Month: January 2007

Iraq vs. Venezuela: Civilian Death Score for 2007

Peaceful Venezuela, lead by the beloved Maximum Leader and dear friend of Cindy Sheehan, Hugo Chavez:  12,249 murders.[*1]
(Now, we don’t know how many more people were otherwise offed or “disappeared” by the Chavez regime, do we?)

War-torn Iraq, scene of a hopeless civil war and a quagmire from which the only solution is a hasty American retreat:  19,408[*2] (combination of Iraqi Security Forces and Iraqi civilian deaths)

As Gateway Pundit[*3] notes, the populations of Iraq and Venezuela are almost identical.  He further notes that most of the Iraqi casualties happened in the first part of 2007, before the “Surge” counterinsurgency strategy had taken full effect.

Kinda gives a bit of perspective, doesn’t it?

I’m a DVR guy now!

The Palatial Abode entered the middle-of-the-first-decade-of-the-Twenty-First-Century this morning, as the nice DirecTV installer guy pulled away in his van at about 11:30 a.m., leaving a DirecTV HR-20 HD-DVR receiver behind, installed, and fully functional.

So, what do those obscure letters and numbers mean? Well, it’s basically a satellite TV receiver with a hard disk inside it, which can record up to 200 hours of standard television (or, 50 hours of high definition TV).

So far, so good. I’ve recorded the movie Heartbeeps (a terrible little thing featuring Andy Kauffman and Bernadette Peters) and also, simultaneously, an hour of CNBC’s “Street Signs.”

The big, big, big plus is . . . it records.

The major disappointment is that the on-screen guide is significantly slower than the HD-20 receiver (which moved upstairs to be Snookums’ Tennesee Lady Vol/Sports Pack-and WE/Oxygen network receiver). But, for the ability to record programs up to two weeks in advance, I’ll take that trade. I’d had difficulties with my old VCR tapes (getting eaten by the recorder) as well as my older (2000-vintage) DVD-recorder unit (not recording reliably–that might have been due to bad media but it was really consistently bad).

(I also need to figure out how to re-program the upstairs DirecTV receiver remote to control the TV . . . a minor implementation detail to be sure, but Snookums seems to hate on a visceral level the concept of more than one remote control in any room . . . )

I’ll post more if and when I find really neat or really awful things about DirecTV’s HD-DVR receiver.

Darrent Williams and black culture

Darrent Williams, a second-year cornerback for the NFL’s Denver Broncos, died of a drive-by shooting while in his stretch limosine this morning in Denver.

As always happens when a young person is cut down in the prime of their life, the first question is “why?”

My attention is drawn to an article written by Byron Williams, a pastor from Oakland[*1] :

Black culture today, for all intents and purposes, is thug culture.

While not a blanket statement, we would be fooling ourselves if we did not acknowledge that this is the reality for too many young African Americans, regardless of economic status. For every African-American parent who spends painstaking hours trying to invoke messages of responsibility and hard work, there are larger, more influential forces overtly and covertly saying such things are reserved for “whites only.”

How did we go from aspiring to excellence to glorifying debased and otherwise degrading behavior? Can this all be blamed on racism or the lack of affirmative action?

Today’s so-called black culture finds its roots in prison behavior.

This does not mean that young whites and other groups do not engage in similar practices. What I am witnessing through personal, nonscientific observation is a black community embracing these behaviors so that they become synonymous with who they are. There appears to be no line of demarcation that separates the cultural statement de jour from their reality.

I do not know if Pastor Williams is black or white, although he is writing in a newspaper for the California Bay Area black community.  I do know that he is absolutely right.

Darrent Williams, rest in peace.

“The only terrorist victories are in the media”

Strategy Page[*1] looks at the wars and hot spots in the world at the end of 2006:

International terrorism has created a international backlash and a war unlike any other. The only terrorist victories are in the media. On the ground, the terrorists are losing ground everywhere. There least refuges are places like Somalia, a few of the Philippine islands, and tribal regions of Pakistan. They are being chased out of Somalia and the Philippines, while Pakistan is under constant pressure to do the same.

Reading the whole article is educational–not only because it documents how many of the world’s current conflicts are between radical Islam and whoever else the Jihadists encounter, but also how the Islamists are defeated every time they’re confronted, as in Somalia.

The only way the Islamists win is if Old Media continues its suicidal anti-Western reporting.