Another Saturday so you know what that means...

Another solid piece by Kyle Williams that WorldNetDaily refuses to put atop their front page.

To their credit, the pieces by Dr. Kelly Hollowell and Jerry Falwell are pretty good this week. Hollowell is contrasting the tragedy of Katrina with that of abortion, while Falwell is generously offering free tuition to students who came out of Katrina at his Liberty University, which I've heard firsthand over the years is a pretty good school, despite some misgivings I've long had about Falwell. I'll still contend that of the three main columnists that WorldNetDaily has on Saturdays, that Kyle Williams's is still the deepest and most articulate. And why WND isn't putting him on the forefront of things anymore, I've no idea.

Read More

Red Dawn over New Orleans

Well, this is a post I never thought I'd ever have to make...

About twenty years ago there was a movie called Red Dawn, starring Patrick Swayze and C. Thomas Howell. Maybe you've seen it before (probably during one of those hundreds of times that TNT used to run it back in the late Nineties) so you already know it's horribly dated by today's standards. But if you haven't: it was about the Soviet Union dropping paratroopers into the American heartland as part of a massive invasion, which Swayze and Howell and Charlie Sheen and a bunch of other kids take up guns and fight against in guerilla warfare. It was like The Breakfast Club starting up its own militia. For its time it was a dark, morbid flick (it held the Guinness record for "Most Violent Movie" for several years afterward). For two hours it was the kids' turn to kick Russkie butt and take names. Little wonder that it became something of a favorite for adolescent viewers.

I wanted to bring up a scene from Red Dawn, just after the Russians and Cubans and other Communists have taken over this town where Our Heroes used to attend high school and play football. The commanding officer of the invading contingent gives orders to his men to go to some building in town, where it's known that gun registration records are kept. The soldiers then take the records and proceed through town confiscating all the guns that are listed in the registry. It's the most efficient way of stifling opposition before it has a chance to really start. All the guns get taken away from the good American citizens (except for the ones that Patrick Swayze and his gang use to open up a can of whup-a$$ on the Soviets with). Hence, hardly anybody has a chance to fight against the oppression.

That scene from Red Dawn was the very first thing that crossed my mind when I read this news coming out of New Orleans. From the Associated Press via the Houston Chronicle:

Authorities confiscating guns from homeowners in New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS — Soldiers and police confiscated guns from homeowners as they went house to house, trying to clear the shattered city of holdouts because of the danger of disease and fire. Police today also marked homes with corpses inside, with plans to return later.

As many as 10,000 people were believed to be stubbornly staying put in the city, despite Katrina's filthy, corpse-strewn floodwaters and orders from Mayor Ray Nagin earlier this week to leave or be removed by force. By midmorning, though, there were no immediate reports of anyone being taken out forcibly, police said.

Police are "not going to do that until we absolutely have to. We really don't want to do that at all," Deputy Chief Warren Riley said...

...Police and soldiers also seized numerous guns for fear of confrontations with jittery residents who have armed themselves against looters.

"No one will be able to be armed. We are going to take all the weapons," Riley said.

On Thursday, in the city's well-to-do Lower Garden District, a neighborhood with many antebellum mansions, members of the Oklahoma National Guard seized weapons from the inhabitants of one home. Those who were armed were handcuffed and briefly detained before being let go...

I've seen numerous reports that the authorities are going by gun registration lists, exactly as was done in the fictional movie Red Dawn.

One of the most obvious questions that pops into mind is, will the confiscated weapons ever be returned to the rightful owners? Somehow I doubt that they will be.

I understand that New Orleans isn't the healthiest places to be at the moment, but the risk of contracting cholera isn't going to marginally increase simply because one is the owner of a firearm.

All things considered: these are American citizens that are being deprived - unlawfully, and unconstitutionally - of their right to self-defense and self-preservation. For no logical or apparent reason whatsoever other than because those who assume to be the "authorities" have decided that these citizens are incapable of taking care of themselves without "government assistance". Considering how the "authorities" completely imploded last week, I'll trust Joe Sixpack's judgement over that of the chief of police and mayor of New Orleans, thankyaverymuch.

This is the kind of thing that revolutions are started over. The bloody kind, mind you.

I had to make a note of this, if for no other reason than because of my own conscience. This confiscation of guns from what would be normal Americans in any other circumstance in New Orleans is wrong, no matter how it's looked at.

I almost want to say it's funny: I've seen things from some movies actually come to pass. I never thought that one of those movies would be Red Dawn though.

Read More

I've never even watched Firefly before...

...but I found this to be pretty darned cool. Wish I had that many bricks to play with :-)

Read More

AAAAHHH it's a Crazy Frog, SHOOT IT SHOOT IT!!

This is supposed to be a big thing over in England and the rest of Europe. I guess it'll be catching on here pretty soon: every decade sees America getting some imported "cuteness" from elsewhere. In the Eighties it was the Smurfs from Belgium. Then the Nineties it was Pokemon from Japan. So Ed came by earlier tonight for dinner and afterward he showed me Crazy Frog, which is a cellular ringtone with a music video that started out in life as an imitation of a two-stroke moped engine and then a Lightwave animation. Or something. It's a blue frog. With a motorcycle helmet. And genitalia of some sort it looks like. This thing's ringtone was the #1 selling musical number in Great Britain for awhile (Coldplay even complained about its popularity). There'll be a videogame of this soon. I'll wager an RC Cola and a Moon Pie that we'll soon be seeing cutesy little stuffed animals of the Crazy Frog and t-shirts with this annoying amphibian on them. America will go nuts for the Crazy Frog. There will be a Crazy Frog movie. And then we'll all wake up the next morning like from a bad hangover and wonder why in the world did we spend bajillions of dollars on all the Crazy Frog stuff that's littering our houses. Just giving you guys advanced warning on what might be coming our way, is all. Do a Google search about the Crazy Frog to find out more.

And when you're finally sick and tired of the bloody thing, aim your shotgun and blast the frog away with the "I Hate That Frog" Flash game. I got as far as 92 meters playing it: how far can you go?

Read More

Will the big rigs put on the brakes?

WorldNetDaily has a story today about commercial truckdrivers possibly staging a strike in the very near future, to protest the rising cost of fuel. I've heard this talked about for at least the past month or so and... well, I'm of the mind that this is altogether possible. Not to mention easily understandable given the frustrations of these truckers. Most of them are independent contractors who have to purchase their own fuel, and a lot of 'em are running in the red right now. I don't blame them at all but it must be admitted that in the wake of the blow this country's taken from Katrina, a trucker's strike all over the place would be a severe test of the tipping point on a lot of things.

Read More

Katrina victims to get $2000 debit cards from U.S. government

From the Associated Press...

Katrina Victims to Get $2K Debit Cards
Sep 07 3:42 PM US/Eastern

By DEVLIN BARRETT
Associated Press Writer

The federal government plans to hand out debit cards worth $2,000 each to families displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

Homeland Security Department Secretary Michael Chertoff, under fire for his agency's response to the disaster, held a conference call with governors of states with evacuees and described the plan. While many details remained to be worked out, the plan was to quickly begin distributing the cards, starting with people in major evacuation centers such as the Houston Astrodome.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the cards are aimed at providing "some immediate cash assistance to those who are in shelters, those that were evacuated."

Republican Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who participated in the conference call, said the cards will be offered "to people in shelters as well as people who are not in shelters but who have evacuated the area and need help." He said the hope is the cards will encourage people to leave shelters voluntarily.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is administering the program. FEMA officials said the program is aimed at those most in need, so not all families that fled their homes will be eligible...

At the risk of being called cold-hearted: this is a really stupid thing to do. There's going to be all kinds of abuse opening up with this scheme. And what happens to everyone else who becomes a victim of a hurricane? Do we give them two thousand dollars from the public coffers also?

This smells too much like a political ploy, if anything.

Read More

Bush kept cancer patients from getting chemo?!?

Unbelievable, but apparently true.

Someone is probably going to jump flunky on me for posting this though, likely tell me something like "Bush was there to boost patients's morale" or something.

Read More

Gilligan has left the island. Maynard G. Krebs has banged his bongos for the last time.

Just hitting wires that Bob Denver - forever stranded with the rest of the Minnow crew on Gilligan's Island, not to mention wondering if he should "Work?" as beatnik Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis - has died here in North Carolina.

Nothing else to say, 'cept another legend has left us. Say hello to the Skipper and Thurston Howell III up there, little buddy.

Read More

So, ummm... you saying the hurricane was GOOD for some people?!

Barbara Bush said this today at the Astrodome, no joke:

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this... this is working very well for them."

Now, what kind of person is it that would divy-up the victims of something so impartial into either "privileged" or "underprivileged"?

I'm almost reminded of the "steerage" passengers aboard the Titanic.

Read More

Europeans building Doctor Octopus fusion machine

Physicsweb.org has the scoop on some scientists re-enacting the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster...

Europe plans laser-fusion facility

2 September 2005

Laser physicists in Europe have put forward plans to build a £500m facility to study a new approach to laser fusion. A panel of scientists from seven European Union countries believes that a "fast ignition" laser facility could make a significant contribution to fusion research, as well as supporting experiments in other areas of physics. The facility could be up and running by the middle of the next decade.

The laser would be used to compress and heat a small capsule of deuterium and tritium until the nuclei are hot enough to undergo nuclear fusion and produce helium and neutrons. In a reactor the energy of the neutrons would be used to generate electricity without the emission of greenhouse gases or the generation of long-lived nuclear waste...

Fusion? Lasers? Tritium?!? I think somebody's been watching Spider-Man 2 way, WAY too many times...

Read More

Together from across a century...

105 year-old Nita LaGarde holds hands with Tanisha Blevin, the 5-year old granddaughter of LaGarde's nurse. LaGarde, Blevin and some others spent two days trapped in the attic of a house amid the flood waters in New Orleans, before rescuers were able to get to them. LaGarde and Blevin then spent four days at the Convention Center before they were finally evacuated.

This now ties with the photo of Jabbar Gibson behind the wheel of the schoolbus as my favorite photo to come out of Katrina.

Read More

Hoping CBS doesn't turn this into "Survivor: New Orleans"

Another uplifting story: holdouts in New Orleans's French Quarter banded together into "tribes" to help each other out.

I think in years to come, what's happened in the Big Easy because of Katrina is going to be a hotly-discussed topic in sociology circles. This has brought out the worst in some people, and the very best in others. Why that happened is going to be well debated for a long time.

Read More

About Bush and me...

I feel the need to clarify something that really can't be emphasized enough:

I do not hate George W. Bush.

I do hate the things he is doing to this country.

F'rinstance, he is committing treason by letting untold millions of illegal immigrants flood across the border from Mexico. Illegal immigrants and God only knows who else: it's a would-be terrorist's dream come true.

He lied us into a war with Iraq. The reasons for this war have never been consistent. If he wanted to take out Saddam because he was "a bad man", fine, market it like that. See how the American people would feel up to going in on that rationale. The entire impetus - no matter what else has come out since then - for the invasion was the weapons of mass destruction. And there really were none. And now the reason for our war is that we have to stay there to honor the memory of those who've died there...?!?

Bush is the President most far-removed from the American people that there has ever been. This alone is why I don't consider him to be a real President: he's just filling a position, without the sense of honor that comes with that position. You cannot be a servant of the people unless you are willing to meet with the people... no matter how their opinion of things differs from your own.

Bush has employed - and continues to employ - some of the most wicked agents of personal destruction that modern politics has ever known. I say again: why should a good Christian choose to associate with Karl Rove? Witnessing to him would be one thing. Encouraging him to continue hurting people without reason is quite another. Seems there's a thing or two in the Bible about that.

Bush, I hate to say, believes he really is above the American people. God never set up a sovereign or a king over us. He didn't anoint Bush to be the first such either. This kind of attitude isn't going to win him any favorable spot in the history books. He will, at best, be considered a bully on par with Lyndon Johnson.

Bush has gone fully in the face of everything that Ronald Reagan believed about the role of government. Reagan believed in smaller government. Under Bush it has ballooned beyond belief. The Department of Homeland Security is a disgrace to everything that traditional "conservatives" have stood for.

Bush pushed the PATRIOT Act into being. 'Nuff said.

Bush supported CAFTA. Also, 'nuff said.

So many other reasons for not trusting the man. For holding him in outright contempt, even.

Do I believe that George W. Bush is beyond redemption? No.

Do I believe he could still change some things for the better? Yes.

Defending and upholding the Constitution of the United States would be one place to start. So would making himself a real man of the people, instead of some far-away politician literally scared of his constituents.

Admitting that mistakes were made. And he has made some. Nobody's perfect. I would trust the man who DOES admit mistakes far more than I could trust a man who does not.

It's almost funny: for not falling into line behind him as a rabid supporter, and for pointing out his faults, I am called "a bitter little man". If I were to throw my hands up in adoration of the man and not question anything, I would be called "a good American citizen" by the same mindset.

Funny still: in the past 72 hours I have...

- defended Bush against some accusations he's faced about the hurricane (the issues regarding aid are one thing, arguing that he caused the devastation is quite another)

-blasted Louisiana Governor Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Nagin... especially Nagin

- paid homage to the memory of William Rehnquist

- condemned Democratic Underground for some vicious things posted on that site

- suggested drilling the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge

- pointed out that New Orleans officials ("Democrats" mind ya) failed to follow their own hurricane emergency plan

Weighing one against the other, I've been a lot harsher on the "Democrats" in the past several days than I have been on the "Republicans" by a vast margin.

It ain't easy being an unaffiliated individual, I tells ya...

Read More

By any other name, Divx still sux (Blu-Ray news)

No not DivX the AVI video codec, which I like a lot. I mean Divx: that bastardized DVD format that was sold at Circuit City several years ago, just when DVD was getting to be popular.

Good lord those were some of the most shameless TV commercials ever made. I actually felt sorry for that poor guy who was being paid to smile into the camera as he explained how Divx players "play both DVD and Divx titles". The really scary thing is that some studios - like 20th Century Fox - seriously considered releasing their movies in the Divx format. Then reality came crashing down upon them when they discovered that most consumers were not keen on the idea of trusting their credit card numbers to a household appliance.

What the heck was Divx? Pay-per-view DVD, plain and simple. You'd buy a Divx disc, which looked exactly like a DVD disc. You take it home and you could put it in your Divx player. It might play your movie two or three times with no problem. But if you wanted to watch it more than that you had to make sure that your Divx player was plugged into your telephone line, because the Divx player had a modem inside that would dial up somewhere and charge to your credit card every time you played the movie from there on out. The encoding on the disc was such that you couldn't play it without proper decryption from Divx Central, only after you'd forked over the money to watch your disc.

This was an idea so bad it made New Coke taste good. Personally, I did not want to plug my DVD player into a telephone jack. I did not want to give my DVD player access to my credit account. I did not care for complete strangers to have a record of what I choose to watch with my DVD player (if I view John Carpenter's The Thing fifty-seven times then that's my own business). I did not want to pay a "user's fee" every time I employed said DVD player. I did not... well, you get the picture.

Geez Louise, who in the world actually bought into this thing, anyway?!

Long story short, Divx bombed. It got yanked off the market and Circuit City offered a refund of some sort to those that did purchase Divx players. And you'd think that a lesson would be learned after such a fiasco, right? Right?!

From Engadget.com comes this item:

Blu-ray players to "punish" users who hack their gear?
Posted Sep 2, 2005, 11:14 AM ET by Ryan Block

Of course the looming next-gen optical format war about to go down between Blu-ray and HD-DVD might be kind of interesting if it weren’t taking place, well, in your very livingroom. But with talks broken down and devices starting to crop up, it looks like the first blows will soon be felt—but aren’t they supposed to be hitting one another and not the end user? Because this little bit in a Reuters piece this morning left us a little unsettled:

On top of that, consumers should expect punishment for tinkering with their Blu-ray players, as many have done with current DVD players, for instance to remove regional coding. The new, Internet-connected and secure players will report any "hack" and the device can be disabled remotely.

Are they talking about PVP-OPM techniques and rejected HDMI keys, or something else far more sinister? Because apparently "A hacked player is any player that is doing something it’s not supposed to do," which open to a pretty fair amount of interpretation—most of which egregious.

So my Blu-Ray player will connect to the Internet. And this differs from connecting my DVD player to the phone line... how?

If this happens, HD-DVD will become the preferred consumer standard. Practically by default. Blu-Ray will go the way of Divx, New Coke and Betamax (GREAT video quality, horrible business decision to make it only record one hour of footage though). And I can't believe that I might be watching this happen all over again...

Read More

The Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon is on

It's a little different this year: it's raising money for both the Muscular Dystrophy Association and for the Hurricane Katrina victims. Jerry Lewis is lookin' good: a few years ago he didn't look so hot but he's buff enough now to do the Nutty Professor again it seems. And darn, Ed McMahon looks pretty good too! Anyway see if it's on locally and if it's not head over to the MDA website and watch a live streaming RealVideo feed of it as it happens. I had to use Internet Exploiter... I mean, Explorer to get it to work, and the RealMedia player 'course, but it's well worth a looksee if ya have the time.

And please, if you can, think about donating to the MDA during this thing.. It's a really good charity, with one of the least amounts of overhead of any nonprofit: whatever is raised at the local level stays at and is used at the local level. Every year Jerry's broken the record for the amount of money that was pledged during the last telethon... let's make him do it again!

Read More

Goofs and all, I like this new show Rome on HBO

It holds nothing back in showing how colorful, brutal, lecherous and oratorical those wacky Romans really were. Tonight's was the second episode and it was decidedly better than the first one. By the end of the hour I just knew where this chapter of the story was gonna end, on the other side of a certain lil' creek on the northern border with Italy. Definitely recommended but I did catch something that, maybe it's just the historian in me but it did jar me somewhat out of the illusion: early in tonight's episode one of the characters uses the expletive "f***ing". Well, that particular word didn't even exist in 49 B.C.! They were about sixteen hundred years away from its origin and that was with the Puritans, believe it or not. Remember how in The Scarlet Letter they made Hester wear that big red "A"? Well something like that: if the Puritans found someone among them in an adulterous relationship, they made that person wear a sign around their necks with the letters F.U.C.K. inscribed on it. That was a well-understood acronym meaning "For Unclean Carnal Knowledge". I know it's funny to cast blame for the worst profanity in the book on the pious Puritans, but there ya go. And these Romans definitely ain't the pious sort. But I guess some lingual license was in order anyway, right? Anyhoo, if ya like a healthy dose of historical realism and don't mind the risque, give HBO's Rome a shot.

Read More

Happy 75th Anniversary to Dagwood and Blondie!

The actual 75th won't come until later this week but today is the "official" celebration of Dagwood and Blondie Bumstead's 75th anniversary since they first appeared in the comics! I'd thought of marking the occassion by making a real Dagwood Bumstead sandwich but I gave up after seeing all the ingredients that go into it. Just as well: I don't like mayo anyway. May try this with every kind of meat imaginable someday though. Anyhoo, 75 years is a nice long stretch by any means, especially in the funny papers. So here's wishing Dagwood, Blondie, Daisy, Alexander, Cookie, Mr. and Mrs. Dithers and all the rest another good 75 years :-)

EDIT: There is a HYSTERICAL piece by David Grimes at Jewish World Review about the unsolved mysteries of Blondie. Like, how does Dagwood eat all those horridly huge sandwiches and stay so rail thin? Nice readin' in light of today's festivities :-)

Read More