Category: Uncategorized

OK, one more.
In an article in today’s American Prowler, Lawrence Henry makes some thoughtful points. I’ve also read Clancy’s Every Man a Tiger and I was intrigued at the time by the huge gulf between the attitudes of the professional Saudi military officers Chuck Horner dealt with during GWI and the apparent attitudes of the Saudi ruling family.
Maybe we really don’t have the problem with the Saudis that many (including me) think we do. Maybe the princes are about to overextend themselves and wear out their welcome. Would a military government in Saudi that was friendly to the U.S. really be such a bad thing?
It’s something to ponder.

Via Best of the Web, this story actually makes me laugh a little.
For some reason I saw my Dad shaking his finger at me and saying “you go out and kill yourself, and I’ll never speak to you again!” Which is something my Dad probably would have done, but just as probably with a big grin on his face.
Somehow, though, I don’t think this young idiot’s father was laughing very much. Which is a good thing.

An excellent article by Richard Perle, entitled “Why the West Must Strike First against Saddam Hussein”. (Link from LGF)

It occurred to me this morning as I read the news (and I can’t remember which article triggered the thought process that has been fermenting all day and just taste-tested nicely; if I do I’ll link it) that, given the past and continuing support of the House of Saud for militant Islam as a means of exporting revolution and saving their sorry asses from the gibbet, we need a new term for “militant Islam”.
I humbly suggest “Wahhabism”.
So from now on when I talk about “militant Islam” in some context or another, I will simply substitute the word “Wahhabism”.
And while we’re redefining words, one of these days maybe we’ll take back that good word “liberal” from the ass-kissing socialist dickweeds who hijacked it back in the ’50s. As I blogged about the other day.

Most days I work in the software development department, sitting here in front of the computer in my pjs (I telecommute), sippin’ on a soft drink (or more likely ice water since I was down with the flu in February), readin’ a little news here, a blog or two there, and incidentally getting some work done.
But two days a week I am seconded to the product support department. Thankfully our front line support is handled by email (and I have an agreement with the company that I will NEVER have to do phone support). But as I suggested yesterday, the Internet is quickly becoming populated by total idiots masquerading as sysadmins and net gurus, who wouldn’t know a bit from a byte or a Hayes modem from a DSL router, or a DNS entry from a hole in their head…and they ALL want our software.
The problem with this is that I have to help them two days a week. And frankly I don’t have the temperment to do so anymore. Back in the days when we were all mainframers (and I admit I was one more by courtesy than anything else, although I CAN program in REXX), people actually had to have a fair amount of knowledge, and life was good. Today, the Internet has become pedestrian due to the web making it so much easier to use. I don’t hate the web; I loathe it while using it a lot more than I used to think I would. (Well — here I am blogging, for instance.)
The problem is, that while the Internet has become pedestrian, the people who run it have seriously decreased in knowledge and ability — probably due to the fact that there are so many open positions for sysadmins these days that anyone who can run Word and write a macro can get a job running an Internet server. Back in the old days, you actually had to know what you were doing before they turned you loose to burn all the lights on the front of the IBM big iron.
I’m exaggerating the problem — I hope. There are a few good people left who understand how it ought to work. What will happen when we’re gone? One of these days the Internet is going to be left to the script kiddies, I suspect. I’m only 22 years from retirement so I guess I’ll live to deal with it…
I ought to write a book. I keep threatening to.

…will be the big hole we blow in what’s left of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
What a wanker. Can’t these Islamist collaborators and fellow travellers go off and wank somewhere else?

Rachel Lucas gave me a link!
And her rant today is pretty amazing. I agree with all of it, even if I do use the cell phone in the car from time to time…
I was glad to see her first bullet point. It used to seriously annoy me when people wouldn’t shut the fuck up in class. It used to seriously annoy a couple of my professors, too, and they weren’t shy about stopping dead in the middle of a sentence, giving the class an icy stare, and waiting for the undercurrent to die away, then pick up right where they left off.
One of these profs began every semester with something like the following: “There will be a midterm and a final, and a paper due at the last class meeting. You may rest assured that the final is comprehensive. If this is not what you were expecting, please see me at the end of the period, when I will be happy to sign a drop slip for you and we will part friends.” I never got less than an A- in his classes, and I only dropped one of them (because I got sick in the middle of the semester and missed a couple of weeks of class — I retook the class later on in my 10-year university career). He’s retiring at the end of the year…

Probably somewhere in between, but I’m somewhat annoyed at Dawn for assuming without data that it’s evil incarnate.
Dawn is far too intelligent to make a post like this without at least taking the time to see whether or not her assessment is fair. I will excuse it on the premise that she is clearly quite angered by what she’s seen of home schooling, but I hope that she will actually do the research she admits that she did not do, because she will find that there is an awful lot of good home schooling going on out there, including lots of opportunities (including, in some cases, sports teams that are accredited to play the public school teams!) for socialization.
I have gut reactions about things too, but I try to do enough research to feel that I’m on solid or at least semi-solid ground before I start ranting about them. There are plenty of people out there (mostly socialists, Democrats, environmentalists, Islamic terrorists, and anti-nuke types) who rant about things they know nothing about already. Let’s not add to the trend.

I have rarely in my life been so privileged to deal with more stupid people who think they are Internet gurus in my life as I was today. I have literally been working since my butt hit this chair at 8AM, with maybe 15 minutes out to eat something for lunch. Morons. Morons, morons, morons. The moronosity quotient of the Internet must be at an all-time high.
I remember when people actually knew what you meant when you said “RFC”. And it doesn’t mean “Regionally Fried Chicken”, either.
Sheesh.

Ah, Chuck, we hardly knew ye…
Damn. Damn, damn, damn.