Prepare to be Groped
# Charlie Hardman - killing to eat meat - Mr. Hardman went on his first hunting trip recently, in Idaho, and killed a deer. He now has a better appreciation of what it really means to be a carnivore. I haven't eaten mammal flesh since 1983, but I shot a deer, a pronghorn antelope, and an elk when I was a kid (fortunately, killing each quickly with a single shot), and grew up eating that meat, so I understand. [saltypig]
as i slit that deer open and pulled out its guts, its fragility screamed at me. the easily ripped ties of its organs mocked what i'm made of. humans -- walking chest cavities with organs piled inside, that without extraordinary effort can be emptied out and halted forever. we are temporary.
i think about that whenever i eat this venison, and i'm better for it. i'll probably eat less meat now, and i'll retain a respect that i would never have had without killing an animal myself. did it have to be hunting? no. but i think hunting is the most humane system for eating meat. i doubt game can ever be happier than in its natural environment. with clean kills, hunting's a good method for carnivores.
# Claire Wolfe at Loompanics - The Most Valuable Commodity - uninterrupted time. [claire]
# U.S. News & World Report - An Intrusive new search - The Taking Away Scissors folks have got a new trick for the Thanksgiving holiday. They're going to start fondling breasts, genitals, and asses. Touch my dick, nazi pig, and I'll fuck you up bad. Touch my ass, and you'll get some nasty shit. Touch my wife's breasts or my daughter, and we'll find out if nazi blood is red. Folks, it's time to start putting down our collective foot and telling these bastards, "NO! HELL NO!" (actually, it's way past time, but this one crosses the line for me). Of course, there is another option to anger for dealing with these cretins. Put on your best gay queen voice, and say something like (to a male goon), "Hey, girlfriend, be gentle with me now." For bonus points, hand him a tube of KY Jelly first. [saltypig]
# David Jay Brown at Digital Falcon - President Hannibal Lector & the Thing That Ate the Constitution: An Interview with Robert Anton Wilson - short, but contains some good quotes. [grabbe]
I coined the term TSOG to mean "Tsarist Occupation Government" and to sound like a monster from a Lovecraft horror story. In a constitutional democracy, decisions concerning your health depend on your own judgement and that of your doctor. When such life-and-death matters get decided not by you and your doctor but by an allegedly omniscient Tsar, we have neither constitution nor democracy anymore but blatant and brutal Tsarist tyranny. Look at America today: we not only have a Tsar but he has more spies and informers working for him than Russia had in the days of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who served as an advisor to Alexander III and Nicholas II. Pobedonostsev managed such an army of snoops that they called him "the Grand Inquisitor." Read Turgenev and Dosteovksy and you'll see how much America in the early 21st century has become like Russia in the 19th.
# Michael Tennant at Strike the Root - One, Two, Many Somalias - why it would be good to let Iraq, and America, follow Somalia into anarchy. [root]
# Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - Raising the Debt Limit- A Disgrace - the spendthrifts on Capital Hill increased their credit limit by $800 billion. This has got to stop. Cold turkey. The bill is S.2986, "A bill to amend title 31 of the United States Code to increase the public debt limit". The senate voted along party lines, with only one democrat (Miller, GA) voting for raising the limit and only one republican (Ensign, NV) voting against it. Similarly, in the House, no democrats voted for the rise, and only 10 republicans voted against it And the republicans have the gall to call themselves the party of limited government?
Last week Congress increased the mortgage on your future yet again, by voting to allow the federal government to borrow another $800 billion to pay its bills. This latest increase in the federal debt limit represents merely another chapter in the unprecedented explosion in federal spending that has occurred in recent years. At its present rate of spending, the federal government soon will amass $1 trillion of new debt in just one year. By contrast, the entire federal debt was only $1 trillion when President Reagan took office in 1981.
It's particularly galling when members of Congress pledge never to raise taxes, but then vote to increase the debt limit. By doing so, they are voting to raise taxes on future generations pure and simple. Debt does matter, despite the flawed arguments of the supply-siders. It will have to be repaid by future generations who did not incur it. To hear supposed conservatives argue the case for more federal debt is disgraceful, quite frankly. Deficit spending is the antithesis of conservatism.
Congress has become like the drunk who promises to sober up tomorrow, if only he can keep drinking today. Does anyone really believe this will be the last time, that Congress will tighten its belt if granted one last loan? What a joke! There is only one approach to dealing with an incorrigible spendthrift: cut him off. Congress wastes hundred of billions of dollars every year on countless agencies and programs. Rather than raising the federal government's credit limit, Congress easily could mandate cuts in the existing bloated budget.
# Project Honey Pot is an effort to stop spambots from harvesting email addresses from web sites. Interesting idea. I have put a honey pot here. It's a CGI that generates a human-readable page, but with the letters arranged in a table in column-first order, so a bot would have a hard time reading it. Linked invisibly from every new page of this blog. [cafe]
# Google Desktop Search is a small (446K) application that indexes your Outlook email, web surfing, and disk drives, and allows you to search them all with Google speed. Is also integrates into your regular Google searches, providing an extra entry in the search results reminding you of the number of matches on your computer. Very nice. I haven't opened Outlook since I installed it, but it works great on the web cache and files that it's indexed so far. [google]
# Laurent Destailleur - AWStats "is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages." NearlyFreeSpeech finally added log file support, and this was the first Google hit for "log file analyzer cgi". It was easy to install, though big, and works like a charm. Whooohaaaaaaaa!!
