The Church of the Blinding White Light of Stupidity

More pics...

I've been playing with Photoshop and Dreamweaver today and created another picture album of our vacation photos... Washington, DC during Memorial Day weekend of 2002... Lots of various street shots, memorials, museums and such... check out the Biker Rally... we stood south of the Air and Space Museum for an hour while bikes streamed by... The National Gallery had a Leanardo DaVinci on display...

All in all, we had a nice time...

Our Chicago Vacation...

Last year Rita and I went to Chicago to visit her son while he attended corpsman school. I've been playing with Photoshop, creating different web albums and here are our pics of the trip.

Sometimes the Post Just Pisses Me Off...

This editorial in the New York Post yanked my panties right up into the crack of my ass... so I sent them an email...

Sirs,
I respectfully disagree with your columnist about New York "deserving" extra money to pay for extra security during this crisis.

I love New York and it's people but your bureaucrats are bleeding you dry... stop asking the rest of the country to open a vein, show those bastards the door and maybe then we can talk.

I love New York... but this is ridiculous. You folks vote for fiscally ignorant asshats who spend and regulate you into poverty then you turn around and ask that we bail you out... after they insult the president by backing Saddam!

Voters of New York, you voted these idiots into office, you live with the consequences.

How's that smoking ban working for you...?

Ralph Peters Says...

Ralph Peters has a good column in the NY Post today...

I told you I am NOT patient... Are we there yet?

Cooking Dinner....

I cooking tonight... no, I mean really cooking....

We bought some large sea scallops this weekend at Wally-World and we always keep home-smoked bacon from a little smokehouse out near Marshall (Coursey's Smokehouse) so I thawed the scallops, wrapped each one in a strip of bacon, skewered them on some bamboo spears and they are broiling in the convection oven at 400 degrees.... I made a bit of garlic-lime butter and doused them with it.... I have saffron (yellow) rice with sliced carrots cooking on the stove...

Did I mention that I am a classically trained French Chef? ...trained by a Cordon Bleu Grad? ... fifteen years in the trade?

When I sobered up I decided that I couldn't stay sober in a commercial kitchen... so I gave up cooking and became a drywaller...

Hey...Stop laughing!

A Day at Home...

I'm home today because I spent all last night making the world safe for retail... and damn am I tired.

I don't blog much about work because a lot of what I do is confidential.

DUH! I do system security!

Let it just be said that your favorite discounter is protected...

And My Eyes Fill with Tears...

This post at Rachel's site caused a catch in my throat and tears in my eyes.

I first heard and saw pictures of the Holocaust when I was very young, maybe four or five years old and even at that age I understood the evil and the pain.

This is something I cannot be calm or detached about, it causes a visceral reaction, I cannot breath, my mind darts about and I want to hide in my room, curl into a ball and cry. It has always been like that for me. I fight that urge, the urge to hide, and I face the fear.

Evil exists... active evil that strives to destroy everything.

It must be opposed, fought and defeated. Passive resistance has never stopped evil like that done by the Nazis, Stalin or Saddam. Active, organized violence is the only cure for these dangers.

Shoot the maddogs and let the populace go back to their lives.

The Disappeared...

There has been a lot of speculation about the purported capture of Osama Bin Laden and his sons. Titusonenine has extensive comments on his site debating why the US would not announce their arrest or death.

I had a conversation with a person who shall remain nameless but he made a good point. Rather than announcing every arrest, it is much more effective to have members of Al Queda "just disappear"... moved, no forwarding address... go out for a pack of smokes and never come home... and I suspect many of them are "sleeping with the fishes".

There have been rumors that GWB signed an Executive Order authorizing the Shadow Warriors to do what must be done, without restraint. I think we are seeing the result of that order. If the captured terrorist has no useful information, why keep him alive? Grab him out of his bed in the middle of the night, spirit him away, never to be seen again.

It's not like Al Queda is going to post a scorecard;

"We still have 300 operatives in the US!"
"The CIA has only captured and killed 2500 of our brothers!"

or a message board;

"If any of our brothers have heard from Akbar Muddumber tell him to get a message to Osama. We have that anthrax he needed."
"To Mohamed Al Bin Madman, we haven't heard from you in two weeks. Is the attack still on?"

If Osama's compatriots know he has been caught, they will change their plans, making those plans more difficult to defeat. But, if parts of the organization just drop out of sight, the remaining players have to determine if they have been compromised, stepping more carefully, looking over their shoulders at every move.

These bastards have been moving through our society for years, unhindered and unnoticed... those days are over. Those who would attempt to destroy us must be destroyed.

I hope there have been a lot of unshaven, dirty terrorist bodies dropped far out in the oceans, beyond ever being discovered.

"Cut 'em if the stand, kill 'em if they run..."

So, to our Shadow Warriors, good hunting and God speed... and be sure to use enough chain to take 'em to the bottom...

Dumb Chicks...

Natalie Maines appears to have forgotten just who it is that buys her shit and has made her a rich little girl... Shooting her mouth off in Germance is getting her band's music banned from the air all over America.

Shit girl... were you channeling Stevie Nicks?!

I think her fans may have gotten her attention as she has now apologized for her remarks.

The Chicks need to remember who it was that helped them become famous, who went to their shows when they were unknown, who bought all those CDs and ponied up $30 a year to join their website/fanclub.

Hint, it wasn't all the Hollywood types they are hanging with now.

This slip of the lip is gonna cost them plenty. Country fans don't let crap like this slide, they are gonna let her know that she was out of line.

Wake up bitch, no one HAS to buy your music, you appeared to be a nice girl and have a good voice so folks bought your CDs and went to your shows.

I doubt that anyone said to themselves...

"Say, I wonder what that cute little Dixie Chick thinks about the war with Iraq? You know, the one that seems to have so much trouble with weight maintenence... I mean, she gains and loses, up and down like a Yo-Yo... and those lips... I wonder if she has had collegen injections? Gosh, I don't know what to think about this geopolitical situation and I sure wish she would impart some of her superior wisdom to straighten me out."

Clue time:

There are thousands of nice, pretty girls in America that can sing and some of them are smart enough to not piss off the folks who are paying the bills. There are also a lot of them who are taller than 5'2" and smaller than size 14...

Of Myself, I am Nothing...

I caught a link off Dean's World that echos my post from a few weeks ago.

Peachniks and protestestors seem to be the kind of folks who cannot live without peer acceptance. Like herd animals, they crave the approval of their self-chosen authorities and will go to great and absurd lengths to get that approval. Like chickens, they will attack and destroy any individual that threatens their feeling of uniformity.

I find this observation incredibly sad. We are humans. We can remember the past and infer the future. We can communicate.

We are more than animals but less than gods and I'm OK with that... but even alone, I am much more than nothing.

Oh My Freakin' God...

Republican - You believe that the free market will
take care of most things, but that the
government should be there with moderate
taxation to provide for national defense and
enforcing morality. Your historical role model
is Ronald Reagan.


Which political sterotype are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

I really have become a Republican....

Are We There Yet?

I am currently burying myself in work to avoid sitting at my laptop asking "Are we there yet?"

Negotiations with vendors that comsume too little time, sorting through 25meg network sniffs to find the errant packet that is causing the application to crash, scanning the network for vulnerabilities, watching the environment for telltale signs of mischief.

I am cooking food that we are not eating, waiting for the other shoe to drop while keeping the nasty little beastie cooped up in the back of my head.

Ah, but the beastie is capering about, swinging on my optic nerves, gibbering about death, disease and pestilence and I just sit, comfortably relaxed as my virtual body tenses. I have a knot in my upper back the size of a hardball and it just will not go away.

Patience is a virtue and I have never been very virtuous, ask my ex-wife...

Cry havok and loose the dogs of war...

Playing Around with Our Vacation Photos...

I've been playing around with all the digital images we have taken on our trips around the country and have posted the pics from Chicago here...

My brother Bill taught me that to become a decent photographer you have to take a lot of pictures and throw most of them away...

Well, at least I take a lot of photos...

Sheik "I Am Totally Screwed Now" Caught...

I see a bunch of folks are worried about what will happen to the Sheik now that he has been captured.

This fellow and his friends put themselves beyond the pale, we did not. A Soldier gets the protection of the Geneva Convention by abiding by the rules and when he deliberately breaks the rules of war as a tactical choice, he is not entitled to protection from anything.

Traditionally, illegal combatants have been executed at the time of capture. The German infiltrators who wore American uniforms at the Battle of the Bulge were shot at once, no trials, no questions, no repurcussions for the executioners.

My father performed a pair of summary executions in Italy (about 1944?) on two young men who, though not in uniform and not members of any army, shot and killed three of his men with a rifle from the church spire.

When they ran out of ammo, they surrendered and demanded to be taken to an officer (Pops was a Sergent). They were the sons of the local fascist thug mayor and thought they were bullet-proof, parading around in their pressed brown shirts.

He took them to the town square, gave them each a ciggarette and when they had finished their smokes, shot them each in the back of the head.

He was exonerated in a court martial, returned to duty and they didn't have any more problems with amature snipers.

This isn't Olly-olly-outs-in-free... you can't step out of bounds then jump back in and call "Safe!". This isn't about freedom or rights or being the "Good Guys". This bastard slit the throat of an innocent man for politcal points. Whatever happens to him could not be painful enough for me.

But, I think the Ghosts have much better plans for him than a slow skinning followed by a painful death. I'll bet they have him in some Mission Improbable situation, messing with his head something awful. I hope they screw with him til he doesn't know that he is even an Arab, then just before they kill him, tell him how many of his comrades he got toasted.

The French Better Take Care...

I was reading the comments over at Scrapple Face and something a commentor said in response to a frenchman's cruel remark to a man who lost his son in a training exercise struck me...

"Shame on you. Furthermore, I ask - Have you considered the consequences of your behavior? You and your comrades make a disastrous mistake if you believe you can change our minds on this issue - you are instead changing our hearts. In doing this you are creating a deep resentment in the hearts of "average" Americans. " ...InspiredPath1

Using the left's logic, I followed the string to this...

[sarcasm]
If you really believe our foreign policies created all those Arab terrorists, how many American terrorists are the French creating with their attitudes and actions? How long until some disenfranchised American youths band together and go after the French for besmirching their honor? How long before the Southern Baptist Council sponsors a mission to Paris to destroy the Eiffel Tower? Is it possible to stop Mormon missionaries from smuggling bioweapons into France aboard their bicycles?

Some historical facts that should give the French pause:

We are the people who killed off all the natives in North America.
We fought a war amongst ourselves where we killed more of our soldiers than we lost in all our wars since 1899 combined.
We are the only country to actually use nuclear weapons on occupied cities.

We kill more people by drunk driving on one saturday night than get killed in a month by terrorists.

Jim Jones was one of our's, as was Charley Manson, Tim Mcveigh, Al Capone, John Wesley Harding, Bonny and Clyde, John Wayne Gacy and a host of others.

France, when some American terrorist shows up on your doorstep and cleans your clock, I will offer the same lukewarm condolences you assholes offered us.

"Well, you should have taken that into account before you went and pissed the old boy off. You knew the Americans were crazy, just look at their history."
[/sarcasm]

As a nation we work very hard to be just and to restrain ourselves, but as individuals, we are the nastiest sons-of-bitches you will ever run into. Don't mess with our families or get on our land.

Of course, the chance of American terrorists attacking French interests is just about nil. Our police go after all violent terrorists, regardless of their political leanings, unlike France.

If we were as bloodthirsty as they think we are, the protest signs would say...

"Reanimate Mumia!"