Category: Uncategorized

Statements like this are why the world will never be peaceful until one religion wins in totality. Remember, this statement was made on 17 Oct 2004

“Sir, why do the government clerics ignore the killing of the prisoners during the time of the Prophet? 600-700 prisoners were killed in the raid on the Qurayza tribe.

“Why do they conceal this? Why do they hide the fact that the Prophet gave the order to assassinate some poets – to assassinate! Not in military operations, but rather by individual assassination.

“Why did he order the assassination of K’ab Ibn Ashraf, the Jew, leader of Khaybar ? And then he ordered the assassination of the leader who successive him. As a result, the Jews became fearful and terrified.”

The Prophet here is Mohammed, as in The Mohammed, who apparently assasinated a lot of people at what is called by some the Qurayza Massacre. This happened thousands of years ago and we’re basing terrorist policy on this event.

Some modern Muslims have apparently interpretted this event as carte blanche to kill in retribution for those that have wronged God. You see the huge loop-hole for modern terrorists in what suddently can be interpretted as “wronging God”. The power of clerics grows pretty quick in this situation.

So, why no peace? Because policy on both sides is being dictated by 2,000 year old events. And don’t think that a Kerry White House will suddenly bring a sense of logic to any of this. How do you convert a fanatic? You don’t; that’s the problem.

This is a concept so foreign to American’s (and many Europeans) it doesn’t even register the first couple times you realize it; Islamic countries don’t just base law on religion, religion IS law. Islam is Jerry Falwell’s wet dream, a complete Theocracy.

You can’t co-exist with fundamentalists; they don’t believe in co-existance. You must convert or be eliminated. That’s the whole point of fundamentalism; total and complete involvement.

Link [via Drudge]

“Well, you know, I don’t know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her eye, which is good,” Heinz Kerry said. “But I don’t know that she’s ever had a real job – I mean, since she’s been grown up. So her experience and her validation comes from important things, but different things.”

Laura Bush taught in public schools in Texas from 1968 to 1977, the year she married George W. Bush.

Good job, Kerry! You just lost all your teacher votes!

Here’s a tip from where it’s NOT playing in the sticks. Shut your wife UP. Or at least explain to her the concept of “insulting” or “tact”.
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If anything tells you about the sad state of journalism in this country, just read what Peter Jennings has to say.

“I’m a little concerned about this notion everybody wants us to be objective,” Jennings said.

Yeah, that would be terrible if you were held to, you know, standards. No wonder Peter had to come to America; where else can a Canadian with an agenda do more harm?

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This is asinine. The Guardian, a United Kingdom (that England, y’all) newspaper has the roster of 85,000 registered voters in Clark County, Ohio. You go to the linked page, enter your email (supposedly, you’re an concerned English person) and you get the name and address of a voter in that county.

You’re then supposed to write to this person and encourage them to vote for who you, as a concerned world citizen, would vote for.

For those who don’t read the Guardian on a regular basis, they are a fairly liberal news paper, who pride themselves on going that extra step. Usually that means corssing into non-objective reporting, something our domestic news sources jumped the shark on a long time ago.

Predictably, reaction has been less than positive.

I really hope this backfires; I don’t think we get much say in the British PM, do we? Limey bastards, indeed.
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Everyone in the world with a blog is posting this today, but I’m going to link to someone who has the transcript up. If you have the means (and by that I mean broadband), download the video. There are bittorrents everywhere (a page here, as a matter of fact). Even if you don’t have broadband, download the movie; it’s worth every byte.

Others will expound on Jon’s profound appearance on Crossfire. Suffice it to say that, while I respect him immensely, it’s sad when we have to make our comedians the voice of sanity on CNN.

iFilm streaming video
CNN transcript
Leiter Report (blog w/ transcript)

Brilliant. Love the stickers.

Link [via Micahel Totten]

About damn time, too. Fricken vultures.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer on Wednesday obtained a court order to temporarily suspend the sale of commemorative Sept. 11 coins heavily advertised as being minted from silver recovered at ground zero.

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To the Christian right, “Dred Scott” turns out to be a code word for “Roe v. Wade.”

I can’t keep all this crap straight anymore. Can we just get rid of Ashcroft and make some of us conservatives feeel a hell of a lot better about voting based on other issues?

By the way, I clicked through some of the linked articles in the Slate article linked here, and I am so disheartened by the conspiracy-theory-laden talk on these pages… I need to ask my folks about this stuff.

Awesome tip.. thanks to Jon for the info! I’m putting this here so I don’t lose it.

In yesterday’s item I complained about the opaqueness of PDF files. As Mark Kunzmann pointed out (in email), the situation is less dire than I suggested. He illustrated by pointing me to page 100 of the government’s energy report here. I can point you to the page describing necessary URL syntax here. This scheme is workable, for large documents like the 170-page energy report, thanks to the same HTTP 1.1 byte-range technology that I’ve been using for random access to MP3 audio.

Thanks for the reminder, Mark. This falls into the category of things I used to know, but forgot. Now arguably, there’s a reason I forgot about it. You rarely (if ever) see PDF URLs ending with #page=6 in the wild. My feeling is that’s because a PDF page is an arbitrary unit of content, and it usually won’t precisely address the element you’d like to refer to.

Note that there’s also the #nameddest option, which works like an HTML fragment identifier and takes you to a specific location within a page. However this seems to be used even more rarely. I suspect that’s because of the manual nature of the procedure required to prepare the destinations. Courtesy of Planet PDF, here is that procedure:

First up, you’ll need to create the destination. To do this from within Acrobat:

1. Manually navigate through the PDF for the desired location, and magnification
2. Go to View > Navigation Tabs > Destinations
3. Under Options, choose Scan Document
4. Once this is completed, select New Destination from the Options menu and enter an appropriate name

Now that you have created your destination, you can link to it using
a similar syntax to that used for page linking. After the name of the
PDF, append “#nameddest=” and the name of your chosen destination. So,
if your PDF has a named destination, “TOC”, that points to a table of
contents, then your link code will look like this:

<a href="http://www.mydomain.com/myPDF.pdf#nameddest=TOC">Link text

[Planet PDF]

Live and learn. Or in this case, relearn!

[Via Jon’s Radio]

No more lorem ipsum for those test layouts.

Link [via TinyApps]