As you may recall, I have 9 computers in my house (Laurelin, Telperion, Numerramar, Earrame, Yavanna, Este, Tulkas, Vaire, and Anduril) plus 2 dead ones (Vingilot and Alcarondas) and an iPAQ (Sting). The loaner Athlon 2400 (Osse) is back in my office now.
Well, to make a long story short: it turns out that Earrame had
DOS_AGOBOT on it and Telperion was infected with KLEZ.H. Silly me; I give Symantec AntiVirus 9.0 to all my students and friends and I don't install it on 3 of my own systems. Well, one of these started launching some kind of port scanning attack on a remote site. Cox Communications shut down my service at 11:27 CST Fri 12 Nov 2004. I am a wee bit miffed that Cox still counted this incident against their "three strikes policy", even though they know it is most likely a trojan horse virus. Gah.Anyhow, from just before noon yesterday until noon today, I had no web (httpd), mail (IMAP/SMTP), remote login (SSH), file transfer (SCP), or chat (IRC) capabilities. I did have AIM/ICQ and YIM sporadically so that I could whinge and pound on the doors of the ark that is the Internet.
I wasn't shaking, through, mmkay?
Second, my friends list is active with another political discussion that promises to dwarf the creationist debate from last week. You've heard of the conservative Christian university Bob Jones University, the largest private liberal arts university in South Carolina? Well,
tv_elf reports on this letter from its president, Bob Jones III, to President G. W. Bush, and her most excellent satiric response, worthy of Swift at the very least.I'm quite impressed at the responses.
wiliqueen follows up in this initial commentary and in this follow-up thread, the latter of which has some cogent remarks by others. As several have noted, it's hard to pick out a single point of contention with what I find to be an all-around odious letter, but I'll stick to a point of inappropriate labeling:You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ.
For goodness' sake, put away that broad brush, Dr. Jones. It's sheerest fallacy to insinuate that all liberals despise Christ, and as a point of political pragmatism, it is beyond myopic to tell a president who purports to seek bipartisan solutions that he owes liberals nothing. Heaven forfend a liberal should have voted for G. W. Bush - he should have returned those votes uncounted! Then again, perhaps "bipartisan" is a bad word to Dr. Jones.
I'd also like to quote
wiliqueen's plea to Dr. Jones:Hate me if you have to, but at least take some pity on the sane Christians -- and, in point of fact, sane Evangelicals (and yes, Virginia, they do exist) -- who end up getting splattered with your delusional war paint. Sheesh.
As for that SIKRIT Pagan AgendaTM:
havocthecat done posted it! Well, I'll be durned. You don't see 
teunc posting its agenda, do you? (Hrmm...)As for Dr. Jones's America: let's just say I am glad it presently exists only in his letters. Me, I had to import a pagan student from overseas - that's how frelling unamerican I am.
Why don't you write to your mental students?
-Banadad, referring to my mentees
--
Banazir
