Maggie's Farm

Just got off the phone with our Webmeister Chris. Here's what I learned about the Denial of Service (DOS) "attack" which we have been dealing with on and off since Thursday, and which has made access for our readers intermittently difficult or, today, impossible.

We have been subjected to what is termed a DOS Botnet Attack, consisting mainly of lengthy black market drug advertisements, containing multiple links, directed to our trackback system and to our commenting system (which is why they are shut down at the moment). A "bot" is, of course, a robotic software program.

Chris determined that this attack is coming from China, India, Japan, and Korea, simultaneously. It is probably a criminal consortium of some sort - and a large one. DOS attacks are not designed to damage specific sites, and they are not designed to result in a DOS - after all, that would defeat the purpose, which is advertising. Like any parasite, a bot is not intended to kill its host - just to feed off it. Just like the Welfare State.

China warns against "wine and women" at Olympics. I guess song is OK.

A case against women's suffrage, at Althouse. Emotional, impulsive, and elections are a popularity contest, like high school. Is that true?

Dumbest thing: he put the duck in the fridge without cleaning it. And now the bird has a name. Sheesh. Can he shoot it again?

The debate about Iran's role in Iraq. Regime Change Iran

From a piece at Driscoll:

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times runs a piece titled, "Was 9/11 really that bad?" with the subhead, "The attacks were a horrible act of mass murder, but history says we're overreacting".

Yeah, LA Times. Let's wait 'til they do something really bad.

Ethanol and corn prices. Willisms

Webb, and absolute vs. relative poverty. Betsy. Good point. Now that absolute poverty is gone in the US, the envy-mongers need to focus on relative poverty. What else can they do? Everybody is relatively poor, compared to someone.

New black realism in a post-civil rights world. Hymowitz in City Journal. A quote:

For a younger generation of blacks, the symbolic, I-marched-with-Martin politics, not to mention the Jackson-style cronyism that it often degenerated into, doesn’t cut it—and not just because this generation is too young to have felt the billy clubs at Selma. Instead of rights activists and ministers, many of these newcomers are lawyers or businessmen. Even though a few grew up poor, they’ve all spent their formative years swimming in the mainstream, including major universities, corporations, and law firms, and they are now solidly middle class. “These politicians are comfortable in a post–civil rights world,” explains Vanderbilt political science professor Carol Swain, author of Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress. “They’ve had white friends; they’ve had white girlfriends. They may still be frustrated by racism at times, but they’re functioning fine in the world they’re living in.”

Roger won the Aussie Open. He is on a roll.

He is 25, and he likes Heineken.

Visions of Sampras.

At Maggie's Farm, we plan to avoid discussing the primaries and the '08 election for quite a while. It is too far away to say anything meaningful - anything can happen between now and then. It's a waste of virtual paper and virtual ink, we believe, and thus damages our virtual planet.

Where is our News Junkie today? On a listening tour in Iowa in NYC on an underwear modeling job again. He calls it "beer money" but it actually supports his poorly-paid, humble journalism career in MA. 

Image: The Diebold Accu-Vote system, famously accurate when Dems win elections, but deeply flawed, corrupt, and hacked by Karl Rove when they do not.

Government isn't the solution: it's the problem.

Ronald Reagan

French member of Parliament convicted for saying that homosexuals are morally inferior.

This isn't about gays - it's about the slippery slope to speech control. Is freedom a universal human aspiration? I doubt it: I think it might be an Anglo-Saxon thing. (Is that a racist statement?)

However, to refute even that Anglo-Saxon statement, look what David Cameron wants to do.  Is it too late for another revolution in the UK? Heck, look at what we did in the US, and that was about a lousy tea tax.

OK, I take back everything I implied about Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism: maybe all humans are infants at heart, longing for a Daddy and Mommy to provide and to take charge.

Image: A guy who knew what was best for you.

It might be a bit chewy for a Monday morning, but Bob at One Cosmos has the answer. You know you want it, as the beer man says at Yankee Stadium.

He does get into Schopenhauer a bit:

"If I take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must vanish, as this world is nothing but the phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of our own subject, and is a species of the subject's representations."

I think I exist to drink wine and to wonder why I exist, after work. After a few wines, one wonders whether one does exist at all, and whether "I" is an illusion. Sometimes, I wonder why other things, like ham sandwiches, exist. The cosmos itself just gives me vertigo.

Image: From the Hubbell scope

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.

Dave Barry

The Duke humanities faculty have everything figured out, don't they? Allen in The Weekly Standard:

"The faculty enabled Nifong," Baldwin said in an interview. "He could say, 'Here's a significant portion of the arts and sciences faculty who feel this way, so I can go after these kids because these faculty agree with me.' It was a mutual attitude."

Indeed, it was the Duke faculty that could be said to have cooked up the ambient language that came to clothe virtually all media descriptions of the assault case--that boilerplate about "race, gender, and class" (or maybe "race, gender, sexuality, and class") and "privileged white males" that you could not read a news story about the assault case without encountering, whether in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or Newsweek for example. The journalists channeled the academics.

Although outsiders know Duke mostly as an expensive preppie enclave that fields Division I athletic teams, the university's humanities and social sciences departments--literature, anthropology, and especially women's studies and African-American studies--foster exactly the opposite kind of culture. Those departments (and especially Duke's robustly "postmodern" English department, put in place by postmodernist celebrity Stanley Fish before his departure in 1998) are famous throughout academia as repositories of all that is trendy and hyper-politicized in today's ivy halls: angry feminism, ethnic victimology, dense, jargon-laden analyses of capitalism and "patriarchy," and "new historicism"--a kind of upgraded Marxism that analyzes art and literature in terms of efforts by powerful social elites to brainwash everybody else.

The Duke University Press is the laughingstock of the publishing world, offering such titles as Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures. Phrases such as "race, gender, and class" and "privileged white males" come as second nature to the academics who do this kind of writing, which analyzes nearly all social phenomena in terms of race, gender, class, and white male privilege. A couple of months after the lacrosse party, Karla F.C. Holloway, a professor of English and African-American studies at Duke, published a reflection on the incident titled "Coda: Bodies of Evidence" in an online feminist journal sponsored by Barnard College. "Judgments about the issues of race and gender that the lacrosse team's sleazy conduct exposed cannot be left to the courtroom," Holloway wrote. "Despite the damaging logic that associates the credibility of a socio-cultural context to the outcome of the legal process, we will find that even as the accusations that might be legally processed are confined to a courtroom, the cultural and social issues excavated in this upheaval linger."

There was a fascinating irony in this. Postmodern theorists pride themselves in discerning what they call "metanarratives." They argue that such concepts as, say, Christianity or patriotism or the American legal system are no more than socially constructed tall tales that the postmodernists can then "deconstruct" to unmask the real purpose behind them, which is (say the postmodernists) to prop up societal structures of--yes, you guessed it--race, gender, class, and white male privilege.

Read the whole thing. And wonder, like me, how long it will take for this sort of academic to be "unmasked" as no more than cynical, bitter, and ignorant careerists, with interest in neither truth nor beauty.

Are there two Dukes? Because one does not encounter such soul-less people in the stands at Cameron Indoor Stadium.

This was some fight. NY Sun.

This is what happens when they stand and fight - 200-300 bad guys dead, two Americans dead in the chopper, and 2 dead Iraqi soldiers. 

Wake up America! Civilization calls!

Red-neck fun - human sling shot. YouTube

Milblogger interviews milblogger. Roggio talks with PFC Alanko.

Your blog helped my law school grades. Volokh

The Mavericks sing Blue Moon. Nice

The future of hydrogen power. Env. Economics

How much autonomy will doctors give up? Kevin MD. In socialized medicine, you doctor doesn't work for you anymore.

A suicidal Turkey? Ralph Peters

Global warming throughout the Solar System

Black Hawk Up. David Warren

The Guardian loves Chavez, because it means Socialism is Back!

Up from Liberalism. Powerline takes a look at recovering liberals.

Consider taking The Pledge. No, not the pledge to quit drinking.

Krauthammer on energy. A quote:

There is no free lunch. Producing energy is going to produce waste. You pick your poison and you find a way to manage it. Want to do something about global warming? How many global-warming activists are willing to say the word nuclear?

So much easier to say ethanol. That it will do farcically little is beside the point. Our debates about oil consumption, energy dependence, and global warming are not meant to be serious. They are meant for show.

An email last night from our crafty and intrepid webmeister Chris:

It has been two days of fending off hackers.  I even had to skip a party and postpone a date.  But I just hit the mother lode.  I just intercepted the Botnet client software (called Toyo).  I now have a full copy of the software & code that is used to infect so many machines.  Tomorrow I am going to install my modified version of client Botnet code on a dummy virtual machine and try to get the control of Botnet.  This is going to be fun. Better than Christmas!!!  It should also lead me to the infamous Qted code that I have been reading about for the past month.  I have everything I need to, for lack of a better word, f- them.....

'Tis of a brave young highwayman this story I will tell
His name was Willie Brennan and in Ireland he did dwell
It was on the Kilwood Mountain he commenced his wild career
And many a wealthy nobleman before him shook with fear

  It was Brennan on the moor, Brennan on the moor
  Bold, brave and undaunted was young Brennan on the moor

One day upon the highway as young Willie he went down
He met the mayor of Cashiell a mile outside of town
The mayor he knew his features and he said, Young man, said he
Your name is Willie Brennan, you must come along with me

Now Brennan's wife had gone to town provisions for to buy
And when she saw her Willie she commenced to weep and cry
Said, Hand to me that tenpenny, as soon as Willie spoke
She handed him a blunderbuss from underneath her cloak
Now with this loaded blunderbuss - the truth I will unfold -
He made the mayor to tremble and he robbed him of his gold
One hundred pounds was offered for his apprehension there
So he, with horse and saddle to the mountains did repair.

Now Brennan being an outlaw upon the mountains high
With cavalry and infantry to take him they did try
He laughed at them with scorn until at last 'twas said
By a false-hearted woman he was cruelly betrayed.

Willie Brennan was an Irish Robin Hood during the 1700s. The song was made famous by The Clancy Brothers. 

Maggie's Farm has been under attack. Slows us down a bit, damages commenting function. Trying to find out where it's from. Who would want to bother us? We will find out...and will punish them.

Chris is on the job - a Vermonter and a real Green Mountain boy - and we are all Yankees here. Don't tread on us unless you are willing to pay the price: we enjoy self-defence: we are well-armed, and love to use our weapons.

Contrary to what some would have us believe all cultures are by no means equal. The fact is that one is clearly superior to all the others by almost any measure we may choose as a basis of comparison. All the evidence shows that the West is the only successful cultural tradition of our time while all the rest have shown themselves to be incompatible with the modern era. The claim that all cultures are intrinsically equal is thus not only patently untrue, but it is also one of the most insidious lies of our age.

Any nation that truly desires prosperity, human rights, and progress must adopt western values. Those in other traditions that have done so have been amply rewarded for their prescience. Japan, South Korea and Honk Kong are examples of those who have prospered greatly as a result of adopting those quintessentially western constructs - democracy and capitalism.

Advancement, justice and affluence can only be attained by societies that operate along the western lines. For all their alleged wisdom and insight all the other civilizations have not only failed to achieve these ideals but have invariably produced the opposite, spawning malfunctioning and backward societies. History has clearly shown that the only viable way is the western one. It is the only one that can bring about progress and guarantee a dignified existence for man.

It is rather ironic that while progressively larger parts of the globe are in the process of transitioning to the western model, its internal enemies have managed to undermine it from within. Their weapon of choice - and one which has proven surprisingly effective - is multiculturalism, a ploy by which they seek to dilute our tradition with values of failed cultures. That this subversive doctrine has gained such prominence is remarkable given that the foreign material at its disposal is for the most part not only noticeably defunct, but - judging by the results it produces - to be avoided at all costs. The deep inroads multiculturalism has made over the years are largely a result of the decades of relentless attacks on the West which have undermined its people's confidence in their own civilization and weakened their resolve to stand up in its defense.

Can't you feel 'em circlin' honey?
Can't you feel 'em swimmin' around?
You got fins to the left, fins to the right,
and you're the only bait in town.
You got fins to the left, fins to the right,
and you're the only girl in town.

(Jimmy Buffet's "Fins," of course)

A primeval Frilled Shark has been videotaped.

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.”

Ernest Benn (h/t, Patriot Post)

An older lady gets pulled over for speeding...

Older Woman: Is there a problem, Officer?
Officer: Ma'am, you were speeding.  
Older Woman: Oh, I see.  
Officer: Can I see your license please?  
Older Woman: I'd give it to you but I don't have one.
Officer: Don't have one?
Older Woman: Lost it, 4 years ago for drunk driving.
Officer: I see...Can I see your vehicle registration papers please.  
Older Woman: I can't do that.  
Officer: Why not?  
Older Woman: I stole this car.  
Officer: Stole it?  
Older Woman: Yes, and I killed and hacked up the owner.  
Officer: You what?  
Older Woman: His body parts are in plastic bags in the trunk if you want to see...

The Officer looks at the woman and slowly backs away to his car and calls for back up. Within minutes 5 police cars circle the car. A senior officer slowly approaches the car, clasping his half drawn gun.  

Officer 2: Ma'am, could you step out of your vehicle please!

The woman steps out of her vehicle. 

Older woman: Is there a problem sir?
Officer 2: One of my officers told me that you have stolen this car and murdered the owner.
Older Woman: Murdered the owner?  
Officer 2: Yes, could you please open the trunk of your car, please.

The woman opens the trunk, revealing nothing but an empty trunk.

Officer 2: Is this your car, ma'am?
Older Woman: Yes, here are the registration papers. Officer 2: One of my officers claims that you do not have a driving license.  

The woman digs into her handbag and pulls out a clutch purse and hands it to the officer. The officer examines the license. He looks puzzled.

Officer 2: Thank you ma'am, one of my officers told me you didn't have a license, that you stole this car, and that you murdered and hacked up the owner.

Older Woman: Bet the lying SOB told you I was speeding, too. 

Guess which one was not charged in the London bomb plot? (from a piece at Squaring the Boston Globe)