Here’s a multiple choice exam.  The man who attacked the Discovery Channel today had a manifesto.  In it, he rants about human population control, immigration, war, global warming, the economy, housing, endangered species, etc.  With the exception of a rant on illegal immigration, it’s mostly radical left wing environmentalist stuff.

Is the appropriate response to this loser to:

1) Claim that he’s obviously been inspired by the anti-wealth and environmental rhetoric of the left, just as right-wing violence has been inspired by anti-government rhetoric?

2) Admit he’s just a nut and the political rantings of nuts should not be taken seriously?  He could just as well have been ranting about the aliens controlling his mind as environmentalism?

3) Claim that this man is a nut and his rantings don’t impugn the Left; but rantings of anti-government loons definitely impugn the Right?

I’ll give you three guesses as to where the Left Wing commentariat is going with this. Anti-immigrant sentiment formed a very small part of this manifesto.

I haven’t commented on the Glenn Beck rally this weekend since I was in transit and it crossed me as more of a religious revival than a political event, which set by interest-o-meter to “low”.  However, one interesting aspects of it was the failed attempts by the Left to find racist signs in the rally.  The Beck people actually asked people not to bring signs to the rally as they wanted to keep it less political.

But that’s good enough for some people.  Apparently, this is not about message discipline; this is just masking the real racism that festers in the hearts of the Beckistas.

You just can’t win with these people.  If protestors show up with racist signs—even if, as happened with Dale Robertson—they are immediately asked to leave, this unveils secret racism.  If signs are discouraged, this conceals racism.  Either way, they’re a bunch of racists.

Update: Incidentally, the rally for Beck involved leaders of all faiths, including Islam, and raised millions to benefit the children of soldiers.  What a horrible horrible thing to go on in Washington.

On November 5th, 2008 the smug liberals told us that they had finally crushed the idiotic and evil machine, that the American people had spoken, and that collectivism was the wave of the future. Unlike their reactions in 2000 - where they simply decided to ignore reality and created the twisted notion in their even more twisted minds that the one that stole the election was Bush & the SCOTUS, and not Gore with his army of lawyers and the Florida Supremes – which started the liberal slide into illogical insanity, and 2004, where they were dejected to see the country simply not trust that buffoon John Kerry, and driven even further into the wilderness, they could not wait to get out and rub salt into the wounds of the opposition. We were told that the world was finally saved, that other countries would finally love us again, the economy would be fixed, that evil America would stop torturing people and inflict war on poor people whose only crime was that they were brown, everyone would magically be working according to their ability, and get back according to their needs, and Utopia would follow. Cats and dogs would start living together! Oh wait, that was Bill Murray’s character in Ghost Busters, but you get the point. They laid it on thick.

We were promised decades of liberal rule for the evils of the capitalist right. Many of us that experienced the Carter years and knew better, told them that the gloat was not just premature, but that once the American people got a taste of the insanity that’s part & parcel of the left’s ideology and governing, that they would sour on it, and sour on it fast. So it isn’t a surprise to me to discover that just 2 years into their reign of fire that Americans now trust the GOP more on almost all election issues, as the below graph clearly shows.

I and many others weren’t fooled for a second by Obama and the demcorats sweet talking and promises of “Hope & Change” – as I said I remember the Carter years, and to anyone that was paying real attention the left’s ideological shift was so drastic it compared to Carter idiocy redux on steroids - that these people could do anything but set us back. The GOP might have been bad at these things when they had power, but the demcorats, especially the current crop of elitist bastards and crooks, make the GOP losers look damned awesome. And the shift took just 2 years of liberal policy & rule to happen.

No, this is not me gloating. I remain quite aware that the GOP will now actually have to do what the American people want, or they too will face our wrath, and then sooner than later. It might surprise you that am actually looking forward to that, though. I seriously believe that if the GOP, once they have power, doesn’t derail this collectivist behemoth that is driving us at Warp speed into the abyss, reverses course of this out of control spending and lunacy, and lets the American people down yet again, that they will be gone too. The one thing I do know is that the American people, now that they know what they will get under democrat rule, the disastrous policies and last 2 years will still be fresh in their minds, will not go back to the demcorats. At least not the sane ones. And while I expect the left to revert to the same tired tactics of the 8 tiresome Bush years, I doubt the American people will buy either the propaganda or the obstructionist anti-Americanism. It will be their Armageddon if they do so. We might even end up with a third party finally breaking the deadlock that elephants and donkeys have had on our government, and even might be set back on the path of exceptionally when they finally gut that bureaucratic monster that pretends to be serving our needs while really enslaving us to its ever growing appetite for control and power.

Miss him yet?

Reason has a cool thread on Obama’s new threads.  He’s apparently put a new rug in the oval office that has five quotes.  Here they are:

“The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The Arc of the Moral Universe is Long, But it Bends Towards Justice,” Martin Luther King Jr.

“Government of the People, By the People, For the People,” President Abraham Lincoln

“No Problem of Human Destiny is Beyond Human Beings,” President John F. Kennedy

“The Welfare of Each of Us is Dependent Fundamentally Upon the Welfare of All of Us,” President Theodore Roosevelt

Fairly blah, as you would expect from our President.  I’m not fond of the last one.  So the question becomes: what quotes would you put in the Oval Office?  The Reason commenters are going with humor—I particularly like this one:

“That rug really tied the room together, did it not?”

Which works on so many levels, given that Obama is doing to the Constitution what Jackie Treehorn’s thugs did to the rug.  We can go with humor, but I’ll take a serious spin on my quotes.  There was a fantastic article a couple of weeks ago from the incomparable Jonah Lehrer on the corrupting effects of power.  Essentially, we tend to give power to good people.  But power tends to make them into bad people.

Mr. Keltner compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that’s crucial for empathy and decision-making. Even the most virtuous people can be undone by the corner office.

So I would want quotes that would remind me of the dangers of power.  Things like:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” - H. L. Mencken

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” - P. J. O’Rourke

“A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.” - Robert A. Heinlein

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” - Thomas Jefferson

“Four-fifths of all our troubles would disappear, if we would only sit down and keep still.” - Calvin Coolidge

Actually, I would take five quotes from any of those men in lieu of what Obama chose.  Apologies to Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, Penn Jillette, Barry Goldwater, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.

Anyway, have at it.  Funny quotes, ironic quotes, inspiring ones.  Go nuts.

Tonight President Obama is scheduled to deliver a speech about the whole Iraq situation. Frankly I am intrigued at how the morons in the WH will try to play this. It seems all bad things they inherited from Bush, but this victory that clearly came from the efforts of our troops that these same grandstanding demcorats put in harms way with their actions and words, and the conviction of President Bush to fight it despite the fact that the opposition was trying to hand our troops another Vietnam-like loss - if you believe the talking heads that are predicting this - that the WH is going to claim is theirs. I doubt Obama will give credit to Bush for this, because that’s not his way. If he does, he will somewhere in there take it back and blame Bush. Maybe by indirectly brining up the liberal meme that Bush faked the intel, red meat for the morons that buy this crap, or some such other nonsense. I certainly hope he credits the troops. And of course he will play to his left wing moonbats and claim he is keeping his promise. The problem is that it will be all show, and we won despite of him and his party, while there is still a risk that we might be pulling out too soon.

The fact is that Obama was part & parcel of the donkey lineup that made the claim back when Bush’s team announced they would pursue the surge option, that it was going to fail. I do give him credit for not declaring it a failure before it happened like Reed did, or for slandering our troops or taking other actions to help the enemy’s cause like Murtha and other demcorats did, but Obama was one of the people that tried - real hard - to derail any and all efforts intended to support our troops and give them what they needed to win in Iraq. Obama made it a point during his campaigning – I mean before the election, not the continued campaigning they are doing almost 2 years after taking the WH and that is making everyone stop wondering if these morons know anything else – to say Iraq was still a failure, and that unless he was elected to fix it by pulling out the troops, things would get even worse. In short, this guy, while not going as far as many in his party have, was if not outright rooting for us to lose in Iraq, at least vested in making our efforts in Iraq look & go bad, for political and personal gain. And the troops at least seem to know that. Of course, I doubt the Lame Stream Media will bring any of that up.

Even more interesting, as I already pointed out, is the fact that most believe that Obama is about to likely claim he kept his campaign promise and that this withdrawal is due his work, when there is no doubt for anyone willing to do the leg work that the pullout going on right now was following Bush’s team’s withdrawal time table, set a long time ago, and the only contribution from the Obama team was that they didn’t fuck it all up in Iraq and pull defeat right out of the jaws of victory before now, as many of us suspected they would. My guess is that the LSM would go right along and hand him that credit. After all, he is their guy, and he desperately needs to be propped up, because the mood of the American people after seeing Obama & the progressive left in action these past 2 years is dour indeed, and November promises a massacre at the polls for the left.

Then you have the fact that Obama now is ramping up the fighting in Afghanistan, which promises to be a difficult and costly slugfest. I wonder if he and his team realize now why Bush’s team moved the fight to Iraq back in 2003. And this whole endeavor seems to be mired in doubt, what with all the talk of a fixed withdrawal table and all, despite the fact he has put General Petraeus whom immediately opted to go on the offensive and actually do some killin’ – hear much about that in the LSM these days? No stories of US troops murdering babies either, huh? - in charge of that operation as well. And then there is of course Iran, which I still feel Bush made a mistake not to deal with at the same time as they took on Iraq.

Say what you want, but tonight’s speech should be interesting. At least it should provide people with a lot to waste time on. Me, I bet it will be a lot of nothing, Obama grandstanding and campaigning, taking credit for other people’s work, blaming Bush as usual for his mistakes, and then the fawning LSM telling us how lucky we are to have this guy in charge. I sure hope I am wrong.

What the hell, man?

Two men taken off a Chicago-to-Amsterdam United Airlines flight in the Netherlands have been charged by Dutch police with “preparation of a terrorist attack,” U.S. law enforcement officials tell ABC News.

...

The two were allowed to board the flight at O’Hare airport last night despite security concerns surrounding one of them, the officials said.

The men were identified as Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi, of Detroit, MI, and Hezem al Murisi, the officials said. A neighbor of al Soofi told ABC News he is from Yemen.

Airport security screeners in Birmingham, Alabama first stopped al Soofi and referred him to additional screening because of what officials said was his “bulky clothing.”

In addition, officials said, al Soofi was found to be carrying $7,000 in cash and a check of his luggage found a cell phone taped to a Pepto-Bismol bottle, three cell phones taped together, several watches taped together, a box cutter and three large knives. Officials said there was no indication of explosives and he and his luggage were cleared for the flight from Birmingham to Chicago O’Hare.

Once in Chicago, officials say they learned al Soofi checked his luggage on a flight to Washington’s Dulles airport for connections on flights to Dubai and then Yemen, even though he did not board the flight himself.

Instead, officials say, al Soofi was joined by the second man, Al Murisi, and boarded the United flight from Chicago to Amsterdam.

When Customs and Border officials learned al Soofi was not on the flight from Dulles to Dubai, the plane was ordered to return to the gate so his luggage could be removed. Officials said additional screening found no evidence of explosives.

I just flew to Australia and back.  During that time, I was patted down, forced to take my laptop out of its supposedly X-ray friendly bag, asked questions about my wife’s medicine and put in an X-ray backscatter machine that irradiated me and snapped pictures of my junk.  Read this story about TSA digging through a woman’s purse and accusing her of embezzlement because she had checks on her (note: TSA is not supposed to be screen for criminal activity).

And these bozos were allowed to board not one but two flights with a mock bomb in their luggage?  And they were then allowed to check their luggage on one flight while they boarded another and escaped to Europe?  The excuse I expect to be made is that they were flagged by TSA and their luggage searched and found to be harmless.  But you don’t let mock bombs go through.  That only sets the stage for them to try with real bombs and non-bulky clothing. I mean, what is a cell phone strapped a bottle of Pepto suposed to be if not a mock bomb?  Was he planning to call the bottle when he landed to make sure it was OK?

Stories like this make me really think our elaborate security screenings are so much anti-terrorism kabuki.  The illusion of safety is more important than the reality of it.

One of the problems I’m having with so-called green technologies (which are often not so green) is that we seem to be going backward in terms of progress. Many of them are simply not up to the technologies they are replacing in terms of performance.  A perfect example would be the time I spent in Australia stumbling around half-lit rooms because the government has mandated the use of CFC bulbs.  They’ve come a long way but they still do not light up completely for some time.  And maybe it’s just me, but I think having well-lit rooms is a hallmark of civilization.

The same is true of other technologies.  My wife has a new Apple laptop and it’s far less stable and reliable than our old one.  Does this have something to do with the “greening” of the apple brand and the banishment of nasty evil chemicals like lead (see here for one of the drawbacks of the lead ban)?

Now we find out that one of the hallmarks of civilization—pest-free bedding, may be being sacrificed on the alter of environmentalism:

While worst in the Northeast and especially New York City, blood-sucking bed bugs are making a remarkably rapid resurgence worldwide.

....

But why are bed bugs back? Though they’ve been sucking humans’ blood since at least ancient Greece, bed bugs became virtually extinct in America following the invention of pesticide DDT.

There were almost no bed bugs in the United States between World War II and the mid-1990s.

Around when bed bugs started their resurgence, Congress passed a major pesticides law in 1996 and the Clinton EPA banned several classes of chemicals that had been effective bed bug killers.

I know you’re thinking about the DDT ban, but the DDT ban is a little overblown since many insects have developed a tolerance for it. However, malathion and propoxur do work. The EPA-approved chemicals don’t kill bedbugs; they simply stun the little bastards.  Environmental groups complain that the effective pesticides have known health concerns.  But there’s a tradeoff here.  Most people will accept a little health risk if it means they don’t spend their nights being attacked by vermin.

And therein lies the problem.  To the radical environmentalists, there are no tradeoffs.  Anything dangerous or icky has to be banned, whether we have a replacement for it or not.

Have fun.

Just for the hell of it,
Great shooting and Great tunes.

and