Thanks to Jay for pointing this out to me.

Yesterday, C-SPAN II, as part of its regular weekend books coverage, ran a reading/q & a with Ben Ferguson, the young conservative author of It’s My America Too. The plaintive whimpering of that title–in particular that “too”–is typical of the phony underdog position conservatives insist on taking to make themselves look like insurgents. Republicans control the presidency, the Senate, the House, and much of the judiciary, Fox News is #1 in cable news, the rightwing rules talk radio, and yet here’s little big Ben, who at the age of 22 hosts his own rightwing radio show, pouting about feeling like an outsider in his own country, boo hoo.

They have no conscience, they have no decency, so let’s stop fake-pretending that they do.

Ouch. From James Wolcott.

I went into the laundry room and behold! A new dryer, and a new washer. Hoorah! No more jiggling with the coins! On the other hand, the cost of doing a load of laundry went from $1.25 to $1.50, greedy bastah’ds.

Robert Novak predicts Bush (and Kerry) will jump and run from Iraq in the next year.

Well-placed sources in the administration are confident Bush’s decision will be to get out. They believe that is the recommendation of his national security team and would be the recommendation of second-term officials. An informed guess might have Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, Paul Wolfowitz as defense secretary and Stephen Hadley as national security adviser. According to my sources, all would opt for a withdrawal.

I don’t believe that this should be an option. As Andrew Sullivan put it so well, “[W]hen you invade a country, depose its dictator, disband its army and take responsibility for its security, you are responsible for its security … We either have to ramp up our forces, retake Fallujah and Ramadi, redouble our faltering efforts to rebuild the Iraqi army – or we have to withdraw and leave chaos and a new terror-state behind.”

Well, just more proof that George W. Bush was a horrible president to begin with, and that his leadership as our “war president” hasn’t been much better.

There’s an episode of Star Trek’s first-season entitled “Arena.” It is a wonderful example of the morality plays the classic series was famous for.

The episode opens with the Enterprise entering orbit of an Earth colony. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and a group of officers beam to the planet’s surface, where they find the colony obliterated. Almost immediately, they come under attack from Gorn soldiers. After repulsing the attack, and returning to the Enterprise, Kirk is determined to catch the Gorn ship and destroy it – sending a warning to that species that the Federation would not tolerate attacks on its citizens.

Long story short – highly advanced aliens sieze both Kirk and the Gorn commander and place the two on a barren asteroid to fight to the death. The winner will be returned to his ship, free to go. The loser’s ship will be destroyed. In the ensuing scenes, Kirk and the Gorn captain talk with each other as they try to construct primative weapons from the asteroid’s mineral offerings. Kirk bests the Gorn captain with a homemade cannon, but chooses to exercise mercy, recognizing that the colony may have been in the Gorn’s territory, changing his perception of the attack from one of aggression, to one of defense.

In the space of an hour, the audience shifts from viewing the Gorn as a ruthless enemy who have butchered helpless men, women and children, to viewing them as a species who viewed the colony as an illegal encroachment into their territory.

There are quite a few episodes like this – the enemy turns out not to be an actual enemy, merely someone placed in a situation (usually through misunderstanding and lack of communication) where the use of violence was avoidable (“The Devil in the Dark” episode was a great example of this).

I think there’s a parallel between these episodes and the situation in Iraq, along the lines of “misunderstanding”, and “thinking you know what you’re doing when clearly you don’t”, but I don’t wish to be blunt.

… and I’m working 11am to Late today. That means I stay all day, and most of the night, and do the dishes before I leave. Yay. On the other hand, last night was busy as all get-out (fifteen runs in five hours, $55 in tips), so hopefully today and tonight will follow the same trend. Saturdays lately have been dead, so it will be very nice if we get slammed tonight.

More later. Like, when I get off work.

Dan Rather needs to resign. CBS did sloppy journalism, and no matter how much they and Rather drag their feet, the price needs to be paid.

Star Wars hits DVD next Tuesday. Remember all those changes Lucas made back in ’97, the so-called “Special Edition”? Well, there are some more changes to all three films, and you can review what those changes are here.

Here’s a photo of the TOS Box Set (that stands for The Original Series). Cool, huh? Season Two is in blue, Season Three in red. If you have to know why, er, don’t ask. :)

Well, it is. Don’t get me wrong – I love Star Trek, grew up with it. When I was a kid, I’d watch re-runs on the TV in the basement. It was a nice big basement, half-furnished, half-not. It had a worn gray carpet. The rear of the finished-half was the TV room … a big, old TV on a big old cabinet, with a big brown leather couch and some old chairs arranged around it. The rear of the room was a play-room for my sister and I. There was an old cushioned bench (like from a bar) in the corner, around a table that I used to play with my Lego collection. There was a rack of shelves on which I could store my collection (which, as you can imagine, since I’m a big kid) has grown considerably.

Anyway, I’m getting off topic.

I used to lay on my stomach in front of the TV, watching re-runs of “Star Trek”. I used to think the Enterprise (of course, I thought the ship’s name was the “Star Trek”) consisted of the Bridge, and then right through those red doors, the transporter room. Just those two rooms. I remember going to my friend Brendan’s house (he lived right across the street) one summer afternoon to watch “Star Trek III.” I know it was summer, because during the fall and winter, we never played together – I went to a Catholic private school in White Oak, he went to a public magnet school far away, I never knew where, but we never saw each other except for the summer, when we would spend every daylight hour together. At the beginning of the movie, there was a commerical advertisement for a new “Star Trek.” My only impression of it was the color beige and a bald guy. My reaction was: “There is only one Star Trek!” and I vowed to never watch the new one. I think Brendan made the same pact with me.

And I didn’t watch the new Star Trek, the imposter, Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’d be flipping through the channels (no remote control, just a big old dial that eventually fell off, forcing us to use pliars) and TNG would flash up briefly, and my Mom once commented (about Data), “He’s so pale! Is he a statue?”

I’m getting off topic. I did eventually begin to watch TNG, and became quite the devoted fan. Yes, I’ve been to Star Trek Conventions, and yes, I own all the DVD box sets of “Deep Space Nine.” Bite me.

Back to classic Trek. I’ve watched probably ten episodes of the original series so far, from this box set. It is corny – the sets are corny, the uniforms are corny, hell, everything but the writing is corny (and even the writing is questionable at some points). It’s been really amazing, watching these episodes again, seeing the “layers” I couldn’t comprehend when I was five.

And, y’know, the box this DVD set comes in? Corny, too.

Do you use Internet Explorer?

A specially crafted JPEG image can now cause a buffer overflow, leading to arbritary code execution. In other words, an image can hijack your computer. This is basically a nightmare.

You should raise the continued IE security issues, including the idiocy of the latest, with your IT department and encourage them to consider bailing. Chances are that they’re tied to a third party vendor that uses some IE-only idiocy in an application in use by your employer. That third party vendor must also be encouraged to open their application up to other browsers.

From Charles Capps, UBB visionary and general computer geek know-it-all. I’ve switched to Mozilla Firefox , and I love it so much more than IE. Download Mozilla here.

Star Trek: The Original Series Season One arrived today, thanks to UPS and Dan. I’m in for some good old fashioned, bad-effects space fun.

Yeah, so I said last Thursday or Friday I’d be back with some Cheney lies … well, it’s been a bit longer than I thought it would, but here we go:

In March of this year, Cheney attacked Kerry for having “repeatedly voted against weapons systems for the military,” hammering the senator for voting “against the Apache helicopter, against the Tomahawk cruise missile, against even the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.” He said this record has “given us ample doubts about [Kerry’s] judgment and the attitude he brings to bear on vital issues of national security.”

Cheney accuses Kerry of calling for “major reductions or outright cancellations of many of our most important weapons systems”; Bush ads attack the senator for voting “against 13 weapons systems for our troops” over 20 years. But it was Defense Secretary Cheney who gloated that he had “put an end to more than 100 systems” in less than three years. In December 1991, he bragged to the Washington Post that he was setting “an all-time record as Defense Secretary for canceling or stopping production” of weapons and equipment.

By Jonathan Baskin and David J. Sirota

… Blame Clinton.

“…So, given that the previous administration’s diplomatic efforts were such a dismal failure, where exactly does Senator Kerry come off blaming President Bush for dealing with a problem that was created by the spinelessness of the Clinton administration?”

Well, let’s see, since then North Korea was declared a member of the “Axis of Evil”, and George W. Bush has done WHAT about it? Nada. So instead of criticizing George W. Bush for what he hasn’t done in regards to North Korea — certainly a nation that won’t roll over as easily as Iraq — what do Republican pundits do? That’s right – they pull out the “Clinton” card.

Gimme a friggin’ break, guys.

Well, this week the ole’ Dell got infested with Pop-Ups. EVERYWHERE. Internet Explorer started crashing every time I opened the browser. It was, let me assure you, a total fuck-up. I downloaded some ad-blockers, but really what saved me was switching to Mozilla Firefox, a new browser.

Mozilla Firefox. The way to go.

Anyway … that Lego space ship o’ mine I was talking about earlier? Well, I ripped it apart and rebuilt it … several times. I was having some “brick” block, resolved by watching “Das Boot” and looking up a cutaway of the USS Torsk. In the process of rebuilding, I ripped out many of the features – from aft to fore, the layout is now aft torpedo/mechanical room/engineering/crew bunks & mess/sonar/control/officers’ bunks and mess/fore torpedo.

Well, but I decided it was missing something, so I started construction of another hull – not quite as long, certainly not as wide. My original intent was to make it a crawl-space sized area with room for cargo, and maybe a brig, but I did some expansions to it – now it’ll have room for a cargo bay, a medical bay, and expanded crew bunks and mess. Once I’ve finished with the lower hull, I’ll rebuild the primary hull on top.

Oh, but for the bricks on the brain …