Category Archives: Current News

This is about stuff in the mass media that generally has a short interest life span. Speculation about an election outcome a few days before the election is an example.

Quote of the day—ISIS

Posted on by

To the filthy and coward non-believers and to the holders of the Christ emblem, we bring the good news, which will keep them awake, that a new generation in the Islamic State … that loves death more than life … this generation will only grow steadfast on the path to Jihad, stay determined to seek revenge and be violent toward them.

ISIS
August 30, 2016
ISIS spokesman killed in Aleppo, group says
[Read that carefully and remember this:

  • They think of you as a filthy and cowardly non-believer.
  • As long as you are a non-believer ISIS will be determined to be violent against you.
  • The new generation in the Islamic State loves death more than life.

It would appear to me they desire we make one of only two active choices. In either case we give them what they want. Although there is potential for other, long term, active choices if I were directly faced with making the decision on short notice I know what my choice would be.—Joe]

Mugme street news

Posted on by

Man Arrested After Assaulting Three People With Baseball Bat:

Officers arrested a 38-year-old man Wednesday in downtown Seattle after he attacked three people with a baseball bat.

Around 10 AM, the suspect approached a 39-year-old man at Westlake Park and asked for a cigarette. When the man declined, the suspect brandished his bat and struck the victim in the arm.

The suspect then walked down the street to 5th Avenue and Pine Street and attacked a man and a woman, both 65. The suspect fled, dropping his weapon as he walked off.

SPD bike officers were able to locate suspect and arrest him within seven minutes of the first 911 call about the incident.

Okay this started one block northeast of Mugme Street but it’s close enough.

That’s deadly force he was using on people. The guy is lucky he didn’t get shot.

When I worked downtown I would get off the bus in the morning at Westlake Park and I would frequently walk through a corner of it to go to lunch.

Use cash

Posted on by

I use a credit/debit card online. But when I’m in a physical store, except in rare cases, I use cash. This is one of the reasons why:

Clothing store chain Eddie Bauer said today it has detected and removed malicious software from point-of-sale systems at all of its 350+ stores in North America, and that credit and debit cards used at those stores during the first six months of 2016 may have been compromised in the breach.

I work in security and POS systems are one of the things we watch and worry about a lot.

What media bias?

Posted on by

Via Paul Koning we have The Unknown Olympic Champion Kim Rhode has won medals in six games. Cue the non-coverage:

How do you manage to win a medal at six straight Olympics and remain more or less unknown? The answer: win by shooting a gun. American skeet-shooter Kim Rhode last week became the first athlete, male or female, to win a medal at six summer games and the first on five continents, but don’t look for her on a box of Wheaties.

Mrs. Rhode, who won a bronze medal in Rio, has received little media attention despite her historic feat. The 37-year-old also lacks a single major corporate sponsor, though her ammunition and training costs are offset with sponsorship and donations from such firearms companies as Beretta and Otis Technology.

Her agent told Bloomberg he had pitched the sharp-shooter to more than 20 companies, with no luck. Our guess is they don’t want to risk a backlash from the progressive antigun culture. It probably doesn’t help that Mrs. Rhode is an outspoken critic of gun-control laws and a Donald Trump supporter.

What media bias?

Interesting times

Posted on by

It appears there are people, besides me, who really, really don’t want Ms. Clinton to be our next president. Yet another hack at her:

Bill and Hillary Clinton’s charitable foundation hired the security firm FireEye to examine its data systems after seeing indications they might have been hacked, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

So far, no message or document hacked from the New York-based Clinton Foundation has surfaced in public, the sources said.

One of the sources and two U.S. security officials said that like hackers who targeted the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democrats’ congressional fundraising committee, the hackers appear to have used “spear phishing” techniques to gain access to the foundation’s network.

I need a bigger bowl of popcorn.

Quote of the day—Vox Day

Posted on by

Some people cannot be convinced by information. Never forget that. They genuinely believe they are our masters. I expect events will eventually convince them otherwise.

Vox Day
August 13, 2016
Mailvox: the reluctant revolutionary
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

It shouldn’t be as big a problem here

Posted on by

I haven’t heard about this in the U.S. media:

schools are a “top priority” target for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), which delivered a direct threat last December.  The terrorist group’s francophone propaganda magazine, Dar al Islam, urged Muslim parents to remove their children from French schools and to kill teachers, who were called “enemies of Allah” for teaching the French principle of secularism.

Don’t think that the French are any more hated that Americans. It’s a good thing that here in the U.S. that we have a lot of staff in our schools armed and trained to deal with active shooters. Right?

Where’s my popcorn?

Posted on by

The presidential election just got a lot more interesting.

Remember how the Obama admin blocked FBI probe of Clinton Foundation corruption?

Things just changed:

Multiple FBI investigations are underway involving potential corruption charges against the Clinton Foundation, according to a former senior law enforcement official.

It couldn’t have happened to a more appropriate set of people.

Where’s my popcorn?

Shocked, SHOCKED! I tell you….

Posted on by

I’m sure you will be just as shocked as I was to learn that the GAO reports the BATF has accidentally ignored the law and it’s policies and created a gun-owner database via the NICS.

Totally a surprise, amirite?

So what are the odds of a prosecution and destruction of those illegally-kept records, you think? I’m putting it at less than 1%. It Trump wants a few million more votes, promise to prosecute and destroy. (Preferably prosecute the records and destroy the ATF, but I’d settle for t’other way ’round).

I’ve been wondering about this

Posted on by

I’ve speculated with a few people and asking their opinion about the DNC email on Wikileaks. It would seem to me that the U.S. Intelligence community would have an extremely strong motive to damage Hillary. They have a far better motive than the Russians do. After all, one could make a good case that the Russians know they can buy off Hillary if they want.

Of course I’m not the only one to have thought of this possibility.

Via Tyler Durden:

So if the FBI really wanted them they can go into that database and get them right now,” he said of Clinton’s emails as well as DNC emails.

Asked point blank if he believed the NSA has copies of “all” of Clinton’s emails, including the deleted correspondence, Binney confirmed.

“Yes,” he responded. “That would be my point. They have them all and the FBI can get them right there.”

Binney then went on to speculate about something even more shocking: that the hack of the DNC could have been coordinated by someone inside the U.S. intelligence community angry over Clinton’s compromise of national security data with her email use.

And the other point is that Hillary, according to an article published by the Observer in March of this year, has a problem with NSA because she compromised Gamma material.  Now that is the most sensitive material at NSA. And so there were a number of NSA officials complaining to the press or to the people who wrote the article that she did that. She lifted the material that was in her emails directly out of Gamma reporting. That is a direct compromise of the most sensitive material at the NSA. So she’s got a real problem there. So there are many people who have problems with what she has done in the past. So I don’t necessarily look at the Russians as the only one(s) who got into those emails.

Quote of the day—Jonathan S.

Posted on by

The last time Muslims took to beheading Roman Catholic priests, the Roman Catholics damn near burned the Middle East to the ground.

For as important as the Muslims are to history, they sure don’t study it very much.

Jonathan S.
Posted on Facebook July 26, 2016
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Incoherent nonsense

Posted on by

Anti-gun people must live in some sort of incoherent alternate universe. The most recent example Clinton, Dems Put Gun Control at Center of Convention Stage:

Democrats were to hear Tuesday night from the “Mothers of the Movement,” a group of women who have traveled the country to promote gun control and reforms to make police officers more accountable.

The group includes the mothers of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, victims of high-profile police-involved killings. They have campaigned with Clinton, who often refers to them as members of “a club no one wants to be a part of.”

…

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said the shifting landscape is the result of several factors: Shootings such as the Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012, renewed concerns over terrorism and high-profile killings of black men in several cities.

“For the first time, this is a winning issue in the general election,” Murphy said.

So… The police killed Eric Garner with a chokehold, Trayvon Martin was killed with the justified (perhaps even praiseworthy) use of a gun by a private citizen (not a police officer as reported here), and Michael Brown was killed with the certainly praiseworthy use of a gun by a police officer, and somehow this changes the “landscape” such that gun control for private citizens is a winning issue?

This is like someone holding their hands over both eyes and when you ask them why they answer, “The sky is blue and I don’t want to eat.”

These people should be in a psych ward instead of government employees. But then, given the current state of the government and the projected trajectory one could make a convincing case the Federal government is a psych ward with the inmates running the place.

Quote of the day—Mary Bayer @marybayer3

Posted on by

You have to take that sort of moderate, “We just wanna have commmon sense legislation so our children are safe!”

You say shit like that, and then people will buy into it.

Mary Bayer @marybayer3
DNC delegate
July 25, 2016
[See also a shorter version at Say Uncle. I chose this one because it shows her stealing the sign of the people who made the video (the police recovered it from her and returned it to the owners). This demonstrates private property means nothing to her, the First Amendment means nothing to her, and, obviously, the Second Amendment is nothing more than a minor obstacle.

From PVertias Action who made the video:

MaryBayerCoP88qMWEAARV3L

After being included in a tweet about the video she then contacted the police saying that she is being harassed.

Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.

As the video says at the end:

Now we know what Hillary Clinton and the Democrats mean when they say, “Common Sense Gun Legislation”…

We’ve known this for decades, but it’s nice to have them saying it on video.—Joe]

Mass killing in gun free Tokyo

Posted on by

From FoxNews.com:

At least 15 people were killed, and up to 45 injured when a knife-wielding man went on a rampage early Tuesday at a facility for the disabled in the Japanese city of Sagmihara, broadcaster NHK reported.

Never forget that you never need to reload your sword.

Quote of the day—Dr. Keith Ablow

Posted on by

At least 84 people died Thursday night in Nice, France, when a terrorist plowed a truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day. Their deaths should free all of us, once and for all, from the toxic and seditious lie, spread by the likes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, that guns–not madmen or radical Islamics–are a threat to civilized people in America, or in France, or anywhere else.

Dr. Keith Ablow
July 15, 2016
Bastille Day bloodbath in Nice proves that gun control advocates are liars
[Read the whole thing. It’s short and sweet.—Joe]

Save lives! Ignore the Bill of Rights extremists

Posted on by

It occurs to me that we need some common sense regulation to prevent the tragedies in Orlando and Dallas. The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact and the 1st Amendment extremists need to compromise for the safety of everyone.

The five dead and nine wounded in Dallas was predictable, preventable, and should never happen again. All it would take would be a small amount of compromise by the extremists in this country who refuse to consider the most common-sense measures that almost everyone can agree on.

Nearly the same thing can said about the 49 murdered and 53 wounded in Orlando last month. Something like that is entirely predictable and preventable.

Here’s what everyone with a shred of common sense can obviously agree on:

  • The whole “black lives matter” talk should have been shut down as soon as the emotions started getting hostile. Yes, the 1st Amendment says we have a right to free speech but that was before social media, text messages, and email. Bad ideas can travel so fast that people don’t have a cooling off period before a critical mass has formed and we have mass demonstrations before the hot heads get a chance to think thing through. The 1st Amendment was fine when mass distribution of dangerous ideas by common folk meant standing on a soap box in the town square and hoping someone would listen to you.
  • There are virulent strains of both Christianity and Islam are literally deadly to the LGBT community. Again, the 1st Amendment is perceived as a block to common sense regulation by the 1st Amendment extremists. But that was a time when homosexuality not seen for what it is. We now know that, at worst, it is minor quirk of nature in expression of one’s sexual desires that is almost entirely harmless. It’s time to put an end to the violence. All reasonable people must agree that all writings and speech which speak ill of alternate expressions of sexuality or gender must be banned and vigorously rooted and and destroyed. Yes, people have a 1st Amendment right to religion. But there are lots of religious to choose from which are not so dangerous. And the extremists almost never mention the first part of the 1st Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” My common sense proposal doesn’t establish a religion. It merely bans a small subset of religions that are incompatible with modern day society. So how can my proposals possibly be considered as an infringement? It’s just common sense.

Thousands of lives each year of depend upon these sort of common sense laws. We can respect the 1st Amendment and yet save countless lives every year if we don’t let the extremists get in our way.

[end sarcasm]

Useful idiot, or just idiot?

Posted on by

Oh, the irony. “A professor at the Southern State Community College (SSCC) in Ohio is currently under investigation for threatening to shoot up the NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia and Washington lobbyists in order to increase support for anti-gun legislation.”

His FB post read, in part :

“Look, there’s only one solution. A bunch of us anti-gun types are going to have to arm ourselves, storm the NRA headquarters in Fairfax, VA, and make sure there are no survivors.

This action might also require coordinated hits at remote sites, like Washington lobbyists.

Then and only then will we see some legislative action on assault weapons.”

Not sure how someone with this tenuous a grasp of reality manages to become an adjunct prof, but there you have it. And while I’m sure that if he did do that, he might see some action on weapons, but I’m not so sure it would be legislative.

Don’t ever let them tell you nobody wants to take your guns.

New Hillary slogan

Posted on by

From John F. on Facebook:

Grandma Hillary has a new opportunity for a campaign slogan: “Incompetence bordering on criminal.“

Well, she might, using different words claim something like that. It actually was significantly over the border. She was well into illegal alien territory. I just wish we could “deport” her to Leavenworth.

The audacity of hope

Posted on by

My thought exactly.

Doing something blatantly illegal and getting away with it is a badge of honor among thieves. I am reminded of “Guilty as hell, free as a bird”.

If you thought she was going to be prosecuted for this, you haven’t been paying attention.

No charges for Hillary

Posted on by

The FBI is not recommending charges be brought against Hillary. But it’s still pretty damning:

Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters. There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation. In addition to this highly sensitive information, we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail (that is, excluding the later “up-classified” e-mails).

None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning because all of these e-mails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff, like those found at Departments and Agencies of the U.S. Government—or even with a commercial service like Gmail.

Separately, it is important to say something about the marking of classified information. Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked “classified” in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.

…

To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.

Can someone who is that careless with the security of our country be trusted in any position of government? Well, I might give consideration to her taking a position of a toilet scrubber in a public park.