Kewel analogy:
I’ve alway’s likened a sunspot to what happens with a rubber band on a toy balsa wood plane. You keep twisting the propeller beyond the normal tightness to get that extra second of thrust and you see the rubber band start to pop out knots. Those knots are like sunspots bursting out of twisted magnetic field lines.
Full article here. Hat tip: Climate Debate Daily.
That is their name. Here is their website.
Found via Ahab
In a similar vein, Murdoc had a link to this Newsweek interview with W. Scott Lewis of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus at GunPundit the other day.
Both organizations are now permalinked to the right of your screen.
The issue of the disarming of adults for the simple fact that they are being educated is easily in the top five Gunnie issues of the day. This needs to stop now.
Imagine that.
Found via Clayton Cramer
While I don’t agree with Gillespie’s words prior to these, I wholeheartedly agree with this sentence
I don’t believe in hell, but I sort of hope there is a place like it for a guy like Castro.
Nick Gillespe
Personally, I believe the man is dead and since they knew they wouldn’t be able to reanimate the corpse they’ve had walking around for the past 18 months or so, they are trying to soften the blow to their regime when the facts are eventually found out.
PS: CNN got exclusive coverage of Iraq from Saddam for talking nice about him and ignoring things going on around them, which makes me wonder what those currently at the wheel of Cuba have that CNN wants.
Please note Fidel did bring social reforms to Cuba – namely free education and universal health care, and racial integration. in addition to being criticized for oppressing human rights and freedom of speech.
CNN Producer Allison Flexner to the CNN “Superdesk”
Reading, Writing and…Rubbing?
Schools cut deals with abusive teachers
It would take months for the agency that licenses Oregon teachers to discipline a Salem-area teacher for inappropriately touching at least eight girls.
To get Kenneth John Cushing, then 44, away from Claggett Creek Middle School students immediately, administrators cut him a deal: If Cushing resigned, they would conceal his alleged conduct — clutching students’ waists, touching their buttocks and massaging their shoulders — from the public.
Cushing signed the pact — obtained by The Oregonian through public records requests — with Salem-Keizer Public Schools in 2004, and officials promised not to reveal the teacher’s behavior if potential employers called looking for a reference. They would attribute his departure to “personal reasons,” the document reads, and make “no reference to this agreement.”
Salem’s deal is just one of 47 similar confidential settlement agreements obtained or confirmed by the newspaper.
Teacher’s unions do not care about the students. Anyone who tells you that they do is lying to you and deserves whatever punishment you deem appropriate for liars.
Teacher’s unions exist for the simple purpose of extending their own power.
But you already knew that.
In November of this year, Washington State is going to see a rematch of the 2004 Rossi/Gregoire election scramble. However, if you lived here and didn’t read political blogs, you’d probably not even notice that a mere nine months down the road, it was going to take place.
Believe it or not, I’m quite happy about this.
Gregoire has been in power for just over three years now, and while she has ridden the national economy’s coattails to a fake state budget surplus (they never add in the state employees pension benefits into the figures released to the press/public), she has also reigned as the best governor a criminal could hope for.
The state prison system, and the jail systems of the four or five major counties are jam packed and they have been “early-releasing†prisoners in record numbers, resulting in higher crime rates. The state, the only entity Constitutionally tasked with apprehension and control over criminals, has done nothing to combat the increasing recidivism of sex offenders.
Other than paying lip service to the families effected.
This is going to be powerful ammunition to the Rossi campaign come July/August, and I believe the deciding factor. Gregoire, the state’s former attorney general, now the state’s Governor, has decided that one of the few duties actually designated to her administration by the Constitution, prosecuting and locking up those who would cause grievous harm to the law abiding citizen, is less important than mandating the calculation of carbon footprints of businesses within the state, giving away tax money in the form of free healthcare to people earning incomes 300% above the poverty level, scaring the citizenry with images of immediately failing infrastructure until a increase in the gas tax passes and then putting off fixing “the danger” until 2012, and diverting money away from the DOT for snow removal on Interstate 90 to pay for “transit alternativesâ€, causing closures of the main East-West interstate highway and costing business within the state $1 Billion per day in closures.
If Rossi would inform the public of the deals similar to the one in blockquotes that were forced upon school districts in Washington by the teacher’s union who donates to Gregoire’s campaign, and then reminds people of the numerous children the Gregoire-run state foster system put who are now either dead or are having to be counseled after being molested because the system didn’t inspect the foster parents, and also enlists the families of the multiple children who were murdered or molested by offenders let loose upon the unsuspecting public by the Gregoire-run correctional system, then he will win in November and we will finally have a responsible adult in Olympia who will finally begin to do something about the bastards.
Voting in the WA Primary: Done
Castro: Stepping Down
Dow Jones: Up
Price of Oil: Dropping slowly after an early rise
My work is done here. Off to bed.
Christopher Hitchens agreeing with Bob1’s comment yesterday
Do you ever wonder what is the greatest enemy of the free press? One might mention a few conspicuous foes, such as the state censor, the monopolistic proprietor, the advertiser who wants either favorable coverage or at least an absence of unfavorable coverage, and so forth. But the most insidious enemy is the cowardly journalist and editor who doesn’t need to be told what to do, because he or she has already internalized the need to please—or at least not to offend—the worst tyranny of all, which is the safety-first version of public opinion.
Read the entirety of Hitchens’ Slate post at the link.
I’ve written before about how I think differently than other folks, and that I notice this and try to compensate for it. But I see what happened at NIU as dog bites man, and a self-defense shooting as man bites dog. How other folks cannot, especially folks like news editors, I will never know and I have no way of adjusting to that fact.
So I thought you might have too.
Mary Mitchell has a way to stop psychopathic mass murderers:
Coronate Barack Obama immediately!
If you’re wondering why Sen. Barack Obama’s message of hope has resonated with so many voters across the country, consider the shooting rampage at Northern Illinois University.
Despite a decade of school shootings, we are never prepared for the horror of someone opening fire on innocent people, then taking his or her own life.
…
Like many of you, I watched the televised reports on the violence feeling completely helpless, and wondering how such a horrible thing could have happened in a place where people should feel safe.
The only reason I can think of is that too many people have lost hope.
I couldn’t be that he stopped taking his meds (a fact that was across the newswires nationwide two days before she penned her screed)? Or that he was a self-mutilating sadist who also battered and abused his own parents to the point where they refused to let him live in their house?
No, he just lost hope.
I seriously hope that my mind is never so open that my brain falls out and I start thinking like Mary Mitchell.
When you’re doing scientific research, one very good idea would be to talk to the locals about what you’re doing and get some facts from them.
Not so for the eco-socialist slouches at OSU
“Dead Zones” off coast tell no tales
The eerie “dead zones” that suffocated marine life off the Oregon coast in recent summers are unlike anything recorded over the past 50 years and could be driven by stronger winds that might reflect global warming trends.
That’s the new conclusion published in the national journal Science today by an Oregon State University team that has tracked conditions as summer oxygen levels in the coastal ocean plummeted — falling to zero in 2006.
Undersea video cameras that summer revealed marine graveyards full of dead crabs, starfish and other life. Some species still have not returned to those areas, said Francis Chan, a marine ecologist at OSU and the lead author of the new research.
Oooh! Frightening! Scary! Stop driving your car and flushing the toilet! The oceans are dying! Blah Blah, blah. Blah blah.
From the same article
But Terry Thompson, a Lincoln County commissioner and fisherman, said he remains skeptical that the dead zones OSU has documented are all that different from what fishermen have noticed along the coast for years.
“There’s no question that two years ago it was very severe, but I want to see more data,” he said. “Fishermen have known for years that you don’t fish in that area in the summer. We just didn’t go there.”
Ooopsie.
Stupid locals. Always fuckin’ up their pseudo science.
Hey Oregonians, you gonna ask for your money back? If I were one of those student’s parents I know I would be for cramming bullshit witchdoctory down my kid’s throat.
Found @ Some Poor Schmuck
I really wonder sometimes, when the leftosphere demands we be more like Europe, if this is what they mean
An independent UK agency on Wednesday rejected an attempt to silence a poster campaign designed to stop Manchester’s plan to impose a London-style congestion tax on motorists. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), a body charged with enforcing regulations against false advertising, upheld two of the three posters designed by the Association of British Drivers (ABD) and Manchester Against Road Tolls (MART).
“Overall the ABD and MART are pleased with this ASA ruling,” an ABD representative said in a statement. “The only complaint which had substance and relevance to our campaign against road pricing in Manchester was soundly rejected.”
The first complaint was lodged against a poster with the slogan: “Just pay up and keep quiet. We know best.” A tolling advocate claimed that this ad was misleading because there had been “extensive public consultation” about the tolling effort. The anti-tolling coalition pointed out that only 5000 of the 2.5 million motorists who would be affected took part in a survey. ASA concluded the polemical ad was not misleading.
A second complaint lodged against the slogan: “Tagged, Tracked and Taxed” suggested that those who saw the poster would assume they would be continuously monitored in Manchester. The ASA rejected this complaint.
Follow the link to see the ads.
Now, as you may remember, here in Washington, our state supreme court decided that making false claims in political advertising was just hunky-dory. While I don’t support that ruling, I do not like having to ask one government agency to OK your ads protesting the actions of another government agency even less.
And call me a conspiracy theorist, but I suspect that these “members of the public” weren’t average Joe’s.
Jerry the Geek has been going to town on the idea of Microstamped ammunition. Just hit the link to his site and start scrolling down.
Take a break when your blood pressure gets high, and then re-start your scrolling again.
As I said in my last post on this issue, it appears as though the Washington State Legislature is going to go the “Herpes” route on this one: Submit it late in the session and keep it inactive and hope that the gunnies don’t notice when you bring it up next session.
But all is not well in other states, and that is where Jerry is concerned bit. In one post he points out some gunnie bloggers, some big, some small, for not staying on top of this issue.
I agree with his concern. Ammo stands a very good chance to be our next battle.
If I may commit some low-grade prophetizing: The bigots will lose handily, though not completely, in Heller. Their only other avenue is to convince the non-gun owning public that if criminals won’t be able to get their hands on ammunition for their deathsticks, if new legislation approving either some “Hatful of Hollow” registration/background check scheme (for ammo AND reloading equipment/components) or just a per-round tax to price it out of range (think of your ball practice ammo being labeled as “Saturday Night Special Bullets”).
There is no express Constitutional right to ammo, unless you think as I do that it would be a little tough to “Bear Arms” without it. And even if you do think as I do, with the possibility of BHO or HRC being allowed to appoint judges for 4-8 years, do you think there’ll be enough judges left on the bench who’ll think like that?
So get on the stick in your home state/county/town. Even if there is no pending legislation in your vicinity, do some preemptive lobbying against it. The first members of a government body to pass this crap will be called “ground breakers” and “willing to stand up to the gun lobby” (even though the NRA hasn’t really said squat on the subject). You know there are gun-bigots in your locale that would love to have those titles bestowed upon them.
Primer up on the subject with Jerry the Geek and then get down with your bad self.
On a so similar its creepy topic, Joe has some good info on the Microstamping of Firing Pins here. Primer up on that too while you’re at it, bub.
