A couple of tech things that came to mind

They're running a new gas line down the street(both sides) and instead of cutting a trench(followed by rebuilding streets and driveways) they use a boring tool that cuts at an angle- and the bit is steerable- so they dig a hole to start it in, holes every so far to check alignment, make the hole and then pull the line through(some kind of polymer, weatherproof and tough as hell). Some of the digging being done by a backhoe that would almost fit in the back of my truck(God, there have been times I'd have loved the use of that!).

The other is my mother had her second eye surgery Tuesday to take care of cataracts. First one was last month: go to the doc, and about two hours later Dad drives her home; couple of followup checks and that's it. Not only are the cataracts out of the way, now she'll only need reading glasses.

Anybody who whines about modern technology can kiss my ass.

Oh HELL yes!

The Iron Dome missile defense system on Thursday successfully intercepted for the first time two rockets that were fired at the Israeli city of Ashkelon from the Gaza Strip.

Iron Dome's success Thursday marks the first time in world history short-range rockets were ever intercepted.

So the Israelis have started deploying a close-in defense system to protect vehicles against RPGs and missiles, and now Iron Dome is in service... Makes you wonder if any of the Slammers have a six-pointed star on their blower, doesn't it?

Remember the name H-S Precision?

Remember them using an endorsement from 'Shoot the lady in the face' Horiuchi in their catalog?

They either didn't learn anything from the reaction, or they're actually the kind of bastards you just don't want to buy from:
A couple months later, someone was dumb enough to give me media credentials for the 2009 NRA Convention. This made me obnoxiously full of myself, so I felt it appropriate to commit an act of journalism. I sought out the H-S Precision display at the convention, and tried to get some clarification on just what in the blue hades happened that they picked such a poorly thought out mascot, especially since he was the only endorsement in that particular catalog.

The H-S Precision representative, the man in charge of putting out a positive image of the company, told me red in the face with anger, that Vickie Weaver deserved to be shot simply because she was there.

I honestly wish I was making that up.
I doubt I'll be able to run out and pick up a new boomstick on April 15, but if I can it damn well will have nothing on it from this company.

Reference Obama's comments on gas prices

the other day, a couple more things that come to mind:
Hey, genius, if someone is having trouble buying gas how the HELL are they going to afford one of your new Government Motors cars? Especially at, what, 30-50 thousand?

Who the hell do you think you are to tell someone "Screw off and buy a new car"? You're not our boss, no matter what you think.

And who the hell are you to tell someone "Your family isn't big enough to need a big car, get a little one!" ? You know the family? You know how much stuff they need to take along?

The President is an arrogant dumbass, isn't he?

Friend, when I pointed to the Insty post, actually said "This is what peak oil looks like." Which is idiotic, ignores all the oil and gas we have that The Lightworker doesn't want us to drill for, and works quite conveniently for someone who seems to think that no Democrat can really do anything wrong and that somehow every disappointment from Obama is somehow the fault of Republicans and conservatives. And she's probably got a plan for those troublesome libertarians, too.

Speaking of Gurkhas and kicking ass,

go read. Besides everything else, ever seen a M2 Browning?
As the 20-minute battle raged, Sgt Pun raced onto a wall to remove the .50 cal machine gun from its mount so he could lower it enough to aim at the attackers below.
Damn.

Added: just checked, overall weight of the M2 is almost 84 pounds, not counting ammo.

Number one, damn Obama and his clowns

for what they're doing
Lower-income households are paying nearly a quarter of their income for energy costs. The 27 million lower-income households earning between $10,000 and $30,000, representing 23% of U.S. households, will allocate 23% of their 2011 after-tax income to energy, more than twice the national average of 11%.
...
Senior citizens living on fixed incomes are particularly vulnerable to energy price increases. Seniors have the highest per capita residential energy consumption among all age categories. The average basic Social Security income of 31.5 million senior households was $15,443 in 2009. The median income of 25.3 million households with a principal householder aged 65 or older was $31,354.
and what that arrogant bastard is saying
“Obama needled one questioner who asked about gas prices, now averaging close to $3.70 a gallon nationwide, and suggested that the gentleman consider getting rid of his gas-guzzling vehicle.”

High gas prices aren’t a bug, they’re a feature.

Number two, from that second link, damn AP for being a bunch of pretend reporters who're so far up Obama's ass they're living on his farts:

“Obama needled one questioner who asked about gas prices, now averaging close to $3.70 a gallon nationwide, and suggested that the gentleman consider getting rid of his gas-guzzling vehicle.”

I was confused when I clicked the link on your page and couldn’t find this quote. So I googled the quote. It shows up in all the google hits but when I click on those articles, it’s nowhere to be found. Looks like AP scrubbed it from all copies of the article! Nothing like a compliant media, eh? Hope you got a screenshot.

In fact, I did. And a good thing, because the story’s been almost completely rewritten. But the “memory hole” doesn’t work very well any more. Here, for the sake of history, is the story as it used to be. And if anyone from the Associated Press would like to email me to explain this change, I’m all ears.

Richard Goldstone is either so effing stupid

it's amazing he remembers how to breathe, or the kind of leftist anti-Israel bastard who makes nazi apologists happy.

Among the reasons I think A: the UN can collectively

kiss my ass and B: why we should throw that organization out of this country is this:
Self-defence is a widely recognized, yet legally proscribed, exception to the universal duty to respect the right to life of others. Self-defence is a basis for exemption from criminal responsibility that can be raised by any State agent or non-State actor. Self-defence is sometimes designated as a “right.” There is inadequate legal support for such an interpretation. Self-defence is more properly characterized as a means of protecting the right to life and, as such, a basis for avoiding responsibility for violating the rights of another.
That is how the bastards see the concept of self-defense: it only exists to them as a way for you to escape punishment for 'violating the rights' of someone who attacks you, or your family or home.

It also, as the article shows, is part of their basis for why all the commoners should be disarmed(for our own good, of course).

If G. Washington did come back for a while, I tend to think he'd burn the UN building down before worrying about excitement over the royal wedding across the Atlantic.

Remember that dealine BATFE blew off?

Issa has issued a subpoena(and about time; that should have been done about one minute after they passed the deadline).


And an opinion on the fascination so many have with the latest royal wedding:
If George Washington knew you were Tweeting about the British royal wedding, he'd snatch the iPhone from your hand and kick your ass.

Having gotten that bit of bile out of my system

(for the moment), reason for more off & on than usual is son was home on leave for a few days; transferring to a new base/unit and took a couple of extra days so could visit.

Various people have written a lot of things about what being a parent does to you*; among those things are kids who start off something like this
hit being more like this
and wind up something like this


In daughters case, starting with things like this
and going(somewhat more recently) to this:
That's her on the right. Over the years everything from "YEEEEEEE!" at either happiness or something gross to a phone call during the first deployment:
"I no longer have a truck."
"What? It's in the drivew-"
"No, my truck here."
"Oh." Pause. "What happened to it?"
"It blew up."
Or, in daughter's case, the aforementioned screaming to "I got the house!" Definitely exciting, just less traumatic.
Which is all leading up to, after son headed to the new location, I missed Medieval Fair for the first time in about 30 years because
Just walking around talking to people and seeing performances isn't the same as being there working the forge and(more importantly)
Dad wanted to go to the Tulsa Arms Show; so we went.
Had a moment during the weekend of that two-sided vision: knowing that some of the things I feel about my kids now are the same one's he and Mom have been dealing with for a long time, just change the names.

In any case: the show was good(usually is). Crowded as hell Saturday, less so Sunday, everything from .22 single-shot rifles to .50 single-shots, ammo and drillings and double rifles to books and knives and general stuff. Good weekend, and I'm beat; all that walking around on concrete is a bit more wearing than the standing and walking on grass at the Fair all those years. And I get home and take a look at the interwebs and find
Idiot politicians excusing savages and murderers for not acting like civilized people,
" " talking about scrapping our freedom of speech so as not to offend the savages,
An idiot politician screwing our energy supplies and working to put us further in debt to others for energy**,
And, as kind of a capstone, reading this absolute flaming idiocy and abdication of personal responsibility in the name of handing lives over into the hands of a politician who's either an absolute incompetent or very competent at working to damage this nation(which my kids have to live in) because these people are either too brain-damaged, too stupid or too dedicated to their cause to say "Mr. President, what the HELL is wrong with you?"
I also find that the people involved in Gunwalker are the same ones who've screwed over the actual cops in the agency, over and over and over. And are now, along with their enablers(handlers?) at DOJ are telling Congress to go away and stop bothering them over a bunch of smuggled guns and dead Mexicans and a few dead Americans. And these bastards are screwing over the country my kids and yours are going to inherit IF it still exists as the United States of America.

More on the show later. Right now, having vented a certain amount of upset I need a shower and some sleep in my own bed.



*I'm reminded of some western in which a guy thinks one of his sons is dead, finds out he wasn't and belts him: "What was that for?!?" "That's for scaring me out of ten years growth, WHICH I CANNOT SPARE!"

**Ok, that one's a few days old, but it still pisses me off

Miss me? The first thing I have to say is

Fuck you, Senator Grahamnesty, you miserable little censorious bastard. And Sen. Reid needs to be right up there in the stocks with you.
Sen. Lindsey Graham said Congress might need to explore the need to limit some forms of freedom of speech, in light of Tennessee pastor Terry Jones’ Quran burning, and how such actions result in enabling U.S. enemies.
Let's limit your speech about censoring us first, dumbass.
"I wish we could find a way to hold people accountable. Free speech is a great idea, but we're in a war," Graham told CBS' Bob Schieffer on “Face the Nation” Sunday.

“During World War II, we had limits on what you could do if it inspired the enemy," Graham said, adding certain speech can “put our troops at risk.”
Hey, Graham, in WWII we were worried about the Germans and Japanese finding out about troop movements and such, we weren't worried about hurting their poor little feelings by someone burning a copy of Mein Kampf or pissing on a statue of Hirohito; can you work up enough operating brain cells to recognize the difference?

You are seriously talking about trashing the 1st Amendment because things we say and do piss off the enemy? You are such a shit that you can't see you want to hand the enemy a victory? Howzabout this, Graham:
Fuck Mohammed, may bees piss upon him. I think I'll find one of those cartoons of the child-molesting psychotic and hang it in a urinal. And you know what? If some Deity-cursed beturbanned prophet monkey has a cow, strokes out and blows himself up? It's not because my speech needs to be restrained, it's because he's a uncivilized barbarian who has so little control of himself that someone thousands of miles away makes him wet his pants and lose control by saying some words, or by doing something with a freaking cartoon. You want to control what I say because these barbarians have no self-control? Can't stand the thought that everyone in the world won't bow down to what they want?
To those in the media who are suggesting, apparently in all seriousness, that Terry Jones caused the deaths of seven UN employees in Afghanistan by burning a copy of the Koran, I'll just note that the only way that argument works is by means of a suppressed premise. The premise is that the killers had no moral agency--in other words, that they were, literally, animals.

Me, I'll stick with "savages" and "barbarians."
At the bloody least.

And I wonder how the clowns like Reid and Graham in DC would speak if some Jew upset by another murder of living people in Israel blew up a mosque or shot a bunch of Hizbollah supporters? Or a Christian pissed off by a bunch of muslims burning a church or killing monks and priests did the same? You know exactly how they'd react: they'd apologize to ever muslim in the world and demand the offender be imprisoned for life; because they expect Jews and Christians and such people to act like civilized human beings, but they'll make excuses for radical muslims. Because that's the kind of PC bigots they are.

No wonder DHS is teaching cops to lie about evidence:

it appears DHS has no respect for the law. Ought to read all of it and decide what you think; the end paragraph in the post:
After a witness interview on March 4, 2011, a Department lawyer attempted to remove Committee documents from the interview room. DHS Attorney Reid Cox attempted to leave the room with the Committee’s exhibits in his bag. Committee staff asked Cox if he had the exhibits in his bag, and he confirmed that he did. Cox was admonished by Republican and Democratic staff that he was not permitted to leave with the exhibits. Democratic staff advised Cox that the exhibits are Committee documents and as such, they are the property of the Committee and cannot be removed without permission. Cox explained that the Department disagreed with that position and he moved toward the door. Republican staff advised Cox to leave the exhibits and contact the Committee to discuss the matter. Cox had a counter-proposal: “How about I take the exhibits, and you call me?” While Cox ultimately left the documents, any attempt to steal Committee documents is a serious matter. If the motive for stealing Committee documents is to use them to conduct a forensic investigation to identify a Committee source, it creates an extremely sensitive situation.
"I'm with DHS and I can do whatever I want." Like lie about 'evidence'? Like try to steal documents?

Maybe we should relable DHS as Doing Harm to Security. Especially considering the borders situation.