Quote without comment

George Tiller was a Mass-Murderer, says Randall Terry -- We Grieve That he Did Not Have Time to Properly Prepare his Soul to Face God

Contact: Sandy Veritas, 904-687-9804

WASHINGTON, May 31 /Christian Newswire/ -- Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, led protests against George Tiller's late-term abortion clinic in Wichita in 1991.

Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue states, "George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God.   I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller's killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder.  

"Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God. We must continue to expose them in our communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes, and yes, even their churches."

Randall Terry is available for comment at 904-687-9804

Two cows (updated for 2009)

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour.

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk..

NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other and then throws the milk away...

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why the cow has dropped dead.

ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND VENTURE CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.
You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows.
No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organise a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called 'Cowkimon' and market it worldwide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don't know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
You count them again and learn you have 2 cows.
You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the journalist who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb the crap out of you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least now you are part of Democracy....

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive.

Red Sox 6, Twins 5

One good thing about a Minnesota-Boston game: I know I won't be displeased with the outcome.

Is it "due process" when the Government always wins?

A brief excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's rebuttal of the President's May 21 speech. Worth a click-through.

If you really think about the argument Obama made yesterday -- when he described the five categories of detainees and the procedures to which each will be subjected -- it becomes manifest just how profound a violation of Western conceptions of justice this is. What Obama is saying is this: we'll give real trials only to those detainees we know in advance we will convict. For those we don't think we can convict in a real court, we'll get convictions in the military commissions I'm creating. For those we can't convict even in my military commissions, we'll just imprison them anyway with no charges ("preventively detain" them).

Giving trials to people only when you know for sure, in advance, that you'll get convictions is not due process. Those are called "show trials." In a healthy system of justice, the Government gives everyone it wants to imprison a trial and then imprisons only those whom it can convict. The process is constant (trials), and the outcome varies (convictions or acquittals).

Obama is saying the opposite: in his scheme, it is the outcome that is constant (everyone ends up imprisoned), while the process varies and is determined by the Government (trials for some; military commissions for others; indefinite detention for the rest). The Government picks and chooses which process you get in order to ensure that it always wins. A more warped "system of justice" is hard to imagine.

"I'm in Luck"

Jeannie was selling her artwork at a birder convention, so to avoid the worst of the holiday traffic I took mostly secondary highways to Luck, WI, abandoned the gas guzzler there temporarily, bought a trail pass, biked the last 17 miles in a blazing 2.5 hours, and joined her in Siren for a noisy but pleasant evening at the Little Mexico.

Jeannie gave me a ride back to Luck to retrieve my car.

The Gandy Dancer trail is fogey-friendly with crushed gravel and gentle inclines. The weather was just right, between 65 and 70 the whole way. The day after, I have no muscle soreness to speak of. Must be the weight exercises I'm doing at the Y.

(The other day when a bagger offered to carry my two bags of groceries out to the car I declined: "Thanks, but I'm Mr. Macho, the world-renowned body builder and professional wrestler. I'm surprised you didn't recognize me when I came in." The young man smiled conspiratorially and said, "Oh yeah. Now that you mention it, I do recognize you.")

Back in Saint Paul now, total absence less than 24 hours.

On the 5th Annual IDAHO*

*(International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia)
Sunday, May 17, 2009

While your attentions were elsewhere, this was done in your name

In January 2002, the Supreme Court of Bosnia ordered the release of six men suspected of collaborating with Al Queda. American peace-keeping forces were waiting for them, seized all six and transported them to Guantánamo where they languished for six years.

One prisoner, Lakhdar Boumediene, successfully challenged his confinement in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Digby picks up the story from there:

That is what we did to innocent people. Maybe most Americans don't think we should play the blame game, but I'm not sure people around the world will be satisfied that we have actually stopped acting like animals based solely on our promise to stop being animals.

Some of the Iraq prisoner abuse photos they don't want you to see

Pretty graphic. Take a look here if you have the stomach for it.

President Obama has changed his mind about officially releasing the photos, fearing a Muslim backlash. I don't agree with him in this instance, but then I never thought I'd agree with him 100 percent of the time.

ping: sendmsg: Operation not permitted in 9.04

Upgraded to Ubuntu Server 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) figuring that might fix a problem rendering a few Flash pages in Firefox. (It didn't.)

But when the machine came back up, the rest of the network (and the rest of the world) couldn't see it. Uh-oh.

So, I start at the beginning looking for network troubles: I make sure the network interface is recognized (ifconfig) and there's still a routing table (route). All OK. Then I try to ping the domain controller and get:

ping: sendmsg: Operation not permitted

Google pointed me to several helpful suggestions, which didn't work, and one which did: there was a problem with iptables (one that hadn't been there before the upgrade). What fixed it was the following magical incantation:

ipmasq

Don't know why it worked (or why ufw doesn't do the same thing), and I'm getting too old to care.

Thanks, Google!

No Country for Middle-Aged Men

Tom Hazel worked for three decades in a blazing hellhole to get his pension. But the financial geniuses who took over his plant had other ideas.

A sad tale from Mother Jones.

White House correspondents' dinner videos

I am so glad we hired this guy.

Obama jokes

Letterman asks his writers to come up with a few routines mocking the new President.

Goposauric Park

Scary stuff. Don't watch just before bedtime.

Cropped by Fox News Channel

From Media Matters.

P-I-G

Variant of H-O-R-S-E, a basketball game for a small group of players. No player is allowed to defend.

The object is to avoid acquiring the five letters in the word "horse". With two players competing, player #1 is allowed to shoot from anywhere on or off the court and, if he makes the shot, then player #2 must duplicate the same shot from the same position. If player #2 misses, he receives the first "letter" from the word "horse" (in this case - an "H"). However, if player #1 misses his original shot; then player #2 is now free to shoot from anywhere on the court and, hopefully, force player #1 to try and duplicate his made shots. A player is knocked out of the game once he has enough letters to spell out the word "horse." If the last shot spells horse the shooting player gets a last chance shot after the first miss. The game is essentially the same with three or more players, all players must duplicate the made shot until it returns to the player that made the shot. -- Wikipedia