Hard Astarboard: General Archives

September 27, 2006

Mmmmmmmmmmm.........

Time for a wee-hours-of-the-morning feast.

Another Seth kind of thing, knockwursts and sauerkraut over a thin spread of dijon mustard {made in Canada, as French products are forbidden in my house} in open-faced sandwich format on rye bread, ramen noodles and fresh tomatoes smothered in Marie's creamy Italian dressing.

Yum!!!!

Posted by Seth at 09:24 PM | Comments (13) |

September 25, 2006

Disappearance

I will be offshore for a couple of days in meetings with a client, and will most likely not be heard from until Thursday.

Just to let y'all know why I may not be replying to comments until then, or posting anything new.

Posted by Seth at 10:35 AM |

July 15, 2006

Kicking Back

So it's the wee hours, I recently finished doing some work and have done some blogging, it's almost time I hit the rack and I'm kicking back with a large mug of Cafe Bustelo and some Sambuca on the side. I have some old music(rightnow, the theme from Romeo & Juliet, next I think Paul Mauriat's Love Is Blue) playing from my MusicMatch library via Logitech speakers I bought last December {Logitech gets my personal uncompensated endorsement, the sound is excellent} and I'm thinking about the state of things...

Israel is fighting a war against Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Gaza. We're talking war, not just a small counterterror Op, in which the IDF is fighting, for the moment, on 2 fronts.

The best President we've had since early 1988 is in the process of diminishing America's sovereignty several notches in the pursuit of forming a small-scale EU with Mexico and Canada. What's really disturbing about this is that we hear almost nothing from the media about this and even less from members of Congress.

Now, where the MSM's concerned, I can understand. Being liberals, they have been busting their touchases these last few years to propagandize we, the people, into casting off "the bonds" of American identity and love of country, and becoming "people of the world united" or something like that, becoming as much like France as possible and of course, offering our collective "guilty American neck" to the chopping block of Islam.

{Ah, Summer Place, by Percy Faith!}

It's really great to know that fellow Americans like ~~the communists at~~ the ACLU and the ~~traitors~~ folks at the New York Times are behind the nation 100% -- Actually, to judge from what they consider journalism, they have become what comes out of the nation's behind. Get some Charmins, clean 'em up. On the other hand, if you're in a priveleged position in a government security or intelligence agency, you can report on the latest defense secrets to the NYT and they guarantee to safeguard your identity while they print the details. Can't blame 'em, right? Someone's got to help fundamentalist Islam murder us, right? It may as well be Keller as anyone, right? Thank G-d he took the initiative to act on our behalf!

{Every Time We Touch, by Maggie Reilly, who had one of the most awesomely beautiful voices I've ever heard. She did some recordings with Mike Oldfield as well as her own great stuff back in the 1980s. I'd've loved to see her and Annie Haslam do a back-to-back concert, they'd have been highly compatible, or her and Annie's band, Renaissance, about tied as my second favorite with Yes, just behind my #1, Focus}

Wow, at half a century, the 1970s and 80s seem like contemporaries of the Boston Tea Party!

At 50, you also have memories of a time when nobody calling himself an American would disrespect our country and the principles upon which it was founded the way the Democratic Party, via its liberal element, does today.

At 50, you can rejoice that you won't be here to see the end result of what liberalism turns our country into over the next half century.

My prediction is the society Sly Stallone is defrosted into in Demolition Man, where cops, not even armed with lethal weapons, "request" that a criminal lay down his weapon and submit to arrest, and there's no enforcement procedure to respond to "Fuck you, make me!" because in the Utopian mindset of that time, citizens naturally respond as expected.

I'd hate, however, to be forced to learn how to use the 3 sea shells.

Posted by Seth at 01:22 AM | Comments (13) |

July 13, 2006

On Friends

Stepping completely away from politics for the moment, this is an e-card I received from a friend whom I haven't talked to, emailed or otherwise had contact with for some time, entirely my fault.

H/T Nikki

Posted by Seth at 11:37 PM | Comments (2) |

July 11, 2006

On the Wichman Issue

This one is self explanatory, and shows how there is little to choose between liberals and Muslim activists. It came to yours truly in the form of a forwarded e-mail.

Looks like a small case of some people being able to dish it out, but not take it. Let's start at the top. The story begins at Michigan State University with a mechanical engineering professor named Indrek Wichman.
Wichman sent an e-mail to the Muslim Student's Association The e-mail was in response to the students' protest of the Danish cartoons that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist. The group had complained the cartoons were "hate speech." Enter Professor Wichman. In his e-mail, he said the following:

Dear Moslem Association: As a professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MSU I intend to protest your protest. I am offended not by cartoons, but by more mundane things like beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on public buildings, suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests (the latest in Turkey!), burning of Christian churches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, the rapes of Scandinavian girls and women (called "whores" in your culture), the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris France..

This is what offends me, a soft-spoken person and academic, and many, many, many of my colleagues. I counsel you dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Moslems to be very aware of this as you proceed with your infantile "protests."

If you do not like the values of the West -- see the 1st Amendment -- you are free to leave. I hope for God's sake that most of you choose that option. Please return to your ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans.

Cordially, I. S. Wichman, Professor of Mechanical Engineering"

Well! As you can imagine, the Muslim group at the university didn't like this too well. They're demanding Wichman be reprimanded and mandatory diversity training for faculty and a seminar on hate and discrimination for freshman. How nice. But now the Michigan chapter of CAIR has jumped into the fray. CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, apparently doesn't believe that the good professor had the right to express his opinion.

For its part, the university is standing its ground. They say the e-mail was private, and they don't intend to publicly condemn his remarks. That will probably change. Wichman says he never intended the e-mail to be made public, and wouldn't have used the same strong language if he'd known it was going to get out.

How's the left going to handle this one? If you're in favor of the freedom of speech, as in the case of Ward Churchill, will the same protections be demanded for Indrek Wichman? I doubt it. Hey guys send this to everybody and ask them to do the same and tell them to keep passing it around till the whole country gets it. We are in a war to the bitter end.

Hat Tip: BJS

Posted by Seth at 10:54 PM | Comments (2) |

June 21, 2006

Wow!

So it's between 9 and 10 in the morning, and I'm doing things on-line. I have a long playlist going at MusicMatch, stuff from my own eras gone by, like

Goodbye To Love (The Carpenters), Stoned In Love (The Stylistics), Early In The Morning (Vanity Fare), Come Saturday Morning (The Sandpipers), etc, etc....

I need to run out of my office and into the rec-room for something. Simon & Garfunkels' "The Dangling Conversation" is playing. I've been sort of singing along with the song, and as I get up and head for the other room I continue doing so. This is about a 70 second project.

I get back to my office, still singing along, and find that Paul, Art and I are still in perfect sync:

"Yes we speak of things that matter, with words that must be said,
can analysis be worthwhile, is the theatre really dead?"

Gives me pause for thought, am I that easily hypnotized?... then the song ends and another one I've liked a lot, untireably, for about a quarter of a century, commences,

A Girl In Trouble (is a temporary thing) by Romeo Void. I must admit that it's one track I've never begrudged (or failed to begrudge) anything whatsoever about the subject or whatever -- I just love the sax music, the instrumental theme and the way it all goes with every aspect of the vocal. I might well be able to listen to it over-and-over, without a dinner break.

What? Y'ain't hearda' Romeo Void!?

Posted by Seth at 05:58 AM |

January 27, 2006

January 22, 2006

No Girlie Men Here!

On this issue, I am in complete agreement with columnist Greg Crosby.

Posted by Seth at 06:28 AM |

December 30, 2005

Horror In Hollywood

Wesley Pruden's got some good ideas on why Hollywood isn't doing as well at the box office these days.

...the idea is dawning on the little minds of Hollywood that maybe the great gullible moviegoing public is fed up with junk -- the endless car chases, the mechanical sex, the gore and guts, the mindless plots and maybe even the relentless sneering at red-state values. Hollywood has forgotten how to tell a story, or to recognize one. One screenwriter who must remain anonymous so he can continue to lunch in this town says that's why there are so many remakes. "No one has any confidence in what they're doing. So if someone suggests remaking 'Titanic' for the fourth time, everyone says, 'Yeah, great, that one always makes money.' Or they'll pay a lot of money for a book and only use the title, because they figure if someone in New York thinks the story was good enough to put in a book it must be OK."

I can't say as I feel all that bad about Hollywood's misfortunes, seeing as the film industry's taken such an adversarial position towards everything even remotely patriotic, or anything at all construable as American for that matter.

Posted by Seth at 06:11 AM |

December 20, 2005

Unionized Critical Infrastructure vs Responsibility

This is what can happen when the public transportation system of a highly populated major city is permitted to be unionized.

NEW YORK - Commuters trudged through the freezing cold, rode bicycles and shared cabs Tuesday as New York's bus and subway workers went on strike for the first time in more than 25 years and stranded millions of riders at the height of the Christmas rush. A judge slapped the union with a $1 million-a-day fine.

Certain jobs entail a higher degree of responsibility than others, one of these keeping an entity like the Metropolitan Transit Authority(MTA), the vast system of subways and buses that keeps the City of New York up and running, well, up and running. When you go to work for such a concern it is a lot different from selling clothes, running a machine in a factory, building cabinets, plumbing or repairing computers. It is an occupational field in which millions of people are depending upon you to get to and from work, including thousands of employees of other city agencies that are essential to the day-to-day operation of the giant machine that is the city government. You know this going in, and you know, just from years of residing in the city, that there will occasionally be differences with the agency that employs you.

You also know, given the profound necessity of your city agency as vital infrastructure, that going on strike is against the law...

If you have a problem with that, don't take the job.

Now we know, of course, that union members have to do as their leaders tell them, which puts them in the middle of a management-to-management dispute. They belong to the union, but they work, in this case, for the MTA. For the City of New York. For the millions of taxpayers in the five boroughs of New York. But they owe their allegience to the union.

So maybe critical infrastructure shouldn't even have the option of being unionized, as the Armed Forces don't have the option of same, and for good reason -- in some situations, for the good of the public, certain organizations should only serve one master.

The $1,000,000.00 per day fine imposed against the transit workers' union for striking, in my opinion, is well justified, just as Ronald Reagan was justified in firing the air traffic controllers during his term as President. Their strike is not only costing the city hundreds of millions of dollars, but it is negatively affecting some 7 million citizens every day it continues.

The strike over wages and pensions came just five days before Christmas, at a time when the city is especially busy with shoppers and tourists.
The heavy penalty could force the union off the picket lines and back on the job. Under the law, the union's 33,000 members will also lose two days' pay for every day they are on strike, and they could also be thrown in jail.

Go for it!

There are a lot of unemployed workers who would love New York City jobs but can't get them because of long waiting lists. Maybe this is a good time to create some vacancies, pass a law prohibiting union involvement in the city government's critical infrastructure venues and rebuild the transit system's employee roster from the sizeable pool of men and women on those waiting lists.

Posted by Seth at 05:34 PM |

December 12, 2005

Testing, Testing, 1,2,3...

It is 4:17 on a partly cloudy, thirty two degree morning here in Charlotte, North Carolina and I have just been assured by the third technical support weenie I've talked to in the last 14 hours that my Internet access from the hotel in which I'm presently ensconced is now in good working order.

According to said representative of the outsourced contractor, the problem had something to do with an online "disclaimer" of some sort that is not made available to individual recipients of the service to access and diddle with, and he said he accessed and diddled with it{my terms, not his}, setting it so that I would have no further trouble for the duration of my thirty day stay here at the Staybridge Suites "by Holiday Inn."

That is, he said, and I quote, "I have set it up so you will have no problems with your Internet access for the next thirty days."

As I said in my reply in the last thread to a comment by Michael, "Once in a blue moon, you get the 1% of tech support people who hasn't yet moved on to a job that pays more than coolie wages, and the problem is solved, more often from their end than not."

I can but hope that the above mentioned master of tech support is indeed in that 1%, and not just another professore of the brush-off as are most of his esteemed colleagues.

The proof, as they say, will be in the proverbial "pudding".

Posted by Seth at 01:17 AM |

October 31, 2005

One Approach To Addressing Illegal Alien Affairs

In view of the government's apparent determination not to guard our borders against illegal aliens nor enforce very many statutes regarding their deportation, it seems one Law Enforcement official has found a way to recoup the expenses of picking up Uncle Sam's slack, and I'm behind him 100%.

Sheriff bills Immigration $71K for 'illegals' in jail HAMILTON — The federal government will soon receive the first of several hefty bills from Butler County Sheriff Richard K. Jones for the housing of suspected illegal aliens in the county jail.
Following through on a threat made last week, Jones on Wednesday mailed a bill totaling $71,610 to the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the cost of housing 15 “undocumented” people, some of whom have been in the jail since June.

Last week, Jones, County Commissioner Michael Fox and state Rep. Courtney Combs announced a multi-tiered initiative to eliminate illegal aliens living in the county and throughout the state.

Among the initiatives was the implementation, on Monday, of a new booking process to include the signing of declarations of citizenship by jail inmates.

Those in jail for misdemeanor offenses who falsify their information, or are found to be illegal aliens, will be reported to ICE — the enforcement arm of the Federal Department of Immigration and Naturalization Services — for possible immediate deportation.

Those who are jailed for a felony offense, will first stand trial for their crimes and then face possible deportation.

To force the issue, Jones is billing the federal government $70 a day for every illegal alien housed at the jail — $10 above the average daily cost of housing an inmate.

In sending the first bill to ICE, which represents 1,023 billable days of housing illegal aliens, Jones said he’s hoping other sheriff’s offices throughout the country start following suit.

“We want to put extreme pressure on ICE to do its job with regard to illegal aliens,” Jones said. “This isn’t just a local issue. This is a national problem.”

While Jones acknowledged that ICE is not under obligation to pay the bill, he said his next step will be to load the questionable inmates into buses and deliver them to immigration offices in Cincinnati.

“Why should Butler County taxpayers have to pay for jail costs associated with people we don’t believe should ever have been in this country, let alone this state or county?” Jones said.

“These prisoners appear to be undocumented, in that they have no Social Security numbers,” Jones said. “They are in my jail because they have committed crimes here. It’s time the federal government should at least pay for the criminals they let stay here. If they don’t want to pay for them, then they can deport them.”

A message left with Greg Palmore, of the ICE Regional Office in Detroit, was not returned Wednesday.

Since announcing the local initiative last week, Jones said he has been inundated with e-mails and telephone calls, mostly from people expressing support for the measures.

Jones has also sent letters to sheriffs in Ohio’s 87 other counties urging them to implement similar measures in their jails.

“If ICE is having so much trouble locating illegal aliens, heck, I’ll help them out — I’ll send them 20 a day from our county jail,” Jones said.

Meanwhile, Combs is drafting new state legislation that will make it a state offense for illegal aliens to cross over Ohio’s borders and Fox is working on initiatives to discourage employers from hiring illegal aliens.

Contact Mary Lolli at (513) 820-2192, or e-mail her at mlolli@coxohio.com.

Please bear in mind that I'm a limited government, states' rights kind of guy, to the max. Certain issues belong to the Fed, others are the property of the private sector.

Border/frontier security issues are the property of the federal government. They have a job to do that they are not doing. The only thing that will fix that will be an onslaught of email from the general public to the human weevils that ultimately decide what makes it into the newspapers and on to TV news programs.

My source for the article posted above is the website produced by Tom Tancredo and Bay Buchanan, from the headquarters of Team America.

These are an issue and an organization we, as Americans, need to support.

Posted by Seth at 06:17 AM |

October 29, 2005

Cruisin'

Cruising around the blogosphere, I've run into some spot-on posts I'd like to share.

For the "feminists" among us who bash the War on Terror as a way of bashing Bush, yet also purport to champion the cause of fellow women, RomeoCat at Cathouse Chat has a "right to the point" post about what these feminists and other liberals really support when they oppose the battle against the Muslim fundamentalists who are at war with us. Good read!

At GM's Corner is a reality based look at "our friends," the Saudis.

And Rightly So's Raven's got a great "pop quiz" up that explores the hypocrisy of a number of wealthy lefties who do the very same things they accuse the right of doing and condemn us for it.

Happy reading.

Posted by Seth at 11:17 AM |

October 24, 2005

A Couple Of Good Columns

During today's read of Jewish World Review online, I ran into a couple of columns I thought I'd share.

Mark Steyn writes that Bush was right:Sometimes war is worth it, and John Leo tells us that -- no kidding, John! -- The ACLU is crossing the line.

Posted by Seth at 01:49 PM |

October 22, 2005

He Got That Right!

Brian Carney's New York experience in yesterday's Opinion Journal talks about something I, too, have recently encountered.

I was in New York for several days last month, and man, has the city of my birth become expensive in the last few years. I mean, here's a place where people have become so accustomed to being robbed at the cash register that they don't bat an eye when forking over $8.00 for a pack of cigarettes or $4.50 for a coffee and a bagel "with a schmear" to go.

I am preparing to move back to the east coast soon and buy a house, and have studied real estate prices from Maine to the Carolinas and New York... well, let's say you're single and you badly want to live in Manhattan, where you are willing to buy a condo or co-op{personally, I wouldn't even consider a co-op, because then you're subject to a "board of directors" whose decisions can in many ways decide upon how you can live in your own "home"). If you search very hard and are blessed, beat the multitudes of competitors for the property and win the day(strike up the band!) you may get really, truly lucky and be able to buy your own tiny studio condo for a mere $350,000.00 plus monthly maintenance fees. Woo, at least you won't have to spend a lot of money on furniture, since there'd be noplace to put it. Add a couple of hundred thousand dollars or considerably more if you're looking to buy a small or medium sized house or a multiroom condo. On the even brighter side, you would have the opportunity to pay the city's high property tax, a gift to the people of New York from mayor and "former" Democrat, billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

The other four boroughs, especially Brooklyn and Queens, with the exception of New York's few remaining enclaves of "live here and die, whitey!", are fast catching up on the inflated property gravy train.

Brian Carney, looking to buy a home for himself and his family, searched high and low for a property that was affordable, without success:

But even Brooklyn has gone real-estate crazy, especially if you limit your search to neighborhoods with decent public schools. After seriously considering a two-bedroom basement apartment in Brooklyn Heights going for far more than we could afford, the reality hit home. New York might be great--greater than ever in many ways--but it was beyond our financial grasp. We regrouped and started to look in the suburbs. Which is where we ended up.

And he's got a family in tow, jeez! It's enough that prices in New York repelled me, intending to live by myself, from its real estate market.

There's this bubble thing, you see, in many large cities, among them New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Washington, DC, that has real estate prices titanically overvalued, and in my opinion as well as those of acquaintances in the business, this bubble will burst in the not-too-distant future, transforming current sellers' markets into big time buyers' markets, and that $500,000.00 house you buy today might suddenly enjoy a market price of only $300,000.00 three or four years down the road, if that.

So, like the author of the linked article, I, too, am looking elsewhere for my house.

Posted by Seth at 12:51 AM |

October 08, 2005

"Tagged"

A couple of days ago, Michael at Flight Pundit tagged three people, including Romeocat, Mad Dog Vinnie and yours truly, to fill in the questionnaire below. Thank you, Michael, and may the bluebird of happiness....

Well, here are my responses:

5 things I plan to do before I die:
1. Own a cabin cruiser, 25 feet +
2. Spend at least 6 months in Israel
3. Get a few books published
4. Figure out how to use my digital camera
5. Make it to at least 1 Carnival in Rio

5 things I can do:
1. Successfully manage a business
2. Design an all-faceted, customized physical security environment
3. Professionally train physical security people
4. Royally irritate liberals(a habit I find difficult to break)
5. Shoot accurately with a rifle or pistol

5 things I cannot do:
1. Figure out all the little settings and doohickies on my digital camera{see “things to do,” above, #4}
2. Anything overly technical on a computer
3. Eat yogurt
4. Fly an airplane
5. Do the Macarena

5 things that attract me to the opposite sex:
1. Self confidence
2. Sexy eyes
3. Sexy lips
4. Real intelligence
5. Passionate about hobbies, interests, work

5 things I say most often:
1. Another day in Paradise!
2. La misma mierde, diferente dia (keeping in mind that I live in California)
3. What’s up?
4. Let’s talk about it over {lunch or} dinner at your favorite restaurant
5. But that’s NOT Uncle Sam’s JOB!

Posted by Seth at 02:52 AM | Comments (4) |

July 04, 2005

A Mistake Pays Off

I hope this guy's luck holds to the end, screwups that work out like this one are truly a rare gift.

Goof Puts Man in Major Poker Tourney

Killeen, Texas - A computer Goof has Robert Guinther headed for a seat at the World Series of Poker tournament in Las Vegas later this week.

Guinther, 65, entered what he thought was a $10 online poker tournament, but midway through he realized that he had accidentally clicked on a World Series of Poker satellite tournament with a $100 entry fee and it was too late to back out. He went on to win, defeating 180 other competitors and earning a spot in the WSOP $10,000 no-limit championship.

The tournament, which begins Thursday, will involve more than 6,600 players who either qualified by winning a satellite tournament or paid the $10,000 entry fee.

"This is the dream of a lifetime," Guinther said. "I watch these guys on television all the time, and I'm excited about the chance to sit down and play with them."

Posted by Seth at 09:33 AM |

July 03, 2005

Peace through Superior Firepower

"Diplomats.... The best diplomat I know is a fully armed phaser bank."

----Lt. Commander Scott, Engineering Officer NCC 1701

Episode 23: A Tale Of Armageddon

Posted by Seth at 03:33 PM |

June 20, 2005

Bureau Trivia

I haven't posted for the last few days because I was inordinately busy and was also having to address some move- related problems with my DSL. I seem to be settled in now, at last.

Over at the FBI's website, there's a small quiz on the Law Enforcement agency in pop culture, for those who are trivia buffs, 5 questions and 1 bonus question.

Posted by Seth at 11:11 PM |