Friday, December 31, 2010

No, I'm not at the big New Year's thing downtown

and not at the various bellydance shows on for tonight.
A: I don't really like crowds, especially crowds with lots of drunks,
B: It's going to drop to 17 tonight(it's 25 as I write this), and
C: I've had a scratchy throat and aches all day; it may be just lack of sleep and the weather changing again, but I'm not pushing it.
So I made a good dinner, and I'll have a drink or two before I go to bed. Good enough.

Oh, and let us not forget "I don't like driving around wondering if that clown weaving a bit is drunk." Especially if said vehicle is heading in my direction.

The Lee County Board of Education is in dire need

of a personnel change. After said personnel are dosed with tar and feathers. Just for this bit alone:
When the discussion arose about the Smithwicks providing a written release, the Superintendent said that he would not, in their place, give a release to the press, because he would not want the press to be rooting around in his child’s records. That struck me as an implied threat. Don’t sign a release, or we’ll plaster every little detail of her records all over the news.
When bureaucrats start this kind of crap, it's time to change them for the same reason you toss the diaper from the baby with diarrhea.

I hope her parents blew a gasket and called the lawyers in; that may be the only thing that will get through to these idiots.

Illumination, solid shot and melt some snow,

all at once!

I haven't fel them either, Tam

She mentioned missing the latest tremblor in her neck of the woods; of the several here in OK lately I haven't noticed one of them, including the one where three people came into the office I was in and said "Did you feel that?"

I think I must be partly immunized. Back when I lived in Lawton you got used to rumbles and the ground shaking a touch every time the redlegs at Fort Sill started practicing. 155mm was nothing but background after a while, though when they(rarely) cut loose with the 8" guns...

The truth is that law enforcement is fundamentally unserious

about prosecuting straw purchasers, and about keeping guns out of the hands of criminals broadly speaking. Doing so is, to put it bluntly, too much work for a unionized American government work force, whose idea of a good anti-gun program is the buyback: offering up taxpayers’ dollars in the hopes that criminals will bring the guns to them. (Way to work that shoe-leather, Joe Friday.) From the police’s point of view, criminals are an inconsiderate bunch: no fixed address, very little record keeping, no scheduled hours of operation, etc. Criminals do not keep appointments or offer even minimal cooperation. It is a lot of work keeping tabs on a Carail Weeks, or on an Eric DeShawn Floyd, a felon with at least 17 priors on his rap sheet who was involved in the fatal shooting of Philadelphia police sergeant Stephen Liczbinski during a botched bank robbery. (I wrote about the case here.) It’s a real challenge. Some cops are heroes; 100 percent of them are government employees.

Which is why Traver and the other gun-control types have focused their attention instead on gun dealers, provoking sufficient controversy to distract the public from such uncomfortable questions as: “Why exactly was a felon with a 17-count criminal history walking abroad to rob and murder?”

Back for a moment to "Romney?

Not a damned chance."

I'm not going to go after the stupid and bigoted Colman McCarthy;

when somebody else has already done such a good job:

On then to McCarthy’s penultimate paragraph, in which he expresses his admiration for soldiers everywhere:

To oppose ROTC, as I have since my college days in the 1960s, when my school enticed too many of my classmates into joining, is not to be anti-soldier. I admire those who join armies, whether America’s or the Taliban’s: for their discipline, for their loyalty to their buddies and to their principles, for their sacrifices to be away from home.

See there, Mr. U.S. Marine Captain — McCarthy doesn’t hate you. Why, he thinks you’re every bit as respectable as a Taliban.

McCarthy concludes with this:

ROTC and its warrior ethic taint the intellectual purity of a school, if by purity we mean trying to rise above the foul idea that nations can kill and destroy their way to peace. If a school such as Harvard does sell out to the military, let it at least be honest and add a sign at its Cambridge front portal: Harvard, a Pentagon Annex.

And I’ll conclude with this.

That is the warrior ethic, Mr. McCarthy — and Harvard could stand a good deal more of it.

To borrow a phrase, people like Colman McCarthy aren't for 'peace'; they're on the other side.

If the Lee County School Board didn't have something they'd rather hide,

or at least, ah, de-emphasize, I doubt they wouldn't have done this:
UPDATE: Transparency! Sorrentino follows up: “The first and only thing that was said was for the Vice Chair, John T Bonardi to move to go to closed session. They are currently in closed session upstairs to discuss ‘information not subject to public records,’ and to ‘preserve the attorney client privelige.’ There’s still time for more Sanford locals to show up.” They sound nervous. As, it seems, they should be.

I've said it before: Zero-Tolerance isn't really about student safety, it's about protecting bureaucrats from having to actually think and make judgements.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Last year the Met predicted 'warm, dry winter' as I recall

and the winter sucked. They predicted that this year, and

“Temperatures will be down again by Sunday, with nights below freezing and daytimes below average at 3C to 5C. Our outlook forecast to January 26 shows temperatures 2C or 3C below average, frost and ice likely and the highest chance of snow or sleet over the northern half of the UK.”

Although official weather records only go back to 1659, weather experts said the centuries from 1100 to 1500, dubbed the “Medieval warm period”, would not have produced winters as cold as today.

So 2011 could end up being the coldest winter of the last millennium.

So Rachel Stewart is an official lying journalist

“Sitting down for dinner at any Texan diner, in my experience, often involves guns,” Rachel Stewart of the Tarnaki Daily News (New Zealand) informs her readers.

I can't recall the exact number of times I have eaten a meal in the immediate company of a man, or men, with shooters on their hips in plain view. For me, I am always equal parts spellbound and queasy.

Spellbound because there is something so fundamentally cowboy and western about it. Guns, freedom, country music and the Second Amendment. It is Texas after all. Yeeha!

Try to recall the exact number, Ms. Stewart. Because funny thing about Texas, besides that “Yeeha!” stereotype you ridicule them with. From Open Carry.org:

Texas is not a traditional open carry state. They also do not allow open carry, or even printing, by those who have a concealed carry permit.

And from NRA-ILA’s “Firearms Laws for Texas”:

It is unlawful to intentionally, knowingly or recklessly carry on or about one’s person a handgun in a motor vehicle if the handgun is in plain view



Whole piece here

On the most recent Zero-Tolerance Idiocy case,

the school system is blowing smoke and denying; their denials don't exactly work out.

So there was bullcrap on 'cop-killer bullets' way back

in the '30's. Wonderful. And another reason to not be real fond of Hoover.

Over in Britain, the Scottish government says "No!", but

SCOTLAND'S wind farms are unable to cope with the freezing weather conditions – grinding to a halt at a time when electricity demand is at a peak, forcing the country to rely on power generated by French nuclear plants.

Output from major wind farms fell to as low as 2.5 per cent of their potential generation capacity during the cold snap as power demand rose to close to the highest level yet recorded, new figures have revealed
.
And why might that be? No surprise to most of you:
Meteorologists say extremely cold temperatures can occur only when there is little or no wind and icy pockets of air are trapped close to the ground, prompting accusations from anti- wind-farm campaigners that wind power cannot be relied on to meet Scotland's electricity needs in the depths of winter.
Over here the government is saying "We did not!"; however,
The data, charted on the Balancing Mechanism Reporting System website, which the National Grid uses to monitor UK power generation, also revealed that at times when wind energy was at its lowest, back-up power had to be piped in from France, where the majority of electricity is nuclear-generated.
And Scotland is planning on closing down the two nuke plants they do have and forbidding any more being built. Glad I don't live there.


Also from across the pond, some slight problems showing up with the new "You can ONLY install one of these!" heating systems.
However, the recent cold snap has revealed a major problem with them. Tens of thousands of people found themselves shivering as their shiny new boilers cut out without warning.

British Gas is understood to have had 60,000 call-outs in Yorkshire alone. And the cost to call out a plumber? It can be between £200 to £300 on a bank holiday. And don’t forget about VAT.
That would be the Value Added Tax that a bunch of our politicians want to stick us with, and that the Brits have been getting screwed by for a long time.

Just have time for two things this morning

First, if this is true, every clown in charge who had anything to do with it needs to be fired. And the drivers taking part, for that matter.
Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts -- a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.
...
"They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important," said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.

Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department -- and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan -- at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents
.
Also, Halloran should be informed that calling drivers who tell you about this kind of crap 'snitches' isn't real bright.


Second, this crap:
Banovac was back at the Will Rogers Airport Tuesday and once again, security says she can't board her flight back home to Phoenix.

Last month security denied her access because they said they found traces of nitrate somewhere on her body.

Now, it's something near her bottom that is raising a red flag.

"The stated reason was there was... They were unable to clear an unusual contour of my buttocks area," said Banovac
.
TSA goes after a pilot for posting video of things that anybody can look out a window and see; think they're not going to screw with her for causing them a problem?

Oh, and I still think the sheriff's office that helped TSA with this crap and seized the guys carry permit ought to be nailed for it, too.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Speaking of officials who need a liberal dose of petroleum and livestock products,

another LE officer dead, this time in the PRoMA:
A paroled career criminal, he had a history of violent theft: two decades ago he was convicted of stealing $86,000 worth of jewels in a downtown Boston store and shooting a security guard in the chest during a scuffle. As a teenager, Cinelli stabbed a man in the chest, police said. Both victims survived.

In 1986, he pleaded guilty to five armed robberies committed after he failed to return from a one-day furlough from the Worcester House of Correction. According to a 2008 Parole Board decision, Cinelli was serving three concurrent life sentences.(bold mine)

The Parole Board released him in March 2009, saying the lifelong drug and alcohol abuser had completed several prison treatment programs for substance abuse and alternatives to violence and earned his GED.

Read that again.
THREE

LIFE

SENTENCES

and he was out on the street with a gun.

I can't buy a new 12 round magazine for my Smith & Wesson, but this violent career criminal was let out of jail on a GED and a successful completion of a substance abuse program? Are they for real? As stories like these increase in frequency it will become a spiraling problem - more and more folks are going to disobey the law, because punishment is a joke and actually incarceration is practically non-existent.

So the wonderful gun laws of the People's Republic of MA failed?

Whoda thunk it?
Massachusetts registers firearm owners, it registers firearms, it registers firearm carriers, it registers all firearm transfers between people (even private sales), it even requires registration to possess a single piece of expended brass – an object that poses no threat to anyone older than two (choking hazards and all that). And yet here we have an individual officially judged unsuitable for firearm ownership due to repeated (and serious) mental illness issues, and he still owned firearms. He was ordered to turn those firearms in, and he still owned them. The police knew where he lived, knew that he owned firearms, knew that he had not turned them in, and he still owned firearms – the very firearms he used to murder those seven people.

From the linked post:
There's a good bit missing from the retrospective. First, Brad points out this nugget:

Despite the passage of time, Stephen C. Doherty, the now-retired Wakefield police chief who rushed to the company minutes after shooting erupted in the usually placid town, said his memories of the carnage surface almost every day.

(emphasis mine). Minutes. When seconds count, police are only minutes away. We repeat this mantra often, at the risk of losing sight of what it represents. This is the very reason we carry our own guns - by their very nature, the police cannot be everywhere at once.
Ref that last, I'm going to bring up one of Robert Peel's 9 Principles:
7) Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
And it was an expected thing that a citizen had the right of self-defense, and the right to use the tools necessary to defend; a part of the Principles that far too many LE and politicians really don't want people to think about, or consider.


Speaking of the last, Lawdog noted that BBC did a series of shows based on Sherlock Holmes and Doc Watson, updated to current days; I've seen two of them, and they were good. What comes to mind right now is from the first, when Watson realizes he's in a situation were things are getting very odd and somewhat dangerous and asks the people giving him a ride "Can we make a stop so I can pick something up?" They stop at the place where he's been staying and he goes in, digs out the pistol he snuck back from 'Stan, checks the mag and slips it under his belt, under his sweater; don't you know a bunch of people at BBC and in the Brit government shit bricks when they saw that? I'm really surprised it made it in.

Just about covers it

All the talk lately of “bipartisan consensus” and the smug No Labels movement brought back to mind the surely apocryphal but truthy story of the Russian visiting a U.S. Senate aide shortly after the fall of Communism in the old USSR. “Please explain two-party system,” the Russian asked, having no experience with multi-party democracy. “It’s simple,” explained the Senate staff veteran. “We have two parties in America—the stupid party and the evil party. Since I’m a Republican, I’m in the stupid party, and we stupidly battle against the evil of the evil party.”

“But sometimes the two parties get together and do something really stupid and evil. We call that ‘bipartisanship.’”

Why his being good on budgets still won't get me to vote for Christie

Governor Christie commuted Aitken’s sentence because of procedural errors on the part of the trial judge, James Morley. (Some would argue incompetence, or even malice.)
...
Chris Christie wasn’t appeasing the NRA or 2012 Republican primary voters. And sadly, he isn’t anything resembling a “friend” to gun owners. A northeast Republican, Christie’s stance on firearms is as draconian as that of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The simple fact of the matter is that if Christie’s views on firearms were widely known, his chances of capturing the 2012 Republican primaries would go up in smoke.

How bad is Christie’s record?
This bad.

Baby, it's cool and wet outside

so I'm in here raising my blood pressure and laughing alternately. For the latter, from Reason, the Venn Diagram of Junk-Touchers
Yesterday happened to have some of Glenn Beck's show on for background noise, and the stand-in host was talking to a security and training guy who said we need to give TSA a break because 'they're professionals doing their job', etc.
No.


On to the fact that a bunch of idiots of muslim persuasion take this
as reason for this:
Three of the suspects are Swedish residents and reportedly arrived in Denmark last night, and PET said the attack was to be carried out “in the coming days”.

All four suspects have Middle-Eastern or North African backgrounds.

In addition to the arrests in Copenhagen, Swedish officials arrested a fifth suspect in Stockholm at the same time.

During the arrests, Danish police found an assault rifle and silencer, ammunition, as well as plastic strips, which are often used by police as hand restraints.

According to PET, the group planned to kill as many people as possible in the building that houses Jyllands-Posten.
Over some bloody cartoons. Because the whole damn world is supposed to do whatever it takes to accommodate their tender sensitivities.


Speaking of vile dirtbags, the family of this murdered state trooper should do everything they can to pull the names of the people involved in this dirtbag being on the street out in public. And demanding to know why this piece of crap wasn't behind bars. And hounding them with the consequences of their actions. Preferably for a long, loooong time to come.


No wonder Nanny Bloomberg was so upset by people who didn't want the Ground Zero mosque built; they were defying what The Mayor and Chief Nanny wanted:
In fact, it turns out that Team Bloomberg was heavily involved in operating the political machinery needed to ensure that various regulatory agencies approved the controversial project -- which has rightly drawn the ire of many 9/11 survivors and victims' families.

Even to the point of pressing Community Board 1 to cast an approving vote -- so that the chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission could be given the "political cover" he so urgently sought before his agency denied landmark status to the existing building.
...
Bloomberg's community affairs commissioner even ghost-wrote a letter to CB1 on behalf of Daisy Khan, wife of mosque promoter Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Meanwhile, officials intervened to obtain permits so that prayers could be conducted at the site.


A: this is dusgusting
B: since when is 'Polish' a race?


Oh, I wish I'd seen this before Christmas!
OFFICIAL VISIT OF LIEUTENANT GENERAL S. CLAUS

An official staff visit by LtGen Claus is expected at this base on 25 Dec. The following directives govern activities of all personnel during the visit:

  1. Not a creature will stir without permission. This includes Officers, Warrant Officers, Staff Non-commissioned Officers, Noncommissioned Officers, and mice. Marines may obtain special stirring permits for necessary tasks through the Battalion S-1 Office (See Company Office for PAR).


The lady speaks on the latest idiocy of Incompitano:
That’s right boys and girls, the groping and the porno scans that haven’t caught a single terrorist have made aviation objectively better. Because it’s really the breast feeding mothers, amputees, and nuns that were the real threat anyway.

So will there be a list of things I can and cannot carry on my person at the mall? Will I be frisked before checking into a hotel? And what if I just went to the mall and purchased a sword at that little shop near the restrooms? Or a chainsaw at Sears? Or what if the whole reason I’m staying at some hotel is for my hunting trip? Is it suddenly far too dangerous for me to keep that high-powered rifle in my hotel room?


One more example of Zero-Tolerance Idiocy in schools. Much easier to screw somebody over blindly following the rules than to actually think about what to do, isn't it? Southern Lee High School officials, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Assuming you HAVE any shame, that is.


Insty pointed to this guy; I hope he's wrong, or not right about the level. But this is beginning to sound like the backstory of Fallen Angels.


Thanks to Uncle, some of the idiot crooks out there. Couple of years ago I read a piece by a prosecutor in Texas who said it'd become policy for them to, immediately after an arrest, check Facebook and Myspace to see if the clown had an account; said it was amazing how many people posted brags on the robbery/burglary/whatever they'd just committed. Sometimes with pics or video.


Unrelated to news, I tried something new for the kitchen not long ago. I've got a FoodSaver, which has been handy, but the thing's been acting up. And I'm low on bags, which are expensive. So decided to try the Ziplock vacuum pump and bags(which were actually cheaper at a local store); so far, working great. Seal well, hold vacuum and easier to wash and reuse. Now I need to stick something steel in one and repeat the 'bury it in the garden' test.


Son started back to his base today after the Christmas visit. Mentioned this before, kids grow up and sometimes you get that odd double-vision. I remember the Sergeant as a kid with a lapful of kitten, same as I remember daughter as a 8yoa on an elephant ride where the critter kept stretching her trunk back to sniff daughter's leg, causing a large amount of giggling. Time do go by, do it not?

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Another "The 1911 sucks" post is noted

by Uncle(no, not linking to the specific). The usual "Only reliable if you invest in a gunsmith and lots of parts", "Old design with lots of problems", etc.

My only statement on this:
You don't like the 1911? Don't carry one. And, put bluntly, piss off; I hate those posts.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Two people now talking about running for President

to whom I say "Hell NO!" Among other things. Newt Gingrich and the senior Senator from Arizona.

Gingrich, for having that commercial with Pelosi on AGW and various other things, no. HELL no. Gingrich, if you run you're screwing the Stupid Party and conservatives just to stroke your ego.

McCain, you not only ran a lousy campaign last time, but you've proven we can't trust you. And we don't. Only reason you'd run again is that you, for some reason, think it's OWED to you to be President, or it's your turn or something. No damned way you'd get my vote.

And the squawk of the True Believer is heard in the land

Over here, in an article on the AGW bullcrap, there's this comment:
Ever since then, all the floods,volcanic eruptions, precipitation,quakes,anomolies have increased between 350 -4000 %. Also the jet stream and ocean conveyor belts have been destroyed.
So there you have it: Man-Caused Globular Warmering also causes earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and anomalies(?) AND has destroyed the jet stream and-

I can't go on, the level of stupid is just too much.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

A guide for soon-to-be ex-congressmen and aides

Step 1: Assess Your Skills and Competencies

The road to your new non-Washington career begins with an inventory of your personal strengths and competencies. Read the critical skill list below, and circle the ones that you possess.

  • Telling other people what to do
  • Demanding money
  • Peddling influence
  • Talking loudly over others
  • Condescension / arrogance
  • Threatening, browbeating, arguing
  • Narcissism
  • Evading responsibility
  • Spin control

As a former Washington professional, you probably circled four or more of the above. Yes, there are some private sector industries where these skills are valued - such as journalism, bill collection, professional wrestling, higher education, and carnival barking. Unfortunately, these are all declining industries with low wages and/or fierce job competition. In order to maintain your standard of living, you will probably have to seek employment in other industries where you will find surprisingly little demand for your skills.

And Merry Christmas to all

Friday, December 24, 2010

Proving that Oklahoma has a full share of idiots who're being called

'teachers', we have this story of a teacher having a kid arrested for- well, go read it.

"How dare you embarrass the government clowns in charge?"

Three days after he posted his critical video clips on YouTube, four federal air marshals and two sheriff's deputies arrived at the pilot's house to confiscate his federally-issued firearm. At the same time as the federal marshals took the pilot's gun, a deputy sheriff asked him to surrender his state-issued permit to carry a concealed weapon. The pilot's attorney, not unreasonably, said he believed the federal government sent the posse to the pilot's house in order to send a message.
Question: does a local LE even have the legal power to ask for his carry permit? Or was he demanding it with no authority? If the latter, he and his sheriff need a severe kick in the ass for taking part in this and abusing their authority to do so.

As to the air marshals, "We were just following our orders", etc. Bastards. My words for the clowns who gave the orders I will not go into.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

When I was first teaching the kids to drive, one of the warnings I gave them

was "Just because the machine you're on can do certain things, doesn't mean YOU can."
A Tempe man is hospitalized in extremely critical condition after his motorcycle ran into a light pole at nearly 160 mph in the central Arizona town of San Tan Valley.
...
The motorcyclist sped past a county sheriff’s deputy at 2:05 a.m. on a road where the posted speed limit is 45 mph. The deputy‘s radar gun clocked Calazo’s motorcycle at 157 mph.

Before a pursuit could begin, authorities say Calazo had crashed four miles away, hitting the concrete base of a traffic light pole.
So it took dumbass, oh, roughly 1.5 minutes to reach from where he was clocked to the pole.

I repeat, dumbass.
“The motorcycle was nearly disintegrated on impact and Calazo flew an additional 104 feet through the air before striking the ground,”
I wonder if he was conscious during the flight?

Insty calls it 'Gun control as child abuse';

good a description as anything.
Malik Hall, a round-eyed second-grader, looked apprehensive as he stood in line with his favorite toy, a thick, blue gun with plastic sword underneath the muzzle. The 8-year-old was furious when his mother, Amanda, told him he would have to give it up. Yesterday morning, he tried to hide it under his pillow, she said.

“I’m worried,’’ she said. “He might cry.’’ . . . Diane Levin, professor of education at Wheelock College, said police and parents coming together to destroy toy guns sends a powerful message to children
.
Yeah, it sends a message: hoplophobe nannies will take your toy and destroy it because it's not pc. And you should blame THINGS for what people do, not the people. Oh, and if someone in authority says "I have decided you should do this" your parents will cave in and make you surrender your toys. Etc.

Yeah, pathetic does pretty well cover it. Both the idiot Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch and the spineless PC parents who went along with this.

So Aitken is going back to court

Not only should his conviction be thrown out, the prosecutors and judge involved should face whatever consequences can be found. Can't fire the judge as he's already been fired, but the prosecutors, yeah. Can he file a civil suit? Don't know; I'm sure his lawyer is finding out.

One part of the article that sticks out:
The Burlington County Prosecutor's Office and former Superior Court Judge James J. Morley both said that Aitken's defense team did not present enough evidence at trial to support the moving exemption. Although the jury asked to see the exemption on three separate occasions, Morley refused.
So you prevent the jury seeing the information, and then say the defense 'didn't present enough evidence'; that passes for 'justice' in New Jersey.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Son is home on leave,

and part of the morning was spent at the range shooting stuff he doesn't have in the Army*.

Which brings one thing to mind: when they were in the Kurdish territory, the mostly didn't carry rifles, just a M9 pistol and a magazine(in the pocket, can't carry it in the pistol); but from what he says the pistol training the infantry gets isn't exactly extensive. If they're going to have people- at times- depending on that pistol for their primary arm, they really need to add some more in-depth handgun training to the mix.

So just a few things I'll bitch and yell aboutmention today, starting with
US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was asked about the attacks, with ABC News interviewer Diane Sawyer posing the questions: "First of all, London. How serious is it? Any implication that it was coming here?"

After a long pause, Clapper replied, "London?"

Isn't that just terribly confidence inspiring?



The brave soldiers of Islam hide behind children while the crusaders take shots to the head to avoid putting them at risk.

Compare and contrast.

Personally, I'm damn glad and incredibly grateful that Sgt Williams and LCpl Murfitt are on our side
.


Congressional Democrats could not find the votes to pass "net neutrality." No problem. Three un-elected officials will impose rules on hundreds of millions of satisfied online consumers. A federal appeals court stops the FCC from employing authority over the Internet. Again, not a problem. Three out of five FCC commissioners can carve out some temporary wiggle room, because as any crusading technocrat knows, the most important thing is getting in the door.

It's not that we don't need the FCC's meddling, it's that we don't need the FCC at all. Rather than expanding the powers — which always seem to grow — of this outdated bureaucracy, Congress should be finding ways to eliminate it
.
Sounds good to me.



Yeah, things were SO much nicer before those nasty guns showed up...


After initially appearing to retreat in the face of the midterm onslaught, Barack Obama and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson have decided to pursue an end-run strategy to impose regulation on energy producers regarding greenhouse-gas emissions. The move sets up a confrontation between the White House and Congress, which has already signaled a willingness to play hardball with Obama on regulatory innovation:
Let's see, he's already sent out Empty-Hat Salazar to say "No exploration or drilling in 'X' areas" and helped push oil prices up, now this; anybody belive he actually gives a rats ass how much damage his policies do to people in this country?
Note to Republicans: you don't oppose this crap in every way possible, your ass will be gone at the next election.


Last, a piece on the idiot academics and media people who have such a soft headspot for communism. One paragraph:
Two weeks ago, there was an Asia Society screening of a UN documentary about the trial of Comrade Duch, who ran one of the Khmer Rouge’s most infamous political prisons. Two women became upset during the Q&A session (about 37:00 into the linked video) that all this talk about torture and killing fields and retribution and memories of the dead had not been presented “in context.” You can guess what they meant, can’t you? That’s right: Big, Bad America had been an enabler for Pol Pot and his fellow-travelers, and apparently that was what we should have been getting worked up about. After all, Indochinese peoples are peaceable, guileless, grudge-free aspiring-Buddha types, so all that unpleasant torturing and executing isn’t the real story, and even if it were, we’d be in no moral position to criticize the Khmer Rouge. Yes, I’m caricaturing the view presented, but not by much. The response from the panel—pointing out that, among other things, the United States and Canada were among only five countries to condemn Cambodia’s human-rights abuses while they were happening—follows.


Later, folks. Bye

It's never comforting when government officials here are channeling

commies in places like Venezuela.
Teodoro Petkoff is a former Marxist guerrilla leader and now a major opponent of Chavez’s goons. He correctly called Chavez’s announcement a “Christmas ambush,” writing in his daily Tal Cual that Chavez is preparing totalitarian measures that amount to “a brutal attack … against democratic life.” These measures include a new vat tax, restricting access to the internet, regulating posts on the internet, and, of course, closing down more of opposition newspapers, and television and radio stations. All this, of course, in the name of real “democracy.” Joel D. Hirst at the Council on Foreign Relations presents a full account of what Chavez intends to do with his new powers.
Here we have the FCC wanting to take control of the internet 'in the name of fairness', etc.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Kevin has a response to James up,

covering in detail a bunch of what can only be described as bigoted and anti-US statements by James.

Original post here; the followup is here.

I'm going to start off with a bit "If Bush was still President...

The FBI is assembling a massive database on thousands of Americans, many of whom have not been accused of any crime, the Washington Post's Dana Priest and William Arkin report.
...
1. The FBI's Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, or SAR, currently contains 161,948 suspicious activity files, into which authorities can put information they've gathered about the people at the center of the files: employment history, financial documents, phone numbers, photos. In many cases, the people in the files have not been accused of any crime but have attracted the suspicions of a local cop, FBI agent or even fellow citizen. The files have led to five arrests but no convictions, the FBI says. Some of the files are unclassified so that local police agencies and even businesses can submit reports on anyone they deem suspicious.
Naw, no possibility of abuse THERE, no...


Ok, Uncle is right: I want one.


The fact that the Akaka Bill could be seriously considered by Congress is all the proof needed that the Democrat Party(and some RINO morons) don't want the racial bullshit to end: they just want to control it for their own ends.


A lot of you have probably seen this already:
A Harry Potter star was beaten, called a "slag" and threatened with death after she met a young man who was not a Muslim, a court has heard.

Victim Afshan Azad, 22, played Padma Patil, a classmate of the teenage wizard, in the blockbuster Hollywood films based on the children's books by JK Rowling.

She was assaulted and branded a "prostitute" after meeting a young Hindu man, a relationship which brought anger from her father, Abul Azad, 53, and brother, Ashraf, 28, Manchester Crown Court heard.

The frightened actress later fled through her bedroom window after threats were made to kill her. But despite attempts to get her to come to court for the trial of her father and brother, Miss Azad would not attend voluntarily, the court was told
.


Snork...
While hunting around for something else, I stumbled across this factoid: In 2008, 93% of American workplace fatalities were men even though males accounted for only 57% of the total hours worked.

I, for one, am grateful, because if women died disproportionately at work we'd never hear the end of it
.


Remember the mess in Honduras?
For a long time I assumed Obama was a communist. How else to explain his support for the Honduran Chavista Manuel Zelaya? Ideological sympathy on Obama’s part seemed the simplest explanation.

However, documents from WikiLeaks suggest an even worse possibility, namely that the whole sorry affair was driven by incompetence at a level that’s astonishing even by the low standards of the Obama administration. Were they really so eager to appease Chavez? That’s crazy even if Obama is personally sympathetic to Chavez...
You have to remember: Obama really believes that he and his minions(in some cases, who's really the minion?) are smarter than everybody else in the damn world, so how could he possibly be wrong?


From Theo:
Charley, a new retiree-greeter at Wal-Mart, just couldn't seem to get to work on time.

Every day he was 5, 10, 15 minutes late. But he was a good worker, really tidy, clean-shaven, sharp minded and a real credit to the company and obviously demonstrating their "Older Person Friendly" policies.

One day the boss called him into the office for a talk.

"Charley, I have to tell you, I like your work ethic, you do a bang up job,but your being late so often is quite bothersome."

"Yes, I know boss, and I am working on it."

''Well good, you are a team player. That's what I like to hear.

It's odd though your coming in late. I know you're retired from the Armed Forces. What did they say if you came in late there?"

''They said, "Good morning, Admiral, can I get you some coffee, sir?'''


Really, AG Holder? Two short years ago 'We' didn't worry about this?
Effing dirtbag or effing moron, you have your choice.


Bilal Ali Muhammad, whether the government remembers you or not, we will.


And on that note, I give you good night.

One big reason I've come to despise the Democrat Party

and call it the National Socialist Democrat Party: you build an estate, on which you pay various taxes throughout life- sometimes more than once on the same things- but you shouldn't be allowed to leave the estate to your family or whoever because miserable little bastards like Barney Frank say 'They haven't earned it."

Frank, put bluntly, it is NON OF YOU GOD-DAMNED BUSINESS WHAT I DO WITH THE ESTATE I BUILT. None. You and your kind are nothing more than thieves workign under color of law to steal what other people earned.

Monday, December 20, 2010

A little personal history

Way back, when I was first working out forging, I knew a blade- and a lot of other things- had to beheat-treated, but didn't really understand the why and only a fuzzy idea of how. So did some reading(couldn't find a lot at the time,pre-internet it was books only and not yet a lot of them). A lot of the stuff I could find was more industrial-oriented, but got the idea.

I've mentioned this job before, basically two steps: bring the piece up to critical temperature and
quench in the proper medium to harden; then heat again to a lower temp to temper*. Nice and simple;but the first times you do it... not just stressful on the steel.

I'd learned to forge and grind and polish blades fairly well, but knew had to heat-treat them properly before they'd be ready for real use**. So gathered my special material. Which in this case was some old motor oil.
A quick digression: the proper medium to quench in depends on the steel(and sometimes
on the end use); for blades even a steel rated as water-hardening usually gives best results with an oil quench; a steel that hardens beautifully in water in a large structure may well crack if made into a blade and water-quenched, it just cools TOO fast and the shock is too much.
There are oils made specifically for hardening different types of steel, but I not only didn't have any I didn't know where to get them and couldn't have bought them if I had(two little kids, etc.) So this attempt started with motor oil. And I didn't know that it was best to warm it either(though if I were smart enough I'd have figured that part out on my own). In any case, I had about two quarts of oil in a bucket, and two small blades for the trial.

Lit the forge, worked it to a clean fire and put the first piece in. This part, no problem, just work
the blade back & forth, turn it over to keep the heat even, get to that proper shade of red that meant critical temperature***. This was a short blade to make this easier, and it only takes a few minutes to get it there, and then pull it out of the fire and plunge it into the oil.

Oh yeah, it smokes and stinks, and I was standing there wondering if it would crack from the shock. It didn't. A piece that comes out of the quench looks gray and scaled(especially from dirty oil), and you have to clean off the oil and scale and shine it up to see if there are any flaws. There weren't, so came the tempering.

Turn the blower back on, low, and start working the blade back & forth and turning it to heat it evenly. You have to keep it clean as you do this, so you can see the color of the steel**** to tell how hot it is, how hard it is. (very)Generally speaking, for a general-use knife with steel like I had you looked for a dark yellow-light bronze shade which indicates around 450F. The level of stress I was feeling as I worked that blade around was incredible; it was so damned important
to me that this work. What I had read said that it was best if you didn't have to quench it again to stop the heat, to time it so when you took the blade away from the fire the color would not continue to darken. Amazingly, I managed to time it right, and let it cold down completely, and test it.

The first test is with a file; a sharp file should almost cut the edge of a properly hardened blade;
if it actually cuts metal away the blade is too soft and won't hold an edge well, if it won't cut
at all(just slides off) it may be too hard and the edge will chip or crack in hard use. So clamp the tang in a vise and try it, and it seemed just about right. So the next is to clamp an inch or so of the point in the vise and see if it'll flex without breaking, not only to make sure it's not too hard but to find if there might be a flaw hiding inside from the forging or hardening. I cannot
describe the elation as I flexed that blade back & forth like a spring, tough enough that I couldn't
bend it, just coming back to straight when I took the pressure off. Effing incredible, and I'd done it. Myself. With my home-built forge and charcoal and a piece of coil spring. If there'd been a woman handy...

When I calmed down a bit I did the second blade, and it worked too! I was damn near floating above the ground I was so high. And when sharpened they actually cut, and held the edge well! Just bleepin' amazing!

A somewhat disgusting number of years has gone by since then, but I still remember it. Lots of knowledge and experience gained, and materials; a few years later I found a place in Tulsa that sells industrial oils and got a five-gallon bucket(of which I still have about two gallons) of light quenching oil; I found places where I could buy oil- and water-hardening tool steel of different alloys for downright cheap, though I still used spring stock for a lot of blades; I found places to get coal instead of charcoal briquets for the fire. I made a lot of things in time to come, small and large, but I still remember the feelings when I heat-treated blades for the first time.


*Quick repeat from years ago: the quench- if you have the temp right- freezes the steel structure in a very highly stressed state, makes it brittle-hard; the tempering heat relieves enough of the stress to remove the brittleness but still leaves it stressed- hard- enough to be tough & flexible AND still hold an edge in use.
**Realistically, back when in the historical periods I was interested in- especially the early ones- the steel I was using, just ground to shape, would have made a better blade than most of humanity would have access to for centuries to come; but to help that steel come to its real potential...
***One of the tricky things, the difference between a little too cool where it won't harden fully and a little too hot which coarsens the structure and makes the blade less than it can be. To get a bit poetic, I came to describe it as 'the moment when that slight shadow in the steel disappeared', which if you actually watch the piece heat is true.
****One of the things I later did was temper in the oven; clean off the oil and shine the piece, and you could set it in at a known temperature. By the way, another method was to heat an iron block really hot and then work the blade on the surface to heat it, or lay a piece of iron pipe-an arch, if you will- over the fire to heat and work the piece on it.

It appears Gov. Christie -ALMOST- did the right thing Updated

by Aitken.

Now the cops and prosecutors who arrested him and brought the charges need to be either severely disciplined or canned for idiocy and misuse of taxpayer funds.

Update: it's been pointed out that this still leaves him a convicted felon, which means his 2nd Amendment rights are gone; yeah, Christie could have done more. Looks like he wanted to split the difference, which means screw him if he runs for higher office.

I know there's argument this allows appeal to whack the law itself; I don't know. I do know that the police and prosecutors and the judge involved need to be punished for their actions.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Oh man, I'd have been on the honor roll

EVERY SEMESTER!

T'is the eason, etc.

Not much in the way of moisture around here the past while; while icy on roads and wires is not desired, some rain or snow would be nice, it's pretty damned dry lately. Aside from that, the supposed-to-be part-time job has been pretty much full time the last while, leaving not much time for blogging. Or sleep at times. SO here goes some stuff I noticed the last couple of days:

Who you gonna believe: Michael Moore(lying commie dirtbag hypocrite) or where Cuban bigshots actually go?
American diplomats made up a story that Cuba banned Michael Moore's 2007 documentary, Sicko, in an attempt to discredit the film which painted an unflattering picture of the US healthcare system, the film-maker said today.
Must suck to be running around giving money to the Wikileaks bozo and find out what you're in favor of points out you're a lying asshole.
The cable describes a visit made by the FSHP to the Hermanos Ameijeiras hospital in October 2007. Built in 1982, the newly renovated hospital was used in Michael Moore's film as evidence of the high quality of healthcare available to all Cubans.

However, according to the FSHP, the only way a Cuban can get access to the hospital is through a bribe or contacts inside the hospital administration. "Cubans are reportedly very resentful that the best hospital in Havana is 'off-limits' to them," the memo reveals.
...
The memo noted that even the Cuban ruling elite leave Cuba when they need medical care. Fidel Castro, for example, brought in a Spanish doctor during his health crisis in 2006. The vice minister of health, Abelardo Ramírez, went to France for gastric cancer surgery. The neurosurgeon who heads CIMEQ [Centro de Investigaciones Médico-Quirúrgicas] hospital – widely regarded as one of the best in Cuba – came to England for eye surgery, returning periodically for checkups.
You might remember Castro bringing in the foreign doctor to take care of his own precious self; in the news at the time and nobody denied it.


Is this fellow being psychologically evaluated? I wish the writer would have mentioned that. Soaking a cat in oil and salt seems just slightly crazy. You're supposed to use fruit juice and inject it.
And you normally remove the outerwear first.


On the Boobs with Badges front,
Abusakran brought a raft, and Jim Hart joined him.“We had oars and shovels to break the ice, for the deer to get out,” Abusakran said.

But in the excited aftermath of the rescue, a natural resources police officer on the scene wrote both men a ticket.

“And he didn’t say anything,” Jim Hart said. “We went in and out of the water numerous times. He didn’t stop us at all.”

They say they were ticketed for not wearing life vests, although both are over the age for mandatory use of flotation devices
.



Nanny Bloomberg says "You need to hear opinions!(but only mine)"
The mayor's mega-company, Bloomberg L.P., announced it is adding opinion pages to its media platforms, and the opinions will be the mayor's.

Conflict of interest? You betcha -- for anybody else. But with a billionaire at City Hall, the rules never seem to apply.

Remember term limits? Or that deputy mayor who moonlights as head of Mike's charity programs?

Or a bunch of the other stuff the article lists.


More of the wonders of socialized medicine in Merrie Olde England:
Trusts around the country are refusing to pay for operations ranging from hip replacements, to cataract removal and wisdom tooth extraction.

The health service is also tightening restrictions that prevent patients undergoing procedures for lifestyle reasons.

Smokers and obese patients are being denied operations until they change their habits and trusts are delaying surgery and non-emergency treatments, the Telegraph has found in the most comprehensive snapshot of NHS cuts yet.
...
Ministers are determined that front line services should be protected and the savings needed can be found from management costs and efficiencies.

But there is growing evidence that NHS managers are sacrificing patient care instead.

Doctors and nurses said the 'grim' results undermine the 'myth' that front line services are being protected and warned they were just the 'tip of the iceberg'
.
If Obamacare doesn't get knocked down all the way, this is our future.


From a friend's Facebook post:
I sent a letter to TSA suggesting using scent dogs in place of dangerous backscatter machines and enhanced pat-downs. Their response? Was to send me step-by-step instructions on flying with fishing rods.



Your TSA at work:
Iranian-American Farid Seif was screened by Trasport Security Administration officials at Houston airport in Texas. His hand luggage was also X-rayed before he took off on his international flight.

It wasn't until Mr Seif arrived at his hotel several hours later that he realised that he had forgotten to unpack a loaded snub nose Glock pistol from his luggage before he embarked on his journey.
But they can feel up your kid or irradiate you just fine.
'It's just impossible to miss it, you know. I mean, this is not a small gun,' Mr Seif told ABC News.
Evidently THEY can.


I'm going to close this one with note that Kevin has a piece up on This I Believe, concerned with the difference in culture and worldview between us and people like James who think nobody but the government minions can be trusted with arms. Including knives, apparently of any type. Because if someone owns them in interferes with his 'right to not be afraid', etc. Well worth reading.

And I don't care if it is later than I usually eat, when that banana bread comes out of the oven I'm having a slice.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Syracuse University is currently acting like a giant collective asshat

due to hurt feelings and tyrannical desires; Popehat has an opinion on it that includes
I interview, and hire, people at a law firm. I cannot imagine a situation in which I would decline to hire someone because they had been the target of satire. That’s because I’m not a fucking idiot. Perhaps the subjects of Audaer’s blog aspire to be hired by fucking idiots. It sure looks like they are going to the right school, then.

And one more left-wing racist opens his mouth and tells us

what he really thinks. And then tries to cover it over.
Meeks made the statement on Wednesday during an interview on WVON-AM (1690). It happened during a discussion of why African-American businesses got a 7 percent sliver of Chicago’s $1 billion spending pie through Aug. 31, down from 8 percent a year ago.

“The word ‘minority’ from our standpoint should mean African American. I don’t think women, Asians and Hispanics should be able to use that title,” he said. “That’s why our numbers cannot improve — because we use women, Asians and Hispanics who are not people of color, who are not people who have been discriminated against.”
Got that? 'People of Color' means anybody not white, except when it suits a racist like Meeks to direct money to a particular group, in which case it only means blacks.

Of course, he makes it all better by later saying he actually only means
he would only exclude white women if elected mayor. The set-aside program currently earmarks 25 percent of all city contracts for minorities and 5 percent for companies owned by women.
There, isn't that all better?

I have two words for the UN clowns who want to regulate this here innernets:

Fuck You.

You corrupt bastards are cordially invited to kiss Security Staff(Jr.)'s ass. One of the last things we need is you dirtbags controlling the net. I don't care how much you like Obama's "Never let a crisis go to waste" idea.

Long Beach Police Department: if the facts are as presented,

the officers involved need to be fired and prosecuted. And any brass who make excuses for them need to be fired.
I'm going to borrow Pournelle's post:
For fifteen minutes the Long Beach Police watched Douglas Zerby sitting on an interior courtyard stoop playing with a toy gun. They never announced their presence. There was no danger to anyone. They never announced their presence. There were at least five police officers there. Then, after fifteen minutes, two or three of them opened fire with shotguns and pistols. There was no warning, and no command to drop the weapon. Apparently his first notification that the police were present was to be shot dead.

This, according to the LBPD, was to protect the citizens and make certain no one got hurt.

Heroic.
The levels of- not fail, incompetence and idiocy- involved here are just flat disgusting. Reading through stuff, it appears that not only did they not announce themselves, they were concealed from him right up to the time 'Zerby reportedly pointed the black metal-tipped nozzle at one of the officers' and they killed him.
Yes, it could be there's something else not being reported; frankly, I hope so, because if there's not then this was the murder of a citizen by the people sworn to 'serve and protect' followed by attempts to cover it up by their brass.

Friday, December 17, 2010

I wonder if Napolitano & Co. never bothered to consider any of this

or just don't give a damn?
We are writing to call your attention to serious concerns about the potential risks of the recently adopted whole body backscatter X-ray security scanners. This is an urgent situation as these X-ray scanners are rapidly being implemented as a primary
screening step for all air travel passengers."


Translation: The naked body scanners may be dangerous to your health.

"Our overriding concern is the extent to which the safety of this scanning device has been adequately demonstrated. This can only be determined by a meeting of an impartial panel of experts that would include medical physicists and radiation biologists at which all of the available relevant data is reviewed."

Translation: The safety of these naked body scanners has never been demonstrated, and especially not by an independent panel of qualified scientists.


Speaking of Napolitano and security,
A Mexican drone crashed in El Paso's Lower Valley, sparking a federal investigation and raising questions about why the aircraft was in U.S. airspace.

"We are collecting data about the crash. We don't have the aircraft because it was returned to its owner," said Keith Holloway, spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates aircraft crashes in the United States and in other countries that request its help
.
So, loss of control and wandered over the border, or deliberately violating our airspace?


That's all I've got time for today; if I was going 'round any faster you could hook me up to a generator shaft.

Snork, hehehehe...

This coming year, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union address occur on the same day.

It is an ironic juxtaposition of events; one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication, while the other involves a groundhog.

Yeah, the recovery is well under way, all right

Yesterday had to drive by Penn Square Mall enroute to a place. If you live in the OKC area, you know what that means this time of year: backed-up traffic in the streets around, and Deity help you if you actually want to get into the mall; usually they've got traffic cops directing things to try to keep the street-blocking to a minimum.

Not now. Normal traffic flow on Penn and on NW Highway, and going past I saw lots and lots of empty parking spaces where in EVERY year I can remember for the last 20 or so the place was packed(generally from about a week ago till Christmas).

Lets see, actual unemployment is above 10%, food and gas(and all other oil-related products) prices are up again, people don't know what the hell is going to happen with Obamacare(including what's going to turn up next the bastards in Congress didn't bother to read before voting on)... yeah, consumer confidence is up.

Problem is, it's up that "We're confident we're getting screwed because of the clowns in DC."

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Monet Parham: not only is she a nanny-state jackass

she's doing this on taxpayer's dime. AND she's a whiny little bitch:
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, claims it violates California law for the hamburger chain to make its meals too appealing to kids, thus launching them on a lifelong course to overeating and other health horrors. It's representing an allegedly typical mother of two from Sacramento named Monet Parham. What's Parham's (so to speak) beef? "Because of McDonald's marketing, [her daughter] Maya has frequently pestered Parham into purchasing Happy Meals, thereby spending money on a product she would not otherwise have purchased."
...
No, she's suing because when she said no, her kids became disagreeable and "pouted" - for which she wants class action status
.
A: Hey, dumbass, you ever heard of using the word "No" and just stopping there? You should, you're SUPPOSED to be a parent.
B: This is such a frigging amazing thing on various levels:
"I don't want to have to listen to my kids whine, so I want everybody to be prevented from getting this."
"I'm such a wuss I can't tell my kids "No" and hold to it, so I want McDonald's to pay!"
The- hell with slippery slope, this would be a vertical dropoff- of 'class action status because of whining kids' is so idiotic that if this weren't in Californicated I can't imagine it even getting a hearing.

Oh, the taxpayer's dime?
Monet Parham, by the way, seems to be an activist employed by the California government to advocate the ingestion of vegetables, though some pains seem to have been taken to obscure this connection.
Gee, I wonder why...

Ah, the level of information we've come to expect

from much of the major media:
Get all that? We have the New York City Health Department saying soda doesn’t actually make you fat, and Duke researchers saying soda taxes don’t actually discourage people from drinking soda, and Bennett pushing the idea that we need soda taxes anyway in order to subsidize medical treatment for all the people who are getting fat from stuff besides soda.

And perhaps most significant: Not a word about public health pioneer Mayor Bloomberg, owner of Bloomberg news.
This is the same major media that likes to keep pushing the Mexican Gun Lie, too. Even though they know it's bullcrap.


More on the past wonders of the communism the 'progressives' want to ram down our throats:
But inside the archives is an abundance of evidence, from the minutes of emergency committees to secret police reports and public security investigations, that show these estimates to be woefully inadequate.

In the summer of 1962, for instance, the head of the Public Security Bureau in Sichuan sent a long handwritten list of casualties to the local boss, Li Jingquan, informing him that 10.6 million people had died in his province from 1958 to 1961. In many other cases, local party committees investigated the scale of death in the immediate aftermath of the famine, leaving detailed computations of the scale of the horror.

In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths
.
Link found at Insty, along with this:
Communists are as bad as Nazis, and their defenders and apologists are as bad as Nazis’ defenders, but far more common. When you meet them, show them no respect. They’re evil, stupid, and dishonest.


Why no, I'd never heard about this:
Fred Phelps is a long time Democrat supporter and frequent Democrat candidate for various offices in Kansas. As recently as 1998 Phelps got 15% in a Democrat primary for governor. He has been a devoted supporter of Al Gore and led his church members in working for Gore in 1988. Phelps’ son Fred hosted a fund raiser for Gore in his home. Have you ever heard of that? Why do you think these things are left out of news reports about Phelps?
Is that a rhetorical question if you ever heard one?



Since Congress passed the Orphan Drug Act 27 years ago, less that 250 new medications and treatments have reached the market, so that means CBLB502 is in very select company. It is the first designed to combat the effects of a massive radiation dose.

The rush to get the drug on the market raises a rather obvious question. The threat of a nuclear or radiological attack by terrorists has existed for more than a decade. If their capabilities in those areas have remained rather crude, why expedite production and introduction of CBLB502? Why not spend the money on more pressing homeland security needs?

Makes you wonder, doesn't it?


Guess That Party! again:
Ex-Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, the ultimate target in a six-year federal investigation into City Hall corruption, was indicted today by a federal grand jury, accused of orchestrating an elaborate scheme that forced contractors to pay heavily in return for city contracts.

The charges cap a lengthy federal corruption investigation headed by the FBI and U.S. Attorney's Office that has netted more than 10 felony convictions, including former City Council President Monica Conyers
.



Is Incompitano still saying the border 'is as secure as it's ever been'?
Terry, 40, was killed about 11 p.m. while patrolling near Peck Canyon in a remote area by Arizona 289.

Border Patrol agents and officers from the Department of Public Safety are stationed on ridgelines throughout the area in the Coronado National Forest. Authorities also are stationed along Peña Blanca Lake.

The scene is about 10 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border and west of Interstate 19
.
TEN MILES INSIDE THE BORDER. I guess somehow they leapfrogged that 'secure border' Napolitano claims.


One more activist the media is either too stupid to find the facts about or too dishonest and biased to report on:
Much of the interviewing press was happy to treat Monet Parham as a random (if oddly well-informed) California mom, but it didn’t take the blogosphere long to discover that she is apparently anything but random. Ira Stoll, who blogs at Future of Capitalism and used to put out the New York Times-tweaking smartertimes.com, soon discovered (via a commenter) that she is in fact the same person as Monet Parham-Lee, who is a “regional program manager” on the state of California payroll for child nutrition matters.

Specifically, she works on a federally funded program that campaigns to exhort people to eat their vegetables and that sort of thing. The comment:

Interestingly, her name has been scrubbed from the website of Champions for Change, the Network for a Healthy California. She has given numerous presentations and attended conferences on the importance of eating vegetables and whatnot.

“She presents herself as an ordinary mother. She is not. She is an advocate, and an employee of a California agency tasked with advocating the eating of vegetables. To the extent that Monet Parham-Lee has EVER taken her daughter to a McDonald's, she should have known better.”
But she's suing Evil McDonald's, so it's all fine, right?


One of the best phrases of the week: Yeah, I know that that level of stupid usually causes flash cavitation, but somehow he survived it.
What brought it on?
Ya know, if you’re going to blame the brown people, blame the Israelis that manufacture a lot of the AKs, too.

KrisAinCA
So it's not just us, it's the JOOOOOOOS!!! responsible for the mess in Mexico.



According to Die Welt, Venezuela has agreed to allow Iran to establish a military base manned by Iranian missile officers, soldiers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Venezuelan missile officers. In addition, Iran has given permission for the missiles to be used in case of an "emergency". In return, the agreement states that Venezuela can use these facilities for "national needs" – radically increasing the threat to neighbors like Colombia. The German daily claims that according to the agreement, Iranian Shahab 3 (range 1300-1500 km), Scud-B (285-330 km) and Scud-C (300, 500 and 700 km) will be deployed in the proposed base. It says that Iran also pledged to help Venezuela in rocket technology expertise, including intensive training of officers.
...
And, over the long haul, Caracas and Tehran would expand and improve Mr. Chavez's missile arsenal, adding such systems as the BM-25 (with a range of up to 4,000 km) that are capable of striking U.S. population centers with a nuclear warhead. Iran reportedly acquired the BM-25 from North Korea back in 2006 and has been working to duplicate the technology. Obviously, Tehran would have no qualms about selling the BM-25 to Venezuela, or simply moving its own intermediate range missiles to that joint base described in the Die Welt dispatch
.


Ok, that's enough happy stuff for one morning. Bleah.

A note about the S&W Combat Masterpiece I drooled over and wondered how to run away withgot to shoot the other day: I'd had a .38 along and fired some of my loads through it, Berry's Plated 148-grain wadcutters over a load of Titegroup; very accurate and very clean.

I've been using plated bullets(from Berry's, X-treme or Ranier) in some loads for a few years now; I've had no problems with them, and they definitely leave less mess behind than cast. Depending on your needs/wants, might check into them if you want to handload but want something less expensive than standard jacketed bullets but don't want to mess with casting.
Yes, I still cast a lot of stuff, that fills a number of niches too.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

S&W K38 Combat Masterpiece


Tam wrote about the piece here* I had a chance to shoot one today.

Damn.

I want one. This was an earlier model than the above, a 5-screw, and it shot beautifully. Slick action, good sights, far more accurate than I(don't you just hate having to say that?), just couldn't ask for better.

Well, I could ask for my own one. And a K32. But that's asking for more, not better.


*Yes, I sto- uh, borrowed the picture from her post; it's such a damn good one

Well, except for that groundwater contaminatiion possibility

sounds good to me

Oh yeah.........

The Washington Post still pushing the Mexican Gun Lie;

anybody surprised?
When the Post reporter claims that the "ATF disagreed," he doesn't speak for the entire agency, just a regional supervisor that is either pushing a political agenda or lacks the big picture. Either way, his superiors have overruled his opinion with facts for over a year.

The myth that legal guns sales in the United States are responsible for Mexican drug cartel violence took another serious blow last week when an ATF official testified in Congress that only eight percent of weapons recovered in Mexico came through licensed U.S. gun dealers.

This figure is far lower than the 90 percent claim made previously as an appeal to reinstate ineffective gun laws that expired in 2004. The claim — still active among the less informed or serially dishonest — officially became myth during congressional testimony last week when Bill McMahon, deputy assistant director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, revealed the eight percent figure, how it was calculated, and where the 90 percent myth arose from.

Of the 100,000 weapons recovered by Mexican authorities, only 18,000 were determined to have been manufactured, sold, or imported from the United States, and of those 18,000, just 7,900 came from sales by licensed gun dealers.

The Post can't even get through their accompanying photo gallery without exposing their dishonesty; this FN MAG machine gun certainly didn't come from a U.S. gun store.


Monday, December 13, 2010

T'is the season



I miss Calvin & Hobbes, but I still love the books

It's official; I need help

'cause I laughed my ass off

And a judge says Obamacare IS unconstitutional

Flatly.
Administration officials told reporters last week that a negative ruling would have virtually no impact on the law's implementation, noting that its two major provisions — the coverage mandate and the creation of new insurance markets — don't take effect until 2014.
Yeah, just because a negative ruling says "You can't do this", no impact at all. No. Sure.

All kinds of news out there, and I don't want to write about it

Just that kind of morning. I will leave you with two things:
First, evidence of just how effing stupid TSA is:
India’s envoy to the United States Meera Shankar, seen in 2004. Last week Shankar was pulled out of the security line at a Mississippi airport and subjected to a “rigorous pat down”, according to Indian officials, despite her diplomatic status.
So either TSA doesn't bother to train people about that little 'diplomatic immunity' thing, or the people on the line are too damn stupid to remember it. Sad thing? This may be the only incident in which the TSA clowns involved may actually face some consequence for their actions.



And last, ref that "I'll leave it to Bill" moment,

The new sniper rifle

.300 Winchester Mag, adjustable stock, rails, and a suppressor as standard equipment. I would definitely think you could reach out and touch someone with it.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Friend in Texas sent me 'A Gunny Parable'

Seems a guy cruises thru a stop sign, or whatever, and gets pulled over by a local policeman. Guy hands the cop his driver's license, insurance verification, plus his concealed carry permit.

"Okay, Mr. Smith," the cop says, "I see your CHL permit. Are you carrying today?"

"Yes, I am."

"Well then, better tell me what you got."

Smith says, "Well, I got a .357 revolver in my inside coat pocket. There's a 9mm semi-auto in the glove box. And, I've got a .22 magnum derringer in my right boot."

"Okay," the cop says. "Anything else?"

"Yeah, back in the trunk, there's an AR15 and a shotgun. That's about it."

"Mr. Smith, are you on your way to or from a gun range...?"

"Nope."

"Well then, what are you afraid of...?"

"Not a damn thing..."

Is there some rule that 'Made for SyFy Movies'

have to be absolute crap?

This is brought up because I suffered through some of a piece of crap called 'Storm'. Idealistic researcher gets pulled into evil government scheme run by a general to control the weather. Why? "So Americans can have the cheap gas they want" of course. Add in some kind of secret agent who murders best friend of said idealist because he discovers something, various planes blowing up, etc. ad nauseum on a major scale.

Just as bad as putting a magazine from a M16 into a dinosaur while it eats somebody and the critter not noticing, just in a different way.

Kind of come to think that way myself

That movie The Tourist? I could never

wind up in that situation(least from the commercials I've seen); if I were touring somewhere in Europe and a gorgeous woman made a point of making my acquaintance, I fear my first thought would be "Ok, what is it? I KNOW I'm getting set up for something!"

Saturday, December 11, 2010

There've been rapes and assaults by 'disaffected North African youths'

for years, now the capital of "We are multicultural(and we'll jail you if you say something wrong about it) Sweden" has its first jihad bombings.

They're so stuck in denial and "We must be properly sensitive" that
TV2 [Denmark] is reporting that the bomber was carrying a rucksack full of nails. Swedish TV is a disgrace — they refuse to say that the killing is related to the bombing. And they won’t say the two explosions were related.

On Swedish TV they actually said that a car containing fireworks caught on fire
.
Wonder how much longer that will last?

They had the same kind of luck we had with the Times Square bomber: apparently didn't know how to make the bombs well enough to get the kind of damage they wanted; and how much longer is THAT going to last?

Friday, December 10, 2010

I have to ask, what level of dumbass does it take

to think a kayaking trip here was a good idea?
An acclaimed South African outdoorsman who was leading a kayaking expedition from the source of the White Nile into Congo was dragged from his craft by a crocodile as two Americans watched, horrified. The guide is presumed dead.
Ya think MAYBE?
The body of 35-year-old Hendrik Coetzee, who was living in Uganda, has not been recovered(no kidding?). The stretch of river where they were traveling is notoriously dangerous for its whitewater, and because of its high density of crocodiles and hippos.
Just damn.

So is Obama saying "I don't want to play President anymore",

or does he think leaving Clinton to answer questions somehow makes him look better?

Or is he flat freakin' nuts?

Having been busy with the window and other stuff, this is the first I heard of this; it's kind of amazing, isn't it?

I really dislike working on windows

what with the chance of cuts and slices and major hemorrhage and such. But friend had a broken window, so.

Get the old glass out, measure, get the new pane, start to install it and- it's too wide. By maybe 1/4". No, they didn't cut it wrong; I didn't notice that the top rail of the frame had a slot the glass fit into(I plead tired and dumbass), so it didn't need to be as wide as I thought. So back to Lowe's to trim that 1/4", back over, and it slides right in. I had some points left from my own cracked pane, did have to get some glazing compound, but it's all done.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'll eat something and fall over.