Saturday, February 26, 2011

There is an idiot named Bobby Franklin in Georgia

who needs to be removed from the legislature if this is his level of brainpower.
His bill defines the beginning of life as the moment of conception and any person who ends that life shall be guilty of murder....period. Now...I am a very devout Catholic pro-life gal and I think abortions are wrong but I think this bill goes too far.

For instance....Mr. Franklin wants all miscarriages to be investigated unless they occurred in the presence of a doctor. So in other words, if you miscarry at home, you could be investigated and you would have to prove that you did nothing to cause that miscarriage. If you took a sleeping pill or if you had a glass of wine then you would have to prove that neither of those things caused you to lose your baby...or you could be charged with murder.
Absolutely out of his freakin' mind. Such as it apparently is.

The sun came out!

There is rejoicing! And while it warms a bit, I'm looking around.
Damn.
A third of the buildings in central Christchurch may need to be demolished and rebuilt, authorities in New Zealand have warned, following an earthquake.

Hundreds of suburban homes damaged in Tuesday's 6.3 magnitude tremor may also have to be pulled down, officials said.
Death toll currently 144 and about 200 missing. Bad.


Engineering a bacteria or virus to be harmless doesn't always work:
Casadaban’s illness is important because of the way the plague bacterium had been weakened. Yersinia pestis needs iron to survive. Normally it gets this iron by stealing it from a host’s body with proteins that bind to it and help break it down. To make the bacterium harmless, scientists genetically stripped it of the proteins needed to consume iron.

“It’s like having a lion, where we took out all its teeth and all its claws,” Alexander said. “But in the case of Dr. Casadaban, the lion didn’t even need to have teeth. There was so much iron that it was freely available and easy to get.”



The federal Education Department in Australia has banned Zumba, a fitness program, from its headquarters after a dance class caused the new building to shake violently.
The possible 'whole lotta shakin' goin' on' cracks are almost endless.


The mayor of LA wants a special six-foot security wall around the official house. Apparently he's bothered by those grubby citizens not being prevented from setting foot on the sacred grounds or something.
And originally, he wanted it to be 8.5' tall.


This crap with TSA is beyond the point at which people should start calling the police and charging them with assault. Maybe child molestation.
The only bad thing on our trip was TSA was at the Savannah train station. There were about 14 agents pulling people inside the building and coralling everyone in a roped area AFTER you got OFF THE TRAIN! This made no sense!!! Poor family in front of us! 9 year old getting patted down and wanded. They groped our people too and were very unprofessional. I am all about security, but when have you ever been harassed and felt up getting OFF a plane? Shouldnt they be doing that getting ON??? And they wonder why so many people are mad at them.
One more reason not to put a bunch of money into trains: the DHS and TSA want to molest you even AFTER YOU GET OFF THE DAMN THINGS.

'Security theater' doesn't even begin to cover this idiocy; the only possible reason I can think of for this is that they want to force people into the habit of being sheep at any time, any place. Thought occurs, what do they charge you with if you say "I'm calling the police, you're holding me against my will"? YOU'RE GETTING OFF THE THING.


Some questions from Doc Helen on one of the latest "You men should grow up!" books:
Though she reluctantly admits that the “materials available to young men are meager, and what is available contradicts itself,” she comes up with this ridiculous conclusion: “At bottom, they are too free, a fact epitomized by their undefined, open-ended, and profoundly autonomous pre-adulthood.” She ends the book suggesting that young women will have to get a better understanding of the limitations imposed by their bodies (Huh?) and young men need to man up.

My question to her: Why should they?

What do you have to offer these men you call child-men if they do man up? Are you going to ensure that they have fair access to their children should they divorce? Will you make sure that they aren’t hauled off to jail if the wife makes false accusations of domestic violence? Will you let them keep the earnings and property that they worked for over years rather than have them turned over to their wife, even if she cheated and was abusive? Will you shield the millions of men who live in fear of their significant other but have nowhere to turn for help? Will you make marriage, in other words, as valuable to men as you think it is for women?


Some questions and possible answers as to why the Mexican government doesn't seem bothered by the Gunwalker revelations(long excerpt):

So why the deliberate indifference?

Possibly, it’s because they want to minimize scrutiny of their own corrupt role in arming cartels:

A Mexican army officer assigned to guard President Felipe Calderon leaked military intelligence to drug cartels, trained hit men and supplied military weapons to Los Zetas, according to a U.S. Embassy cable recently released by Wikileaks.

There’s another piece of the puzzle for that State Department tie-in mentioned the other day that could expand the Grassley Senate investigation.

St. Louis Gun Rights ExaminerKurt Hofmann makes a particularly relevant observation about timing:

As Charlotte Gun Rights Examiner Paul Valone pointed out in private correspondence, that U.S. Embassy cable is dated January, 2009, meaning that when, a couple months later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blamed violence in Mexico on "[o]ur inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals," she was well aware that the drug syndicates were not depending on the U.S. commercial gun market for their weapons.

So Hillary knew at the time that Calderon’s own inner circle was neck-deep in profiteering from cartel connections and military arms supplying. As did Calderon, of course, who still continued to demand a ban on semiautomatic firearms be imposed against United States citizens.


Other day, in one of those stupid arguments on Facebook(I know, sometimes just can't seem to help myself) I was faced with a truly amazing thing: a bunch of the progressives and liberals actually believe ALL our current problems stem from Ronald Reagan having been President. Yeah, not good enough to blame Bush, in the end "IT'S BECAUSE OF THAT BASTARD REAGAN!!!" I mean, these people literally do not see that a Democrat or Socialist ever did ANYTHING wrong. Just flat amazing.


Paul Helmke really doesn't want people to pay attention to Gunwalker, does he?


And that's it for now; cleaning and maybe some handloading to do.

Well, this helps a helluva lot,

doesn't it?
Officers seized more than 6 tons of marijuana, about 145 pounds of cocaine, 12 automatic and semi-automatic weapons, thousands of rounds of ammunition, grenades, body armor and camouflage netting during two raids in McAllen on Wednesday, [Police Chief Victor] Rodriguez said . . .

Much of what officials seized was allegedly provided to the group, which claimed to be working with the Gulf Cartel in Reynosa, by Guardsman Jose Francisco Padilla, 30, of San Juan, police said.

“(Padilla) is a source of the flak equipment … .30-caliber weapons and ammunition,” Rodriguez said. “We know he is an active National Guardsman, but I don’t know what his assignment is.”
Apparently "Steal stuff and sell it", from the sound of this.

Found at Sipsey Street, who also notes that Sen. Coburn has taken notice of Project Gunwalker.

A bike I have no personal knowledge of

Something I ran across at the bike show last weekend, a Ural Patrol:
Not just a sidecar, a two-rear-wheel-drive bike; there's a driveshaft that delivers power to the sidecar wheel. The one I saw was a 2003, here's some specs on a later model.

I'll throw in that the one on sale had been fixed up in more military trim: slotted headlight cover, a RPK(semi) on a pivot mount on the sidecar, etc. Be an interesting thing to drive around, and with the off-road tires would probably do quite well in bad terrain.

Friday, February 25, 2011

More reason, if I needed another, not to every again have an American Express card

They help out assholes who want to destroy dams.

From the same post, another rich-as-hell asshole musician who wants death and destruction. Except. of course, for the major company that helps make him rich:
AP reporter Ryan Foley’s update from Madison on Monday night included details about a rock musician causing the crowd to to roar: “At noon, guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine took to a stage on the Capitol steps to fire up the crowd. He said he flew in from California to lend his voice to the protest.”

While reporters like Adam Nagourney “worry” out loud that the Wisconsin Republicans are going to look too extreme, AP somehow left out Morello’s truly appalling and extremist stands, like speaking fondly of Philadelphia cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Maoist Shining Path terrorists in Peru. If that didn’t seem pro-violence enough, then there’s Morello praying for the drowning of President Bush in 2007, as reported in the Washington Post:
Onstage, when the Nightwatchman [Morello] sang, “I pray that God himself will come and drown the president if the levees break again,” the Jammin’ Java crowd’s attitude was chilling. People were praying.
...
That’s pretty strong stuff coming from work-for-hire employees of one of the great cogs in the global capitalist machine, the megaconglomerate Sony, which wholly owns and distributes Rage’s music and even is a co-owner of the group’s publishing. Since 1992, Rage has sold nearly 7 million records, and it’s safe to say that nobody has benefitted more from that commerce than the band’s unabashedly capitalist paymaster.

I have to note that on the CBS news page where I found

the Obama quote on 'stability', on the sidebar there's a 'Charlie Sheen is dating -' piece.

Why the hell is this considered news? I mean, if they had a 'Charlie Sheen found dead from heart attack/overdose/protecting herself girlfriend' or whatever, THAT would be of slight news interest, but this crap on what celebritute he's currently boinking?

So Obama made a comment that we can 'hang on

until oil prices stabilize', and we're supposed to be comforted.

May I point out that prices could settle at, oh, $150/bbl and that would be a 'stabilized' price?

This is just freakin' awesome

Starting with iron ore, down to the completed blades.

thanks to Uncle for the pointer

I think it was Steve at what used to be Hog on Ice who said

something like "Lots of lawyers are scum; so why does anyone think putting them in a black robe will change that?"
Ciavarella has told the media he never took bribe from anybody and has never wrongfully sentenced any teenager to juvenile detention. He was accused of receiving kickbacks from Robert K. Mericle, the builder and co-owner of two juvenile detention facilities in return for closing down the county's only juvenile detention center and sending teenage offenders to a private-run, for-profit facilities, sometimes for minor offenses. The former judge of Court of Common Pleas in Luzerne County has been accused of receiving $2.8 million as kickbacks.

The "kids for cash" case prompted the state Supreme Court to throw out thousands of convictions
.


Over to WI, this is what you get from a teacher?
“That’s your problem. You’re an entrepreneur, so you don’t work. You don’t know what work is until you get into an educational area. … You’re uneducated, unethical, immoral, and you don’t know what life is. That’s your problem. Why don’t you go behind that fence where you belong? Why don’t you go back with your own kind?” She said this indicating towards the bottom of the Capitol Steps, where a couple of hundred tea partiers were gathered listening to speeches
...
Bystander: “What did you mean when you said does he have any children that he claims?”

Lady in red: “Because he’s such a free spirit and an entrepreneur, I would assume that he’s not supporting children. …

(To Robinson:) You are a big-mouth take-care-of-yourself man. You don’t care about anyone.”
...
When I asked the lady in red why she was so incensed at Robinson, a man she had never spoken to in her life, she said “He comes here dressed to the nines, look at him. He is portraying someone not from this community.” She admitted that her assumption that this black man has children he doesn’t support was racist, but said “What I said is racist, but I am not a racist.”
.
'not from this community'. From a clown supported by thousands of bussed-in union clowns. Yeah.


Gee, the cost of oil affects things? Who- outside, apparently, of some of the idiots in this administration- would have thought it?
People actually paying for stuff, that's who.


The Weare Police Department needs to have its collective ass sued off, as that may be the only think that'll get the attention of these clowns. Speaking as someone who tends to have a 'toward the police' lean, when I see things like this
Police also claim dashboard camera videos of her arrest aren't available because the equipment wasn't working that night. Hipple said police don't have maintenance records to prove the cameras weren't working.
my sympathies go out the window.


Between the price of gas around here currently being $3.18, the cost of bloody everything going up/about to due to this and other fun idiocies, and not quite enough sleep, that's about all I can deal with on news today

The clown who was Schools Superintendent for so long, Sandy Garrett,

can't stop screwing with things even when she's out of office, it would seem.
A Department of Education source claims she was privy to a conversation in which Garrett, a Democrat who held the post for 20 years, allegedly indicated in mid-December that she had been in email contact with board member Tim Gilpin, a Tulsa attorney and like Garrett a Democrat, who supported Barresi's Democratic opponent, Senator Susan Paddack. Gilpin is a former Tulsa County Democratic Party chairman and longtime donor to liberal Democrats. Gilpin and former Democratic Senator Herb Rozell, also a board member, touched off a furor a month ago when they attacked Barresi at her first board meeting and refused to approve her employment of three top assistants.
Various denials, 'never happened', etc. Except
Garrett's emails have mysteriously disappeared from department computers. An employee says she was instructed by Garrett to delete them; Garrett says she gave no such order. But emails from her final months in office as yet have not been located.

The missing emails were discovered after The Associated Press asked about them. Two state records custodians told The AP that the deletion violated a state directive and cost researchers access to significant historical records of a longtime office-holder.
But whyEVER would she do something like that...
After The AP asked to see Garrett's recent correspondence, the Department of Education said the records no longer existed and disclosed that Garrett communicated with her staff through her private e-mail accounts in her last month on the job
.
Why, that sounds like someone trying to cover things up, doesn't it?

Thursday, February 24, 2011

The Koch brothers,

those BASTARDS!
no wonder the socialists and liberals hate them!

It can never be forgotten: Sen. Chuck Schumer(SDP-NY)

is not only the enemy, but a happy violator of of that troublesome oath he swore:

Under the plan endorsed by Schumer and Bloomberg, states and federal authorities would be required to increase the percentage of denied gun permit applicants to the national gun database. The penalty for not reporting would be a loss of federal funding for crime prevention.

Not required to make sure the data in the database is more accurate and up to date, but to just deny more people the right to purchase a gun, with no regard to accuracy? They call the proposal “modest.” If their Thesaurus has the word “stupid” next to “modest,” I might buy that.

First, we have one response to the Touching Special Areas people

She says that whenever a TSA agent attempts to dine at the restaurant, “we turn our backs and completely ignore them, and tell them to leave… Their kind aren’t welcomed in our establishment.”

The restaurant claims that 90% of its patrons are in agreement with their stance and that the local police have actually helped escort TSA workers of the premises
.
Followed by the comment from a friend:
"Very wrong response! Of course they have the right to dine - after they've been viewed naked, and the pictures ridiculed by the staff, and they've been groped in full view of the other diners. If they try to leave before this is carried out, they can be thrown to the floor, handcuffed and taken away for interrogation."

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Sgt. Son called a few nights back,

and said something I'm still snickering about. Talking about some of the difficulties with some of the people in the squad, there came the disgusted comment(from his hoary age of 26):
"He's 20 years old and he's still acting like a teenager!"

I'm going to be laughing about that for a long time.

Found a couple of bones in the fridge

left from the last time I had ribs. Took them out and gave them to the Security Staff. Senior took hers to a suitable spot to chew on; Junior took his and chomped it up in about twelve seconds.

That little beast has some serious jaws.

"You, too, can be irradiated

by a body scanner that doesn't do the job!"

AND may be dangerous; we don't know for sure since, last I heard, the safety stuff that should be available still isnt.

To borrow from Simon Templar, Whales do too have wings!

CBS actually made a real report on the Gunwalker mess.

Now maybe some others among our professional journalists will get off their fat asses and report on it.

The current count in New Zealand is 75 dead

and about 300 missing. Damn.

Rep. Michael Capuano, you are a hypocritical little bastard,

aren't you?
January 9: "What the hell is going on? There's always some degree of tension in politics; everybody knows the last couple of years there's been an intentional increase in the degree of heat in political discourse. . . . If nothing else good comes out of this, I'm hoping it causes people to reconsider how they deal with things."

The other day:
"I'm proud to be here with people who understand that it's more than just sending an email to get you going. Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary."
And here's one of the results of the bastards words:

If the police in that town are worth a crap, this sorry thug will shortly be in jail.


Update: Capuano now that he's been called out: "Oh, I should have worded it differently."

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Gets interesting when a journalist is called on the bullcrap

they pose as 'given':
they

Found this at Ace

A very nice breakdown of how & why Marx was(and his ideas still are)

full of crap over at Classical Values. One bit:
To Marx value was raw material plus work. The means of producing that work (machinery, etc) were just sort of there. And he made no allowance for invention. (Which is why though Marxist revolutions often recruit intellectuals they're the sort of intellectuals who never had an original idea in their life.) Of course in our day and age, invention and original thought are at least as important as machinery in creating product. Also, the raw material fallacy means all the countries who have nothing else to sell feel "exploited" because we're taking their "value" away. Imbuing raw material itself with value means that it's sort of like stealing national treasure. This has given rise to an entire colonialist-exploitation-theory of history which has held more people in misery in developing countries than the most brazen robber baron could manage. And no one, NOT ONE seems to realize that their raw materials mean absolutely nothing if not used. If someone doesn't have an idea to use it. If the finished product is not good for something. In other words, if you're not producing something that someone else finds useful. (I.e. enough to pay for.) If the relationship isn't MUTUALLY beneficial.

I can't remember who is was, the first time I read of the 'stealing the treasure of the indigenous people' garbage, who called bullshit on it in a very plain way; as he pointed out, if someone had not developed technologies that used oil, the mid-East would still be a bunch of camel & goatherds raiding each other to steal wives and raping the livestock because without someone needing it that oil is worthless. Still true, and why the oil ticks live in dread of someone finding a practical substitute for oil.

Been reading about the mess in WI,

and in the mid-East and north Africa, and thinking about the reactions of some people here.

Specifically, despite a lot of the groups and people involved(Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, for example) we've got a bunch of people yelling "Democracy! It's about Democracy!! Democracy good!!!" ; how the hell do you see a bunch of islamist clowns talking about imposing sharia and calling for war to wipe out the Jews and keep saying that as if there's no problem?

Some of this is pretty much pushing for base-form democracy, mob rule; and mob rule pushing for a theocracy, at that. But you've got a bunch of people, primarily progressives and socialists, who either see no problem with mob rule(they plan to control the mob, of course) or are too damn stupid to see the problems. Long as they keep yelling "Democracy!" they think it's all good.

Went 'round with someone the other day on the mess in WI; according to her it's purely the downtrodden workers fighting for their rights against the evil right-wingers who want another bit of value on their stock accounts. Think about this: the state is broke, the people elected are acting to do exactly what they said they would, get the costs under control and stop the unions from controlling the process, and somehow this is seen as Evil Right-Wing Fascists robbing the poor workers, etc.(yeah, she is a socialist) She even sees a connection to those epitome-of-evil Koch brothers. She also defended the crooked doctors handing out fake sick excuses for teachers to skip work because "I'd be stressed too if I knew I might be fired for no reason!" Let's see, skipping work on falsified grounds, abusing sick leave... that's grounds to be fired in just about any company, and I think most states have similar rules on that, but that would be getting fired 'for no reason'. Yeah. Right. (she also basically said that one piece of information I brought up didn't count for squat because I found it on a blog while she quoted something from a local paper; I just said "Information is where you find it." This is also the one who claimed a Media Matters list of calling Glenn Beck names and disagreeing with him proved he 'lied' about a bunch of things)

And let's completely ignore that the Governor pointed out that if these concessions aren't made there'll be thousands of state and local public employees laid off; that doesn't count or something.

Back when, I worked for a state agency. In Oklahoma the union is called the OK State Employees Association, and I became really sick of them. If they'd been honest they'd have registered as a lobbying arm of the Democrat Party, which actions rather ticked me off; add to that their apparent complete disregard of the financial condition of the state when demanding more. More money, more benefits more whatever. And if the point was made too loudly that "THERE IS NO MONEY FOR THIS, YOU MORONS!" their answer was "Then raise taxes so you can give 'us' a raise!" I'd be sitting there thinking "Hey, if you raise taxes to give us a raise we'll be paying those increased taxes too, dammit!"

Their answer to that seemed to be "We'll only raise taxes on the rich!", etc. Yeah. That NEVER soaks down to everyone else, does it? Right now look at how that's worked in Californicated and the PROM; raise taxes on the wealthy and at least some of them move, and then you lose ALL the taxes you were getting from them. Isn't that a wonderful idea?(it is for the lower-tax states those people move to, of course) We're seeing the same attitude in WI; there's no money, but Progressivism Forbid that be acknowledged if it means the unions lose some power. I think one of the things that demonstrates this is about power is the outrage the unions have for two things in particular:
ALL union members would have to vote annually about keeping the union, and
The state would no longer collect dues for the unions, they'd have to get them directly from members.
The unions are apparently terrified of both ideas, which tells me the unions don't trust the bulk of their members to want to stay in and don't trust that they'll be happy to pay dues; they want the power of the state to take the dues for them, and don't want to have to deal with a vote of all members. Says bad things about the union, doesn't it?


I'll add to the personal history that there were a couple of people in my area who were OPEA members; the one time we had a problem that they went to the union with, the response was "Oh, we don't get involved in things like that! And please remember to renew for next year."

Rep. Allen West does not put up with bullshit

"I've been on the battlefield, my friend, ok? Don't try to blow sunshine up my butt"

When the bad guys think they have no reason to fear you,

you get hostages. Then you get dead hostages.
The four Americans aboard a yacht hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia are dead.

Hijacked last Friday off Oman, the Quest was being piloted toward the Somali coast – and was being shadowed by a U.S. Navy warship.

CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that gunshots aboard the yacht were heard, and the warship took action.

All 4 Americans were dead, killed apparently by their captors
.
Yeah, how's that God-damned Hope and Change working?

We've got a Navy that could take care of this, and deal with the pirates. Except the politicians won't let them. And here's part of the result. And the captured pirates will get a nice, comfortable cell and plenty of food and a 'international court' that won't accomplish squat.

New Zealand got pasted

with another quake. Second in only a few months.

Wonder if any of the hobbit burrows are left? I know it's a dumb question, but it did pop to mind

Monday, February 21, 2011

How do I despise the New York Times,

#372:
Oh, wait:
The New York Times had agreed to temporarily withhold information about Mr. Davis’s ties to the agency at the request of the Obama administration, which argued that disclosure of his specific job would put his life at risk.

How brave of you to wait five days before outing an undercover CIA agent.
You couldn't f*cking wait until he was at least out of prison and of harms way?

You are patriots who truly love this country.
You love America the way an abusive husband loves his wife. You love the idealized version of her, but are ready at any moment to beat the shit out of her should she do something you disapprove of. You know, like spying on the enemies of the United States
.

Wow, a lot of pictures from WWII in the Pacific

here.

Found at Theo's place

Robert Mugabe's health 'hurting Zimbabwe'

Yeah, as long as the bastard is still breathing.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Two things for now: First, Columbia University

should be given two choices: ROTC or lose the federal funding, as I think the law calls for. And every one of the miserable little liberal shits who gave this man crap can FOAD; they're not worthy to kiss his ass.
Columbia University students heckled a war hero during a town-hall meeting on whether ROTC should be allowed back on campus.

"Racist!" some students yelled at Anthony Maschek, a Columbia freshman and former Army staff sergeant awarded the Purple Heart after being shot 11 times in a firefight in northern Iraq in February 2008. Others hissed and booed the veteran.


Second, RNS found this: 10kT Nuke Scenario in Port of Los Angeles. Scary stuff. And the little shits mentioned above ought to consider that
A: There are people out there who would flat LOVE to smuggle that nuke onto their university and trigger it, and
B: Troops like Anthony Maschek put their lives on the line- and often pay a price- to try and keep it from happening.
But that would require them stepping out of their nice, comfortable little liberal bubble. And I doubt they have the balls or brains to do that.

I have an idea for Gov. Walker:

Find every one of the union clowns getting one of these 'take a day off' notes and fire them for false sick-time claims.

Then go after the doctors for knowingly handing out these falsified forms.

That'd be a good start.