Enough is enough

L.A. Times Writer: Let’s Have Another National Conversation on Race
 No, let’s not.  Having grown up in the South I’ve been subjected to all too many “conversations on race”.  Of course it’s never a conversation at all - it’s merely a public opportunity for whites to admit their racial wrongdoings and receive the conditional forgiveness of any black people present while the organizers preen.
If I never go through another one until the day I’m finally killed by the homeless, it'll be too soon. - “Matenloch”

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Better read the fine print first...

Breitbart thinks he got a correction:

The Political Times column last Sunday, about a generational divide over racial attitudes, erroneously linked one example of a racially charged statement to the Tea Party movement. While Tea Party supporters have been connected to a number of such statements, there is no evidence that epithets reportedly directed in March at Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, outside the Capitol, came from Tea Party members. - The New York Times

Andrew celebrates, but over at PJM, commenter Mark Buehner says you’d better parse it like Pravda in the old days:

This wasn’t a correction- it was a further calumny.

1. They make an unsupported allegation about other tea-party racist statements. That’s what got them into this mess.
2. They imply (quite strongly) that somebody made racist statements at the capital… but they just can’t prove 100% that they were teapartiers.  Wink.

A REAL retraction would explain that there is no evidence, despite mounds of video and audio evidence, that any racial slur was uttered by anyone that day.  This pile of garbage was a non-apology apology that managed to make further unsupportable claims.

So nothing to see here, folks.  Might as well move along.

Via:  Insty.

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Darkness at 9:30...

Striking stripes across the sky (looking west-northwest):

Getting gloomy in the north:

Aieee! (Five minutes later, looking southeast.):

After all that excitement, it barely rained here (although points west and south got a bit).  Later on, things cleared off; right now it’s sunny and high 90s.

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Today’s Ruling Class update

Rabble rouser Jules Crittenden offers a bouquet of apoplexy-inducing links.

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No time like the present

Curious about why the seeming out-of-the-blue ethics charges against 20-term Democrat Congressman Charlie Rangel, and now 10-term Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Walters are popping up now?  Don’t be: It’s all about the timing

House Democrats hear the rumbling of a potential Republican takeover come next term.  The last thing they want is a lead up to the presidential election with a Republican House majority loudly airing the Democrats’ dirty laundry.  So...

Have an investigation while they’re still in chage, give the culprits a slap on the wrist, claim that “the process” worked, and then scream like stuck pigs about double jeopardy should the Republicans try for a more-thorough look in 2011.

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Today’s Emily Litella moment

Time publishes a contrarian piece that contends the President’s characterizations of the Gulf spill may have been “exaggerated:”

...So far — while it's important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage.  “The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared,” says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana.

...and folks wonder why a paid-up member of the DSM dissed the Prez:

WTF?  Where does some punkass fish wrapper rag like Time get off daring to even suggest that the ascended Messiah was wrong?

Well, maybe this has something to do with it:

The Coast Guard has gathered evidence it failed to follow its own firefighting policy during the Deepwater Horizon disaster and is investigating whether the chaotic spraying of tons of salt water by private boats contributed to sinking the ill-fated oil rig, according to interviews and documents.

Coast Guard officials told the Center for Public Integrity that the service does not have the expertise to fight an oil rig fire and that its response to the April 20 explosion may have broken the service’s own rules by failing to ensure a firefighting expert supervised the half-dozen private boats that answered the Deepwater Horizon’s distress call to fight the blaze.
...
...The question of what caused the platform to collapse into the Gulf two days later remains unanswered and could prove vital to ongoing legal proceedings and congressional investigations.

That is because the riser pipe from which the majority of BP’s oil spewed did not start leaking until after the rig sank.  Experts and some lawsuits have openly tied the sinking of the drilling vessel to the severity of the leak.

But then, if it turns out there wasn’t a disaster, then government-agency bungling couldn’t have contributed to one... right?

Elsewhere:

UPDATE (100802):  Tam spots another conveniently-timed Time piece.

Examiner link via Insty.

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Hey Captain, don’t leave yet, the show’s just starting!

A change of government in the U.K., and oh, look what comes out!

A cackling Phil Booth, No2ID National Coordinator, writes to tell us that six months after he first pestered the Identity & Passport Service about its quotes from ID card-toting happy campers in its publicity material, it has confessed - um yes, all but one of those quoted worked for the government. - The Register

But wait, there’s more!

The Department for Transport (DfT) has “unwittingly” misled the public over the benefits of speed cameras for the last four years. That was the shock admission yesterday by a DfT spokeswoman, when finally cornered by the Department’s own research.

Of course, our government would never do stuff like that.  (snicker!)

Previously.

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Today’s Captain Renault moment

The Australian:

The US government secretly advised Scottish ministers it would be “far preferable to free the Lockerbie bomber than jail him in Lybia.

Correspondence obtained by The Sunday Times reveals the Obama administration considered compassionate release more palatable than locking up Abdel Baset al-Megrahi in a Lybian prison.
...
The document, acquired by a well-placed US source, threatens to undermine US President Barack Obama's claim last week that all Americans were “surprised, disappointed and angry” to learn of Megrahi’s release.

Gee, d’ya think?

Elsewhere:

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Running Windows? Shut off shortcut icons.

Trend Micro’s ConterMeasures:

On the 16th of July Microsoft released Security Advisory 2286198 confirming an as yet unpatched vulnerability in Windows Shell that exposes all users of all current versions of Microsoft Windows to very real risk of attack and infection.

According to Microsoft “The vulnerability exists because Windows incorrectly parses shortcuts in such a way that malicious code may be executed when the icon of a specially crafted shortcut is displayed.”  So what does that mean in plain language?

It means that if any user of Microsoft Windows opens a folder containing a shortcut which has been designed to exploit this vulnerability, they will be infected.  No opening of files required, simple browsing is enough.

Although Microsoft have stated that “This vulnerability is most likely to be exploited through removable drives” users should be on their guard against all shortcut files whose authenticity they cannot guarantee.  This same vulnerability could be exploited though contaminated file shares or something as simple as a malicious compressed archive such as a zip file.

Or a malicious shortcut on a web page, or even an Office document(!).^[1]

At this time there is no patch to fix this available. Microsoft does have a workaround here; applying it makes Windows display a generic icon rather than the application’s special one.

This exploit was first discovered in a trojan targeting Siemens SCADA control systems, but has now been spotted in the wild.

Elsewhere:
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Clipfile - July 22, 2010

“Our American culture was built on the idea that we can - and should - tell the political class to piss off.” - Daniel La Ponsie

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