ABC’s Neighborhood

I'd planned to stop posting, but things keep happening that are so surreal you'd have sworn they were fiction if you didn't know better.

This is about the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York. I'd say that only a fool would do that, but it promises to have zero positive sound bytes and endless negative ones, so I'll say that only a fool would do that and thanks, Scumbama!

Everyone knows it's a show trial.

It will provide an Allah-sent platform for terrorists.

It's an affront to the victims of 9/11 and an assault on the sensibilities on their relatives and those of any thinking American.

I never want to see his filthy face or hear his rotten voice, but I'd love to read a transcript of our pig President's account of how he came to think a trial was a great idea...

From Media Research:

On this weekend's Inside Washington, (Evan) Thomas, now Editor at Large with Newsweek... rued (about Major Muslim): "I cringe that he's a Muslim.... I think he's probably just a nut case. But with that label attached to him, it will get the right wing going... these things are tragic, but that makes it much worse." NPR's Nina Totenberg soon chimed in with agreement: "It really is tragic that he was a Muslim."

I can't believe I agree so much with this pair of dirtbags, but I do - I cringe that he's a Muslim too, and I think it's tragic for everyone that anyone is a Muslim!

Remember...?

The FBI agent, Coleen Rowley , who tried to warn the FBI about 9/11 terrorists? And now we have another terrorist situation the FBI ignored.

When George Bush was President and unemployment was miniscule, and the media ran frequent stories about the dire straits people were in? And now, with unemployment in the 10-20 percent range, you don't hear a media peep?

When the protest groups were out in force for pending executions? Shouldn't they be doubly exercised now that we're executing a poor Muslim? So why aren't they...? Could it be they haven't heard about it?

I while back, I reported that I read on some liberal blog that Mark Lamont Hill, D-Racist had been dropped by Fox News.

So can you imagine my shock and dismay at seeing him on one of O'Reilly's lightwweight panels tonight?

I actually yelled, "I took a GODDAMN LIBERAL at his word again? Man, there's something wrong with me!"

Let the itemization begin...

"We’re scrupulously non-judgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like "radical Islam" or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic, just plain old "radical extremism." But we never make any effort to delineate the line which separates "radical Islam" from non-radical Islam. Indeed, we go to great lengths to make it even fuzzier. And somewhere in that woozy blur the pathologies of a Nidal Malik Hasan incubate... The vast majority of Muslims don’t conspire to kill cartoonists or murder their daughters or shoot dozens of their fellow soldiers. But Islam inspires enough of this behavior to make it a legitimate topic of analysis. Don’t hold your breath. We’d rather talk about anything else — even in the Army. What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that’s the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas." - Mark Steyn

I slam, you slam, we all slam for Islam.

I just got back from the LISA '09 conference in Baltimore. For those who do not know what that is, it originally meant Large Installation System Administration. There are heated debates on what comprises a large system now, so the expanded name is a bit of a misnomer. If you support customers, have servers to manage, possibly some infrastructure thrown in and there are "business needs" involved, then you qualify.

There is really no adequate way to explain LISA. You need to be there and absorb it. I have missed seven of these in a row and I'm not sure why, as this is where the ideas are. If you maintain (production, quality assurance, development, sandbox, etc.) systems, this is where you will hear about the issues, the problems, the solutions and be able to tap into the best minds in this section of Information Technology.

The number of attendees varies quite a bit depending on the economy - a large number of academic institutions attend and they don't have the budgets of private business or government agencies, so that is one factor. This year was near a thousand attendees if I remember the numbers correctly. There have been much bigger ones, but this is still a respectable showing.

The conference typically goes on for 6 days of mixed training and technical sessions. In addition, there is a mini trade show, evening events and informal Birds of a Feather (BOFs) sessions where people with an idea or a problem get together to brainstorm.

I'm not going to go into the week I was there in any detail, as it would be a small novel (non-fiction) and this is just a short posting. I'll be posting much more info later on my more technical site/blog which is currently low volume and really low readership.

I do have this to say. LISA is attended by the best and friendliest group of technology geeks I have ever met and the community is amazing. If you have the chance, visit the USENIX site LISA '09 and view some of the talks or the keynote.

If you are a system administrator and are looking to be a member of a professional community, feel free to visit the League of Professional System Administrator's site and find out all about it. You may also wish to visit USENIX's SAGE Special Interest Group. This is where LISA was conceived and implemented.  

The real reason for this post is one of the BOFs I attended... all about blogging, specifically system administration and technology in general. It was a lively discussion and part of it was a short discussion on comment spam and managing it. My other site is locked down due to a rather large amount of comment spam which took ages to clean up and as a result, I felt it necessary to lock it down. Post discussion, I have decided to open it up again. This will happen after I upgrade the software, and fix up the legacy data and include it. It doesn't have a lot of technical merit, but it does have history and at least shows how long we have been at it.
 

Earlier this week, I wrote about the filthy dog Muslim who ran down his daughter and then ran himself. She was gorgeous. She's currently dead. And yesterday, a filthier dog Muslim killed other daughters' fathers.

I haven't heard any of the coverage since I first mentioned this latest terrorist attack because it doesn't matter what's being said, and I certainly don't want to hear any excuses.

And once again, there were warning signs that were ignored.

I did read some headlines that said something about The Fort Hood Scumbag having been harassed, that he was deploying to Muslimland, and that he claimed to be a Palestinian. The accuracy or inaccuracy of any such headlines are irrelevant. All you need to know is that the guy was a Muslim, he attacked America's finest, and that the people who made it possible for him to be in a position to do that were, unfortunately, not among the people he killed.

Interestingly, there was a story yesterday about some scared liberal movie director who made a film in which he's blowing up all sorts of Christian symbols, and he's quoted as saying that he wanted to blow up some Muslim crap in Mecca - you know, on film, but he was afraid - because Muslims do it for real.

It is clear to anyone who can still think that Muslims terrorists, acting alone, are probably now a greater danger than terrorist sleeper cells.

No wonder Muslims won't eat pigs - it would be cannibalism.

You know what they say, there are three things that are certain in life: death, taxes, and Muslim terrorist attacks...

12 dead, and the toll will likely rise. A deliberate act by Major Malik Nidal Hasan or some such crap (to be corrected as facts and time allows), "recently" assigned to Fort Hood, and get this - the "attacker' was a mental health professional... a psychiatrist

Which better describes this nation's mental health.

Mental health and Muslim? That goes together like a horse and rattlesnake.

And a Major Muslim? How could that happen?

If this results in Muslims finally being regarded with the suspicion they so richly deserve, then it will have served some purpose.

I mean, was there ever any doubt Muslim attacks would happen again? And bigger ones are being planned?

May God damn Allah!

And let the excuses begin...

None of this is confirmed as I write, much of it is my own speculation. If I'm wrong, I will not apologize.

I finally understand why liberals are so confused... about one thing at least...

Great Moments in Socialized Medicine
Europeans like to think of America as racked by street crime, and also as neglecting its citizens' medical needs. But this story from London's Daily Telegraph suggests there may be an element of projection in this stereotype:

Nearly 170,000 violent incidents take place in England's NHS hospitals each year, data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act has revealed.

Labour's laws on 24-hour drinking are being blamed for alcohol-fuelled violence in accident and emergency departments in particular.

There have been several murders and rapes at hospitals in recent years and thousands of attacks annually involve the use of knives and other weapons.

Almost one in four attacks results in injury, yet only a fraction of them are ever reported to the police.

The statistics reveal the dangers that doctors, nurses, paramedics, patients and visitors face in our hospitals on a daily basis.

Some hospital A & E [accident and emergency] departments have been described as "war zones" on a typical Friday or Saturday night.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail reports that "the decision to designate patients as 'do not resuscitate' is falling to junior doctors in one in five cases, a report has revealed":

Usually a consultant should make the final decision--after talking to the family--in cases where elderly patients are not expected to survive.

But senior doctors were involved in dealing with just one in three patients admitted to hospital shortly before dying, says the report from the National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death. . . .

The findings come amid continuing controversy over elderly patients near the end of their lives being assigned to "death pathway" schemes.

Experts claim doctors and nurses need more training in how to care for people who are dying, because wrong diagnoses can result in withdrawal of food and fluids when they might otherwise have survived.

Then again, according to former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, "In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We've all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false."

 

See, it's not "death panels," it's "death pathways" - it's not a final, abrupt  determination, it's a journey. If we want to communicate better with America's dumbest twenty percent, we've just got to learn the terminology!

Now here are a few more Taranto Gems of the Day...

A Scapegoat Alternative
A Sunday Associated Press dispatch from Camden, N.J., give us a mischievous idea:

In a final campaign swing on behalf of the only governor seeking re-election this fall, President Barack Obama on Sunday pitched Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine's bid as a key component for the White House to make good on its political promises.

Once he realizes the Bush well has run dry, maybe the president can blame Corzine's loss for his failure to make good on his promises.

 

And last but best, at least for me...

The Curse, Reversed
We're more of a football fan, but still, as a New Yorker we feel as if things have returned to normal. The New York Yankees last night won Game 6 of the World Series to defeat the Philadelphia Female Horses. It's the first championship for the Yanks since 2000. Of course, just weeks after that series, Hillary Clinton became a senator from New York state, a position in which she served until early this year, when she left to be Barack Obama's low-profile secretary of state.

Turns out we were right: Mrs. Clinton cursed the Yankees. Though reader Jorge Souss has another theory:

Since the Yankees won their first pennant (1921), every Democratic president except Lyndon Johnson has presided over two or more Yankee world championships. And during the past 50 years, the Yankees have won eight World Series in the 20 years in which a Democrat occupied the White House and have not won a single championship in the 30 years in which a Republican was president. During the past half century, the Yankees have won 40% of the time when a Democrat is president and 0% of the time when a Republican is president.

So it should not have surprised you that the Yankees have not won a World Series since October 2000. As Democrats reminded us every time something wasn't exactly as we wanted between 2001 and 2009, "It's Bush's fault!" I believe that you owe Secretary Clinton an apology. And when the Yankees defeated the Phillies, Arlen Specter had had nothing to do with it. President Obama won it for the Yankees merely by showing up (as he did with the Nobel Prize).

C'mon, what could the party in the White House possibly have to do with the Yankees? That's just superstition!

 

Even if you don't appreciate baseball the way you should, The Philadelphia team's name "correction" was the loudest out-loud laugh I've had in ages...

Well, the results of the election are in, and the big winner was... Fox News!

And as expected, the big loser was... anything liberal.

CNN even finished behind it's surrogate, CNN Headline News.

Now THAT'S change you can believe in!

Meanwhile, Bobo said he didn't pay attention to the election results.

I'll pause here to give you time to finish laughing.

So you want a simple test to find out how ignorant a liberal is? Just mention Fox News and see how long it takes to hear a discouraging word. The shorter the period, the dumber he is. One third of the Fox audience is liberal. Granted, half of them are watching so they can find something to criticize, and the other half don't understand what the people on Fox are talking about because it's the first time they've heard about the subject, but a statistically insignificant number of liberals probably realize that Fox is the only place they can get all sides of a story.

In fact, liberals are snowy about the fact that the number of their species watching Fox is greater than the number of liberals watching the other cable news channels combined.

But who can argue that with liberals when they say Fox is biased? No one, that's who. Because Fox IS biased... in favor of presenting all the facts, free speech, allowing both sides to be heard, and they don't understand that the reason Fox airs more conservative views than liberal views is because conservative views make sense. In fact, I get angry at Fox because they air too much liberal nonsense.

Liberals, of course, don't see their views as nonsense - because they never carry them to their logical conclusion. There's always a leap... "We want the public option so that... people can live forever!"

FAME!

That's the liberal mind at work... and "work" is probably a mischaracterization as well as a statistically insignificant number, because most liberals are either unemployed or they "work" for the government! And of course, their jobs were all just saved - and many even got raises thanks to the stimulus. For joy!

Now here's something I found more interesting that the enormous Fox lead in viewers... it's the enormous Fox lead in the coveted 25-54 age group. There too, Fox handily beat the other networks combined, but what's so significant there is that if you're 25 and watching Fox, it's very unlikely you'll be able to watch the other networks with a straight face. I mean whenever I turn on MSNBC, it takes milliseconds to overwhelmed by the stupidity, the hate, the desperation that's being conveyed by the anchor of the hour.

So Nancy Pelosi thinks "we won!?!" I wonder, could other liberals think that as well? If so, keep on keepin' on, bro...