Toddlers who dislike spicey food = racist

Article Linky

“Toddlers who turn their noses up at spicy food from overseas could be branded racists by a Government-sponsored agency.

The National Children’s Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among youngsters in their care.

This could include a child of as young as three who says “yuk” in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.

The guidance by the NCB is designed to draw attention to potentially-racist attitudes in youngsters from a young age.

It alerts playgroup leaders that even babies can not be ignored in the drive to root out prejudice as they can “recognise different people in their lives”.

The 366-page guide for staff in charge of pre-school children, called Young Children and Racial Justice, warns: “Racist incidents among children in early years settings tend to be around name-calling, casual thoughtless comments and peer group relationships.”

It advises nursery teachers to be on the alert for childish abuse such as: “blackie”, “Pakis”, “those people” or “they smell”.

The guide goes on to warn that children might also “react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying ‘yuk’”.

Staff are told: “No racist incident should be ignored. When there is a clear racist incident, it is necessary to be specific in condemning the action.”

Warning that failing to pick children up on their racist attitudes could instil prejudice, the NCB adds that if children “reveal negative attitudes, the lack of censure may indicate to the child that there is nothing unacceptable about such attitudes”.

Nurseries are encouraged to report as many incidents as possible to their local council. The guide added: “Some people think that if a large number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the institution. In fact, the opposite is the case.”

Wow. Just wow. I guess the next logical step after this is to say that the children must be racist because their parents are. Then they will outlaw racism and arrest the parents, turn the children over to the government so the government can “re-educate” them. 1984 is starting to look more and more like a possible outcome for the UK.

Update – T-Shirt hell has the perfect shirt for this:

Read This And If It Doesn’t Make You Want To Throw Up

then I’m afraid we just can’t be friends anymore. Linky.

From the article:

“Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.”

Nutjobs… all of them.

Italian Spiderman

Classic. Forget web, shotguns and crotch rockets are WAY better.

Episode 1:

Episode 2:

Best Bush Quote Ever

President Bush is in Isreal speaking to Knesset and had this to say,

“Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” the President said to the country’s legislative body, “We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is –- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

There is nothing I can say to make that any better.

And of course, the democrats are having a hissy fit over this.
Obama replied with,

“It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 6Oth anniversary of Israel’s independence to launch a false political attack. It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel. Instead of tough talk and no action, we need to do what Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan did and use all elements of American power — including tough, principled, and direct diplomacy – to pressure countries like Iran and Syria. George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the President’s extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel.”

Nancy Pelosi says that the comments by Bush were “beneath the dignity of the office of the president and unworthy of our representation.” And the great Joe Biden said, “This is bullshit, this is malarkey. This is outrageous, for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, to sit in the Knesset … and make this kind of ridiculous statement.”

Amazing, recalling history and speaking the truth (that appeasement doesn’t work) is now considered “ridiculous.” Why are the democrats so pissy over this? Because they think Bush was attacking Obama with this statement.

*Update* The White House press secretary Dana Perino, completely burns Obama with this,

“I understand when you’re running for office you sometimes think the world revolves around you. That is not always true. And it is not true in this case.”

Best Torrent Site is Back!

Demonoid is back online. All user accounts are still there which means no rebuilding of ratios. Have at it.

Boycott Creative *UPDATE*

For those of you that don’t know, Creative is a company that manufacturers sound cards. If you wanted a good sound card, typically you went with Creative. For a while now, however, Creative as been getting worse and worse to the point where their products have become not much more than expansive crap; but they still dominate the sound card market. The main problem has been their drivers. Even with XP, their drivers were crap.

Back when I built my first desktop, I went to the local Staples and bought a Creative sound card. Nothing special, just a regular 24bit 5.1 sound card. As I have always done when I get a piece of hardware, I went online to get the latest drivers. However, I couldn’t find drivers for the specific model I had, so I got the drivers for the root model that should have worked. The only problem was they didn’t. Turns out the sound card I bought was a special model that was apparently only sold in stores like Staples because it had been discontinued; a model which wasn’t supported with new drivers on their website. They didn’t even have old drivers on the website, so I was forced to use the ones off the CD.

Strike one for Creative.

So I used the drivers from the CD and all was well. Then one day, for no reason, I started getting a crackling noise. I uninstalled the drivers, removed the card and then reinstalled everything. That did not fix the problem, and since I couldn’t get updated drivers, I now had a useless sound card.

Strike two for Creative.

Now, we have strike three.

Creative’s drivers for Vista where so crappy that it took one of their customers to make them work correctly. This one man did what the entire Creative driver team couldn’t, he made drivers that worked. Ha. So what did Creative do? Embrace him? Offer him a job? Ask him what he did to make them work so they could fix their own drivers?

Nope. They told him to stop. This in turn has spawned many angry replies from customers that where only still using their Creative sound cards on Vista because of this one man. Many said they would never use a Creative product again and even started a new thread on the Creative forums with the title, “Post here if your done with Creative.“

I, for one, was done with Creative before this. A couple of months ago when I was browsing Newegg to price parts for a new computer, I chose not to go with Creative and instead with an Asus card.

Bye Creative.

*UPDATE* As a result of the backlash Creative has gotten over this, they have backed down and even reinstated all the posts made by Daniel_K.

Give This Man Another Medal

Simply for the line, “and then I kicked him in the teeth and I just kept going.”
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/ver/256.0/popup/index.php?cl=7158225

WWII vets kicking some punks ass makes me happy. However, the fact that he had to because society has become such a shit hole, makes me sad. Men like that are the reason we won the war. One to the balls to take the punk down, another to the teeth to keep him there.

Hat tip Hot Air.

Customize Your PC: #4

All versions of Windows since 98 (98 SE, ME, XP and Vista, excluding 95, 2000 and NT) have the System Configuration utility, also known simply as msconfig. Not much has changed in it except which system files it configures.

I’m going to give a quick rundown of every tab in the msconfig window.

First thing you need to do is open msconfig. To do this, click Start > Run and type in msconfig then hit enter. You should then see this:

This tab is for selecting how Windows is going to boot. The first option is self explanatory. I have never seen Normal Startup selected, though I image it is the default option selected after a fresh install of Windows.

The next option is Diagnostic Startup. I’ve never used this option before, but it seems to be pretty similar to Safe Mode. Some of the services that this disables is Networking, Plug & Play, Event Logging, and Error Reporting. And according to Microsoft, this also permanently deletes all system restore points. So keep that in mind if you ever decide to use this.

The next option is the one that is always selected on my computers, Selective Startup. The first two sub options should be checked. The second two sub options will be checked if you have never changed anything under the Services or Startup tabs, if you have, they will be green like in the picture. The next sub option  just tells Windows whether or not you are using the original boot.ini or a modified one. You will not be able to select modified unless you modify the boot.ini file from within this program (the boot.ini tab). If you edit it manually by opening it in notepad, msconfig will still think it is the original. More on boot.ini later.

Next tab: SYSTEM.INI

First thing you should know about this tab and what’s in it is this: DON’T CHANGE ANYTHING. This file has pretty much been phased out in favor of the registry. In a fresh install of XP, this file is created blank, but XP will still acknowledge some entries to provide backwards compatiabilty with older 16-bit applications.

Next tab: WIN.INI

First thing you should know about this tab and what’s in it is this: DON’T CHANGE ANYTHING. By default in Windows 3.x, basic settings were stored in this file, but like system.ini, it was phased out in favor of the registry. Also like system.ini, XP will still acknowledge some entries to provide backwards compatibility with older 16-bit applications.

Next tab: BOOT.INI

If you use Vista, skip this. Vista did away with the boot.ini file and now stores information for manging boots in the registry.
Boot.ini is the only boot file you would ever need to worry about, and really only if you are trying to do dual boot. Boot.ini contains several things Windows needs to know as it boots. Editing the file from here will change the option under the General tab to “Use modified BOOT.INI.” First entry is timeout. If you have multiple versions of Windows (or Windows and Linux, though using boot.ini to boot Linux sucks and isn’t really done anymore), the value for timeout is the length of time, in seconds, it will give you to select which OS you want to boot. The next entry is default. This tells Windows what OS entry you want to be the default. If you fail to make a selection before the timeout period ends, the value for default will be used.
The next section lists the operating systems installed. Each line is a separate entry and these will be displayed at boot up. Here is an example of a boot.ini with two OSes:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)..WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)..WINDOWS=”Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)..WINNT=”Windows 2000 Professional” /fastdetect

The checkable options add the value to the end of the selected OS giving it various different commands for booting said OS. Here’s a rundown.

/SAFEBOOT – Safe Mode

/safeboot:minimal – Enter safe mode with minimal device drivers.
/safeboot:miniaml(alternateshell) – Uses an alternate shell (interface).
/safeboot:network – Adds network support.
/safeboot:dsrepair – Starts a domain controller in Directory Services Restore Mode.

/NOGUIBOOT – This disables the bitmap progress bar when booting. This also disables the text output used by CHKDSK and various partitioning tools, so you should use this switch with extreme caution.
/BOOTLOG – Creates a log file to log the boot process.
/BASEVIDEO – Starts the computer using the standard VGA video driver instead of the video driver from the video card manufacturer.
/SOS – Names the display drive while loading.

Clicking Advanced Options brings up yet more command options.

/MAXMEM=nnn – Sets the highest memory address Windows can use
/NUMPROC=n – Sets the number of processors Windows is allowed to use. This is useful if you have a processor that is defective or failing. This applies to multi-core processors as well. What I’m not sure about is how you can tell it which proc to use and which one not to use.
/PCILOCK – Tells Windows to let the BIOS assign device addresses instead of Windows.
/DEBUG – Causes the kernel debugger to load and activate.

/DEBUGPORT=comport – Debugs a certain port.
/BAUDRATE=n – When a com port (com1, 2, etc) is selected this option becomes avaliable to set the baud rate used.
/CHANNEL=n – If 1394 is selected as the port, this allows you to set the channel used.

For more command options, see this.

Next tab: Services

This contains a list of all services that have a Startup Type of Automatic or Manual as listed in services.msc (which has a complete list of ALL services whether set to Automatic, Manual, or Disabled). As long as the service does not say it’s essential, you can de-select it from starting up with Windows, however doing so may cause weird things to happen if the service has something to do with Windows functionally. Some people thing that cleaning out this list to only include services vital to Windows will speed up boot time and free up system resources. Not so much. If it is from Microsoft, I’d leave it be, but feel free to un-check any third party services. This tab also tells you what the current status of the service is, Running or Stopped. A lot of services will run at boot to serve some function then shutdown shortly after, others remain running all the time. These services are started before you get to the login screen.

Next tab: Startup

This lists all programs that are set to startup with Windows. This includes Microsoft programs as well as third party apps. Anytime you tell a program to start will Windows, it simply adds an entry here (which is actually in the registry) telling Windows to boot it at startup. This is done about the same time as the desktop first appears. This is a good place to come if you have a slow boot up. Taking programs out of here can have dramatic effects in your computers start up time if the program is a resource hog or simply isn’t working right.

For more information check out the following links:
How to Edit the Boot.ini File
How to Troubleshoot Configuration Errors in Windows XP by Using the System Configuration Utility
How to Troubleshoot Configuration Errors in Windows Vista by Using the System Configuration Utility

Also, special thanks to Jesse for recommending msconfig as a topic.

Few Things

First off, with yet another hat tip to RHOG, is the worst sports analogy ever.

“Since all political commentary is powered by sports analogies, let’s take football here. The Clinton team is playing as if this will be decided on points. But in fact, it will be decided by judges, some of them empires, some of them representatives of the crowd, some of them big donors to the stadium. And those judges are terrified of pissing off their loyal fan base. The strategy here should be making the loyal fan base like you, not trying to pummel the other team.”

What? Empires? It’s umpire you jackass, and they aren’t in football (American football or soccer), they are in baseball. Not decided by points? Has this guy ever watched even one game of football… ever? Highlights even? Does this guy get ESPN? And why would you need to make the LOYAL fan base like you? I’m a Dolphins fan even though they have sucked for years.

Moving on….
Obama’s military adviser is anti-semitic.

Clinton says she “misspoke” when she lied through her teeth about her trip to Bosnia in ’96. Hat tip Crush Liberalism.

“She was quick to answer, jumping in before I was fully finished with the question. Here’s her response in its entirety:

“Now let me tell you what I can remember, OK — because what I was told was that we had to land a certain way and move quickly because of the threat of sniper fire. So I misspoke — I didn’t say that in my book or other times but if I said something that made it seem as though there was actual fire — that’s not what I was told. I was told we had to land a certain way, we had to have our bulletproof stuff on because of the threat of sniper fire. I was also told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac but that there was this 8-year-old girl and I said well, I, I can’t, I can’t rush by her, I’ve got to at least greet her — so I greeted her, I took her stuff and then I left, Now that’s my memory of it.

I followed-up, noting that the episode has raised questions about her credibility on foreign policy. She responded:

“No, I don’t, Good grief, I went to 80 countries, you know. I gave contemporaneous accounts, I wrote about a lot of this in my book. you know, I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things — millions of words a day — so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement.”

I like how she even tries to drum up sympathy and distract you by throwing in that bit about the 8-year girl (seen in the video) still being there after the ceremony had been moved.

On an unrelated note, I don’t know when I’ll do another “Customize your PC” post. Maybe this weekend if I can think of something else to do. If you have a suggestion, please, please post it in the comments or send me a message.

Hillary Caught in a Blatant Lie

I’m surprised CBS is actually calling her on this one.