Month: April 2007

Holland native, his security firm cash in on war

Security firm claims same rights as Army

(quote: “In court papers, Blackwater argues it cannot be held liable because it has become an irreplaceable part of the military and, as such, cannot be sued.”)

And for the morbidly curious:

Excerpts from Blackwater 61 cockpit recorder

And the consequences of that incident:

Plane Crash Leaves Anger, Questions

In the course of reading the story I learned that another of my classmates is Somebody Important now — state rep Bill Huizenga. He apparently worked for Pete Hoekstra — Hoekstra’s a buddy of Rick Santorum, and with him famous for revealing the discovery of the long-sought, fabled weapons of mass destruction in Iraq… and when American intelligence officials said that Hoekstra and Santorum were either wrong or lying, they retaliated by suggesting that the CIA must be full of Al Qaeda moles. McCarthy would be proud.

As far as I can remember, Bill, like Erik, was a perfectly nice, decent guy. Hate to see him keeping such shady company.

Because I hate myself or something, I got out my windows/linux laptop and upgraded it from “Edgy Eft” to “Feisty Fawn.”  X11 stopped working. Great.  Whatever.

I decided to give it the old “reinstall.”  See how the Feisty installer works.  Welllll…. I had some adventures there.  Always a challenge to get linux going on some wacky old laptop, you know?  I redid things that worked before and they worked again.  (Note to self: the secret code to tell it to use 1280×768 resolution in /boot/grub/menu.lst is ‘vga=797’.)

The thing that amazed me though is that I still had to do this to get sound working.   Was it only a year ago that I was messing with that?  It seems like forever.

Strange Domains Registered by the RNC- Not Just gwb43.com « Neomeme:

democratflipflops.com is particularly interesting, because it was registered in 2002, suggesting the Republican war machine for labeling Bush’s 2004 opponent a flip-flopper was working long before the election

I’m always surprised how many basically intelligent people bought the “Kerry’s a FLIP FLOPPER” stuff. People who voted for Bush in ’04 and can not defend that action in any other way anymore still justify in a “there was no good choice in ’04” way, invoking a vague handwaving dislike of Kerry and a mumbling of KarlRovian words like “flip-flopper.”

Those Republican strategists, they’re good at what they do to people’s brains.

Fred Fish – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia —
Passed away recently, creator of the beloved “Fish Disks” for the Amiga. He is now free of Guru Meditation Errors.

Think Progress » Rep. Rohrabacher: ‘I Hope It’s Your Families That Suffer’ From A Terrorist Attack:

At one point, Rohrabacher argued that imprisoning and torturing one innocent person was a fair price to pay for locking up 50 terrorists who would “go out and plant a bomb…and kill 20,000 people.” When members of the audience groaned, Rohrabacher said, “Well, I hope it’s your families, I hope it’s your families that suffer the consequences.”

I guess I’m glad one of them’s willing to come out and say what they’ve been doing, and advocating, all along.