Final Protective Fire

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

 

For years the conventional wisdom was that the elections in Iran were rigged by teh mullahs - who approved candidates to the ballot. Recent events in Iran look to some observers like Ahmandinejad has developed a power base independant of the heretofore ruling mullahs. He's put a lot of former Revolutionary Guard peers of his in power in the government. Khamehni's statement about a recount which seems to have gone no where seems to confirm this view.

If so, it should not surprise anyone with a knowledge of history. The parallels to Napoleon's rise should be obvious.

Robin 4:50 PM

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Wednesday, April 22, 2009

 

Wow ... IDF flys fighter jets over Auschwitz. Just wow.

Robin 7:44 PM

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

 

Well, we've reached the end of 2008. Good riddance in a lot of ways. In the wider world, we saw a ridiculous election that put an empty suit into the White House and we saw long standing structural problems in our financial system finally collapse like a brick house standing on the San Andreas fault.

In personal matters, the sabbatical we began in Spring of '07 came to an end in the summer of '08. We had some good travel adventures during that sabbatical but now we need to refocus on returning to the working world.

Hopefully 2009 will see a lot of turn-around.

Robin 8:41 PM

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

 

November 11th is a holiday in the United States and many other countries, now called "Veteran's Day" it was originally commemorative of the end of WWI - Armistice Day - which ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.

Usually I post McCrae's In Flanders' Fields but today, I'll post Wilfred Owen.

Dulce et Decorum Est (written in 1917 and published posthumously in 1921) is a poem by World War I soldier Wilfred Owen. The work's horrifying imagery has made it one of the most popular condemnations of war ever written. It was originally drafted as a personal letter to the famous pro-war poet Jessie Pope.

— Excerpted from Dulce et Decorum Est on Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!–An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The poem above always spoke to me, but no more so than last year when we were in Flanders, visiting the WWI memorials and cemeteries surrounding Ieper. Hearing Last Post played at the Menim Gate.

Robin 12:58 PM

Sunday, July 13, 2008

 

Just in case you thought that the Green Party had any sane people in it ... forget it. The Green Party just nominated Cynthia MacKinney for President.

Just in case you needed a candidate for the faux environmentalist anti-semitic loonwaffle vote.

Robin 8:44 PM

Sunday, September 23, 2007

 

There is a very moving story of a wounded veteran speaking at the recent NRA Convention from American Thinker.

Robin 3:32 PM

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Tuesday, September 18, 2007

 

There is a silly lawsuit ongoing about some anti-Bush people being refused entry to a Bush campaign event a few years ago. To put it in context, here's how dissenters are handled at a John Kerry event.

Robin 11:33 AM

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Tuesday, September 04, 2007

 

Claire Short of the EU Parliament demonstrates that unique modern EU form of anti-semitism by claiming that among Israel's many sins is global warming.

Evidently, that's the new measure of evil among these bizarre euros. So they have to add it in to the fanciful list of crimes committed by "them". Its beyond parody, the EU as Monty Python skit.

Robin 9:05 PM

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This is hilarious.

Robin 2:05 PM

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Friday, August 17, 2007

 

For some time, I've been following the case of SCO v. IBM, and the later SCO v. Novell case that is derivative of it in many ways. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you probably aren't interested in Linux, Open Source and the cute little tricks that Microsoft has been playing to try to stifle it. You can catch up if you wish by reading PJ's website Groklaw. Basically, under the influence of Microsoft, a company that had ended up with the old Unix operating system busienss of AT&T through Novell and was busy driving itself into the ground with bad business decisions made a really stupid one. SCO decided to adopt a business model of suing Linux distributors claiming that they were infringing the copyright of Unix. The only problem to this brilliant theory were twofold - first that there was little copyright left in Unix for various reasons related to its history and less that actually was copied by Linux. Second, SCO did not actually own the copyrights to Unix because of the odd way it was transfered to it by Novell. Because of my past in Unix software development and operations before I changed careers, it was of interest to me.

Last week, there was a ruling by the judge in SCO v. Novell that essentially ends SCO's hopes to sue IBM and Novell. Pamela discusses the ruling here.

This ruling essentially kills off SCO v. IBM because the court ruling in the other case that SCO does not own the core Unix technology will mean that SCO does not have standing to sue IBM for infringment of it ( infringment that they were also failing to prove anyway ).

The case has gone on far too long - mainly because the whole purpose of the case was to cast doubt on the legality of Linux. Now SCO should fold like a house of cards as they owe Novell a lot of money and just lost their lottery ticket.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

UPDATE:9/14/07: SCO files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Good riddance to bad rubbish redux.

Robin 6:08 PM

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Thursday, August 16, 2007

 

Taser markets a non-lethal weapon for self-defense to women, who could possibly object? Why the long irrelevant Amnesty International of course.

Robin 8:24 PM

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Friday, August 10, 2007

 

While Al Queda certainly remains our primary terrorist threat, the animal rights crowd is becoming increasingly violent as described in this LA Weekly piece about a recent attempt on the life of a researcher at the Jules Stein Eye Institute.

The United Kingdom has in the past seen most of the violence of the animal rights terrorists, but we are going to see increased amounts here in the United States.

Robin 6:34 PM

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Sunday, August 05, 2007

 

There are some very very sick people in the world. Of course, not every sick person is of a particular ideological faction, but people who are suffering from BDS seem in my experience to be particularly likely to be really virulent.

Robin 12:13 PM

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Wednesday, August 01, 2007

 

Beldar has the definitive post on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the current tempest in a teapot.

Robin 8:21 PM

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Saturday, July 28, 2007

 

I quickly visited a link on Kos because of a posting on LGF and there had been some discussion about it on Patterico's blog. Good lord, they have really got some complete nutbars on Kos' site. How do these people feed themselves unassisted?

Robin 9:53 PM

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Friday, July 27, 2007

 

This is an interesting oped piece by Michael Burleigh in the Times. Its UK centric as he discusses the status of anti-terrorism measures in the UK, but this quote is, I think, especially important:

One of the puzzles of our time is why Britain scrupulously adheres to the Human Rights Act, when our allies and partners systematically flout the European Convention on Human Rights. Talk of human rights abuses invariably focuses on the US, with sneering TV documentaries about Guantanamo or CIA “extraordinary rendition”. But on much of the Continent they don’t allow civil liberty lawyers to turn terrorism into a risk-free activity.

Robin 3:59 PM

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Wednesday, July 25, 2007

 

We've been watching the Tour de France this summer. Interestingly, my wife and I were taking a shuttle van to the airport at the end of May and we were riding with a guy who was in the business of sports conditioning consulting, and consulted to several professional cyclists. In the half hour ride, we discussed the upcoming tour with him and expressed our dissatisfaction with how the sport had been handling doping and other cheating. We were big Floyd Landis fans and we are still puzzled about what credibility to give the lab results that resulted in Floyd's loss of the title. The trainer told us that he thought Vinokourov was the rider to follow this year.

Now, its gotten completely ridiculous. A handful of lesser lights have been thrown out of this Tour for doping, and then Vinokourov was thrown out together with the whole Astana team ( taking out then-fifth-place Andreas Kloden as well, although I've not seen any specific allegations against him ).

Now, after a brilliant defense of his yellow jersey, Michael Rasmussan was fired by team Rabobank and withdrawn from the Tour for lying to them about where he was training - the same issue that had earlier caused the Danish federation to expel him from the Danish cycling team for the upcoming Olympics.

Now I'm completely disgusted. Evidently the most honest sport in the world actually is Professional Wrestling. I've got to go to Vince McMahon for a sport with integrity. At least we all know how its fixed.

Robin 5:24 PM

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Monday, July 09, 2007

 

Glenn Reynolds notes a Popular Mechanics piece on a Taser round designed to be used in a shotgun and comments: "but it'll be pretty important to be sure that your 12-gauge is really loaded with Taser rounds when you think it is, and not, say, slugs. Or vice versa. I'm not sure that mixing nonlethal and lethal capabilities in the same weapon is a good idea, accident-wise."

Glenn makes a good point. If you use the same firearm for lethal and non-lethal ammunition, there will be an accident.

Many police departments who use non-lethal ammunition in shotguns, like rubber balls, use special bright orange stocks and have rules that such designated weapons are never loaded with lethal ammunition. You can find such stocks at some mail order firearms parts suppliers if you want to follow this scheme yourself.

Robin 9:12 PM

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Saturday, June 30, 2007

 

How amusing, someone just emailed me a message of abuse from an anonymous remailer.

Cowardice is so hip, you know.

Robin 8:55 PM

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Saturday, June 16, 2007

 

This article describes an attack by a squirrel on some people in Germany which is finally beaten to death by an elderly man with a crutch.

What is the world coming to when it takes three Germans to kill a squirrel?

Robin 6:04 PM

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Wednesday, May 23, 2007

 

Jeff at Protein Wisdom writes about another example of the partisan bias of our news media - The Associated Press writes about a DUI arrest of the Speaker of the State Senate in Minnesota but does not bother to mention that he is a DFL Democrat. Actually, Jeff's research shows that the AP actually edited out the reference to his party.

Robin 2:29 PM

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