As I have stated earlier, I don't get many comments on my blogs. I enjoy the ones I do get, however--even if they disagree with me. We all have our own perspective on things and I find it interesting to interact with people with differing viewpoints as long as everyone can maintain a civil dialogue and intelligently represent their position on a given issue.
When I recently wrote The Devils In The Details--Part III, I addressed the media's coverage of gas prices and I touched on the political furor surrounding domestic oil exploration. I have received two anonymous comments on this posting, apparently from the same individual.
The first one read as follows:
"Two things ...First, the numbers being thrown around the web are that it would only take an increase of 1 to 1.5 mpg in our cars to save as much gas as ANWR will provide. We have a saying in engineering that you "go after the low-hanging fruit." I'd say mentioning that to people, and encouraging people in that direction is simple (low-hanging fruit).
Second, you may not complain when you tank up your 10 mpg SUV ... but how do you compare it to James Woolesy's Prius? Here we have a conservative, walking his talk, to reduce dependence on foreign oil. Why are you so special that you should still be driving 10 mpg?"
Seven hours later today I received this:
This news just in:
"DETROIT - Most Americans believe it is "patriotic" to buy a fuel-efficient vehicle to help wean their country off Middle Eastern oil, according to a new poll released on Thursday.
Some 66 percent of participants in the survey said they agreed that driving vehicles that require less fuel to run was patriotic, since it could help reduce the US dependency on Mideast crude."
Good comments and good questions, and here is my response.
Our country became an "automobile culture" shortly after the end of World War II. Rumor has it (I can't find proof in the form of Internet links) that General Motors and Ford financed the politicians that lead the removal of public transportation--things like street cars and trolleys--in the major cities to foster growth of the concept of one or more autos in every driveway. In fact, houses didn't need driveways until the car came along.
By the way...why do Americans drive on the parkway and park on the driveway? Oh, never mind...
I lived through the oil embargo of the early 1970's and the gas price crunch of the late 1970's, so I feel I am well qualified to talk about auto fuel economy. My first car was a 1974 Honda Civic Hatchback. I was only fifteen years old when we bought it and what a great car it was in a day when people thought foreign cars were crap. My family was way ahead of the curve. Little did we know that Honda would become one of the most popular cars in the world within the next ten years.
Our little tin box had a semi-automatic transmission, and AM/FM radio, air conditioning, and cost $2,100 brand damn new. By semi-automatic, I mean that you had to "shift" the transmission from low to high if you were going to go faster than 45 MPH. You also lost about 5 MPH when you turned on the air conditioner, but it got over 20 MPG in town and nearly 40 MPG on REGULAR gasoline on the highway. You could fill it up with $0.60 per gallon gas and not spend $8.00.
Yes I drive a vehicle that gets 10 MPG. No, I did not buy it as a status symbol. You see, being in the industrial construction business, I've owned a so called "sport utility" vehicle since 1984. I bought a S-10 Blazer as a substitute for a pick-up truck back when hardly anyone was building or driving "country Cadillacs." Chevy made the Surburban, the Blazer, and the S-10 Blazer, Ford built a couple of sizes of Broncos, and Jeep and International built a couple of trucks with covered beds, and everyone else drove station wagons.
They didn't really use the term SUV back then, the attraction for me was being to haul passengers and "stuff" in the same vehicle without messing up the girls' hair making them ride in the bed of a pickup truck.
By the time I wanted and could afford to buy a Surburban, I had to stand in line at the Chevorlet dealer behind a bunch of Dunwoody housewives who wanted to drive around with an entire soccer team in tow. I just wanted to drag my boat to the lake every week and haul a few thousand pounds of luggage and construction materials with me around the southeast US.
By April 1995, if I wanted to special order a new three quarter ton four wheel drive Surburban I would have to wait four or five months for it to be manufactured and delivered. Instead, I bought a white 2500 series XLT off of the lot in Roswell, Georgia and paid full sticker price to boot. I didn't purchase any baby seats with my truck, however.
I drove over 30,000 miles each year for the next four years. Most of the time I was by myself, but I couldn't do what I was doing in a Honda or a Toyota. I bought oil and tires and washed and pampered my truck and it never let me down. Only once did I ever break down on the side of the road and even then I didn't have to be towed to a garage because I installed a new alternator myself on the side of Interstate 85 in north Georgia.
By 1999, my beloved Chevy had over 150,000 miles on the odometer and it was still running strong. The loan was paid off in 2000 and today it has a little over 181,000 miles on the original 454 cubic inch cast iron engine. The third seat burned up in the fire that destroyed my house in 2001 and the driver's seat cover is showing a little wear, but, as I said, it's paid for and I will drive it until it won't drive any more.
I really don't mean to gloat about my truck and its low gas mileage. When my girl Pat is in town we use her Ford Mustang for transportation. It gets about 20 MPG on the road and over 15 MPG in town and is fun to drive to boot.
I feel that I have the right to be a bit smug about my choice of vehicle because I have really used it as it was intended to be used and no other form of transportation could do what I have done with my SUV.
The problem with our society is that the "fad" of SUV's has caused a whole bunch of people to buy crappy pseudo-SUV's that really don't have any capability that a car or station wagon doesn't also possess. These vehicles also have poor fuel economy because of their size.
You won't believe how many people I have seen in Jeeps and Toyotas, hopelessly stuck in 2" of snow ten feet off of the pavement. Why pay the extra money to buy and fuel a SUV when the darn thing gets stuck every time mother nature sneezes?
I drive a real SUV for all the right reasons, if there is such a thing as "the right reasons." The thing about living in America is that you have the right to be STUPID with your time and your money and if everyone wants to keep driving at 12 MPG and they are willing to pay $2.25 to do it then more power to them. Just like in the late 1970's, I personally expect to see a mass exidus to vehicles with higher fuel economy, but as for me and my Chevy Surburban, all we have to say is...
Varooooommmmmm, Varoooommmmmmmmm (guzzle guzzle)
Saturday, March 19, 2005
More Hummingbird stuff
Imagine being an animal weighing less than an ounce and having to make an 18 to 20 hour, non-stop trip from South America across the Gulf of Mexico to South Florida. That's what our little Rubythroated Hummingbirds do every winter.
I basically knew nothing about hummingbirds until last summer other than I had seen a few in Jamaica and in the Bahamas. Then we bought our first feeder and visited the web site hummingbirds.net and a whole new world opened up to me. These little birds are truely a joy to watch and associate with.
I spent a good deal of time doing research on the Internet and happened to read an article about hummers getting trapped in garages. Little did I know that within months I would be using the information to save a bird.
You see, Hummingbirds instinctively fly straight up when they are threatened. For some reason, in spite of seeing an opening ahead or below their position, their little brains tell them that the route to safety is up.
Last fall Pat and I were visiting my mother at her farm in south Alabama. I was doing some repair work on her poolhouse and had spent the day with the garage doors open on the garage and coincidentally I had cleaned and refilled her hummingbird feeder located between the pool and the garage. Late in the afternoon, when I was cleaning up from the day's activities, I walked into the garage and was greeted by the sight of a hummingbird bouncing off of the ceiling and flourescent light fixtures in a panic to escape.
What ensued was a ten minute scramble with my mother moving her car out of the garage and Pat jumping around on her tip toes and me scrambling up and down a step stool trying to capture or "herd" the little bird out of the garage. The problem was that with both of the garage doors open the bird kept going over the doors rather than under them.
We finally ended up turning the lights on, closing the garage doors, and I climbed on the step stool and captured the little male Ruby Throat with my bare hands and carried him outside. He was so tiny and fragile, but he survived the incident and hauled butt out of sight as soon as I let him go in the front yard.
We are so happy that "our" birds are back for the season here.
I basically knew nothing about hummingbirds until last summer other than I had seen a few in Jamaica and in the Bahamas. Then we bought our first feeder and visited the web site hummingbirds.net and a whole new world opened up to me. These little birds are truely a joy to watch and associate with.
I spent a good deal of time doing research on the Internet and happened to read an article about hummers getting trapped in garages. Little did I know that within months I would be using the information to save a bird.
You see, Hummingbirds instinctively fly straight up when they are threatened. For some reason, in spite of seeing an opening ahead or below their position, their little brains tell them that the route to safety is up.
Last fall Pat and I were visiting my mother at her farm in south Alabama. I was doing some repair work on her poolhouse and had spent the day with the garage doors open on the garage and coincidentally I had cleaned and refilled her hummingbird feeder located between the pool and the garage. Late in the afternoon, when I was cleaning up from the day's activities, I walked into the garage and was greeted by the sight of a hummingbird bouncing off of the ceiling and flourescent light fixtures in a panic to escape.
What ensued was a ten minute scramble with my mother moving her car out of the garage and Pat jumping around on her tip toes and me scrambling up and down a step stool trying to capture or "herd" the little bird out of the garage. The problem was that with both of the garage doors open the bird kept going over the doors rather than under them.
We finally ended up turning the lights on, closing the garage doors, and I climbed on the step stool and captured the little male Ruby Throat with my bare hands and carried him outside. He was so tiny and fragile, but he survived the incident and hauled butt out of sight as soon as I let him go in the front yard.
We are so happy that "our" birds are back for the season here.
Our Birds Are Back!
When we moved down here to St. Simons Island last March, we reluctantly accepted a rental agreement that had the stipulation of not allowing pets. The condo's white berber carpet has certainly benefited from this stipulation, but it gets a little lonely around here when Pat is out of town.
Our second floor living room has a giant 12' sliding glass door on the balcony that looks out into a nice sugar maple tree and the local squirrels spend a good deal of time entertaining us with their antics in our tree and the adjacent pine trees.
Our other adopted pets are a bunch of Rubythroated Hummingbirds that we started feeding last summer and we were excited today to have our first bird visit our feeder this year. We wishfully put the feeder out on February 20th, but March is really early for them to be seen in Georgia and we hope that it is a sign that spring has truly arrived here in the Golden Isles.
We are pretty sure that the fellow (the males have red throats--thus the name) that stopped by today a few times is one that was here last year because he used the same branch in our tree as a perch when he wasn't eating. They are really territorial and dominant birds will perch adjacent to the feeder and defend the food source from other birds that aren't in their "clan." It's really funny to see little aerial "dogfights" between birds the size of your thumb.
I have a couple of cups of hummingbird food (1/4 cup sugar to 1 cup water) on the stovetop right now and both feeders are going out ASAP.
Hey little birds...come and get it...
Our second floor living room has a giant 12' sliding glass door on the balcony that looks out into a nice sugar maple tree and the local squirrels spend a good deal of time entertaining us with their antics in our tree and the adjacent pine trees.
Our other adopted pets are a bunch of Rubythroated Hummingbirds that we started feeding last summer and we were excited today to have our first bird visit our feeder this year. We wishfully put the feeder out on February 20th, but March is really early for them to be seen in Georgia and we hope that it is a sign that spring has truly arrived here in the Golden Isles.
We are pretty sure that the fellow (the males have red throats--thus the name) that stopped by today a few times is one that was here last year because he used the same branch in our tree as a perch when he wasn't eating. They are really territorial and dominant birds will perch adjacent to the feeder and defend the food source from other birds that aren't in their "clan." It's really funny to see little aerial "dogfights" between birds the size of your thumb.
I have a couple of cups of hummingbird food (1/4 cup sugar to 1 cup water) on the stovetop right now and both feeders are going out ASAP.
Hey little birds...come and get it...
Friday, March 18, 2005
U.N. Not In Mood
The headline reads: UN ‘not in mood’ for more change. Here is the intro to this story...
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
From the World section
NEW YORK --The senior aide to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he does not expect additional firings of key personnel as the organization struggles to defend itself from multiple scandals.
"We're not in the mood for more wholesale change," said Mark Malloch Brown, who became Mr. Annan's chief of staff and primary adviser three months ago.
"Senior appointments will not stop, but there is no wholesale change," he told The Washington Times in an interview earlier this week.
I wish someone would take a big stick and deliver an old fashioned "come to Jesus" lecture to Kofi Annan that he will remember for the rest of his miserable life. Then, since the UN is "not in the mood" for "change" I wish that the US would keep all of our "change" in the bank instead of continuing to fund this sorry excuse for an international organization.
Is it just me?
Thursday, March 17, 2005
The Devil's In The Details--Part III
Continuing along the path of dissecting the ineptitude and bias of the liberal mainstream media, it is with great pleasure (and limited fanfare) that I offer my third, brief installment of “The Devil’s In The Details.”
This reoccurring theme in my writings is a result of my constant amazement at the level of stupidity exhibited in the news products delivered to the American public by so-called professional journalists. Direct lies and misrepresentation of truth by omission of relevant facts and data are the rule rather than the exception. I am personally insulted by much of what is represented as “news” and wonder why more people don’t demand fundamental changes in our nation’s print and broadcast media.
Since many people are not as proficient in mathematical concepts as I am, I like to look at news stories that involve financial and statistical concepts and try to relate background information that might help put the story into an understandable context. Take gas prices, for instance.
I’ll admit that gasoline prices are high right now. If you listen to the media, you probably won't be suprised to learn that we have record gas prices.
“NEW YORK (Reuters) - Record pump prices won't cool America's love affair with the open road, although drivers are starting to fuel their passion with smaller, more efficient vehicles, an auto group says.
"Our historical experience tells us Americans will not give up their travel plans due to high prices of fuel," said Geoff Sundstrom, spokesman for U.S. auto group AAA. "But we think we're already starting to see consumer backlash against high fuel prices in car sales, and that trend may continue."
Average U.S. regular gasoline prices have spiked more than 15 cents in one month to $2.05 a gallon, matching last spring's record, and are expected to keep climbing in the coming days due to soaring costs for crude, AAA said. “
The only problem with this story is, we really don’t have record gas prices.
As I stated in The Devil’s In The Details—Part II, in 1980, during the socialist dictator loving President Jimmy Carter’s reign, the national average price for regular unleaded gasoline reached the equivalent of $2.85 per gallon when adjusted for inflation (2004 dollars.) For some reason (maybe because Carter was a Democrat) you don’t hear this little tidbit of info in the newspaper headlines and on the evening national TV news.
If you look at the chart in this record gas price link, you will see that gasoline cost the equivalent of between $2.00 and $3.00 per gallon all the way up until after World War II when production was increased and gas was made available to the expanding post war middle class whom were all buying new cars for the first time to park in the new garages of their new tract houses.
The liberal media and tree hugging eco-fascists that lament high gas prices and the US dependence on foreign oil are the very same people that loose their minds when the Senate approves oil drilling in ANWR. They can’t have it both ways. Either we explore for, produce, and refine oil domestically or we buy the raw crude and refine it. American’s are dependent on oil regardless and things aren’t changing any time soon.
It’s a fact that much of our domestic oil supplies lie in the ground untapped because it is cheaper to import oil than it is to pump our own oil out of the ground. The breaking point is about $45 per barrel, so expect to see a few new wells pumping out in Texas and Oklahoma this year although the quantity of crude produced is a drop in the bucket compared to the 20,000,000 barrel per year thirst Americans have for petroleum products.
And other thing—there hasn’t been a new oil refinery built since the mid 1970’s. A number of refineries have been shut down due to age and obsolescence. The existing refineries have been modified and improved, but their capacity is strained due to having to produce specific blends of gasoline for specific regions of the country during the summer months. If the environmental morons don’t get off of their butts and let the oil companies build a few new refineries on a regional basis, we are going to really be in a bind in about ten years.
You do realize that you can’t just order a new oil refinery out of a catalogue and have it delivered next week? It takes two or three years to design and construct a new refinery, not counting the two or three years of lawsuits and government permit evaluations that the owners will have to go through to get permission to start construction.
On a personal note, it costs me nearly $90.00 to fill up my Chevy Suburban’s 42 gallon fuel tank. The difference between me and most people is that I don’t blame the government for my ten year old decision to drive a vehicle that gets less than 10 MPG in the city.
I just drive down the road and enjoy the sound of that big 454 cubic inch V-8 engine as it makes the tree hugger’s heads spin around and around.
I love it...
This reoccurring theme in my writings is a result of my constant amazement at the level of stupidity exhibited in the news products delivered to the American public by so-called professional journalists. Direct lies and misrepresentation of truth by omission of relevant facts and data are the rule rather than the exception. I am personally insulted by much of what is represented as “news” and wonder why more people don’t demand fundamental changes in our nation’s print and broadcast media.
Since many people are not as proficient in mathematical concepts as I am, I like to look at news stories that involve financial and statistical concepts and try to relate background information that might help put the story into an understandable context. Take gas prices, for instance.
I’ll admit that gasoline prices are high right now. If you listen to the media, you probably won't be suprised to learn that we have record gas prices.
“NEW YORK (Reuters) - Record pump prices won't cool America's love affair with the open road, although drivers are starting to fuel their passion with smaller, more efficient vehicles, an auto group says.
"Our historical experience tells us Americans will not give up their travel plans due to high prices of fuel," said Geoff Sundstrom, spokesman for U.S. auto group AAA. "But we think we're already starting to see consumer backlash against high fuel prices in car sales, and that trend may continue."
Average U.S. regular gasoline prices have spiked more than 15 cents in one month to $2.05 a gallon, matching last spring's record, and are expected to keep climbing in the coming days due to soaring costs for crude, AAA said. “
The only problem with this story is, we really don’t have record gas prices.
As I stated in The Devil’s In The Details—Part II, in 1980, during the socialist dictator loving President Jimmy Carter’s reign, the national average price for regular unleaded gasoline reached the equivalent of $2.85 per gallon when adjusted for inflation (2004 dollars.) For some reason (maybe because Carter was a Democrat) you don’t hear this little tidbit of info in the newspaper headlines and on the evening national TV news.
If you look at the chart in this record gas price link, you will see that gasoline cost the equivalent of between $2.00 and $3.00 per gallon all the way up until after World War II when production was increased and gas was made available to the expanding post war middle class whom were all buying new cars for the first time to park in the new garages of their new tract houses.
The liberal media and tree hugging eco-fascists that lament high gas prices and the US dependence on foreign oil are the very same people that loose their minds when the Senate approves oil drilling in ANWR. They can’t have it both ways. Either we explore for, produce, and refine oil domestically or we buy the raw crude and refine it. American’s are dependent on oil regardless and things aren’t changing any time soon.
It’s a fact that much of our domestic oil supplies lie in the ground untapped because it is cheaper to import oil than it is to pump our own oil out of the ground. The breaking point is about $45 per barrel, so expect to see a few new wells pumping out in Texas and Oklahoma this year although the quantity of crude produced is a drop in the bucket compared to the 20,000,000 barrel per year thirst Americans have for petroleum products.
And other thing—there hasn’t been a new oil refinery built since the mid 1970’s. A number of refineries have been shut down due to age and obsolescence. The existing refineries have been modified and improved, but their capacity is strained due to having to produce specific blends of gasoline for specific regions of the country during the summer months. If the environmental morons don’t get off of their butts and let the oil companies build a few new refineries on a regional basis, we are going to really be in a bind in about ten years.
You do realize that you can’t just order a new oil refinery out of a catalogue and have it delivered next week? It takes two or three years to design and construct a new refinery, not counting the two or three years of lawsuits and government permit evaluations that the owners will have to go through to get permission to start construction.
On a personal note, it costs me nearly $90.00 to fill up my Chevy Suburban’s 42 gallon fuel tank. The difference between me and most people is that I don’t blame the government for my ten year old decision to drive a vehicle that gets less than 10 MPG in the city.
I just drive down the road and enjoy the sound of that big 454 cubic inch V-8 engine as it makes the tree hugger’s heads spin around and around.
I love it...
Thanks, But No Thanks
(Just Send Money)
Well, it’s official…“Christian groups and some other private relief agencies are being asked to halt their work in the tsunami-ravaged Indonesian province of Aceh and leave the area by March 26, Indonesia's defense minister said yesterday.
The decision likely will target Western and smaller church groups as the government moves to tighten control over reconstruction work in Aceh, the home of a decades-old separatist insurgency.”
My first reaction to this story was to declare the Indonesian government ungrateful. This was my position when they started talking about asking the military to leave in January when I wrote Looking A Gift Horse In The Mouth. But then I thought about it a little and came to a quite different conclusion. Their actions actually fall under the category of defending their own borders AND protecting the safety of the relief workers.
I’m not about to start challenging Indonesia’s right to make decisions about what happens on their land contained within their borders, I just want our leaders and the people here in the US to make a mental note that it is OK to make hard decisions and toss “political correctness” concerns out the window when it comes to national security.
Indonesia’s actions are a perfect example. The Aceh provence’s “decades-old separatist insurgency” consisted primarily of kidnappings, murder, bombings of Muslim factions and Christians by other Muslim factions—little annoying things that conservative Americans would call “terrorism.” The PC police and the media insist on calling these actions “insurgency.” Using these standards, why isn’t last week’s Atlanta Courthouse shooter referred to as an insurgent African American inmate?
The two factions in Aceh, the Indonesian Government and separatist rebels, have basically called a cease-fire to allow the relief effort to operate, but now that most of the bodies have been recovered and an infrastructure has been re-established, there is a great risk that the relief workers might become targets for kidnapping or be killed in “insurgent” attacks.
I really would hate to see a busload of Southern Baptists blown to smithereens because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I say that we should be happy that the Indonesian officials have the foresight to see things as they are and that we should bring our people home ASAP, confident in the belief that the US did more than the rest of the world put together to relieve the suffering of the Tsunami victims.
Now if we could just learn the lesson of not allowing political correctness to get in the way of defending our own borders and population from acts of terrorism.
Of course, that won’t be happening any time in the near future.
Well, it’s official…“Christian groups and some other private relief agencies are being asked to halt their work in the tsunami-ravaged Indonesian province of Aceh and leave the area by March 26, Indonesia's defense minister said yesterday.
The decision likely will target Western and smaller church groups as the government moves to tighten control over reconstruction work in Aceh, the home of a decades-old separatist insurgency.”
My first reaction to this story was to declare the Indonesian government ungrateful. This was my position when they started talking about asking the military to leave in January when I wrote Looking A Gift Horse In The Mouth. But then I thought about it a little and came to a quite different conclusion. Their actions actually fall under the category of defending their own borders AND protecting the safety of the relief workers.
I’m not about to start challenging Indonesia’s right to make decisions about what happens on their land contained within their borders, I just want our leaders and the people here in the US to make a mental note that it is OK to make hard decisions and toss “political correctness” concerns out the window when it comes to national security.
Indonesia’s actions are a perfect example. The Aceh provence’s “decades-old separatist insurgency” consisted primarily of kidnappings, murder, bombings of Muslim factions and Christians by other Muslim factions—little annoying things that conservative Americans would call “terrorism.” The PC police and the media insist on calling these actions “insurgency.” Using these standards, why isn’t last week’s Atlanta Courthouse shooter referred to as an insurgent African American inmate?
The two factions in Aceh, the Indonesian Government and separatist rebels, have basically called a cease-fire to allow the relief effort to operate, but now that most of the bodies have been recovered and an infrastructure has been re-established, there is a great risk that the relief workers might become targets for kidnapping or be killed in “insurgent” attacks.
I really would hate to see a busload of Southern Baptists blown to smithereens because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I say that we should be happy that the Indonesian officials have the foresight to see things as they are and that we should bring our people home ASAP, confident in the belief that the US did more than the rest of the world put together to relieve the suffering of the Tsunami victims.
Now if we could just learn the lesson of not allowing political correctness to get in the way of defending our own borders and population from acts of terrorism.
Of course, that won’t be happening any time in the near future.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
There Is No Fairy Godmother
It seems that “(j)ournalists are unhappy with the way things are going in their profession these days. Many (journalists) give poor grades to the coverage offered by the types of media that serve most Americans: daily newspapers, local TV, network TV news and cable news outlets. In fact, despite recent scandals at the New York Times and USA Today, only national newspapers - and the websites of national news organizations - receive good performance grades from the journalistic ranks.”
Isn’t that so darn sad…poor little journalism majors, all upset about the quality of their product and the public perception of their profession. Too bad that after they made an “A” in creative writing class in high school and spent five years getting a four year undergraduate degree in “journalism” that they had to find out that successful professional journalism involves doing research and reporting boring things like THE TRUTH and using messy things like FACTS and DETAILS to support their stories. You can’t just run around reporting stories about what you FEEL or BELIEVE in your stupid liberal head—at least not since the advent of FOX News and the arrival of a couple million bloggers on the scene.
What is amazing is that they still believe that the national media like the NY Times, USA Today, and the LA Times should get a good performance grade. Can they really be serious? Just like a drug addict, they profess to want to change, but their goal is to cut back on their addiction, not to stop altogether, and for this reason they are doomed to failure because they just can’t say no every once in a while—it’s all or nothing.
Take the current hubbub on Social Security reform, for example. If you listen to media reports, President Bush is going to take away our senior citizens’ Social Security Checks and allow STUPID AMERICAN CITIZENS to invest some of their own money in the risky lottery known as the stock market. What, let a common citizen make their own retirement investment decisions—NO WAY—a certain formula for disaster. Quick, everybody, cover your eyes and ears and run away to hide until you are retirement age and let the SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST FUND (held safely in a lock box) take care of you.
Why can’t the media bring themselves to report the truth about Social Security? Because reporting the truth would be favorable to the position of the president and the Republicans and counter the to position of their favored Democratic party. You do realize that the core of the Social Security debate is about government power and winning elections and has very little to do with your long term financial stability, don’t you?
This single issue (social security) really bothers me and further leads me to dislike and distrust the media. How can hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens who make their living as so called “journalists” allow their own political bias and opinions to overshadow the American People’s common good? Why can’t more than a few of them stop reading and reprinting their own mindless Democratic talking points and start doing some actual research and report the FACTS to their viewers and readers?
Fact #1—THERE IS NO SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST FUND. The government is stealing over 12% of my money and giving it to people that have retired. When I retire, they intend to try to do the same thing to younger working citizens, unless I happen to keep earning income at the rate I have been able to earn it in the past in which case the government fully intends to look me squarely in the eye and tell me to GO TO HELL YOU MEAN OLD RICH WHITE MAN. Then there is always the possibility that I will die before I reach the revised 72 year retirement age in which case the government accountants will issue a collective sigh of relief and the actuaries will utter a muffled “I told you so”
Fact #2—THERE IS NO FAIRY GODMOTHER—so if you are under the age of fifty you better start planning for your retirement today because if it is up to the media and the Democrats you are going to be sweeping French fries at McDonalds or greeting people at Wal Mart until you are 100 Years old to supplement all of the money that the government has saved for you in their mighty LOCK BOX.
YOU GET MY POINT?
Isn’t that so darn sad…poor little journalism majors, all upset about the quality of their product and the public perception of their profession. Too bad that after they made an “A” in creative writing class in high school and spent five years getting a four year undergraduate degree in “journalism” that they had to find out that successful professional journalism involves doing research and reporting boring things like THE TRUTH and using messy things like FACTS and DETAILS to support their stories. You can’t just run around reporting stories about what you FEEL or BELIEVE in your stupid liberal head—at least not since the advent of FOX News and the arrival of a couple million bloggers on the scene.
What is amazing is that they still believe that the national media like the NY Times, USA Today, and the LA Times should get a good performance grade. Can they really be serious? Just like a drug addict, they profess to want to change, but their goal is to cut back on their addiction, not to stop altogether, and for this reason they are doomed to failure because they just can’t say no every once in a while—it’s all or nothing.
Take the current hubbub on Social Security reform, for example. If you listen to media reports, President Bush is going to take away our senior citizens’ Social Security Checks and allow STUPID AMERICAN CITIZENS to invest some of their own money in the risky lottery known as the stock market. What, let a common citizen make their own retirement investment decisions—NO WAY—a certain formula for disaster. Quick, everybody, cover your eyes and ears and run away to hide until you are retirement age and let the SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST FUND (held safely in a lock box) take care of you.
Why can’t the media bring themselves to report the truth about Social Security? Because reporting the truth would be favorable to the position of the president and the Republicans and counter the to position of their favored Democratic party. You do realize that the core of the Social Security debate is about government power and winning elections and has very little to do with your long term financial stability, don’t you?
This single issue (social security) really bothers me and further leads me to dislike and distrust the media. How can hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens who make their living as so called “journalists” allow their own political bias and opinions to overshadow the American People’s common good? Why can’t more than a few of them stop reading and reprinting their own mindless Democratic talking points and start doing some actual research and report the FACTS to their viewers and readers?
Fact #1—THERE IS NO SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST FUND. The government is stealing over 12% of my money and giving it to people that have retired. When I retire, they intend to try to do the same thing to younger working citizens, unless I happen to keep earning income at the rate I have been able to earn it in the past in which case the government fully intends to look me squarely in the eye and tell me to GO TO HELL YOU MEAN OLD RICH WHITE MAN. Then there is always the possibility that I will die before I reach the revised 72 year retirement age in which case the government accountants will issue a collective sigh of relief and the actuaries will utter a muffled “I told you so”
Fact #2—THERE IS NO FAIRY GODMOTHER—so if you are under the age of fifty you better start planning for your retirement today because if it is up to the media and the Democrats you are going to be sweeping French fries at McDonalds or greeting people at Wal Mart until you are 100 Years old to supplement all of the money that the government has saved for you in their mighty LOCK BOX.
YOU GET MY POINT?
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Sports Poll Insanity
(Boring Sports Stuff-Bear With Me Here)
I generally ignore professional sports, but I follow college sports with a good deal of interest. The happenings on the gridiron on a Saturday afternoon in October or on the basketball court on Tuesday night in the middle of January doesn’t control my mood and dictate the level of self esteem that I enjoy in my life, however.
This isn’t true for some people that I know. My dad had a friend, Jim, that was a HUGE Auburn Football fan and Jim would become physically sick if Shug Jordan’s Auburn Tiger’s lost to Bear Bryant’s Alabama Crimson Tide in November in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.
What really amazes and confuses me is the concept of sports rankings.
You know--the so called “Top Twenty (Five.)”
There’s the coach’s poll and the sports writers poll. They keep changing the name(s) of the polls through the years, but it is still essentially the coach’s poll and the sports writer’s poll no matter what you call them. Then in football, there is the Frankenstein of sports polls, the BCS. I’ll save that discussion for another day, perhaps.
I put very little stock in any of these farcical listings, since the coaches are in theory too busy to pay attention to anyone but whomever they are playing tomorrow or next week, and the sports writers are an even more biased, mindless, partisan bunch of ingrates than the “regular” writers in the “mainstream media.”
I did a little research and found out that, in order to be one of the coaches that votes in the “coach’s poll” and maintain the appearance of being “fair and balanced,” you generally can’t actually coach a team that has a basketball program—at least a successful basketball program.
Here is the listing:
"The USA TODAY/ESPN Board of Coaches is made up of 31 Division I head coaches. All are members of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. The 2004-05 board: Dana Altman, Creighton; Tevester Anderson, Jackson State; Eddie Biedenbach, North Carolina-Asheville; Jim Boeheim, Syracuse; Charles Coles, Miami (Ohio); Barry Collier, Nebraska; Dick Davey; Santa Clara; Fran Dunphy, Pennsylvania; Mick Durham, Montana State; Rob Evans, Arizona State; Steve Fisher, San Diego State; Pat Flannery, Bucknell; Greg Graham, Boise State; Tom Green, Fairleigh Dickinson; David Henderson, Delaware; Bob Huggins, Cincinnati; Johnny Jones, North Texas; Gene Keady, Purdue; Eddie McCarter, Texas-Arlington; Bob McKillop, Davidson; Phil Martelli, Saint Joseph's; Joe Mihalich, Niagara; Ron "Fang" Mitchell, Coppin State; Dave Odom, South Carolina; Rick Samuels, Eastern Illinois; Kirk Speraw, Central Florida; Bob Thomason, Pacific; Perry Watson, Detroit Mercy; Gary Williams, Maryland; Dennis Wolff, Boston University; Rich Zvosec, Missouri-Kansas City."
No Dean Smith’s or Frank McGuire’s on this listing, but they must be psychic or psyco or something to conjure up the seasonal ranking and how they do it is a mystery to me.
Suppose, in basketball, the eighth ranked team plays the second ranked team, and the number two team wins. You might say “Hurray for the pollsters, they were right,” right? Well, not so fast there Kemosabe.
While the next poll will still probably show the number two team as number two, the former number eight team will probably fall in the rankings to number twelve or thirteen (unless the looser is UCLA, Michigan, Duke, North Carolina or one of a few other perennial national favorites in which case they will only drop a few spots as a result of being out played by the number two team.)
How can the outcome of a single game yield such a result? I mean, if number two beats number eight, the universe is in order, isn’t it. Two is better than eight, eight is better than twenty, Right?
Well, maybe not in the world of sports rankings.
Number twenty beating number eight or number two is an entirely different matter. Yessirreee. If you are number twenty and you beat number two, particularly “early’ in the season, the best you can expect is to rise a half dozen spots to maybe number fourteen or fifteen while number two will drop half that distance to number five or so. They figure that your team just got “lucky” and the pollsters refuse to acknowledge that they might be wrong in ranking the number two team number two.
If number twenty beats number eight, number eight will take a nose dive again to number twelve or thirteen, but the winner (number twenty) will only rise a couple of points to number seventeen or eighteen.
I guess it is like stretching or compressing a spring or something—the further you push or pull it the harder it gets to make progress. All in all, it makes absolutely no sense to me and I really don’t spend much time paying attention to it all or run around “crowing” about my team’s ranking in public.
Another interesting thing to notice when you look at the membership of the College Board of Coach’s is to wonder why the heck most of these guys get to decide the college basketball rankings when they coach at such no name institutions? South Carolina’s Dave Odam made a name for himself at Wake Forrest and Maryland’s Gary Williams took Maryland to a regular season ACC championship in 2002 and won the 2004 ACC tournament, but the balance of the coaches’ schools are relatively invisible in the regular season polls.
Not so with this year’s NCAA Tournament. Tom Green’s Fairleigh Dickenson is seeded number 16 and Fran Dunphy’s Pennsylvania is seeded number 13 in the Chicago Bracket.
In the Albuquerque Bracket, Dave Altman’s Creighton is seeded number 10.
In the Syracuse Bracket, Kirk Speraw’s Central Florida is the number 16 seed.
In the Austin Bracket, Joe Mihalich’s Niagara garnered a 14 seed and Jim Boeheim's Syracuse is a number 4 seed.
There is a general perception that any one basketball conference like the ACC can only be allocated five or at an absolute most--six spots in the NCAA tournament. Some years it’s a battle to get four seeds out of sixty-four.
This year the ACC got two number one seeds and five seeds overall—Duke, GT, NC, NC State, and Wake Forrest.
Here is the funny thing--the Coach’s Board members did even better than the ACC. They made out with six seeds, with Syracuse and Creighten being the only no-brainers. Two sixteen seeds, one fourteen seed, and one thirteen seed seem to be ample rewards for this group of “insiders.”
I wonder how many of these same members of the college “Board of Coaches” are also on the NCAA selection committee?
Just wondering…
I generally ignore professional sports, but I follow college sports with a good deal of interest. The happenings on the gridiron on a Saturday afternoon in October or on the basketball court on Tuesday night in the middle of January doesn’t control my mood and dictate the level of self esteem that I enjoy in my life, however.
This isn’t true for some people that I know. My dad had a friend, Jim, that was a HUGE Auburn Football fan and Jim would become physically sick if Shug Jordan’s Auburn Tiger’s lost to Bear Bryant’s Alabama Crimson Tide in November in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.
What really amazes and confuses me is the concept of sports rankings.
You know--the so called “Top Twenty (Five.)”
There’s the coach’s poll and the sports writers poll. They keep changing the name(s) of the polls through the years, but it is still essentially the coach’s poll and the sports writer’s poll no matter what you call them. Then in football, there is the Frankenstein of sports polls, the BCS. I’ll save that discussion for another day, perhaps.
I put very little stock in any of these farcical listings, since the coaches are in theory too busy to pay attention to anyone but whomever they are playing tomorrow or next week, and the sports writers are an even more biased, mindless, partisan bunch of ingrates than the “regular” writers in the “mainstream media.”
I did a little research and found out that, in order to be one of the coaches that votes in the “coach’s poll” and maintain the appearance of being “fair and balanced,” you generally can’t actually coach a team that has a basketball program—at least a successful basketball program.
Here is the listing:
"The USA TODAY/ESPN Board of Coaches is made up of 31 Division I head coaches. All are members of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. The 2004-05 board: Dana Altman, Creighton; Tevester Anderson, Jackson State; Eddie Biedenbach, North Carolina-Asheville; Jim Boeheim, Syracuse; Charles Coles, Miami (Ohio); Barry Collier, Nebraska; Dick Davey; Santa Clara; Fran Dunphy, Pennsylvania; Mick Durham, Montana State; Rob Evans, Arizona State; Steve Fisher, San Diego State; Pat Flannery, Bucknell; Greg Graham, Boise State; Tom Green, Fairleigh Dickinson; David Henderson, Delaware; Bob Huggins, Cincinnati; Johnny Jones, North Texas; Gene Keady, Purdue; Eddie McCarter, Texas-Arlington; Bob McKillop, Davidson; Phil Martelli, Saint Joseph's; Joe Mihalich, Niagara; Ron "Fang" Mitchell, Coppin State; Dave Odom, South Carolina; Rick Samuels, Eastern Illinois; Kirk Speraw, Central Florida; Bob Thomason, Pacific; Perry Watson, Detroit Mercy; Gary Williams, Maryland; Dennis Wolff, Boston University; Rich Zvosec, Missouri-Kansas City."
No Dean Smith’s or Frank McGuire’s on this listing, but they must be psychic or psyco or something to conjure up the seasonal ranking and how they do it is a mystery to me.
Suppose, in basketball, the eighth ranked team plays the second ranked team, and the number two team wins. You might say “Hurray for the pollsters, they were right,” right? Well, not so fast there Kemosabe.
While the next poll will still probably show the number two team as number two, the former number eight team will probably fall in the rankings to number twelve or thirteen (unless the looser is UCLA, Michigan, Duke, North Carolina or one of a few other perennial national favorites in which case they will only drop a few spots as a result of being out played by the number two team.)
How can the outcome of a single game yield such a result? I mean, if number two beats number eight, the universe is in order, isn’t it. Two is better than eight, eight is better than twenty, Right?
Well, maybe not in the world of sports rankings.
Number twenty beating number eight or number two is an entirely different matter. Yessirreee. If you are number twenty and you beat number two, particularly “early’ in the season, the best you can expect is to rise a half dozen spots to maybe number fourteen or fifteen while number two will drop half that distance to number five or so. They figure that your team just got “lucky” and the pollsters refuse to acknowledge that they might be wrong in ranking the number two team number two.
If number twenty beats number eight, number eight will take a nose dive again to number twelve or thirteen, but the winner (number twenty) will only rise a couple of points to number seventeen or eighteen.
I guess it is like stretching or compressing a spring or something—the further you push or pull it the harder it gets to make progress. All in all, it makes absolutely no sense to me and I really don’t spend much time paying attention to it all or run around “crowing” about my team’s ranking in public.
Another interesting thing to notice when you look at the membership of the College Board of Coach’s is to wonder why the heck most of these guys get to decide the college basketball rankings when they coach at such no name institutions? South Carolina’s Dave Odam made a name for himself at Wake Forrest and Maryland’s Gary Williams took Maryland to a regular season ACC championship in 2002 and won the 2004 ACC tournament, but the balance of the coaches’ schools are relatively invisible in the regular season polls.
Not so with this year’s NCAA Tournament. Tom Green’s Fairleigh Dickenson is seeded number 16 and Fran Dunphy’s Pennsylvania is seeded number 13 in the Chicago Bracket.
In the Albuquerque Bracket, Dave Altman’s Creighton is seeded number 10.
In the Syracuse Bracket, Kirk Speraw’s Central Florida is the number 16 seed.
In the Austin Bracket, Joe Mihalich’s Niagara garnered a 14 seed and Jim Boeheim's Syracuse is a number 4 seed.
There is a general perception that any one basketball conference like the ACC can only be allocated five or at an absolute most--six spots in the NCAA tournament. Some years it’s a battle to get four seeds out of sixty-four.
This year the ACC got two number one seeds and five seeds overall—Duke, GT, NC, NC State, and Wake Forrest.
Here is the funny thing--the Coach’s Board members did even better than the ACC. They made out with six seeds, with Syracuse and Creighten being the only no-brainers. Two sixteen seeds, one fourteen seed, and one thirteen seed seem to be ample rewards for this group of “insiders.”
I wonder how many of these same members of the college “Board of Coaches” are also on the NCAA selection committee?
Just wondering…
Monday, March 14, 2005
Wireless Network Under Construction
(Anyone Got A Big Hammer?)
Blogging may be light this week because I'm installing a Linksys wireless network with VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) capability. I'm excited and exasperated all in the same moment.
I'm up to my ears in anacronyms like DHCP, IP addresses, PPPoE, MAC, and some other things I've never been involved with before other than on a superficial basis.
We've dropped our dial up access a little prematurely and I'm under the gun to get this stuff working while Pat is out of town. Her Dell has a Ethernet port, but my older Dell just has a RJ11 jack and I refuse to pay $39 for an Ethernet card when I can get the 802.11g wireless card for the same price.
Poor planning on my part, but at least I'm forced to put in the wireless network that I've been talking about for a year. The good news is that prices have come down drastically and VOIP is readily available and reasonably priced.
Wish me luck...
Blogging may be light this week because I'm installing a Linksys wireless network with VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) capability. I'm excited and exasperated all in the same moment.
I'm up to my ears in anacronyms like DHCP, IP addresses, PPPoE, MAC, and some other things I've never been involved with before other than on a superficial basis.
We've dropped our dial up access a little prematurely and I'm under the gun to get this stuff working while Pat is out of town. Her Dell has a Ethernet port, but my older Dell just has a RJ11 jack and I refuse to pay $39 for an Ethernet card when I can get the 802.11g wireless card for the same price.
Poor planning on my part, but at least I'm forced to put in the wireless network that I've been talking about for a year. The good news is that prices have come down drastically and VOIP is readily available and reasonably priced.
Wish me luck...
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire
(Or Full Of Bullet Holes)
Well, the dust has settled a good deal since I wrote Are They Just Plain Stupid, I Was Right, They Were Just Stupid, and What Is There To Not Understand about the little kidnapped communist Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena.
Apparently, other than getting kidnapped and costing her homeland a whole bunch of Lira, she accomplished very little in her latest “wonderful communist adventure” as described by Jack Kelly in the Post Gazett:
“Sgrena went to Iraq to report on the heroic resistance to the American imperialists. Dutch journalist Harald Doornbos rode in the airplane to Baghdad with her.”
"Be careful not to get kidnapped," Doornbos warned Sgrena.
"You don't understand the situation," she responded, according to Doornbos' account last week in Nederlands Dagblad. (Excerpts were translated into English and posted on a Dutch writer's Web blog.) "The Iraqis only kidnap American sympathizers. The enemies of the Americans have nothing to fear."
Sgrena left her hotel the morning of Feb. 4 to interview refugees from Fallujah, the resistance stronghold captured by U.S. Marines in November. The interviews didn't go well.
"The refugees ... would not listen to me," she said. "I had in front of me the accurate confirmation of the analysis of what the Iraqi society had become as a result of the war and they would throw their truth in my face."
Sgrena's feelings were hurt that the refugees could be so curt to her: "I who had risked everything, challenging the Italian government who didn't want journalists to reach Iraq and the Americans who don't want our work to be witnessed of what really became of that country with the war and notwithstanding that which they call elections." (Maybe it reads better in Italian, or maybe she just can't write worth a damn.)
She got nabbed on her way back to her hotel. Sgrena told her captors she was on their side, and suggested they kidnap an American soldier instead. But the U.S. government doesn't pay ransoms.”
Italy has admitted that they paid a ransom for the return of her troublesome carcass and that the Italian government has agreed at the insistence of President George Bush to not be paying any more money for wayward journalists in the future.
I find it hilarious that the Iraqi’s would be “curt” to her. Well, most of the Iraqis are not STUPID like she is. They have enough every day first hand experience to know what is actually going on in Iraq and they don’t need a little communist Italian to tell them any differently. Sgrena has started believing her own propaganda, I’m afraid.
Now here is a real pisser. The US government has admitted that “the attack on the Toyota Corolla carrying Sgrena and Nicola Calipari, the intelligence officer, to Baghdad airport had been prompted by a satellite monitoring system. This detected that their vehicle did not have clearance from US military authorities. A signal alerted a mobile checkpoint near the airport and its soldiers opened fire.
“The Italian team should have known what to expect, but it appears they didn’t realise how sophisticated the American military are,” said Selva."
So isn’t that special. As a result of this silly bitch deciding to run around with an anti-American agenda in a foreign country where US forces are at war, our government has revealed detailed information about security measures being taken to protect our troops.
Not to say that all of the regional military muckity-mucks (except the Italians) didn’t already know about US satellite technology (here is a picture of where I live taken from satellite), but it really pisses me off that this stupid idiot “journalist” can run around the world spitting bile and venom about the US and the end result is the further compromising of our own national security.
Hey, Sgrena--kiss it baby.
Why don’t you get a life, and shut the hell up while you’re at it.
Well, the dust has settled a good deal since I wrote Are They Just Plain Stupid, I Was Right, They Were Just Stupid, and What Is There To Not Understand about the little kidnapped communist Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena.
Apparently, other than getting kidnapped and costing her homeland a whole bunch of Lira, she accomplished very little in her latest “wonderful communist adventure” as described by Jack Kelly in the Post Gazett:
“Sgrena went to Iraq to report on the heroic resistance to the American imperialists. Dutch journalist Harald Doornbos rode in the airplane to Baghdad with her.”
"Be careful not to get kidnapped," Doornbos warned Sgrena.
"You don't understand the situation," she responded, according to Doornbos' account last week in Nederlands Dagblad. (Excerpts were translated into English and posted on a Dutch writer's Web blog.) "The Iraqis only kidnap American sympathizers. The enemies of the Americans have nothing to fear."
Sgrena left her hotel the morning of Feb. 4 to interview refugees from Fallujah, the resistance stronghold captured by U.S. Marines in November. The interviews didn't go well.
"The refugees ... would not listen to me," she said. "I had in front of me the accurate confirmation of the analysis of what the Iraqi society had become as a result of the war and they would throw their truth in my face."
Sgrena's feelings were hurt that the refugees could be so curt to her: "I who had risked everything, challenging the Italian government who didn't want journalists to reach Iraq and the Americans who don't want our work to be witnessed of what really became of that country with the war and notwithstanding that which they call elections." (Maybe it reads better in Italian, or maybe she just can't write worth a damn.)
She got nabbed on her way back to her hotel. Sgrena told her captors she was on their side, and suggested they kidnap an American soldier instead. But the U.S. government doesn't pay ransoms.”
Italy has admitted that they paid a ransom for the return of her troublesome carcass and that the Italian government has agreed at the insistence of President George Bush to not be paying any more money for wayward journalists in the future.
I find it hilarious that the Iraqi’s would be “curt” to her. Well, most of the Iraqis are not STUPID like she is. They have enough every day first hand experience to know what is actually going on in Iraq and they don’t need a little communist Italian to tell them any differently. Sgrena has started believing her own propaganda, I’m afraid.
Now here is a real pisser. The US government has admitted that “the attack on the Toyota Corolla carrying Sgrena and Nicola Calipari, the intelligence officer, to Baghdad airport had been prompted by a satellite monitoring system. This detected that their vehicle did not have clearance from US military authorities. A signal alerted a mobile checkpoint near the airport and its soldiers opened fire.
“The Italian team should have known what to expect, but it appears they didn’t realise how sophisticated the American military are,” said Selva."
So isn’t that special. As a result of this silly bitch deciding to run around with an anti-American agenda in a foreign country where US forces are at war, our government has revealed detailed information about security measures being taken to protect our troops.
Not to say that all of the regional military muckity-mucks (except the Italians) didn’t already know about US satellite technology (here is a picture of where I live taken from satellite), but it really pisses me off that this stupid idiot “journalist” can run around the world spitting bile and venom about the US and the end result is the further compromising of our own national security.
Hey, Sgrena--kiss it baby.
Why don’t you get a life, and shut the hell up while you’re at it.
Saturday, March 12, 2005
A Few Humble Words
This just in From the ACC Tourney...
Georgia Tech 78
North Carolina 75
Next up, Duke or NC State tomorrow. Bring them on...
Georgia Tech 78
North Carolina 75
Next up, Duke or NC State tomorrow. Bring them on...
A Nice Big Steaming Pile
I used to have a really nice yard at my house in Marietta, Georgia. Being a yard nerd and into manual labor induced muscle pain, I used to spend a couple of afternoons each week and one weekend day doing my “yard thing.” Mowing, aerating, pruning, planting, spreading lime, pre-emergent weed killer, fertilizer—you name it, I had a piece of equipment to accomplish the task and did it religiously and my efforts showed in the quality of my lawn.
I’m also a cat person. I had a dog before, and I’ll have one again when and if I move back to the farm in Alabama or buy a parcel of land larger than a postage stamp, but I like big dogs like Rottweilers and I don’t believe in torturing a large dog by keeping them in the house.
Our next door neighbors in Marietta had five dogs and a small herd of cats, and a fenced back yard to keep the larger mongrels in. They had this one little furry mixed breed beast that was an inside pet, except when he needed to visit the toilet late at night. Then they let him unescorted out the front door of their house, where he proceeded to walk down their driveway to the street, barked a few times at no one and nothing in particular, turned left and wandered into MY yard to do his business.
It took me a while to figure out what the yellow spots were in my grass because the owners were apparently poop-scooping the poop on a clandestine basis, but the little bastard’s urine must have had a PH of 0.1 because he could kill a 12” circle of grass with one little squirt.
The barking was ultimately his downfall because once I figured out who (or what) was responsible for violating my lawn I started staking him out with my BB gun, powered by about four pumps. Not enough power behind the BB to cause injury and leave evidence, but I could make that mutt do a triple axel figure skate jump or a quadruple somersault and leave my yard with amazing speed.
We currently live in a very nice area here on St. Simons Island. Not the best—that’s down at the Island Club or over on Sea Island—but the houses around our condo complex sell from the mid $300K range up to over half a million dollars each.
Although the yards are typically tropical in nature with lots of pine islands and flower beds, EVERYONE has a landscape company do their lawns and the places each look like a botanical garden most of the time.
Which brings me to my point.
Why the hell do all of these snooty homeowners take their $1000 dogs out for a walk to pee and crap all over their neighbors’ curbs, grass, and mailboxes? Is it a mutual thing? “Your dog does my yard and my dog does your yard,” or something. Really, there is a daily parade of fancy dogs ambling along the streets with their owners mindlessly allowing them to ravage an area within ten feet of the curb.
What do I do if I don’t own a dog and am not able to reciprocate in the mutual urination and defecation association? Can I eat a few bowls of chili, drink a six pack, toss on a big ole poncho, grab the newspaper, and wander over into my neighbor’s yard to squat down and take my evening constitutional? On Saturday morning can I drink a half pot of Café du Monde coffee, toss down a few donuts, and scramble by for a little “business in the bushes?”
If no one sees me, so I’m not charged with public indecency, is leaving a big steaming pile on the front lawn against the law?
Just wondering—if Fido can, why can’t I?
I’m also a cat person. I had a dog before, and I’ll have one again when and if I move back to the farm in Alabama or buy a parcel of land larger than a postage stamp, but I like big dogs like Rottweilers and I don’t believe in torturing a large dog by keeping them in the house.
Our next door neighbors in Marietta had five dogs and a small herd of cats, and a fenced back yard to keep the larger mongrels in. They had this one little furry mixed breed beast that was an inside pet, except when he needed to visit the toilet late at night. Then they let him unescorted out the front door of their house, where he proceeded to walk down their driveway to the street, barked a few times at no one and nothing in particular, turned left and wandered into MY yard to do his business.
It took me a while to figure out what the yellow spots were in my grass because the owners were apparently poop-scooping the poop on a clandestine basis, but the little bastard’s urine must have had a PH of 0.1 because he could kill a 12” circle of grass with one little squirt.
The barking was ultimately his downfall because once I figured out who (or what) was responsible for violating my lawn I started staking him out with my BB gun, powered by about four pumps. Not enough power behind the BB to cause injury and leave evidence, but I could make that mutt do a triple axel figure skate jump or a quadruple somersault and leave my yard with amazing speed.
We currently live in a very nice area here on St. Simons Island. Not the best—that’s down at the Island Club or over on Sea Island—but the houses around our condo complex sell from the mid $300K range up to over half a million dollars each.
Although the yards are typically tropical in nature with lots of pine islands and flower beds, EVERYONE has a landscape company do their lawns and the places each look like a botanical garden most of the time.
Which brings me to my point.
Why the hell do all of these snooty homeowners take their $1000 dogs out for a walk to pee and crap all over their neighbors’ curbs, grass, and mailboxes? Is it a mutual thing? “Your dog does my yard and my dog does your yard,” or something. Really, there is a daily parade of fancy dogs ambling along the streets with their owners mindlessly allowing them to ravage an area within ten feet of the curb.
What do I do if I don’t own a dog and am not able to reciprocate in the mutual urination and defecation association? Can I eat a few bowls of chili, drink a six pack, toss on a big ole poncho, grab the newspaper, and wander over into my neighbor’s yard to squat down and take my evening constitutional? On Saturday morning can I drink a half pot of Café du Monde coffee, toss down a few donuts, and scramble by for a little “business in the bushes?”
If no one sees me, so I’m not charged with public indecency, is leaving a big steaming pile on the front lawn against the law?
Just wondering—if Fido can, why can’t I?
Law Enforcement Incompetence
I lived in the Atlanta metropolitan area for 27 years, beginning in 1977, and I can honestly say that the Atlanta Police and Sheriffs departments are perhaps the most clueless and inept organizations of their type in the entire country. At the risk of appearing racist, I will say that these law enforcement departments are treated as “jobs programs” by the city’s African American politicians and city council. Actual law enforcement is a secondary or tertiary concern.
Former Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell, whom was recently indicted on federal corruption charges relating to his tenure as mayor from 1994 to 2002, appointed an unqualified woman named Beverly Harvard as Police Chief during his tenure. Beverly’s qualifications? She had been the driver and administrative assistant to the former Atlanta police chief. Her entire term of service was a joke, and Atlantans looked forward to laughing their way through any news conference in which Ms. Harvard participated due to inability to clearly speak the King’s English.
Meanwhile, Fulton County Sheriff Jacquelyn Barrett, another Bill Campbell cohort, was elected to run the Sheriff’s department and Atlanta Jail from 1993 until she was defeated last in last November’s elections.
Barrett was defeated because of her own incompetence and numerous scandals relating to the construction and operation of the new Atlanta Fulton County jail. Besides being unable to keep the inmates locked securely inside (she allowed a dozen people to escape or be mistakenly released in 2003,) she also had trouble keeping people from outside from getting in, as in when a video crew was allowed inside the jail to film a rap video for inmate rapper T.I. last year. Some of the guards were even in the video.
Needless to say moral and discipline were in the toilet when an imminently qualified gentleman named Myron Freeman took office as the new Fulton County Sheriff this past January. Unfortunately, Mr. Freeman hasn’t had enough time in office to make improvements in the jail or in inmate handling procedures relating to the courts and the City of Atlanta has suffered a tragedy as a result.
Today the Fulton County Sheriff’s department allowed Brian Nichols, a violent rape suspect who had previously been found with two homemade knives in his shoes, to steal a gun from a female deputy and shoot four people in the courthouse, escaping down through eight floors of the building and onto the streets of Atlanta.
First things first, the Sheriff’s department has lost control of the Atlanta jail which they are charged with operating, supplying administrative staff and guards in the facility. As I stated earlier, they can’t keep the inmates in and the rap video crews out. Inmate violence is rampant and somebody is making knives and the guards and deputies are letting the inmates to walk out of jail and into courtrooms with sharp instruments in their shoes. They left a lone woman deputy to guard an unshackled 6’-1”, 200 pound rape suspect who had been caught with weapons before? That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?
Next, how the heck did this guy get off the eighth floor of the courthouse and onto the street without having to pass more than one other deputy? The one that he did see he killed, but I would expect the courthouse to be literally teaming with law enforcement personnel.
Finally, there is a thing known as a “magnetic safety trigger” made by Magna-Trigger that numerous security and law enforcement officers use when in close contact with inmates in places you don’t want a gun getting loose in—places like jails and courthouses.
When the device is installed in a Smith and Wesson handgun, the gun will not fire unless the user wears a magnetic ring on their trigger finger. Similar magnetic devices are available for other gun brands like the Colt Maglock.
What a neat idea, huh? Make the guns in courthouses useless except to the deputies.
Of course the conversion costs money, between $200 to $300 per gun, but with three people dead and one wounded, the $6200 it would cost to modify 20 guns seems to me to be a small price to pay.
Hopefully this is a wake up call for law enforcement everywhere to look at their security efforts and possibly employ some technology to make things a little safer for everyone involved.
Former Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell, whom was recently indicted on federal corruption charges relating to his tenure as mayor from 1994 to 2002, appointed an unqualified woman named Beverly Harvard as Police Chief during his tenure. Beverly’s qualifications? She had been the driver and administrative assistant to the former Atlanta police chief. Her entire term of service was a joke, and Atlantans looked forward to laughing their way through any news conference in which Ms. Harvard participated due to inability to clearly speak the King’s English.
Meanwhile, Fulton County Sheriff Jacquelyn Barrett, another Bill Campbell cohort, was elected to run the Sheriff’s department and Atlanta Jail from 1993 until she was defeated last in last November’s elections.
Barrett was defeated because of her own incompetence and numerous scandals relating to the construction and operation of the new Atlanta Fulton County jail. Besides being unable to keep the inmates locked securely inside (she allowed a dozen people to escape or be mistakenly released in 2003,) she also had trouble keeping people from outside from getting in, as in when a video crew was allowed inside the jail to film a rap video for inmate rapper T.I. last year. Some of the guards were even in the video.
Needless to say moral and discipline were in the toilet when an imminently qualified gentleman named Myron Freeman took office as the new Fulton County Sheriff this past January. Unfortunately, Mr. Freeman hasn’t had enough time in office to make improvements in the jail or in inmate handling procedures relating to the courts and the City of Atlanta has suffered a tragedy as a result.
Today the Fulton County Sheriff’s department allowed Brian Nichols, a violent rape suspect who had previously been found with two homemade knives in his shoes, to steal a gun from a female deputy and shoot four people in the courthouse, escaping down through eight floors of the building and onto the streets of Atlanta.
First things first, the Sheriff’s department has lost control of the Atlanta jail which they are charged with operating, supplying administrative staff and guards in the facility. As I stated earlier, they can’t keep the inmates in and the rap video crews out. Inmate violence is rampant and somebody is making knives and the guards and deputies are letting the inmates to walk out of jail and into courtrooms with sharp instruments in their shoes. They left a lone woman deputy to guard an unshackled 6’-1”, 200 pound rape suspect who had been caught with weapons before? That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?
Next, how the heck did this guy get off the eighth floor of the courthouse and onto the street without having to pass more than one other deputy? The one that he did see he killed, but I would expect the courthouse to be literally teaming with law enforcement personnel.
Finally, there is a thing known as a “magnetic safety trigger” made by Magna-Trigger that numerous security and law enforcement officers use when in close contact with inmates in places you don’t want a gun getting loose in—places like jails and courthouses.
When the device is installed in a Smith and Wesson handgun, the gun will not fire unless the user wears a magnetic ring on their trigger finger. Similar magnetic devices are available for other gun brands like the Colt Maglock.
What a neat idea, huh? Make the guns in courthouses useless except to the deputies.
Of course the conversion costs money, between $200 to $300 per gun, but with three people dead and one wounded, the $6200 it would cost to modify 20 guns seems to me to be a small price to pay.
Hopefully this is a wake up call for law enforcement everywhere to look at their security efforts and possibly employ some technology to make things a little safer for everyone involved.
Friday, March 11, 2005
Creeping Crud
Me and the computer are suffering.
I'm hhacking and ccoughing and the Dell Notebook refuses to connect to the internet, thus the absence of postings on Thursday.
Pat returned from Chicago tonight and I fired up her laptop long enough to check E-mail, get a fix of my fellow blogger's writing, and let you know that, in the words of Governor Arnold...
I'll be back.
I'm hhacking and ccoughing and the Dell Notebook refuses to connect to the internet, thus the absence of postings on Thursday.
Pat returned from Chicago tonight and I fired up her laptop long enough to check E-mail, get a fix of my fellow blogger's writing, and let you know that, in the words of Governor Arnold...
I'll be back.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
I'd Rather...But Not Dan Rather--Part II
Just like the Martha Stewart saga, I can't add a whole lot to the Dan Rather story that I haven't already said in my earlier postings except to state how glad I am that it is over.
If it were really over...except it isn't...over.
Rather still works for CBS and will be on the air on the news magazine 60 Minutes. A lot of people out there still put a great deal of stock in what is said on 60 Minutes.
Isn't the program 60 minutes where Mr. Rather attempted to pass off forged documents on the American public? Documents that impunged the reputation of a sitting US president? Documents intended to affect the outcome of a presidential election?
Documents that practically everyone at CBS except Mary Mapes and Dan Rather have admitted were fakes?
Documents about which Dan Rather recently told David Letterman that he could have proved were real if "they had just had more time before they went on the air with the story?"
Hey Danno, you're now semi-retired...take all the time you need.
Prove the documents are real, YOU STUPID LYING, PARTISAN BASTARD.
If it were really over...except it isn't...over.
Rather still works for CBS and will be on the air on the news magazine 60 Minutes. A lot of people out there still put a great deal of stock in what is said on 60 Minutes.
Isn't the program 60 minutes where Mr. Rather attempted to pass off forged documents on the American public? Documents that impunged the reputation of a sitting US president? Documents intended to affect the outcome of a presidential election?
Documents that practically everyone at CBS except Mary Mapes and Dan Rather have admitted were fakes?
Documents about which Dan Rather recently told David Letterman that he could have proved were real if "they had just had more time before they went on the air with the story?"
Hey Danno, you're now semi-retired...take all the time you need.
Prove the documents are real, YOU STUPID LYING, PARTISAN BASTARD.
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Anti-Gun Insanity
The hysterical whackos are at it again in Illinois.
“Anti-gun lawmakers are seeking a ban on .50-caliber "sniper rifles," saying they're favored by terrorists and can shoot down aircraft from a range of more than 2,000 yards -- though they don't appear to be tied to any crimes here in the last decade, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis shows.
A spokesman for the National Rifle Association, which is pushing dozens of its own bills in the General Assembly, vowed to fight the sniper-rifle legislation backed by Representatives Elaine Nekritz (D-Northbrook) and Beth Coulson (R-Glenview).
"There isn't a single person in the United States that I know of who has been killed by one of these firearms," said Todd Vandermyde, an NRA lobbyist in Springfield.”
As I wrote back in November in “Six Dead In Wisconsin” and in September in ”1994 Assault Weapons Ban Expires,” why can’t the anti-gun morons get it through their thick skulls that dead is dead and if someone that knows what they are doing shoots at you with a .177 caliber pellet gun you are in almost as much trouble as someone firing a so called “sniper” weapon?
I have friends that shoot competitively that you do not want coming after your butt with a pea shooter. And by the way, you don’t want me looking for you with my old JC Higgens M-25 semi-automatic 22 caliber rifle with a Weaver 4X scope if I have an axe to grind with you.
It’s a slippery slope, and banning one kind of gun leads to banning yet another, Next they say that you can only own “x” number of guns (I have three rifles and two shotguns—so sue me) and finally no one legally has any guns except the police and the military.
And, of course, PEOPLE LIKE CRIMINALS who already have illegal guns or own guns illegally like felons.
Why do we have to keep going through this stuff every few months?
“Anti-gun lawmakers are seeking a ban on .50-caliber "sniper rifles," saying they're favored by terrorists and can shoot down aircraft from a range of more than 2,000 yards -- though they don't appear to be tied to any crimes here in the last decade, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis shows.
A spokesman for the National Rifle Association, which is pushing dozens of its own bills in the General Assembly, vowed to fight the sniper-rifle legislation backed by Representatives Elaine Nekritz (D-Northbrook) and Beth Coulson (R-Glenview).
"There isn't a single person in the United States that I know of who has been killed by one of these firearms," said Todd Vandermyde, an NRA lobbyist in Springfield.”
As I wrote back in November in “Six Dead In Wisconsin” and in September in ”1994 Assault Weapons Ban Expires,” why can’t the anti-gun morons get it through their thick skulls that dead is dead and if someone that knows what they are doing shoots at you with a .177 caliber pellet gun you are in almost as much trouble as someone firing a so called “sniper” weapon?
I have friends that shoot competitively that you do not want coming after your butt with a pea shooter. And by the way, you don’t want me looking for you with my old JC Higgens M-25 semi-automatic 22 caliber rifle with a Weaver 4X scope if I have an axe to grind with you.
It’s a slippery slope, and banning one kind of gun leads to banning yet another, Next they say that you can only own “x” number of guns (I have three rifles and two shotguns—so sue me) and finally no one legally has any guns except the police and the military.
And, of course, PEOPLE LIKE CRIMINALS who already have illegal guns or own guns illegally like felons.
Why do we have to keep going through this stuff every few months?
Martha Stewart
There, I said it.
And while I'm at it, Michael Jackson, Scott Peterson, and Kobie Bryant et. al. can all go somewhere far, far away and I'll help take up a collection to pay their airfare. I just don't give a damn.
Oh, and FOX's Greta Van Sustren can be their co-pilot...
And while I'm at it, Michael Jackson, Scott Peterson, and Kobie Bryant et. al. can all go somewhere far, far away and I'll help take up a collection to pay their airfare. I just don't give a damn.
Oh, and FOX's Greta Van Sustren can be their co-pilot...
Monday, March 07, 2005
What Is There To Not Understand?
Imagine this situation with me. You’re driving through suburban Atlanta, Georgia at night. You are in the Stewart Avenue (now called Metropolitan Blvd.) area of south Atlanta near the airport that is known as a high crime district. Prostitution, drugs, petty crime, a shooting almost every day—you get the picture?
As you cruise along at about 45 MPH with your windows rolled up and your doors locked, you see a police roadblock up ahead.
What do you do?
Do you a) maintain your speed because of the bad neighborhood and attempt to blow though the roadblock, or do you b) slow down and obey the commands of the officers?
If you chose option a, wouldn’t you expect the police to react rather adversely to your behavior? If you actually drove your car too close to an officer, might you not expect the police to use deadly force in response to your threat? As a minimum you could expect an ensuing police chase and the opportunity to spend a free night with crappy accommodations courtesy of Clayton County Georgia.
Now move this situation to Iraq, a country that has been under the rule of a dictator for 30 plus years and been under military rule of coalition forces for going on three years. You watch CNN and Fox news and work for your government’s security agency.
HOW IN THE HELL DO YOU EXPECT ME TO BELIEVE THAT YOU SOMEHOW THOUGHT THAT YOU COULD BLOW THROUGH A MILITARY ROADBLOCK IN A COUNTRY FULL OF SUICIDE CAR BOMBERS AND NOT GET YOUR BUTT SHOT OFF?
Yet after two plus years of coalition operations, someone actually is trying to say that people are still confused about what to do at roadside military checkpoints.
“The deadly shooting of an Italian intelligence officer by U.S. troops at a checkpoint near Baghdad on Friday was one of many incidents in which civilians have been killed by mistake at checkpoints in Iraq, including local police officers, women and children, according to military records, U.S. officials and human rights groups.
U.S. soldiers have fired on the occupants of many cars approaching their positions over the past year and a half, only to discover that the people they killed were not suicide bombers or attackers but Iraqi civilians. They did so while operating under rules of engagement that the military has classified and under a legal doctrine that grants U.S. troops immunity from civil liability for misjudgment.”
SO WHAT’S NOT TO UNDERSTAND?
JUST LIKE HERE IN THE UNITED STATES, YOU SEE A ROADBLOCK—YOU SLOW DOWN AND STOP.
Got It Now?????
As you cruise along at about 45 MPH with your windows rolled up and your doors locked, you see a police roadblock up ahead.
What do you do?
Do you a) maintain your speed because of the bad neighborhood and attempt to blow though the roadblock, or do you b) slow down and obey the commands of the officers?
If you chose option a, wouldn’t you expect the police to react rather adversely to your behavior? If you actually drove your car too close to an officer, might you not expect the police to use deadly force in response to your threat? As a minimum you could expect an ensuing police chase and the opportunity to spend a free night with crappy accommodations courtesy of Clayton County Georgia.
Now move this situation to Iraq, a country that has been under the rule of a dictator for 30 plus years and been under military rule of coalition forces for going on three years. You watch CNN and Fox news and work for your government’s security agency.
HOW IN THE HELL DO YOU EXPECT ME TO BELIEVE THAT YOU SOMEHOW THOUGHT THAT YOU COULD BLOW THROUGH A MILITARY ROADBLOCK IN A COUNTRY FULL OF SUICIDE CAR BOMBERS AND NOT GET YOUR BUTT SHOT OFF?
Yet after two plus years of coalition operations, someone actually is trying to say that people are still confused about what to do at roadside military checkpoints.
“The deadly shooting of an Italian intelligence officer by U.S. troops at a checkpoint near Baghdad on Friday was one of many incidents in which civilians have been killed by mistake at checkpoints in Iraq, including local police officers, women and children, according to military records, U.S. officials and human rights groups.
U.S. soldiers have fired on the occupants of many cars approaching their positions over the past year and a half, only to discover that the people they killed were not suicide bombers or attackers but Iraqi civilians. They did so while operating under rules of engagement that the military has classified and under a legal doctrine that grants U.S. troops immunity from civil liability for misjudgment.”
SO WHAT’S NOT TO UNDERSTAND?
JUST LIKE HERE IN THE UNITED STATES, YOU SEE A ROADBLOCK—YOU SLOW DOWN AND STOP.
Got It Now?????
I Was Right, They Were Just Stupid
It seems that little Italian communist Giuliana Sgrena was released because the Italian Secret Police arranged to pay a multi-million dollar ransom to her "insurgent" captors. The Italian authorities didn't tip off the US forces that she had been released because they didn't want us to know that they were paying for it.
In an interview with Hamid Mir, Osama Bin Laden's "official biographer", he said that "I met some criminals in the al-Mansoor area of Baghdad who offered me lot of money. They proposed that I trap one Western journalist for them; they will take the ransom and then I will get may share. I just disappeared from Palestine Hotel after that offer."
So these Osama want-a-be's that don't have financial backing have discovered that the Italians are willing to indirectly fund their efforts against coalition troops. Snatch a reporter, even one that is simpathetic to their cause, and hold her until someone ponys up some cash. I wonder how bad the conditions of her captivity really were? She could have been well fed and living watching CNN while the world worried about her plight. And I wonder who got a cut of the ransom money like that promised to Mr. Mir?
I wonder how many Rocket Propelled Grenades and Improvised Exposive Devices six million (see update below) dollars will buy? I wonder how many innocent Iraqis and coalition troops will be injured and killed as a result of Comrad Sgrena's "independent" reporting efforts in Iraq?
The domestic and Italian leftists and the media should quit their whining and admit that these people brought the firepower of the Americans on themselves through their own incompetence.
With reporters like Giuliana, who needs "Osama" to fund terrorism?
Update: 9:20 AM
They paid six million, not a million ransom. Here is the Washington Times story.
What pisses me off is how Comrad Sgrena's story keeps changing to suit the facts that have leaked out publicly. First she was certain that they had targeted her as a journalist for the tone of her stories. Now she is certain that the US troops were targeting her because she was released as a result of a ransom? She says that the car was not speeding, but she also is quoted as saying that they were going so fast that the driver nearly lost control of the car avoiding rain puddles.
Expect to hear the bitching and complaining continue while the left attempts to impune our troops efforts in Iraq.
In an interview with Hamid Mir, Osama Bin Laden's "official biographer", he said that "I met some criminals in the al-Mansoor area of Baghdad who offered me lot of money. They proposed that I trap one Western journalist for them; they will take the ransom and then I will get may share. I just disappeared from Palestine Hotel after that offer."
So these Osama want-a-be's that don't have financial backing have discovered that the Italians are willing to indirectly fund their efforts against coalition troops. Snatch a reporter, even one that is simpathetic to their cause, and hold her until someone ponys up some cash. I wonder how bad the conditions of her captivity really were? She could have been well fed and living watching CNN while the world worried about her plight. And I wonder who got a cut of the ransom money like that promised to Mr. Mir?
I wonder how many Rocket Propelled Grenades and Improvised Exposive Devices six million (see update below) dollars will buy? I wonder how many innocent Iraqis and coalition troops will be injured and killed as a result of Comrad Sgrena's "independent" reporting efforts in Iraq?
The domestic and Italian leftists and the media should quit their whining and admit that these people brought the firepower of the Americans on themselves through their own incompetence.
With reporters like Giuliana, who needs "Osama" to fund terrorism?
Update: 9:20 AM
They paid six million, not a million ransom. Here is the Washington Times story.
What pisses me off is how Comrad Sgrena's story keeps changing to suit the facts that have leaked out publicly. First she was certain that they had targeted her as a journalist for the tone of her stories. Now she is certain that the US troops were targeting her because she was released as a result of a ransom? She says that the car was not speeding, but she also is quoted as saying that they were going so fast that the driver nearly lost control of the car avoiding rain puddles.
Expect to hear the bitching and complaining continue while the left attempts to impune our troops efforts in Iraq.
Are They Just Plain Stupid?
Or do they just think that we are?
I’ve had it up to here (pointing to the top of my every graying, balding head) with journalists. Particularly the variety called “war correspondents.”
Foreign and domestic, they are, by and large, in my personal estimation, useless, overeducated morons with a political axe to grind--having no intention of reporting the facts about what is occurring around them. Not to say that they are all bad, mind you, just that most of them are.
These individuals have jobs as reporters, but they have lost sight of the fact that, when it comes to world events, they are supposed to REPORT WHAT IS HAPPENING. Noooooo, that would be too easy, they are now editoralizers and commentators. They have either lost sight of who their audience is, or else they think that we are too stupid to read and listen to the facts and form our own opinions based on the evidence.
History has given us some really great war correspondents. Guys like Ernie Pyle, for example. Ernie Pyle was “embedded” with the US forces in Europe and the Pacific as a reporter during WWII. By “embedded,” I don’t mean that he slept in the Paris or Tokyo Hilton and made day trips to film a drive by “terrorist” car bombing and to send out an anti-war missive in time to be home for happy hour at the hotel bar.
By embedded, I mean that Ernie lived with the troops he reported on. He wore an Army uniform, he ate and slept with the troops and he died with the troops, as a Japanese machine-gun bullet killed him on the island of Ie Shima on April 18, 1945, at the age of 44.
Ernie won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, but he didn’t win it by despising the young American men he reported on while salivating for a “friendly fire” expose or an Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Ernie was famous for reporting on the lives of the men that were charged with defending our freedom and his life on a day by day basis. Here is an excerpt from an article entitled “Killing is all that matters”:
“WITH THE AMERICAN FORCES IN ALGIERS, December 1, 1942 - From now onward, stretching for months and months into the future, life is completely changed for thousands of American boys on this side of the earth. For at last they are in there fighting.
The jump from camp life into front-line living is just as great as the original jump from civilian life into the Army. Only those who served in the last war can conceive of the makeshift, deadly urgent, always-moving-onward complexion of front-line existence.
And existence is exactly the word: it is nothing more.
You dig ditches for protection from bullets and from the chill north wind off the Mediterranean. There are no more hot-water taps. There are no post exchanges where you can buy cigarets. There are no movies.
When you speak to a civilian you have to wrestle with a foreign language. You carry just enough clothing to cover you, and no more. You don't lug any knickknacks at all.
When our troops made their first landings in North Africa they went four days without even blankets, just catching a few hours sleep on the ground.
Everybody either lost or chucked aside some of his equipment. Like most troops going into battle for the first time, they all carried too much at first. Gradually they shed it. The boys tossed out personal gear from their musette bags and filled them with ammunition.
The countryside for twenty miles around Oran was strewn with overcoats, field jackets and mess kits as the soldiers moved on the city.
Arabs will be going around for a whole generation clad in odd pieces of American Army uniforms. “
Sound Familiar? Other than the reference to the Mediterranean and Northern Africa, this piece could have been written two years ago during the initial invasion of Iraq. Go to the link and read the entire piece if you have time and read more of Ernie’s work here.
Now let’s talk about the little Italian communist Giuliana Sgrena and the stir that her reporting efforts have caused in Iraq:
“The daughter of a World War II veteran, Sgrena was one of the founders of the peace movement in the 1980s.
Before joining Il Manifesto, she worked for the daily Guerra e Pace (War and Peace), but she made her name at the communist newspaper mainly through her avowed affinity with the Arab world.
"For my whole life, I have fought and written on behalf of the weakest," she said in a video put together by those who campaigned to secure her release.
With this in mind, the reporter refused to become embedded with the US military during the war - choosing, instead, to remain in Iraq on her own during the major hostilities of the spring of 2003.
She then returned to the country periodically, focusing on the suffering of ordinary Iraqis brought about by a war she was vehemently opposed to.
Sgrena's outspoken anti-war stance should have endeared her to Iraqi insurgents fighting the US-led forces, said friends and colleagues shocked at her capture on 4 February.”
Wrong, Comrad Sgrena. The only way to endear yourself to the Iraqi “insurgents” is to be an Arab man, grow a long beard, strap explosives to your body or install them in the trunk of your car, and end your life killing as many of your innocent fellow Iraqis while looking for your gaggle of eternal virgins.
And by founding “the peace movement in the 1980’s” isn’t Sgrena about 20 years too late? I thought that the American left started the “peace movement” in the 1960’s in response to the Vietnam War. Come to think of it, isn’t passivism and the “peace movement” was as old as history—supported by the coddled “intellectual” group du jour whom constantly criticize those around them that militarily defend their right to be stupid and complain about society’s ills.
So any way, this silly Italian woman “war correspondent” wanders into Iraq, on her own, because she is against the war and would never allow the American Military to support and protect her presence there. Instead, Sgrena and her fellow “war correspondents” over at Il Manifesto have been running around Iraq undermining the coalition’s efforts. Look at this excerpt from a story published under the headline ’My Name is Giuliana Sgrena: I write for a Newspaper Which Opposed the Sanctions and the War Against Iraq’:
“Sheik Hussein al Zobey, Sunni coordinator of the refugee camps inside the University of Baghdad, uttered an impassioned appeal for the journalist's release: "In the name of truth, free her. I appeal in the name of those who come to help us. I ask the kidnappers to free Giuliana, who has promised to help us. She has laughed and played with our children—and has cried with us."
"Truly moving is the involvement of the Iraqi people in Giuliana Sgrena's ordeal," writes Il Manifesto's correspondent from Baghdad, Stefano Chiarini. "Suffering daily abuses and violence from occupation forces or their proxies, the Iraqis themselves are subjected to routine hostage-taking by the occupiers. If the father is not at home, they arrest his son, or brother, or other relative. Under the pretext of looking for arms, American soldiers and their Iraqi trainees look for jewels and money. And, yet, the whole country has mobilised for the liberation of Giuliana." ”
This is yet another perfect example for the left and the Democrats and the other international “nay sayers” of what kind of animals we are dealing with in Iraq. It doesn’t even matter if you have adopted their side of the fight, if you are not an Arab Muslim you are a potential target. If you happen to be a white skinned woman, your life is even more worthless.
The only reason Sgrena was released was that it was politically expedient for her captors to do so, and she hasn’t yet learned her lesson. Continuing along the path of ignoring the military control and restriction issues brought about by the “insurgent” actions, she and her Italian "James Bond" wannabe protector jump in a used Datsun car and go screaming down a road toward a US Military roadblock.
This story in the anti occupation web site uruknet.info (written by Washington Post reporters) seems to make a case opposite the meaning of their own headline that “Observers Cite Other Shootings at Checkpoints:
“But the circumstances of Friday's shooting of Italian military intelligence officer Nicola Calipari made it particularly vulnerable to calamity, a military source said as he divulged new details of how the car in which Calipari and a newly freed hostage, Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, came to be attacked.
The automobile was traversing onto a route -- the road to the airport -- where soldiers have been killed in shootings and by roadside bombs. U.S. soldiers had established an impromptu evening checkpoint at the entrance to the road about 90 minutes earlier and had stopped other vehicles.
They knew a high-level embassy official would be moving to the airport on that road, and their aim was to support this movement.But no specific coordination occurred between those involved in Sgrena's rescue and the military unit responsible for the checkpoint, according to the source, who said he cannot be named because the military's investigation into the incident is continuing.
Soldiers at the checkpoint have told U.S. military officers that they flashed lights, used hand signals and fired warning shots in an effort to stop the car, which they believed was traveling at more than 50 mph, a typical speed for that road. But Sgrena, who had just been released by Iraqi captors, recalled later that the car was not traveling very fast and that soldiers started firing "right after lighting" a spotlight -- a decision she said was not justified.
Sgrena was wounded by shrapnel in the U.S. barrage.The absence of advance communication between the Italians and the U.S. soldiers at the checkpoint appears to have put the occupants of the car in grave jeopardy, given what many U.S. officials describe as the military's standard practice of firing at onrushing cars from their checkpoints in Iraq."
In my view, the main contributing factor was a lack of prior coordination with the ground unit," the source said. "If requested, we would have resourced and supported this mission very differently."
Military officials in Iraq have said for two days that they cannot answer questions about U.S. rules of engagement because of a need to keep insurgents off guard. Officials have not said whether these rules have changed since the insurgency in Iraq worsened in late 2003. They also have declined to estimate how many civilians such as Calipari have been killed accidentally by U.S. forces -- at checkpoints or elsewhere in Iraq.”
So the bottom line here is that you are going to hear two versions of this story, no matter what the facts actually are. One is what I’ll call the Eason Jordan version saying that the US is targeting journalists. The other version, which makes sense for me, is that these Italian cowboys were running around in a war zone and failed to heed the rules of engagement and got their butts shot off.
Which version are you going to believe?
I’ve had it up to here (pointing to the top of my every graying, balding head) with journalists. Particularly the variety called “war correspondents.”
Foreign and domestic, they are, by and large, in my personal estimation, useless, overeducated morons with a political axe to grind--having no intention of reporting the facts about what is occurring around them. Not to say that they are all bad, mind you, just that most of them are.
These individuals have jobs as reporters, but they have lost sight of the fact that, when it comes to world events, they are supposed to REPORT WHAT IS HAPPENING. Noooooo, that would be too easy, they are now editoralizers and commentators. They have either lost sight of who their audience is, or else they think that we are too stupid to read and listen to the facts and form our own opinions based on the evidence.
History has given us some really great war correspondents. Guys like Ernie Pyle, for example. Ernie Pyle was “embedded” with the US forces in Europe and the Pacific as a reporter during WWII. By “embedded,” I don’t mean that he slept in the Paris or Tokyo Hilton and made day trips to film a drive by “terrorist” car bombing and to send out an anti-war missive in time to be home for happy hour at the hotel bar.
By embedded, I mean that Ernie lived with the troops he reported on. He wore an Army uniform, he ate and slept with the troops and he died with the troops, as a Japanese machine-gun bullet killed him on the island of Ie Shima on April 18, 1945, at the age of 44.
Ernie won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, but he didn’t win it by despising the young American men he reported on while salivating for a “friendly fire” expose or an Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Ernie was famous for reporting on the lives of the men that were charged with defending our freedom and his life on a day by day basis. Here is an excerpt from an article entitled “Killing is all that matters”:
“WITH THE AMERICAN FORCES IN ALGIERS, December 1, 1942 - From now onward, stretching for months and months into the future, life is completely changed for thousands of American boys on this side of the earth. For at last they are in there fighting.
The jump from camp life into front-line living is just as great as the original jump from civilian life into the Army. Only those who served in the last war can conceive of the makeshift, deadly urgent, always-moving-onward complexion of front-line existence.
And existence is exactly the word: it is nothing more.
You dig ditches for protection from bullets and from the chill north wind off the Mediterranean. There are no more hot-water taps. There are no post exchanges where you can buy cigarets. There are no movies.
When you speak to a civilian you have to wrestle with a foreign language. You carry just enough clothing to cover you, and no more. You don't lug any knickknacks at all.
When our troops made their first landings in North Africa they went four days without even blankets, just catching a few hours sleep on the ground.
Everybody either lost or chucked aside some of his equipment. Like most troops going into battle for the first time, they all carried too much at first. Gradually they shed it. The boys tossed out personal gear from their musette bags and filled them with ammunition.
The countryside for twenty miles around Oran was strewn with overcoats, field jackets and mess kits as the soldiers moved on the city.
Arabs will be going around for a whole generation clad in odd pieces of American Army uniforms. “
Sound Familiar? Other than the reference to the Mediterranean and Northern Africa, this piece could have been written two years ago during the initial invasion of Iraq. Go to the link and read the entire piece if you have time and read more of Ernie’s work here.
Now let’s talk about the little Italian communist Giuliana Sgrena and the stir that her reporting efforts have caused in Iraq:
“The daughter of a World War II veteran, Sgrena was one of the founders of the peace movement in the 1980s.
Before joining Il Manifesto, she worked for the daily Guerra e Pace (War and Peace), but she made her name at the communist newspaper mainly through her avowed affinity with the Arab world.
"For my whole life, I have fought and written on behalf of the weakest," she said in a video put together by those who campaigned to secure her release.
With this in mind, the reporter refused to become embedded with the US military during the war - choosing, instead, to remain in Iraq on her own during the major hostilities of the spring of 2003.
She then returned to the country periodically, focusing on the suffering of ordinary Iraqis brought about by a war she was vehemently opposed to.
Sgrena's outspoken anti-war stance should have endeared her to Iraqi insurgents fighting the US-led forces, said friends and colleagues shocked at her capture on 4 February.”
Wrong, Comrad Sgrena. The only way to endear yourself to the Iraqi “insurgents” is to be an Arab man, grow a long beard, strap explosives to your body or install them in the trunk of your car, and end your life killing as many of your innocent fellow Iraqis while looking for your gaggle of eternal virgins.
And by founding “the peace movement in the 1980’s” isn’t Sgrena about 20 years too late? I thought that the American left started the “peace movement” in the 1960’s in response to the Vietnam War. Come to think of it, isn’t passivism and the “peace movement” was as old as history—supported by the coddled “intellectual” group du jour whom constantly criticize those around them that militarily defend their right to be stupid and complain about society’s ills.
So any way, this silly Italian woman “war correspondent” wanders into Iraq, on her own, because she is against the war and would never allow the American Military to support and protect her presence there. Instead, Sgrena and her fellow “war correspondents” over at Il Manifesto have been running around Iraq undermining the coalition’s efforts. Look at this excerpt from a story published under the headline ’My Name is Giuliana Sgrena: I write for a Newspaper Which Opposed the Sanctions and the War Against Iraq’:
“Sheik Hussein al Zobey, Sunni coordinator of the refugee camps inside the University of Baghdad, uttered an impassioned appeal for the journalist's release: "In the name of truth, free her. I appeal in the name of those who come to help us. I ask the kidnappers to free Giuliana, who has promised to help us. She has laughed and played with our children—and has cried with us."
"Truly moving is the involvement of the Iraqi people in Giuliana Sgrena's ordeal," writes Il Manifesto's correspondent from Baghdad, Stefano Chiarini. "Suffering daily abuses and violence from occupation forces or their proxies, the Iraqis themselves are subjected to routine hostage-taking by the occupiers. If the father is not at home, they arrest his son, or brother, or other relative. Under the pretext of looking for arms, American soldiers and their Iraqi trainees look for jewels and money. And, yet, the whole country has mobilised for the liberation of Giuliana." ”
This is yet another perfect example for the left and the Democrats and the other international “nay sayers” of what kind of animals we are dealing with in Iraq. It doesn’t even matter if you have adopted their side of the fight, if you are not an Arab Muslim you are a potential target. If you happen to be a white skinned woman, your life is even more worthless.
The only reason Sgrena was released was that it was politically expedient for her captors to do so, and she hasn’t yet learned her lesson. Continuing along the path of ignoring the military control and restriction issues brought about by the “insurgent” actions, she and her Italian "James Bond" wannabe protector jump in a used Datsun car and go screaming down a road toward a US Military roadblock.
This story in the anti occupation web site uruknet.info (written by Washington Post reporters) seems to make a case opposite the meaning of their own headline that “Observers Cite Other Shootings at Checkpoints:
“But the circumstances of Friday's shooting of Italian military intelligence officer Nicola Calipari made it particularly vulnerable to calamity, a military source said as he divulged new details of how the car in which Calipari and a newly freed hostage, Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, came to be attacked.
The automobile was traversing onto a route -- the road to the airport -- where soldiers have been killed in shootings and by roadside bombs. U.S. soldiers had established an impromptu evening checkpoint at the entrance to the road about 90 minutes earlier and had stopped other vehicles.
They knew a high-level embassy official would be moving to the airport on that road, and their aim was to support this movement.But no specific coordination occurred between those involved in Sgrena's rescue and the military unit responsible for the checkpoint, according to the source, who said he cannot be named because the military's investigation into the incident is continuing.
Soldiers at the checkpoint have told U.S. military officers that they flashed lights, used hand signals and fired warning shots in an effort to stop the car, which they believed was traveling at more than 50 mph, a typical speed for that road. But Sgrena, who had just been released by Iraqi captors, recalled later that the car was not traveling very fast and that soldiers started firing "right after lighting" a spotlight -- a decision she said was not justified.
Sgrena was wounded by shrapnel in the U.S. barrage.The absence of advance communication between the Italians and the U.S. soldiers at the checkpoint appears to have put the occupants of the car in grave jeopardy, given what many U.S. officials describe as the military's standard practice of firing at onrushing cars from their checkpoints in Iraq."
In my view, the main contributing factor was a lack of prior coordination with the ground unit," the source said. "If requested, we would have resourced and supported this mission very differently."
Military officials in Iraq have said for two days that they cannot answer questions about U.S. rules of engagement because of a need to keep insurgents off guard. Officials have not said whether these rules have changed since the insurgency in Iraq worsened in late 2003. They also have declined to estimate how many civilians such as Calipari have been killed accidentally by U.S. forces -- at checkpoints or elsewhere in Iraq.”
So the bottom line here is that you are going to hear two versions of this story, no matter what the facts actually are. One is what I’ll call the Eason Jordan version saying that the US is targeting journalists. The other version, which makes sense for me, is that these Italian cowboys were running around in a war zone and failed to heed the rules of engagement and got their butts shot off.
Which version are you going to believe?
