It's official - ESPN blows

They fired TMQ. What a bunch of small-minded control freaks. I wonder if it ever occurs to anyone that firing everyone who says anything the least bit critical of individuals who happen to be Jewish is probably not the best way to convince the Judenhassen that Jews are not, in fact, running everything.

I'm done with ESPN. Half of Page 2 has already been converted to stupid Hollywood junk and whiny women complaining that they can't get dates because they know too much about sports. Right, that's probably it. They ought to just change the name to Page E-IX and have done with it. Let ESPN know what you think. I did.

Just one more reason to despise Disney. In truth, I believe this contemptible firing had more to do with Easterbrook daring to criticize Disney's chairman than it did with anything relating to Judaism.

Linux and Acrobat Reader

Acrobat Reader is a virtual necessity if you want to read PDF files, so I was surprised at the shoddy level of Linux support by Adobe. I fully expected it to be available via Red Carpet or the Redhat Update Agent, but barring that, I was anticipating an easy RPM installation at the very least. That proved not to be the case, as I got what proves to be a very normal error when trying to run it on Redhat 8:

$ acroread

Warning: charset "UTF-8" not supported, using "ISO8859-1".

Aborted

Fortunately, and this is one of the things I love about Linux, someone has come up with the solution. I can vouch for its efficacy, although the author, being a programmer no doubt, assumes that you will know how to use vi. (He does better than most, actually, in telling you how to start vi.) The thing to keep in mind is that vi requires going into Insert mode in order to make your changes, and then leaving it before you quit and save. It's a little bit like the old DOS Edit command, which was probably copied from vi or another UNIX command in the first place.

Anyhow, i will insert text at the cursor, so make your changes and then hit ESC to exit Insert mode. Then type ZZ to save and quit. You can start Acrobat Reader by going out to the terminal and typing acrobat. The interface is grey and ugly, but the PDF documents look good and everything works fine.

Old age and wisdom...

will overcome youth and skill. That was a favorite saying of the father of one of my best friends, who is very appropriately nicknamed Sly. After re-reading my last post, it occurred to me that another reason why challenging a man on the far side of the half-century does not seem unfair to me is that my sensei just turned 50 this year. He may not have the 17-inch biceps he had when I first met him, but I have no doubt that he can still wipe up the floor with me.

I remember the following exchange very clearly:

Sensei: You are fast. Faster than almost anyone I have ever seen.
Me: Then how come you always get in before I can?
Sensei: (smiles broadly) Because I know what you are going to do before you do it.

The ironic thing about this conversation was that he was paying this backhanded compliment while at the same time extending a hand to help me up from the floor after having dropped me with a rear-hand strike to the solar plexus. He was, and is, a deadly fighter. I once watched him absolutely destroy the 10th-ranked point fighter in the country - he could have easily been a champion if he did not disdain point fighting as a perversion of the art. His teaching was distinctive enough that when a friend and I visited another dojo while he was gone for a time, the instructor, a well-known Tang Soo Do champion, asked us if we were his students after only two rounds of sparring.

Waiting for Franken

The week ends, and still no response from Mr. Franken or his press agent. I suppose he's having too much fun heaping coals on a drug addict going into recovery to defend the manhood of the Democratic party. I was cranking up Creed on the way to the gym today and that, combined with the thought of going back into training mode, got me fired up to hit the weights hard. Topped out preacher curls with five reps at 120 today, which was the first time I've done that in a while. It felt so good that I'm thinking it might be time to get back with the whey protein.

A few people have emailed over the last two weeks to say that they think that it is unfair, or cowardly or somehow otherwise reprehensible to challenge a 51 year-old man. I disagree, as this argument entirely ignores the point that Mr. Franken himself was responsible for introducing the concept of adding a physical element to the political debate. No doubt after reading chapter 38 of Mr. Franken's new book, Rich Lowry was wishing he had taken Mr. Franken up on his challenge.

Second, I'll be perfectly happy to accept a challenge from any national media figure interested in a little banging after Mr. Franken responds in the affirmative to mine. What people don't realize about full-contact fighters - and street brawlers, for that matter - is that they are not confident because of what they can do to you. They are confident because they not only know what to expect if things don't go well, they know they can take it because they've experienced it before. I've been knocked out, I've had numerous bones broken and I've crawled across a concrete floor spitting blood while desperately trying to get air into my lungs. You see, I fully accept the possibility that Mr. Franken or another opponent might do a little damage here and there, but so what? It would hardly be the first time.

How can there be no media bias when they admit it?

Just wondering... first the Los Angeles Times copped to it - before demonstrating it in spades with the timely Schwarzenegger hit - and now NPR is fessing up as well, albeit in a more defensive, mealy-mouthed manner. Don't hold your breath waiting for anyone from the ABCNNBCBS* cabal to follow suit, though. Or the New York Times for that matter.

*CNN admitted they weren't doing their job in Iraq; they did not admit to their open left-liberal bias.

TMQ apologizes....

Along with Ralph Wiley and the Sports Guy, Tuesday Morning Quarterback is the best thing about ESPN's Page 2. TMQ, or Gregg Easterbrook, is also an editor of The New Republic, a left-liberal magazine of some regard. Although he did apologize for the way in which he felt he mangled his words, I don't really see that he had anything for which to do so and I'm glad to see that he's standing his ground on the substance, if not the style, of his remarks. Jews, no less than Christians, have a responsibility to answer to God for their actions and decisions, and I think it is eminently reasonable to question both Michael Eisner and Harvey Weinstein for their decision to inflict what is apparently a new low in movie-making violence on the American public. No executive - Christian, atheist or Jew - should be permitted to hide behind modern guilt over historical prejudices in an attempt to escape being held responsible for what appears to be another vicious assault on the values of our civilization.

The very notion that one needs to watch one's tongue about implying that Jews, as opposed to Christians or atheists, are inordinately interested in money several hundred years after the Catholic prohibition on usury was broken is ridiculous. Jews have far more serious problems these days, for example, the fact that the schools in many Muslim countries are teaching another generation of children to believe that one day the trees will cry "O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!" And while the Euro elite sneers in scorn, hoping secretly that someone else will finish the job their grandfathers started.

But that's just my opinion. As I've written before, the Jewish people, in addition to suffering the unwarranted hatred of the nations, have also been remarkably stupid at times with regards to their own self-preservation in the past. Why on earth would they be concerned now with the opinion of a Gregg Easterbrook, while Israeli leaders like Shimon Peres and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer are attempting to lead the Jewish people down the fatal path of Mordechai Rumkowski and Jacob Gens?

Suicide watch in Boston

Once again, as always, the Sports Guy does not disappoint. I am not a Yankees fan and I hate to revel in schadenfreude, but the Sports Guy without the familiar Red Sox albatross hanging around his neck would be like Abbott without Costello.

As a sports fan, sometimes you know when bad things are about to happen. You recognize the depressing signs because you've been there before. So maybe that's the real "curse," those moments when you turn into Haley Joel Osment in the Sixth Sense . . . only you aren't seeing dead people, you're seeing a dead ballgame. And when it's happening to thousands of fans all at once, the resulting collective karma kills your team.

(Does any of this make sense? Of course not. I'm completely insane. The Red Sox have driven me insane. It's official.)

Meanwhile, the Vikings are 5-0 and the governor of Minnesota has ordered guards to the border, with orders to shoot Sports Illustrated photographers on sight. Take no chances, Gov. Pawlenty. Everyone saw what happened when they put Jake Plummer on the cover.

You VILL update

I wrote on the need for Linux migration before reading an interview with Bill Gates which did not change my opinion one little bit. Do you want control over what is going on inside your own computer? Tough cookies, cowboy:

Microsoft is also going to make sure that people install firewalls and updates by default.... From now on, Microsoft will install these patches automatically.

Bill's claim that Windows gets patched quicker than Linux has also been vigorously contested, as one buglog posted recently showed that it took Microsoft, not the 24 or 40 hours as claimed by Bill, but 2000 hours, to patch a bug that cropped up in August.

When murder isn't murder

So it looks like the government courts, having decided that it's just fine to murder unborn babies, have now made the long-predicted next step of approving involuntary euthanasia by starving Terry Schiavo to death. And if you don't think depriving someone who can't feed herself is murder, then just don't feed an infant for a few months and see if you're charged with a crime - not that Dr. Peter Singer thinks there's anything wrong with that. Apparently it's been decided that we're to go the way of Holland, where the doctors of death have been creating their own mini-massacre behind closed doors for almost 20 years now:

Euthanasia in The Netherlands is "beyond effective control", according to a report which shows that one in five assisted suicides is without explicit consent. British opponents of assisted suicide say that the figures are a warning of the dangers of decriminalising euthanasia, as Holland did in 1984. By 1995 cases of euthanasia and assisted suicide in Holland had risen to almost 3 per cent of all deaths. The Dutch survey, reviewed in the Journal of Medical Ethics, looked at the figures for 1995 and found that as well as 3,600 authorized cases there were 900 others in which doctors had acted without explicit consent. A follow-up survey found that the main reason for not consulting patients was that they had dementia or were otherwise not competent.

Doesn't anyone else see that there is a connection between these cardinal beliefs of the American left and their globalist counterparts?

1. There are too many people: (environmentalism, overpopulation worries, etc.)
2. Abortion must remain legal. (kill the unborn)
3. Irresponsible homosexual behavior must be indulged. (kill the queers)
4. Suicide and involuntary euthanasia must be made legal. (kill the incompetent and the unfit)

It makes sense, of course. If there are too many people, then why not just kill off the weak, the sick and the unproductive. Think of it as intelligent evolution in action, plus, it would surely keep Social Security solvent for another decade or two. And eventually they'll get around to those pesky Jews, like they always do.

No names, no prisoners

Joe Farah, as he so often does, hits them hard and hits them where it hurts. He's absolutely right, too. If you care even a little bit about your kids, if you have any regard for them whatsoever, get them the (insert your favorite noun here) out of the public schools. Or, as they should more properly be called, the soulless, mind-killing, cog-in-the-machine-programming, government-run propaganda factories.

There's a reason why Hitler, Marx and Lenin were all big fans of the public school concept, after all.

Follow me to freedom

I just turned in next Monday's column, a passionate screed on OS migration. I considered holding off on it until the column was running in the Dallas Morning News, but then I decided that it was perhaps a bit too technophilic for the poor unsuspecting readers of the Dallas editorial page. At least WND's readers are used to me and my idiosyncracies by now.

A distinguished tradition of failure

I don't mean to sound cruel, but I have to admit that despite my near complete disinterest in baseball, I'm kind of glad that the Cubs lost. From an outsider's perspective, it would seem kind of a shame to cast aside such a long and distinguished record of failure. As for the Red Sox, the only question is whether the Sports Guy - may he live forever - would be more suicidal if they A) lost to the Yankees in Game 7 of the ALCS; or B) went on to the World Series and lost to the Marlins.

I'm going with (B). Florida is still an expansion team in the hearts and minds of baseball's purists. You'd think, as a Vikings fan who can still remember crying his eyes out when the Vikes lost their fourth Super Bowl to Oakland, I'd have more sympathy. But I don't.

By the way, did anyone else think it was funny that Tom Clancy matched up the Vikes against the Broncos in The Sum of All Terror? Of course, the joke has lost its punch now that Denver has two wins under their orange-and-blue belts. Tom, you know you should have gone with the Bills! I bet it still annoys him that he didn't.

Derb remembers Bruce Lee

John Derbyshire of National Review writes an interesting account of his brief clash with fame, when he appeared as a bit character in a Bruce Lee movie. I tend to agree with his opinion that Bruce Lee and jeet koon do were basically one and the same; it's not a fighting style so much as it's the way a uniquely talented fighter fought. You can train one hundred fighters in exactly the same discipline, and they will still fight one hundred different ways.

Except, that is, for tae kwon do. Take one hundred tae kwon do fighters chosen at random, and not a one will know what to do with his hands or bother to guard his head.

Jew haters at State

There is simply no excuse for this intentional slight of Israel. Thanks to DG, who brought this State Department map of Saudi Arabia to my attention. Notice how State was able to find space for labeling the tiny little island of Bahrain, but somehow, they just couldn't fit the six letters that make up the name of the only Jewish country in the vicinity on the map.

I am not Jewish. I am not particularly fond of Jewish culture. I dislike the quasi-socialism that has made up Israeli government policy for the entirety of its existence. But I have nothing but contempt for the Arabists at State, who would like to help their murderous proxies finish what the National Socialists started by wiping out what they consider to be a "s----- little country".

There has got to be a spiritual component to this irrational, illogical Jew hatred. There's simply no other credible explanation for two millenia of rabid cross-cultural antipathy.

Palestinians killing Americans... again

I have never understood why the Palestinian murderocracy is permitted to play whack-a-Jew while the State Department cheers them on and lobbies for the PA to receive more financial support from the U.S. government. What really infuriates me, though, is that Arafat and his bloodthirsty gang are again being permitted to murder Americans with total impunity. Arafat has killed Americans before, and I have no doubt that he will do so in the future until President Bush finds a backbone and shows more resolve in shutting down the monster than did his predecessors: Clinton, Bush, Reagan, and Carter. You can't tell me that Arafat believes we're going to strike back, when we jump all over Israel every time they justifiably hit back at the poor, defenseless murderers. I have no doubt that later today we'll hear plenty of somber condemnations worded in the harshest possible terms. Whatever.

I have many doubts about the so-called War on Terror, but chief among them is this: if we are truly fighting against terror, why is the godfather of terror, the creator of modern terrorism, left in peace?

Voting for the New Blog showcase

Why not? Here's my three votes:

Father Joe's Corner...

Inspiration

NOVAK KNEW BETTER THAN TO BURN VALERIE PLAME

No harm, no foul

Blogspot was acting up for about two hours. I couldn't view it, either via the general Internet or from within Blogger itself, and while I could see and edit posts, I couldn't publish. At first, I assumed it was something I'd done - sign of an inveterate tinkerer's guilty conscience - but after checking out other blogs in the Blogosphere, I was relieved to discover that whatever it was wasn't of my making. Which would have been hard to credit anyhow, considering what a plain vanilla blog this is... and will remain. The text is king!

On the Redhat front, some fortunate poking around revealed this important message with regards to kernel upgrades and Linksys drivers:

A final note to remember. In the future, whenever you need to upgrade to a newer kernel, you'll also need to reinstall these drivers. These files are compiled specifically for your current kernel version/arch, so they won't work with upgrades. For this reason, I always check that driver site to see if a new set of drivers has been released before I upgrade to newer kernels.

In other words, don't trust your friendly neighborhood supertechnical stud programmer who guesses that the low-level changes are unlikely to mess with your PCMCIA drivers. Or rather, trust, but verify. Anyhow, I'll definitely wait for Saint Tim to get around to updating the kernel RPM before upgrading the kernel now.

Russian dolls and the monkey solution

Linux is not a digital paradise, as yet, but we're getting there. One of the biggest annoyances I've run into thus far is the package dependency problem. I wanted to download a newsreader, but XNews doesn't run under Linux, so I did a little research and learned that Pan is considered to be roughly equivalent to Agent, one of the more popular Windows newsreaders. Then, after downloading Pan's installation package, I learned that I needed eight other packages in order for it to install properly.

Fine, fair enough, since the new version of Pan is quite a bit newer than the Redhat 8.0 discs from which I installed Linux a while back. I downloaded five of the eight packages, installed two of them, and then learned that the third required two additional packages. Hmmm. So I downloaded those two, installed the first, and then learned that the second required an additional package. Grrrrrr. It was rather like a mixed drink: two-parts cracking open those increasingly smaller Russian dolls and one-part fighting the Hydra sans a fiery brand for the regenerating stumps.

At that point, I gave up, assuming that there had to be a better way. Sure enough, there was. Ximian's Red Carpet is a little like the Red Hat update agent, only it works a lot better. Not only did it have the Pan interdependencies worked out, downloaded and installed in minutes, but it also resolved a package interdependency issue that had caused the Red Hat update agent to throw in the towel. Very impressive! So much so that I went ahead and upgraded Ximian Evolution, the email program I'm using, without even bothering to read the new features list. Good on ya, Monkey Men.

Unfortunately, Evolution Pilot doesn't seem to recognize my Dana. But my list of Windows-necessary functions is now down to three. Adieu, sweet Bill....

Waiting for Mr. Franken

I still haven't heard a response from Al Franken, the great champion of Democratic Party manhood. I assume he's simply been tied up with his book tour, but in case he somehow missed seeing the column in which I posed a challenge to him, I decided to send the following email to his press agent.

Dear Mr. Franken,

I'm a little disappointed that I have not heard from you as yet. Perhaps this column did not happen to come to your attention, in which case I am rectifying matters by sending this to you here. I should also like to interview you, either pre- or post-incontro della contesa.

Very best regards,
Vox Day
Universal Press Syndicate

I hope he'll get in touch with me soon. I was also interested to see that Rich Lowry has finally addressed the question of Mr. Franken's slur on his character, although I'm disappointed that Mr. Lowry seems content to contest the matter on the field of words, not combat. My profile is quite a bit lower than the editor of the National Review, but I still feel that it's a real pity Mr. Franken did not address his original challenge to me. I would have been happy to take him up on it.

Anyhow, Mr. Franken, I eagerly await your response.

Donovan McNabb, Superstar

16/30 157 5.23 1 2
11/26 126 4.85 1 0

That's Donovan McNabb's performance since the affaire d'Limbaugh, which has mysteriously inspired a panoply of headlines crowing that the quarterback was not only not overrated, but was back in a big way as proved by the Eagles' win over the Redskins. Right, a 48 percent completion ratio to go with an average of 1 TD and 1 INT per game is really stellar, gentlemen. Of course, a lot of these jokers who purport to be sportswriters picked the Eagles to run away with the NFC East, which now looks like this:

4-1 Dallas
3-3 Washington
2-3 New York
2-3 Philadelphia

Looking at that sparks one big thought - dang, but the Big Tuna can coach! The Eagles are by no means out of it, as yet, but a loss to New York next week would make it very, very difficult for them to reclaim the division title if Dallas beats Detroit as expected. Look, Donovan is a decent quarterback, but he's inaccurate and is looking less and less likely to be a top QB over the next few years. I wouldn't have dumped James Thrash earlier in favor of picking up Andre Johnson and keeping the faith with superpsycho David Boston - which won me a big game last week - if I had any faith in Donovan's ability to get him the ball in the end zone.

If you want a black quarterback to talk up and cheer, there's one in Minnesota worthy of high regard. Welcome back, Mr. Culpepper!