A Final Farewell to Amish Tech Support

Oh, the glorious madness of ATS! Insanity will never look so appealing, and reckless offensiveness will never again be so cool. I know Laurence will still be out there on the electronic aether of the Internet, but ATS is now like the flashback to Paris in Casablanca. It has become a time and place that cannot be brought back, and the memories will remain only memories.

And I will never forget the "madhouse-bound" rogues of ATS; Dr. Schlocktopus, Rabbi M., Clarence, Wind Rider, Shiksa, Russel, Coughlin (The token leftist!), Contruder, and The Lair Simon, all under one blog! A great time was had by all!

"What is the denomination of Hannukah Gelt?"

"He's back back back back back...He's outta here! (And I thought for a moment that AP was recycling headlines.) SCORE!"

"When Mister T says that he pities the fool, I don't believe him."

I wonder if Laurence fully understands the greatness of what he did. The madness, the genius, the stuff that didn't make any sense, and the Disney loathing! Amish Tech Support made everything that didn't make any sense not need to make any sense, and truly affirmed its description as "a padded cell in the basement of the blogosphere." A blogosphere without the legacy of ATS would be like a world without Catch-22, or an Elizabethan England without Shakespeare, or a Berkeley without University of Berkeley.

Without ATS, who will there be to say outrageous things and be completely ignored? Who will there be to make witty comments on the obscure and the bizarre? Who will there be to unhesitatingly and unrestrainedly slam celebrities?

To paraphrase Steinbeck in Tortilla Flat; in the blogosphere if you speak of Amish Tech Support you do not mean a group weblog of multi-columned layout, with comments and individual webpages for each post. No, when you speak of Amish Tech Support you are understood to mean a unit of which the parts are men, from which came cynicism and mirth, exposition and, in the end, a mystic regret. For Amish Tech Support was not unlike the Round Table, and the webloggers of Amish Tech Support were not unlike the knights of it.

Farewell Amish Tech Support. You will be missed.

"When Bremer issued the order to disband the army there was no army."

A very interesting interview with the Iraqi Ghost, Ahmed Chalabi, by Middle East Quarterly. Much of it may be self-serving, but it does bring a different perspective.

I do think his organization was actively fabricating evidence for Saddam's weapon's program, or was fed info by the Saddam's intel ops. That doesn't make me think less of Chalabi though. The man is a champion for justice and freedom in Iraq, and if I was in his position, I would have done the same thing. Anything that could lead to the removal of that brutal tyrant.

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I will cover the interview's points more thoroughly later.

Fly-Fishing Weblogger Watch

"OPEN LETTER TO NEW YORK AREA TROUT"

A Joke

"Radical De-Bassification"

NF Decides

As it stands now, I do not forsee voting for Kerry.

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This is the first part of a continuing series on my continuing struggle to reconcile my hawkish foreign policy with my liberal domestic policy views to choose between Bush and Kerry.

Internal polling:
Bush: +0
Kerry: -5
(Approval scale from +10 to -10)