Great minds n'at.

Neo-neocon thinks there's three reasons why Newt may end up the Republican nominee.  I'm not sure of her #1 reason - I'm afraid that Romney may end up being the last man... er, politician... standing.*  As for #2 and #3, though, I think she's spot on, and (as usual) more eloquent than I could ever aspire to be:

(#2) He’s not afraid to confront Obama...

One of the many reasons so many Republicans are still angry at John McCain for the campaign he ran in 2008 was his almost palpable fear of criticizing Obama. Gingrich will have no such problem, and it’s because Gingrich is unlikable rather than despite that fact.

(#3) His skeletons have been out of the closet and rattling around for so long that they’ve almost turned to dust. 

* In which case I'm going to go out and sniff some eau de skunk to kill the smell of RINO and vote for Herr Mittenmeister.  Not that I think he's much better than Obama, really - just more survivable.  I see an eventual vote for Mitt as a vote for "both legs broken" instead of "knife through the heart".  I'd rather not have either one, thank you very much...

My Daily Crack

Linux boot time optimizations.

Mmmmmmmmmmmm good.

"Your name is in the mouth of others: be sure it has teeth."

I like free and open source software (yeah, there's a difference).  I like it as a developer.  I appreciate it as a user.  I love the price.  There are a number of reasons to appreciate the flexibility and power of the F/OSS model.

Project names, unfortunately, are not one of them.

There's a new peer-to-peer search engine project, called... YaCy.

Ya see what they did there? 

Sheesh.

(The title of this post, of course, is maxim 16).

"Please Hold, Your Call Is Important To Us. Not."

Penn State has apparently set up a new hotline for reporting abuse, the "Sexual Assault and Relationship Violence Hotline".  Good for them!  I mean, they only have over 90,000 students at 24 sites across the state - I'm sure that they have never had to deal with allegations of sexual assault and violence before, right?  Especially not any connected with their sports program!

*crickets*

If PSU was honest, the number would be 1-800-TELL-JOE, and result in a "This number is no longer in service" message.  Or maybe just infinite hold music.

Oh, no, wait - it's ESPN that has the infinite hold music.  My mistake.

So... Drop Me A Line

Apparently, President Obama made the coveted GQ "Least Influential People Alive" list this year.  So nice to see him finally get the recognition that he deserves after having to accept those "Man of the Year" and "Leader of the Year" consolation prizes from GQ in 2008 and 2009.

While Mr. Obama comes in at #25, I was unable to determine if that meant that GQ considered him to be the most influential, or the least influential, on the list.  In any case, it's a pretty stunning accomplishment.  Nobel to Nobody in three short years.

Well, stunning for those of us who didn't already see his complete lack of potential back in 2007.  Very hipster of me, I know, but... I knew that Obama was an incompetent political hack before knowing he was an incompetent political hack was cool.

Heck, according to GQ, even I have more influence than the President, the Speaker of the House, and major CNBC media personalities.  Combined.  If y'all have anything you'd like, you know, influenced, apparently I'm your man.  I'll look at publishing a rate sheet later this week.

Nothing To See Here...

Net oil imports in the US are at the lowest they've been in the last 16 years.

Shale oil production in North Dakota is booming - a six-fold increase in the last six years.

Completely unrelated, I'm sure.

For the Record...

Daniel Hannan across the pond at the Telegraph writes sets the record straight, and tells the Occupy protesters ten things we evil capitalists really think:

Chatting to some Occupy protesters this morning, I was struck by how wide of the mark were the beliefs they attributed to me as a Right-winger. In the interests of deeper understanding, here are ten things which – trust me – most of the Tory scum I hang around with think. Obviously, I don’t expect to turn my Leftie readers in a single post; still, they might get a clearer idea of what we actually believe.

Synchronicity

Former Soviet state unveils a statue commemorating a US president, while supposed US allies burn a US president in effigy.

A most excellent example of Quinn's First Law: Liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent.

Like White Shoes Before Memorial Day

The turkey has been carved, the potatoes mashed, the stuffing presented and all the various other accoutrements of a traditional Thanksgiving meal have been sliced, diced, and otherwise consumed.

When you awake from your tryptophan and carb induced stupor, feel free to stumble grogilly towards your CD player, iPod, or whatever, and crank up the Christmas tunes.

Everyone who's been listening to Christmas music already?  Tacky.

As for you, 3WS?  Yeah.  We'll be having words about your programming. Just as soon as I check with the Mandarin to see if he's still tinkering with that new orbital high-energy particle beam installation of his.

Illegal WHAT Now?

The Big Bear gets a rant on regarding things suspended.

Illegal things suspended.

Maybe it's just me, but the obvious solution would seem to be something like this.  Slap one up on the window behind your rear view mirror, and presto! - no more illegal danglies.

Er, suspendies.

Things.

On Pants

It took Kerchak almost two years to put his on.

This story arc is simply amazing.

Ah-yep.

Moe Lane notes:

You know, I’ve noticed that I’ve had to hope that “blindingly stupid incompetence” was the true reason for a lot of what the Obama White House has done recently…

I'm with ya, Moe...

But you've got to include the intangible benefits!

As I've mentioned earlier, for the past couple of years, I've been an election poll worker in my district.  For those who may not be aware of the details, this isn't a volunteer position. There is a time commitment  - training and, obviously, sitting around all day at the polls - so, in addition to the dubious pleasure of acting as a civil servant for a day, there is also an element of purely financial remuneration involved.

I'm both unsurprised and amused to note that, given the amount of time I spent at the polls this year, said compensation in my county ends up being just slightly less than the Federal minimum wage.

"One does not simply walk into Tampa."

The Lieutenant of the Tower of Barad-dur she was, and her name is remembered in no tale; for she herself had forgotten it, and she said: “I am the Mouth of Romney. . ."

Yet another reason to dislike the oatmeal candidate.  Bland and slimy.

Bland, insipid, uninspiring...

... all synonyms for Mitt Romney.  In a comment seen over on Althouse:

The underwhelmingness of Mitt Romney is a wonder to behold.

Indeed.  Oatmeal, anyone?

horn->toot();

Ahem.

I happen to be one of the folks who helped build the FXT 3500 from Avere Systems.

Which is - as of today - sitting pretty at the top of the SPEC NFS benchmarks, clocking in at 1.56 million ops/sec with a 0.99 ms overall response time.  Oh, and with half the hardware - and at half the cost - of the previous two record holders.

Faster, better, cheaper... choose any three.

/me does his happy dance :-)

Ahem.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled political ranting...

Printer Drivers

Hey, HP?  I'm willing to leave my current job and take over your printer software division.  I may be the first VP of yours that has to list tar & feathers as a monthly budgetary requirement, though.  At least until I can get y'all straightened out.

See, you supply printers.  Which are devices for taking ink, and applying it to paper.  For the vast majority of your customers, you are not - I repeat, not - in the business of supplying printing experiences.  I'd suspect that at least 90% of your customers would describe a "printing experience" as something in the vicinity of "When I tell it to print, it prints.  At which point I can get on with my life."

I'm just sayin'.

Go ahead, give me a holler.  I have quite reasonable rates.  Aside from the tar & feathers, that is.

Quaker Oats, Cream of Wheat, Or...

Herman or Newt?

The way things are starting to shake out in the Republican primaries, it's starting to look like that's the choice we're going to be presented with, unless Perry suddenly learns how to talk on national TV. Both Cain and Gingrich have their personal flaws, but as Scott M. points out over at American Digest:

You can't pick a candidate that will preempt liberal smears, so pick a candidate that will fight and win. Romney isn't electable. Romney is the man that lost to the man that lost to Obama. Conservatives are so afraid of a fight they hope to find a candidate that hits all the check marks so nobody will attack him. The desire for a candidate the libs can't attack should be proof your worldview is dysfunctional.

Emphasis mine.  I'd agree with this evaluation of Romney.  Erik Erickson recently opined that if Mitt wins the Republican nomination, conservatism dies and Barack Obama wins:

Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee. And his general election campaign will be an utter disaster for conservatives as he takes the GOP down with him and burns up what it means to be a conservative in the process.

By any measure, nominating Romney is the "safe" option.  He's got steady numbers, after all - one in four Republicans support him!  And the rest, we're promised, will hold their noses and support him, too, because compared to our current train wreck of an administration and incompetent-in-chief, he'd be a marginally better choice!  Yay, Mitt!

In other words, he's political oatmeal.  Bland, tasteless, and what all the Grown Ups (TM) insist you should choose because it's good for you.

I... hate... oatmeal.

Insanity is often defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  Mitt's just the same old soggy bowl of oats.  He's being peddled in a marginally attractive package in the hopes you'll think he's somehow different from all the bowls of mush you've choked down in the past.

No thank you.

There's still some time to go.  Miracles do happen, after all.  We could end up with a dark horse, come-from-behind front runner that is the perfect, personable, unsmearable conservative candidate we can all support.  I'd argue that expecting that to happen is just a slightly different form of insanity, though.

So... realistically.  Who's it going to be, folks?  Herman, or Newt?

Or are you going to be good boys and girls and eat your yummy, yummy Romney brand oatmeal?

Wiki Games

Via dustbury:

Go to your browser’s address bar and start typing en.wikipedia and report the five top results.

Hmmm.  Easy enough.  My five:

• Susan B. Anthony
• DCE/RPC
• Pittsburgh Mills
• Rifts (role-playing game)
• Burned (Hopkins novel)

I leave the presumed connections between these topics to your fevered imagination.

Election Observations, 2011

Just got back from working the polls for our local election.  Out of 15 hours (from prep to cleanup), it feels like 13 of those were on my feet.  Urgh.  Some anecdotal observations from southwestern PA:

• Turnout was about 26%.  Not great, but not particularly un-spetacular, either.  It was more or less what is expected for a local election.
• Democrats were generally winning, with most (minor) races falling into a 55%-45% margin.
• Which is a bit surprising, in that the precinct registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 4:1, as far as I can tell.
• Given that we had the same number of straight-ticket voters for the Democrats and Republicans, and that the races weren't obviously horrible blowouts in favor of the Democrats, I'm going to guess that Republicans were more motivated than Democrats, and so more likely to vote.
• An alternative explanation is that, for some unfathomable reason, a lot of Democrats decided that they were going to vote Republican.
• There were a number of folks who asked for help with a comment along the lines of "I don't care about (some random race), they told me who to vote for."  This was always the older voters.
• Speaking of which, the average age of voters was... uhm.  In the 60+ area, I'd guess.  The ratio of retired to otherwise was very high, and the number of obviously under 30 voters was very, very low.   We had a sum total of two (2) children accompanying parents today.

The last lead me to some interesting thinking.  What was the age of radical liberalism in the US?  Right - the 1960's.  So say you're 20 years old in the mid-1960s, and those years have left their mark on you.  You're a liberal, by George, and - while you may have some qualms about who you've been asked to vote for, here and there - you know, deep down, that "liberal" means "Democrat".

Fast forward to 2011.  You were 20 in 1966, so now you're... wait, what?

Seventy five.

Those old people who were willing to vote for whoever "they" told them to vote for?  They're the children of the 60s.  Flower power, all we are saying is give peace a chance, hey hey ho ho, western civ has got to go.

Yeah... they're old now.

And by old, I mean dying.

Which brings me to OWS.

I'm starting to look at OWS and wonder if it's real purpose is to help raise up another generation of voters who were convinced that "compassionate == liberal == Democrat".  If they can mobilize some voters, or get some safe issues into the headlines, fine... but the real motivation is to re-create enough of the basic elements of 1960s counter-culture to grow a new generation of hardcore Democratic voters, since the old crop is starting to get a bit manky, if you know what I mean.

All right, enough random thoughts.  Time to relax.

What was the title of that Al Franken book again?

I've seen this photo of Susan B. Anthony showing up on Facebook recently, along with various messages of support for a woman's right to choose (to kill her unborn child, just in case you were wondering which choice we were talking about here).  Said "right" is one which a particular major political party endorses whole-heartedly, while another major political party generally does not.

The obvious implication is that, like Ms. Anothony, all Right Thinking (TM) people will choose the proper political party.  You know, the one Susan B. would have chosen - the Democrat party.

Except...

At the time the photo was taken, Susan B. Anthony - abolitionist, temperance movement activist, and women's suffrage activist - had found her home in the Republican party.  When she was arrested in 1872 for voting in the Presidential election, she reported that she had "positively voted the Republican ticket—straight..."  She apparently campaigned for Republican candidates who supported her ideals, at least until she became disillusioned with political parties in general later in life.

Even more signifiant is that fact that her position on abortion was... well, let's be charitable - inconsistent with the message that people are trying to use her name to endorse:

In her writings, Susan B. Anthony occasionally mentioned abortion. Susan B. Anthony opposed abortion which at the time was an unsafe medical procedure for women, endangering their health and life. She blamed men, laws and the "double standard" for driving women to abortion because they had no other options. ("When a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is a sign that, by education or circumstances, she has been greatly wronged." 1869) She believed, as did many of the feminists of her era, that only the achievement of women's equality and freedom would end the need for abortion. Anthony used her anti-abortion writings as yet another argument for women's rights.

Lies, half-truths, and deception.  Well, at least you've got to give the "progressive" left credit for being consistent.  Even if it is only consistently wrong, consistently misleading, and consistently on the side of death over life.

Aretae: "Where there is competition, there is no power. Where there is no competition, there is power."

Hmmm.  And if you can convince someone to cede power to you, for some reason... doesn't that logically result in a death of competition?  It seems like it would be so much easier to go that route, after all, especially in politics.  Skip the whole "getting everyone to agree" step, just jump straight to the grant of power with a "trust me, I know what I'm doing" and voilà! - goodbye competition.

I'm sure that's never happened, though.