Typical Day in the Neighborhood

Posted on May 15, 2006 by Phil Kadath

It’s Thursday at the Seattle Times and they are deciding which ‘Letters to the Editor’ to print in their Friday edition. Shortly thereafter, they have decide which ones of those they are going to include in their online version.

Since I get their emails every morning, I can show you their final decision:

They went with only three topics: Washington junior Senator, Maria Cantwell, and the Democrat voters who hate her; Bush and Iran; the design of the Washington State Quarter.

Cantwell voted to go to war with Iraq and for confirming both Justice Robers and Justice Alito. For these three things, she is beilng likened to Senator Lieberman, whom most hard-core leftists consider a DINO.

Not even her stonewalling of any possibility to drill oil in ANWR seems to be able to save her ass locally, and the few psuedo-moderates in the area are scared an ‘R’ will win her seat if the radicals don’t sit down and shut up.

—————–

There are three ‘Letters’ in the Iran section, none of them are pro-keeping nukes out of the hands of the Iranians and they can all be summed up by this sentence from the ‘Letter’ by David Richardson of Shoreline, WA:

“What we don’t want to admit is that Iran is reacting logically to the threat of U.S. aggression.”

Yes, you read that correctly; it is all America’s fault. Iran would be a peaceful little puppy dog if America would just mind it’s own business. It isn’t any real surprise, I just wanted to show more proof that the “Blame America” syndrome really does exist.

——————

There is only one ‘Letter’ on the subject of which design is going to be shown on the back of the Washington State Quarter, but boy-oh-boy, is it a doozy!

There is irony in the choice of icons for the Washington state quarter: the salmon headed for extinction; and the mountain, with its pesticide-contaminated snows, poised to throw another mudslide.

Yes, I know that it is typical eco-weenie pap, but it isn’t from your typical eco-weenie. No, this ‘Letter to the Editor’ comes from a man whose salary I pay for, John Edwards (professor emeritus, Department of Biology, University of Washington), Seattle.

Don’t even think of accusing him of possibly having an agenda.

And don’t even accuse the Seattle Times of having one either because they’ll deny it.

Posted in Academia and Other Nonsense, The Left is Never Right | Leave a comment

Mish Mash

Posted on May 14, 2006 by Phil Kadath

It’s Mother’s Day, so I hope you’ve done your deeds before stopping here. 

And in case you hadn’t noticed, today is an Official Light Blogging Day.

I’ve received an email from The Professor that says he’s out looking for the Mother of All Booty and won’t be posting today. Sorry about that, Hiney Hounds.

Myself, I’m off to visit the Mother of All Things Analog this morning (and then hopefully snoozing in the afternoon). I’ll be terrorizing the locals with Grimm today, much to the chagrin of the Evergreen State College pinheads who live nearby her place.

Speaking of terrorizing, besides being Mother’s Day in America, today is also the 58th Anniversary of the declaration of the State of Israel.

So, after you’ve done the ‘Honoring of Thy Mother’ today, go and pick up a friend of the Jewish faith, find a local “palestinian” family and kick them out of their house so that your Jewish friend can live there.

That way, when the ‘palestinian’ family members start bitching about “Americans helping the eevviill Jooos take away their land“, they’ll actually know what they’re talking about instead making up bullshit.

Like The Professor yesterday, I’m just wanting to help folks stay honest.

Posted in Life in the Atomic Age | 1 Comment

Two Pennies, From Me to You

Posted on May 13, 2006 by Phil Kadath

If you didn’t see it yesterday, The Baron du Toit posted some inside baseball about data mining in relation to the donnybrook over the NSA thumbing through phone number data.

The standard “Read the Whole Thing” line applies to said post. You can read it and come back to get my two cents or read and then go. Also make sure you read at least the fifth comment to the post by Staff Martin.

While the idea of my government, whom I have learned never to trust, no matter what, knowing the traffic going in and out of my phone does bother me, as did the thought of the Fed tapping international phone calls. But it doesn’t bother me as much as the fact that there are people already in my country, waiting to get a sign from whomever to light themselves off in a shopping mall so that they can kill me for not converting to their back-asswards religion.

And let us not forget, that if we had nipped this problem in the ass, say, in the mid to late 70’s, we wouldn’t have the problem we do today, and none of this would be necessary. There is something to be said for overwhelming force, early on in the process.

From everything I have seen, read and heard, the feds having the numbers, the in/out calls for those numbers, the length of the call and time of the call, is not illegal, because a separate search must be made in order to find the owner of that number. Not that that makes me feel any better about it.

One distinction I would like to make between the The Baron’s comparison and the Feds is that Kroger can’t come to my house to arrest me.

But that aside, I have also been reading the left wing blog sites and sporadically listening to Airhead America radio since this hit and one thing they all keep saying is that “No one has been caught using information found during the data mining”. They seem to feel safe in saying this because they believe that the Bush Administration would have paraded around whomever they caught with this program while telling us how they caught them.

I know liberalism is a disorder, but can it really make people that damn stupid? A multi-billion dollar program, down the drain after it’s first arrest and capture so that the NSA can make themselves look good? Excuse, but if they caught one person with it, that proves to them that it is successful and that they’ll probably catch ten, twenty or fifty more via this program. They’re not going to talk about it; that is their job, to be secretive.

The leftists said the same thing about the tapping of international calls. Their point went down the crapper after it was found out that the sleeper cell out of Oregon was discovered when one member, at an Al-Qiada training camp in Pakistan, called one of the other members, a recent graduate of the same camp, in the US and was picked up by the international call tap.

I also find it odd that this story broke, on a program going on since 2002, right before the confirmation hearings for General Hayden. As it is well known, the NSA and the CIA don’t exactly get along, and I’m wondering if someone was pissed off that Hayden was leaving the NSA to go work for TBAR (Those Bastards Across the River).

What I would truly find funny is if this was another “Torture Prison’s in Europe” story, used to flush out another traitor working in national intelligence.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

There’s a Moon Out Tonight

Posted on May 13, 2006 by Professor Booty

In fact, it’ll be a full moon.

And if you look very closely, you might even be able to see it before the sun sets.

spankable113.jpg

And now for Monday, if one of your coworkers asks you if you saw the beautiful moon on Saturday, you can say that, yes, you did see a beautiful moon.

Professor Booty: Helping you stay honest.

Posted in Kewel! | 1 Comment

Looking for a Hand Out

Posted on May 12, 2006 by Phil Kadath

No, not me (unless you’re so inclined).

No, it’s ‘Baghdad’ Jim McDermott who is begging for money and he’s got Slick Willy stopping by for star power.

And, of course, the local liberal media has to give the event free advertising.

Rep. Jim McDermott doesn’t need to raise money for another term in the House. It’s his Queen Anne home that could be in financial jeopardy.

Mired in the first lawsuit among members of Congress, McDermott is enlisting the star-power of former President Clinton to help fill the coffers of his legal defense fund.

While details aren’t firm, the Seattle Democrat said Clinton will appear at the Seattle Center on June 3 for a conversation about the First Amendment. He said neither ticket prices nor fundraising goals have been determined.

The Ninth Circuit switched bodies with sane people for a day and told McDermott to pay $660,000 for violating the rights of Representative John Boehner of Ohio when McDermott leaked the cellphone call Boehner and Gingrich were on.

The man who wore Saddam Hussein’s ass as a lip ring is afraid that he might have to sell his house in order to pay those damages and that after he does that, he won’t be able to afford to live in his own district because of the cost of housing in Seattle.

Somehow, and you should read the whole article if you get a chance to try and figure it out for yourself, but somehow, the McDermott supporters have twisted this case around so that they think that leaking a private cellphone conversation between two elected representatives to the press, that has been proven to be a violation of privacy in civil court, is somehow a First Amendment issue.

Yeah, I know, it’s crazy. But hey, these are people who choose to vote Democrat. And when they vote for McDermott, they know they are voting for a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, so go figure.

Posted in The Left is Never Right, Too Stupid to Live, Useful Idiots | 5 Comments

Fiction Friction

Posted on May 12, 2006 by Phil Kadath

During my time off last week I did something that is rare for me: I watched a bunch of movies.

It isn’t that I’m normally averse to watching movies, it’s just that I can usually think of better things to do with my time (cleaning guns, reading this here interweb, etc). But last week I had a bunch of time, the interweb bored me after about Tuesday and all the guns had been cleaned (twice), so I settled down into the Pythonesque torture device known as “The Comfy Chair” and tried catching up on the ever growing DVD collection.

Now, the Analog Wife is a movie maniac. I suppose I could say that I’d be a fan of sitting in a dark room with a bunch of strangers if I had to live with me too, but her celluloid addiction started long before she met me. She has amassed a collection that, while not overly large, does catch the eye of many of the visitors to Casa de Analog, and I can faithfully say that if I am the master of the music collection, it is she who controls the content of the movie collection.

I do, however, have a decent selection of flicks that I have either bought myself or she has bought on sale thinking I might like them. One of the former of those that I watched was the Terry Gilliam adaptation of Huner S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. Let’s just say that I can relate with that movie. I also watched the entire Cowboy Bepop series and Ghost in the Shell I & II as well as the first Stand Alone Complex series.

Let’s see, I also watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a single sitting, the Star Wars double trilogy in two sittings (three in the morning and then three that evening) and the four Harry Potter movies in another single sitting.

And this is where I have a question for you:

I have watched the Potter movies before, but always one at a time. In watching the series, I came away highly entertained, but with questions, and since these movies are adaptations of books, I wonder just how much the screeenwriters are leaving out.

But alas, there is a problem to upset the “Well then, just read the books, silly” comeback:

I fall alseep reading fiction, or at least 99% of it. I can read non-fiction books for days on end. Technical manuals are a breeze. But if I am reading fiction, I had better be sitting somewhere uncomfortable or on the commode if I am going to make it through.

I’m currently moseying my way through a triple sci-fan trilogy recommended by a co-worker, “The Gandalara Cycle” or some such. Eh. It’s not bad. Not great, but not bad. And then the Analog Mom recently dropped off Stephen King’s new one called “Cell” for me to read. The wife has snatched it up and is currently pouring through it.

So, to those of you who have read the Potter books, do they answer questions left by the movies and, more importantly, as they are set for children to read, are they readable by adults?

What say ye?

Posted in Color me confused | 9 Comments

Precision Scout Rifle, Part 1

Posted on May 11, 2006 by Alaska

I noticed that Josh of South Park Pundit was musing about a Cooper-style Scout rifle. After half-jokingly suggesting this monster

338 Garand.jpg Garand with Scout Scope.jpg

…I started thinking about using a Scout rifle at longer ranges. Generally, you can’t. The key limitation seems to be the low-power, long eye-relief scope (typically 2.5x or 3x) prescribed for a Scout. In fact, that was pretty much the reason I bought my Sako .308 instead of a Steyr Scout as my first rifle. (Well, the insane price for a Steyr Scout, and that it doesn’t come in a left-handed version, were also factors.)

But hmm, thought I, I’ve just attended an ultra-long-range shooting clinic where we shot handguns with normal riflescopes. They weren’t long-eye-relief scopes, either, but they remained very usable. All that happens is that the image gets smaller as the scope gets further away from your eye. There was still plenty of image left for precision shooting at long distance (albeit an image with a big black donut around it), even with the scope out at arm’s length. That’s only a bit less than where it would be if mounted out over the rifle barrel, Scout-style.

The Steyr Scouts have been alleged to be sub-MOA rifles. If so, there’s really no reason you couldn’t have your Scout scope in a quick-detach mount, with a spare target rifle scope ready to go if you wanted to make a long shot. Hey, it really is the only rifle you need! Now if it only came in a left-hand version….

Posted in Have Gun, Will Travel | 4 Comments

No, no high-caps here, Officer

Posted on May 11, 2006 by Alaska

I spent far too much time gawking in Cabela’s a week ago Wednesday. I should note in my defense that Cabela’s not only had a ridiculously large gun selection, but it also had a wide variety of high-capacity magazines over which to drool — the kind that are, you see, still contraband in California. For example, they had 92FS fifteen-round mags made by Beretta, not some knockoff aftermarket vendor. Thirty-round Bushmaster mags for the AR family that will just happen to fit in the California-legal Kel-Tec SU-16. Etc., etc. Yum yum yum.

Now, if you were a cynic, you might suggest that this was the real reason I was so excited about Cabela’s. But of course you would be wrong, because buying such things and bringing them back to California would be, you know, illegal. Besides, I stocked up on high-caps prior to the ban many years ago. As the man says, that’s my story & I’m sticking to it.

Posted in Have Gun, Will Travel, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Cabela’s!

Posted on May 11, 2006 by Alaska

I’ve lived in California, Oregon and Maryland. I’ve traveled to a lot of states in between. But until last week, I’d never been inside a Cabela’s. If the Mitchell, South Dakota store is typical of the breed, then if you live near a Cabela’s, you’re one lucky dude or dudette.

It’s not just a gun store (with the biggest selection of firearms I’ve seen in one place in my life, I might add.) No, I was excited about Cabela’s because of the dioramas! As a kid visiting the Smithsonian, my favorite parts were the life-size wildlife and historical dioramas in the Museum of Natural History. Well, Cabela’s has ’em too! (Warning: lots of pics below; click for bigger.)

Continue reading →

Posted in Have Gun, Will Travel | 4 Comments

I’ll have to do some research

Posted on May 11, 2006 by Phil Kadath

But as of now, I would greatly appreciate it if this judge was nominated for at least the DC Court of Appeals, if not the SCOTUS

A Texas jury decided in 1991 that Steven Kenneth Staley, now 43, should be put to death for killing a restaurant manager, but three days before his February 2006 date with destiny, psychologists testified that he is mentally ill, and the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a mentally ill person cannot be executed. The solution, declared state judge Wayne Salvant in April, is for the state to inject Staley with enough psychotropic medicine to make him sufficiently sane to understand why he is going to die, at which point he can be killed.

Except for cases of self defense, you almost have to be a little crazy to kill someone, especially if you premeditate the act or do it in cold blod. Insanity should not be a defense for violence, it should be a reason to put someone away in a deep dark hole for a good long time before it is decided they need to be put out of our misery.

This judge has the proper frame of mind for this case: “Fix him up so we can f*ck him up”.

Found at Right Thinking

Posted in Life in the Atomic Age | 3 Comments