Michael Moore has a messege for the Democrat Party:Let the resounding defeat of Senator Joe Lieberman send a cold shiver down the spine of every Democrat who supported the invasion of Iraq and who continues to support, in any way, this senseless, immoral, unwinnable war. Make no mistake about it: We, the majority of Americans, want this war ended — and we will actively work to defeat each and every one of you who does not support an immediate end to this war.
Nearly every Democrat set to run for president in 2008 is responsible for this war. They voted for it or they supported it. That single, stupid decision has cost us 2,592 American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives. Lieberman and Company made a colossal mistake — and we are going to make sure they pay for that mistake. Payback time started last night.
I realize that there are those like Kerry and Edwards who have now changed their position and are strongly anti-war. Perhaps that switch will be enough for some to support them. For others, like me — while I’m glad they’ve seen the light — their massive error in judgment is, sadly, proof that they are not fit for the job. They sided with Bush, and for that, they may never enter the promised land.
To Hillary, our first best hope for a woman to become president, I cannot for the life of me figure out why you continue to support Bush and his war. I’m sure someone has advised you that a woman can’t be elected unless she proves she can kick ass just as crazy as any man. I’m here to tell you that you will never make it through the Democratic primaries unless you start now by strongly opposing the war. It is your only hope. You and Joe have been Bush’s biggest Democratic supporters of the war. Last night’s voter revolt took place just a few miles from your home in Chappaqua. Did you hear the noise? Can you read the writing on the wall?
To every Democratic Senator and Congressman who continues to back Bush’s War, allow me to inform you that your days in elective office are now numbered. Myself and tens of millions of citizens are going to work hard to actively remove you from any position of power.
If you don’t believe us, give Joe a call.
Please God, let the Democrats listen to crazy Michael Moore. Please cause a cloud of moronic stupidity to descend upon their minds so that they think that following Michael Moore's advice (or giving in to his threats) is the only way to regain their power this November. Please Lord make them such brain-dead idiots that they will look to a certifiably insane hypocritical lying sack of weasel feces like Michael Moore for leadership.
Oh, Michael what, exactly, is in this "promised land" of yours? An endless buffet table? Limitless blowjobs from teenaged interns? An infinite number of astoundingly stupid groupies willing to pay money to see your mockumentaries?
Michael Moore is a dumbass. He is apparently too stupid to realize that nearly half of the voters in Connecticut are registered independents who could not vote in the Democrat primary. Nearly half of the Democrats who turned out to vote cast their ballots for Lieberman. Add the independents who favor Lieberman (a majority of them according to polls) and the Republicans who will cross over and Lamont will go down to a McGovern style defeat this November - sort of like the one they will suffer in 2008.
Hat Tip: Blue Star Chronicles
Thursday, August 10, 2006
The Nutjob Left Speaks
The lion still has a few teeth
From The Washington Post:British authorities said today they had disrupted a "major terrorist plot" to blow up passenger flights between the United Kingdom and the United States with liquid explosives, prompting a full-scale security clampdown at U.S. and British airports and a cascade of delays in trans-Atlantic flights.
London's Deputy Police Commissioner, Paul Stephenson, said 21 people had been arrested in London and in Birmingham, England, after a months-long investigation into what he said was a plan for "mass murder on an unimaginable scale." Peter Clarke, chief of the London police department's anti-terrorism branch, said the investigation reached a "critical point" last night, requiring immediate disruption of the plot, the arrests and the imposition of heightened security measures.
British Home Secretary John Reid said the conspirators planned "a wave of attacks" on aircraft in flight. "Had this plot been carried out, the loss of life to innocent civilians would have been on an unprecedented scale," he said.
U.S. officials raised the "threat level" for air transport to red, the highest alert. The terrorists had intended to target flights to Washington, New York and California operated by American Airlines, Continental Airlines and United Airlines, a U.S. official said.
[Snip]
British authorities said the threat involved terrorists who aimed to smuggle liquid explosive material aboard airplanes in hand baggage, including timers and detonators that could be assembled in flight. In July 2005, terrorists attacked London's subway and bus system with bombs made of acetone and peroxide mixed in plastic containers. Those attacks claimed 52 lives and injured hundreds of others.
Chertoff said the attackers planned to carry explosive material and detonation components on planes "disguised as beverages, electronic devices and other common objects."
Good for the British!
Let's look at a few details. First of all the Brits were able to crack this because they used "sneak and peek" warrants (this detail is from Fox News, not the WaPo). These warrants allow law enforcement to enter and search then leave without informing the suspect. The ACLU hates these types of search warrants and would deny them to US law enforcement.
Next, remember all the incidents over the past few years where groups of young Arab/Middle Eastern looking men have caused fear on airliners by acting in a suspicious manner? How they would cluster in groups whispering in Arabic or Farsi and casting furtive glances at fellow passengers? When questioned on the ground by law enforcement they would say that they were offended by their fellow passengers looking at them like they were potential terrorists and just having a bit of fun by scaring them. When the men would be checked out they would have clean backgrounds without connections to any known terrorists and would always have legitimate reasons to be flying.
In my opinion these have been recognizance missions by terrorists new to the Jihad who could not possibly have been identified by Western law enforcement. The purpose of these recognizance operations was to gain intelligence on what in-air security measures would be taken on an airliner in flight. The data from these probes was, in my opinion, an integral part of the planning for this latest terrorist plot. The terrorists learned that a group of Arab men can do just about anything on an airplane and the only thing that will happen is that their fellow passengers will stare at them in fear and some of the women will cry. Upon landing they will be questioned by the police or FBI, but these terrorists never planned to land, at least not in one piece.
Also the London subway bombing last year was carried out with liquid explosives indicating that operation was, at least in part, a trial run for this plot. Any even halfway competent organization would want to text a technology that they had never worked with before.
Another lesson from this is that even a failed attack can cause large scale disruption to Free World air travel. The delays and inconvenience associated with air travel will now be increased for the foreseeable future.
What I am hearing right now on Fox News is that the terrorists were native British Muslims. If true I will lay odds that they are the children or grandchildren of immigrants from some Islamic nation. This incident can be added to the long list of European nations failing to assimilate Muslim immigrants down to the second and third generation.
Not only failure to assimilate Muslim immigrants but failure to even blunt the hatred that devout Muslims feel for any culture that is even one tenth of a degree more free, more tolerant or less ignorant their own.
The government of the United Kingdom is almost certainly too far gone into political correctness to do what must be done, that is treat Islam in the same manner as Nazism was treated by the post WWII West German government. But that is what needs to be done and not just in England but all over the Free World.
The Green Acres Lyrics
Shallowness too deep for tears
Theodore Dalrymple is the best writer for City Journal, the best magazine in the world. He turns his attention to the large number of unwed pregnancies in Great Britan:
It has long been an official pretense in Britain that we have so many teenage pregnancies—the most by far in Europe—because British girls don’t know where babies come from. The answer to the problem, therefore, is yet more sex education: ever more children putting ever more condoms onto ever more bananas at ever-earlier ages.
[Snip]
A report from the charity, the Joseph Rowntree Trust, throws doubt on the official line. Its researchers interviewed 41 teenage mothers within a year of giving birth, some as young as 13, who reported wanting to have a baby. They also interviewed ten young fathers.
Although the sample was far from representative, the authors gave the careful reader reason to suppose that the phenomenon of young girls wanting to have babies is more common than often supposed, as Kay Hymowitz also found among American underclass girls (“The Teen Mommy Track,” Autumn 1994). Rather than face up to the disapproval of their parents (or, more likely, parent), and that of the rest of society, teenage mothers prefer to claim that their pregnancies were accidental.
As the report makes clear, and as I have found from clinical experience, the girls regarded pregnancy and the resultant baby as an answer to existential problems. The young women came from broken, violent, chaotic, and loveless homes; they hated school because it seemed pointless; their only employment prospects were in the lowest-paid and most monotonous jobs.
A baby, then, answered all their prayers. It was a constant focus of interest and an object upon which they could lavish their hitherto thwarted desire to love and be loved. They also found that, thanks to welfare, their financial position actually improved after having given birth, provided only that the child’s father did not live with the mother or work to earn his living—whereupon, of course, all state benefits stopped, casting the young family into poverty.
The young mothers also reported that having babies fulfilled a desire for “independence,” a word used without irony in the report. This language is evidence that the British character has changed utterly in the last 60 years. Where once even the poorest people would have thought it a disgrace and humiliation to depend on public welfare, such handouts of taxpayer money by the state now constitute the very conception of independence for a considerable proportion of the population. Indeed, welfare recipients almost all call the day on which they receive their dole “the day when I get paid.”
In not a single case—at least, as far as one can deduce from the report—did a mother wonder whether she was reproducing the conditions from which she was, for understandable reasons, fleeing. The report does, however, quote from an article that appeared in the liberal British newspaper, the Guardian:So when a girl at 17 decides to go ahead and have a baby, there is no tragedy of lost opportunity other than the local [supermarket] checkout till waiting for her low-paid labour. Why . . . can’t [the government] recognise that some of these teen mums are making reasonable—even moral—decisions about what they value in life, and what they want to do with their lives? How did opting for baby and motherhood over shelf-stacking ever become a tragedy?
Sometimes shallowness goes too deep for tears.
I have long said that when you make unwed motherhood a job description you will have no end of applicants.
This is an example of why elections matter. Welfare reform in America would not have been possible without the Republican majority in the legislature.
I cannot stress this enough. It is too late for Western Europe, but not too late – yet – for the United States. As imperfect as the Republicans are, and God knows their imperfections are legion, they still represent the best hope of survival for the nation.
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
More trouble in Belgium
From The Brussels Journal:This morning the police came to my door again to question me about allegedly racist articles on The Brussels Journal. I was not in. Tonight the local police phoned to "invite" me urgently to the police station. In Belgium any leftist or totalitarianist can lodge a complaint against "internet racism" through a Belgian government website and the judiciary starts an investigation. Apparently someone in Ghent has lodged a complaint against this website. I am not allowed to know who this person is, but I am requested to come to the police station to be interrogated. I told the officer that I refuse to justify my writings for anonymous complaints. "I am not living in the Soviet Union," I told him (though I fear I am).
As a matter of principle I will not go to the police station. I defend the freedom of the press, which implies the right of journalists not to be questioned by the authorities about articles and opinions that they write or edit. I told the officer that if the police wants to question me they will have to arrest me. The Belgian authorities are clearly intent on intimidating us and closing down this website.
This is important for us Americans to take note of because the left in this country is heading down the same road that the left in Europe is on. The Europeans are just further down it than we are.
For all of Mr. Belien's courage and intelligence he does not understand what he is dealing with. The totalitarian impulse which is never far from the surface in European politics is once again asserting itself. Sometimes it wears the mask of communism and sometimes fascism, but the one thing that remains unchanged is the desire to crush any dissent.
If Paul Belien does not get himself and his family out of Europe now he will live to see the day when his home is invaded by thugs operating with the approval (if unofficial) of the government. He will be forced to watch as his wife is beaten and raped before he is beaten to death or permanent disability.
It matters not whether the agents of the Left are wearing brown or red they will not tolerate dissent. They will utterly destroy any opponent over whom they can gain power.
If you are in continental Western Europe and you refuse to live as a slave then get out now.The Lyrics to the Beverly Hillbillies Theme song
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
A sad day for America
Breitbart is reporting:Three-term Sen. Joe Lieberman fell to anti-war challenger Ned Lamont in Connecticut's Democratic primary Tuesday. .
.
. . . Democratic critics targeted Lieberman for his strong support for the Iraq war and for his close ties to President Bush. They played and replayed video of the kiss President Bush planted on Lieberman's cheek after the 2005 State of the Union address.
The American Spectator had this to say eariler in the day:Welcome to The Chasm. It is almost possible to feel it splitting the common American ground as it falls away. It has happened before.
The Chasm is the reason the 1936 Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States against Franklin D. Roosevelt wound up in FDR's Cabinet as Secretary of the Navy. It is the reason Wendell Willkie, the 1940 GOP nominee opposing Roosevelt, wound up running missions for his successful opponent. It is the logic behind the entire British political system melding into one as the realization Winston Churchill had called the menace of the anti-Semite Adolf Hitler correctly, right from the start.
But Americans in 2006 are only now discovering The chasm, and there are Americans aplenty who still don't get it -- starting with Connecticut Democrats. One wonders about those continual polls that show our fellow countrymen so historically out of it that they think Lyndon Johnson was President during the Civil War.
There have been times aplenty in American history when the leaders of opposite parties bonded during crisis. Lifelong rivals Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas came together instantly when the two political and personal rivals who had vied for everything from the same woman to the same Illinois Senate seat and the presidency itself realized the fate of America rested on Douglas's ability to support the new President Lincoln. One of the first people President John F. Kennedy reached out to during the Bay of Pigs crisis was his just defeated opponent Richard Nixon -- who instantly rallied across The Chasm to his old friend and recent foe.
Much has been made by his far left opponents of Lieberman's willingness to play the hands-across-The-Chasm Douglas and Nixon roles. Yet the confluence of Israel's recent vulnerabilities mixed in with the battle for Iraq has suddenly -- or not so suddenly? -- drawn anti-Semitic venom. Is it a surprise that Lamont has accepted campaign help from Jessie "Hymietown" Jackson or Al Sharpton, the latter of whom has made a career railing against "diamond merchants"? All of this while Israel is fighting for its very life against opponents who use "ceasefire accords" as nothing more than rest stops on the way to killing more Jews?
. . . Democratic Party -- the party of Cabinet members, Supreme Court Justices, U.S. Senators, Congressmen, Governors, and others who happen to be Jewish -- the party of vice-presidential nominee Joe Lieberman -- has lost. The Chasm has opened, and Democrats are burning the bridge.
Shame.
As a Republican I should be happy. This will be good for my party. The Democrats have shown that they have learned nothing from the McGovern experience of the 1970s. This probably means that Republicans will keep control of both houses of the legislature this November and that is good for the nation.
However I am sad. In the first place Lieberman is a good man. On almost every issue other than national security he is a left-liberal and therefore totally wrong, but he is as true patriot and deserved to win.
Second, this demonstrates like nothing else could that the moonbats have firm control of the Democrat Party. America is fighting a war on three fronts. One is the war against Islamofascism in the Middle East, the next is the war to save our culture from the illegal immigrants and the third is the battle to save our political system from the lunatic left (who, if they had control would unconditionally surrender in the first two).
What would von Clausewitz or Sun Tzu have said about that?
Where is Hillary Clinton when you need her?
The Brussels Journal reports that there is a heathcare crisis in Belgium: Belgium is one of the few countries where the liberal agenda has been pushed so far that, apart from abortion and gay marriage, euthanasia is also allowed by law. However, "market failure" is now jeopardizing the right of Belgians to die. The standard euthanasia procedure in Belgium (as in the Netherlands) is through injection with an overdose of the drug Pentothal. Brussels' leading euthanasiast, Prof Wim Distelmans, complained in the Belgian press today that the supply
of the drug to Belgium has all but stopped since Abbott Laboratories, the American pharmaceutical company that used to produce Pentothal, transferred the production to its spin-off Hospira in 2004.
The cause, apparently, is the packaging of the drug. So far Pentothal was sold in packets of ten ampullas, while one or two ampullas suffice to kill. Hospira has decided to start selling packets of only one ampulla in Belgium, but while the old packets have been sold out the new are not yet available. Hospira refused to comment but the reason for the change in packaging may be that the Belgian pro-euthanasia authorities are no longer willing to reimburse Pentothal unless it is sold in single doses.
"We have been without Pentothal for weeks now," Distelmans complains, adding that there is no alternative to the drug. "The intention of euthanasia is to bring the patient into an in an irreversible coma in an elegant and reliable manner. Pentothal is the only drug which can do this."
I think that if we want it to be legal for doctors to kill their patients they should have to use a .45 or a .357 magnum. Pushing a couple of shots of Pentothal is way too easy. If the doctors want the power to take life let them wipe brains off the wall.
I say this because in countries where voluntary euthanasia becomes legal it doesn't take long for involuntary euthanasia to become the norm. This is why the elderly in those European nations that have legalized euthanasia are afraid to go hospital.
Tag, I'm it
The Dowager Viscountess at White Trash Republican tagged me with this. Since I’m in a good mood due to the Ecosystem getting its fiftieth member I’ll give it a try.
One book that changed your life:
“Time Enough for Love” by Robert A Heinlein
One book that you've read more than once:
“A Free Man of Color” by Barbara Hambley, I’ve read all of her “Benjamin January” novels, the first three more than once.
One book that you would want on a desert island:
“How to Build a Boat out of Things Found on a Desert Island With The Principles of Sea Navigation”
One book that made you laugh:
"A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole, this is the most truly funny book that I have ever read.
One book that made you cry:
“The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the account of the inmate’s revolt at the Kenger slave labor camp was heartbreaking.
One book you wish had been written:
“The Fifth Crusade: How Christian Europe Finally United to Eradicate Islam”
One book you wish had never been written:
“Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson, this book got DDT banned and condemned millions of people to death.
One book you are currently reading:
"The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul” by Speros Vryonis, Jr, as part of my research into Islam.
One book you have been meaning to read:
“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” by Edward Gibbon, I have the first three volumes and will start on them as soon as I get time.
I don’t know anyone else well enough to tag them (except the people who have already been tagged by others) so I won’t.
50!
The Hillbilly Ecosystem gets member number 50!
Patty at This That and Frog Hair has joined. Patty has a great blog. Go over and say howdie to her.
We can now have that party!
Liz at White Trash Republican will bake her special hemp seed muffins and make some of her famous tater salad and Patrick at Born Again Redneck will bring a large platter of fresh fried chicken (so fresh that you can download an MP3 of its death rattle on his blog) and some of that fine weed that they grow up in the Pacific Northwest (it keeps their economy afloat). I have a whole barrel of fine corn likker that my daddy put up the day before he got arrested taking the weekend load down to Raleigh. We was saving it to toast him the day he got out, but he was one of the inmates that escaped in the big breakout of '71 and ain't nobody seen him since so we can drink it up now. I'm hoping that Cookie from the Cook Shack will whip up something from his recipe book.
There will be shooting contests for rifle, pistol and shotgun before (well before) the barrel of moonshine is opened. We might even get our other new member Andrea from The Right Nation to drop by with a bottle of grappa and some take out from one of his local restaurants (since he doesn't cook).
All Ecosystem members turn out. You'll have so much fun you won't be able to remember a thing!
More photo phollies
There is a good post up on The Brussels Journal that shows that you don't need photoshop to lie with, or about, pictures.
Katyusha rockets have a short boost phase. After that they are ballistic. Under no circumstances are their motors still burning when they hit their target.
Question: If the news media didn't have egg all over its face already and if they didn't know that the bloggers were looking at every picture they publish with a microscope would they have bothered to publish this correction?
Question: Is it a good idea to use stringers who are parties to the conflict? Is that the best way to cover a war? Would the BBC have used members of the Hitler Youth as stringers during WWII?
Ok, I know that if the BBC were the same then as it is now they would have, but back then the Beeb wanted the good guys to win the war. Factor that into your answer.
Monday, August 07, 2006
The Andy Griffith Show Theme Song Lyrics
The pot simmers south of the border
From The Washington Post:MEXICO CITY, Aug. 6 -- Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the runner-up in Mexico's presidential election whose supporters have erected tent cities to protest the results of the July 2 vote, said Sunday that the political crisis would not be resolved by the partial recount ordered by the country's highest electoral court.
Speaking inside the 18-by-9-foot tent where he has lived for the past week, López Obrador was utterly defiant. He will not accept results of the partial recount, he declared during his first interview since a special election court on Saturday rejected his request for a full recount. And he said he would not ask his supporters to disperse even though they have brought gridlock to Mexico City's downtown.
[Snip]
During the interview, López Obrador -- a former Mexico City mayor -- described Mexico as a "racist" and "classist" country dominated by men who "are not businessmen, but are traffickers in influence." Opinion polling conducted since the election suggests that darker-skinned indigenous peoples supported him and his Democratic Revolutionary Party while lighter-skinned Mexicans supported Calderón, advisers said.
Mexico has a huge gap between the rich and poor -- nowhere more noticeable than in Mexico City, where a large elite class shops at Christofle and Cartier while millions live in grinding poverty. The poor are López Obrador's most ardent followers, but he said he is not a populist. "I am a leftist," he said.
"A leftist". That is why he is not the answer to Mexico's suffering. Make no mistake; most of Obrador's complaints are well founded. Mexico is ruled by a small number of wealthy families who are descended from the Spanish Conquistadores who have, for the most part, not intermarried with the native Mexican Indians.
The government of Mexico has made some legitimate progress, but it is still massively corrupt and incompetent. The fanatic tenacity with which Mexican leaders promote illegal immigration of poor Mexicans into the United States is an indication of how bad things are in Mexico. Money the illegals send back to Mexico helps keep the Mexican economy afloat and the US represents a "safety valve" bleeding off the most discontented and ambitious young men (the men most likely to join a domestic revolution). Imagine what would happen back home if the rage and hatred the Mexican illegals direct at the undeserving United States was to be focused on the Mexican government, which richly deserves it.
However the ability to define the problem does automatically make you qualified to develop the solution. Obrador's prescription for Mexico is a kind of xenophobic socialism. What Mexico needs is not more government control it is free market reform and the opening of Mexico to foreign investment.
Right now it is difficult to immigrate to Mexico and even harder to for a foreigner to start a business in Mexico. This needs to change. Large numbers of American baby-boomers are reaching retirement age and would love to move to Mexico which has much natural beauty and low land and labor costs. Mexican property values could be increased and millions of Mexicans could be employed in Mexico seeing to the various needs of these American retirees for everything from domestic staff to building construction to health care. Then all of the businesses that cater to the newly employed Mexicans will prosper and so on as the effect ripples through the economy.
Also, there are a substantial number of American businesses that would benefit greatly from relocation to Mexico. I have heard more than one dairy farmer say that his land would make more money as a golf course or housing development, but that he stays with farming because he loves it and feels that the nation needs his produce. The same thing is true for many other kinds of farmer in America.
If Mexican laws were changed to make it easier for them to relocate to Mexico many US farmers could sell their land in America for enough money to set up larger operations in Mexico where costs are so much less that they could have profitable businesses without government price supports. But Mexican laws would need to change.
American retirees will not jump through the hoops to move to a nation which will then treat them like third-class non-citizens and American businessmen will not stake their economic futures on a corrupt socialist economy which could wipe out their investment overnight through some lame-brained central planning experiment or steal it outright through nationalization.
And none of this even touches on the problems of Mexico's oil industry. Mexico's proven reserves of crude are dwindling rapidly. Oil geologists believe that Mexico has more, perhaps much more, oil but the Mexican state oil bureaucracy is not competent to find it and develop it in any kind of timely and efficient manner. US oil companies, which are very good at finding and developing oil could be the key to saving the Mexican economy from total collapse.
But Obrador doesn't understand any of this. Like the poor and ignorant peasants who form the core of his support he believes the socialist myth that tearing down the rich will automatically uplift the poor. As a hater of capitalism he will not open Mexico to foreign investment other than "partnerships" with Cuba, Red China and Venezuela.
Obrador's opponant Felipe Calderón is neither Thomas Jefferson nor Adam Smith, but at least he does not have a program designed to make things worse.
Sunday, August 06, 2006
The vultures continue to circle
NewsMax.com is carrying this story:The ABC television network has pulled a miniseries about the Holocaust it was developing with Mel Gibson 's production company, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, quoting an unidentified representative for the network.
Gibson was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving early on Friday and was reported to have launched into a tirade against Jews, asking the arresting officer if he was a Jew and blaming the Jews for starting all wars.
The actor, who holds strong conservative Catholic religious and political views and whose father is a Holocaust denier, apologized on Saturday.
It is no surprise that Disney would put as much distance between themselves and Gibson as possible. Corporations are generally allergic to anything controversial (except "Gay Days" in Disney's case).
What I question here is the assertion that Gibson holds "strong conservative Catholic religious and political views". That he holds strong conservative Catholic religious views is not in dispute. However NewsMax needs to understand that with the sole exception of "life issues" like abortion and euthanasia the Roman Catholic Church is a left-wing organization.
The RCC supports the welfare state and unlimited Third World immigration and opposes the death penalty. To be a "conservative Catholic" is to be a political liberal. During the filming of The Passion of the Christ Gibson was accused of belonging to the Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell "Christian Right". He denied it. He claimed that he was unsure of his political views.
On top of this he recently said that he modeled the dying Mayan Empire in his new movie Apocalypto on the Bush administration's war on terror. Apocalypto is about how the Mayan rulers attempt to use apocalyptic religious rhetoric to distract the population from the governments failures, which are leading to the collapse of their civilization.
Yep, sounds like the next Jesse Helms to me.
Hillbilly Hog Roast number 3 - Update, part II
Green Acres and The Waltons have also been suggested. Here are a couple more that I'll throw out for your consideration. Little House on the Prairie and Gomer Pyle USMC, a spinoff of The Andy Griffith Show.
Here are the entrants so far:
The Beverly Hillbillies
The Dukes of Hazzard
The 700 Club
The Andy Griffith Show
Hee Haw
The Waltons
Green Acres
Little House on the Prairie
Gomer Pyle, USMC
If anything else comes in before midnight tonight I'll update the list tomorrow. Voting begins at 12:01 AM, Monday morning. Just because you recommended something does not automatically mean that a vote will be recorded for it. You must post a vote to the comments of the "Voting Is Open" post that I'll put up after midnight or send me an email.
Remember only Hillbilly Ecosystem members can vote. If you want to vote then join.
Hillbilly Hog Roast number 3 - Update
Today is the last day to offer suggestions for the official Hillbilly TV Show. So far we have:
The Beverly Hillbillies
The Dukes of Hazzard
The 700 Club
The Andy Griffith Show
Hee Haw
I will offer a couple more suggestions this afternoon and then close the nominations out at midnight tonight.
Voting will begin tomorrow and run through midnight next Sunday.
Saturday, August 05, 2006
Hillbilly number 49 joins the family!
We have a new Hillbilly in the Ecosystem family! The Right Nation is the newest Ecosystem member. This blog is based in Italy and is run by a man named Andrea Mancia. It is written in Italian but is about American politics from a conservative perspective. You can visit and use the translation software that comes with Windows or you can go to the English version.
It is a well done blog by one of our few remaining friends in Europe. Go over and say hello.
I found this on his blog, so you can see that he's going to fit in real nice around here.
UPDATE:
I originally thought that Andrea was a woman's name in Italian as it is in English. Mr. Manica wrote to correct me on that. I sincerely apologize for the mistake. If I had been thinking about my history I would have remembered Andrea Doria, the Genoese admiral and statesman of the early renaissance and known that I was dealing with a gent.
Of Minnie-Balls and Dum Dums
Milestones in the development of small arms ammunition.
Firearms at the time of the American Civil War (we're talking long guns, not pistols here) came in two types. Smooth bore muskets and rifles. Rifles, as the name implies, had rifled barrels. Rifling a barrel means cutting a series of grooves into the interior of the barrel so that when the bullet is fired spin will be imparted to it. This spin gives the bullet gyroscopic stability and has the effect of making the bullet fly straighter.
The advantages of a rifle are clear. A smooth bore musket was accurate only out to about 50 feet. The bore of the musket was larger than the diameter of the musket ball so as to make loading easier and faster. This meant that the ball when fired would literally bounce around the inside of the barrel as it was fired. When exiting the barrel it would rarely be going in exactly the direction that the shooter was aiming.
This is why infantry battles were fought by massed ranks of soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder firing at each other from short range. To hope to hit anything you had to get close aim in the direction of the enemy and trust to luck that you would hit something. With a rifle, however you could accurately pick off enemy soldiers out to 250 yards.
So why didn't all the armies of the world switch to rifles? Because rifles were slow to load. In order to get the accuracy that rifles are capable of the bullet had to fit tightly into the barrel. This meant that it had to be forced down the barrel with a ramrod and this took time. A musket can be loaded and fired twice (or more if the soldiers are well trained) for every one time a rifle is fired.
This speed issue made the smoothbore musket queen of the battlefield until 1848 when a captain in the French Army named Claude E. Minie invented a new kind of projectile. The "minnie-ball" as it came to be called was actually shaped like a modern bullet.
The genius of the minnie-ball was its hollow base. As the rapidly expanding gasses generated by the explosion of the gunpowder filled the base of the bullet it would expand, like a balloon being inflated, and cause the grease filled bands to engage the rifling. Because the projectile was smaller than the bore of the rifle it could be loaded as quickly as a musket, but it had all the accuracy of the slow-loading rifles. It was literally the best of both worlds and it revolutionized warfare.
The next development in small arms ammunition was originally developed for the infantry rifle, but ended up being banned for military use by international agreement. Instead the Dum-dum bullet, or rather its modern descendant, has taken over the ammunition market for police and armed citizens.
With the invention of Cordite, a more efficient propellant than black powder, projectiles (bullets) could be driven at higher velocities with a better chance of hitting a target at a longer range. However this caused recoil to become an issue. Firearms designers had compensated for the low velocities which black powder propellant produces by using large diameter (caliber) projectiles.
Driving the large caliber bullets at the higher velocities make possible by Cordite gave them an unacceptable level of recoil (the "kick" one feels when firing a gun). Firearms designers responded to this by designing rifles which fired smaller caliber bullets. A smaller (therefore lighter) bullet driven to the same velocity produces less recoil.
However smaller bullets do less damage to the target than larger ones and therefore have less stopping power. In 1890 British engineers at the arsenal at Dum Dum, India (near Calcutta) developed a bullet that would deform upon impact with the target. They did this by removing the copper jacket from the tip of the bullet. The use of higher velocity bullets had led to bullets being clad in copper jackets in order to keep them from torn apart by the barrel's rifling during firing.
By leaving soft lead exposed at the tip of the bullet it was able to deform, or mushroom, upon impact. This deformation of the bullet causes more of the kinetic energy of the bullet to be transferred to the target causing increased destruction of tissue and bone. Also as the bullet mushrooms its diameter increases causing it to contact more tissue as it moves through the body. The area of tissue which is actually contacted by the bullet and is crushed or cut by it is a major factor in the effectiveness of the bullet.
British engineers later improved upon the design further by adding a hollow cavity at the tip of the bullet. This gave the British Army's smaller caliber infantry rifle the same stopping power as the old .45 caliber Martini-Henry, but with significantly improved range.
Now enter the diplomats. At The Hague Convention of 1899 German representatives presented evidence of the massive wounding caused by British designed hunting ammunition and asked that "explosive" (meaning expanding) bullets be outlawed under international law. The Germans neglected to mention that this would give the advantage (at least in their minds) to the newly developed German Spitzer bullet.
The Spitzer was a pointed projectile fired at supersonic velocity. Upon entering the body it would tumble, or rotate, 180 degrees. This rotation would dump energy into the target and create a larger wound channel like an expanding bullet would (at least in theory). The Spitzer bullet was sometimes called the "latent dum-dum". In practice the Spitzer proved a poor stopper. It was observed that men shot with the German 7mm Mauser would often be able to return to duty within week or less.
The United Kingdom did not agree with the German Empire about the issue of expanding bullets, but did not press the issue so they were banned. The United States never ratified the Hague Convention, but follows some of its provisions.
Although the hollow point bullet is not used for military applications they have come to be nearly universal for law enforcement agencies and armed civilians.
Next chapter:
From Super-Vels to Hydra-Shocks. Handgun ammunition comes of age.
Inspiration for this post provided by Shooting The Messenger
Friday, August 04, 2006
Pictures of Asheville
This is Asheville, the Emerald of the Blue Ridge. At the left is the BB&T Building. Center is the First Baptist Church (with the dome). At the right the building with the structure on top is the National Climatic Data Center. To the right of the Climatic Center is the Battery Park Apartment Building. 
Panning the camera to the left we see the Buncombe County Courthouse and the Jackson building. Over to the left of the courthouse is the city office building.
Author Thomas Wolfe's father had a shop on the site where the Jackson Building now stands. He carved tombstones.
Here is a better view of the First Baptist Church.
This is the Haunted Bridge of Beaucatcher Mountain, also known as Helen's Bridge.
The story goes that a woman lived with her only child, a daughter, in a house on Beaucatcher Mountain. One night the daughter was killed in a house fire. In her grief the woman hanged herself from the bridge.
Supposedly if you drive your car up to the bridge late at night, stop and turn off the headlights Helen will appear to you if you call her name.
The story also says that if you see her your car will refuse to start when you try to leave.
Yes, I tried it. No, nothing happened.
Mad Mel and the Jews
Michael Medved offers some thoughts on the recent episode involving Mel Gibson:
The anti-Semitic rant which accompanied Mel Gibson's drunk driving arrest in Malibu raised the incident from the level of tawdry tabloid embarrassment to an act of image-shattering self-destruction, while providing abundant fodder to celebrity gossips, late night comedians, and the actor-director's innumerable enemies. Those of us who defended and praised Gibson for his outspoken Catholic commitment, and for his refreshing efforts to use the movie medium to advance his faith, now feel betrayed and, yes, a bit humiliated. In that context, six pertinent points may help keep the pathetic incident in proper perspective.
[Snip]
The "Mad Mel" Moment in Malibu may change the way we perceive the dark hatred that lurks within Gibson's heart but it alters nothing about the images and messages he put on screen in "The Passion of the Christ." It's still the same movie, frame for frame, line for Aramaic-and-Latin line, that it was before his tirade and arrest. The tens of millions of people who felt overpowered and inspired and uplifted by a remarkable piece of cinema need not now apologize because they responded in good faith to the work of a deeply flawed, bigoted filmmaker. Mel Gibson's personal disgrace makes me feel pity for his family but it does nothing to force my reconsideration of my critical admiration of his movie. At the time of its release, I argued vehemently against hysterical charges (many of them emanating from people who hadn't even seen the film) that "The Passion" represented some vicious, anti-Semitic screed, and I also decried dire predictions ("He'll have blood on his hands," thundered one commentator in The New Republic) that the movie would inspire anti-Jewish incidents around the world. I tell the story of my high profile involvement in this dispute in my recent book RIGHT TURNS (everyone should read it!), and in the aftermath of Mel's meltdown and arrest I wouldn't change a word of it. The fact remains that all the predictions of pogroms in Pittsburgh proved preposterous: while earning some 1 billion dollars in movie theatres and on DVD, "The Passion" inspired no anti-Semitic incidents anywhere in the world. In fact, several surveys of audience attitudes showed that anti-Jewish sentiments actually decreased when movie-goers saw the film. The worst part of this latest controversy is that Gibson's revolting statements give people like Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League a juicy, retroactive excuse to say "I told you so" --- long after the benign and warm-hearted worldwide reaction to the movie had utterly undermined all the smug denunciations claiming that this wildly popular entertainment would foment implacable hate.
I'm just waiting for the Gibson haters to demand that we reconsider the American Revloution in light of Mel's statements.
Medved has a warning:
At a time of surging Jew-hatred around the world, Gibson's drunken, after-midnight remarks to arresting officers on a lonely stretch of Malibu highway represent a less serious threat to the Jewish people than the very public anti-Semitic and anti-Israel comments by numerous celebrities, academics, UN officials and politicians. In April of 1996, for instance, the Oscar-winning actor Marlon Brando declared on Larry King Live: "Hollywood is run by Jews, owned by Jews, and they should have greater sensitivity about the issue of people who are suffering. Because they have exploited....We've seen everything but we never saw the Kike." The Anti-Defamation League criticized Brando, of course, but never suggested that he should be ostracized and boycotted, as they recently demanded in Gibson's case. Meanwhile, Gibson had already attempted a public apology for his loathesome private remarks, declaring that "I acted like a person who was completely out of control when I was arrested and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable.I am deeply ashamed of everything I said." Compare this contrition to the unapologetic, and ceaselessly repeated attacks on Israel by another controversial Hollywood director, Michael Moore, who declared in Liverpool (quoted in the New York Times, June 26, 2004) that the embattled Jewish state represented one of the modern world's centers of evil: "It's all part of the same ball of wax, right? The oil companies, Israel, Halliburton." Ironically, Michael Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel (brother of a Democratic Congressman from Illinois), is one of the entertainment industry figures leading the charge to demand that the show biz establishment blacklist Gibson.
[Snip]
. . . Like it or not, Mel Gibson will not simply disappear (though he might well take some time off for rehab) and the Jewish community will hardly benefit by isolating him as a permanent enemy and encouraging him in the far more open expression of anti-Semitic attitudes. Does Ari Emanuel believe it would somehow help the Jewish cause if his client, Michael Moore, could now welcome a new colleague --Mel Gibson -- as a participant in the poisonously anti-Israel rallies, conferences and demonstrations that Mr. Moore regularly addresses? Those who believe that Gibson's anti-Semitism couldn't get any worse simply lack imagination. Public amplification of the bigotry that Mel revealed privately in Malibu might well spoil his popularity in the United States, but imagine how it could boost his already considerable following in Europe, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union-- not to mention the Islamic world!
Mr. Medved's caution to his fellow Jews also raises a question. The Hollywood left does not reject Michael Moore even though Moore is an anti-Semite. I have not heard any Hollywood leftist denounce congressman Dingle for refusing to draw any moral distinction between Israel and Hezbollah. I can remember the last time that Hollywood types held a fundraiser to get a convicted cop-killer out of jail, but I can't remember the last time they held a fundraiser to help the IDF.
I also don't remember any movie stars or producers or agents or any other representatives of the Hollywood community picketing the UN for allowing Arafat to address the General Assembly.
So what is the source of Hollywood's hatred for Mel Gibson? The answer is simple. The Passion of the Christ. Mel Gibson earned the undying hatred of left-liberals by making a movie which accurately depicts events from the Bible in a way which has brought tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people to faith. Gibson's work has been used by God to save many souls from hell, so it is a natural thing that the enemies of God will gnash their teeth.
The fact that God was able to use Mel Gibson in this way despite the fact that Mel holds deeply sinful hatred for God's chosen people in his heart is simply proof that God is able to work His will through flawed and fallen instruments (good thing to because there are no other kind among humans). After all God was able to use Adolph Hitler to bring about the rebirth of the nation of Israel, wasn't He?
The story if Mel Gibson's life is not yet over. If the lives of the saints teach us anything it is that we are all works in progress. The door to repentance and redemption remains open to us as long as there is breath in our bodies and thought in our minds.
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Cuba
The prospect of Fidel Castro becoming a permanent guest of the Ninth Circle of Hell has started speculation that soon Cuba will be free.
May it be so.
Cuba is a beautiful island blessed with a magnificent climate abundant natural beauty and an industrious population. Its natural advantages should combine to make it a happy and prosperous place.
It is neither.
The brothers Castro (may their end be swift and painful) would have the Cuban people believe that the source of Cuba’s misery lies 90 miles to the north. That is, with the United States. The economic embargo which was placed on Cuba after it became clear that Cuba was going communist and entering the Soviet orbit is the Kennedy administration’s most enduring legacy.
Fidel calls the embargo a “blockade” and finds it a convenient hook on which to hang all the suffering of the Cuban people. The very term “blockade” implies a ring of US Navy ships surrounding the tiny island keeping out the commerce which would lift Cuba out of poverty and into the ranks of affluence. But is it?
It is true that the United States does not trade with Cuba, however the European Union does. The economy of the EU is almost the same size as the US economy. Canada trades with Cuba. Russia and China and India all trade with Cuba. Mexico and all of Central and South America and Africa trade with Cuba. Korea, both North and South, trade with Cuba. In fact all of Asia trades with Cuba. Australia and New Zeeland trade with Cuba.
Have I forgotten anyone who trades with Cuba? I don’t think so, but in case you don’t get the idea let me state it this way:
The entire world, minus the United States of America, trades with Cuba.
That means that 95% of the Earth’s population and more than 70% of the Earth’s wealth are potential suppliers to and customers of Cuba.
Cuba has a contract with Spanish firms to purchase 100% of their cigars every year. You can’t sell more than 100% of something.
Some missionaries were recently at my church. They had just gotten back from Cuba (you can get clearance to go there for humanitarian purposes). They had pictures of the junk cars that the Cubans drive. All of them are US made from the 1940s and ‘50s. Castro tells the people that they have to make due with that because of the “blockade”. But is that true? Is the fact that American car companies are forbidden to sell cars to Cuba the reason that Cubans have to drive 50 year old junk?
Last time I checked Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagen, Honda, Kia and Hyundai were just some of the cars that were made outside of the United States by non-American companies. There is no law against any of those car companies selling cars in Cuba.
Why don’t they?
Because nobody in Cuba has the money to buy them other than a tiny Communist Party elite. The Cuban economy is a basket case, despite the fact that it has most of the world’s people and wealth as a potential marketplace, because it is a COMMUNIST ECONOMY.
Centrally planed economies fail. Always have and always will. That is why the USSR imploded and took Eastern Europe with it. That is why the Pilgrims in Plymouth Colony almost starved to death. That is why China is having to dump communism, in all but rhetoric, in favor of a kind of Asian fascism to be competitive with the West.
If President Bush was to go to congress tomorrow and call for the embargo to be lifted, and congress were to go along with him, it would make little difference to the Cuban people. This assumes that Castro would allow the embargo to be lifted – he wouldn’t (it would take away his excuse for failure).
Think about it. Cuba could sell cigars in America. Cuba already sells all the cigars it can roll. Cuba could sell its sugar to America. America already produces all the sugar it needs and more. We have to prop up the price of domestic sugar to keep our own growers from going belly up. Does Cuba make anything else worth having? If it does I haven’t herd of it.
But, Cuba is beautiful and has great beaches. . . You might have something there. But America has beaches (California, Hawaii, South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi and Virginia to name a few) and France has beaches and Mexico and any number of other nations. Once the novelty wears off how many people will PREFER Cuba to better developed vacation spots? You know places with a tradition of good customer service?
Of course this all applies to Cuba as it is now. When Fidel makes his appointment with eternal damnation things can change. No more communism in Cuba means that foreign investment will be allowed. People who know how it’s done like Hilton and Trump (pause a moment to allow liberal readers to recover from their palpitations) can come in and develop. Genuine opportunity for the average Cuban will follow.
Of course it doesn’t HAVE to happen that way. In Russia former KGB and CPSU operatives took control and are turning Russia into a strong-man dictatorship. When Castro finally ends up sunning himself on the shores of the lake of Fire the US will need to step in quickly.
Vladimir Posner once asked me what I thought should have happened after the fall of the Soviet Union. I told him that I thought that the Soviet people deserved a decommunnization process like the denazification that Germany was put through after WWII. Needless to say he disagreed. But I was correct. If Cuba is to become a free country and enjoy the prosperity which its natural resources entitle it to the DGI and the CPC must be subjected to the same treatment that the victorious Allies meted out to the SS and Nazi Party in Germany.
Just think of it. Reclining on a perfect beach (nickel plated revolver snugly tucked into your Galco shoulder holster), smoking a Romeo y Julieta and sipping a Cuba libre brought to you by a beautiful Flower of the Caribbean. . .
I’ll be in my bunk.
Photos upcoming
I received an email the other day asking me to post some pictures of Asheville. It seems that a regular reader is from the Emerald of the Blue Ridge (I just made that up, Asheville city counsel - you can use it no charge) and misses it.
So, being the accommodating sort that I am, I went up on Beaucatcher Mountain and took some pictures of the city's skyline as well as some pictures of one of our semi-famous landmarks. Helen's Bridge, otherwise known as the Haunted Bridge of Beaucatcher Mountain.
I came home and uploaded the pictures and created a nice photo post and just as I was finishing up blogger ate the whole damn thing.
It is now refusing to let me work with photographs. So I will try again tomorrow.
Republicans use their brains (at last)
From The Washington Post:For years, organized labor has worked hard to raise the minimum wage, while business groups have campaigned to block such a change. This week in the Senate, however, the AFL-CIO is pushing to kill the wage increase while practically the entire business lobby is demanding that it pass.
The reversal is the product of election-year politics and clever -- critics say devious -- legislative packaging that has been dubbed the "trifecta." In the same bill, senators are being asked to raise the minimum wage (the liberals' goal), cut the estate tax (the conservatives' objective) and approve a laundry list of popular, though narrowly targeted, tax breaks.
[Snip]
Labor officials say that their opposition is a matter of economic and social justice. . .
"We don't think minimum-wage workers should have to wait for millionaires to get another tax cut before they receive a long-overdue pay increase," said Bill Samuel, the AFL-CIO's legislative director.
The death tax punishes people who have worked hard and built business (like family farms) and kept the business in the family. It also punishes people who have saved and invested and want to leave their wealth behind for their heirs to enjoy (not to mention the heirs).
As a percentage of the total income flowing into the federal treasure it is tiny. The loss of it would probably be more than offset by gains in other areas as people stopped sheltering their assets and started using them in ways that would cause their wealth to continue to grow for the next generation.
And what does organized labor care about the estate tax for anyway? They have a chance to get the minimum wage increase they claim that they want right here and right now. Why do they care if a small number of people get a tax break? Could it be that the AFL-CIO is in truth more of a left-liberal organization than it is a working man's organization?
That might explain why they support a minimum wage at all. After all the minimum wage harms those it is meant to help; an economic reality that is easy to document for anyone with any real understanding of economics.
The minimum wage is an entry level wage paid to people without much ability to create value for their employer. Most of the people drawing minimum wage are teens working their first job. Also there are elderly people looking to supplement their Social Security/retirement pensions and certain people whose circumstances make them high risk for employment. People such as ex-convicts and residents of halfway houses.
In all of these cases minimum wage employees will learn skills and prove themselves to be reliable (sometimes after first learning to be reliable) or they will not and be weeded out. Those who are left will have a demonstrated ability to create value for their employers and will be paid more.
To raise the minimum wage is to increase the cost of employing these unproven, unskilled and/or high risk workers. Hiking the minimum wage will reduce the employment opportunities for young black men in the inner city, people on parole or probation, teenagers looking for their first job, and retirees living on Social Security.
Ultimately a boost in the minimum wage will lead to more workplace automation and more outsourcing and more jobs moved off shore and less opportunity for people at the economic margins in American society.
This is just fine with Liberal elites because it means more people reduced to dependence upon the government. To a left-liberal the utopian future looks like an endless soup line with an ignorant, infantilized population utterly dependent upon their elite masters for food, housing and health care. The (little) money they have left over after taxes from their state subsidized jobs to be spent on recreation (mostly chemical) and on sporting events (two things which keep a population distracted and numb - in Oceania the only thing plentiful and cheap was "victory gin").
You know what? I don't care. The people hurt by an increase in the minimum wage are people who vote Democrat anyway so frak 'em. In exchange for the benefits of a lower death tax I am willing to see fast food restaurants automate burger flipping so that they don't need so many Bevis and Butthead types behind the counter.
This will help Republicans stay in control in Washington and will therefore push back the imposition of Sharia in the United States so it is as good trade.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Manufactured "Atrocities"
It now seems likely that all things are not as they have been made to appear in regards to the "Qana Massacre".
From FrontPage Magazine:
. . . it is increasingly clear that the Qana “massacre” was a stage-managed Hizballah production, designed precisely to enflame international sentiment against Israel and compel the Israelis to accept a ceasefire that would enable the jihad terrorist group to gain some time to recover from the Israeli attacks. Some of the principal evidence for this:
The Israeli bombardment took place about midnight, but the house where the civilians were gathered reportedly did not collapse until 8AM. Said Brigadier General Amir Eshel of the Israeli Air Force, “It is difficult for me to believe that they waited eight hours to evacuate it.” Indeed, it strains credulity that not only did these Lebanese civilians remain in a house that had been bombed for eight hours, but peacefully went to sleep in it after the bombing – since the victims were all apparently sleeping, despite continuing Israeli air bombardment in the area, when the building collapsed. Eshel suggested that “it could be that inside the building, things that could eventually cause an explosion were being housed, things that we could not blow up in the attack, and maybe remained there” – in other words, Hizballah bombs and/or weapons.
Photos of the rescue operation, which were transmitted all over the world and appeared on the front page of the New York Times and other major newspapers, are extremely suspicious. The blog EU Referendum has done important work scrutinizing the photos, finding numerous anomalies. Most notably, the dating of the various photos suggests that the same bodies were paraded before reporters on different occasions, each time as if they had just been pulled from the rubble. In a rebuttal to this charge, AP’s David Bauder rather lamely asserts: “web sites can use such stamps to show when pictures are posted, not taken.” Responds Richard North of EU Referendum: “Note, however, the use of the word ‘can’. He does not say that the ‘date stamps’ are wrong.” EU Referendum has also uncovered strange anomalies in the photos themselves: some workers are wearing different gear in different photos, yet clearly carrying the same corpse. Richard North comments about one of these workers: “It stretches belief to breaking point to argue that, on his way to the ambulance, he took off his helmet, his fluorescent waistcoat and his flack jacket just in order to pose for the cameras putting the body in the wagon – especially as we have the body being placed on the ‘guerney’ – which means the scenes are totally inconsistent.”
The very existence of these pictures raises more questions. As Israel Insider puts it: “While Hezbollah and its apologists have been claiming that civilians could not freely flee the scene due to Israeli destruction of bridges and roads, the journalists and rescue teams from nearby Tyre had no problem getting there.”
The Christian Lebanese website LIBANOSCOPIE has charged that Hizballah staged the entire incident in order to stimulate calls for a ceasefire, thereby staving off its destruction by Israel and Lebanese plans to rid themselves of this terrorist plague: “We have it from a credible source that Hizbullah, alarmed by Siniora’s plan, has concocted an incident that would help thwart the negotiations. Knowing full well that Israel will not hesitate to bombard civilian targets, Hizbullah gunmen placed a rocket launcher on the roof in Qana and brought disabled children inside, in a bid to provoke a response by the Israeli Air Force. In this way, they were planning to take advantage of the death of innocents and curtail the negotiation initiative.”
According to the German scholar Matthias Küntzel, “the Berlin daily the Tagesspiegel published a letter-to-the-editor from Dr. Mounir Herzallah, a Shiite from the South of Lebanon. Dr. Herzallah reports on how Hezbollah-terrorists came to his town, dug a munitions depot and then built a school and a residence directly over it. He writes: ‘Laughing, a local sheikh explained to me that the Jews lose either way: either because the rockets are fired at them or because, if they attack munitions depot, they are condemned by world public opinion on account of the dead civilians.’ Hezbollah, he says, uses the civilian population ‘as a human shield and then when they are dead as propaganda.’”
Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, declared that “War is deceit.” Specifically, he taught that lying was permissible in battle.[1] While the doctrines of religious deception (taqiyya and kitman) are most often identified with Shi’ite Islam, and ostensibly rejected by Sunnis, because they were sanctioned by the Prophet, they can still be found in traditions that Sunni Muslims consider reliable, and are practiced among Salafis. Jihadists today have spoken of the usefulness of deceptive practices.
This is not the first time Islamofascists have used manufactured "atrocities" to bring condemnation to Israel. The same kind of thing was tried in the case of Mohammed al-Dura and more recently in the Gaza beach explosion which killed seven Palestinians. A good clue that an incident is a set-up will be the fact that a team of cameramen will "just happen" be right there on the spot ready to capture the images for distribution to the world media.
What we have to remember is that the international news media is, with few exceptions, a partisan player in these events. They have chosen sides and the side they have picked is not the Western democratic one. They will be quick to spread the images of Qana as long as it is seen to be the result of Israeli military action, but they will be glacially slow in reporting evidence that the deaths are the result of Hezbollah murder.
Why the international media have willingly turned themselves into Janissaries for the Islamofascist savages is beyond my understanding but understanding or not we had better acknowledge it and act accordingly.
Israel expands ground operations
This seems to be a week for good news. First Castro seems to be circling the bowl and now we hear that Israel is not allowing the international community to arm-twist it into backing down from its campaign to crush Hezbollah. The Washington Post is reporting the following: ZARIT, Israel, Aug. 2 -- Thousands of Israeli soldiers streamed into southern Lebanon on Tuesday, as clashes with Hezbollah fighters in at least half a dozen towns marked an intensified ground campaign to dislodge Hezbollah strongholds that have withstood three weeks of aerial bombardment. The Israeli military said it also planned to resume wide-scale air attacks after a 48-hour slowdown following an airstrike Sunday that killed more than 50 civilians, most of them children, in the Lebanese village of Qana.
Israeli troops carried out an operation in the eastern city of Baalbek early Wednesday, "hitting a number of terrorists and arresting several," an Israeli military spokeswoman said Wednesday morning. She said all of the Israeli forces returned to the bases safely.
Hezbollah said on its al-Manar television station that its fighters battled Israeli commandos who launched a raid on a hospital in the city beginning at about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday.
All I can say here is, "Thank God for the internet". If it weren't for the 'net how many of you would know that the building which collapsed and killed those "more than 50 civilians, most of them children" in Qana was still standing hours after the Israeli air raid? It is getting harder and harder for the Islamofascists to manufacture atrocities for propaganda purposes.Israeli officials said both air and land attacks would accelerate in the next few days as the military pushes deeper into southern Lebanon in an effort to clear a broad swath of villages and towns of Hezbollah fighters and the equipment they use to fire missiles into Israel. Israel has ordered its army to punch all the way to the Litani River, Israeli officials said.
Israeli military leaders said they were bracing for some of the toughest fighting in the 21-day campaign against Hezbollah.
"They are very hard to identify, very hard to know where they are," Brig. Gen. Shuki Shachar, deputy commander of the Israeli army's northern forces, told reporters Tuesday. "And it's very hard to hit them and not hit the population that they use in a cynical way."
They are hard to identify because they don't wear uniforms and they operate within the civilian population like Mao's proverbial "fish through water". They use occupied civilian homes as armories and launching pads for their rockets in the HOPE that counter battery fire will kill civilians, especially children.
Even the Nazis did not hide behind German children.Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told graduates of the National Security College near Tel Aviv, "We have said we would agree to a cease-fire once we know with certainty the conditions in the field will be different than those that led to the eruption of this war."
He added: "Every additional day is one that erodes the power of this cruel enemy. Every additional day, the Israeli army reduces their ability to fire and also their ability to strike in the future."
I have not been a fan of Olmert and his plans to surrender land to the Palestinians, but he seems to "get it" in this case.
In some quarters much is being said about Dr. Rice's statements relating to a cease-fire:Meanwhile in Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on the PBS "NewsHour" that she saw a cease-fire in Lebanon coming in a matter of "days, not weeks."
Rice is giving out the message designed to comfort the European Union, meanwhile the expanded ground operations in Lebanon are showing what the United States' real position is. There is simply no way that Olmert would be widening the war without assurances from the White House that the US stood behind him 100%.
I'm sure that I join with most of you in wishing the IDF good luck and good hunting.
To lock or unlock
I have a friend who was looking for a .40 caliber Glock. He went to a gun store which happened to only stock Glocks with the optional internal lock. The salesman was showing him how the lock worked by dry firing the pistol and then locking it to demonstrate how the gun could not be fired with the lock engaged. The Glock would not unlock. My friend left the store with the salesman still trying to unlock the gun.
He wound up buying a Glock without the locking device. He was able to do this because Glock offers the lock as an option. Smith and Wesson has decided that their customers do not deserve a choice about such things. They have taken the decision to include an internal lock on all of their revolvers.
The S&W lock is located in the frame near, and in some cases behind, the cylinder latch. In some guns it is necessary to move the cylinder latch forward to insert the key which locks/unlocks the gun. All Smith revolvers sold in the American market have this feature.
This is not a good thing. The S&W lock is made of several small stamped metal parts and a tiny spring. Each little part must work correctly or the gun will fail to lock, or much worse, fail to unlock. The July/August, 2006 issue of American Handgunner has an article by Charles E Petty about this.
Now the first thing you need to understand is this. If you look up “gunwriter” in a thesaurus you will find synonyms like “whore”, “liar”, “paid advertising flack” and so on. In other words gun magazines exist to sell advertising to companies that make firearms, firearms accessories, and other products that gun owners are likely to buy. The articles which take up space between the ads serve the function of promoting the products which are advertised in the magazine.
On the staff of any gun magazine the advertising department has more power than the executive editor. Gun company PR flacks have the ability to get gun scribes fired from staff positions and can make sure that freelance writers never make another sale, at least not under their real name.
For this reason you must understand that when Mr. Petty wrote about the problems that Smith & Wesson is having with their gun locks the entire purpose of the article was to downplay and dismiss any concern that potential S&W customers might have. It seems that Smith has been having a problem with the locks engaging during firing and locking the guns up. On the target range this is annoying; in a gunfight this could easily be fatal.
Reports of the lock failures have been circulating on the internet so the first thing Petty does is to make sure that the reader knows that everything you read on the ‘net is pure bullshit and should under no circumstances be relied upon.
Next Petty called up Smith & Wesson to ask them about the problem. Now since I can’t prove that S&W called up American Handgunner editor Roy Huntington and ordered him to publish an article pooh-poohing the lock failure issue as PR damage control I won’t make that allegation, but the reader may assume what he wishes.
A Smith & Wesson factory rep told Petty that “only a couple of guns have come back” (to the factory for service due to the lock engaging while shooting). The rep went on to say that gunsmiths at S&W were unable to duplicate the condition so the spring was replaced and the gun was returned to the customer (on the theory that it is better to do something than nothing).
One thing you need to remember about shipping a gun back to the factory (or anywhere else for that matter) is that you can’t just mail it. You have to overnight it and that costs $35.00 each way. So the people who sent the guns back to S&W paid at least $70.00 to do it (not counting insurance). This is not something that most people will do for an imaginary problem.
Mr. Petty then took a bunch of S&W revolvers that were being tested (revolvers made available at no charge by S&W so that they could be tested and written about) to the range and fired several cylinders of ammo through them rapid fire double action and did not experience any lock up problems.
On the strength of an afternoon at the range with a few guns and what was probably less than half a case of ammo Petty wants us to draw the conclusion that the lock issue is a non-problem.
Here is something else, by way of background, which you should be aware of. Gun companies like Smith and Wesson have done studies and found out that most people who buy a gun only shoot it around 300 times during the entire time that they own it.
They buy it and take it to the range and shoot it some to make sure that it works then they put it in the nightstand or the glove compartment or the closet or gun safe and only take it out and shoot it rarely. Then it gets traded or sold or given to one of the kids or just kept there on the shelf.
This means that most people who buy a gun never shoot it enough to run into the problems that pop up with extended use. Remember when the FBI made the switch to automatics after the tragic Miami shootout? The Bureau wanted a pistol that they cold issue to cadets at the Academy and have them carry and shoot monthly for their entire 20 or 30 year career.
Most of the guns that were submitted failed due to the inability to withstand that much shooting. The factory representative from Sigarms even told the FBI that if they wanted a gun that could withstand 11000 plus rounds to forget an aluminum frame.
The reason that there are almost no stories of frame failures floating around the civilian firearms community is because almost no one shoots their gun that much. Therefore it is neither surprising nor comforting that there are only a handful of stories of S&W lock failures. Unless the lock is defective from the factory very few shooters will put enough rounds through the tube to cause it to break from normal wear and tear.
But little stamped metal moving parts that function in an environment of recoil have to be prone to failure with enough use, unless S&W has figured out a way around the laws of physics.
If you don’t think that you are going to shoot a gun that much and you don’t mind playing the odds go ahead and buy a locking Smith. But if you are like me and you don’t own a gun that you don’t shoot you might want to think long and hard.
Another issue to consider is what the hell good is the lock anyway? If you intend to store the gun in an unready state (that is in a condition that does not allow it to be simply picked up and fired) then it should be unloaded and stored in a secure location. If the gun is to be kept in a ready state for duty, concealed carry or home defense then you do not want to lock it and have to depend on your ability to locate and manipulate something about the size and shape of a handcuff key to make your gun ready to shoot.
The only purpose the lock serves is to make trouble for you in court and assist the anti-gun moonbats in discrediting self defense as a valid reason to own a gun. If you do not use the lock and an accident happens you will be crucified in court for neglecting a safety device that could have prevented the accident. It is hoped that this will frighten enough gun owners into using the lock that there will be some cases of gun owners trying to defend themselves with guns which they are unable to unlock in time.
The antis will then be able to say that the gun in the home was useless. The bad guy took it away from the home owner and now it is on the street endangering innocent lives.
Whether you want a gun with an internal lock up to you. Do your homework and make an informed decision. As for me, I love S&W revolvers, but I will only be buying older used ones from now on.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Castro to assume room temperature?
I went over to see what KillCastro was saying about Fidel's situation:
for whom the bells won't toll
That'd be a great title for a novel about the final days of the beast.
No bell will ever toll for him.
At least, not in mourning.
The only bells that will toll will do it for the beginning of a new era for Cuba and the Cubans, the bells will herald a new country, the awakening of the Phoenix from its ashes, Cuba will stand up from the mud, the blood, the debris, and will recuperate its place among the free nations.
The carcass of the dictator will lie, without pain or glory.
The only tears that are going to be shed will be the tears of joy.
The bells are not tolling for you, fidel kasstro.
The bells are tolling for a brand new nation under the sun.
To all Cuban-Americans. I share your joy at the prospect of the death of Castro and his evil regime. My prayers are for the rebirth of Cuba as a prosperous and free nation.
Is that a light at the end of Cuba's tunnel?
Psycmeister has a report that Fidel Castro transferred his power to his brother Raul while he underwent surgery.
Both of the Castro brothers are getting on in years and are more and more suffering from ill health so let's wish both of the communist murderers slow and painful deaths followed by an eternity as a pair of charcoal bricketts in Satan's backyard grill.
The Cuban people have suffered long under the lash of this evil pair. May their deaths soon set their people free.
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