Monday, November 06, 2006

I wonder how much our news will talk about this?

A British Muslim plotted to cause "massive explosions" in Britain and the United States designed to kill thousands of people, a court heard today.

Dhiren Barot, a 34-year-old convert from north London, led a conspiracy to commit mass murder and was intent on causing, in his own words, "another black day for the enemies of Islam".

His plots included using radioactive dirty bombs, a petrol tanker, and a co-ordinated bomb attack using limosines packed with gas cylinders.


And the subways? He also planned to flood London's Underground network by blowing up a Tube train under the Thames, predicting that if he could "rupture the river itself", this "would cause pandemonium, what with the explosions, flooding, drowning etc that would occur".

Isn't this just a wonderful project from a devoted member of the ROP?

Two other things picked up from the son this weekend

I asked him if he'd heard about John Effin' Kerry's comments: "Oh yeah, Sgt. - was really pissed about that!" and went on to list some of the sergeants comments.

Second, he'd mentioned this before but this brought it back to mind: I think every DI in both batteries he's been in so far have been in Iraq or Afghanistan or both and came back to the States in the last few months. Lessons have included lots of personal notes about what they've seen/done and pointers coming therefrom. I'd heard the Army was working to get the lessons from the lines back to the training people, and it appears they're really doing it.

'Global Cooling/Warming/Climate Change' BS

Dammit, Kim beat me to it. I saw this article the other day but didn't bother to read it at the time. Short version, Mr. Monckton notes exactly how the UN(got to increase our power over the world) and 'scientists' more concerned with pushing a political agenda than facts screwed the data and findings to show what they want you to see, not what the data actually is. Just to whet your appetite:
Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "

So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick. The wrongly flat AD1000-AD1900 temperature line was the shaft: the uptick from 1900 to 2000 was the blade. Here's how they did it:


And there's more to come:
This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect.

Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere now, just in case) is killing people.


Pretty much the only really nasty disagreements with people I've had over the last while have been over this 'climate change' crap. The people who wrote to disagree with me early in the history of this blog were quite nice about it; they disagreed and argued, they did not insult and threaten. In person? Different matter there, I've been hit with the "You don't read REAL sources" and "All RESPONSIBLE scientists agree" and so forth. So far, I haven't seen any unfiddled data to make me change my mind, and every time I've checked into the "We're all gonna die unless we act NOW!" stuff it's turned out to be anything from 'ignore the inconvenient facts' to flat-out falsified information. Usually from people who are a: truly worried about the world and think they have to do anything necessary(in their minds) to change things to power-hungry bureaucrats who see it as a way to grab more power.

I'll be watching for the next articles.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Facial decoration

Of the natural kind, that is: beards and mustaches. This over at Lawdog made me think of some history.

I had a beard for several years. Partly just because I could, partly because I started growing it in winter(nothing seemed to keep my face from chapping after shaving back then) and partly because once there, I got used to it.

Had it before my first divorce(I still hate using that term), and for a few years after. Bought a little battery-powered trimmer to keep it neat and got along quite well. Couple of things finally made me reevaluate:
As Peter Capstick wrote, my hair was not turning majestically silver at the temples like Stewart Granger: it was just turning grey and falling out. And the beard had more grey than my hair.
My trimmer was about to die.
And I had a girlfriend(who in time became My Second Divorce, and even worse term) who said something about how she'd never seen me without it.

I'd had the plague that was going around that late-winter and hadn't seen her for almost a week. I was starting to feel better and that evening I studied my reflection and decided that since I couldn't even remember what I looked like without it, it would go. At least for now.
So out came the clipper, which promptly died. Not batteries, it went tits up about 1/4 of the way through. So I wound up using three disposable razors- all I had- to take it all off. If you've never done this, believe me, even a short beard will clog those things amazingly well; if I'd known where it was right then I'd have dug out the straight razor and used it.

In any case, I finished and used some hand lotion on my face- no after shave- and decided that while there was indeed a difference, I couldn't really call it an improvement, but it was done.

Next day got various comments at work along the usual line of "You shaved!". Called the girlfriend and asked if she was willing to risk being around me that evening, got a yes, and headed over that evening. Knocked on the door, no answer. Door was unlocked, which she'd do if she was on the phone or busy and expecting me so I walked in. Called her name, no answer, so headed one way down the hall and got halfway down when I heard her behind me, on the phone, so turned around.

She was coming down the hall toward me and stopped dead. "I don't BELIEVE it!" Ever seen a dog cock it's head when you do something? She cocked hers, actually leaned to the left a bit to get a different angle and repeated "I don't BELIEVE it!" Which caused whoever she was talking to to ask what the hell she didn't believe. "It's M, he shaved!"

By this time I was feeling like a curiosity in the store window, but got over that. She then said something I heard a bunch of times over the next couple of months: "You look at least ten years younger". Hadn't noticed that myself, but it turned out a lot of people did.

There was one other upside to getting rid of it: for the next few months, I could run into people I'd known for years at fairs & such and start talking to them, and after a few minutes they'd stop looking at me funny and start and say "Oh, it's YOU!"

I've thought about growing one again, but looking at pictures of myself from that time, decided against it. Besides everything else, the damn beard would probably look like it'd been sprayed white nowadays.

Speaking of survival kits,

urban division, since Baboon Pirates showed one, I thought I'd steal his idea show mine.












Kimber Compact Aluminum with a McCormick 7-round mag inside, a 7-round blue steel spare in belt clip, the Fobus holster I use a lot and a fairly new knife: a CRKT MIL-HRE.

The Kimber has Hogue finger-groove wraparound grips(the Pistolero recommended them, and he was right). I use the blued mag as a spare because the color doesn't show the way stainless does if my jacket blows open on that side.

Carnival of Cordite #79

is up and ready

Saturday, November 04, 2006

To the cat-meat imam,

Take this!

And she ain't my girlfriend(dammit) but take this, too!

The son has been heard from

He got a pass and came up to see some friends and pick up some stuff. Spent about two hours talking, mostly about things that've happened in AIT. Among other things:

Good manners dictate that when somone gets Saran-wrapped into their bunk(while drunk, of course) you will, before you turn it on its side, wrap some around the other bunk so that guy won't have to redo it.

When somebody decides to be a smartass and pisses off a DI, causing everybody to have their pass cancelled, there will be payback.

The flat statement that if he goes to the sandbox area, he will not depend on the issue 9mm sidearm. Among other things, a sergeant telling about having been assigned to dignitary protection duty and having a Secret Service agent demonstrate that an attacker can a: drive the slide back and b: actually rip the slide off the weapon. Yes, the Service took care of the paperwork. And yes, I told him that when the time comes, we WILL get hold of a .45 for him.

Aside from the PT, he tells me it's actually pretty easy. I think he's full of crap; for one thing the little bastard is almost scary smart in some ways, and he expected it to be so bloody nasty that anything less he considers 'easy'. One thing he said: he thinks that the only reason some people have a real problem is they have no self-discipline, and (very important) don't know how to shut up.

He looks good. He's doing well in the training, he's looking forward to the future and, PT or no, he no longer looks like Boris Karloff after a bad day at the morgue. Right now he's off to a movie with some friends(much more attractive than time with parents) and hopefully I'll see him tomorrow before he reports back.


Apparently those times of threatening his life as he grew actually did some good. At one point I told him that if he didn't knock it off I was going to kick his skinny ass up between his shoulder blades, shake it back down to proper position, and repeat until he got the idea. Meant it, too; after that maybe being yelled at by a DI isn't so bad.

Reason #3 why fraternities are for idiots

ORLANDO, Fla. -- School officials investigating an apparent hazing ritual at a fraternity house on the University of Central Florida campus in which pledges were found in diapers, fairy wings and women's panties told Local 6 News that there is evidence that several of them may have been sexually assaulted.

Listen, parents of still-school-age kids, this is what your hard-earned dollars are paying for, along with feminist world-view classes and 'How To Pretend You Are Gay Or Trans-Gendered Day'.

An incident report indicated that a male in the fraternity was spotted wearing pink fairy wings and women's underwear and was not able to walk on his own.

The report also said the officers found a man wearing a pink tank top, women's underwear and a blond wig who was lying on the floor and vomited several times. Another male was sobbing on the floor wearing a rainbow-colored wig and a diaper, the report said.

Officers said the common area had a strong smell of urine and vomit.

"The University is looking into three possible concerns: misuse of alcohol, possible hazing and possible disorderly conduct," Director of UCF News and Information Linda Gray said. "The last thing in the world we want is for those kinds of things to happen."


'Possible concerns', huh? Guess all those PhD and Masters degrees those college bigshots have paid off, they can actually figure out there's a 'possible' problem.

Found through that ever-helpful cook, Steve.

And for a first from me, a quote from Bill Clinton

"The reason we are at this moment is that they do not represent faithfully the Republicans and the more conservative independents in the country. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here tonight," Mr. Clinton told donors at a fund-raiser for Democratic congressional candidates. "This is a sweeping, deep, big thing. . . . If you're a conservative on the budget, on law enforcement, on the rule of law, when it comes to the environment, on the conservation of our military resources, you have to be a Democrat."

Be it said, the first sentance is right; if the idiots in the Stupid Party had stuck to the conservative principles, a: the country would be better off and b: the Evil Party would be LOUDLY whining about 'how the election will be stolen', etc. The big reason the Stupid Party is in such trouble is having pissed off the people back home enough to make a lot of them think hard about staying home next Tuesday.

Otherwise? "If you're a conservative on the budget, on law enforcement, on the rule of law, when it comes to the environment, on the conservation of our military resources, you have to be a Democrat." So far as that goes, Bill has either been smoking funny cigars or is simply proving once again what a wonderful liar he is.

'Course, by his standards "conservation of our military resources" probably means "Drag all the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan and then trash the military again so we can use the money on social engineering programs".

Why I think many of the Major Media

would make good fertilizer

"The bad news," investigative reporter Seymour Hersh told a Montreal audience last Wednesday, "is that there are 816 days left in the reign of King George II of America."

The good news? "When we wake up tomorrow morning, there will be one less day." . . .

If Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans, Hersh said.

"In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation," he said. "It isn't happening now, but I will tell you--there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq." (found at Best of the Web)


As I recall, isn't this the 'journalist' that claimed U.S. forces were deliberately shooting journalists? Among other bullshit claims? He and John Effin' Kerry ought to get married, they think so much alike.

And as to John Effin', BobG says " What is interesting is that everything he says about volunteer armies is true...if you are referring to UN peace keepers."

Friday, November 03, 2006

From Uncle,

Sensible Gun Laws

Sensible Gun Laws

Ban All Guns

Ban Gun Ownership

And I'll add

Jews Protecting Themselves
and just to hit the above more specifically on self-defense
Jews and Guns

And here's a 'Progressive' dream for you

Found this at Tim Blair's place, too:
Former President George W. Bush began serving consecutive life sentences today for High Treason in connection convictions for creating a false casus beli for War with Iraq. He was sentenced to Life plus 100 years. He is also serving a life term for warrantless wiretapping.
And it goes from there. Some of the 'progressive' things they'd like to see happen?
• Former Bush officials sentenced to harvest stem cells in the former Huntsville Penitentiary;

• Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly convicted for “propaganda”, stripped of their citizenship, and sentenced to life imprisonment;

• Mona Charen “eaten by some wild animal” after escaping prison;

• “Ann Coulter, Michelle Malagang and Judith Miller” denied parole and ordered not to “speak in public or publish for the rest of their lives”;


Note a common thread? Like anyone who wrote/said 'unprogressive' things being imprisoned, being killed, having their freedom of speech stripped?

Again, will someone tell me what's 'progressive' about this crap?

Remember the 'cat meat' imam I wrote about?

First, Tim Blair notes this comment from the Australian Democrat national secretary:
I’m going for political suicide here but I’m willing to stand up with anybody else in this country who happens to agree with Sheik Hilali’s sentiments.

Not because of any emotional or religious point of view but from sheer logic. While men who want to assault women exist, there will be women who get assaulted. Unfortunately, how a woman dresses does affect her level of likeliness to be chosen. The subsequent reaction to this latest opportunity to get angry about something is the real lesson here.


Sounds very realistic in a way; fact is that wearing a skirt that flashes your crotch when you move will attract attention, including from males you don't want it from. However, A: most men have been raised with sufficient self-control to not consider it a license to assault and B: will generally do something if some jackass steps over the line(at least in civilized places). Using "You weren't dressed modestly" as an excuse/defense for someone being assaulted/raped is a large, steaming pile of what comes out of the south end of a northbound bull.

BUT, both those things require a society that gives a crap about the concept of women as human beings, that (shades of the old horrible days in the West!) they should have protection against attack. Those ideas seem to be entirely foreign to moslem thinking in some- maybe many- places:

On the first two days of Eid in Cairo, a mob of hundreds of men swept through downtown attacking and sexually assaulting random girls in an animalistic display that must boggle every mind. Apparently, the utter lack of basic decency, respect for women, or the rule of law was not confined to Ramadan alone - in fact, Ramadan was the only thing suppressing the baser instincts of these men. I feel sick at heart, and may never spend time downtown again, as it seems we women are actively in danger there. Will Cairo one day be like Mogadishu, where every woman is raped before she turns 16?

Go read that. Then go read this from the Sandmonkey about the happenings on a holy day in a holy month. Including :That The Police forces didn;t came from another planet, that they were born and raised egyptians, amongst the egyptian people, the same egyptian people who have produced those mobs who found it in their right to attack girls in middle of crowded downtown for 5 houres under the police's watchdul eyes. The ones who approached the police asking them to do something were told : "what do you want us to do? It's Eid. Happy Eid to you too!" The same response was given to women who went to the police stations to report the incidents. The police refused to do their jobs and take a report, because it would probably reflect badly on their downtown peers.

This crap happened to muslim women, many of whom were dressed in the modest manner the cat-meat sheik demands- though they didn't lock themselves in a room in their home, shame on them!- in the full light of day in the sight of the police, and the authorities did nothing. Only some men who worked at businesses did a damn thing, and bless them for having the balls to act.

The Sandmonkey also notes this:
A second Muslim cleric in Australia has stepped into a bitter dispute
over attitudes to women and rape, charging that anti-Islamic bias
ensured Muslim rapists got tougher sentences than other men.

[…]

Both clerics referred in their sermons to heavy sentences meted out to
a group of young Muslim men for a series of notorious gang rapes in
Sydney six years ago.

One of the men received a 55-year jail sentence, which was later reduced on appeal.

"They make a big fuss about these kids because one of them, his name is
Mohamed," Omran said in his sermon, according to a report in The
Australian daily Tuesday. "Even if you kill someone, you don't go for
60 years."


Well, Mr. Cleric, got news for you. I'm one of those people who think that actual rape should be handled on the same level as manslaughter and the bastard put away for a LONG time. For you to bitch that they got long sentences because of their religeon is another pile of cow droppings. They got long sentences because they committed gang rape and flatly said their victims weren't really human because they weren't moslem. That makes your little 'victims' among the vilest kind of criminals, and they can rot in the damn jail.

Yeah, yeah, I know, many moslems don't approve of this crap. The fact remains that many either quietly agree, or refuse to say anything about it, and governments in some countries don't want to be 'bothered' with it because, after all, it only happened to women.

No wonder so many of these places and people go along with the UN 'disarm the peasants' programs; if their intended victims were packing, it just might get messy for the bastards.
(added: for further on this last, see Tam's comment on the matter)

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Remember these words:

...but don't forget that every coin the UN gets is a piece of metal that can be used to forge chains.

Found thanks to Cryptic

Here's some of the solution in Darfur,

which I'd seen before and lost track of(I'm gonna start writing stuff down), Militia keeps violence in Darfur at bay:
GUSA JAMAT, Sudan --One corner of Sudan's violent Darfur region is green and peaceful in this post-rainy season thanks to a powerful village militia that has kept the fighting around it at bay for more than a year.

Go read the damn thing. Contrast that with this:
"You have been here for three years now, and what have you done for us?" a tribal leader bitterly asked a delegation of AU soldiers and police that came to the Kassab refugee camp last week.

As they often must, the peacekeepers patiently explained to camp delegates that they had come to Darfur only to monitor the violence and have no mandate to fight it.


So on one side you've got people with arms who've kicked the ass of the murdering raping slavers, and on the other people depending on 'peacekeepers' who do nothing but stand there and watch.

To use the words of Bruce at mAss Backwards:









And you can buy the stickers here

I didn't know Micheal Dukakis was an official in Britain

Fury over killer freed to wipe out family
...
He had been out of prison for less than two years after serving half of a seven-year sentence for manslaughter for killing another girlfriend who had refused to leave her husband for him.


Seven year sentance for killing a woman, and out after half of that. Flat idiotic. And to make it even better? Mark Goldstraw, 31, was jailed for life yesterday for setting fire to the house in revenge after being jilted by his teenage girlfriend. Emphasis most emphatically mine.

And it just gets better:It also emerged that Goldstraw could have been back in custody before the murders because he was in breach of his licence by living with his mother rather than at the address given to the Probation Service.

Officials insisted that mistakes were not made in their handling of Goldstraw. Rob Mandley, Staffordshire's chief probation officer, said: "From the evidence we had, Goldstraw was complying with the licence requirements as far as we knew."

Translation: "Don't blame us, we had Evidence! he was complying. It was wrong, but it ain't our fault."

I've got one disagreement with this statement from a member of the family:Last night Mr Hine's brother, Robert, said: "I'm very angry that he should be allowed out of prison to do this to my brother and these children.

"There's no appropriate punishment. He's done it before. He shouldn't be let out at all. We don't ever want to see him again. No prison sentence will replace the lives that have been lost."
It's not that he shouldn't be let out at all; it's that the bastard should be hanged. Or shot. Or fried. Or some method of capital punishment. Not only does he deserve it, you know that if he stays in prison, in a few years you'll have some of the same idiot-level 'public servants' who let him out before trying to do it again.

Everybody's been piling on John Effin',

and I'd like to join in

Over at Michelle Malkin, found this post on past remarks he made, which touches both on what he thought of the military then, and how it relates to his idiot remarks now.

During a Vietnam-era run for Congress three decades ago, John Kerry said he opposed a volunteer Army because it would be dominated by the underprivileged, be less accountable and be more prone to "the perpetuation of war crimes." Bunch of dummies who couldn't get a 'real' job, and have no self-control? Check.

"I am convinced a volunteer army would be an army of the poor and the black and the brown," Kerry wrote. "We must not repeat the travesty of the inequities present during Vietnam. I also fear having a professional army that views the perpetuation of war crimes as simply 'doing its job.' Only stupid minorities would join? Bunch of moral cretins who have no problem with 'war crimes'? Check.

But we're supposed to ignore everything else he's said and believe him when he says NOW that he 'supports and respects the troops'.

And flying monkeys just flew out the back of my pants.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

A single murder that points out two problems

I know I whack on the Brits a lot. Well, not a lot, but I do. Things like this are why.

A successful City lawyer was stabbed to death by two hooded robbers only yards from the flat he shared with his fiancee, the Old Bailey heard yesterday.

Tom ap Rhys Pryce, 31, was just eight months away from his wedding to Adele Eastman, 31, when Donnel Carty, 19, and Delano Brown, 18, attacked him after he refused to hand over his mobile phone and Oyster card, the jury was told.


A horrible crime committed for crap. Here's the two parts that really bother me here. First, remember all those CCTV cameras that are supposed to make people so much safer, etc.?
Two people living in the street told police they had seen two hooded black youths attacking Mr ap Rhys Pryce. Mr Horwell said that the killers, cousins who deny murder, were caught because of their "incompetence and naivety".

He said that only 17 minutes before they robbed and murdered Mr ap Rhys Pryce they were caught on closed circuit television robbing another man, Kurshid Ali, of cash and his mobile phone at Kensal Green Tube station.


Ok, most crooks get caught because they're not too damn smart, but here's the problem with the damn cameras: it doesn't do any good to have them recording crimes if nothing happens about it.

And the second: "Their motive was greed," said Mr Horwell, opening the case. "It was two against one. They were armed and he, of course, was not. It did not matter to them that this man worked hard for his position in life. He had a promising career in the legal profession. Emphasis mine.

OF COURSE he wasn't armed, he be in jail if he was caught with a cane and admitted he carried it for self-defense, let alone any other 'offensive weapon'(which includes a freakin' pepper shaker). And if he'd had some hand-to-hand skills and hurt the little bastards, this same Mr Horwell would be trying to put him in jail for it.

This is so disgusting. And so sad.

National Ammo Week is a'comin!

November 11-19. Can't believe I forgot to mention it before, but happily Kim reminded me.

Get ready, folks. 100 rounds minimum if you can. A brick of Federal .22's runs about $8 at Academy, that'd be 500 rounds. Two boxes most anywhere would only be $3-4 at most. And you know it'll get used.