Friday Morning Hodgepodge

Here’s a Friday hodge podge of updates.

Since Glen Beck is picking this weekend instead of the three day Labor Day weekend seven days later for his Teaparty rally you have to wonder if he’s not just targeting that day because its’ Martin Luther King day. With his John Birch Society leanings you also have to wonder where the heck he’s going to go with it, but I’m expecting more history rewrites and more obfuscation and redirection from the real principles in our constitution.

I’m beginning to wonder if the pols on the right aren’t just occasionally feeding tinder and funds to the Anti-mosque madness simply because it keeps the press focus off of their wingnuts and whackos, like Buck, Angle, Miller, and Rand. Long time readers here and at LGF know that the anti-mosque movement is imported by Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller from the far right Eurofascist parties, and I suspect that they will get re distanced a bit later after they stop becoming a useful distraction and turn into a dangerous one. Geller is particularly pernicious, with birtherism, support of neo nazis, eurofascists, and white supremacists in her background. (e.g. I’ve pointed out in the past without naming her blog how she picks up stories from Neo nazis, and I’ve detailed the fascist tendencies of Vlaams Belang and their friends that she supports in Europe. Here and Here. )

The election in Alaska is turning interesting, and that has to be a voter turn out thing — in the general Murkowski would heartily thump Miller, and I suspect that’s what will happen if she runs 3rd party. She still has a chance with the recount since the absentee ballots are likely to favor her and not miller.

The teaparty movement has served up a series of real whackjobs — viscerally many elder GOP conservatives want to agree with these candidates because of the anti government sentiment but when you start saying “What about your Social Security?” “What about your Medicare?” “What about your rights?” they sometimes start thinking…

Personal Update

Now that the weight restrictions are off my arms (previously I had serious potential to displace the split in my sternum with too much pressure across it.) I’m catching up on things long overdue at the house, including some yardwork. It feels good to be able to do productive work again and not have to rely on my wife to lift and carry. She was definitely a trooper throughout this ordeal and I do love her dearly for that support.

So far I’ve cleaned out the Smoker, installed a outdoor yard faucet , repaired a chandelier and Frankenputer, and jury rigged a tail light lens for my daughter who got her tail light capsule stolen. On the remainder of the leftovers list are installing two new bathroom faucets, repairing the humidifier before winter, and installing an outdoor electric outlet (I’m converting everything outside to electric from gas for yard work except the lawn tractor to cut down on personally generated carbon output. This doesn’t help a great deal yet since much of the power in Kansas is coal generated, but some comes across the power inter-tie from the zero carbon Wolf Creek facility. By time those items get done it will be time for grub pellets, fertilizer, and then leaf raking in the yard.

Meanwhile, Kasey says “It’s Friday! Have a great weekend! Don’t forget to visit the park with me either buddy, I’m tired of running the edge of this fence…”

Frankenputer lives Again

The new Motherboard worked, and the Frankenputer media monster now lives again, however I’m in process of reloading Windows 7 anyway since the BIOS and PS are different and I want to enable their advanced capabilities.

Update: all is reloaded and all is well with Frankenputer. My mondo backups are intact, the Netflix, youtube, Hulu, CBS, Mediaplayer, and etc. streaming connections are all set back up, my pictures, videos, and Itunes are all back in place. I’m loving life again…

To give you an idea why this is important my music+video+pics alone over runs an 80gig Ipod, and that media does not include the online streaming, the  Kindle books and PDFs, or the multitude of CD’s and DVD’s  that are laying about ready to play or import in Frankenputer’s DVD drive…

Frankenputer Chronicles III

In previous episodes you saw the genesis of Frankenputer, but in this one you find that he has died. That’s right, something is wrong with the server and it won’t even do a POST . That’s indicative of a power, memory, or bios/MB problem so … I swapped out the memory to eliminate one of those and I am now moving on to the power supply.

This seems reasonable to me since the PC has only a 400 watt supply, and I’m really going overkill on some of the peripherals. It’s got a GTX-260 GPU that takes two power leads, and I’m also driving two extra hard drives, a Wifi USB dongle, and a blue tooth USB dongle. [ Picture a wee Scottish engineer inside the Power Supply yelling “Cap’n! The power supply canna take it anymore! ]

I upgraded to a 600 watt PS, so all should be well after the replacement surgery is complete.

UPDATE: The power supply did not do it, so it’s something more serious, like BIOS or Motherboard. More to come…

That Mosque Problem

The new group to hate for bigots in the US is Muslims — you can see it all across the country, and if we end up with institutionalized and accepted hatred of Muslims as our norm then the terrorists on 9/11 won, because that is exactly what they want from the US. They seek a clash of civilizations, they want unending war and terror. Anyone who does not believe strictly as they do is Takfir, and either outcast or subject to death. It’s the same view that some of the US bigots have – they want to adopt the ways of Al Qaeda and cast out the impure, and they want to adopt the ways of Tyrants in the mideast and block religious freedoms in direct contravention of our constitution. Many of them pimp the dictums of Bin Laden and Zawahiri in the US better than either of those two terrorists do simply because they want to further that black and white “us and them” inevitable clash of civilizations worldview that Al Qaeda favors. It’s sheer idiocy.

The main proponents of the Clash of Civilizations in our country are a dark alliance of religious whackballs put together by Arch-Con Paul Weyrich* who are furthering the aims of an Orthodox pantheon of foreign lobbies from pan Hellenic and Pan Serbian states. The main goals of those lobbies are really European in nature, but they are the tail wagging the GOP elephant when it comes to religious freedoms and attitudes towards muslims. They are at root religious Eurofascist groups of extremely fundamentalist Orthodox Catholics and Melkites. The two most vocal bigots are Robert Spencer and Pam Geller, but they also have recent converts like Newt Gingrich, Romney, Huckabee, and Sarah Palin coming to their aid. (and when Gingrich recently converted to Catholicism he picked the flavor favored by both Weyrich and Spencer: Melkite)

The terrorists in Al Qaeda, their associated movements like Hamas, LeT, and their political groups like Hizb ut Tahrir and the Muslim Brotherhood are all Luddite fundamentalists who fear the modern world. Their terror is in direct opposition to modernity, and in direct opposition to the education, freedoms,  and social liberties they see leaking slowly into every one of their tyrannical countries. The lashback from the terrorists is out of fear, because they have zero paths to victory over the long haul. They will lose against modernity and there will be Islamic reform – there’s no such thing as a little freedom – once people taste it they demand more.

The fundamentalist axis of Orthodox lobbies are also religious luddites who fear modernity and social freedoms, and they are the same groups who attack Roms, Roman Catholic churches, and Synagogues in Eastern Europe, they are no more ally to the “West” than the people in The Black Hand were. So why on earth are we giving their swill countenance in the US?

John Stewart humorously lampoons the bigots cause, and in the US the best way to combat bigotry is too show the world how ridiculous they and their fears are.

* note that while Paul Weyrich was alive that he was highly adept at marshaling fringe single issue tribal nationalists, neo confederates, and other hate groups and melding them into alliances. Thus we have him as sponsor to several of these bigot groups, but now that he’s dead who holds the reins?