  That got him to thinking about the changes that this country went through in the 60’s (he lived through that period).  This brought us around to the subject of “peace activists”.

One observation that I made is that the “peace activists” that we have today just don’t cut it with regards to the ones from back then (at least from my current vantage point—I wasn’t born until 1970, so I don’t have first-hand knowledge).  While I despise those who spit on our soldiers, I can understand why the rest of them were against the war (not that I necessarily want to get into a debate about Vietnam).  Today is completely different.  This country was attacked and we are at war whether these people want to admit it or not.  Not only are they wrong about the need for action, but most of them are idiots.

They also have a distorted view of our aims and capabilities.  They talk about the United States as if we just can’t wait to slaughter innocent women and children.  Besides Israel, I don’t know of any other country that takes such pains to prevent the deaths of innocents.  But to listen to these people you’d think that we were going to carpet bomb Iraq into a smoking pile of rubble from one border to the other.  I’m not trying to minimize the fact that war is a horrible thing, but let’s have a bit of perspective on the subject.

My friends know that I’m usually not shy about venturing forth with my opinions.  However, for the past few days I’ve been kind of run down and out of it, which is one reason I haven’t posted much (the other is that I was trying to get some things done at work).  I think I was fighting off some kind of bug.  To give you an idea of the situation, I cancelled a trip to the shooting range on Thursday because I felt like I was getting the flu.  I have to be in a fairly bad way to pass up a trip to the range (but then I didn’t want to endanger anyone else, since I was feeling a bit dizzy).  However, I hope (knock wood) that I’ve squashed that bug now and I shall soon return to my normal state of pissed-offness (is that even a word?).

This site was down most of the day due to technical problems with the system that hosts it.

I’m usually fairly patient about these things, since I work in the IT industry and I know that things sometimes break.  But the key to managing it is to keep the customer informed about what’s happening.

My hosting company has an automated system that monitors the status of all of the services that run on the system.  I was able to determine from the status page that the site was completely down for about 30 minutes.  However, once the server processes were restarted, Apache was having problems because it did not have enough space in /tmp to create session files (or so it appears).  So despite their system thinking that the server was up and functional, it actually wasn’t.  This meant that I had to submit a problem request to get them to look at the problem again. 

I’ve been with this company for a couple of years now and I’m generally happy with their service.  However, I’m becoming concerned because this same problem happened about a month ago.  Having multiple occurrences of the same problem can be a sign of deeper process-related issues.

Someone entered a comment in an old post of mine from October 9th.  I’d noticed in my referrer logs that I had been getting three or four hits a day on the above “Bushism” post.  The poster called the President an “imbercile” (sic).

I hereby propose a new rule of internet discussion:

Godwin’s Bush corollary:
Calling President Bush a moron or imbecile means automatic loss of argument.

Update: I want to clarify that I’m not a supporter of President Bush.  I’m just sick and tired of the meanspiritedness surrounding the so-called public discourse about him.

I’ve got a couple of articles up over at The Liberty Dogs.

Send a fax to President Bush via the ACLU
The ACLU has a page that allows you to send the President your thoughts about Total Information Awareness

Federal Computer Database to Spy on All Americans
An article on the Poindexterbase from the Liberator Online’s GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS, UNBELIEVABLE NEWS section.

For those that are interested in the full text of the report, it can be found here (PDF format, Acrobat reader required).

If there are technical problems with the above link, I’ve squirreled away a copy of it here.