Is your property yours? Maybe not.

Professor Bainbridge and Kevin both take a look at a case before the Supreme Court that has BIG implications for all of us. It's about the way cities are using their power to take your property, pay you what they decide is a fair price, and then sell or give it to someone else. Kevin's got a very good breakdown of what's been happening with this, and why it appears that the SCOTUS may lack the integrity/balls to rule as they should, so I won't try to repeat or compress it.

This boils down to, if SCOTUS rules(literally, in this case) with the government, we're screwed. It means your city or county can literally steal your home or business so they can sell or give it to someone else who they think can 'better' use it; and their idea of 'better use' could be anything from apartments, to a condo complex, to some business they think will pay more money in taxes(i.e., pay us off and we'll rob the citazens for you).

This is profoundly depressing. The highest court in the land appears to care not for the document it is supposed to protect and defend, caring only for the way the words can be twisted and warped to serve what they've decided is a 'good idea'. If you disagree, tough shit, because the all-high court knows better than you peasants!

And the question becomes, what do we do about it?

Nobody in black with a scythe riding past......yet

I was right, I do NOT have the real plague; only a undistinguished relation.

The flu is fairly consistent when I get it. Somewhere between one and two weeks of misery during which I have to keep putting lotion on and around my nose to keep it from turning into scenery from a Martian landscape. This is a pain, but not nearly the bad relation.

It's weird how this stuff happens at times. Real flu fades in over a couple of days, settles in and makes itself at home for a while. With this, Thursday night I was a little ratty, but I thought that was from tired and from the ventilator draft at the range blowing on the back of my head & neck. Then I woke up Friday morning and could hardly talk, and felt halfway like someone had whacked me with sticks while I wasn't looking. Now my throat and the aches are both a lot better. Still tired, the way this crap does to you, but not too bad; though I'm not heading back to the gym for a few days, and I'll stay out of the wind.

Found out today that some other people at work got the same thing. It's some type of virus, confirmed not the flu that all the news people are screaming about(Is the epidemic due to the vaccine shortage? More at ten!).

It rained a bit last night, and it's supposed to tomorrow night & Wednesday. And the grass in back gets higher, and higher... By the time it's dry enough and I'm healthy enough to mow, I may need the hooded guys' scythe to take it down to lawn mower height.

But it sure is green out there.

Wild animals, city dwellers & Disney Disease

Disney Disease is my name for the attitude of otherwise intelligent people who believe the crap that started coming out of Disney years ago and continues in a lot of the 'nature' shows today. It boils down to 'animals are our friends, no animal will deliberately try to hurt you, they're only scared of us evil humans', etc. It ignores the true nature of a lot of animals, and sets a lot of people and animals up for a serious collision.

Current case in point, mASS BACKWARDS brings up the case of a woman who tried to 'scare away' the coyote that was cornered by the dog. The coyote, of course, chomped down on her when she got too close. In many cases a coyote may indeed run away; or it may decide it needs to show who's top dog and start slicing. If you are in any doubt, I assure you that a coyote can bite the tax reform act out of you with great speed. Making this case worse is the coyote tested as rabid. NOT a good situation. And this was in Cape Cod! Apparently the state wildlife people had been making noises about how since people were moving into the 'natural habitat' of the critters, people needed to scare the critters if they got too close, so they'd be scared of people. By the way, if I'm not mistaken, the coyote just moved east into areas like Massachusetts over the last decade or so; 'natural habitat' my ass.

My point is that these people believe that if you have good intentions toward them, the animals won't hurt you; and believe that all you have to do is wave your arms to scare them away. Got news for you, folks; sometimes that don't work. Coyotes are predators, and if they either feel cornered or decide they need to show who's on top around here, may very well chew on you. A fox or skunk or possum that's near a den, or around breeding season when you disturb it, may well bite the crap out of you. That's not taking into account the occasional case of something that's sick and won't act normally because of it.

Bears and elk and deer, too. Bears are big powerful omnivores who, if they feel imposed upon- or on occasion hungry- will turn you into an entree. They don't care what you think of the matter. Deer and elk won't eat you, but the males can gore you with antlers, and the male & female both can kick you into a hospital bed.

I don't want animals killed off; if we did that, there'd be nothing to hunt. Besides, I like having wild things in the woods and plains. I just wish people would often be more realistic about what they're dealing with when they come face-to-face with one of them.

Note: about a year ago I was driving home about 10 one night when I saw what I thought was a dog run across the street and stop in the median a litte ways ahead of me. I slowed down in case it decided to run back, and as I approached tried to decide what it was. It's a German Shepherd? No, it's... IT'S A FREAKIN' COYOTE! In the middle of Oklahoma City. Yes, I did get a real good look; I slowed way down, and it was standing near a streetlight. It was also about the biggest, fattest coyote I've ever seen; it had apparently been living well on cats, dogs, possums and trash cans.

Global Warming, and a lost city found

These two things both from Dean Esmay

First, this piece on the infamous 'hockey stick' chart that 'proved' global warming. And on the roadblocks put in the way of the people who found the mathematical errors/among others/ in the piece.

Second, the ancient city that was literally uncovered by the tsunami. Amazing things turn up.

The Anniversary of Iwo Jima

Feb. 19th is the date the first American troops landed on that island, and began some of the bloodiest combat of World War II.

I had two great-uncles. Ray spent WWII getting a government-paid tour of Europe as a rifleman in Patton's Third Army; he's never spoken to anyone in the family about it, just a little about some of the souvineers he brought back.

George, who died last year, was a diver in the Navy, and spent a lot of time in the Pacific. S&R and salvage of both our and Japanese vessels, and among the places he went to was Iwo Jima. He never spoke of it, either, except for one time...
When Bill Clinton was trying to drum up support to invade Iraq, remember the 'town meeting' where a bunch of people, especially some old veterans, tore his butt apart over it? My dad and I were visiting George at the time, and as this went on- interspersed with some video of Marines training for assault landings- George started talking. Some about what he'd done himself, some about what he'd seen, including "all those boys dead on the beach and in the water"at Iwo. He believed that Clinton was only talking it up because he thought he'd get political points for it, not because he really believed it needed to be done, and for George that was it; that made Clinton a sorry opportunist not to be trusted with the lives of others.

That was the only time he ever said a word about the War that put him on a partial-disability pension. He and Ray had done the same thing; finished a dirty job that needed doing, then came home and put their lives back together. I figure I'm the richer, and my kids also, for having known the two of them.

I will not forget George's words that night about what he'd seen & done. We need to make sure we never forget those who went and did.

Note: Kim du Toit notes that Adam of the Walter & Adam Fund died in Mosul from a car bomb explosion on Feb. 17th.

The first Carnival of Cordite is up!

It's right here, and has some really good stuff linked up.

That's it for me right now; the plague or something has decided to set up housekeeping in my throat.

Does whiskey kill plague? If I had a bottle I'd damn well find out right now.

I have never liked Jimmy Carter

1976 was the first year I could vote, and surprisingly for me/already hated politicians in general/ I actually paid attention to the presidential race. I wasn't wild about Ford, but there was something about Carter that set my teeth on edge. There were specific policy things that bothered me, but beyond that was a basic distrust of him. Which he proceeded to prove right.

This is the guy who put Stansfield Turner in charge of the CIA; who took a somewhat messed up agency and really screwed it up. Carter was a Naval officer under Hyman Rickover, and I've read that he and a lot of his junior officers had a really bad habit of looking to technology to prevent stupid humans from messing things up. Well, Carter and Turner decided that since we had these fine reconnaisance satellites, we didn't need all those human agents on the ground costing money and causing trouble, so they fired several hundred agents. Some were near retirement, but weren't given the option to retire; just a card saying "we don't need you anymore, don't let the doorknob hit you in the ass on the way out". Besides the fact that there are lots of things satellites can't see for you, there are things they cannot do, which was brought out by their firing what I read were the only agents who spoke Farsi just before the Iranian revolution began.

Carter did a number of things as president that really pissed me off. And after he left office, in some ways he may have actually become worse. He's declared elections fair and valid when everyone else was yelling about evidence of fraud, he's kissed up to dictators, and he's spoken against this country. His sucking up to the Nobel Prize committee so as to get a prize led to him being awarded one with the committee actually saying that it was their way of taking a poke at President Bush. And so on.

Power Line had a piece earlier about Carter, including specifics of some really dispicable things he's done. They also mention a book I was unaware of, "The Real Jimmy Carter" by Steven F. Hayward. I'm going to have to find this and read it.

I used to know a lady who thought Carter was one of the best presidents we'd ever had, apparently for two reasons: first was his various crawling around and kissing up to make up for all the evil things the U.S. had done- the CIA in particular- and second was the fact that 'he signed lots of international agreements'. I pointed out that yeah, he signed multiple agreements with the Soviets and North Korea, and they simply turned around and ignored them. Her attitude was basically that "at least he did make agreements". First time I'd really run into the attitude that the process counted for more than the results. Which I think is a load of crap.
'Course, she thought we owed the Palistinians and should beat the Israelis into submission to them, and we really got along there...

Marvelous developments!

I meant to post on this earlier. Read it over at Dean's World.

A researcher named Ashok Gadgil first developed a way to use ultraviolet light to kill bacteria in water, giving a lot of people drinkable water at a price that could be afforded. Now he's found a cheap way to filter arsenic out of drinking water; if it indeed works out, this man will have saved literally God only knows how many people by his work, and made their lives a lot better.

Not a whole lot of people manage to do such a thing. Check it out.

Do NOT register your weapons. Ever.

From Smallest Minority comes a link to the end result of registration, this case from New South Wales in Australia.

Money quote: "Mr Moroney said that, as part of the blitz, thousands of weapons were destroyed because police were not satisfied that the firearms were being kept securely, or that "possession of that firearm was necessarily further warranted"." Please note, they minions of the state decided either they didn't like the way the owners stored them, or decided the peasants didn't 'need them anymore'; so they stole private property to be destroyed.

Also note, the registration system there means that the cops can show up at your home any time they like to 'inspect' your storage and decide if they think you should be allowed to keep your property.

This is directly related to a bill some jackass tried to pass here a few years ago stating that if you owned more than a certain amount of ammo/I think it was 1000 rounds/ you would have to have an 'arsenel' license from the feds, which would entitle them to inspect your home and 'storage' any time, day or night, with the usual threat of arrest & confiscation if they didn't think you were within their specs.

Never, NEVER register your arms with some government flunky; they and the nannies will screw you with it.

Ok, here's some stuff to use, now for a variety of reasons

A couple of years ago I read about some stuff called Microlon Gun Juice. It's a lubricant/protectant that goes on wet, then the carrier evaporates leaving a dry film. I did a writeup of my experience with it for George at Mad Ogre to post in his weapons section. Short version, it works quite well.

George has been putting together a load of stuff to ship to the troops in the sandbox, and wrote me today that Microlon is sending him a case of Gun Juice to include. That's a bleep-load of product, and will go a long, long way.

So the stuff works, and the company is supporting the troops with their product. Two good reasons to support the company.

Note: I just sent Ogre a follow-up to my original piece. I took a knife blade and treated it to test how well Microlon worked to prevent rust. It does a pretty damn good job so far. I'm going to be using this stuff for a number of purposes for a long time to come.

It's hard to believe some people can actually exist

Over at Whacking Day, he's had a number of bits from a real and true loon named Joe Vialls. "The Jews run everything, the U.S. is about to implode, the Russians are going to strike against the Jewish-American elite", etc. This particular link is to a collection of some of his predictions for the future.

This guy brings true meaning to the term 'barking moonbat'. It's hard to describe; think of someone off his meds and a bigot and a socialist... not exactly an attractive line of thought.

Tex is good for other things, too. He reviews motorcycles, he quotes fine literature ("Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss.
- Robert A. Heinlein ")
and tells off idiots like George Monbiot who tell us the sky is falling.

I've really got to go to Australia some day.

Star BM test

As my previous post indicated, had a chance to try shooting one of these. It's a 9mm semi-auto pistol, one of those originally issued to the Spanish Civil Guard. First impressions were:
It's solid, steel frame & slide.
It's nicely fitted, no slop or rattles that shouldn't be there.
Lots of holster wear on the outside, but the inside was very good; looks like it was carried a lot & shot a little.
Big sights, wide front blade & rear notch to match, though the front needs some paint to make it easier to pick up.
The bore and chamber were spotless, with strong rifling.
And a very nice trigger. A little takeup, and then a clean break, no creep or drag I could tell.

Detail-stripped it to clean, and the insides were in quite good shape. The magazine disconnect, trigger & sear assemblies were not removed; there was no old, caked grease, nothing was hanging up, so wiped it all down, wiped it clean & lightly oiled it all. As noted previously, putting the trigger/follower/spring combination back in is a serious pain in the ass. As it was, the hammer strut slot & pivot had a little grunge, and there was a little on the spring, so it needed doing, but finding the way to put it back together involved some bad words. Field-stripping for normal cleaning is downright simple.

Testing used one box of CCI Blazer ball. There was one stovepipe in the second magazine(it came with two) and that was it; otherwise it ran through without a hitch, and the slide lock worked every time. Accuracy was quite good. I had no problem keeping shots in about 3-4" groups offhand at 7 yards in slowfire, and about the same starting from low-ready, up to fire and back down. With the aforementioned paint on the front sight to make it easier to pick up, I think I could improve on these groups.

One thing I did have to watch was the thumb safety. When the hammer is cocked and you thumb the safety on, the last part of the motion takes a real push. The safety actually cams the hammer off of the sear and blocks it from falling, and seems a very secure arrangement. If you don't push it all the way on and pull the trigger, the hammer won't fall then, but may well slip off the sear and fall to the 'safety' notch when you take the safety off; which means that if the sear slips over a worn or damaged notch, the gun will fire. It might be possible to polish the surfaces and make the safety take less pressure to put fully on, but I'm iffy about messing with it. I'd say just make sure you push it all the way on.

Overall, I liked it. It's solidly made of good steel, gave good accuracy- certainly capable of better, I'd say-, and I'd guess it will be reliable. Stovepipes like the one I had could be from a number of things, one of the most common being ammo. I'd try it with several brands to see what it liked best, especially in the case of self-defense ammo. And the price was quite good. I know of very good things said of Kimber and Wilson, for instance, but at prices starting around $700 on the Kimbers and about $1200 for a Wilson... This ran the guy about $185, and I think he got his moneys worth. So if you were looking for a 9mm pistol for target shooting and/or self-defense, and you're on a budget, take a good look at one of these. Wouldn't mind having one myself.

I am going to pick up some different ammo, including some good hollowpoints for further testing. I think I'm going to be pleased with the results.

Update: over at Shooters' Carnival, here's another test on this handgun. Even if you're not interested in this, check out the Carnival anyway, lot's of good stuff there.

Ref the conviction Lynne Stewart

About damn time. She's the kind of 'lawyer' I find most contemptible; professing love of the freedoms of this country and individual rights while doing everything they can to destroy those things.

To Gitmo with her.

Note for gunsmithing

If you're helping someone take a Star BM down for cleaning, and you don't have to take out the hammer/spring/follower setup,

DON'T.

About that announcement from North Korea...

Varifrank has some outlook on it.

I fear I hadn't thought too much on this matter, taking it for granted that they had them. However, the effect of the announcement on the Peoples Republic of China hadn't occurred to me. Complications, indeed.

Found over at Smallest Minority

Old .22 rifles

I love old .22s. Many are very basic rifles meant to puncture tin cans and put squirrels and rabbits on the table, some were finely-finished works for those who could afford the best. Part of the attraction is the possible history behind one; the worn bluing, the scratches and dings on the stock, a bit of filework on the sights tell you things about it, how it was used and cared for- sometimes how it was abused through bad luck or carelessness. And even the abused ones can be worth the work to clean and fix them up.

A few years ago I was at a flea market with my daughter and stopped at a table to look at one of these. It was a Remington Model 33, the NRA Junior version. It was intended as a beginners target rifle, and came with a Patridge front sight(a square post instead of a thin body with a bead on top), a Lyman aperture rear sight(also called a peep sight), and sling swivels. The swivels were missing; the toe of the stock was broken off; and the finish was pretty much gone, all the metal worn to that faded color called 'gun-metal'. The bore was a bit dirty, but I couldn't spot any obvious pits. I talked a bit, asked the price, and wandered on. The price he wanted would have been fine for one in considerably better condition, but not this one.

It was a hot day, and a lot of people were packing up early, and we made a last pass by the table, just to take one last look. They were loading up, and already had the .22 packed. I asked about it and the man pulled it out of a case. I talked a bit about price, but he was still higher than I was willing to pay- more than I had for that matter. He asked how much did I have, and I told him $65. He thought about five seconds, then said, "I haven't sold a thing all day. It's yours." Money changed hands, and we took it home.

First thing for it was take the barrel & action out of the stock and run an oily patch through the bore, leaving it to soak. Wipe the outside down with a heavy coat and set it aside. The bolt took a bit of figuring, but finally got it apart and cleaned & oiled it. Wiped the bore out, and amazingly, it was in fine shape. No pitting or sign of rust, sharp rifling. The bolt went back together, the action & outside was cleaned off and the trigger mechanism lubed, then all put back together. Yes, I do love working on things like this.

It was about two weeks before I could shoot it, and I took along six different brands & types of ammo since some can be downright picky about what they shoot well. And to say I was pleased would be an understatement. This rifle was made in 1933, and had seen hard use. After almost 70 years, the trigger pull was crisp and light(as good as some quite expensive target rifles I've handled), and with one brand of ammo it would shoot 1/2" groups at 50 yards. The worst ammo went into about 1.5", most of it around 1": fine performance for most new rifles.

As I had time the stock was scraped to remove the old finish and crud, and I fitted a piece of walnut to repair the broken toe, then finished the whole thing with Tru-Oil stock finish. Someday I may reblue it, but for now I like the way it looks about as much as the way it shoots. One of these days I'll find the proper type of sling swivels and put them on, to finish the job.

Please do not misunderstand me, I like new and old guns; it's just that there's something about some old ones, especially when you can restore them a bit. You get a fine firearm and the pleasure of working on it, and that can be a very good thing.

By the way, I'm quite proud of the stock repair. After it was rasped and sanded to match the shape and curves and finished, you can't spot the line: the grain matched up beautifully. And in case you wonder, I did find out what the rifle is worth in current condition, matter of fact the rear sight is worth about what I paid for the rifle. And I don't care. It stays in the safe, and someday it'll go to either one of my kids or a grandkid.

Ideally, that's the way it should be.

I'm Anti-Science, he says!

I had a comment on the earlier post that I thought I'd respond to here instead of in the comments.
Anonymous says:
"Guess who I don't trust?

That would be head-in-the-sand types, who find some oily reason to reject anything that might worry them.

The problem really is that this head-sticking might be growing. Consider this bit from a reacent Neal Stephenson interview:

"For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It’s no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you’re living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.

It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture."

I don't know if you are doing it on purpose, but you are part of that. You are part of the anti-science.

Good day to you sir!"

Ok, Fez, here's my response.
I don't have my head in the sand, and I don't have an 'oily' reason to reject things that might be of concern. One of the questions, possibly 'the' question, is deciding if something is indeed something to worry about and/or a threat. And I don't think global warming is, for reasons mentioned before. Also, a while back there was an article at TechnologyReview.com dealing with the famous 'hockey stick' graph showing warming as starting up roughly the same time as the Industrial Revolution started up. Problem: they found a 'fundamental mathematical flaw' in the program used to product the graph, "This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not." Read the article, it's quite interesting. And it also points out something other than the problem with the graph; namely, the problems they had trying to get their findings published. Which leads to:

"science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture." Science is supposed to be about that: it is also supposed to be about the willingness to ruthlessly discard a theory, or parts of it, when data shows it to be inaccurate or flat wrong. Unfortunately, it's not. Scientific fraud, altering data to fit theory instead of the other way around, is an old problem that's not gone away. It's seen in, among other things, the almost hysterical denunciations of people who disagree with a pet theory- for instance, the screaming and threats directed to Bjorn Lomborg for daring to point out that data shows things have improved, and that a lot of the hard-pushed 'solutions' such as Kyoto are not necessarily a good idea. The same thing appears to be happening in HIV/AIDS research(check over at Dean Esmay for some interesting stuff on this) and BSE('Mad Cow' disease). Tech Central Station has had some reports on BSE that pointed out that it's very difficult to get funding to search for things other than prions in reference to BSE because the Powers That Be have decided that prions are it.
These things make it hard for a lot of mainstream culture to give the kind of support that once was pretty much taken for granted; when people find out about the broken hockey stick, when they hear the threats at scientists who dare to go against the PC ideals, when they find out that medical research is/has been sidetracked and the Powers That Be don't want to let it head toward another line, it causes doubts about the integrity of the process itself, and why should I be willing to put more millions into a broken process? That a lot of the guardians don't seem to want to fix?

Questioning a theory, arguing with a set of ideas, does not make you anti-science. That's kind of like the argument you hear a lot that red-state people are 'anti-intellectual and anti-education'. Generally, they're not either; they are anti-being told how to live their lives by people who think that having a set of letters after their name or the 'correct' viewpoint means they're qualified to tell all the peasants how to live. Anti-dipshit is not the same as anti-education, and those who think it is are doing a disservice. I don't think the U.S. overall is turning against education or the use of the sciences. I think there is a lot more criticism of a lot of avenues of research, and one of the effects of that is some researchers think that questioning them and/or their work means you dislike science and research.

Our lives are incredibly more free and more comfortable and more safe in many ways because of work in the sciences, and I'm glad of it. That doesn't mean I won't call bullshit when I think a line of reasoning is wrong, or that a suggested fix is a bad idea. It means I will question, and demand facts, and demand that researchers live up to the standards they are supposed to uphold.

I think that about covers it.

Additional: this article found through Dean Esmay on problems with a lot of research

On Indians, and assorted other crap

Over at Hog on Ice, Steve has been laying his own personal smackdown on that academic nitwit Churchill, in his own inimitable style. Inspired by his work, I shall therefore put down in words my own opinion on some related things.

I don't say Native American, I say Indian. 'Native American' covers anyone every born here, not simply the PC-approved tribal types. When I really want to be annoying, I refer to the earlier arrivals on these shores as the First Immigrants.

No I don't think there's anything particularly holy about the tribes that were here before the first Europeans set foot on these shores. They were human, and suffered from all the usual flaws and good points. As far as the 'worshipped their mother Earth' crap goes, it's exactly that. There was an amount of spirituality in their beliefs, no question: and like some people who go to church on Sunday and cheat someone selling used cars the next day, it was, to a certain extent, nonsense. Ever read about Lewis and Clark's travels? They spent timein places where they couldn't trade for food, because the local tribes had eaten everything that didn't run away fast enough, and they were starving, too. They moved through areas where there was no deer or elk or whatever to be seen, or a few at a distance, because they had been hunted out.

The horse was a native animal here. The Indians killed them off for food before the idea of using them for beasts of burden came up, so they didn't see them again, or think of riding them, until the Spanish came. Most of the big animals here after the last ice age were hunted to extinction by them. They've found bison kills, usually where they ran a herd off a cliff or riverbank, where they killed far more than they could do anything with before they rotted.

Respect for others? Slavery, murder, unlimited warfare, cannabilism, and torture- often just for the fun of it- were staples. There's one tribe/can't recall the name offhand/ that was known by the Pawnee word for 'slave'; so many of them had been taken for slaves over time that that's what the Pawnee called the whole tribe, and over time so did all the other tribes around.
I once did some reading on the Cheyenne, some of the fearsome warriors of the plains. Except they didn't go there voluntarily; their early tales say they lived in the woodlands to the east. Then a bigger tribe decided it wanted their hunting grounds and ran them off into the plains to live or die. Along the same lines, when the Sioux decided to move west, they simply killed, enslaved or ran off anyone who got in their way. And so forth.
In the book 'Our Oldest Enemy', it lists records of the various eastern tribes who fought with the French against British settlers; their big reasons for showing up were to kill and to give the younger warriors a taste of man-meat(sound like a bunch of orcs, don't they?)

There are some fine things that have come down to us from many of the tribes, and we would be the poorer without them. But I got sick of the worship a long time ago. It's kind of like the Beatles; you can't just say they made some good music, oh no, you've got to idolize them. Yeah, I'm sick of that crap, too.

True enough, most of the tribes were treated badly over time, some downright horribly. Which puts them in the same category as the Europeans and Asians and Africans who treated everyone outside their tribes as a resource to be mined, sometimes by converting them to fertilizer or barbeque.

I once read a story that touched on the idea of what would have happened if the eastern Indians had had the Norse or the Scots who touched down around long enough to learn the working of metal. There were- still are- huge deposits of iron and copper in the northeast. If some of the tribes there had learned to refine and work it, you'd have wound up with a bunch of barons and counts and kings just as nasty on their bad days as any in Europe or Asia or Africa. Even if they hadn't gotten to that level, the big trade goods the Europeans brought was iron and copper and steel implements, from knives to needles to cooking pots; if some tribes had learned to make those, so the early white settlers didn't have a monopoly on those items... That would make an interesting book.

Two things, both a pain

First, many Dutch schools have banned the display of the Dutch flag by students; they fear it may "provoke other students, mainly Moroccan students". This is not being 'sensitive', this is surrender. When you do not allow students to display the national flag because it might 'provoke' immigrants... get that fork ready, 'cause you're just about done.

Check the wording from one school: "They deny access to students who have flags on their bags or cloth. The school says they need to do this because of the new social climate. But they say prohibition is a big word, they do it in consent with the pupils..." Hey, butthead, if you 'deny access to student who have the flag', that's not in 'consent' with the pupils, that's a command from on high. You just don't have the balls to admit it.


Second thing, the noise about the Marine general who said it's fun to shoot terrorists. Here's what he said at a news conference:
"Actually it's quite fun to fight 'em, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up front with you, I like brawling," Mattis said.

"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil," Mattis said during a panel discussion. "You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

And the predictable sources have been pissing and moaning about it ever since. "It's a bad example, We have to have a Higher Standard", etc. Shut the hell up! This is a man who has been leading troops in combat, providing leadership in & out of combat for years. And you know what? Have fun, General Mattis. Your targets are murdering terrorists who are wasting oxygen that could be breathed by more deserving organisms; like the women they murdered, for instance. So shoot them with a smile on your face. And if you're ever in Oklahoma City, I'll buy you a drink. Hell, I'll buy you dinner. You're doing a nasty job that has to be done, and doing it well, and I thank you.

Further on weather

Yesterday the prediction was for rain last night, ending by about noon, clearing in the afternoon.

It's now 4p.m., it's still cloudy and spitting rain occasionally. Yeah, they can predict what'll happen in the next hundred years or so.

By the way, remember the last couple of years during hurricane season? There would be monstrous storms and more of them, the destruction would be awful! All caused by global warming!

Horsecrap.