5/06/2005
More Screwed Up American Media
Listening to the hourly news on the radio on my way home from work yesterday. On a day when elections where held in Britain, elections widely touted as a referendum on prime Minister Tony Blair's support of America's war on Islamofascist terror, can you guess what the lead story was?
A public statement by the f&*%ing "Runaway Bride."
Followed by the latest from the Michael Jackson trial.
This is what the mainstream media has come to. Note to media gurus: when I see/hear anything about either of these stories, I change the freaking channel Tell me something that's worth knowing. Tell me about the latest behind the scenes maneuvering in Congress, nauseating as that may be. Tell about about our troops taking supplies to a school in Iraq, or a hospital in Afghanistan. Tell me about China's latest threat against Taiwan, and how it's supported by the weasels in Paris. Tell me about how the social welfare states in Europe are collapsing, or about how successful many former Warsaw Pact countries flat tax laws have been.
Just tell me something worth knowing.
Permalink
|
5/05/2005
Choices, choices, choices...
I've got enouh money in my little motivational can to buy myself something, I just can't decide what.
Option 1 is a Choate Dragunov style stock for one of my SKS's. Because it looks evil and fun. And I really like my SKSs.
Option 2 is buying a 75 round drum for my WASR. Impractical and pretty much unnecessary, but it would annoy the heck out of folks like DiFi.
Then there's always Option 3, which is to spend the money taking the wife out to a really nice dinner somewhere.
Permalink
|
More Thoughts on the Home State
Court actions resulting from the November 2004 attempt to elect a governor continue. Personally, I don't much care about all the legal maneueverings, and personally I find all of it a bit distasteful. The GOP it seems to me are trying use statistical numbers games to get teh courts to declare that Rossi won. I think they've already pretty much proven that the amount of illegal votes, uncounted ballots, illegally counted ballots, and extra ballots are well, well beyond the number of votes that separated the two candidates. The Democrats, I think, have belatedly figured out that this case isn't going to get thrown out and are playing at the GOPs statistics game, trying to find illegal votes in GOP areas.
Maybe I'm just simple, but it seems to me that this whole thing should be over. We know for a fact that the number of illegal votes (felons, non-citizens, double votes), uncounted absentee ballots, and unverified but still counted provisional ballots total out to somewhere close to ten times the number of votes separating the two candidates. And that's just in King County, which also has the niggling problem that the number of votes counted doesn't match the number of people credited with voting. There's no way to know who all those wrongly tallied votes were for, therefore, there is no way to know definitively, who won the election. Thus, the only fair thing to do is to do the election over again.
Had the revote been held any time prior to the start of the recently concluded Legislature session, I honestly think Gregoire would have won. I say this because the Libertarian candidate, who earned a large number of votes, ran on the 'leftist' issues on the Libertarian platform-civil liberties, gay marraige, opposition to the Iraq war, marijuana legalization-rather than the more common small government, pro-gun issues, which don't get votes in Seattle. Had the revote been held quickly, I think many of those voters would have voted for Gregoire, giving her a win larger than the cumulative errors around the state.
But now? After the antics of the Legislature, and Gregoire's support for them, the former Attorney General would go down in flames, and she and her party know it.
Gregoire would get shelled because, after less than 6 months of squatting in the Governor's mansion, she's broken the promises she made on critical issues, especially taxes and spending. Increases in taxes on gasoline and cigarettes, categories in which Washington's state taxes are already among the highest. The return of the estate tax. And allowing local governments to tack additional fees onto vehicle registrations, despite two voter initiatives limiting license tabs to $30. To do all this, they gutted another popular voter initiative, I-601, which required a two-thirds vote in the Legislature to approve tax increases and limited the growth of government spending. To do this, they declared the state budget to be "emergency spending" simply because they couldn't get the Republicans to go along with their wishes.
Queen Christine and the Imperial government in Olympia must be stopped. I am a part of the Rebel Alliance. They are the traitors.
Permalink
|
5/04/2005
It's Still True
"Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them." -T.E. Lawrence
And that's how we will win in Iraq. Slowly, but surely, with the Iraqis destroying the insurgency.
Permalink
|
Ma Deuce's Diary-4 May 2005
It's been a while, I've I've got plenty of good stories.
Roster of American combat heroes in Iraq is rich
Though most have won little note outside their own units and hometowns, dozens of GIs have distinguished themselves with extraordinary valor in what for many were their last moments of life.
His tour in Iraq is truly 'burned' in his memory
He received the phone call in February 2004 at work -- he's a respiratory therapist at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia -- telling him he had to report to Fort Bliss, Texas, in three days. The printed orders came soon after: He'd be heading for Iraq.
Military vehicle is blast from past
The new vehicle can tow a large mortar, haul 2,000 pounds of ammunition or evacuate wounded soldiers. Some versions will be armed with a .50-caliber machine gun.
Re adjusting to life after deployment
For members of the military and their families, readjustment is the name of the game before, during and after an extended deployment, especially one which puts the military member in a combat zone, such as Iraq.
Permalink
|
5/03/2005
Feinstein at It Again
Via Say Uncle!, we find Queen of the Grabbers Dianne Feinstein (Bolshevik-San Francisco) once again going heavy on the fear-mongering scare tactics and riding the terrorism hobby horse like the Lone Ranger on Silver.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein announced Friday the introduction of legislation that would classify .50-caliber rifles in the same category as machine guns or sawn-off shotguns.
Trying this approach because she knows that an outright ban has the same chance of passing as she does of becoming President.
The legislation would change the .50-caliber's classification as a "long gun,'' requiring all future sales to go through a licensed gun dealer and a background check on the buyer, Howard Gantman, a Feinstein spokesman, reported.
Throwing a bone to the ignorant here, since all retail sales already must go through an FFL and a NICS check.
If the legislation passed, the Internal Revenue Service would also record all future purchases of the weapon under the National Firearms Act.
Lovely-the Grand Inquisitors of the Infernal Revenue Service as custodians of our rights. Anyway, I thought the ATF did this, or did it move since ATF moved to Justice?
The U.S. military commonly uses the large weapon, which California banned in 2004, as a sniper rifle. According to Feinstein, the destructive power of the rifle makes it different than a standard rifle, requiring more safeguards before a person can purchase the weapon.
the most common use of .50 BMG rifles is sniping, true. But the rifles themselves are hardly common, having only been type-standardized within the last 6 months. They were originally used by EOD units to blow up mines and such from safe distances. Then the Special Ops types noticed them, and eventually they made their way to the Big Army and Marines.
As far as their destructive potential, the NFA, which classifies only weapons with a bore diameter of greater than .500 inches as destructive devices, became law in 1934. The Machine Gun, Caliber .50, M2, went into production for the U.S. military in 1933, a full year before the NFA. And yet, the .50 BMG was not included under the NFA.
"For instance, a sniper atop the Washington Monument (with a .50-caliber rifle) could target anybody or anything within a four-mile radius, including the White House, the Capitol, every building on or around the Mall, and aircraft flying in and out of Reagan National Airport,'' Feinstein said in a statement.
This statement is so silly that I don't know where to think that DiFi is so stupid that she actually belives this crap, or if she's lying and she knows it. I'm guessing it's the latter.
Now, the listed maximum range for the .50 BMG cartridge is 6,765m. But that's how far the bullet will fly if fired at the optimum ballistic angle, under perfect conditions, on flat ground. You're not going to be hitting anything smaller than maybe a specified 100 square yard patch of ground at that range. Maximum effective range-the range at which you can aim at something and hit it hard enough to damage/kill it-is listed as just over 1,800m. Still a long ways, but nowhere close to 4 miles (6,400m).
A comparison: The Army claims the maximum effective range for the 120mm smoothbore cannon mounted in the M1 series tanks as around 5,000 meters-at least, that's the best I've been told by armor officers. I think the tank can hit tank-sized targets farther away, but they can't tell what they're shooting at. That's still almost a mile short of the 4 miles that Feinstein claims for the .50, and that's a tank gun, with a laser rangefinder, high powered optics, and computer fire control. A sniper, even with a tripod mount and a 36x scope on his .50 rifle isn't even going to come close. For one thing, it's tough to use that scope when the barrel is pointed at the sky at a near 45-degree angle, which you'd have to do to get that bullet to fly 4 miles.
The rifles are currently classified in the same category as .22-caliber target rifles and .30-06-caliber hunting rifleS.
Actually, they're classified in the same category as all rifle with a bore diameter of .500" or less. Read the law, morons.
I don't own a .50 rifle. I really can't afford one, nor do I have any good places to shoot one.
But I'd buy one if this looked like it had a chance of becoming law. Molon Labe, bitch.
Permalink
|
5/02/2005
Support Justice Janice Rodgers Brown
This from the SF Chronicle. The article supports Justice Brown for her consistent rulings in favor of individual rights. And unlike her Democrat detractors in the Senate and elsewhere, these authors actually cite specific cases to back up their arguement.
Hi-Voltage Wireworks vs. San Jose: "[D]iscrimination on the basis of race is illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, inherently wrong, and destructive of democratic society."
People vs. McKay: "If full custodial arrest is authorized for trivial offenses, the power to search should be constrained."
And on overall judicial philosophy: "judges 'must vigorously resist encroachments that heighten the potential for arbitrary government action.'"
Forget the Appeals Court. We need her on the Supreme Court.
Permalink
|
|
|
