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I'm sad to report that my beautiful, beloved pet Noble Macaw, McGee, passed over into Bird Heaven on Sunday night, February 7th, 2010, at the age of about 20. I found him dead, at around 10:30 p. m., on the bottom of his cage. It was very much of a shock, which I still haven't gotten over, but I hope it'll wear off soon.

So saying, I've decided to write a memoir of McGee. Here goes:

The Obama administration made clear its concerns about the expansion of Jewish settlements, so it was insulting to Joe Biden to arrive in Israel and--less than day later--hear the Israeli government announce the approval of 1,600 new homes in East Jersalem. SecState Clinton was understandably peeved. Jeffrey Goldberg:

Distributism is, basically, the doctrine that "ownership of the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the general populace, rather than being centralized under the control of the state (state socialism) or a few large businesses or wealthy private individuals (plutarchic capitalism)."

Viking grave discovered in London

Desmond Tutu is right about the ill treatment of gays in African nations.

Bruce Carroll is right about gay-bashing in America and elsewhere. In Iran, being gay can you hanged, but Tutu's focus is elsewhere.

Secretary of State Clinton announced that the U.S. is restoring $37 million in aid to Honduras and is normalizing relations with the small nation.

A while back, a couple of you suggested a method by which one could reach one's (Ubuntu) desktop from afar, across the Internet.

All one needed was a dyndns.org domain to get around the home desktop's dynamic dns, and some port forwarding on the router. Seemed simple enough. I've managed to gain access to the desktop from within the LAN, but, so far I'm unable to do it via the Internet.

I think the problem is that I'm trying to port forward through two routers -- an ActionTec provisioned by Verizon Fios and a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 to which all my devices connect.

Pope refuses to condemn Ugandan bill proposing execution of gays.

Congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL) introduced yesterday H.R. 4789, a bill amending the Social Security Act Title XVIII, Health Insurance for the Aged and Disabled (Medicare). If we won't get a public option through reconciliation, if the public polls are showing overwhelming support for a public option, and if we want to avoid creating a new agency, then let's open up Medicare in its own act and make some progress regardless of what happens with the HCR mess.

Could it be that Glenn Beck has a point?

Then Beck played a clip of Obama: