AEKowalski's blog

It was bound to happen eventually. The infamous team of depressives over at The Onion (now a wholly-owned subsidiary of MoveOn.Org) has finally produced an offensive parody of the Pope that doesn't really shock anyone, considering the source, and doesn't even make the people who are supposed to get the joke laugh. This comes on the heels of their ONN piece on John McCain and the secret service, the title of which was revised because as originally written, it sounded like McCain was begging for an assassination attempt. For anyone who missed it, the title of that story has changed within the past 36 hours on their website, after what I can only guess was a little afterthought on the part of The Onion's editors. I guess they weren't intersted in a visit from the actual secret service after joking that the Senator was calling for his own assassination.

[Update: I commend BMW, Daimler Benz, Honda and Toyota for their swift and forthright stance on this disgrace.]

Briefly, from Taranto's Best of the Web yesterday:

Undergraduates in cognitive science and psychology are rigorously and routinely instructed not to directly extrapolate behaviors from lower animals into evidence of cause in different animals, much less higher primate species. Al Gore is not a scientist, though -- he's a politician -- and we all know that Al Gore was advised to be more of an Alpha Male, and in his autobiography he explains his "Hypnotized Chicken Theory of Global Warming Consciousness Raising" -- a hypo. that, even with his disclaimer, would have gotten him laughed out of the Cognitive Science departments of our nation's universities if it was submitted as an academic paper. The fact that he included it in his book tells you what Al Gore really thinks of you, gives you some indication of the intellectual heft he carries, and provides some insight into why he partnered with Google on his Current TV venture.

I tried to give Vista the benefit of the doubt. I really did. When I constructed my two workstations over a year ago, I thought I'd try to give Microsoft's new operating system a fair shake and an unbiased look without any MS-hating prejudice.

Well, I'm happy to report that after my last blog entry [note: At RedState] expressing some concern about the length of the process and a little worry about whatever that might signal for my license application, it turns out that I needn't have worried:

Update: Most people who have followed the V-22 through its history even in the most cursory fashion realize that it is made by Boeing.

Gulp.

I don't know whether anyone has noticed, but the photograph up on Drudge right now has our party's presumptive nominee standing in front of a pair of V-22 Ospreys in Iraq.

Does anyone know if that's a current picture? Are Ospreys deployed in Iraq right now to shuttle VIPs around?

More than six months ago I decided to exercise my 2nd Amendment rights and get back into a hobby I'd had since high school, as well as join the largest civic organization in my town, by starting the process of getting my firearms license in Massachusetts. If you've read my blog, you know that the process can be long and expensive: Massachusetts firearms laws and licensing regulations are among the strictest in the nation. Everyone who applies for a license here is subjected to a rigorous criminal background check and mental health background check at the state and Federal levels.

And it's largely true. A few of us know (from painful experience) the stories about how digital data (or data that was previously analog but is now digital) can survive for years, with no expiration date and no statute of limitations. This news comes to us via an (latter-day) internet security consultant from California who, among other lucrative jobs he's done during his IT career, once gave a famous PowerPoint presentation telling the audience all they needed to know about setting up pornographic websites.

In case anyone didn't know, I've recently posted a few tech blog entries to RedState detailing my experiences building a pair of workstations based on Windows Vista, Asus K8N-DL motherboards and so on and so forth. You can read them by clicking on the last three entries in my blog at RS.

I hope they've helped a few people, because these are really wonderful motherboards and AMD processors in Opteron configuration are *fast* (and *cheap!*).