Thanks, Blogger

I haven’t been able to post thing one all day, because I couldn’t get in. I couldn’t even ping the server, much less access it.

An aside: Sorry for the slow day… Blogger’s in trouble again, apparently.

You guys see this nut case Nathan Walker in Tampa?
Here’s a description: Got a hand-made sign on the side of his car, saying:”Never forget Bush’s illegal oil war murdered thousands in Iraq.”  Rieal bright guy, huh?

He’s so ticked about the majority vote in this country being overhwlemingly for GWB, that he claims a GWB bumper sticker sent him over the edge, where he tried to run a woman and her two kids off the road.
Rpeatedly.
In front of witnesses.The local ABC station in Tampa has the details

I’d say this is just another nutcase who (thereby) actually beleives the lies the Democrats have been spreading, and taking them to their logical conclusion.

AP is reporting that

A bus driver for the Dave Matthews Band pleaded guilty Wednesday to dumping 800 pounds of human waste from the vehicle’s septic tank onto a sightseeing boat on the Chicago River last summer.

There is something totally satisfying about this one.

Let’s see… 800lbs of dreck. Isn’t that about the average output of leftist political nonsense, particularly greenie nonsense, spread at their concerts?

Dizzy Girl has posted covers from the New Harry potter book; The half-Blood Prince… which I will admit to enjoying rather a lot of late. Good fun.

She posts the US version as well as a couple UK versions of the cover. Interesting, given the thing is something like six months away from publication.

Boortz said it again this morning, and it bears repeating:

“How many years has it been since an oil refinery was built in the United States?  I think that it’s been over 25 years. Can’t you imagine that this is having some affect on getting gas to the pumps for your Summer driving?  And then there’s all those special blends.  We have about 55 different blends for different parts of the country .. .all demanded by the eco-whacko crowd.  The refineries can’t keep up.

Who to blame?  How about environmentalists?  Any plan to build a new refinery is immediately met by a tidal wave of opposition from so-called “environmental” groups.  Ditto for any suggestion that we start retrieving the supplies of crude oil and natural gas from the Gulf shore of Florida and the Pacific coast.  No can do, the environmentalists don’t like it.  Then, of course, there’s ANWR.  On its best days ANWR looks like a vacant urban lot.  Most of the time it looks like an iced-over K-Mart parking lot.  There’s oil there, but we can’t get to it.  Again .. blame the environmentalists. 

What about nuclear power plants?  Environmentalists again. 

Remember, for many of the so-called environmentalists, the goal isn’t protecting the environment.  The real goal is weakening America.  The environmental movement became the refuge-of-choice for socialists and communists who had nowhere else to go after the fall of the Soviet Union and the worldwide communist movement.  Here they found a movement they could use to further their goals of weakening capitalism and the American economy … and anyone who dares to challenge them is branded as a wicked capitalist who wants dirty air and water.

When you fill up your tanks for your trip to grandmas, remember to thank your friendly local environmentalist groups for their help.”

I can’t say it better myself.
That’s EXACTLY where the blame belongs. WHY are we still listening to these idiots? Boortz is more or less correct about refinery capacity issue as well; the last time we built a refinery in this country was 1976. Refiners can’t make a buck, because of the nonsense you have to go through to get one online… from NIBY to the enviro-wackos.

These enviro-wackos have brought us to the brink of national emergency… these people are weakening America. It’s that simple.

Boing Boing has pictures of a steam and ash event yesterday. Just so we’re up to date, here’s a live shot:

Here’s the link to the Volcano cam page

Update:Photos: Mount St. Helens awakens | CNET News.com“> CNet has some nice shots, too.

Remember that nonsense for the UN about how ‘Stingy” Americans are?

Chuck Simmons has been keeping track and offers an update of the figures.
Perhaps we should be pulling UN funding and sending it instead to Sunami Victims?

Here we go again.
Some security outfit in India has a server set up, and they’re encouraging peope to try to hack into it.

Cnet has the Details.

If I recall right, the last time someone made this kind of offer, about everyone on the planet gained control of the box in a reasonable amount of time… about three hours.

Boortz today notes that the President has nominated John Bolton to be the next Ambassador to the UN. Boortz notes that Bolton….

…led the charge against the International Criminal Court, referring to the day he withdrew the U.S. signature on the treaty as “the happiest moment of my government service.” So far, so good. Next, he is being criticized for traveling to South Korea and calling the communist gargoyle of the north, Kim Jong-Il a “tyrannical dictator” who made North Korea a “hellish nightmare.” That sounds about right to me!  I wonder why it upsets the Euro-wimps so much. 

Then there’s this quote, another zinger about the UN: “If the U.N. Secretariat Building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” Truer words have never been spoken. Sounds like just the man the United States needs representing us at the United Nations.

Bingo. It’s called ‘reality’, folks, and Bolton has a firm grip on it. Good on the President for nominating him.

Little Green Footballs points up a article in the leftist Independant which asks the question leftists hate; Was Bush Right After All?

That they can ask the question at all, means the answer is undeniably, “yes”.

Techdirt says Vonage had some trouble with it’s services recently, apparently owing to a software glitch.

Will someone please explain to me the attraction of this kind of service? Why on earth do I want to pay someone the kind of money Vonage demands to talk VOIP?  I mean, I can talk to the same people via a number of different freebie chat services, provided by any number of places… Yahoo, for example. Yes, you do need to install their chatter, but so too, in the case of Vonage.

Sorry, I don’t get it.

Q&O has a great thread going on this topic.

I will only point out the studied non-definition of entities in all this. This man seriously equivocates between the unilateral dictatorship of “representative” (you call it) politicians and the completely voluntary associations which I choose for their each-individual value to me, and he calls them all “society” in one great big ball.

Wrong answer, Billy. I figured you had it skewed. Looks like I was right.

Here it is; I do not now nor have I ever equated society with govermment. Rather, I have repeatedly called government a tool of the culture… by which the culture gets achives it’s goals. Do you understand the line being drawn, here… the difference between the two? Indeed, I keep pointing out where government has gone outside what is good for the culture… IE, the American Revolution is an example that keeps popping up in our threads)

I have always granted, indeed; trumpted, that government is a less than perfect tool.  But the rejection of all government, simply because it can at times (many times) be wrong is counter productive, in the end because it defeats the society which got us each as far as we’ve gotten, in, for example, what you call ” the completely voluntary associations which I choose for their each-individual value to me”.

Apparently, Billy, and Rich We need to be going over the basics again.

The bottom line here is you’re trying to sacrifice the society on the altar of militant individualism. TRrouble is our culural values, our society is in fact the best hope for the rights you seek.  In short, you’re attempting self-destruction.

Here it is; Rights are a cultural construct, and meaningless outside that construct. As I said in the article linked above: Rights are not universal.

When Jefferson wrote that “WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT” he was not speaking a universal truth at all. The operative word in that phrase is “WE”.

Rather than talking about a universal point of view, a universal truth, if you will, he was instead talking about the point of view of WE the new American culture. With this angle, many of the long-held myths about rights tend to disappear.

Consider; if it was in fact a universal truth that all men were created equal, it wouldn’t have been such a radical idea, for the time, much less then to now. Last I checked, it is quite true that a vast majority still do not consider these as any kind of truth, universal or otherwise; they consider them to be anything BUT self-evident. Royalty still exists, as do class structures, and slavery, as well.

Again, I say…Jefferson was speaking of the point of view of OUR culture, not that of others.

The fact of the matter is that RIGHTS ARE A CULTURAL CONCEPT, and are nigh on meaningless outside that construct.

Once the culture is allowed to fall either to the law, (or, in the case of anarchy, the lawless) ….even in an attempt to impose rights where they do not exist, what happens to real rights, which are a cultural concept?

They fail.
Forgive me, but I don’t see that as a particularly desirable outcome.