December 23, 2015

A caroling we go

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Don't we know archaic barrel
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

UPDATE: Here's the real deal.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 07:07 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 48 words, total size 1 kb.

December 21, 2015

Same song, next verse.

A woman deliberately drove into a crowd of people on the sidewalk in Vegas last night. Then she did the same thing two more times. One dead, several dozen in various hospitals with varying degrees of injury. She's been charged with murder.

Stop me if you've heard this before: The police don't quite know what her motive was -- but they're absolutely certain it wasn't terrorism.

Now maybe it wasn't terrorism. Maybe they're right about that. But if they aren't sure what the motive actually was, how in hell can they exclude terrorism? They always say this. "Nope, nope, nope, no terrorism here. Go about your business!" The goal always, always is to prevent all the knuckledragging bitterclingers from considering any kind of backlash against Muslims.

Because that's the most important thing. Keeping ordinary non-Muslim Americans safe is down the list a long way.

Now never mind that there has never been any kind of backlash. No wholesale torching of mosques. No Muslims being beaten in the street. No Halal butcher shops getting bricks thrown through their window. But our betters are absolutely certain that the population of bitterclingers is a powderkeg with a fuse primed (and closets full of AR-15's), waiting for one spark to go off.

They fear their own people more than they fear enemies who are hostile to us and our way of life.

Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that they think that the "enemies who are hostile to us and our way of life" are indeed those same bitterclingers.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 04:41 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 262 words, total size 2 kb.

December 20, 2015

Monumental screwups

I'm not a big one for beauty contests; I don't think I've ever watched one since before Bert Parks died.

But I missed something special today. It seems that the announcer announced that Miss Columbia was the winner. Actually it was supposed to be Miss Philippines.

It reminds me of this.

Mariya Dmitriyenko had just won the gold medal in the 75 target event at the 10th Arab Shooting Championship in Kuwait and as she stood on the podium with the other medal winners she was expecting to hear the sound of the Kazakhstan national anthem.

Instead the obscene lyrics of the spoof Kazakhstan anthem from the film Borat began to play. ...

Ms Dmitriyenko looked around to see if anyone else had noticed the wrong music was playing, they hadn't so she was forced to listen all the way to end of the tune with her hand on her heart and a bemused look on her face.

The organisers had found a copy of the anthem online and hadn't realised it was from the satirical film the head coach of Kazakhstan's team, Anvar Yunusmetov, told Tengrinews.kz on Friday.

The organizers later apologized abjectly for the mistake.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 08:23 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 199 words, total size 1 kb.

December 13, 2015

The UberGeek

Someone gets boucoups geek points for this one.

Sadly, I'm sure it's a photoshop. It would be even better if it were real, of course.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 07:14 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 27 words, total size 1 kb.

December 06, 2015

President Obama

President Barack Obama is a horse's ass.

And with that, I'm sure I'm now on the "do not fly" list, and if he has his way I won't be permitted to buy a gun.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 06:23 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 36 words, total size 1 kb.

December 04, 2015

Salon went there

They finally said what lefties have been thinking ever since the Heller decision:

The Second Amendment must go: We ban lawn darts. It's time to ban guns

And here we again express gratitude to the Founders for making the amendment process extremely difficult. Repealing the Second Amendment would require passage of a new amendment, and there's precisely zero chance of that happening any time soon.

Any Senator or Representative who votes for such an amendment can kiss their job good-bye, and even if such an amendment makes it out of Congress (which is unlikely in the extreme) there is no way it gets ratified by 38 state legislatures. Not going to happen.

The Constitutional Amendment process is deliberately a very high hurdle. Not that it is impossible; the 26th Amendment (18 year old vote) was ratified in just 3 months and 8 days. But that's because there was broad consensus that it was the right thing to do.

There sure as hell isn't broad consensus on repealing the Second Amendment. Not to mention the entire issue of trying to meddle with the Bill of Rights for the first time ever.

Congress won't even consider this, so it's not to worry. But it's about time someone on the left was honest about what they really mean by "common sense gun control measures." Deep down it was always about banning guns.

Because after all, no one really needs a gun, do they? And if Australia, the UK, and Japan can ban guns, why can't we?

Well, here's my answer: "Si vis pacem, para bellum"

UPDATE: And if someone asks me, "Do you really need a gun?", here's my answer:

I must be getting old. I missed the memo that said that I have to prove I need something in order to buy it. I remember a time when the only reason I needed was "Because I want to."

We used to call that freedom.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 07:04 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
Post contains 325 words, total size 2 kb.

December 02, 2015

Fog of war

We've got another spiffy mass shooting going on down in California.

Everyone wants to know what's going on, of course, And no one really knows for sure. About the only thing that's certain is, Shots Fired, Some People Were Hit.

Aside from that, everything is really hazy and foggy. The best advice is to forget the whole thing for at least 24 hours, unless you live in the area, in which case get and load your gun and be prepared to defend yourself in case some hostile tries to take cover from pursuing police in your home.

UPDATE: Of course, another reason to wait is because there's always misreporting driven by The Narrative. Here's a prime example:

A senior federal official who is monitoring the case said investigators believe one of the shooters left the party after getting into an argument and returned with one or two armed companions.

Yeah, right. It's just a spontaneous attack caused by an argument that led to three attackers wearing masks and body armor and armed with rifles. I believe that.

What horseshit.

UPDATE: Anyway, the story is beginning to settle down. Current best guess: there were three attackers who moved into the building, fired a bunch and slaughtered a lot of people, then left the building and drove away in a black SUV. The police finally found it and cornered them and there was a big gunfight, in which two of them were hit. One may be dead. The third one is reported to have escaped and he's on foot in a San Bernardino neighborhood. If you live there, at this point you definitely want your gun loaded and ready and close at hand. And don't open your door for anyone wearing body armor and carrying a rifle! (Or anyone else you don't know.)

UPDATE: And I can't follow my own advice. 24 hours? I didn't even last two.

UPDATE: The two who were shot in the SUV both died. One was a woman. There are some (Arab) names floating around which are claimed to be those of the attackers, but I'm not going to take those kinds of rumors seriously until they're confirmed by authorities.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 02:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 366 words, total size 2 kb.

December 01, 2015

The things I miss by not owning a TV.

I just learned that there's a TV comedy called "Portlandia" which is about funny people living in Portland OR. It's not a situation comedy; apparently it's a series of sketches. And they must be doing something right because it's in its seventh season.

I assume it isn't actually being taped here, and they occasionally slip in an iconic image of the city just to place it here. And that got me thinking.

What would I consider to be the iconic image of this city? And the answer was easy: Being at the Rose Test Garden in Washington Park, looking over the city on a clear day, with Mount Hood visible in the distance. Most of the year you can't see it for the clouds, but you can see it during the summer, and it's really a spectacular sight. Photographs don't do it justice.

Number two? Waterfront park, looking north, showing the Hawthorne bridge and the Morrison bridge. There are a lot of bridges across the Willamette, in case you didn't know. It cuts the city in half so there's a hell of a lot of traffic between the two sides. All the bridges north of the Sellwood bridge are drawbridges of various kinds, or else they're really, really high so that ships can fit underneath. The Hawthorne bridge is a steel truss bridge with a lift section in the middle. The Morrison bridge is something called a "bascule bridge".

Number 3? I suppose it would be a scenic street scene in Old Town, but I never went there in the old days, and I never go anywhere these days.

I guess the problem is, Portland is a very nice city, but it isn't really a distinctive city. No particularly noteworthy buildings or landmarks that are known outside the area.

I wonder what kind of establishing shots they do use. I also wonder what it is about people in Portland that made it possible for others to laugh at us for seven seasons.

UPDATE: I'm trying to think of any city I consider to be inherently funny. All I can come up with is Brooklyn.

UPDATE: Actually, Berkeley is inherently funny, too.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 08:01 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 370 words, total size 2 kb.

November 22, 2015

Baseball

I just saw this:

If God wanted the Red Sox to win the World Series, He wouldn't have created the Yankees.

I think that applies to the Cubs, too.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 09:08 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 30 words, total size 1 kb.

November 15, 2015

The French Respond

Today French air assets dropped 20 bombs on Raqqa, a town in northern Syria which is the ISIS capital. The bombing targeted military and government installations and "they were all destroyed".

Which is fine, and congratulations to the French. The real question is "what comes next?" Back when Bill Clinton was president, a couple of our embassies in Africa were attacked by Al Qaeda, and he responded with individual bombing attacks -- one each. The results of those attacks may have been serious (though one of them hit an al Qaeda training camp that had been abandoned), but that half-hearted response is a lot of what convinced bin Laden that the US had no balls.

If tomorrow the French say, "Let that be a lesson" and return to quiescence, it's going to have the same result this time. So I want to see the French (how strange it is to be saying this) hit them again and again. This shouldn't be a single response, it should be the beginning of a sustained bombing campaign, and I mean a serious one. Today's bombing raid was made by 12 planes. That's a good start, but there needs to be a lot more than that. They need 40 or 50, each flying a mission every other day.

The worst thing they could do is what Obama has done: just enough bombing so that he can say he's doing it, without being so great as to have any practical significance.

(How odd it is to say this:) I hope Hollande has more balls than Obama.

12 years ago I spent a lot of time cursing at the French. Now it's an odd feeling to find myself placing my hopes in them.

UPDATE: However... though the situation is catastrophic, to some extent it's giving me a bit of schadenfreude.

Obama is the president that the Europeans all hoped for ten years ago. They despised Bush; they wanted an American president who was more European. And with Obama they got one. When he was elected the reaction in Europe was, "America has finally come to its senses."

Well, now they're complaining about it. America is too weak. America won't lead. America (or actually, Obama) won't fight.

America is now trying to free-ride, the way Europe always has. Obama wants to "lead from behind", which is a fancy way of saying "abdicate all responsibilities in the world". Obama wants someone else to do the fighting and take all the risks.

Europe, be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 06:21 PM | Comments (24) | Add Comment
Post contains 427 words, total size 3 kb.

<< Page 7 of 95 >>
63kb generated in CPU 0.0233, elapsed 0.3927 seconds.
45 queries taking 0.3773 seconds, 127 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.