History

Doing July Fourth Right

Popular Mechanics has twenty ways. They left out the most important one, though:

It is instructive, and educational (particularly for those who haven’t seen it since high-school civics class, if then) to read aloud Jefferson’s work of genius, the Declaration of Independence. In so doing, we are reminded of the principles on which this country was founded, the offenses committed against our ancestors by the English king, and the reasons that we forged our own nation.

So, I hope that you thank the founders who solemnly pledged “their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor“–who sacrificed so much, and actually underwent bombardment by true explosives, so that you could enjoy your barbecued ribs and potato salad, and the benign burning of colorful chemicals launched on rockets.

Political Commentary

A Libertarian Cartoonist

Meet Roman Genn, an escapee from the Soviet Union, who knows what freedom is all about.

BC: Some of your pieces, such as the clever depictions of Napoleon Bonaparte and Winston Churchill that you just alluded to, rely heavily on the viewer having a background knowledge of history. Does this fact limit your commercial appeal? It seems to me that the general population is about as interested in history as they are in quadratic equations.

Roman Genn: Yes, Sir Winston’s life and achievements are undoubtedly less interesting than Ms. Hilton’s current legal predicament. As Liddell Hart put it to J.M. Scammell,

Political Commentary

A Just Decision

I agree with Bush’s decision to commute Libby’s prison sentence. But what’s interesting is that Tim Noah does as well:

President Bush’s commutation of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s 30-month prison sentence will likely prompt many people with politics similar to my own to cry bloody murder. It will be called a cover-up. It will be called a payoff for Libby’s failure to implicate Vice President Dick Cheney, and perhaps even Bush himself, more directly in the Plamegate scandal. It will be compared to President Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, and to Bush p

Administrative

Linux Problem

The mobo died in my file server, so I decided to upgrade and actually get a modern motherboard for it, with actual hardware RAID, etc. I bought an ASUS M2A-VM HDMI (I didn’t really need the video features, but the price was good).

When I try booting it into Fedora Core 6, the hard drive hangs. Fine, no surprise. It doesn’t recognize the hardware (I was going from a Sempron to an Athlon-64 X-2).

The problem is, I can’t boot from an installation disk or a rescue disk, either. It gets to the point at which it says:

running sbin/loader

…and then, nothing. Just a flashing cursor. I’ve let it go for half an hour, with no joy. Is it possible that the motherboard is of such a recent vintage that Anaconda doesn’t know how to deal with it? I’ve never before had a machine that I couldn’t boot into Linux from a CD.

[Update after doing a search for “Linux M2A-VM boot problems”]

Apparently I had to disable HPET. It seems to be working now.

[Late night update]

Uh, oh.

“Cannot find any Linux partitions on your drive.”

Well, that’s why I’m going to RAID 1…

[Wednesday evening update]

Even though I found the old installation on the IDE drive, because X is broken, I decided to try to do an installation on the new dual 250-meg SATAs. Unfortunately, neither the original installation or the install CDs can find the LAN connector. I look at the BIOS, and it says it’s enabled. Any ideas?

I can install without it, but the machine won’t be of much value if the OS can’t talk to the rest of the local network, let alone the Internet.

War Commentary

National Jihad Service

Everyone in involved in the British bombing plots seemed to have the same employer:

Eight people arrested in connection with failed car bombings in Glasgow and London all have links with the National Health Service, the BBC has learned.

Mark Steyn and Stanley Kurtz have thoughts on the implications.

[Early afternoon update]

Iain Murray makes another relevant point about the NHS:

The high proportion of foreign physicians is indeed down to a lack of British Doctors – not just from lack of students, but also because many trained Doctors choose to pursue other careers. Life in the NHS is not a rewarding experience. A family member of mine who is so highly regarded as a Doctor that she has won a prize carrying a substantial annual stipend for the rest of her life has withdrawn from clinical treatment because she was constantly asked to make life-or-death decisions based on the rationing of resources (you won’t hear that story in Sicko). The socialization of medicine in the UK is responsible for a lot of problems. The importation of terrorists is just one of them.

[Update at 2 PM EDT]

Dr. Sanity has some thoughts on doctors as terrorists.

[Evening update]

More thoughts on Doctors Evil, from Michael Ledeen:

I think it has something to do with what Mel Brooks once referred to as “that total indifference to pain and suffering” that is necessary to be a good doctor. You have to be “clinical” about all that, because you can’t afford to have your judgment swayed by real sympathy with the sufferer.

Political Commentary

No Market

Jane Galt points out another of the many problems with employer-provided health insurance. I believe that this lies at the core of health insurance problems. Until people actually are motivated to shop for insurance themselves, and the insurance companies motivated to view the patient, rather than employers, as the customer, we will have no hope of fixing things.

War Commentary

Couldn’t Have Been Us

Remember after 911, when some of the apologists for the terrorists were saying that they couldn’t have pulled it off, because Arabs are too incompetent and dumb to do anything like that?

Well, here’s some evidence for that proposition:

The calls made on the phones allowed police to trace those behind the failed attacks last Friday, the London daily evening newspaper said, without giving sources.

The phones were meant to set off blasts when they were called, but the devices failed to detonate the mixture of gas canisters and nails in the two Mercedes cars parked in London’s entertainment district.

In a very real sense, this is no doubt part of the reason that we haven’t had more attacks, at least successful ones (remember moron Richard Reid?). The intersection of the sets between people who want to pull something like this off, and people who are capable of it, is fortunately not very large. Unfortunately, though, with advancing technology, it’s going to get easier and easier to do more and more damage.

[Update in the late afternoon]

Were they amateurish by design?

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!