Just Pretend

Nothing has happened to change my conviction the world will change dramatically before Christmas. We won’t recognize it.
But let’s pretend for a moment my conspiracy theories about how it will change are all wrong. Let’s take away the one major variable of human choices, choices by some alleged global elite. Let’s further pretend all my [...]

Lessons in Propaganda: My Dog Tank

There is a popular tale making the email rounds. Among the various titles, I received it as “To Whoever Gets My Dog”. This is merely pro-war jingoist propaganda (not to mention bad grammar — try “Whomever” as in “To Whom”).
As far as anyone has tried to find, it’s not a true story. I won’t bother [...]

Willing Doormats

Somehow I doubt my personal experience is so very unique, if only because the salient parts were shared with large numbers of others. Every time I have worked within a government bureaucracy, there were several kinds of people I could easily catalogue one way or another:

the decent sort who just want to do their job
the [...]

OpenSUSE Wins One (Updated)

FreeBSD couldn’t cut it on my Pavilion after all. Once I got it all built from source and tried to run the X server, it refused to find a usable screen. Running the HAL/DBus service didn’t help at all. So I gave up and decided to try a desperate act: I tested openSUSE 10.3 GNOME [...]

Medical Break Dancing

Let’s break it on down. It has been said, “Everyone has a right to decent medical care.”
No. You cannot posit a positive right. Rights, by definition, are granted by God. Our world is fallen, and God has commanded certain things as restrictions on human behavior to prevent injustice. Justice does not permit one person any [...]

While We’re Waiting…

I understand the FDIC 2nd Quarterly Report for 2009 has been staged for release tomorrow. That in itself means nothing, since bureaucracy seldom operates optimally. However, given the situation, waiting until a Thursday may well be a low-level tactical move. We won’t know until it happens, but I counsel you to be cynical: Never underestimate [...]

Stumbling through the Mirror

There’s nothing like suddenly gaining insight into your own character, something hidden for many years.
It has long been my contention God called me to serve Him. At the time, the obvious meaning was to aim at pastoral ministry. That was back at age 16, and it was the first step of sanity out of a [...]

Welcome Back, Crater

Back when I first started learning Linux and BSD, I went through a series of cranky machines, mostly used in part or in whole. I began giving them names based on some previous theme I had back in the military, using names to suggest noises and such. My first real usable box was named thud. [...]

Your Next New Government

Okay, we have had a really bad time with that king and his minions in the assembly. Fat lot of good that thing was made His Majesty give up some power; he just got more people to agree with him about oppressing us. So let’s do away with inherited titles and such, and make the [...]

CentOS 5.3 and ath5k

For a time I ran Etch on my Inspiron 4100 because I kept having trouble with my wifi card on CentOS. While the Backports site offered a recent kernel for Etch, I missed the RedHat world very much. After doing some research, chasing different references, I found there was a solution. After reinstalling CentOS 5.3, [...]