Tonight's Music

Lunasa and Anxo Lorenzo at the 13rd William Kennedy Piping Festival (Armagh - Northern Ireland).

The View doesn't improve

From The New York Post:

Roseanne Barr has emerged as the top contender to replace Rosie O'Donnell next year on "The View," sources say.

A rep for Barr says she has not been approached.

"It's almost like that rumor that spread last month about how she was going to be on 'Desperate Housewives,' " said Barr's spokesperson.

"She's a piece of work, she's a character, she says what's on her mind and she's funny," said a source with knowledge of ABC's sudden and desperate search to find a new co-host to replace O'Donnell who quit the show last week.

"They're missing strong personalities on that show, and that's what they're going to need if they want to keep it going," an ABC staffer close to the situation told the Post.

During an appearance on "Larry King" last week, Roseanne danced around the question of joining the "The View."

"I'm not looking for the job," she said at one point - and joking at another, "Well, I want $10 million, like Rosie."

But she never said she wouldn't take it if offered.

So ABC figures that the formula for success is to get a fat obnoxious ignorant screeching loudmouth to engage in high decibel bloviation. It would be hard to argue with them seeing how well the ratings did when Rosie O'Donnell joined the cast.

Maybe its that the soccer moms who make up the majority of the shows audience like seeing an ugly and stupid woman like Rosie because it makes them feel better about themselves.

Thompson continues to lead the straw poll

I just checked the GOP Straw Poll results again and Fred Thompson is in first place with over 50% of the vote. Julie Annie is running a distant second with less than 16%. No one else gets into the double digits.

I know that this isn't a scientific survey, but I think it gives a pretty good indication of where Republicans want the party to go.

I hope Fred is paying attention.

Join the 'net's FUN Ecosystem

Anybody out there who still bothers to pay attention to TTLB might have noticed that the service is having some problems of late. It can't seem to figure out how to count links with any consistency or accuracy so that I went from a Playful Primate to a Large Mammal to a Mortal Human back to an Insignificant Microbe in the space of a week.

This is not a complaint as the service is free it would be hard for it not to be worth every penny we pay for it. However it is amusing to watch the ratings go up and down like a merry-go-round. They even, occasionally, intersect with reality.

This is all good fun and nobody is being harmed, but if you want to belong to a truly superior ecosystem. One which not only gives you a place to belong where we use the honor system and let you choose your own ranking, but gives you links from all the other blogs, then you are invited to join The Hillbilly Ecosystem.

If this sounds good to you pull up a rocking chair, grab a mason jar of moonshine, prop your shotgun on the porch rail and set a spell.

We'll be starting up our summer Hillbilly Hog Roasts next month where we'll choose such important things as the Official Hillbilly Car and Official Hillbilly Vacation Spot and I don't know what all, but it will be a hoot.

So come join us.

Today in history

Americn history from The Scotsman:

George Washington gave his inaugural address today in 1789 when he became the first President of the fledgling United States of America. The address was delivered at New York's Federal Hall which was the USA's capitol building at that time.

Tony Snow back at work!

From The Washington Post:

Don't get him wrong. Tony Snow appreciates all the cards and flowers and prayers. He's likely to choke up talking about the outpouring of support he has received since learning that his cancer has returned. But after weeks out of the office, Snow says, "you get buggy."

So the White House press secretary plans to return to duty today, raring to get back to representing a besieged president and jousting with journalists. With investigators bearing down, various appointees under fire and the president in a veto showdown with Congress, there will be no shortage of hard questions. And Snow can't wait.

"I'm feeling great and I'm in good shape," he said in an interview Friday. "I'm eager to get back at it. I actually don't feel any different from when I left."

The return of Snow's colon cancer a month ago sidelined President Bush's best-known champion and triggered a wave of public sympathy for the smooth-talking former television and radio show host. Snow has spent the past four weeks recovering from surgery and planning his treatment, staying out of public sight until his surprise appearance at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner this month.

He looked thinner and more drawn that night but delivered an impromptu speech filled with the upbeat energy that has characterized his public response to misfortune. Now, he said, he plans to return to work full time while receiving four months of biweekly chemotherapy treatments, beginning on Friday. Although the cancer has spread, including a tumor attached to his liver, Snow said his doctors told him the chemotherapy will be "less toxic" than the type he endured in 2005, when he continued working at Fox News six days a week.

It will be good to see Tony back at work. It will also be good to see the moonbats at DailyKos and Democrat Underground who had already written his obituary falling to the ground in paroxysms of foaming madness at the sight of his return.

You have to deeply admire his courage and determination. He gave up a lucrative gig as host of a popular nationally syndicated talk radio show and newspaper columnist to take the pay cut and massive work load of being the president's press secretary because he believed in president Bush and believed that he had a contribution to make.

And he was making a contribution. Nothing about his presence behind the podium blunted the frothing hatred of the White House press corps for Mr. Bush, but the fact that Mr. Snow was orders of magnatude more intelligent than they were often brought back memories of Oliver North's testamony before congress in the Iran-Contra hearings.

Again it is very good to see him back at work and let's all keep him in our prayers.

I've sawed that board off three times and it's still too short

From The New York Times:

PORTLAND, Me., April 23 — When Maine became the first state in years to enact a law intended to provide universal health care, one of its goals was to cover the estimated 130,000 residents who had no insurance by 2009, starting with 31,000 of them by the end of 2005, the program’s first year.

So far, it has not come close to that goal. Only 18,800 people have signed up for the state’s coverage and many of them already had insurance.

[. . .]

Governor Baldacci said in an interview that when the Legislature enacted the Dirigo Health Reform Act in 2003, it gave him less money and more compromises than he had wanted. He said his administration had now learned more about what works and what does not.

His new proposals include requiring people to have insurance and employers to offer it and penalizing them financially if they do not; making the subsidized insurance plan, DirigoChoice, more affordable for small businesses; creating a separate insurance pool for high-risk patients; instituting more Medicaid cost controls; and having the state administer DirigoChoice, which is now sold by Anthem Blue Cross.

“We’ve got a reform package that takes Dirigo to the next level,” Mr. Baldacci said. “It takes the training wheels off.”

The program failed, as it was guaranteed to fail just like all other top down "solutions" to problems are doomed to fail.

So like a good politician the governor is trying to get the failed program more money and throw more of the coercive power of the state behind it.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is how a free and prosperous nation gets turned into a poverty stricken socialist hell. This is a hill worth dying on in terms of political opposition. Once the government is in a position to be the source of an essential service like health care the opportunity to reduce its size and scope without a bloody revolution is virtually eliminated.

This is why the political left is go gung-ho for it.

Fred Thompson is winning this big time

Tonight's Music

Another video of

Knowing the enemy

One of the contributors to the group blog Knowledge is Power has had an epiphany:

As I study to fight this local land use issue, I’ve opened up a can o’ worms the size of the Dakotas. I’m beginning to see how Islamofascism [Islamosupremacism] is simply an opportunistic infection lying dormant in the dirt and arising to attack Western Civilization as it is weakened by the Actual Enemy: socialism and all its illegitimi.

Yes, Yes, Yes!

The simple truth is that Osama bin Laden and Kim Jong-il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are little more than venereal warts on the arse of the world. They are pipsqueaks who could be crushed utterly by a nation with the military and economic power of the United States. That is if the United States had the will to act against them using the necessary force applied with the necessary ruthlessness.

That is where the modern left come in. Left-liberalism has obtained such purchase in American thinking that the nation lacks the will to take the needed action. Not all the people lack the desire to do what must be done, but enough do to make a consistent consensus impossible to maintain. It doesn't help that those who control the mainstream media and entertainment industry, the academy and one of the two major political parties, that is those who have the most influence in shaping public opinion, are firmly under the control of the political left.

A nation which lacks the will to engage and defeat its enemies is doomed. Just as a person with an immune system which has been compromised by HIV will sicken and die from exposure to common microorganisms which a healthy person's body would destroy before they ever gained a foothold a nation compromised by political correctness, multiculturalism, moral relativism and the other poisons of the left will fall prey to forces much weaker in military and economic terms.

The left saps a nation's confidence by trashing its history, degrading its culture and mocking its religion. The left insists that all cultures are equally valid, thus placing the nation which eradicated smallpox on the same level as societies which go into collective hysterics over vanishing penises. Although very few Americans other than college faculty, State Department employees and the editorial offices of the New York Times really believe this down deep it is able to create enough doubt to paralyze the nation at critical times.

Keeping the left out of power is the number one task for those who do not wish to see America slide into the abyss. This is why I regard fighting against amnesty for illegal immigrants as most important task facing the part of America which retains its sanity and does not desire national suicide.

Twenty million new voters, fourteen million of which will vote Democrat, will tip the balance too far to the left for any conceivable Republican strategy to overcome. From that point America becomes a carbon copy of the European Union and the last part of the West willing to fight for its survival, the last outpost of Christendom, falls the to the modern day Mongol Horde.

The fisherman goes where the fish are

From The Chicago Tribune:

Imagine federal agents bursting into Water Tower Place or the Oakbrook Center mall in a crime sting. Imagine them holding up photos of white male suspects and comparing them with the white men present in the store. Imagine them kicking open the doors of the ladies room with their guns drawn.

If you were an innocent shopper or bystander in the mall, wouldn't you be outraged?

This is essentially what witnesses reported after a sting last week by federal agents at a strip mall in the heart of Chicago's Mexican neighborhood known as La Villita, or Little Village.

The authorities were searching for 22 people linked to a $2 million fake-ID operation. The suspects were charged with mail fraud, conspiracy and other crimes; two were charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

To be sure, the authorities should go after such criminals. But to do so in such a public way essentially criminalized the innocent shoppers and families in the strip mall, which includes a thrift store, a pharmacy and a health clinic.

The ill-timed and poorly-executed raid further fueled the raging debate over immigration. As Congress considers whether to give legal status—temporary or permanent—to the 12 million undocumented workers living in the U.S., immigrant-rights groups will take to the streets of American cities on Tuesday to call attention to the need for immigration reform.

Anybody who walks by this strip mall knows that in the large parking lot and nearby streets one can easily buy a fake green card, Social Security number or driver's license. Illegal vendors shout "Micas! Micas!" the Spanish slang for green cards. It has been that way for more than a decade.

Do you suppose that if drug dealers stood about openly in Oakbrook Center or Water Tower Place openly selling heroin and rock cocaine that police might just conduct a drug sweep there? And if you say that the merchants and customers at those upscale Chicago locations would never tolerate pushers hawking their wares openly right under their noses you begin to understand why the comparison is ridiculous.

If criminals moved into middle or upper class areas of any American city and began operating out in the open and attracting more ciminals the middle or upper class citizens (mo matter their race) would burn up the phones to the police the mayor and the city counsel demanding that something be done and right damn now!

In the Mexican community criminals conducting business of fraud and identity theft operate openly with the support of even the legal residents and citizens. How many complaints do you suppose that the Chicago Police or Immigration and Customs Enforcement received from merchants and shoppers at La Villita about the criminals standing around shouting "Micas, Micas"? And in the unlikely event that someone in the Mexican community did cooperate with law enforcement what do you suppose the reaction of the other members of the community would be if that knowledge became public?

In the world of white America a soccer mom who sees a drug deal going down on the street corner near her kid's elementary school and drops a dime to the local constabulary gets to be the guest of honor at the next PTA luncheon and the factory worker who knocks down a purse snatcher and sits on him until the cops get there finds his money is no good at the local watering hole that night after work.

Now do you get why the raid on La Villita was justified and a raid on Water Tower Place wouldn't be?

Tonight's Post Modern Music Appreciation Club

Cradle of Filth released a CD/DVD combo titled Eleven Burial Masses.

Other CD titles of this veteran black metal group include Vestal Masturbation, Principal of Evil Made Flesh and their latest release, Thornography, about which the band says:

"Just as the gravel-lined, turd-stained streets of urban England gave heavy metal to the world back in the late ‘60s, so that small country with the big voice continues to be the place where the world’s finest dark metal band rest their weary, alcohol-ravaged heads after another sonic killing spree. Love them, hate them or both, Cradle Of Filth is back again to fondle you while slitting your throat. Thornography has arrived."

Cradle of Filth was influenced in the early 1990s by the black metal hero Varg Vikernes whose spree of murder and church burning inspired a generation of mentally ill teenagers with what might be charitably called musical talent to slather on corpse paint and start banging out paeans to everyone (or thing) from Satan to the old Norse gods.

Here is a video from Cradle of Filth. Beware this video contains unrealistic and badly done depictions of murder and cannibalism.

Buyer's remorse in Warsaw

From The Brussels Journal:

A quote from Lawrence Auster at his blog, 26 April 2007

Poland belongs to a transnational body that exercises real authority over member states. This body, the European Union, forbids discrimination against homosexuals. Poland thinks it is in accord with the law to protect homosexuals from discrimination, even as it seeks to ban the promotion of homosexuality! Probably the Poles think that anti-homosexual discrimination consists of things like outright persecution, incitement of hatred and violence, and so forth. But the EU evidently interprets anti-homosexual discrimination as any statement or policy that suggests that homosexuality is in any way less good for human beings than heterosexuality. Where the EU thinking ultimately ends up, of course, is a law like the Sexual Orientation Regulations in Britain, which make it unlawful even for a Catholic adoption agency not to adopt children to same-sex couples. I don't think the Poles realize yet what they have gotten into. They have subjected their country to an egalitarian juggernaut that will not stop until it has eliminated every conceivable type of anti-minority discrimination from every square inch - excuse me, every square centimeter – of the cosmos.

It is difficult to understand why the Poles would throw away the independence that they had regained after decades of slavery under the Soviet lash so quickly by joining the manifestly undemocratic European Union.

Don't laugh, its could come to this

From Cox & Forkum

Tonight's Music

Buille in performance on BBC's Blackstaff Sessions.

If you are curious about the correct way to pronounce Buille try this. You have just spent the last three days drunk on the cheapest raw mezcal you can imagine. And you've been eating crappy Mexican food, some of which was tainted with e coli bacteria from human feces.

You wake up on the morning of the fourth day sick as a dog and with a raging hangover which could heat and light Chicago for a month if it could only be converted into electrical current and you roll over in the sweat-soaked vermin-infested Tijuana hotel bed to find Rosie O'Donnell laying next to you naked and with a look of contentment on her face.

Think of the sound the projectile vomit would make as it left your mouth to splatter on the filthy carpet. That's what the word "Buille" sounds like when pronounced correctly.

Going gentle into that good night

Mark Steyn writes an advanced post mortem for Scotland:

For example, consider the following headline from the Scotsman the other week: "Teaching jobs in doubt as pensioners set to outnumber pupils by 2009."

This was a story by Peter MacMahon, the paper's "Scottish Government Editor", and it begins thus: "Scotland's demographic time bomb will explode in three years, when the number of pensioners north of the Border overtakes the number of children in school, the Executive has been warned."

Seems straightforward enough: the country's demographic death spiral is accelerating faster than expected. And, as far as the Scotsman is concerned, the alarming thing about this development is that it could put cushy state teaching jobs "in doubt".

For crying out loud, man, get a grip. It puts every job "in doubt". It puts the continued existence of your country "in doubt". And it means the Scottish National Party is going through the motions: nobody needs a Scottish nation if there are no more Scottish nationals. See you, Jimmeh? Not for much longer.

Indeed, the remarkable feature of contemporary Scottish nationalism is that it has achieved all the features of a failed nation state without achieving the status of a nation state. "Teaching jobs" are the least of it. And doubtless the unions will see to it that, even when there is only one wee scrawny bairn left in the whole of Scotland, platoons of teachers will still be manning abandoned elementary schools across the kingdom. The jobs-for-life public-sector employee stood on the burning deck whence all the boys had fled.

With half the annual births it had in the 1950s and a population on the brink of falling below five million, Scotland has become a minor member of the axis of extinction: Germany, Japan, Russia - once great nations now recording net population loss. In its general approach to economic reality, not to mention the physical health of its population, Scotland is closer to the Russian end of the picture than to the German-Japanese end.

How did this happen? Almost everywhere you go on the planet, the great institutions of this world were built by Scots, from the Canadian Pacific Railway to the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank. Where is the spirit of Mel McGibson in Braveheart?

"Aye, fight and you may die. Run and you'll live…at least for a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade all the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take…OUR FREEDOM!"

But it is all more complicated than that. The modern Scot is prepared to fight - or, at any rate, strike - but only for the right to die in his bed on a government pension. In fact, one of the small signs of the country's woes is the byline of Peter MacMahon's Scotsman story. It is apparently possible to make a career in Scottish journalism as a "Scottish Government Editor", which in itself tells you something about the Scottish state.

What can be done to save Scotland? The Scottish Executive would like Scotland to have control of its own immigration, as the province of Quebec does. Quebec's collapsed birth rate has also cost it its dreams of nationhood and, like Scotland, it looked to immigration to save it, since when it has attracted a lively range of jihadist cells for whom Montreal offers the advantage of being a terrorist-indulgent neighbourhood only a stone's throw - or a bomb's - from the Great Satan's border. As the estate agents say, it is location, location, location. Glasgow has no such unique selling point.

Where are the immigrants going to come from? The birth rate is falling everywhere but the pre-modern world, ie, Africa and large swaths of Islam. Assuming that a talented Indian wished to leave his own land, which has the fastest-growing middle class in the world, why would he eschew America or Australia in order to go to Aberdeen and spend his working life supporting the elderly unsackable hordes of superfluous primary-school teachers?

The Muslims do their bit to keep the classrooms full. Abu Hamza, one notes, has seven children, all British subjects, although none inclined to go north, young man. But, in a world running out of emigrants, that is where any policy based on immigration leads: a future in which Scotland achieves nationhood as North Yemen.

Scotland is the canary in the United Kingdom's coal mine, but, given that three of the four component parts of the realm are mired in the same bloated, dead-end dependency culture, it would be foolish for the English to assume they won't get stuck with the bill for a Celtic fringe decaying into a long-term geriatric hospice. I doubt any Scot with an eye to electoral viability would want to run on anything that smacked of American conservatism, but surely they could at least learn something from Ireland, where, you will recall, Braveheart was filmed. They could have shot it in Scotland, but the Scots are too busy shooting themselves.

The other day Esko Aho - oh, come on, you remember, the former Finnish prime minister - presented a report to the European Commission that, in essence, read like a three-year-old Steyn column with an expenses budget: successful companies are abandoning the EU because it is becoming an irrelevant, sclerotic, statist backwater, etc.

Europe, says Mr Aho, is "living a moderately comfortable life on slowly declining capital. This society, averse to risk and reluctant to change, is in itself alarming, but it is also unsustainable in the face of rising competition from other parts of the world. For many citizens without work or in less-favoured regions, even the claim to comfort is untrue."

That is the point. On the present course, everywhere will wind up like Scotland. Mrs Thatcher liked to say that "the facts of life are conservative". Having declined to endorse that proposition in the Eighties, the Scots will be learning it far more painfully in the years ahead.

Watching my ancestral homeland commit suicide in slow motion is very painful. Scotland could be saved, as could the rest of Europe, but doing so would would require the European people to wean themselves from living government subsidized lives.

I frankly don't see that happening. It took over 2500 years but Homer's vision of the land of the lotus eaters has finally come true. However it wasn't a narcotic plant which has put a race of people to sleep. It is a government check.

Fun with Thompsons

Notice the big round clip that holds 50 bullets? Nobody needs that kind of firepower! [snicker]

Glock 'n Roll!

Fits had this posted on Shooting the Messenger. It is a drop in conversion which converts the Glock (in this case a model 19) to select fire.

If the firearms laws in this country weren't screwed to the nines I would have one of these.

Let the overreactions begin

From The Chicago Sun-Times:

One violent, profanity-laced English essay later and Allen Lee's future with the Marine Corps appears to be over.

Because of pending criminal charges stemming from his essay, Lee's recruiter told him Friday evening that the Marine Corps has discharged him from his contract, said Sgt. Luis R. Agostini, spokesman for the Marine Corps Recruiting Station Chicago.

''Basically he is no longer an applicant to become a Marine,'' Agostini said.

Police Thursday released portions of an essay used to charge a Cary-Grove High School student with disorderly conduct, leaving several experts puzzled at an arrest based on such schoolwork.

Asked to write about whatever he wanted in a creative writing class, would-be Marine and honors student Lee, 18, described a violent dream in which he shot people and then "had sex with the dead bodies.''

But then he immediately dismissed the idea as a mere joke, writing, "not really, but it would be funny if I did.''

A second disorderly count accuses Lee of alarming first-year teacher Nora Capron by writing that "as a teacher, don't be surprised on [sic] inspiring the first CG shooting,'' an apparent reference to Cary-Grove High.

Lee said Thursday he was "completely shocked'' to be arrested Tuesday for his essay, especially because written instructions told kids not to "censor'' what they wrote.

"In creative writing, you're told to exaggerate,'' said Lee. "It was supposed to be just junk. . . .

"There definitely is violent content, but they're taking it out of context and making it something it isn't.''

"I have no intention of harming anyone,'' said Lee, who has been transferred to an alternative school setting. "I miss school.''

A kid grows up in modern America being fed a steady diet of violent and sexually supercharged movies, television shows, music and video games and then you turn him lose on a creative writing assignment and tell him to be outrageous and what do you expect him to write?

Before Virginia Tech this would have hardly raised an eyebrow, but now it becomes a criminal case and threatens to destroy this kid's future. Educrats displayed a similar inability to distinguish babies from bathwater after the Columbine Massacre when all across the country any young man who had ever come to school in a trench coat was asked to explore the world of homeschooling or distance learning.

I also can't let this tidbit pass without comment:

Bernardine Dohrn, director of Northwestern University's Children and Family Justice Center, laughed when she heard the charge.

"You might want to talk to him, talk to his parents, but the criminal justice system seems to be the last thing you'd want,'' said Dohrn, a former Weatherman leader who lived for years as a fugitive.

For those of you who aren't as old as I am Bernardine Dohrn was a real-life bomb planting, murdering terrorist back in the 1970s. That she gets to sit in an office and be "director of Northwestern University's Children and Family Justice Center" rather than sit on death row and wait for her appointment with a lethal injection is another giant 500 lb. gorilla of a clue that the educational system is seriously fraked up.

A kid whose only crime is regurgitating some of the imagery which he has been steeped in his entire life of reading Frank Miller comic books (sorry, graphic novels) and watching Tales From the Crypt and whose life goal is to serve his country in the Marines gets shafted while an honest-to-goodness terrorist murderess gets tenure and a six-figure salary.

The inmates really are running the asylum.

These kids today. . .

The very best humor is the kind that you could mistake for truth because it hits so close to home. The People's Cube excels at this:

A lesson in instant gratification went bad when a New York high-school freshman's remark about assassinating President Bush earned him a visit from the Secret Service, prompting a loud outcry from the educational community. "I don't know where this President is taking our country if a student can no longer openly express his idealistic aspirations and make a difference," says English teacher who oversaw the publication of the student magazine that printed the boy's statement. The comment about shooting the president to become "a national hero" appeared under a section titled, "How long does it take to live?" in which students answered questions of how they would spend their last 24 hours alive before attempting to assassinate George Bush.

"It was a normal training exercise in instant gratification," the school principal told us in his office at the Educational Complex in the Chelsea area of Manhattan. "It is part of the curriculum aimed at purging the students' minds of all traces of the bourgeois concept of delayed rewards, and teaching them about the importance of instant gratification. Let us not forget that the epitome of instant gratification is the act of martyrdom by a Palestinian suicide bomber who only needs to push a button once to get a free one-way ticket to Paradise. As responsible educators, we don't want to put any wrong ideas in our student's heads about the possibility of them surviving such a heroic act."

"Isn't killing Bush a good thing?" argue Irving's schoolmates in their friend's defense. "Isn't Bush a capitalist criminal that stole oil from the Middle East and unleashed global warming on Iraq, leaving the impoverished locals to blow themselves up from heat and exhaustion? Well, who would we rather believe - you or our professionally trained teachers?"

The consensus among the students and the faculty is that the "controversial" kill-Bush remark was "not a big deal" and that the simple-minded 14-year-old honestly and correctly reiterated the meaning of what they had learned in class: (1) this country is not worth living in or dying for, (2) Bush is the worst president, which is why (3) he must be killed, and (4) killing anyone is OK if it serves the Greater Good™.

Go read the rest.

The tinfoil hat of the 21st century

From The Daily Mail:

Before knocking on Sarah Dacre's door, I take the precaution of checking my mobile phone. It's switched off, as she has requested.

"Last time someone came to visit," she warns, "I started feeling awfully nauseous. It turned out he had a picture phone with him and had left it switched on. A picture phone!"

She pauses, looking genuinely horrified. Apparently, this type of mobile automatically sends signals to a local base station every nine minutes - "No wonder I felt so sick."

We sit down in the living-room of the airy, north London house that, for the past two years, has been Sarah's refuge from modern life. Save for the absence of a television, it looks ordinary enough.

But beneath the coats of magnolia paint, she points out, the walls are lined with a special paper that contains a layer of tin-foil; and upstairs, the windows are hung with a fine, silvery gauze.

These aren't idiosyncratic decorating decisions, though. All these silvery layers are here for a purpose: to keep the 21st century at bay.

Sarah, 51, is one of a growing band of people who claim to be experiencing extreme - and incapacitating - sensitivity to electrical appliances, as well as to certain frequencies of electromagnetic waves.

"Wi-Fi, or wireless broadband networks, seem to be the worst thing," she says.

"Closely followed by mobile phones - particularly if they're being used in an enclosed space - the base stations of cordless telephones and mobile phone masts.

"I have to restrict the amount of time I spend on the computer or watching television, and make sure I don't have too many household appliances on at once, because that sets me off as well."


It goes without saying that her very real symptoms are psychological. There are some people who simply find life too challenging and need to invent some kind of barrier to keep the world at bay.


In primitive times people like this either got over it and lived or they starved to death. The modern West with its great wealth (the gifts of technology and capitalism) and its tolerance of those who are "different" (the gift of its Judaeo-Christian heritage) can afford to indulge such folk.

Tonight's Music

This is the band Flook. Flook was began as a side project by Michael McGoldrick of Capercaillie.

You see Brian Finnegan on the pennywhistle, Sarah Allen (who is currently taking time off to have a baby) on the accordian, Ed Boyd on guitar and John Joe Kelly who is thought by many to be the best bodhran player in the world.

Some people have too much time on their hands

From The Plain Dealer:

Damon Wells and his home appear no longer safe.

The .40-caliber handgun that Wells carries legally for defense may not be enough to protect the 25-year-old man and his home in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood.

Sunday night, a day after Wells shot and killed a 15-year-old who threatened him with a gun on his porch, Wells' home was under siege. Police sent a car to guard it.

Now the doors on his house are boarded up; the windows, too.

No one appears to be home.

Outside Wells' home Tuesday night, a crowd of about 50 people gathered to mourn Arthur "Ace Boogie" Buford, whom Wells killed during the attempted robbery.

Vigil organizers called for young men to turn away from violence and from turning on each other. They called on those present not to be poisoned by rap music that promotes violence and not to support music companies that produce that music.

Near Wells' home, a utility pole has become a makeshift shrine where sympathizers are leaving stuffed animals, notes and balloons.

Most of those gathering there are teenagers, and they are angry, shocked and sad. They say that no matter what police and court officials say, Buford never did anything wrong.

They don't care that Cleveland prosecutors said the shooting appears to have happened in self-defense. They want justice.

If you trespass on someone's property and menace them with a gun and they shoot you in self defense then JUSTICE HAS BEEN DONE!

Now leave the man alone and go get jobs.

Cretins.

Hat Tip: War on Guns

Chicago Only Ones take it up a notch

An elderly first-generation Chicago resident was recently paid a visit by an Illinois State Police trooper. After asking to come inside the man's home, the trooper asked if the man owned a gun - to which he replied yes. The trooper then directed the individual to surrender the firearm. The man complied with the officer's demand and the trooper left with the gun. And the story gets better...

The gun in question was purchased legally by the man in the 1970s shortly after he became a U.S. citizen. When Chicago's infamous gun registration scheme went into effect in the early 1980s, the man registered the firearm as per the requirement. However, over the years, the fellow apparently forgot to re-register the firearm, and forgot to renew his Illinois FOID Card.

So...what does this all mean?

In the last edition of The Illinois Shooter, we reported on the activities of a shady taskforce known as the Chicago Anti Gun Enforcement (CAGE) unit. This elite squad, operated jointly by the Illinois State Police, the Chicago Police Department, and the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, supposedly exists to identify illegal gunrunners. However, information gained by the ISRA makes it clear that the CAGE unit is targeting law-abiding citizens, not criminal gunrunners.

Thanks to a ruling by a liberal federal judge, the CAGE unit now has the name of every single person in the United States who, since 1992, lawfully purchased more than one handgun in the period of a week. The CAGE unit also has all the makes, models and serial numbers of those guns. In essence, the Chicago Police Department is now registering guns and gun owners nationwide.

The ISRA has also learned that the CAGE unit has compiled a list of families where more than one person in that family holds a FOID card. Acting on that information, the CAGE unit is now contacting gun shops where those families have shopped, and is illegally registering all guns purchased by those families.

Now, it appears that the CAGE unit is scrubbing Chicago's gun registration list against the list of FOID card holders. Indications are that folks who have let their registrations and FOIDs lapse will have their guns confiscated. We have to wonder how long it will be until state troopers show up at the doors to confiscate the guns of non-Chicago residents who have let their FOIDs expire.

Say it with me. Registration leads to confiscation. Repeat until its burned into your brain.

Hat Tip: Knowledge is Power

Survey Says!

Who Won SC Democratic Presidential Debate? U.S. Senator Barack Obama emerged a clear winner in tonight's debate among 8 Democratic candidates for President of the United States, according to a SurveyUSA poll of 403 South Carolina debate watchers. 31% of debate watchers say Obama won. Obama, the only black candidate, was the overwhelming favorite of black debate watchers. U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton finished in 2nd place, picked as the winner by 24% of viewers. Clinton, the only female candidate, did better among women than among men. Former U.S. Senator John Edwards finished 3rd, picked as the winner by 14%. Obama did three times better than Clinton and twice as well as Edwards among South Carolina's Independents. Obama and Clinton tied among Democrats. Edwards and Obama tied among Republicans. Clinton won among white viewers. 60% of debate viewers were white. 36% of debate viewers were black.

The Jackass Party might want to take a good look at this before they coronate Mrs. Bill Clinton.

Questioning

After looking at all the press reports about mass killings and how they are made possible by lax gun laws I do admit that I have a question for the gun lobby.

Do people really need revolvers that use clips that hold over 10 bullets?

The flying frauds

From Newsday.com:

WASHINGTON -- A flock of small jets took flight from Washington Thursday, each carrying a Democratic presidential candidate to South Carolina for the first debate of the political season.

For Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, it was wheels up shortly after they voted in favor of legislation requiring that U.S. troops begin returning home from Iraq in the fall.

No one jet pooled, no one took commercial flights to save money, fuel or emissions.

OK, we'll go through this one more time for those of you who attended public school. They're HYPOCRITES. This is what hypocrites do.

Any questions?

HIM we're going to shoot?

From The New York Times:

BAGHDAD, April 26 — The American military has charged a top commander at its main detention center here with nine violations of military law, including “aiding the enemy,” a rare and serious accusation that could carry a death sentence.

According to a military statement released Thursday, the officer, Lt. Col. William H. Steele, provided aid to the enemy between Oct. 1, 2005, and Oct. 31, 2006, “by providing an unmonitored cellular phone to detainees” at Camp Cropper, an expansive prison near Baghdad International Airport that held Saddam Hussein before he was hanged.

Colonel Steele, who oversaw one of several compounds at Camp Cropper as commander of the 451st Military Police Detachment, was also charged with several counts of illegally storing and marking classified information; failure to obey an order; possession of pornographic videos; dereliction of duty regarding government funds; and conduct unbecoming of an officer — for fraternizing with the daughter of a detainee since 2005, and for maintaining “an inappropriate relationship” with an interpreter in 2005 and 2006.

There were no further details given to explain the circumstances of the accusations.

I do not know if the charges against Colonel Steele are true or not, but I want to ask a question.

Let's assume for the sake of discussion that this man did everything which he is accused of doing. Would what he did have been one millionth as harmful to the US war effort as what the Democrats in congress did on Thursday in voting to withhold funds for the troops unless the administration agrees in advance to surrender?

We may put this Colonel Steele up against a wall and shoot him (or at the very least dishonorably discharge and jail him) but Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are going to continue to walk around free and keep cashing their government paychecks?

Where is the justice in that? If the Democrats can do what they did yesterday and suffer no consequence for it then the legal concept of treason, of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, has no more meaning.

Putin rattles his saber

From The Washington Post:

MOSCOW, April 26 -- President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that he was suspending Russia's obligations under the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, ratcheting up a tense standoff with the NATO alliance over U.S. plans to build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe.

The CFE Treaty dates from the last days of the Cold War and limits the deployment of conventional arms, including tanks and other heavy weapons, on either side of the old Iron Curtain. Putin linked his decision, which he said could lead to full withdrawal from the treaty, to the U.S. missile plan.

NATO countries are "building up military bases on our borders and, more than that, they are also planning to station elements of anti-missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic," said Putin, delivering his annual state of the nation address to both houses of parliament, the cabinet and regional leaders. "In this connection, I consider it expedient to declare a moratorium on Russia's implementation of this treaty."

Western governments have contended for years that Russia has not fully complied with the treaty and amendments to it, pointing to force levels it keeps in the Chechnya region and the continuing presence of its troops in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Moldova. The missile defense plan has raised disputes over the treaty to a new level of intensity.

The Kremlin has expressed deep hostility to the American system despite repeated assurances by the Bush administration that the planned 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and radar station in the Czech Republic would pose no threat to Russia.

I am tempted to think that Putin is simply politically tone deaf. That he just doesn't realize that nations that slaved for decades under the iron bootheel of the USSR have the deep fear that the Russians will come back and abuse them some more. For nations like Poland and the Czech Republic as well as Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia NATO membership is a guarantee of their continued existence as free and independent nations.

The Russians, however, seem incapable of seeing things that way. There is a streak of paranoia and xenophobia in the soul of the Russian nation which dates back to the time they suffered under the Tarter Yoke (and was not helped Hitler's invasion of the USSR either).

There is also the fear, natural to any oppressor, that a people which were once brutalized will seek vengeance when the opportunity presents itself. Putin, as a former KGB officer, knows all too well what life was like for the Soviet Union's formerly captive peoples.

However as reasonable as Russia's leaders might think they are being all men need to realize that they live in the world as it is, not as they might prefer it to be. Or as the maggot said to the king of France, "we live not as we wish to, but as we can". Putin and whatever puppet he installs to be his front-man while he runs the country from the shadows need to realize that the Soviet Union was the focus of evil in the world during all the years of its existence and that all the peoples who were enslaved by it or menaced by it have every right to take steps to ensure that it will never come back in some mutated form to harm them again.

Putin should just be grateful that Poland and Hungary and the other former Warsaw Pact nations aren't building nuclear weapons and targeting them at Russian cities.

Tonight's Music

Tejedor - Salton de Teixois. Filmed live in Oviedo, with special guest Niall Vallely.

Tonight's Post Modern Music Appreciation Club

Tonight we feature the latest CD by Peruvian terrorist black death metal band Goat Semen.

The CD entitled En Vivo Lima Hell was recorded live at an underground nightclub whose location must remain undisclosed (out of fear of a visit from government death squads).

For all of you who rode the short bus to school

Go here for a lesson in why it was a mistake for you to vote Democrat this past November.

Self Explanatory

From our friends at The Peoples Cube.

Someone notify the authorities!

From The Financial Times:

Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on “carbon credit” projects that yield few if any environmental benefits.

A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.

Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.

The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a “green gold rush”, which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go “carbon neutral”, offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming.

The burgeoning regulated market for carbon credits is expected to more than double in size to about $68.2bn by 2010, with the unregulated voluntary sector rising to $4bn in the same period.

The FT investigation found:

■ Widespread instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.

■ Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.

■ Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.

■ A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.

■ Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.

I am shocked, SHOCKED I say!

This seems a good time to announce my new business venture. Hillbilly White Trash is offering carbon offsets. I have planted two cypress trees in my yard and am getting ready to plant two apple trees. Anyone interested may purchase one of these carbon offsets for the paltry price of $10,000.00 each.

Interested parties may contact me via email to arrange for payment.

I am prepared to offer photographic proof of each tree's existence.

Want a good laugh?

Go here.

Winners and losers

From The Washington Post:

The House last night brushed aside weeks of angry White House rhetoric and veto threats to narrowly approve a $124 billion war spending bill that requires troop withdrawal from Iraq to begin by Oct. 1, with a goal of ending U.S. combat operations there by next March.

The Senate is expected to follow the House's 218 to 208 vote with final passage today, completing work on the rarest of bills: legislation to try to end a major war as fighting still rages. Democrats hope to send the measure to the White House on Monday, almost exactly four years after President Bush declared an end to major combat in a speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. That would be a particularly pungent political anniversary for Bush to deliver only the second veto of his presidency.

I have said before that I take this as evidence that the troop surge must be working. The Democrat Party has become so invested in their opposition to this war that they cannot survive as a majority party if the US wins. All that it will take is a reasonably free, reasonably stable, reasonably free Iraq which does not support terrorism and which is exporting a steady stream of oil to help keep world prices down to cause a massive shift in American public opinion.

The advancing of the primaries by some of the largest states has forced the serious candidates of both parties to begin to campaign in earnest earlier than they ever have before. This means that the public is beginning to pay attention earlier than ever before. A victory for the US now would be the best possible thing for Republicans and the worst possible thing for Democrats.

A US victory in Iraq would also be the best possible thing for Iraq and for all the decent people of the Middle East who do not support the Global Jihad and simply wish to live their lives in peace and security.

A US victory in Iraq would be the best possible thing for American workers and investors because the decrease in the world price of oil due to the increased supply and the lessening of fears of regional instability would lead to a general lowering of prices across the economy. This holds true across the entire planet. Even working people in Europe and China would have better lives if America won in Iraq.

Another group who would profit from an American victory in Iraq is all the people who will not be killed or maimed in future terrorist attacks which will not occur if militant Muslims lose hope in their cause. History teaches us that militant Islam will go dormant if it is defeated on the battlefield and its adherents see no hope of reversing their loses. Islamists have staked all their hopes for the future of the Jihad on their ability to drive the Americans out of Iraq in humiliation. If this fails it is almost a certainty that the Islamists will return their attention to their slow demographic conquest of Europe leave the resumption of the shooting war with the West until the second half of the 21st century.

Of the groups which will profit from an American defeat in Iraq the first is al Qaeda. Al Qaeda could claim that it drove the Great Satan off of sacred Islamic soil. It would regain its place as the premier terrorist organization in the great jihad to rid the world of the freedom to be anything but a fanatical Muslim. It would once again be awash in recruits and funds and be able to plan and execute those attacks on American soil which it has been dreaming of doing.

Another beneficairy of American defeat would be Iran. Iraq has a majority Shiite population. Without the US there to stop it Iraq would be drawn into an Iranian led Shiite block along with Syria (and, before its over Lebanon). A Shiite block which would be nuclear armed and at odds with the rest of the Middle East on sectarian grounds. This is a recipe for $6.00 per gallon gas and economic recession in the developed world and depression everywhere else.

A nation which would be especially hard hit in this scenario would be Red China. Dramatically higher energy prices would threaten to stall or even reverse their explosive economic growth. This could very well spur them to an attempt to completely annex the Spratley Islands, triggering a regional war which could draw in the United States.

Another winner to emerge from an American defeat in Iraq would be the oil companies whose profits would go through the roof if petroleum prices were to massively increase. This would ingite a boom in oil exploration and could even wind up overcoming American environmentalist's opposition to increased domestic oil drilling. We could wind up with offshore oil rigs off the coast of Florida and large scale drilling in Alaska. This would be an obvious windfall for companies which provide services for the oil industry, like Halliburton, as well. Too bad Dick Cheney doesn't own any Halliburton stock, he would clean up.

Of course the most visible group (to Americans) who would profit from American defeat in Iraq is the Democrat Party in the US. An American loss in Iraq would put Barak Obama or Hillary Clinton in the White House and give the Democrats a fillibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

Look at who wins if America loses. Osama bin Laden, Nancy Pelosi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hillary Clinton, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, Harry Reid. This association, which amounts to a practical alliance even if no one likes to say it out loud, doesn't seem to trouble Pelosi, Clinton and Reid.

Does it bother you?

Virginia Tech's Professor of Hate

Steve Sailer looks under the rug at Virginia Tech:

Ever since South Korean immigrant Cho Seung-hui gunned down 32 people at Virginia Tech, there has been much comment that the university should have realized just from his two hate-filled and inept plays that the senior English major was a dangerous creep who needed to be taken away.

For a playwrighting class, Cho penned Mr. Brownstone and Richard McBeef (which, despite the Macbethian title, is a Hamlet-knock off about a young hero's lethal conflict with the new stepfather who murdered his real father).

Richard McBeef includes such sterling dialogue as:

"I hate him. Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die. Kill Dick."

Many have asked: "How could the English Department not recognize the horrific implications of these works?"

No one who wonders that, however, is familiar with the poetic oeuvre of one of Cho's own teachers, Virginia Tech's Distinguished Professor of English and Black Studies, Nikki Giovanni (for her website, click here).

Among the most celebrated figures of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and recipient of 21 honorary degrees, Giovanni has published poems strikingly similar to Cho's plays in both vileness and incompetence. For example:

The True Import of Present Dialog, Black vs. Negro, by Nikki Giovanni

Ni**er
Can you kill
Can you kill
Can a ni**er kill
Can a ni**er kill a honkie
Can a ni**er kill the Man
Can you kill ni**er
Huh? Ni**er can you
kill
Do you know how to draw blood
Can you poison
Can you stab-a-Jew
Can you kill huh? Ni**er
Can you kill
Can you run a protestant down with your
‘68 El Dorado
(that’s all they’re good for anyway)
Can you kill
Can you piss on a blond head
Can you cut it off
Can you kill
A ni**er can die
We ain’t got to prove we can die
We got to prove we can kill
[More]

Ironically, the author of these lines was asked to deliver the closing remarks at Virginia Tech's convocation memorializing the 32 slaughtered by Cho. For some reason, Giovanni didn't read The True Import.

The left, especially the academic left, has tons of people like Giovanni and the usual reaction in the academic community to anyone who shines the light of day on them is profound offense and an absolute devotion to academic freedom.

But I wonder what the academic community's reaction to the discovery that a tenured professor had been ghost writing speeches for David Duke would be.

Of course to ask the question is to answer it. There is no academic freedom to take positions which the left disagrees with.

Slimy Dick on Hillary's experience

Dick Morris is like a Harvard MBA, often wrong but never in doubt. However he is always at his best when shining the light onto Mrs. Bill Clinton:

Polls suggest that the leading attribute attracting voters to Hillary’s presidential candidacy is her “experience,” a virtue which contrasts, presumably, with the lack of it in Senator Barack Obama, her chief rival. But a close examination of her record as first lady and as New York Senator suggests that her experience is largely in the avoidance of death by scandal. Were it to be captured in a television series, it would certainly not rise to the level of “Commander In Chief” and probably not even to that of “West Wing.” It would find its televised metaphor in the reality series "Survivor."

Consider what her experience has been. She burst forth on the national stage with two tasks in her husband’s administration: The selection of the nation’s first female Attorney General and the design and adoption of a comprehensive program of health care reform. Her efforts to designate an Attorney General hamstrung the new Administration for months as two nominees, in succession, had to withdraw their names from consideration. Finally, at the eleventh hour, she urged her husband to appoint Florida’s Janet Reno, a selection Bill Clinton would come to describe as “my worst mistake.” In the bargain, she suggested the appointment of Lani Guanier as head of the civil rights division, a job she was shortly forced to relinquish when her radical views became known, another embarrassment for the new Administration. Her other selections for the Justice Department, the White House staff and the Treasury were her three law partners: Web Hubbell, Vince Foster, and William Kennedy, appointments which culminated in one imprisonment, one suicide, and one forced resignation.

Her other assignment, health care reform, collapsed in such a debacle that it cost her party control of both houses of Congress, a fate from which it took twelve years to recover.

[. . .]

Her experience continued when her race for the Senate and its aftermath became, in turn, mired in scandal. The pardon of the FALN terrorists to get Latino support in New York, that of the New Square Hassidim to get Hillary Jewish support, and the clemency shown toward Hillary’s brothers’ clients to get them financial support caused her ratings to plunge to their lowest level in March of 2001 as she took her Senate seat. The theft of White House gifts, almost $200,000 of which had to be returned, did nothing to endear her to the electorate.

Since then, Hillary has done nothing of note in the Senate except to vote for the Iraq War, a position she has since disavowed, and to win the applause of her colleagues for not being partisan and obstinate. Her main efforts have been directed at raising massive sums of money for herself and her colleagues and making a lot writing and selling her memoirs. Her efforts on behalf of New York after 9-11 have been exposed as largely derivative of those of her colleague, the more effective Chuck Schumer.

She has passed no important legislation, except for twenty bills renaming post offices and courthouses and congratulating Alexander Hamilton, Shirley Chisolm, Harriet Tubman, the American Republic, and the Syracuse men’s and women’s Lacrosse team on their respective accomplishments.

Is this the experience upon which her candidacy is based? Did I leave anything out?

Mrs. Bill Clinton was a disaster as First Lady. Do we really want to give her a chance to be President?

Tonight's Music

Corvus Corax - Live in Mexico City - March 29, 2007

Is the case against the "Haditha Marines" tanking?

Our good friend Beth over at Blue Star Chronicles has posted an important story which seems to indicate that the government's prosecution of the "Haditha Marines" is a "Duke Rape Case"-style miscarriage of justice. Here is a bit of it:

In a nutshell, the case exploded when an intelligence officer dropped a bombshell on prosecutors during a pre-hearing interview when he revealed the existence of exculpatory evidence that appears to have been obtained by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and withheld from the prosecutors.

[. . .]

Confronted by the massive mounds of evidence that Marine Corps sources tell NewsMax proves conclusively that the cases against the Haditha Marines are baseless, the prosecutors were forced to postpone the Article 31 against Lt. Col. Chessani and two of the enlisted men in an attempt to regroup.

If this turns out to be true I hope that the Navy's Nifongs are dishonorably discharged and disbarred. If the rumors that this entire prosecution was cooked up because the Navy was being arm-twisted by certain left-liberal Democrat congressmen I hope that they are exposed and impeached.

Actually I HOPE that they are tried for treason and shot by firing squad, but since that ain't going to happen I'll settle for them being drummed out of office in disgrace.

The Sow says goodbye

Roger Friedman, writing on FoxNews.com has this to say about Rosie O'Donnell's departure from "The View".

We told you on Jan. 10: Rosie O’Donnell would leave “The View.”

Her announcement this morning has nothing to do with contract negotiations breaking down. ABC did not end Rosie’s "View." Rosie ended it.

And don’t believe the spin that ABC was mad at her for comments made at the Matrix luncheon on Monday. Rosie was finished with "The View" over the Christmas holiday when Barbara Walters failed to defend her against Donald Trump.

In fact, it was worse than that: When O’Donnell discovered that Walters had bad-mouthed her to Trump, she decided to leave the show. It was that simple.

ABC, in fact, wanted O’Donnell to stay with the show. They offered her, as she said on the air, a three-year contract. She refused to sign. Rosie said she’d stay for a year, and this is what you don’t know: She wanted $10 million to do so.

ABC did not turn down the money. They turned down the one-year part. They wanted stability. They would have paid her something like $30 million to sign for three years. That’s how much they wanted her. She was the future of "The View."

I don't know if this is true, but it is believable. An ego the size of Rosie's will not accept anything less than fawning adoration and slavish sycophancy from those around her. When Baba Wawa made the mistake of letting slip a tiny little bit of what she feels in down deep in her heart about the detestable Sow - to The Sow's mortal enemy, Donald Trump - she guaranteed that The Sow would not continue to work with her.

There are rumors that Rosie was dumped because she embarrassed the network with her spouting of 9/11 conspiracy theories and her foul mouthed performance at the Matrix Awards (along with her general demeanor on he show where she screams, shouts down any contrary opinion and generally behaves like a spoiled three-year-old on crystal meth). However this is unlikely.

Ratings in the show's target demographic of women between 18 and 49 who have the IQ's of pencil erasers have never been higher and if some advertisers were put off by her others would have been standing in line to take their place.

I believe that The Sow will start her own syndicated daytime talk show.

Handgun Stopping Power for Dummies*

Ever since the Virginia Tech shootings I have been looking for information on what kind of 9mm ammunition the killer used. A Google keyword search on "Cho, ammunition" reveals over 700,000 hits. Every one of them mentioned that Cho bought "ammunition clips" on eBay.

They are called MAGAZINES not CLIPS!!!!!!!

Then I found this piece on MSNBC which looked more promising:

NEW YORK - We're getting a better picture of just how heavily armed Seung-Hui Cho was — a further sign of how much he had done in advance of the shootings to prepare himself for his rampage.

Virginia State Police say they're nearly done with their on-scene investigation at Virginia Tech. But inside the classroom building, investigators say they found a surprising number of handgun magazines, or clips — 17. Some, officials say, were high-capacity magazines that hold 33 rounds. That means, investigators say, that Cho may have fired at least 200 times during his killing spree on Monday.

In the photos Cho sent to NBC, he showed some of his ammunition — hollow-point rounds, purchased, officials say, in the weeks before the shootings. Law enforcement officials say hollow-points are generally considered more lethal.

Joseph Vince, a retired ATF agent, agrees.

"It's not something that you would need for home protection, because what you are trying to do is eliminate an immediate threat," Vince says. "The idea of killing is what this ammunition portrays to me." . . .

Well at least he uses the word magazines and mentions hollow-point ammunition. But I don't have a clue how much faith to put into it because of all the bulls**t about hollow-points not being needed for home protection.

For the benefit of my readers who are not gun people I will explain:

Full metal jacket ammunition (that is non-hollow-point ammunition) has poor stopping power. That means that you have to shoot someone a whole bunch of times to make them stop trying to kill you. The more times someone is shot the more likely they are to die from their wounds.

You see a person can have a fatal wound, but not be immediately incapacitated. You can have your heart blown right out of your body and still remain on your feet and able to fight for around a minute. A minute is not long to live, but it is plenty of time to shoot someone or cut their throat or bash their brains out with a baseball bat.

This is why knowledgeable people who carry handguns for self defense do not care about the killing power of a bullet. It matters not if the ammunition you shoot the bad guy with kills him deader than a doorpost if he first has a chance to gut you like a fish with the butcher knife he picked up from your kitchen counter.

What knowledgeable people look for in ammunition is "stopping power". Stopping power is a measure of how quickly bullet can render someone unable to continue fighting. You want the person who is trying to kill you to drop like a stone with one solid hit on his torso. You do not care if he makes a complete recovery after spending some time in the hospital. All that matters is that he became combat ineffective as quickly as possible.

Of course you can never count on a one shot stop so you practice shooting rapidly, as rapidly as you can and still keep the shots clustered near the center of the target. This is why police are trained to keep shooting until the suspect goes down.

But if you are using a well designed hollow-point round like the Federal HST it will take many fewer hits to make the criminal go down than it will if you are using full metal jacket.

Another property of full metal jacket (FMJ) rounds is that while they have poor stopping power they have excellent penetration. Penetration means how much stuff the bullet can pass through before it loses so much energy that it comes to rest. A FMJ bullet fired from a 9mm handgun will often be able to penetrate a human body and emerge with enough energy to inflict a serious injury on another person.

A 9mm FMJ fired inside your home at an armed home invader can miss the crook and pass through the wall of your house, travel to your neighbor's house and penetrate his wall with enough energy left to kill his 6 month-old baby sleeping peacefully in its crib. That is unless you live in a brick or stone house. A 9mm FMJ can pass through several interior walls and doors. This means that the bullet that misses the bad guy in your apartment can leave your apartment and kill your neighbor in the next apartment.

Hollow-point ammunition penetrates less because it expands as it penetrates. This is also why it has better stopping power. As the round penetrates the hollow cavity in the tip of the bullet opens up causing the bullet to expand. The energy to make the metal of the bullet deform is taken from its forward momentum. As the bullet expands its surface area grows larger and it makes contact with more of the target body's tissue creating a larger wound channel and imparting more "shock" to the target's nervous system. Also blood loss is increased and rapid loss of blood pressure contributes to the incapacitation of the target.

In conclusion hollow-point ammunition is ideally suited for home defense (and any other kind of self defense) because its improved stopping power takes your attacker out of the fight with fewer shots fired (increasing his chances of survival) and its reduced penetration decreases the hazard to innocent bystanders.

Bottom Line: If you want to know anything about guns the last person to ask is an ATF agent.

*The dummies are the media and the cops.

A for effort, but. . .

From The Washington Post:

Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said yesterday that he is considering an executive order to make sure that gun sellers have more information about the mental health of potential buyers, a move that would have kept Seung Hui Cho from purchasing the handguns he used to kill 32 people at Virginia Tech last week.

A court had found Cho to be dangerously mentally ill, but that information was not available in the computer systems used by the outlets that sold Cho the guns. Kaine's proposal would ensure that such mental health information be in the database.

"I think there's a way to tighten this and to get more data onto the system," Kaine (D) said. If that data had been available at the gun stores, Cho, who killed himself after the rampage April 16, would have been barred by federal law from buying the weapons.

Even lawmakers who have traditionally been reluctant to restrict gun ownership said that providing additional information would help keep guns out of the hands of the dangerously mentally ill.

"The murderer down at Virginia Tech never should have been able to purchase a gun," said Del. Mark L. Cole (R-Fredericksburg). "Someone who's declared a threat to themselves or others should not be able to purchase a firearm."

I have no problem with doing a better job of reporting on those who have been found to be dangerously mentally ill this would almost certainly not have stopped the Virginia Tech massacre.

Think about it. This was a college campus. Do you not think that Cho did not know, or could not have found out by hanging out at any bar frequented by V-Tech students for half an hour, where to buy ecstasy, meth or pot? Do you not suppose that drug dealers would either have a gun that they would be willing to sell or would know someone who did?

It was easier for Cho to get his guns from a gun store but he could have gotten them elsewhere and that is why gun control will never work.

Stating the obvious

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON, April 24 — President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney aggressively challenged the motives of Congressional Democrats on Tuesday, as the House and Senate prepared to consider a war spending bill that would order troops to be withdrawn from Iraq beginning later this year.

In separate appearances that served as a prelude to an inevitable veto showdown, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney accused Democrats of political opportunism in forging ahead with a $124 billion measure that sets a timetable for leaving Iraq.

Will Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney also inform us that the sky is blue and that water is wet?

Of blessed memory

The Jewish student organization Chabad on Campus has established a Librescu Family Condolence Page in honor of slain professor Liviu Librescu. Librescu was the 74 year-old Holocaust survivor who gave his life to delay the Virginal Tech shooter and give his students time to flee the gunman.

Those wishing to pay their respects can go to the page and leave a message which will be forwarded to the Librescu family.

Tonight's Music

Niall Valley plays concertina on the BBC's Highland Sessions. Also Donald Shaw on the piano.

Good News!

From The Brussels Journal:

A quote from LifeSite, 23 April 2007

German homeschooler Melissa Busekros finally returned home early this morning on her 16th birthday after having been forcibly separated from her family by the government 3 months ago. Back in February, Melissa was seized from her family home in a dramatic police raid for the crime of home schooling – illegal since 1937 by edict of Nazi Chancellor Adolf Hitler – and placed with a foster home in a location unknown to her family.

The International Human Rights Group (IHRG), which has doggedly championed the rights of Busekros and other German home schooling families, reports Melissa penned a note to her foster family and left in the dead of night, arriving on her doorstep in Erlangen at 3AM to the astonishment of her family.

According to IHRG, German law gives Melissa Busekros far more rights after turning 16, meaning she now has far more clout in determining her custody in German law. So, as soon as she turned 16, Melissa – the same girl whom a state official of the Jugendamt (Youth Welfare Office) described as happy with state custody – headed out the door for her family.

There is a danger the Jugendamt may order police forces to seize Melissa again. However, confident of her new legal rights, Melissa is prepared to refuse to leave home on the advice of her attorney, Dr. Hildebrandt.

I love the way that the neo-Nazi goons just had to issue the press release about how happy Melissa was to be in state custody.

It reminds me of a movie I saw some years ago. A man was arrested by the Gestapo. After being held for several days it became apparent to them that he was not the man they were looking for. They told him that he was being released, but he had to sign a form testifying that he had not been mistreated while in state custody. The man told them that he couldn't sign the form because they had broken all his fingers.

Spiking the truth

From the Media Research Center:

ABC News polling chief Gary Langer, in a posting buried on ABCNews.com, revealed that a poll taken Sunday discovered that when "asked the primary cause of gun violence, far more Americans blamed the effects of popular culture (40 percent) or the way parents raise their children (35 percent) than the availability of guns (18 percent)." ABC's World News on Monday devoted nearly two minutes to results of ABC's survey, but didn't get to that finding which shows the public does not share the media assumption that gun availability is to blame for the murders at Virginia Tech.

Is anyone shocked that the mainstream media would seek to suppress information which does not fit their template?

In a town called New Castle they should just settle things over a pint

From The Chicago Tribune:

NEW CASTLE, Ind. -- Two staff members were injured in a disturbance Tuesday at a medium-security prison that began when inmates from Arizona and Indiana clashed, authorities said.

Indiana State Police Sgt. Rod Russell said the situation was being controlled and stabilized and that authorities had accounted for all staff members. The perimeter of the prison was secured and no inmates had escaped, although some were still out of their cells, Russell said.

He said the situation "had improved 100 percent" compared with when it started about 2 p.m.

Tuesday's incident occured a month after Arizona and Indiana contracted to house up to 1,260 Arizona inmates at the prison about 45 miles east of Indianapolis. About 630 Arizona prisoners had been transferred within the past two months. That is in addition to the 1,000 Indiana inmates housed there as of mid-March.

Russell said the disturbance involved a problem between inmates from the two states but was not sure of the details.

I would hope that the situation can be resolved with no more people injured or killed.

REID'S BLOODY HANDS

From an editorial in The New York Post:

April 24, 2007 -- Fresh from his declaration that "this war [in Iraq] is lost," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid is moving quickly to hasten America's unilateral surrender.

And to cast the Middle East into murderous chaos.

Reid yesterday promised that the Democratic-controlled Congress will within days pass legislation requiring U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq over the six months starting Oct. 1.

Never mind that such legislation:

* Likely wouldn't pass either house of Congress . . .

* . . . and, even if it did pass, certainly wouldn't survive a veto.

So the point must be not to make policy, but to send a message: That Harry Reid's Democratic Party is against war in the Middle East, maybe?

Or that war in the Middle East is OK - so long as no Americans are fighting?

Or, maybe it's all about politics?

To be sure, Reid won't risk calling for an immediate pullout. He cautioned his party's bug-out-now wing to be patient, despite "the restlessness" of those who "voted for change in November [and] anticipated dramatic and immediate results in January."

The problem, said Reid, is that "George W. Bush is still the commander-in-chief - and this is his war."

And there's the real problem: From the start, Reid and the Democrats have seen the war in Iraq as a partisan opportunity.

They refuse to present a unified front to the rest of the world - especially to America's enemies - because, in their pinched view, to do so would be to weaken their own prospects for retaking the White House in 2008.

Words have consequences. Although Reid's surrender bill will never become law his words give aid and comfort to the enemy. They also encourage the enemy to step up their attacks on American forces in order to bolster Reid's position.

Let me state that again. The terrorists in Iraq know that Harry Reid is their ally and they will murder American soldiers and Marines in order to provide assistance to their ally and help him achieve his political goals. And Harry Reid will accept their aid (damning his soul to the deepest pit of hell) gladly.

If this doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the modern Democrat Party then you are beyond help.

Doesn't that face just make you want to heave?

Baba Wawa is learning that is learning that the downside of being a whore is that you have to climb into bed with people who turn your stomach, from The New York Post:

April 24, 2007 -- ROSIE O'Donnell's blue humor made faces red when she emceed the Matrix Awards in front of 2,000 feting New York's most accomplished women in media at the Waldorf-Astoria Grand Ballroom yesterday.

The loose-lipped lesbian dropped the F-bomb as Barbara Walters lowered her head on the dais and covered her face with her hand. O'Donnell concluded a rant about Donald Trump by grabbing her crotch and shouting, "Eat me!"

O'Donnell also said she was sad when Trump called her "disgusting" and "fat" because, "it was always my dream to give an old, bald billionaire a boner."

The annual luncheon of N.Y. Women in Communications - which honored Cindy Adams, Meredith Vieira, Joan Didion, Susan Lyne, Arianna Huffington and Lisa Caputo, among others - featured as presenters News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, Joy Behar, Nora Ephron, Martha Stewart and Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Also on hand were 17 sweet-faced high school girls who won scholarships to pursue their dreams of careers in media.

I call Walters a whore because she is the executive producer and part owner of The View and is the one who made the decision to hire Rosie O'Donnell for the ratings that the vulgar disgusting moonbat entertainer could bring to the show.

And the plan succeeded ratings for The View have never been higher and no matter how embarrassed Barbara becomes ABC will never allow her to dump such a moneymaker.