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.

It's just beautiful! Kevin says it well

Over at Smallest Minority, Kevin has a couple of posts on and in response to the comments of a history professor named Cornell. Prof. Cornell basically says the 2nd Amendment means that someone may bear arms only as part of a militia unit, that there is no individual right to arms, the group he's part of (Second Amendment Research Center, John Glenn Institute) is only trying to help with some 'common-sense' restrictions needed for the public safety(sound familiar?) and so forth. Kevin's reply is long, fact-filled and comprehensive. I'll not excerpt from it, it ought to be read in its entirety. I will include this:

"(Citizenship) "would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citazens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State." (My emphasis)"

That's from the Dred Scott case, one of the worst decisions to ever come out of the Supreme Court. It specifically denied fundamental rights to a whole people. But it a way, it's useful; it lists just what a lot of people were scared of blacks having equal access to.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Yeah! Here's how to do it!

From Free Iraqi:
"Citizens of Al Mudhiryiah (a small town in the "death triangle") were subjected to an attack by several militants today who were trying to punish the residents of this small town for voting in the election last Sunday.The citizens responded and managed to stop the attack, kill 5 of the attackers, wounded 8 and burned their cars.3 citizens were injured during the fire exchange. The Shiekh of the tribe to whom the 3 wounded citizens belong demanded more efforts from the government to stop who he described as "Salafis". "

Yes! These people have a chance to build a free country for themselves and their children, and they're grabbing it. And thank God they were armed; gave them the most effective way to fight the bastards.

To all the people who said the Iraqis could not really make it in a free society; screw you. They seem to be taking to the ideas of freedom from terrorists and self-defense and voting quite well.

Very important statement: "I consider it good even if the government forces were not there at the time to do something about it, because it shows that Iraqis are no longer paralyzed by fear from the terrorists and are able to organize themselves and defend their town when it's necessary." Exactly.

All honor to them

Clayton Cramer has this about one of the Iraqis that Moore & Co. don't mention:
"one story that is famous now in Iraq is about one brave Iraqi (A'adel Nasir) who saw a suspicious looking guy walking around a polling center in (Al- Hurriyah) district and soon the brave man realized that the suspicious guy was trying to commit a suicide attack; he ran towards him, wrestled him and knocked him down causing the bomb carried by the terrorist to explode, sacrificing his own life and saving the lives of the people standing in line at the gate of the voting center. It turned out later that the terrorist carried a Sudanese id.
Now, the school that hosted the voting center on the 30th carries the name of A'adel Nasir, as the Iraqi minister of education announced today."

And from FreeWill:
"I want to refer you to this incident from right at one year ago.That was when Iranian and Lebanese terrorists went on an early-morning rampage through Iraqi police stations and administrative offices, killing numerous officers, until they were finally caught at one station near Fallujah that made a stand. Despite being caught badly short on ammo, the Iraqi cops there fought back with everything at hand, and even when they ran out, did not flee. Fighting dragged on for an hour, and Coalition forces, only 10 minutes away, could hear the explosions and sent out a radio call to ask if the Iraqis needed reinforcement.

The Iraqi cops politely refused: Despite death and hellfire raining down around them, they didn't want reinforcements. This was their fight, and they wanted more ammo. They got their wish, and ultimately repelled the murderers, taking their RPGs as trophies.

(After the battle, the commander observed, somewhat prophetically in hindsight, that "there has to be a foreign agency that is financing this type of thing". You can read more about the battle in that article, or this one. Numerous related photos here.)"

I repeat, all honor to them. And screw Pelosi and Reid and company.(metaphorically, that is; you think I'm that crazy?)

Computer modeling and weather

I wrote once before on the subject of 'global warming', just touching on it. Last night & today is a fine demonstration as to why so much of the crisis-mongering means nothing.

There was a snow advisory for the area. We were supposed to get 1" to 3" here; south & west, up to 6". Every meteorologist in the area, and the National Weather Service, was warning of this. What did we get? Some wet flakes and some rain. Of the predicted 6", some areas of southwest & east central OK had some icy spots on bridges. That was it.

This mess was less than 24 hours into the future, and they blew it bigtime. And it's not the first time, and won't be the last. Snow, thunderstorms, tornados... with multiple Doppler radars scanning a mesocyclone, they can say there might be a tornado, and they're often wrong. And sometimes they still don't spot one until someone reports it on the ground.

Correction: it's 'State of Fear'. What, you want perfection?

When the models cannot reliably predict what's going to happen within 24-48 hours, why in the hell do people believe it when someone says "My computer models predict the earths temperature will rise X degrees in the next century", or whatever the time frame is they're using? But a lot of people do. And they're scared to death by it; so they demand Changes Be Made, and Now! Don't tell me what it will cost in how many ways, don't tell me there's nothing to replace what I want to get rid of, we have to DO SOMETHING!!!

I just finished reading 'Climate of Fear', Michael Crichton's newest book. Not a bad story. In some ways the most interesting things were the charts included. Real charts, showing the results of studies of temperatures, of sea levels, etc. Guess what they indicate? That the crisis-mongers are full of crap.

Oh, he also references exactly where the data came from. Including Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish researcher whose former colleagues at Greenpeace want to hang. You see, he wrote a book pointing out just how full of crap all the predictions of crisis are, and they can't stand it. Pretty good book. No, I didn't understand everything in it, I still got the gist of it.

If someone used data like most of the modeling studies to sell their services to predict the stock market, they'd be in jail for fraud. But since they're 'only' predicting the weather a century away and scaring hell out of people, they get away with it.

At this point I've been up for 21 hours, with about 6 hours sleep before that, and I'm beat. But I wanted to get this down now. No particular reason, just needed to do it. Now goodnight, all, I'm for a shower and bed.

(Sondra K, where are you when I need you? Heh, heh, heh.....)

We're paying how much for these schools?

The Geek linked to this, demonstrating the ignorance of so many schoolkids about our freedoms.

Is this really surprising to anyone? There was just a story about some Massachussetts schools with 'multi-cultural math' that had nothing to do with teaching math, and everything to do with making people 'feel good' about everyone. Math and science scores tend to suck, but kids are taught that they're not allowed to say anything that might hurt someones feelings(obviously, feelings are more important than actually KNOWING anything), and when they do teach the Constitution or Bill of Rights, it's through a pretty set of P.C. filters to teach it the say the squirrels decide that they 'ought' to be.

My daughter had a class in high school called 'street law' that was apparently some teaching about the Bill of Rights, and out of the entire class she was the only one who could accurately name more than one or two of them. (she also had an interesting discussion one day on the distance at which someone with a knife is a threat; the teacher was impressed and the other kids wanted to know 'where do you find out this stuff?') It was discouraging then, and it's apparently gotten worse.

Bah. I need to hit the range today.

Long list of quotes

FreedomSight has the link, lots of good stuff. There's one in particular that really ticks me off:

"If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees." -President Bill Clinton, August 12, 1993.

That quote demonstrates quite well why Kim du Toit said he never wants to read another news story about Clinton unless it contains the words "died suddenly".

First-aid

Lo, these years gone by, I used to play a lot in a history group call the Society for Creative Anachronism. It specializes in medieval history, including using weapons made of rattan in combat. Make your own armor, go to events, become a character, etc. Due to the normal incidence of people getting injured even without meeting in a ring to hit each other with sticks, there was always someone around with some first-aid training. The local guy who was pretty much in charge of this went by Andreas, and was a fully trained EMT- it was his real-life job.

One summer my then-wife and I went to a war between Ansteorra(Oklahoma & Texas) and the Middle Kingdom(Kansas, Missouri and somewhere else). The first thing that happened was we discovered the wife was allergic to chiggers; when you find this out in a campground that has just been mowed for the first time in a couple of months, you've got a problem. If you're not familiar with the little bastards, they are a tiny- as in sharp pencil point tiny) little red insect that gets into your skin to feed on your blood. They inject an anticoagulant like a mosquito, but the itch caused by a chigger is a mosquito times ten. Unless you're allergic, then it's times God knows what. Since this was a War, there were a number of medical types around, including at least one doctor, and they provided a tube of some ointment that helped some. I had no chigarid, and nobody had any nail polish I heard of, so that couldn't be done(chigarid is a liquid that you dab over the chigger, it dries and kills it and helps kill the itch; nail polish will kill the bug also, though it doesn't seem to help the itch much). So she used most of a tube of the stuff and spent a large part of the weekend fairly miserable.

My own need for assistance came from clumsiness. I found a loose end of a wire on a sword hilt, and drew my knife to seee if I could push it back into place. Oops, slip, and the point skated off and sliced through my left hand on the thumb side of the index finger knuckle. Ok, wipe the knife off and sheath it, sheath the sword. A friend named Brian was standing there while I did this, and inquired did I have a bandage? Yes, of Course, I have bandaids in the tent! So I hold my left hand out so as not to drip on the floor and dig out a bandaid. Then we decided I really should wash it off first, so we walked about a 1/4 mile to the faucet, and rinsed it off. Then I stood there dripping red as we had the thought that, you know, bandaids don't stick real well on wet skin. Looking about, we spotted Andreas, set up with all gear handy near the water. So we walked over. "Andreas , to you have any gauze?"

Andreas was a BIG guy, currently sitting on a stool swapping stories with people. "Do I have gauze, of course I have gauze." Pause. "What do you need gauze for?" I held up my hand and said, "I cut myself".

You know how even a small cut, if you have water on the area, winds up looking terrible? This wasn't too bad a cut, but it had been bleeding fairly well, and now my whole hand was wet, so I now had red literally dripping off.
I'd never seen his face change that way. It froze for a second, and he jumped up and said "Sit down!"

"It's not that bad, I just need to-"

"SIT DOWN!"

Ok, ok, I sat down, and he sat down with a whole kit and began cleaning. Happily it had missed, or maybe barely nicked the vein, so after proper cleaning he put a pressure bandage on it, fairly bulky because of the location. So far so good. By the time he was done he had calmed down, and everyone there who'd looked at my hand and went "!*&$*!" had calmed down. However...

The bandage made it look like I'd damned near cut my hand in two, and I spent the rest of the weekend explaining no, I hadn't slipped with an axe, or no, it hadn't happened in the battle. But dammit, if I'd been single I could have played it into some interesting times. "Yes, it WAS bloody awful. But you just can't stop in the middle of things, so when all was over I wobbled over to the healer, and now I can't use my hand very well. Can you get that lace loose yourself, darlin'?" "Why no, I can't; however, if you'll roll this on we'll see how I work one-handed", etc.

I thought about introducing this in fairy tale fashion, except this is all true. Including that I used to hit people with sticks. For entertainment, I mean. Not for- never mind.
(start of a southern fairy tale: "You're not gon' believe this")

"Mr. Zarqawi, you've got mail" 

"Take that, you foul Islamist nutcases!" 

Further thoughts on the Iraqi election

Ted Kennedy and John Kerry are assholes.

Now that that's out of the way, from what I'm hearing at least 70% turnout! Bloody wonderful! God (whichever name you use) bless them all for their courage. Will it be a government that we'll approve of in every detail? Probably not. That's not the point of this; them choosing their government is.

Various places/people have been running 'ink your finger in support' stuff, not a bad idea.

Did I mention John Kerry is a jackass?

The local 'peace' group had a march today, leading into 'Non-Violence Month' or something. The head of the group, Nathaniel Batchelder(sp? no, I'm not checking, I really don't care) was interviewed on the radio. Among his other gems
"We're marching to protest the terrible conditions in Iraq"
"We're protesting the policy, this war should never have happened"
"War is never the answer", etc. I think those about cover it. He's one of the people who informs you that violence NEVER solves anything, war is ALWAYS bad, 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed by us, etc.
After noting that you disagree with someone like this, you usually hear something along the lines of , "I disagree with him, but I do not doubt his sincerity, and I respect him for it." Well, I don't respect him. He's either idiot-level naive, or a fool if he means all he says. And he's dishonest; that 100,000 number has been ripped apart, along with the study it came from, but he keeps using it; got to have a big body count of innocents, you know. He's also part of the group that used to- may still for all I know- try to find trucks carrying nuclear weapon parts or materials and follow them. I don't know if he ever actually condemned the Soviet Union or the PRC, but we were definately sorry whatevers for having this stuff. So no, I don't respect him, and I don't respect his views. He reminds me of the people who say we shouldn't have gotten involved in WWI or WWII, etc. I have yet to hear an alternate solution to Nazis and Imperial Japan that makes sense, but they're sure it's there.

Day by Day says it pretty well, today and yesterday.

Sondra K has also been selling her butt. Er, sellin g the use of her bu... That's just not coming out right. Selling advertising on her butt! There you go! It has nothing to do with the election, but it's such a nice backside...

To all the troops, all the people at the sharp end, thank you. Many times over.

The Iraqi election, and other things

So the Iraqi people, by the millions, gave the finger to the bad guys/literally and figuratively/ and voted. Good for them. There's a lot left to do, but they've made a damn good start.

Instapundit linked to this at DU, wherein Steve Stirling, a fine sci-fi writer, does a bit of fisking(look for joatsimeon). Happily, he's not the only one there either horrified or pissed of by some of the other comments. I've always been a bit horrified by what I run across at Democratic Underground; people who insist that Bush is 'chimp' or a nazi, and that the elections can never be considered valid as long as our troops are there(and of course we shouldn't be there in any case) seem to either not be thinking with a full deck, or are so filled with hatred and disgust of this country that nothing we do can ever be good. I just flat cannot understand that attitude.
In any case, the Iraqis voted, the bad guys are scared and horrified, and both are to the good.

Spent the day helping some friends out at a small Midwinter Ren-Fair out at the fairgrounds. Considering it's the first one, and the weather sucked, not a bad turnout. Some good vendors and entertainers, and some nice people overall. Among the entertainers were the Bilge Pumps, nicest group of filthy pirates you'll ever meet. And among the vendors were Alain Viesca, who does prints of various kinds, mostly fairys. I now have the Tequila Fairy, which I will have to find a frame to hang her in. His websites a bit messed up right now, but you can still hit the gallery and see much of his work.
Another vendor was Storm Watch Jewelry. Mostly Celtic patterns, all designed and made by Ron Pace. Yeah, this is a commercial for these two, and I'm not getting paid(dammit) for mentioning them. I like their work.

Now it's misting outside, it's thrown in some periods of snow and sleet during the day, and my knees ache from walking around on concrete all day. See you later.

One face of the enemy

Instapundit had a link to this interview with the jackass academic who compared the people murdered on 9/11 to "little Eichmanns". Let's take a look, shall we?

Start with the picture at the top. Here's a 'progressive' for you: he looks like one of the idiots in the 60's who kidnapped 'evil capitalists' and murdered them after the ransom was paid, AK47 and all(and sunglasses, can't be real radical chic without the shades).

Let's take some quotes from the interview.
"Defining violence in terms of property—that basically nullifies the whole notion that life is sacred. People who want to elevate property to the same level of importance as life are so absurd as to be self-nullifying." Ok, so you can trash property that someone may have worked their ass of to get, and that doesn't count for anything. Check.

" The individuals who are perpetrators in one way or another, the “little Eichmanns”* in the background—the technocrats, bureaucrats, technicians—who make the matrix of atrocity that we are opposing possible are used to operating with impunity. If you’re designing thermonuclear weapons, you’re subject to neutralization, in the same sense that somebody who is engaged in homicide would be, in terms of their capacity to perpetrate that offense." Let's see, 'matrix of atrocity', 'little Eichmanns'(apparently a favorite phrase), and of course 'subject to neutralization'. Translation: if you're in any way part of the 'enemy' as we see it, we can kill you. Check.

" I’m actually a de-evolutionary. I don’t want other people in charge of the apparatus of the state as the outcome of a socially transformative process that replicates oppression. I want the state gone: transform the situation to U.S. out of North America. U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether." The U.S. is evil, so are all the other developed countries but less so, so the U.S. has to go. Check.

There's a fair bit of discussion connected to the post at Insty, and I'll have to agree with what Glenn says: it doesn't do any good to say that clowns like this don't represent the left when they aren't actually repudiated. As has been pointed out, when Mikey Moore is in the kings seat the the Democrat convention, when Barbara Boxer (hypocrite-CA) is sending letters of thanks and praise to MoveOn & company, and they're just accepted, then the are indeed the face of that political party. And it's a real ugly face. Whether they actually mean it or not- and some of them damn well do mean it- it's a face of the enemy.

Will the next one to pass Ted Kennedy slap him?

I just heard some excerpts of his current "we can't win, the administration LIED, we've got to run" speech. It brings up some thoughts, starting with

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS MAN?

I don't care how 'passionately' he feels about his party, etc., to come out with this crap just before the Iraqi elections is, is... I can't think of the words. 'Stupid', 'careless', 'irresponsible' just don't cut it. To throw this mass of lies and exaggerations and flat crap out, ESPECIALLY NOW, is virtually criminal.

General stuff

Over at Powerline, evidence that Barbara Boxer is not only a hypocrite, she is a real loon.

From Lileks on the coming Iraqi election:
"So there’s an election in Iraq soon, I understand. I haven’t been writing about this here because I’m just taking the long, long view, and haven’t the time or inclination to argue with people who think “No WMD!” is the argument equivalent of a spreading a full house on the green felt table. It may seem so, but unfortunately we’re playing chess. However the election goes will be one thing; how it’s reported is another. The thing to watch is the position of the Damning But, the old DB. The DB will probably bob up in the first or second paragraphs of most dispatches. “The election went as planned in 95 percent of the country, but violence marred polling in the disputed Sunny D Triangle, where insurgents opposed to Tropicana Juice fired automatic weapons into an juice concentrate factory.” That’s one spin. “The election, long anticipated as a flashpoint for insurgent activity, went off with few delays. Despite sporadic gunfire marred the overall mood of success in several provinces, observers said that the process was ‘smooth as a Sade groove,’ adding that they were annoyed Sade had simply faded away instead of letting her career end with a tasteful layout in Playboy.” See? No DB there. We’ll see"

Ah, the weather weenies. The chance of scattered showers ending by noon turned into snow and slushy roads this morning. I'd have better luck checking Granny's fuzzy caterpiller for weather forecasting.

Ann Coulter made a comment in her last book that Bush should nominate for a position someone who really doesn't care if they get it or not; then they'd be free to speak back plainly to some of the pompous windbags involved. Her personal suggestion for a reply to Ted Kennedy? "Well, Senator, we'll drive off that bridge when we get to it." Not only funny, it just might push Splash over the edge. Barbara Boxer? My thought would be, "Senator, coming from a two-faced hypocrite like you, being called a liar doesn't mean much". The possibilities are endless.