17 December 2011

So when Hitchens showed up at my door early one morning kitted for battle with nothing more than his black leather jacket, blue jeans, and a half-smoked pack of Rothman’s (he refused to bring Kevlar, saying it made him feel “like a counterfeit”), I offered him a welcome-to-the-war shot of “Listerine,” just to be hospitable.

“I don’t usually start this early,” he said, his glass already gratefully extended, “but holding yourself to a drinking schedule is always the first sign of alcoholism.”


this guy gets better and better the more i read of his obit
The reactions to Hitchens's illness from his intellectual opponents –- which ranged from undisguised glee to offers of prayers -– testified to his stature as one of the leading voices of secularism since the publication in 2007 of his anti-religious polemic God is Not Great. The reaction from the author himself, who after a lifetime of "burning the candle of both ends" described his illness as "something so predictable and banal that it bores even me", testified to the sharpness of his wit and the clarity of his thinking under fire, as he dissected the discourse of "struggle" that surrounds cancer, paid tribute to the medical staff who looked after him and resolved to "resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice".
That was it for us. I had passed the only test that mattered to him, one in which he touchingly, anachronistically conflated intellectual honesty with a decidedly masculine, martial sense of honor.
I admire all public atheists.

This is pretty funny too
A friend of theirs once took Christopher Hitchens and his wife Carol Blue to dinner at Palm Beach’s Everglades Club, notorious for its exclusion of Jews.

“You will behave, won’t you?” Carol anxiously asked Christopher on the way into the club.

No dice. When the headwaiter approached, Christopher demanded: “Do you have a kosher menu?”

....

Christopher was never a man to back away from a confrontation on behalf of what he considered basic decency. Yet it would be wrong to remember only the confrontational side.

Christopher was also a man of exquisite sensitivity and courtesy, dispensed without regard to age or station. On one of the last occasions I saw him, my wife and I came to drop some food –- lamb tagine -– to sustain a family with more on its mind than cooking. Christopher, though weary and sick, insisted on painfully lifting himself from his chair to perform the rites of hospitality. He might have cancer, but we were still guests -– and as guests, we must have champagne.

Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair:

He was a man of insatiable appetites — for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the volume of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. ...

Christopher was the beau ideal of the public intellectual. You felt as though he was writing to you and to you alone. And as a result many readers felt they knew him. Walking with him down the street in New York or through an airplane terminal was like escorting a movie star through the throngs.

This from LA times. I never actually read CH as far as I know.

16 December 2011

http://newsone.com/entertainment/casey-gane-mccalla/tsa-leaves-cmon-son-note-for-rapper-after-finding-weed/

TSA leaves weed alone. They also saw some kief in a keyfob, heard one agent say 'it could be heroin' to another, but let it by. You can't blow up a plane with
a gram of heroin or grass.

I had flowers and cookies with me too.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-autos-oil-change-20111215,0,4554184.story

californians change oil too frequently.

its a relic of older cars ---just like my saving
files frequently is a relic of unreliable computers
of the past.

Plus you can use your used motor oil to fertilize your lawn.
Iraq occupation officially over. Hope the green zone is the next battlefield. State Dept = Covert Mil, just as legit targets as before.

Only more concentrated. Just do it.
9000 gallons of gas under an overpass... and the overpass is toast, as is traffic for a while...
Kobe Bryant gets divorced. Only a few years ago he bought off his wife and the inseminated woman he
arseraped a while back. Karma.

12 December 2011

So, who did more harm, a leaking officer or a stupid pilot / stupider engineering manager/specifier?

Got RQ-170? A lot more interesting than the hypocracy of US State / Mil communications. (PS: no diff state/mil)
(pps: enjoy your green zone)


Syria 5K dead.
Why no Sarkozy Save Us?
No oil?
Run by Israel?



08 December 2011

Another shooting in Va, yawn.
George Little citing his lack of intelligence and the pentagon's lack of belief in citizens' concerns.


Folks in glass empires ought not fly drones.

05 December 2011

Why America needs purging


"Occupy" movement declared terrorists. President signs
order to indefinately detain leaders. No judicial process
necessary.

04 December 2011

Darknet. Meshnet. SOPA.

Try this:
ipconfig /displaydns > myhosts.txt

to start caching your personal DNS entries.

You can later put them in drivers/hosts which Windows uses (besides a networked DNS resolver) to resolve names.

01 December 2011

Can Congress Steal Your Constitutional Freedoms?

by , December 01, 2011

Can the president use the military to arrest anyone he wants, keep that person away from a judge and jury, and lock him up for as long as he wants? In the Senate’s dark and terrifying vision of the Constitution, he can.


http://original.antiwar.com/andrew-p-napolitano/2011/11/30/can-congress-steal-your-constitutional-freedoms/

911 used cruise missiles piloted by god-fearing drones. Drones are useful. We can sit in the US and kill half a planet away. We so brave.
Steve Pinker and Geddy Lee

Canadian Jews.
Time travel.

US invaded Iraq.

That that caused 911.

Obama declared that US citizens are legit extra-legal targets of war.

This legitimizes 911.

The timing is off, but what if neutrinos carry fascism?