Wow! The statists running the German government think it’s a bad thing for you to educate your children.
A German couple who fled to Tennessee so they could homeschool their children was granted political asylum Tuesday by a U.S. immigration judge, according to the legal group that represented them.
Remember Animal Farm. Comrade Napoleon said he’d take care of educating the dogs.
Or if fiction’s not your thing, remember Ceau?escu’s government in Romania and its orphans.
(Kudus: Big Journalism.)
I see someone has already come out with a new Hitler Parody. This one is about the special election in Massachusetts to replace Ted Kennedy:
I saw the other day (redirected from I forget where) an interview with the director of the original movie, who is “pleased, nay, thrilled” about the development of this unique art form derived from his work.
I saw so many of these Hitler parodies that I finally Netflixed Downfall, the original movie from which the video is excerpted. It makes the third Nazi movie I’ve seen in the past several months.
I live in the future. I’m posting from my car. Cool.
Here is the GPS telling me how fast I’m going.
That’s a cool number, because it’s 29. In hex, it’s 200 (traditionally written 0x200, or 200H for old-school 8080 assembly programmers). Inn octal it’s 1000 (or, traditionally, 01000). In binary it’s 100000.
(After I noticed that, I was of a mind to wait until 01-10-10 to publish it.)
Update: it’s actually not number 512. WordPress is counting something (edits? comments?) rather than individual postings?
In this awesome piece, Bill Whittle nails both the severity of the crisis we are in, and the reasons we have to hope that all is not yet lost.
I haven’t watched Sesame Street in about a million years, but this makes me wonder what I’ve been missing.
“Is Ricky Gervais a celebrity?” Hilarious. (Via Eric Bryant.)
Lileks recounts the fun of getting a new scanner for Christmas. There’s really nothing new or novel about it though (except that he took time to make screen captures of all the dialog boxes, so he could mock them). The fact is, all scanners suck.
I have ready access to scanners (all-in-ones, actually) made by HP, Epson, Brother, and, at work, a monster Konica-Minolta printer-copier that also scans. Every one of them is a disaster. The printing software is good and the scanning software stinks.
The hardware may be awesome, but the software is horrible. And bad as it is on Windows, it’s worse on a Mac. (Objectively worse; subjectively it’s worse by far, because the majority of software on a Mac is beautiful.) My personal theory, which I developed while working for one of the companies I just named, is that scanner software is written by electrical engineers instead of computer scientists. EE’s may be great with resistors and capacitors, but I haven’t met one in years who was a more than passable programmer. (But these are rants for another day.)
Anyway, my advice to Lileks and anyone else is twofold:
Last night, my children, who are studying Africa, watched a video about the Congo. During the segment dealing with decolonialization, one of the talking heads mentioned how President Mobutu was effective as a leader, but ineffective as an economist. When the price of copper collapsed, so did Congo’s (by then, Zaire’s) economy. The talking head said that Mobutu had only the knowledge of a tribal chief: he gave gifts in exchange for support. To pay for the gifts, he had to shake down everyone doing business, or trying to do business, in Congo.
Not like the people who run our sturdy, 233-year old republic. Not hardly.
Consider this story about a study being done at George Mason university:
Report: Democratic Districts Received Nearly Twice the Amount of Stimulus Funds as GOP districts.
True, to the unsophisticated, that story may have a bit of a whiff of Mobutu’s Zaire about it. But the difference couldn’t be more clear. You see, Mobutu shook down real businesses and got real money. The stimulus money is all borrowed. Apples and oranges.
And, while I’m in a sour mood about our nation’s devoted public servants, there is this piece in the Wall Street Journal about congressional junketeering. I especially liked the graph, way down in the story, showing a slow but determined rise in spending through the ’90s, followed by a meteoric rise this decade.
Maybe the rest of the country celebrated Black Friday today, but here at our house, it was white and brown Friday.
We painted the eaves of the house. Which is to say, I painted it, mostly, because it was too far off the ground and the little missus isn’t one for heights. So I made about a thousand trips up and down the ladder — paint 18 inches, climb back down, move latter 18 inches, climb back up, then repeat. Do that once around with the white sealant-and-primer, then come back around with the brown paint.
(I won’t mention the first pass, dangling off the roof, scraping off the old paint and smoothing the wood. Because it was stupid and I could have killed myself. So it’s best if you don’t know about that.)
But the funny thing? I threw out my back rummaging around in the refrigerator for a soft drink.
I just finished replacing my Linksys WRT-54G wireless router with a Linksys-by-Cisco WRT-160N wireless router.
Q: why a new router? Wasn’t the old one working? Yes. But I have a project that will require a WRT-54G — yes, it involves DD-WRT — and Amazon had a good price on refurbished WRT-160N
I was astonished to see there was an automatic configurator for Macs. Things have sure changed since I bought my iBook in 2003.
After that, configuration went about like I expected. The automatic installer just assumed 192.168.1.* was available, and grabbed it to use as the LAN. Instead, it should have been a nice little DHCP client and asked the DSL modem what network it was on, and learned it was on a 192.168.1.* network. So of course, nothing worked.
But I’ve been through this before, so I didn’t take long to figure out the problem. I deleted the automatic configuration and started over, telling it to use 192.168.2.*. After that, it only took a couple of minutes to set everything up.
An unexpected bonus was figuring out how to delete old WiFi networks on the Windows Vista box. (That feature was there all along, seemingly, but when I’m doing Windows administration, I can’t find my backside.)