Don’t you love it when people make stupid mistakes because they never actually take the time to learn the software they’re using? Someone at the UN doctored a UN report in Microsoft Word, and left the revision tracking feature on. Oops. The revisions were done after the document was given to Mr. Annan, who promised no changes to the report would be made. Hat tip to Little Green Footballs. Apparently he didn’t want the rest of the UN and the general public to know what’s really going on. Remove some peoples names, remove some details that might blow up in your face, those don’t count as changes do they?

I’ve commented on Kofi before, but his continued presence as head of the UN baffles me. Who is he paying off to keep this position? He makes error after error, one scandal after another, and he’s still in power. Good thing he doesn’t have any real power, like say… Control of the internet?

There are several other good posts on the subject. The Chief blames Bill Gates (never a bad idea), and Emperor Darth Misha uses his vast vocabulary to graphically comment on the situation.

Why is it that some people you don’t want to agree with. John Stossel is one of those people. I find it annoying when I agree with something he’s said. His recent article at TownHall.com, The doomsday provision, is a case in point. It’s pretty good.

I find it hard to disagree with someone who says things like…

“Talking to prisoners about guns emphasizes a few key lessons. First, criminals don’t obey the law. (That’s why we call them “criminals.”) Second, no law can repeal the law of supply and demand. If there’s money to be made selling something, someone will sell it.”

Rich, famous, writes well, has a interesting and well paying job… No wonder he annoys me so much. He is however, right. I particularly like his quote at the end by Alex Kozinski, a federal appeals judge and an immigrant from Eastern Europe -

“the simple truth — born of experience — is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people.”

“The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do,” Judge Kozinski noted. “But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.”

I’ve always been fascinated with this sort of response. No, not Chet’s response, but the reporters response to Chet. As Mr. Fuhrman at From On High put so well…

“Of course, what the author doesn’t realize, after having piled scorn on Chet Szymecki for his being fearful to the point that he feels the need to strap on some iron before leaving the house, the columnist expresses a similar irrational fear - of Chet”

If you are going to choose a class of people to be fearful of, people legally carrying firearms aren’t a good group to choose. As a rule, they are quite law abiding citizens. It’s the people illegally carrying that you need to worry about. Don’t worry about the man carrying the $1000 dollar pistol openly, instead worry about the guy carrying the stolen gun behind his waistband. Why should you be fearful of someone who is by all appearances going out of their way to live within the law.

Rather than be concerned with people like Chet, I’m more interested in how many people at that meeting had firearms concealed, with or without a permit. How many had a pistol in their car? How many possessed a firearm that they legally couldn’t own? These are questions that deserve to be in the news. Not some vapid nonstory about someone who didn’t do anything illegal.

How about finding a criminal to write about? Oh that’s right, you don’t write about criminals because they’re dangerous… they actually break the law.

I’ve got good news and bad news… The good news is Al Gore isn’t running for President. The bad news is he still won’t shut up, which makes me suspect he’s lying about the good news. He’s saying very clever things like that if he’d been elected in 2000…

“We would not have invaded a country that didn’t attack us”

Mr. Gore I suggest you read this and this and this. I particularly like that last one dated January 2001. It says in part:

“Since Operation Desert Fox in December 1998-in which the coalition struck Iraqi targets with bombs and cruise missiles for four days in response to Iraq’s refusal to comply with UN weapons inspectors-Iraq has shot anti-aircraft artillery or surface-to-air missiles at coalition fighters or committed other violations more than 700 times.”

So in 1998 Mr. Gore and Mr. Clinton’s peaceful solution to violations of UNs directives was striking “Iraqi targets with bombs and cruise missiles for four days”. Iraq in turn targeted our aircraft or our soldiers or otherwise violated the no-fly zone 700 times in a little more than two years. Let me get this straight. According to Mr. Gore, President Bush started a war with Iraq which “didn’t attack us”?

Mr. Gore, when you are in a state of negotiated ceasefire with another country (as we were with Iraq), and they are still shooting missiles at you… That’s a war. You may choose to ignore 700 hostile acts by a country you are at war with, but that’s doesn’t make it a ceasefire. President George W. Bush didn’t start the war in Iraq, he’s just trying to end it. We have been in more or less open warfare with Iraq since Desert Storm. Sure there have been quiet times, but we never left, and they never quit shooting at our forces.

I would suggest Mr. Gore that you had your chance in Iraq, and you chose not to act. It’s politicians like you that got us into this mess to begin with.

I’ve gotten several more junk comments. Ironically one of them was too my post on Comment Spam. Can you imagine having a job doing this kind of crap. “What do I do for a living? I go to people’s websites and post stupid comments that link to useless sites about completely unrelated subjects.” It’s not like my site gets any traffic to speak of. If it wasn’t for people leaving bogus comments I wouldn’t be getting many comments at all. No more comment spam please. My two loyal readers deserve better than that.

Update: This post got a spam comment about roulette ten minutes after I posted it. Moronic. Don’t they have better things to do?

Years ago I read Addicted to Mediocrity by Franky Schaeffer. While the book is about Art and Christianity, I’ve always been struck by the overall theme “Addicted to Mediocrity”. We are a culture which has that addiction. Some people spend most of their lives striving to be mediocre. I don’t mean average, to me it’s not the same thing. You can be lazy and average while it takes work to be truly, consistently, mediocre. Average to me means good days and bad days, high points and low points. Mediocre means consistently “poor to middling in quality”.

A lot of fast food restaurants can be relied on to be mediocre. Politicians can be that way too. Never a high or low, just middling. I work in graphic design with occasional work in various fine arts such as photography, painting, and sculpture. To work in those fields requires (or should) for you to strive for perfection. Sure you fail, but that’s part of striving. Most of my work is fairly good. Some of it is exceptional. Once in a while I get an idea that is a complete failure. I fix it, and move on. That’s the life of an artist. I don’t care if everyone likes what I do. I’d rather have one person say “oh my God I love that!” than one hundred say my work was “pretty good”.

Too many people these days try for the middle ground. They try to have consensus. They want everyone to think they are OK. I don’t want everyone to think I’m just OK. I’d rather have a few people think I’m damn good, even if a few think I’m a little nuts in exchange. To me the biggest regret I could have in my life wouldn’t be looking back and saying “I failed”. My biggest regret would be not to have tried. I might fail at some goal, but not because I didn’t set my eyes on the top.

Why is it that so many people settle for mediocre in their lives? I think they are missing the point. Success is great, and failure sometimes really sucks, but striving is the whole point. If we aren’t striving for something in life, why are we even here?

NOPD seems to be in the market for some new cars. During hurricane Katrina “over 270 patrol cars were lost” to flooding. 270 cars? Where exactly were the police officers when their cars were floating away? You’d think law enforcement officers would be smart enough to protect their transportation. Or maybe they were just looking to upgrade…

“Last week, after reports surfaced that the Louisiana attorney general’s office was investigating the alleged theft of about 200 cars from Sewell Cadillac Chevrolet, possibly by NOPD officers, Riley revealed his own internal investigations. All told, Riley said 12 officers were under investigation for looting or failing to combat looting in their presence, four officers had been suspended and one had been reassigned.”

Maybe these cars taken by the hundreds of officers who abandoned their posts and fled from the storm. Don’t worry though, they weren’t looting. It was just a case of “appropriation of non-essential items during the height of Katrina, from businesses”.(Hat tip Michelle Malkin) I feel safer already.

What’s with spam comments? Are spam comments on a blog supposed to draw the readers or the blogger to the spammers site? I don’t know of any bloggers who leave the comments up so that would pretty much rule out targeting the readers. And why would I take seriously a comment that is totally unrelated to the post it is attached to? What a useless waste of time.

The really dumb part of this whole thing is targeting my blog. I get about three hits a day, and most of those people are lost. I may be wrong, but I don’t think I’m a good target for comment spamming.

What is dumber, throwing someone off of a plane for wearing an offensive shirt, or getting yourself thrown off of a plane for wearing a an offensive shirt. I’d have to say the woman thrown off the plane gets my vote. You know she wore the shirt to piss people off, and it worked. Surprise!

“Lorrie Heasley claims it’s a freedom of speech privilege”

Freedom of speech? I think she’s confused. Sure you have the right to speak, but Southwest Airlines is also free to throw you off the plane, and I’m free to think you’re a moron. Isn’t freedom great!

I’m constantly amused by people’s misunderstanding of freedom of speech. They seem to think that freedom of speech means freedom from consequences. That’s the rub, consequences are always in play. People also have the right to remain silent, the ability to remain silent is much rarer.