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Coincidence?

By Mitch Berg

Reading this, I couldn’t help but notice this.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 7:44 am and is filed under Campaign '08. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

41 Responses to “Coincidence?”

  1. Chuck Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 8:02 am

    Saw this on another blog…but have to comment. I think this ends the debate it. It is settled science. The Democrat party is run by lunatics. Angry Clown, even you have to agree. I wonder if Crazy Herb is going to give his house to “Indigenous Peoples” and move back to whereever his ancestors came from….

    http://www.northlandsnewscenter.com/news/local/10327072.html

    Move out of the way Columbus and make way for Duluth’s 3rd “Indigenous Peoples Day.”

    The city’s proclamation is dedicated to changing public perception regarding the observation of Columbus Day.
    Duluth Mayor Herb Bergson says the traditional celebration of Columbus Day does not accurately reflect history and how indigenous people were affected by it.

    “To me it’s murder and not only was he responsible for murders, but his men were responsible for raping and pillaging and doing acts that are monstrous.”

    The celebration kicked off this afternoon with a march downtown… and culminated with a potluck community feast at the Washington Center.
    The feast included a number of American Indian songs and dances.

    Three of the five city employee unions have agreed to no longer recognize Columbus Day as a city holiday as part of their new contracts.

  2. angryclown Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 9:01 am

    And I couldn’t help thinking of this: http://snipurl.com/1ryib

  3. Chuck Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 9:58 am

    AC, that’s almost as funny as when Democrats in the south used to portray African-Americans as monkeys. What is it with your side on monkeys?

    Of course our side called Kerry “horse-head” and Edwards is the “silky pony”, so I guess we are guilty also.

  4. angryclown Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 10:13 am

    Ah, good times, eh Chuckwagon? Of course that’s before all those southern racists switched to your party.

  5. peevish Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 10:13 am

    Reading this…

    I couldn’t help notice this:

    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/09/terror/main3346411.shtml

    Sure am glad GWB doesn’t DO politics on national security issues, sure am glad he doesn’t leak anything.

    Whatsamatta Mitch.. couldn’t find anything better than this tripe to distract us from the actual news?

  6. Mitch Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 10:37 am

    couldn’t find anything better than this tripe to distract us from the actual news?

    You’re onto me.

    I DO have the power to “distract” my readers “from the news”, because I DO assume every one of them gets ALL their information from me. And only me.

    Because I AM that big.

    Gotta hand it to you.

  7. Chuck Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 10:41 am

    Peev, someone in the gov’t leaked this and should be held responsible. And this is a real security leak, not the fake one that the Democrats were obsessed with earlier this year (Valarie, what happened to you).

    AC, you need to hang out with me at the bar in the labor temple building in Duluth. When you walk out, you will say “gee, you were right. Democrats are the most racist people in America.” You do know what they call Mideast types there? Arabs are known as “Sand xxxxxxx”. And Native Americans are called “Timber xxxxxxx”. Asians are frequently known as “squinty eyed xxxxxxx”. If you’re not sure where the buillding is, just drive north on I-35 until you see the brick building with the large signs attached to the outside of the second floor, promoting Democratic candidates.

  8. angryclown Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 10:46 am

    Yeah Chuck, that’s exactly what Angryclown needs to do. Hang out with you in a bar in Duluth. Here, let me put that down on my lifetime to do list: No. 487,902,657,348,902 between “remove hair from nutsac with pliers” and “throw self into volcano.”

  9. Yossarian Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 10:49 am

    Mitch, I’m awaiting your marching orders for the day. Please program my cerebrum before noon Central time. My primary operating system is Linux, although I do have logical partitions that run AIX 5L, Solaris and i5/OS, respectively. Because, as Peev correctly surmised, I can do nothing or think about anything other than what is broadcast here.

  10. Chuck Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 10:50 am

    “between “remove hair from nutsac with pliers” and “throw self into volcano.” ”

    There has to be something funny to say here, but I can’t think of it right now. Anyone?

  11. angryclown Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 10:55 am

    Step aside, Chuck. Mitch is the only one, other than Angryclown, with the necessary comedic ability.

  12. Yossarian Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 10:59 am

    Personally, I’m waiting for Peev to compain about the childish nature of AngryClown’s comedic ability, because as far as I can tell, AC isn’t worth beans as a person.

  13. angryclown Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 11:21 am

    Linux? You flatter yourself, Cathcart. I don’t think you could run a game of Donkey Kong inside that brain of yours without falling out of your chair.

  14. Mitch Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 11:21 am

    o. 487,902,657,348,902 between “remove hair from nutsac with pliers”

    Experience is a fearsome teacher.

  15. angryclown Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 11:25 am

    See what I’m saying? Sure Mitch is an evil wingnut, but when he rolls up his sleeve you can see the burned in rubber chicken scar from the Shaolin Humor Academy.

  16. Yossarian Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 11:25 am

    Actually, the last thing that made me fall out of my chair was a YouTube video of a guy failing to launch a bottlerocket from his rectum, so you’re probably not far off, AC.

  17. angryclown Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 11:26 am

    Shhhh. Kermit’s still a little sensitive about it.

  18. buzz Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 11:40 am

    “487,902,657,348,902 between “remove hair from nutsac with pliers””
    Please. Clearly hypothetical. As a liberal, AC wouldn’t have a nutsac.

  19. peevish Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 11:41 am

    No mitch, you’re not either big, nor important, but you are nothing other than a propogandist. Then again, I never said you were SOO big, or that your readers ONLY got their news from you, now did I? Care to invent more BS Stramen?

    Yet:
    You don’t write about the war when it’s going badly

    You don’t write about the economy when it’s going badly.

    You don’t write about the debt

    You don’t write about North Korea, or FISA, or.. well, I suspect you get the idea.

    Instead, you purposefully look for ways to continuously attack Democrats (whom I also attack – so it’s not as if I’m some sort of partisan hack – no that would be you). Since the Presidency is held by a Republican, Yeah, it looks like a distraction – you want to talk about your attack issues, rather than actual important issues. You deride Nick Coleman as if Nick Coleman is actually important – I ask you questions about how the administration is actually going to deal with the Shiia/Sunni divide – the ACTUAL and MAIN problem in Iraq – you demure and talk about the effectiveness of David Patraeus – so yeah Mitch, you avoid uncomfortable topics, and try to push it off into areas of comfort, so YEAH Mitch, that’s distraction.

    The point of your attacks is pretty obvious. You’re a Republican schill – you carp about things like Wen Ho Li, like Clinton’s rather moderate changes and uses of FISA as compared to Bush’s, you carp about national security, but if you’re golden boy of a Prez does ANYTHING that is wrong, including going WAY beyond Clinton on FISA or Bush does somethign equivilant to something a Democrat did, or really just something you ought to speak about, you’re dead silent.

    Instead we get more drivel about Clinton being liked by people who are, by your commentary, less bright than monkeys. You sure are civil, you sure aren’t condescending at all, you sure are looking for a civil discussion.

    So, Yeah Mitch, that’s distraction, get it.. and NO it doesn’t mean that you are powerful, or big, or important, it means your a hypocrite and as you have admitted to in the past, a propogandist (though I think your term was something like – I make no bones about being overtly biased). In this case ‘biased’ means you usually refuse to write about anything that might put Republicans in a bad light until you can find some glimmer of hope, and you vertually NEVER fail to attack Democrats, to distort the record for that matter, at EVERY opportunity.

    And so, you get called on it.

    Chuck – leaking Valerie Wilson’s identity was probably a crime, but one that can’t be proven because Libby took the fall for those responsible (Armitage, Rove, Cheney). How do you know the same cabal of security sieves didn’t leak this? Or, since I personally abhore the ludicrous tactics of the right, I’ll not require you to disprove a negative. Evidence suggests this administration, from top to bottom, especially at the White House, is one HUGE security problem – why should I believe it wasn’t the office of the VP that was involved given past history?

  20. buzz Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 11:47 am

    Sigh. I hereby retract my previous statement about AC, and direct it towards Peev.

  21. Mitch Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 11:48 am

    You don’t write about the war when it’s going badly

    You don’t write about the economy when it’s going badly.

    You don’t write about the debt

    You don’t write about North Korea, or FISA, or.. well, I suspect you get the idea.

    Yes, I do.

    You’ve got very selective perception!

    I’ve written about all of the above. The distinction you miss is I haven’t written anything you agree with on any of the above. Such is life. We move on.

    I write about what grabs me. Nothing more, nothing less. You can read anything you want into it (indeed, that is pretty much all you do!). And you certainly may – but that is all it is.

  22. Terry Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 11:54 am

    Yoss-
    Are the partitions encrypted?
    I’m working on a technique that will allow you to keep multiple OS’s on the same machine, each on their own encrypted partition & booted via a USB flash drive with LUKS built into its initramfs. ext3 & the Solaris parts are easy. I’m just beginning to noodle around with NTFS. I think it should be possible for Joe User to install multiple copies XP with a single product key on the same physical machine as long you only run one copy at a time. Great for isolating one user environment from another.

  23. Yossarian Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 12:15 pm

    Uh oh, Terry is calling me out on my geek bluff. I’m clearly out of my league. I’ll try to respond in Peev-speak.

    “Yet:

    You don’t code in COBOL unless you’re comfortable with such legacy languages.

    You don’t program in XML without first building an RPG interface.

    You don’t exceed your IT budget.

    You don’t mess with a mainframe, or z/OS, unless you really know what you’re doing, or.. well, I suspect you get the idea.

    Instead, you purposefully look for ways to continuously encrypt data(particulary in this era of legislative regulatory compliance). Since failing to adhere to regulations can mean stiff penalties, yeah, it’s an important consideration- you want to protect your data carefully, and encrypting partitions is a good way to achieve that. You deride Linus Torvalds as if Linus Torvalds is actually important – I ask questions about how Linux is actually going to deal with the Red Hat and SuSE Linux divide – the ACTUAL and MAIN problem in Linux implementations- you demure and talk about the effectiveness of Solaris and AIX – so yeah Terry, you avoid uncomfortable IT issues, and try to push it off into areas of USB flash drives and LUKS, so YEAH Terry, that’s distraction.

    The point of your technique is pretty obvious. You’re a Microsoft XP schill – you carp about things like NTFS, like HP-UX’s rather moderate differences from AIX and uses of initramfs as compared to SAN Volume Controller, you carp about data security, but if you’re golden child of an OS does ANYTHING that is wrong, including crashing or other such downtime, you’re dead silent.”

    As I said, I’m way out of my tech geek league, so everything that appears above is completely nonsensical twaddle, but so is practically everything Peev writes.

  24. Mitch Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 12:27 pm

    Twaddle, yes – but dead-on parody too.

  25. Terry Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 12:44 pm

    Yoss-
    RÁrÛ ½óùì%ûØ&3=´Ó:éITÙNþö”dÚQ^ØåíÓÛ·+8¥Õý£VzØëñ¡{%\MQÃóزÛh¢tf▒Mâôq°+¸hÕH>5ÍðjFò¨ñýH¾|¨GòÕX9iI~~½
    h9ê3_ÿE¯zOåQ7w^Mvñ­@%76tQûu▒Àú:ie/Ö@wÀ¶À6À+à%ÛªøZTPRØ[þ1µ©ÕÿPË*Qwô*§3»(aSCAß6R¬Îf»;ú¶êº%7
    A}Z-¡LllÕötÞwVßkb½,yO£±>Þã×ì½0hDÙ¥½þú[Ò?ôZüAáq?®óÏ6áGëO:Ü”Dª×¢ÆÖÛù±Zq~íDõ5iüÉY/-iY.´| Þ//ê\rKS`·$¼1ø¨ê

  26. nerdbert Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 1:17 pm

    Terry, my solution for multiple instances of XP/Vista is a bit lower tech: (g)parted and cloning partitions, with grub for booting works well for isolating XP partitions and using a single key. Just remember the hide command to hide the other XP partition in the grub configuration. It works best if you do the clone after a clean install and make sure you put the users home on a separate partition (a little registry hacking doesn’t hurt anybody). Not automated for Joe User, but it could be relatively easily. And easily extensible for additional OSes.

    Why do it? Well, if you have kids you know what security holes AIM and Messenger are, and all the virii that come down those. My kids are limited users, but still stuff gets through. So I clone the partitions and then if I’m going to do something sensitive (taxes, banking, etc) I use my grub password protected private partition to make sure that it’s reasonably more secure from what the kids have done to their partition. And the sensitive data is kept in only in that private partition in encrypted folders.

    As to OS choice, while I’m pro-choice I can’t comment on Yossarian’s OS, but we can be reasonably confident that AC’s is Vista: far slower and flashier than need be, unable to run or process information without permission from a controlling master, and incompatible with the vast majority of hardware and software out there. But at least he’s a tiny bit better at security than what came before him in his genre of leftist ideologue — but even there, he’s rather annoying with all sorts of bothersome, confusing, and incredibly repetitive messages just like Vista.

  27. Yossarian Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 2:02 pm

    Nerdbert = WIN.

  28. Terry Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 2:06 pm

    Nerdbert-
    A fine solution and one that is useful for a household with several users & one computer. Well within the reach of a savvy XP user, too. Little to no maintenance after the initial setup.
    One problem, though — the admin user on all partitions will have access to the mbr & so can foul up everything, even the user of a hidden partition. I admit that is a problem with my encrypted part/multiple installation scheme as well.
    How’s this sound, though — run each instance of XP on qemu from a linux or XP host OS. That way each user could be completely separated from the underlying hardware that hosts the other partitions.

  29. angryclown Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 2:31 pm

    Nerd commented: “I can’t comment on Yossarian’s OS, but we can be reasonably confident that AC’s is Vista.”

    Wingnuts are PCs. Angryclown’s a Mac.

    Cathcart judged: “Nerdbert = WIN.”

    Like the Employee of the Month award at the local Jiffy Lube, this isn’t a laurel to which Angryclown has aspired.

  30. Terry Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 2:45 pm

    “Like the Employee of the Month award at the local Jiffy Lube, this isn’t a laurel to which Angryclown has aspired.”

    Notice he did not say “this isn’t a laurel to which Angryclown was qualified to receive.” Career jealousy is an ugly thing.

  31. buzz Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 2:46 pm

    Dammit clown. It hurts me when you talk yourself down like that. I have every confidence that someday you WILL win that employee of the month award at the local Jiffy Lube. Just believe in yourself, dammit!

  32. swiftee Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 3:01 pm

    “No mitch, you’re not either big, nor important [and to prove it I’m going to spend the next hour and a half writing inane pap in your comment thread].

    Assclown removes the hair from his nutsack every morning…

    http://thefuntimesguide.com/images/blogs/smooth-shaving-bald-head-4.jpg

  33. angryclown Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 3:33 pm

    Speaking of lube, what’s that on your breath swiftee? Confuse the KY with the toothpaste again? You’ll never win Manwhore of the Month that way.

  34. Kermit Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 4:06 pm

    487,902,657,348,900, – discover nutsack. 487,902,657,348,901- close WebMD.

  35. Troy Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 5:34 pm

    What? No one uses VMware or Xen to do virtualization?

    I think both are worth a try, even for the Mac users in the crowd. 🙂

  36. nerdbert Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 6:31 pm

    Terry, I’m not much of a fan of qemu for the simple reason that games don’t run too well under it and I’ve got a range of kids from 16 to 3 to deal with. The older ones tend to like some more graphics intensive stuff and qemu just can’t handle that and even some of the little kid games give it trouble, so I’m stuck with multiple native XP sessions.

    The thing I like is that gparted, Clonezilla, and grub are all free and they’re actually pretty easy to use. I make periodic backups using Clonezilla and I like it better than the copy of Ghost I’ve got, and gparted is an excellent clone of Partition Magic that works better than PM on a mixed SATA/PATA setup.

    There’s not a whole lot you can do to prevent root/admin from any OS modifying the underlying hardware without securing the BIOS. That’s one reason to keep a boot CD/DVD around: ubuntu, bartpe, etc. At least there you can repair the grub setup.

    I’ve never liked the default of one big partition on Windows boxes as it makes selective backups and OS restores much more difficult. I keep 3 partitions on the family machine: FamilyOS, SecuredOS, and FamilyData. All user accounts are on the 3rd partition and programs on the first. Very few programs are installed in the SecuredOS: nothing more than AV, a reasonable firewall, some spyware detection, and TurboTax/Quicken. In case of bad infection I can blow away the first partition, reimage to a known good state, and not lose a lick of user data like pictures and iTunes. Note: just moving My Documents isn’t enough, so I move the entire profile to the data drive, so that all program settings and local caches are on the Family Data partition, too. That’s a pretty easy regedit command (find the ProfileImagePath key and change it from “%systemdrive%\documents and settings\kid” to “d:\documents and settings\kid”, login as “kid” and copy all your settings and data from c: and you’re done) and after I’ve done the prep for the accounts added I image so I never have to remember how to do it twice.

    Yes, the kids managed to dork their partition with a spyware install so bad I had to reimage their OS partition (I told them not to trust “free emoticons” for AIM), but at least by putting their data in another partition I didn’t have to restore that and nothing was lost. Actually, I was glad they did that since it taught them a lesson and now they’re much more careful, and the recovery didn’t hurt too much on my part. But if I’d lost my wife’s photo directory when that happened both the kids and I would have been in a world of pain.

  37. nerdbert Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 6:42 pm

    Troy, I have VMWare and it’s not bad for anything that’s not too video intensive like games. It’s better than Wine and for specific cases it’s good. I do perverse things with it, though: I run VMWare under Linux so that I can run XP, the corporate Windows only VPN, and an X11 emulator that lets me log onto our Linux compute farm. All that wouldn’t be required if they’d spring for a reasonable VPN, but try running that through corporate IT who are paranoid about anything other than Windows on user machines. The key is getting to the 3rd level corporate IT support guys who run the Linux farm and who are more than willing to slip you a copy of the VPN for your Linux box…

  38. Terry Says:
    October 10th, 2007 at 2:03 am

    Troy & Nerdbert-
    I guess I’m a special case. Only I log onto my home computer but at work I have to use a up to a half dozen different windows PC’s depending on where I’m assigned. I finally solved that problem by moving all my work stuff onto an encrypted 12GB USB drive & booting that OS (Debian Etch) no matter what PC I’m assigned. 12 GB ain’t a lot of space but it holds the OS, browser, email, MySQL, a simple build environment & other goodies with 6 GB to spare.
    The performance hit is terrible on any app where you have to do a lot of disk transfers. To xfer data between memory and disk each 512 byte block is XOR’d with a 512 byte mask generated on the fly by the encryption program. Slow, especially on old machine’s with USB 1. A host machine with at least 1GB is best so you can avoid dirty page writes from mem cache to physical disk.
    I don’t have administrative privilege on the machines at work because the way they’ve got it setup anyone with admin rights can get into the personnel files, ie, I could give myself a raise if I was admin on a networked machine. Without admin rights I can’t install vmware or xen — unless they’ve come out with a better user mode lately.
    I have been thinking about compiling an XP version of qemu (it’s been shown to work, mostly, on XP) and then launching my USB OS on top of it, but I would be stuck with app privileges & the same security problems that any XP app has.
    The game thing is very important. At home I have a desktop running only XP so I can play WoW & I boot my laptop with my encrypted USB drive when I need to do work or linux stuff.

  39. Troy Says:
    October 10th, 2007 at 10:41 am

    So, what do you guys do for backup?

    I usually use a bunch of DVDs every once in a while for a real backup, but ‘rsnapshot’ for file versioning and mistake recovery. It works OK and fits the budget (“what budget?”), but is more relaxed than I’d prefer.

  40. angryclown Says:
    October 10th, 2007 at 11:20 am

    Why don’t you guys get a room?

  41. Terry Says:
    October 10th, 2007 at 1:30 pm

    Troy-
    Backing up the 12GB encrypted USB drive is easy. Once a week I boot the desktop from it, plug an 80GB USB drive into another port, and issue “dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb”. Takes about 10 minutes & the image is bootable via qemu. Back when I had the linux system crammed onto a 4GB drive I could fit the whole thing on a blank DVD.
    The XP desktop has an extra 80 GB IDE drive. I image the system drive with it every month or so using a non-free tool made by acronix.

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