Peenie Wallie

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June 30, 2005

Cracking DC's Gun Ban

Alphecca, a "gay gun nut in Vermont" with "opinions about all sorts of stuff he knows nothing about" is quoting a story from Reuters about a crack in DC's rigid gun control laws. This is something that he seems to know something about, however. DC's strict gun ban are in direct violation of the 2nd amendment.

Currently, rifles and shotguns and handguns registered before the 1976 ban may be kept in District homes only if they are unloaded, disassembled and stored in a locked cabinet.

Indiana Republican Rep. Mark Souder submitted a bill to the House of Representatives that would roll back the handgun ban and registration requirements for ammunition and would decriminalize possession of unregistered weapons. Souder argued that weapons that are disassembled, unloaded, and locked, are useless for self-defense. His amendment prohibits the city from enforcing this law with federal funds.

"I believe the constitutional right to bear arms supersedes local authority," Souder said in favor of his amendment. This statement is intuitively obvious to the casual observer. If the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights can be supercede by local authority, then they are meaningless. If a county or municipality can rule agains free speech, right to bear arms, or right to peacably assemble, then these rights are meaningless and the entire constitution is a farce. Obviously, our founding fathers meant that the Bill of Rights enumerated very basic fundamental rights of the citizens. I won't even go into the 9th amendment and how SCOTUS has eviscerated that amendment.

His bill passed today by a margin of 259 to 161. Now, on to the senate. :)

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 30, 2005 at 10:31 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Hollywood, WIPO, MPAA, RIAA and the other Rapscallions and Scallywags

Who do you think sued to stop construction of the Golden Gate Bridge? If you guessed the ferries, you're right. The automobile ferries sued because it would make their service obsolete overnight. People would still be able to get to work every day, they just wouldn’t have to wait on the ferry any more. The ferries, predictably, wanted a cut of the bridge revenue, and we wisely said “get lost�.

So, that’s basically what we’re faced with today in the movie and music industry. The people who will lose, now that the genie is out of the bottle, is Hollywood, the MPAA, the WIPO, and the RIAA. And to them, I say, good riddance. They're just middlemen between the artist and the consumer anyway. Raping both parties for the benefit of neither.

Some claim that the intellectual piracy has to be addressed in some manner or we all lose. But, I'm not clear that this is the case.

Continue reading "Hollywood, WIPO, MPAA, RIAA and the other Rapscallions and Scallywags"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 30, 2005 at 4:55 PM : Comments (3) | Permalink

Ed Hathcock schools Romulus in Eminent Domain

Michigan is the poster child for the decaying Midwest Rust Belt of the post-industrial revolution. A noir state, punctuated by urban blight and genetic refuse, the detritus of the waves of people that fled the state when the Big 3 collapsed, leaving tens of thousands of vacant houses in their wake. With no buyers, entire subdivisions were left to atrophy and revert to native grasslands. Pheasant and deer took over the neighborhoods and the criminals took over the city. At night, in Detroit, even the police are afraid to stop at the red lights.

Romulus is a Wayne County city perched on the edge of Detroit. Most people know Romulus as the home of the Detroit/Wayne County Airport(DTW). But to me, Romulus is more than that. In a state widely panned as a modern dystopia, Romulus stands apart as a crime-infested chanchre; a criminal panacea.

In 1995, two IRS agents got into a fatal shoot-out with each other in Romulus. The same year, a customer killed an employee at the Rally's drivethrough in Romulus because she put pickles on his hamburger. It's a tough city.

Continue reading "Ed Hathcock schools Romulus in Eminent Domain"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 30, 2005 at 1:59 AM : Comments (1) | Permalink

June 28, 2005

Come and take them.

The notorious supreme court ruling handed down this week in Kelo vs. New London demoted every man from citizen to serf. The ruling redefines homeowners as transient squatters. Under the new ruling, the cities will view homeowners as revenue theives, condemn their homes, bulldoze them, and award the property to commercial developers.

In 480 B.C., the Persian Emporer Xerxes took 600,000 of the fiercest fighting troops in the world to conquer and invade Greece. As the Greeks retreated to the South, they needed time to regroup and strengthen their Navy. The Spartan General-King Leonidas, his 300 personal bodyguards and a handful of Thebans and others volunteered to hold back Xerxes's troops as long as possible, while the main Greek army retreated to the South. They chose to make their defiant, suicidal stand at the narrow pass of Thermoplyae. When Xerxes offered to spare their lives if they would lay down their arms, Leonidas shouted these two words back. Molon Labe! (mo-lone lah-veh) They mean, “Come and get them!� They made their stand at Thermopylae, and they all died to the last man. Today, a plaque at the site commemorates the event. It reads: "Go tell the Spartans, travelers passing by, that here, obedient to their laws we lie."

So, we say to the Supreme Court Justices: Come and take them.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 28, 2005 at 9:49 PM | Permalink

Trackback Spam

I'm getting enough trackback spam now, that I've finally decided to do something about it. I'm going to try to get Jay Allen's Movable Type Blacklist working to see if it helps. He also a place where you can report trackback spam, which I will do as well. Anything to stop these weasels. After all, as Bayosphere notes, their motivation is greed, and I think we all know how despicable it is to want to accumulate wealth.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 28, 2005 at 4:06 PM | Permalink

Justice Souter's house condemned by eminent domain?

Those that live by the sword, die by the sword. Justice David Souter sided with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, and John Paul Stevens in the landmark case allowing governments to use the 5th amendment's "eminent domain" for public use by private developers. This ludicrous decision in Kelo vs. New London allows governments to confiscate citizen's property for any project they believe will generate more tax revenue.

According to his Freestar Media web site:

"On Monday June 27, Logan Darrow Clements, faxed a request to Chip Meany the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare, New Hampshire seeking to start the application process to build a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road. This is the present location of Mr. Souter's home.

"Clements, CEO of Freestar Media, LLC, points out that the City of Weare will certainly gain greater tax revenue and economic benefits with a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road than allowing Mr. Souter to own the land.

"This is not a prank" said Clements, "The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development."

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 28, 2005 at 1:51 PM | Permalink

June 27, 2005

Freed Baghdad hostage stalks kidnappers

This is almost too good to be true. Swede Ulf Hjertstrom was kidnapped and held captive in Baghdad for several weeks by terrorists. He was released by his kidnappers on May 30, and has now invested approximately $50,000 to pay bounty hunters to stalk down and murder his kidnappers. Classic.

Meanwhile, in a related story, this other hostage named Douglas Wood was held captive with the Swede by the same lunatics. When Wood was released, he called his kidnappers "a$$holes", which apparently upset the excruciatingly liberal Melbourne Age editor Andrew Jaspan. This Jaspan guy is the kind of weak-kneed, translucent liberal that could cause any country to unravel.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 27, 2005 at 10:51 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Al Queda Training Manual

Know thy enemy. Here's the complete text of the Al Queda training manual. Note that they specifically tell their recruits to claim that they were tortured if they are ever captured. Lesson 18 - Prisons and Detention Center states:

1. At the beginning of the trial, once more the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by State Security [investigators] before the judge.
2. Complain [to the court] of mistreatment while in prison.

So, it's not surprised that they claim they're being tortured at Gitmo. But there is a problem with following this logic, though. If they really were being tortured, we'd run the risk of ignoring some serious problems with our interrogators.

I don't know what's going on down at Gitmo, but not too many people do, as it's tucked away on the southeastern end of an island we're not even allowed to visit. Which is why I'm seriously considering driving down there to check it out.

Update: Uncorrelated has links to proof of abuse at Gitmo.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 27, 2005 at 7:18 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Stop the insanity: Close the Oceans

CNN is reporting that two people have been attacked by sharks in Florida this week. How many more people have to die before we close the oceans? Today, anyone can legally wade into the ocean and tempt fate. There is no cooling off period. No age limit. No certification required. It is perfectly legal for any child, of any age, with no experience at all, to wade into the ocean. In a country where it's illegal to tear tags off of polyester pillows, it's perfectly legal for an infant to wade into waters known to be infested with man-eating sharks, sting rays, and Portuguese man-of-wars.

And what states pose the greatest danger? Not Kansas. In Kansas, no one has ever been killed by a shark. Nor has anyone ever been attacked by a shark in Nebraska. Or North Dakota. As it turns out, sharks have only attacked people in states that spend money directly marketing their coasts to tourists. In a brash display of remorseless greed, these contemptible states are peddling death, knowing full-well that people die every year in the oceans. Men. Women. Even young children.

Of all the states in the union, Florida has the worse record for shark attacks. In 2003, Florida had the largest number of shark attacks worldwide, with 30. There were 12 attacks off the coast of Florida last year.

And why do Florida and other states, allow this massacre to continue? Greed. Florida earns billions of dollars each year from tourism, and if a few of them enter the food chain while they're swimming or surfing, then that's just too bad. Florida's Tourism Industry is no less culpable than the murderous moguls of the tobacco industry or the despicable profiteers in the firearms industry.

The killing has to stop. How many more people have to die before we stop the insanity and close the oceans? Can't we at least have some common sense regulations around ocean-related deaths? Like an age limit on drowning deaths? Or a limit on the number of shark attacks per month? What sane person would allow their child to swim in the ocean, where countless people have drowned or been eaten alive? Can't we charge these irresponsible parents with reckless endangerment of a child? If we save the life of just one child, isn't it worth it?

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 27, 2005 at 3:46 PM : Comments (2) | Permalink

Gun Control and Orwellian surveillance backfire in Chicago

Pass a law banning handguns, confiscate 10,000 firearms, set up the most pervasive Orwellian surveillance system in the country, and feed the video into the Department of Homeland Security and what do you get? Chicago was rewarded for their efforts with nearly two dozen people shot across the city in 12 hours. Hmmm. Cities with the highest rates of gun crime (DC, New Orleans, Chicago) seem to have the strictest gun control and the most elaborate surveillance networks. Heavy drug users all smoked pot first, therefore pot is a gateway drug. So, following the same logic, all cities with gun control have the highest crime rate, could it be that gun control causes crime? Or does the logic only to drugs. I wish the MSM would explain to me how I'm supposed to interpret these basic facts. I hate to have to think for myself, as I'm apt to stray toward a politically incorrect decision. Any comments greatly appreciated.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 27, 2005 at 12:13 PM : Comments (2) | Permalink

June 26, 2005

Austin

I'm slowly converting my old slideshows from notoriously grainy Pinnacle Studio videos into the sharp Imagematics StillMotion PE Plus format. I shot these images in Austin, TX, in the Summer of 2003. Although these images are not new, this is the first time they've ever been assembled into a slideshow with decent resolution.

This slideshow is a 14 Meg self-playing executable named scientist.exe created using Imagematics StillMotion PE Plus. The soundtrack is Scientist by Coldplay. Click here to download the presentation. If you have an Apple, an iMac, or some other type of computer with training wheels, click here to download the Macromedia Flash version. Click here if you need help.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 26, 2005 at 10:42 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 25, 2005

Puddletown

I'm slowly converting my old slideshows from notoriously grainy Pinnacle Studio videos into the sharp Imagematics StillMotion PE Plus format. In the fall of 2003, I shot these images in Astoria, Eugene, Nehalem, Tillamook, and Portland(a.k.a. Puddletown, Stumptown, Bridgetown, Rivercity, etc). Although these images are not new, this is the first time they've ever been assembled into a slideshow with decent resolution.

This slideshow is a 13 Meg self-playing executable named clocks.exe created using Imagematics StillMotion PE Plus. The soundtrack is Clocks by Coldplay. Click here to download the presentation. If you have an Apple, an iMac, or some other type of computer with training wheels, click here to download the Macromedia Flash version. Click here if you need help.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 25, 2005 at 11:53 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Stumptown

I'm slowly converting my old slideshows from notoriously grainy Pinnacle Studio videos into the sharp Imagematics StillMotion PE Plus format. I shot these images in the fall of 2003, when I spent most of my time shooting homeless people and graffiti. Although these images are not new, this is the first time they've ever been assembled into a slideshow with decent resolution.

This slideshow is a 9 Meg self-playing executable named colorblind.exe created using Imagematics StillMotion PE Plus. The soundtrack is Colorblind by Counting Crows. Click here to download the presentation. If you have an Apple, an iMac, or some other type of computer with training wheels, click here to download the Macromedia Flash version. Click here if you need help.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 25, 2005 at 8:41 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

A gerbil in the microwave

Ever wonder what would happen if you put a gerbil in the microwave? Well wonder no more.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 25, 2005 at 3:30 PM : Comments (4) | Permalink

Serenity: Big Screen chases niche market

The internet and the blogs that arose from its primordial soup have eviscerated the news media, exposing the MSM as little more than a gypsy parade of half-wit charlatans. Unfortunately, the internet has done little to loosen Hollywood's cinematic chokehold on the shows that appear in the box office. If you've ever been to a decent Film Festival like Austin's SXSW(South By SouthWest) or Havana's Festival Internacional Del Nuevo Cine LatinoAmericano, you begin to realize that any originality and creativity is deftly liberated from the movies when they are ground, like sausages, through the Hollywood mill. The movies that emanate from Hollywood are as innocent of flavor as a grocery store tomato. But there is hope.

Continue reading "Serenity: Big Screen chases niche market"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 25, 2005 at 11:01 AM : Comments (2) | Permalink

Three Planet Race

This weekend, three planets will apear very close together just after sunset. To view the planets, go to a spot with a clear view of the western horizon just after sunset. Venus, the brightest planet, will appear first, followed shortly by Saturn and Mercury, both much fainter than Venus. All three planets will be an a portion of the sky about the size of the full moon. It's rare to see Mercury, as it's an interior planet, and therefore always appears close to the sun.

http://skyandtelescope.com/observing/article_1534_1.asp
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/WinnipegSun/News/2005/06/25/1103870-sun.html

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 25, 2005 at 10:30 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Fighting Eminent Domain

Zach Wendling at Uncorrelated suggests fighting eminent domain abuse with "environmental laws" and I think he may be on to something. I may start an endangered colony of Black tailed Prairie Dogs or Preble's Meadow Jumping Mice and have my land declared "critical habitat" for an endangered species. That should stop the land-rapers from building a Walmart over my little 3.5 acres of paradise. And, while we're on the subject, there's still another check-and-balance in play here that the Supreme Court didn't mention. Our founding fathers had the foresight to give us one final measure of retribution against the bureaucrats that steal our money and take our land. And I'll be you know what that is, don't you? Rest in peace, Marvin Heemeyer.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 25, 2005 at 5:03 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 24, 2005

Eminent Domain - The Supreme Court lays an egg

The Supreme Court of the land has spoken. In the case of Susette Kelo vs. The City of New London, Connecticut, the court ruled 5/4 that cities can legally use Eminent Domain to steal private property from citizens for the benefit of private developers. The Kelo decision is a classic case of judicial activism and legislating from the bench. It is a clear violation of the 9th Amendment, which guarantees unenumerate rights, like the right to own private property. This ruling is an abomination and a stain on our jurisprudence. Even for ajurisprudence has been systematicaly, endemicably, and irreparably marred and denigrated by judicial fiat and malfeasance, this decision stands head and shoulders above the rest. This flagrantly, extra-constitutional decision will serve to destroy the individual right to own private property guaranteed by the 9th amendment. It is a wreckless, destabilizing ruling by a group of mental dwarfs that treat the constitution as a "Living Document". Our founding fathers rose up because they were taxed a few cents on tea and paper. If they got so worked up over tax on tea, I can only imagine what they would do upon learning of this miscarriage of justice.

"It is literally true that the U.S. Supreme Court has entirely liberated itself from the text of the Constitution. We are free at last, free at last. There is no respect in which we are chained or bound by the text of the Constitution. All it takes is five hands." - Antonin Scalia

Continue reading "Eminent Domain - The Supreme Court lays an egg"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 24, 2005 at 9:09 PM : Comments (1) | Permalink

Flight Controllers at DFW have routinely covered up near collisions for 7 years

The genuises at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport have routinely failed to report near collisions between commercial airlines over the last seven years, according to information recently released the Office of Special Council, in independent government agency. Not that this should come as a surprise to anyone.

The Air Traffic Controllers routinely failed to report near collisions to the FAA, the FAA routinely ignores the NTSB safety recommendations, the NTSB has never held inquiries into the four 9/11 plane crashes, as they're legally required to, and the Department of Homeland Insecurity is poised to waste ten billion dollars on missile defense systems for commercial airlines.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 24, 2005 at 1:15 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 23, 2005

White Males - Are they actually gods?

When the anti-llectuals at the helm of the politically correct bandwagon gave the green light to vilify and demean the white male race with a lascivious, foaming tirade of epithets at the very people that made this country great, Fred Reed responded. He offers the following commentary on the endangered White Male, the most reviled organism to ever infect the planet.

Tell you what. I'm gonna get me about sixteen Dobermans with no judgment. Then, next time I see one of those chunky talk-show ladies with short hair blowing about what brigands white males are, and how we ought to dethrone them, I'm gonna get the Dobermans to eat her. Then I'll get their stomachs pumped, because I like dogs, and send them on a vacation to the Bahamas.

The other day I heard one of'em blathering about white males. (A chunky lady, not a Doberman.)[snip] I found myself wanting to say, "Now, listen here, Maple Syrup. You get up in the morning, maybe with the help of a forklift, and get food out of the refrigerator, which white men invented and you don't understand. (What's the compressor for? Did you know a refrigerator had a compressor?) Then you sit down to write your thoughts on a defenseless computer, which white men invented and you don't understand. (What's branch prediction on a floating-point pipeline? Name the three parts of a transistor?)

Next you to go to the studio in your car, which white men invented and you don't understand. (What are dual overhead cams? The difference between pre-ignition and detonation?) Finally you spew your wormwood and gall on television, which white men invented and you don't understand. (Where is closed-captioning encoded in an NTSC signal? I'll tell you: In the vertical-blanking interval. Now do you know?)

Hooboy, am I impressed, Sweet Potato. Yes ma'am. I sure enough see why we need to get rid of white males. How could anyone doubt it?

Read the whole article. Classic.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 23, 2005 at 4:28 PM : Comments (2) | Permalink

Coolest remote-control toy ever

http://www.putfile.com/media.php?n=HydroFoam

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 23, 2005 at 1:00 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 22, 2005

Learning Perl

I decided to lear Perl. I'm tired of staring at Perl scripts and wondering what they do. Larry Wall, the NASA rocket scientist that invented this cryptic language, should be carted off to Gitmo to have bamboo shoots driven under his fingernails. But, be that as it may, I've resigned myself to learn it. So far, I like this Perl tutorial. It's for beginners and that's what I'm after at this point. A simple introduction to a lanugage no sane person would use.

Continue reading "Learning Perl"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 22, 2005 at 7:03 PM : Comments (6) | Permalink

Lost Boy Scout found in Utah wilderness

Recently, a young Boy Scout about 12 years old went missing in the mountains west of Utah. Brennan Hawkins was last seen struggling to remove his climbing gear near a climbing wall about 200 yards from the family's campsite.

Thousands of people searched day and night on horses, all-terrain vehicles, and helicopters with infared sensors. The boy was found after spending 4 days alone, lost in the wilderness. After downing bottles of water and eating all the granola bars carried by a group of volunteer searchers, the boy asked to play a video game on one rescuer's cell phone.

So, he's a whiz with a cell-phone video game, but not so good at walking 200 yards back to camp. Hmmmm. Well, obviously the kid was traumatized, and I'm glad that he lived through the ordeal. Darwin gave him a pass on this go-round. But he made some critical mistakes, and, as a Boy Scout, he should have known better. If you think you know what he did wrong, take this Peenie Wallie Survival Test.

Please make sure that you tell your young children that, if they get lost, sit down, calm down, and stay put. These are basic survival skills. Running around the woods in a panic is what gets people killed. I took a Wilderness Survival course from Papa Bear Whitmore in Colorado. Seeing this kid on the news, made me remember the stories Papa Bear told us about grown men, lost in the mountains, that panicked and died miserable deaths.

You won’t see anyone lamenting Brennan's mistakes on the news. They’re just a bunch of talking heads trying to entertain us. They don’t know what to do outdoors. They’re just glad he’s home, as am I. But Brennan made some critical mistakes. Someone needs to talk to his Boy Scout Troop Leader and ask him what he’s teaching these kids.

If you want to know what to do when you find yourself lost, follow this advice. If you want your kids to grow up, you might want to tell them also.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 22, 2005 at 4:54 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 21, 2005

San Francisco Unleashed

I was browsing through some of my old frames of San Francisco and decided I could cobble together yet another pointless video. I shot most of these in the fall of 2004, before I broke away from shooting homless people and graffiti. (Aren't you thrilled?) Although these are all new, unreleased images, they're unedited, and fairly rough. (But you get what you pay for, right?)

This slideshow is a 24 Meg self-playing executable named speed.exe created using Imagematics StillMotion PE Plus. The soundtrack is Speed of Sound by Coldplay. Click here to download the presentation. If you have an Apple, an iMac, or some other type of computer with training wheels, click here to download the Macromedia Flash version. Click here if you need help.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 21, 2005 at 10:16 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

The Straight Dope on Crooked Cops

Reason's Hit and Run is highlighting some well documented problems with the so-called "War on Drugs". Last month, Norm Stamper, the head of Seattle's Police Department for six years, published Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing. Alternet has this excerpt:

Almost all of the major police corruption scandals of the last several decades have had their roots in drug enforcement. We've seen robbery, extortion, drug dealing, drug stealing, drug use, false arrests, perjury, throw-down guns, and murder. And these are the good guys?

Yikes. Where's the money the IRS stole from me to fund this fraudulent war on drugs? I want it back!

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 21, 2005 at 6:56 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

So much for the Sixth Amendment

Well, it seems the ends justify the means and "due process" goes out the window in yet another "politically correct" miscarriage of justice and prosecutorial malfeasance. The judges seem to ignore the constitution in their mad haste to get their thumbprints into the wet cement of jurisprudence. The Sixth Amendment was added to the bill of rights to correct a problem with long delays between the crime and the trial. Namely, deterioration of evidence, witness tampering, selective recall, etc. But now, in a the new McArthyism era of political correctness, the constitution is shredded in a fervent attempt to try people for murders that occurred over 40 years ago. Putting an 80 year old man in a wheelchair in prison for the rest of his life for a crime he allegedly committed over 40 years ago is a grotesque miscarriage of justice. An extralegal theatre of the absurd.

I have no idea if this guy is guilty or not. I really don't care. It doesn't enter into it. If we have laws, we should follow them, or we should change them. So, the question I have is, should we repeal the Sixth Amendment, or is that an unnecessary formality? Maybe we should just ignore it like we ignore all of our rights when we go to the airport.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 21, 2005 at 12:01 PM : Comments (2) | Permalink

48 hours to kill the 'Broadcast Flag'

Hollywood's pet agency, the FCC, couldn't get the job done. Hollywood wanted the FCC to completely take over your computer, your Tivo, DishPlayer, Radio, MP3 player, DVD burner, basically everything in your house that requires electricity except for the toaster, so that it would be impossible to copy songs, movies, tv shows, radio broadcasts, or any other form of media they could think of. Unfortunately, even though the FCC is so deep in the pockets of the companies they're supposed to be regulating(a textbook case of "agency capture"), they couldn't get the job done because the Supreme Court handed the FCC their walking papers about a month ago, saying that, no matter how thoroughly in debt they felt to the interests they were supposed to be regulating, they had, in fact, overstepped their legal authority by a considerable margin.

Now, it's widely rumored that the Media Moguls are going to do an end run around the FCC and shove the "Broadcast Flag" into a massive appropriations piece of pork that's scheduled to be voted on in this Thursday (June 23rd), according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation(EFF). Fortunately, the EFF has an Action Alert where you can just fill in your name and address, and it will email your appropriate resentatives automatically. It's simple. Just put in your name and address, customize the email message (if you choose to), and hit submit. It automatically looks up your representatives based on your zip code and sends them your little nasty-gram. Do it now, or you won't be able to record shows on your Tivo or VCR any more. This is no joke. Big Brother is at the gate.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 21, 2005 at 9:30 AM | Permalink

June 20, 2005

Configuring Windows XP, IIS, MySQL, Perl(WIMP) with Movable Type

• Set up your own Web Server using Windows XP and IIS
• Configuring Perl to run under XP and IIS
• Install Movable Type and MySQL under XP with IIS
• Upgrading Movable Type from 3.15 to 3.17 (Windows XP, IIS, MySQL, Perl)
• Setting Up Remote Desktop using Windows XP
• Troubleshooting Remote Desktop using Windows XP
• Removing Viruses and Spyware
• Add a Favicon to your website

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 20, 2005 at 10:28 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Upgrading Movable Type to 3.17 with XP, IIS, MySQL, and Perl (WIMP)

Tonight, I upgraded my website from Movable Type 3.15 to 3.17. I'm not really sure that I needed to, I just like to have the latest and greatest. I was hoping they would include some new functionality, but it still looks basically the same to me. I'm sure the differences will become clear to me later on, as I become more proficient with the application. In any event, here's my meticulous instructions on upgrading from Movable Type 3.15 to 3.17 using Windows XP Professional, Internet Information Services(IIS), MySQL, and Perl(WIMP). If you're running Linux, Apache Server, MySQL, and Perl(LAMP), the directions are pretty similar, just make sure you do a CHMOD on your Common Gateway Interface(CGI) scripts(.cgi) and set them to 755.


Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 20, 2005 at 9:58 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Stand by your man



Drudge is reporting that serial philanderer Bill Clinton is having another affair, not that you can blame him, since he has this waiting for him at home. Now that Slick Willie has been caught up in yet another torrid love affair, will Hillary stand by her man? You betcha. She doesn't care who he's nailing, so long as it doesn't suck her into a bitter, acrimonious divorce in the midst of her doomed presidential bid as the Socialist Party Candidate in 2008. The more discerning among you may notice that, in a pathetic attempt to cash in on Clinton's cachet as she begins her doomed presidential race, you won't see the word "Rodham" ever again. It's all Hillary Clinton from here on out. And, no, she won't win. All of us dumb hicks in Flyover Country will make sure of that. So Run, Hillary, Run!

Update: I'm not clear what the point is. I despise Hillary more ways than I can mention in this blog entry. Mostly, because she's a socialist, and the way she tried to ram socialized medicine down our collective throats. Thank the Lord she had her hat and walking papers handed to her in one fell swoop. In any event, this person (who makes me want to buy a razor for some reason) seems to think that white males in the South will vote for Hillary. Delusional. I doubt Hillary's husband would vote for that tyrant. Her blog is called Hillary Now, but I strongly prefer and advocate Blogs Against Hillary.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 20, 2005 at 1:00 PM : Comments (1) | Permalink

June 19, 2005

Happy Father's Day



For Father's Day, Jennifer wanted a week-long unsupervised vacation at Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch in California. At first, I have to admit I was somewhat hesitant, because, after all, Michael Jackson sleeps in a hyperbaric chamber, has a pet monkey, and a pet giraffe, bleached and butchered his face, with chin implants and countless nose jobs, sleeps with boys in his bed, and has been accused of multiple counts of sodomy and molestation against children. But then I thought - Wait a minute. A jury of his peers found him "Not Guilty". So, he must not be guilty. Besides, who am I to cast judgement on others? I once kept a library book two weeks past due. So, it's not like I'm perfect either. Also, I can email her as much as I want using a free emailid provided by the Neverland ranch. Her emailid is victim_214389@neverland.com. I'll miss her, but I'm sure she'll have fun.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 19, 2005 at 1:39 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 18, 2005

Video of amusement park swing malfunction

This is crazy. Looks really painful.
http://www.collegehumor.com/?movie_id=161125


Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 18, 2005 at 10:42 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Driving to Gitmo



Senator Durbin (Soc-IL) recently compared the actions of the U.S. guards at Gitmo to the actions of the Nazis, the Soviets running the Gulags, and Pol Pot's regime.

Durbin invoked Godwin's Law and I harbor little empathy for socialist worms like Durbin and his ilk. However, I have a problem with Gitmo. I have a problem with the way the "illegal combatants" are denied the rights afforded by the Geneva Convention, and the way citizens like Jose Padilla are incarcated indefinitely, without counsel, without a trial, without even being charged. I'm not saying Jose Padilla is a hero. I'm saying the cure may be worse than the disease.

And, although it's absurd to mention Gitmo in the same breath as the millions that our Soviet ally Stalin flushed into the Gulag Archipelago (by some estimates Stalin killed 60 million people), or the countless legions that were executed and dumped into mass graves in the Killing Fields by the notorious, U.S. backed leader Pol Pot and his minions after we carpet bombed that country causing an estimated 600,000 deaths.

I have posted extensively on the issue of the political status of the prisoners in Gitmo, their treatment, and the rumors of Camp 6. But, because it's so secretive down there, I've been toying with the idea of driving down to Gitmo to see what it's like for myself. Questions, concerns, comments? Post your thoughts in the comments section.

Update: David Kopel at the Volokh Conspiracy seems to get the gist of the situation, and compares the guards' actions to the British treatement of the IRA suspects in the 70's. Although it may not qualify as "torture", the actions of the guards at Gitmo may be cause for concern to some reasonable people, even though the people they're questioning are suspected terrorists.

Update: Uncorrelated and Andrew Sullivan, and The Shape of Days seem to understand the potential problems that Durbin was attempting to expound upon.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 18, 2005 at 9:12 PM : Comments (2) | Permalink

Vonage - Join the revolution

My phone company got all excited because I hadn't paid my bill for a few months, and decided to disconnect me. And let my old phone number run free. 303-697-8644 was released and was last seen floating through the ethereal, like a barnacle on the ocean's tides. I was told that they could connect me to "new accounts", and I could start all over, but I told them I wasn't interested. I don't use my home phone anyway, plus the fees are outrageous, so I wasn't anxious to jump into that line. Although our omniscient government set the phone companies up as monopolies, I now have a choice. I can use "Voice Over Internet Protocol" or "Voice Over IP" or "VOIP".

So, I checked with a few people and they assured me that Vonage VOIP would be simple to set up. Should take about 10-15 minutes at the most, and I'd be up and running with Vonage as my new phone company. I should have known better though, because, for me, nothing is ever easy. Especially if a computer is involved.

Continue reading "Vonage - Join the revolution"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 18, 2005 at 4:35 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 17, 2005

Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford

The commencement speech Steve Jobs gave at Stanford is truly inspriational. He rose from college dropout to baron of Silicon Valley. Jobs is the founder of Apple, NeXT, and Pixar.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 17, 2005 at 12:41 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 16, 2005

Repeal the 19th Amendment

There's been a lot of talk about repealing the 22nd Amendment, so that Bush can run again, but very little talk of repealing the 19th Amendment.

Women are more emotional than men, and tend to vote based on their emotions rather than logic. Granting women the right to vote has been the single greatest contributing factor to the rise of the welfare state in our country. So says the research paper by John Lott, Jr. and Larry Kenny of the prestigious John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago Law School.

This is an idea who's time has come. Let's get this country back on track by removing a majority of the liberal, emotional, uninformed voters in one fell swoop. Let's repeal the 19th Amendment and take this country back before it's too late.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 16, 2005 at 11:38 PM : Comments (14) | Permalink

Troubleshooting Remote Desktop for XP

I recently got Remote Desktop working so I could remotely manage my server at home. Needless to say, it was much harder than Microsoft would have you believe. You should make sure your Internet Connection Firewall(ICF) is set to allow exception for Remote Desktop on port 3389. (Start - Settings - Control Panel - Security Center - Windows Firewall. Turn the firewall on, and on the Exceptions tab, check the box next to Remote Desktop, click Edit, and verify it is set up for port 3389. Set up port forwarding in your router to allow TCP traffic on Port 3389. Microsoft recommends you run it through a VPN tunnel, but I'm not doing that. I could never get my VPN tunnel to work, so I'm using an RDP tunnel, and it works fine, except for the known Man-In-The-Middle(MITM) vulnerabilities.

In any event, I have had it working for about a month. Then, about a week ago, for some reason, it began to function sporadically. I kept getting the error message:

"The client could not establish a connection to the remote computer."

After some troubleshooting, I decided that, if I rebooted my server, it would allow me to connect once and only once. Then, once I disconnected, I could never reconnect, until the server was rebooted again. So, I searched the web for this problem, and this seems to be the closest to describing my problem. They claim it's caused by Webroot's Spysweeper, which I am running. They also mention that the error messages are logged in the Event Viewer.

I went to Start - Settings - Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Event Viewer, and, lo and behold, I found the error messages from the failed Terminal Services(RDP) connection attempts. However, the message seem somewhat cryptic.

"Terminal Server session creation failed. The relevant status code was 0xC0000037."

I searched for this error message and found this which also seems to describe my problem. Everyone is pointing the finger at Webroot's Spysweeper. This guy claims they have a fix, but I could never get it to work, so I just unistalled the garbage, and now my Remote Desktop works correctly. Spysweeper was pretty nice, but who needs the aggravation? Plus, it's rented software. You are buying an "annual license", then it expires after a year, and you have to renew your "lease". Freaking sucks.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 16, 2005 at 9:50 PM : Comments (3) | Permalink

Google site-ranking secrets revealed

Slashdot is covering the Buzzle story by Darren Yates that reveals previously secret details regarding google's search ranking logic. If you want to get your web site higher in Google's search listing, read this and memorize it.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 16, 2005 at 2:16 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 15, 2005

Theft of virtual property results in Meat Space murder

Slashdot is covering a story on The Guardian Gamesblog regarding a recent incident surrounding a theft of virtual proptery. In a Massively Multiplayer Online Game(MMOG), one player borrowed a virtual sword from another player in the game, and then went and pawned it on eBay for 480 pounds. In response, the original owner of the virtual sword went and killed the guy who stole it from him. And I don't mean he killed his character off in the game. He went and murdered the guy in cold blood. Probably an over-reaction, but it shines a light on the relatively obscure world of virtual property.

People are paying real dollars for virtual currency and virtual property. Big dollars. David Storey paid $26,500.00 for a virtual island in the game Project Entropia. Keep in mind that, this island, for all intents and purposes, doesn't exist. He'll never set foot on the island. No one ever will. It exists as a few 1's and 0's in the memory of some server on the left coast. I'm not saying it isn't worth $26,500.00. I just think it's pretty wild that people are paying real money for something so ephemeral and intangible.

Earlier this year, the news broke on the Virtual Sweatshops, where people work all day, playing a game on a computer, to accumulate virtual property in MMOG's. So, they play all day to find virtual gold, silver, swords, etc. inside of a video game, and then their booty is sold on eBay for a profit. The owner of the virtual sweatshop makes a profit, anyway. He pays his workers a small pittance, I'm sure.


Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 15, 2005 at 5:50 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

The sheep at the gate

The Volokh Conspiracy is covering Anne Applebaum who's covering Veronique de Rugy, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Veronique has correctly pointed out that the TSA and their Orwellian theatre of illegal searches has not made us any safer. Nice to know that others are capable of rational, objective analysis.

She doesn't even mention the fact that the searches are unconstitutional, or that the airports have become Kafkaesque Zones devoid of any constitutional protections. That, apparently, doesn't bother her. But, she is right that we are no safer, for all of their effort.

She calculates that "if 624 million passengers spend two hours each waiting in line, the aggregate opportunity cost incurred is roughly $32 billion per year." (Or 142,368 man-years squandered standing in line to be humiliated.) She approaches this from a financial angle, which is valid, though perhaps less alarming that when considered from the angle constitutional corrosion.

If it makes sense to disarm people when they fly, why not when they travel by rail? or by bus? Why not search people when they cross state lines? Are we just one terrorist bombing away from being searched when we go into a grocery store? A Wal-Mart? A church?

Searching and disarming a citizen does not make him safe. It makes him a serf. We will all still die one day. Nothing can change that. Stop frittering away our "inalienable" constitutional rights and demand the right to live and die as a free man.

Related post: 61st Anniversary of D-Day

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 15, 2005 at 12:55 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 14, 2005

More Airplane Videos

There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots.

F14 Supersonic Flyby between two ships at sea.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 14, 2005 at 8:35 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Funny Videos

Bunch of people falling down on slides.

Guy tries unsuccessfully to fend off amorous donkey.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 14, 2005 at 8:31 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Grafedia - Graffiti Unplugged



Slashdot is covering a story that CNN picked up off the wire from the AP about Grafedia, a new service started by John Geraci of that he bills as "hyperlinks for the urban landscape". Basically, people scrawl an email address onto the side of a building in blue paint, underline it, and then upload an image or sound file to associate with that email address. When a passing moron spots the blue underlined email address, you can send a text message to the email address, and will receive the attachment as a reply. So, it's a rudimentary attempt to create an anonymous bridge from cyberspace into meat space, which is desirable, and therefor, inevitable. John has some other neat projects which you can check out at his subfuzz website.

Although the idea is very interesting, I'm not clear that it's terribly practical. The better idea is to be able to upload text messages, so that you could download something more meaningful than a cell-phone screen short or a short WAV file.

Continue reading "Grafedia - Graffiti Unplugged"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 14, 2005 at 6:06 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Republican Gerbils

Yesterday, all seven baby gerbils were democrats. Blind and clueless, stumbling through their own excrement, pawing at the walls of the aquarium, like Howard Dean on acid. But today, a little black one named Jesse opened his eyes and became a Republican. They should all be Republicans by the end of the week, God willing and the river don't rise.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 14, 2005 at 5:59 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 13, 2005

Michael Jackson found guilty of butching his face

Michael Jackson was found guilty today of butchering his face with plastic surgery over the last few decades. Jackson started out as a young black male, and, after multiple horrific surgies, skin treatments, and colonics, transmogrified into a freak. A veritable walking poster for birth control. Click here to track the History of Michael Jackson's face.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 13, 2005 at 2:53 PM : Comments (3) | Permalink

Supreme Court ignores constitution, sets dangerous precedent

The Supreme Court justices declined to address whether American citizens arrested on U.S. soil can be designated "enemy combatants" and held without trial. By "declining to address" the issue, they implicitly condone it. (That which we don't condemn, we condone). I have a lot of respect for Michelle Malkin and the conservatives, but I'm on the other side of the fence on this one. Jose Padilla, the U.S. citizen charged with planning a dirty bomb radiological attack, has been held as an "enemy combatant" for years. He has never been charged with a crime. This is in clear violation of the U.S. constitution, and is a much greater threat to the citizens of the U.S. than Citizen Padilla ever could hope to be. I saw a bumpersticker shortly after 9/11 that said "They can take our lives, but they can't take our freedom." So, I guess we'll need to collect all those and put out a new expurgated version. Maybe we can just change it to say "America - We bravely traded our freedoms for the illusion of safety."

Update: Mark in Mexico thinks that they wanted to follow protocol and give the appeals court a chance to rule first, but that's not now I read this:

"But justices declined to address a separate issue: whether American citizens arrested on U.S. soil can be designated 'enemy combatants' and held without trial."


Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 13, 2005 at 1:56 PM : Comments (2) | Permalink

2,000 year-old seed from extinct date tree sprouts

Myopic Zeal is reporting that the original date palm of Judea, praised in the Bible and the Koran for its shade, food, beauty and medicinal qualities, was destroyed long ago by the crusaders. However, some 2,000 year old seeds were recovered from an excavation at Masada in the Judean Desert of Israel in the 1970's. The Masada is a cliff fortress where, in A.D. 73, 960 Jewish zealots died by their own hand, rather than surrender to a Roman assault. Recently, one of the 2,000 year old seeds, nicknamed Methuselah, was planted and has sprouted into a healthy, growing date tree. It's a foot tall so far, and growing. If it's a female date tree, then it should produce dates when it reaches maturity in 30 years.


Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 13, 2005 at 1:23 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Christina Aguilera music used as torture in Gitmo

Drudge is reporting that the man widely believed to be the 20th Hijacker, Mohammed al Qahtani, was tortured at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba by "dripping water on his head" and "playing Christina Aguilera music". Obviously, even a seasoned terrorist couldn't stand for this type of abuse. Eventually, he "tells his captors he wants to commit suicide and asks for a crayon to write a will."

However, although I support the U.S. military, and I don't doubt that this guy Mohammed al Qahtani, known as "Detainee 063" is a bad guy, my position is, and always has been, that these people should be treated as POW's and subject to the Geneva Convention. If the guy is guilty, give him a trial and convict him. If he isn't, let him go. If you wonder how to prevent another 9/11, here's a clue, stop disarming the passengers and allow them to defend themselves. Reinforce the cockpit doors so that people can't get into the cockpit, and then, if the terrorists want to bust a rod on a commercial airline, we'll let "Matt" and "Bubba" handle things.

Continue reading "Christina Aguilera music used as torture in Gitmo"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 13, 2005 at 10:21 AM : Comments (1) | Permalink

June 12, 2005

Nuke The Moon - Carl Sagan's diabolical work on Top Secret Project A119



Did Carl Sagan work on a secret project to nuke the moon in the 1950's? Apparently so, according to several reports that surfaced as the result of work on his post-humous biography. At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force was working on a top-secret plan to detonate an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile(ICBM) on the moon, in a dramatic show of force designed to intimidate the Soviet Union.

According to the top physicist that worked on the project, Dr. Leonard Reiffel, of the Armour Research Foundation, said "The Air Force wanted a mushroom cloud so large it would be visible on earth." Reiffel confirmed that it was "certainly technically feasible" and that an ICBM could have hit the moon with a margin of error of less than two miles.

This is one of the more bizarre plans hatched by our government, right up there with the Operation Northwoods and MK Ultra.

I originally saw the "Nuke The Moon" mantra on IMAO, which sells "Nuke The Moon" T-shirts and has a brief diatribe espousing the virtues of same, and assumed he'd come up with the idea on his own. Hat tip to Robert Racansky for pointing out that the government had, in fact, conspired to nuke the moon long before IMAO's existence.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 12, 2005 at 10:20 AM : Comments (2) | Permalink

June 11, 2005

7-11 Employee fired for preventing robbery

According to David Kopel of the Volokh Conspiracy, when a 7-11 employee was threatened at gunpoint, they pulled their own gun and held the would-be robber at bay until police arrived and arrested the criminal. As a result, 7-11 fired the employee. Fortunately, in Feliciano v. 7-Eleven, the West Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the employee had a right to self defense, which trumped the company's policy of not intervening to stop a robbery.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 11, 2005 at 5:47 PM : Comments (1) | Permalink

Install Movable Type and MySQL under XP with IIS

Movable Type is a web log (blog) software package from the company Six Apart that you can download for free. It can work with multiple databases, but I set mine up with the free, but fairly robust MySQL database with Perl scripts and IIS. It's somewhat difficult setting it up for Windows XP Pro and IIS though, as most true bit-heads would set up their shop using LAMP (Linux, Apache Web Server, MySQL, and Perl). But, my theory is:

1) I'm already am running Windows XP Pro, and it's working fine for me (if it ain't broke don't fix it) and
2) Internet Information Services(IIS) is shipped with XP Pro, so it's basically free (no additional cost, anyway)

So, instead of using LAMP, I guess I'm using WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySQL, and Perl). Here's the notes I made when I installed IIS under Windows XP Pro last year. Then, after IIS is working, here are the notes I compiled from installing the Movable Type blog software and MySQL on a system running Windows XP, IIS, and Perl.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 11, 2005 at 11:44 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Missing Teenager Natalee Holloway was murdered in Aruba

One of three young suspects arrested Thursday in the investigation into the disappearance of an Alabama teenager has confessed to her murder, a senior police official said late Friday.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 11, 2005 at 1:35 AM : Comments (2) | Permalink

Promoting Your Blog

I found this link which details some blog promotion strategies. The thing I found that was interesting is the Pingomatic pinger, which pings multiple sites.

Continue reading "Promoting Your Blog"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 11, 2005 at 1:00 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 9, 2005

Rogers, Arkansas - Friday Night Fights

Rogers, Arkansas police are anxious to start prosecuting some teenagers for horsing around on Friday night. Apparently, someone's been watching Fight Club, as a bunch of high-school-aged kids got together and held some amateur boxing matches and some mud wresting matches. Fortunately for the bleating masses, the prosecuting attorney will dry to dream up some charges to be filed...just as soon as he gets back from vacation. Click here and scroll down to see the videos "VIDEO: Parents, community members react to 'Fight Night' video" and "VIDEO: Police seek organizers of 'Friday Night Fights' party, video".

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 9, 2005 at 9:50 PM : Comments (4) | Permalink

Police terrorize neighborhood

Police tried to crash a "Normal Rockwell" high school graduation party in Bathesda, Maryland. The cops asked permission to give breath alize tests to the teenagers, the matriarch of the party refused.

So, the cops staked out the party, parked at opposited ends of the street, and illegally stopped and breathalized everyone as they left, in direct violation of the 4th amendment. None of the teenagers tested positive for alcohol. They then ticketed every parked car in sight, including their neighbors that didn't even go to the party.

But, this should come as no suprise to regular readers of PeenWallie.com. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. You should see what the Morrison Police did to the owner of Tony Rigatoni's.

Continue reading "Police terrorize neighborhood"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 9, 2005 at 5:57 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 8, 2005

World's biggest computer hacker arrested

In an attempt prove that the U.S. was concealing evidence that we have been repeatedly visited by UFO's, an unemployed computer programmer allegedly hacked into 92 separate Pentagon and Nasa networks, causing damage estimated at a billion dollars.

Gary McKinnon, 39, known online as 'Solo' online, allegedly compromised extremely sensitive networks by searching for computers with known security vulnerabilities and by guessing a few simple passwords.

If he is successfully extradited to America, he will face computer crime charges in 14 states. If convicted on all counts, he could spend up to 70 years in federal "pound you in the ass" prison and be fined close to two million dollars.

U.S. Authorities spent nearly a million dollars tracking him down.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 8, 2005 at 12:43 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 7, 2005

Creepy Crawly Things

I was crawled tonight. But that's a good thing. :) My website was crawled by a googlebot spider. The spider in question was crawl-66-249-66-41.googlebot.com out of Mountain View, California. Apparently, this is a googlebot spider version 2.1. It's possible that they've crawled my site before and I just didn't notice. But, it is interesting to know that these programs are out there crawling through cyberspace, checking out links, and reporting back to ground control.



Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 7, 2005 at 11:27 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Seven Baby Gerbils - Day 9


Click on photo for larger image

The gerbils have changed a lot since Day 5. They sprouted a fine coat of hair on their backs, grew a lot (they're still very tiny though), and became more mobile. When Snuggles is on the nest, they nurse six at a time. When she leaves the nest, they tend to pile into a big gerbil hill, and doze in their nest of kleenex and aspen shavings. Occasionally, they'll stray from the nest, and they actually move around quite well now, but they can't see or hear, so they just walk into the walls until mom picks them up in her mouth and carries them back to the nest. She never lets them stay out long. She spends her days nursing, and chasing errant "pups", as they're called.

Continue reading "Seven Baby Gerbils - Day 9"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 7, 2005 at 9:09 PM : Comments (76) | Permalink

Set up your own Web Server using Windows XP and IIS

This is a document I cobbled together when I started hosting my own website about a year ago. It borrows heavily from the expertise of others. I attempt to give credit and links where appropriate. Some people have asked me about starting their own web server. I recommend paying someone else to host it remotely, instead of setting up your own web server for a variety of reasons:

• it's easier
• access to your website is faster (mine is slow because my pc is too far removed from the spine of the internet)
• they usually provide you with software/ftp uploading directions, etc.
• you usually have a free web page provided by your ISP anyway.
• you can turn your pc off at night
• you don't need to worry about losing all of your web site data (presumably the host is backing it up)

However, if you're not disuaded by the above logic, I have some notes you may find useful.

Continue reading "Set up your own Web Server using Windows XP and IIS"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 7, 2005 at 10:55 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

T-Shirt Hell

This T-Shirt Hell site is freaking hilarious. I saw a story on CNN about them. All the religious zealots were up in arms across the globe about a section of their website. He actually took down the section of the site titled Worse Than Hell because he received death threats. Well, apparently, Worse Than Hell is back up now. I'm not saying I think they're all funny, but I'm a big advocate of free speech, and, hey, who am I kidding? Some of them are pretty funny!

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 7, 2005 at 8:32 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 6, 2005

61st Anniversary of D-Day



Today is the 61st anniversary of D-Day, the invasion of mainland Western Europe at Normandy, France. Thousands of Allied soldiers died on the five landing beaches of Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha, and Utah, but Omaha is where they were really slaughtered. These brave, altruistic men ran headlong into machine gun nests, making the ultimate sacrifice so that we could be free. And how do we repay their memory? We're scared to get on an airplane and sit next to a stranger without trampling on their constitutional rights. They must be searched (violating 4th amendment), disarmed (violating 2nd amendment), muzzled (violating 1st amendment), identified and checked against a no-fly list (violating 9th amendment).

We used to laugh at how serfs in Germany and the Soviet Union had to show papers to the authorities when traveling domestically. Papers Please. Who's laughing now? Modern domestic air travel in the U.S. bears the hallmarks of a repressive regime.

If you think it makes sense to search people when they go into Disney World, a court room, or travel on planes, then why not search them on trains, buses, and light-rail? Why not search people when they cross state lines? Or go into a Wal-mart? Are we just one suicide bomber away from being searched when we go to the grocery store?

The Allied soldiers died so that we could be free. Shouldn't we stand up for our constitutional rights that they died to protect? Where are we headed as a society? Remember, it's not just your rights that you're giving up, but the rights of your children and grandchildren. What kind of world will they grow up in? Are our constitutional rights secure, or did all of those soldiers die in vain? Take a minute to stop and think about it on today, the Day of Days.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 6, 2005 at 1:59 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 5, 2005

Mars rover Opportunity digs out



The mars rover Opportunity managed to dig itself out, under the diligent guidance of the engineers at Lockheed Martin at Deer Canyon. Click here to see a video of Opportunity digging out. It had been stuck in a sand dune for five weeks, buried up to all six hubs in fine Martian soil. I bet there's some high-fiveing going on down in the canyon. Congratulations, guys. Nice work.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 5, 2005 at 9:25 PM : Comments (1) | Permalink

Government intensifies war on inanimate objects



The U.S. Government squanders roughly $35,000,000,000.00 a year in the so-called "War on Drugs". Fighting a war on inanimate objects is roughly equivalent to punching a door with your fist after you inadvertently walk into it. It doesn't say anying about the door, but it speaks volumes about you.

Continue reading "Government intensifies war on inanimate objects"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 5, 2005 at 11:36 AM : Comments (2) | Permalink

MovableType 3.16 Comment problem

I'm having a problem with comments posted using the "block quote" feature. Now, I'm testing my web page with this Markup Validation Service. Here's a link to the comments page inside the validator. Apparently, it doesn't like my comments because:

document type does not allow element "blockquote" here. The mentioned element is not allowed to appear in the context in which you've placed it.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 5, 2005 at 9:09 AM | Permalink

June 4, 2005

Bullets with serial numbers?



A red-necked, knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal is covering the progress of an asinine law in Kalifornia to put serial numbers on bullets. These tree-huggers will stop at nothing in their quest to deny citizens of their constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Not only will it not solve or reduce crime, but requiring bullet manufacturers to put serial numbers on bullets will send ammunition prices into the stratosphere. But, what do they care? They don't want us to shoot anyway. This is just another end-run around the second amendment by the Republik of Kalifornia. Someone wake me when it's over.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 4, 2005 at 10:59 PM | Permalink

Planting Time



I finally got my garden planted today. I normally plant in May, but I've been preoccupied with attempting to salvage the weasel. So, I finally got the garden tilled, put 5 4x4 posts in the ground set in concrete. Hoed the garden into rows, and planted corn, okra, spinach, squash, and watermelons. Tomorrow, I'll put the fencing up around the garden to keep out the deer and elk.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 4, 2005 at 9:13 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Main Stream Media jounrnalists lament loss of credibility

The bleating mouthpieces of the MSM met in Denver this week, to lick their wounds and lament the rise of the blogosphere. Web logs or blogs, as they're called, have sounded the death knell for these scurrilous, spineless so-called journalists of the MSM. Sick of the weak-kneed mind control peddled by the pseudo-intellegentia, blogs have been eviscerating the MSM, doing their fact checking for them, and pointing out their glaring lack of journalistic integrity. Oh, and get this, Dan Rather ("fake, but accurate") was the keynote speaker. How apropos is that? I can only imagine how his speech went..."Well, folks, the times they are a'changin'. Now that there are blogs doing fact checking, it's gettin' where you pretty much gotta' tell the truth, or you'll get fired like I did. My boss was madder than a wet hen!"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 4, 2005 at 4:15 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

June 3, 2005

Scientists recover DNA from ancient cave bear

Scientists have extracted and decoded the DNA of a cave bear that died 40,000 years ago.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 3, 2005 at 10:46 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Opportunity Still Stuck



Opportunity is still stuck in a sand dune on Mars. Click on the photo above to see a video of the little rover spinning its wheels.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 3, 2005 at 10:24 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Massive internet attack under way

The most massive attack on the internet in the history of the world is currently under way. The goal of the attack is to hijack computers using Trojan Horses and link them together into huge networks of compromised PC's called "botnets". These botnets can then be used to launch Denial Of Service(DOS) attacks on websites. Read more details on the attack here.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 3, 2005 at 12:27 PM : Comments (2) | Permalink

June 2, 2005

Police taser citizen twice for speeding

Boynton Beach, Florida police taser a woman twice for speeding.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 2, 2005 at 6:46 PM : Comments (2) | Permalink

Day 5 for the baby gerbils


7 baby gerbils
Day 5

The gerbils skin color has changed from the pink color of Day 1 as their hair begins to form under the skin. You can clearly see that some will be dark, some will be a lighter color, and at least one will be a zebra.

NOTE: BE CAREFUL HANDLING BABY PUPS. THEY WILL JUMP OUT OF YOUR HANDS, ESPECIALLY IF THEIR EYES ARE STILL CLOSED. THEY HAVE NO FEAR OF HEIGHTS. THEY WILL JUMP OUT OF YOUR HANDS, AND, IF YOU'RE STANDING UP, THEY WILL BE INJURED OR DIE. BE VERY CAREFUL HANDLING PUPS. IF YOU MUST DO IT, HOLD THEM ONLY AN INCH OR TWO ABOVE THE GROUND SO WHEN THEY JUMP, THEY WON'T FALL 3 FEET.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 2, 2005 at 6:31 PM : Comments (94) | Permalink

When cell phones are outlawed, only outlaws will have cell phones


Cell phone carnage

Due to an FAA ban, no one has been allowed to place a cell phone call on any commercial airline flights in the U.S. for the last decade. All cell phones must be turned off while the plane is in the air or on an "active taxi". The FCC didn't like that multiple cell towers are visible simultaneously and the signals might confuse the network. The FAA was afraid that the phones would interfere with the plane's navigational instruments, hence the FAA ban.

But, this is, of course, absurd. First of all, consider that, on any given flight, there are people who forget to turn off their cell phones. You can tell because you'll hear them ringing in flight, especially during takeoff and landing. It happens. I've done it. I've flown across the country many times with my cell phone locked, loaded, and powered up. So, here's a news flash - cell phones don't interfere with the plane in any way. This is intuitively obvious to the casual observer.

Continue reading "When cell phones are outlawed, only outlaws will have cell phones"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 2, 2005 at 1:34 PM : Comments (1) | Permalink

June 1, 2005

Bayosphere Blogger


18th and Lexington Mural
By Andrew Schoultz and Aaron Noble
2002-2003

I've applied for a part-time position as a blogger for the Bayosphere Project, a San Francisco Bay area blog started by Dan Gillmore. So, wish me luck. If anyone wants to click here and post that I'd be a good writer for the blog, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 1, 2005 at 11:33 PM | Permalink

Bring Back Dick



While we're on the subject of Watergate and Deep Throat, I just thought I'd point out a few interesting little tidbits. Shortly after Richard Nixon was re-elected Vice President in 1956, his brother Donald found himself upside down in a business selling "Nixonburgers". So, Tricky Dick phoned his friend, reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, to ask them to bail Donald out. Hughes floated Donald a largely unsecured loan of $205K, and shortly thereafter, the IRS reversed itself and granted the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation tax exempt status. The waning days of the 1960 presidential election in 1960 found Nixon campaigning in San Francisco's Chinatown. Unbeknownst to the round eyes, the little oriental kids held up a banner in Chinese characters which read "What about the Huges loan?" and handed out fortune cookies with the message "Ask him about the hughes loan".

The Chinatown hijinks, and countless others, were perpetrated by Dick Tuck, a political rival of Nixon that plagued Nixon throughout his political career.

Nixon was Eisenhower's Vice President for 8 years(1953-1961), but Eisenhower was asked to name a decision Nixon had been responsible for in that time, he replied "Give me a week and I might think of something." Shortly thereafter, Republican Richard Milhouse Nixon narrowly lost the election to Jack Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Continue reading "Bring Back Dick"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 1, 2005 at 10:00 PM : Comments (0) | Permalink

Hunter S. Thompson's obituary for Richard Milhouse Nixon



I thought I'd take advantage of the occasion of the recent outing of Deep Throat, the anonymous new source that helped to bring down Nixon in the Watergate Scandal by revisiting Hunter S. Thompson's obituary of Nixon. Hunter S. Thompson's obituary of Nixon loosely followed the style of H.L. Mencken's anti-eulogy of William Jennings Bryan, possibly the most brutal obituary I have ever read. The words of Hunter S. Thompson are as follows:

"He was a crook

Jun 16, 1994

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK

DATE: MAY 1, 1994

FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON

SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON:

NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA... BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is becoming the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of
every unclean and hateful bird."--REVELATION 18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing--a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said. "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive--and he was, all the way to the end--we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style--and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.

Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.

These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable--some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern--but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man--evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him--except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."

Many were incensed about the howitzers--but they knew there was nothing they could do about it--not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last war, and he won.

The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.

Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November.

The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments--most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H.P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism--which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.

When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise--a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him.) It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director--who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says--and he is, after all, the President of the United States.

Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."

Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. he was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.

Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn't bother him.

Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.

It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that--but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure, Nixon was one of these, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.

Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.

Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives--whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

KICKING NIXON WHILE HE WAS UP

It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string warts, on nights when the moon comes too close....

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn ... pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness...toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's apartment.

Ah...nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. But how would the voters react if they knew the President of the United States was, according to a New York Times editorial on Oct. 12, presiding over "a complex, far-reaching and sinister operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization ... involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families and persistent efforts to lay the basis for possible blackmail and intimidation?"

- Hunter S. Thompson

Update: Just for clarification, these are the words of Hunter S. Thompson. Not mine. Some people seem to be confused by this. I updated the blockquote indentations to try to make it more clear.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 1, 2005 at 9:22 PM : Comments (2) | Permalink

H. L. Mencken's obituary for William Jennings Bryan



Shortly after the famous Scopes Trial, the first trial ever broadcast live on national radio, William Jennings Bryan died. H.L. Menken was less than kind to him in this anti-thesis of a eulogy. This is easily the most vicious, scathing obituary I have ever read.


The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 27, 1925

William Jennings Bryan

It was plain to everyone, when Bryan came to Dayton, that his great days were behind him -- that he was now definitely an old man, and headed at last for silence. There was a vague, unpleasant manginess about his appearance; he somehow seemed dirty, though a close glance showed him carefully shaved, and clad in immaculate linen. All the hair was gone from the dome of his head, and it had begun to fall out, too, behind his ears, like that of the late Samuel Gompers. The old resonance had departed from his voice: what was once a bugle blast had become reedy and quavering. Who knows that, like Demosthenes, he had a lisp? In his prime, under the magic of his eloquence, no one noticed it. But when he spoke at Dayton it was always audible.

Continue reading "H. L. Mencken's obituary for William Jennings Bryan"

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 1, 2005 at 8:00 PM : Comments (12) | Permalink

Deep Throat Revealed

Mark Felt, deputy director of the FBI under Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon stepped forward to announce that he was, in fact, 'Deep Throat'. Deep Throat was the name assigned to protect Bob Woodward's anonymous source when they broke open the watergate scandal that ultimately led to to the downfall of Richard Nixon. When Vanity Fair ran an article quoting the former number 2 man at the FBI proclaiming himself to be famous Deep Throat source, the Washington Post stepped up an confirmed his claims.

Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 1, 2005 at 7:08 AM : Comments (0) | Permalink