Monthly Archives: June 2006

Quote of the day–Robert Whelan

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The right to private property is the Englishman’s right to his castle. This looks to me like the point where Labour has overstepped the mark into behaving more like a dictatorship than a democratic government.

I think anybody whose property is seized under this law should go straight to court to see if a judge thinks it should stand.

Robert Whelan
Representative of Civitas
From Homes of the dead to be seized by the state
June 17, 2006, Daily Mail
[Perhaps Mr. Whelan is using English understatement because in my viewpoint the English politicians started behaving like a dictatorship when they started putting restrictions on firearms.  And when they seize the property of the dead, remove the contents, and rent it out for their own gain it’s way past the point of “seeing a judge things it should stand”.  It’s time to exercise your right to keep and bear arms.  But the people are just now realizing they waited too long to do that.  HT to Ry for pointing this out.–Joe]

This is what we are dealing with

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Barbarism:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 20 — The American military said today that it had found the remains of what appears to be the two American soldiers captured by insurgents last week in an ambush south of the capital, and a senior Iraqi military official said the two men had been “brutally tortured.”

Major General William B. Caldwell IV, the American military spokesman, said “the remains” of what are believed to be the two Americans were found near a power plant in the vicinity of Yusefiya, about three miles from the site were they had been captured by insurgents.

General Caldwell declined to speak in detail about the physical condition of those who had been found, but he said that the cause of death could not be determined. He said the remains of the men would be sent to the United States for DNA testing to determine definitively their identities. That seemed to suggest that the two Americans had been wounded or mutilated beyond recognition.

Maj. Gen. Abdul Azziz Mohammed Jassim, the chief of operations of the Ministry of Defense, said that he had seen an official report and that he could confirm the two Americans had been “killed in a very brutal way and tortured.”

“There were traces of torture on their bodies, very clear traces,” General Jassim said. “It was a brutal torture. The torture was something unnatural.”

If those are the rules they are playing by then we should play by the same rules.  Unless they surrender and/or cooperate with allied forces our treating of their dead, wounded, and captured “with respect” makes us appear weak to them. Our rules of war lower the “cost” for them to be at war with us.  The lower the cost for them the longer we will be at war and the more dead of our own we will have to endure.  We need to raise the cost.  Feed them to the hogs and prevent them from getting their 72 virgins.  We need to maximize their cost in every way we can.

This barbaric act will virtually ensure that no more U.S. soldiers will be taken alive or at least conscious.  They will fight to the last bullet and last ounce of strength.

Quote of the day–Mujahedeen Shura Council

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We announce the good news to our Islamic nation that we executed God’s will and slaughtered the two crusader animals we had in captivity. And God has given our Emir, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, the good fortune of carrying out the legitimate court’s command in person.

Mujahedeen Shura Council
A group linked to al Qaeda
CNN June 20, 2006
U.S.: Two missing soldiers found dead
[The Geneva and Hague Conventions do not apply to these Muslim extremists who do not abide by it themselves.  We need to start feeding them, dead or alive, to the hogs.–Joe]

An important admission

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Ms. Cuiker made a slip of the tongue (or pen) and said the following in an LA Times article about the Canadian gun registry:

Although it doesn’t directly address the problem of illegal handguns, the registry helps create a culture in which guns are seen as dangerous…

As gun rights activists have been saying for years, they want to demonize us.  It’s not about saving lives or facts, these laws they want passed are about demonizing gun owners.  It’s about creating the appearance of danger in spite of the facts.

Quote of the day–Bruce Schneier

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You just have to be thankful he wasn’t an underwear bomber.

Bruce Schneier
TALES FROM THE CRYPT(OGRAPHER)
Bostons weekly dig
In response to a comment about the TSA requiring the removal of shoes at airport “security” check points because there was one Islamic extremist that tried to blow up a plane with a bomb hidden in his shoe.
[Bruce agrees with me that existing airport “security” is less than worthless.  Read the article.–Joe]

Bloomberg needs to work on knife control

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It’s the knife culture that is out of control!  Not the gun culture!  And it’s in the anti-gun bigot Bloomberg’s city too:

NEW YORK — Police suspect a knife-wielding homeless man went on a rampage, stabbing four people in a bloody 12-hour span, including two Canadian tourists, before police finally nabbed him early Wednesday.

Kenny Alexis, 21, was taken into custody about 4:15 a.m. outside a fast-food restaurant in midtown Manhattan shortly after the two Canadian women were stabbed, police Commissioner Ray Kelly said.

The women were identified as Melanie Carrier, 22, and Audrey Perrier, 25, both of Montreal.

Carrier remained in hospital Wednesday afternoon, awaiting surgery on her lower back, police said. Perrier was treated and released.

The other two victims, a man from Texas and another man not identified, were in hospital. All of the victims are expected to survive.

Police say Alexis had in his possession the knife used in the attack on the two women and investigators were attempting to link it to two separate subway ambushes that took place earlier.

They complain about “silencers” and “high capacity guns” but they don’t seem to realize a knife is a lot like a suppressed (very short ranged) gun you don’t have to stop and reload.

Bomb help 2005 update

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I’ve updated the Bomb Help 2005 web page.  There are a lot more I need to put up–including a bunch from 2006.  I just haven’t gotten around to getting their email and my responses on the website.  I just hadn’t felt like responding to these clueless twerps for the last year.  I’d look at their messages and draw a blank so they just queued up in my “Bomb help” folder until today.  Then I sort of cut loose when a new one came in today.  Altogether, I think there was 23 of them I responded to today. The people on the Bomb Help Fan Club email list probably thought I was spamming them. 

My favorites from this batch are here:

Oh, I’m getting responses back from some of them too.  This could be lots of fun.

Overtime sucks

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Overtime has both it’s advantages and disadvantages.  The increased pay is nice but the extra hours are seldom fun even if you enjoy your work.  In this case I’m sure it literally sucks:

BERLIN: Sex workers in Berlin have gone into extra time at the World Cup and are doing double shifts to cash in, a German newspaper said on Wednesday.

“Berlin’s hookers are groaning – all brothels are creaking at the seams,” mass daily Bild reported. “In some establishments the girls already have to put in double shifts owing to the World Cup,” the paper added, saying clients were virtually queuing up to get in to the host nation’s ‘Freudenhauser’ (literally, joy houses). One taxi driver was quoted as saying he had taken a fare from four would-be customers of some of the capital’s estimated 8,000 prostitutes.

“But they were turned away. The places are too full.” German police said last week there were no signs of forced prostitution being on the rise. Be that as it may, with around a million fans having come over for the month-long football showpiece and with prostitution legal in Germany, supply is clearly meeting demand. Bild quoted Josephine Conte of Berlin’s upmarket Bel Ami establishment, one of 400 “joy houses” in the city, as saying demand had gone through the roof and that her employees were having to put in “special shifts.”

She explained: “We have VIP reservations right through to the end of the tournament. Sometimes we don’t know where to put all the men!” According to ‘Joy’, a 21-year-old woman doing the morning shift with seven colleagues, “the guys come for a massage as they want to relax before the game.” But “the guests must be patient with waiting times of up to two hours,” according to Conte. It’s hard work, says another ‘Joy,’ a blonde aged 23 who says she sometimes puts in a 16-hour day, though some of that is on call after a regular shift.

“We are earning as much in one day as we normally would in a week. “But after the World Cup I’ll need a holiday.”

Posted in Sex

Get your Windows update installed soon

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I got an email at work yesterday saying I needed to update all my Windows machines.  I did so and it seemed like there were a LOT of updates.  I updated my boxes at my “home” in the Seattle area and had James (who is staying with me until he can move into his new apartment tomorrow) do the same.  It turns out there were a very large number of updates released by Microsoft yesteday and a lot of them were for security vulnerabilities.

The vulnerabilities being fixed makes them known to attackers. If you haven’t updated your computer after the fixes have been released then you are, in most cases, more vulnerable than before they were released. Update your computer now.

Quote of the day–Alan Gottlieb

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The right of citizens to be safe in their homes and communities can never be subject to a popular vote.

It is astonishing that in a city where the leaders preach how open they are to diversity, they encouraged voters to blindly march to the polls last November to practice a blatant, egregious and despicable form of social bigotry against their neighbors and fellow citizens.

Working to deprive others of their property and their right to self-defense just because you don’t like firearms is morally repugnant, and with today’s ruling, the people who pushed Proposition H last fall should feel ashamed of themselves.

Alan Gottlieb
Second Amendment Foundation
June 13, 2006
Judge Rejects San Francisco’s Handgun Ban
[I’m pleased SAF/CCRKBA is continuing to push the bigotry meme.  Also of interest is the city bigots announced today they are going to appeal the decision.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Raymond Chen

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It would be unreasonable to expect the HTML parser to be able to understand every language both present and future. (At least not until clairvoyance has been perfected.)

Raymond Chen
June 5, 2006
[I absolutely love this quote.  Understatement in the first sentence followed by the only known exception to the stated rule.  Succinct yet complete encapsulation of the situation.  Some people get annoyed at me when I find exceptions to their overly broad generalizations but I think they are an essential component of understanding the situation and almost always just trying to help.  Today, as most days, Raymond is my technological and word-smithing hero.-Joe]

Hate crimes

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You probably have to be a numbers geek to enjoy this but since this is my blog and I am a numbers geek you get the “benefits”.  Clayton Cramer computes how hated you are based on the number of crimes committed against various groups (racial, sexual orientation, and religious belief) as compared to what is to be expected from your representation in the population.  So for example, if the group you belong to composes 10% of the U.S. population yet suffers 20% of the hate crimes you are hated more than a group that composes 80% of the population and suffers 40% of the hate crimes. 

What group do you think is the most hated?  Blacks maybe?  They used to get lynched for looking at white women “the wrong way”.  Nope, not the most hated anymore.

What about Jews?  They were considered the “spawn of the devil”, “controlled the banks”, and “vermin that spread disease.”  Nazi Germany was implementing the “Final Solution” just 65 years ago.  There still must be a lot of residual hate for them, right?  Not all that much in this country anyway.  In the Mideast I’m sure it’s tough to top their score.

Maybe it’s the Muslims.  It was Muslim extremists that perpetrated 9-11, the first World Trade Center bombing, the Beslan school hostage crisis, and nearly all the casualties of our armed forces in the last few years.  Surely they are the most hated.  Nope.

What about homosexuals?  The Pink Pistols haven’t really caught on enough to prevent gay bashing, right?  I’m not sure about the effect of the Pink Pistols on hate crimes against gays but homosexuals only come in at number two.

The most hated group is not identified by religion or sexual orientation.  This group is identified by “race” (the definition of “race” is a topic for another time) and I’m a member.  Read the Clayton’s post for details.  This runs counter to the Seattle School Districts definition of racist however.

Update: I fixed the example in the first paragraph.  I was in a hurry and made a major error in my haste which defeated my attempt at clarification.