Raj for anything!

I thought the guy was a good political choice, but after seeing this video he is definitely my choice for any public office in the land. Raj not only understands the problem, he's got a hell of a sense of humor about it.
(But where did he ever get that elephant in Texas?)

Seeing red

In case you haven't heard of these folks, they're trying to raise money in order to distribute anti-retroviral (AIDS, for those who've been living off-planet for the last decade or so) drugs in Africa.
While I suspect behavior modification, rather than ameliorative drugs, is the actual solution to the problem, at least these people are trying.
Besides, anyone who can get Apple to make an extremely cool red iPod Nano has got my backing...

Know your enemy

According to AP, there's now a 'worship hall' (more commonly called a mosque, though the PC police probably thought that might antagonize someone) in a building at West Point.
Why?
The Muslim cadets at the United States Military Academy now number 32, up from just two in 2001.

Good news and bad news, I guess.
The good news is we're going to have people who can understand the motives and the language of our enemies.
The bad news is that we're not going to know if they are our enemies until it's too late...
(For anyone thinking that wasn't very PC, please remember the fragging incident in Iraq last year.)

When even your friends think so

Time photo by Douglas Merriam

Time magazine quotes a 'Democratic activist' referring to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, bitch-on-wheels congressperson from the People's Republic of California, as "Teresa Heinz without the accent".
Ouch.
I remember Ms Pelosi when she was just a local San Francisco moonbat (note false politician smile in photo). She'll be hell on gun owners and an advocate for open borders if she becomes Speaker of the House... (And it'll be your fault if you didn't vote.)

Say it isn't so, Charlie

In 1970, Charles Bronson did a commercial for a Japanese cologne called Mandom. How they could make a stud like him look gay, I don't know. (Though in Japan at the time, smitten with all things Playboy, this probably passed for very hetero behavior.)

Bronson was no Hollywood wimp, either.
A Lithuanian ex-coalminer (born Charles Dennis Buchinsky) from Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania, he was drafted into the army in 1943. Assigned to the Army Air Corps and trained as a tail-gunner on B-29s, he flew 25 missions and received, among other decorations, a Purple Heart for wounds incurred in battle.
Director John Huston once summed him up as "a grenade with the pin pulled". Sergio Leone once called him "the greatest actor I ever worked with".
I always liked his stuff, even the terrible Death Wish movies...

Follow the money, they say

And when you follow the twenty billion dollars that Mexicans send home every year, you get to places you would not have thought of, according to this map from Investors.com. The obvious guess would be that Mexicans from the impoverished border states are coming across the line into the US, but this dollar-weighted map shows that, counter-intuitively, the most money is going to Mexican states in the middle of the country, where things must be even worse. Amazingly, "last year, northern states like Nuevo Leon and others created 1 million new jobs. In the north, there's no remittance dependency, no lack of jobs, no emigration problem and no prospect of revolts."
The Governor of Mexico's Central bank declared that "no nation can afford to lose its human capital indefinitely", but it looks like the country's President, who called Mexican emigrants "heroes", doesn't agree.
According to the International Labor Organization, Mexico is now the "world leader in export of its citizens".

Which would make us, of course, a "world leader" in imports of illegal immigrants.
However, the Inter-American Development Bank says that the "people most likely to emigrate illegally are neither the highest income people nor the lowest, but the highest tier of the poor", so we're hardly getting the best and the brightest.
And, just in case you thought it was getting crowded in your neighborhood, this statistic from the Population Reference Bureau: "55% of America's population growth is due to legal and illegal immigrants and their children"...

Again, I was wrong

Okay, okay, so it's today that my hit counter actually registered two grand. So sue me for excessive zeal...

Quote for the day

"Without women, all the money in the world means nothing."

Aristole Onassis

The Beeb fesses up

According to a post on the Michelle Malkin blog (via the British Daily Mail), the British Broadcasting Corporation recently held an 'impartiality summit', at which they acknowledged that "the corporation is dominated by homosexuals and people from ethnic minorities, deliberately promotes multiculturalism, is anti-American, anti-countryside, and more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Christians".
The broadcaster's 'diversity tsar' even insisted that women newsreaders should be able to wear "whatever they wanted while on TV", including veils.
One threshold decision taken at the meeting was that Ali G could be allowed, on-air, to reject kosher food, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Bible by throwing them into a garbage can, but not a Koran. Too much chance of offending a Muslim somewhere, you see...

If only the American media companies could admit to the same things.
It's not that bias itself is wrong (hell, I have a few biases myself, in case you hadn't noticed), merely the inability or unwillingness to admit it...

It would be tragic if it weren't so funny

This is apparently the most-watched video on YouTube.
I'm not sure it's worth the 1.65 billion dollars that Google paid for them, but it's worth some significant fraction of it...

Grander

Back on 6 September, I posted that my rants had been seen by a thousand people. Today my counter hits two thousand.
While that's about every fourteen seconds for a blog like Michelle Malkin (who gets an unbelievable one hundred thousand hits a day), it's still a nice thing for those of us who putter about in the less-visited corners of the blogosphere.
My appreciation to each and every one of you for dropping by, from an amazing assortment of places. (See map below for where you are.)
Tell your friends.

Years of therapy in the making

The only comment I can make on the whole Madonna "African baby" thing is a quote from one of the Stolen Generation of Australian aborigines:

"I've got everything that could be reasonably expected: a good home environment, education, stuff like that, but that's all material stuff. It's all the non-material stuff that I didn't have, the lineage... You know, you've just come out of nowhere; there you are."

Another case of, as my mother would say, more money than brains...

England expects

201 years ago this day, 21 October 1805 at 1630 hours (local time), Admiral Horatio Nelson died of his wounds aboard HMS Victory off Cape Trafalgar, Spain. The flags represent the first two of a twelve-hoist signal, perhaps the most famous in naval history:

England expects that every man will do his duty

My history buff, Brown , reminds me: "An extraordinary man, of an extraordinary culture, in an extraordinary time… What might we, in our culture and time, learn from him? Much, I would reckon."

Because they help her float?

Why does the Little Mermaid have tits? No other marine mammal has external mammaries; it ruins the streamlining.
Hell, even the manatees that inspired the whole mermaid myth don't have external tits. They do, however, have external genitalia. But that's one place Disney won't ever go...

Going to hell in high style

This cartoonist isn't willing to court disaster just from the Islamofascists, he's going after the Christofascist market as well, with a book of cartoons of both Jesus and Moe.
That whistling sound is an incoming fatwa, along with Jerry Falwell grinding his teeth because he can't issue one...

En Oh El Ay, NOLA

In the "you are not going to believe this" category, this story has my embedded reporter in New Orleans shaking his head and noting that it definitely rates about a 9.0 on my weird-shit-o-meter.
The only thing weirder, he says, is that the Saints are 5-1...

Nola should have been a song by Weird Al Yankovic, but isn't thus far, so the original will have to do...

Quote for the day

On a rainy day in Philly, Wyatt Earp has this gem:

“I sometimes think that if it rains hard enough, it will wash away all of the filth; but it never does.”

the curmudgeonly delicious Edward Woodward as the Equalizer

Quote for the day

"Were things better under Saddam? Before there were massacres, but they were secret. Now they take place openly."

from The Religion of Peace

Well, I certainly hope we can spring Saddam from jail before the end of his trial. I would hate for the Iraqis to live under a democratic state a day longer than necessary...

Off to do my part in the War

I'll be away through the weekend, refighting the Civil War in northern Virginia; my blogging will fall off sharply until I return. 3000 muskets, many cannon, lots of smoke, and bayonets.

Plenty of Rebs there, but not much Allah Akbar!, I can assure you...

It would be funny if it weren't so tragic

In case you haven't watched CNN recently, there was yet another inexplicable school shooting in Pennsylvania.
A one-room school. Full of Amish children.
Five dead, so far, most young girls. Six others wounded.
According to Aaron Meyer, who owns a buggy company in the nearby village of Bird in Hand, "Many of these townships there have no police at all, because there's no crime."

That Amish drive-by shooting joke rings a little hollow just now.
As Captain Den put it best, it was the day the devil came to visit...

Why I love Macintoshes

From Macenstein

I don't have this many. Nor the sleek lapbook support system...

Another take on the iPod

From Cowboy Blob

I'm amazed it hasn't happened already...

Candidate interrogation

Based on perhaps one of the funniest lines in the movies, spoken by the ever-weird Johnny Depp in Once Upon a Time in Mexico, I would ask this of any candidate running for an office higher than dog catcher:

Are you a Republican or a Republican't?

No funny question comes to mind for the Democrats, other than the on-going incredulity of "You're running Hillary for what?"

See, diversity does work

This guy has set up throngs of campaign signs along the road I drive to work. Though I don't live in his district, I was compelled to visit his campaign site to check him out. He admits to being a poster child for the Melting Pot: "I am a first generation American. My father was born in India and my mother was born in Ireland. We would not be the country we are today had immigrants not paved the way."

He also tells it like it is: "We do, however, need sensible immigration reform. I support additional funding for border enforcement as well as efforts to attract the best and the brightest from around the world. "

I like this guy. If you live in the 13th Congressional District (Northeast Philadelphia), vote for him. He is what America is all about...

Quotes for the day

"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest."

Mohandas K. Gandhi

"If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun."

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

"The Second Amendment shall never be construed by Congress as to deprive law abiding citizens of their arms."

Thomas Jefferson

Two holy men and a founding father. Who am I to argue?

Hanukkah & Christmas are coming, get one now

In the gotta have one category, this bobblehead Moe ranks right at the top.
I mean, how else are we ever going to start having drive-by fatwa shootings if everyone doesn't have one of these bobbling away on the dashboard of their cars?

Buy one today and stick it on the dashboard of the next taxi you take driven by, you know, one of them...

A burning question

For once the Islamofascists have clarified something I've been wrestling with for awhile: why the whole Flag Burning Amendment to the Constitution is a bad idea. (This guy has a lawyerly dissertation on the subject, as do these people.)

The full text of the amendment reads: "The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States."

But what if it was the Islamic Congress, and it was the "physical desecration" of the Qur'an? Or "insulting the Prophet" (otherwise known as Moe)? Or even, as I posted earlier, "belittling Turkishness"?
I suspect the Religious Right (aka Christofascists), or the Obsessed Conservatives, or whoever is pushing this bogus trespass on the Bill of Rights, would not sign on to permit anyone to be prosecuted for burning a Qur'an, or especially this flag:







The notion that harming a symbol of anything (a nation, a religion, whatever) is somehow criminal is, in itself, criminal. And dangerously foolish...

(Besides, isn't the proper way to dispose of a worn-out American flag to burn it? So, if I burn a flag with anger that's a crime, but if I burn it with reverence that's a good thing? Can't these idiots make up their minds?)

Okay, it's not just the jihadis we have to worry about

Worry about this guy, too: Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda.
Right on the home page for his Creciendo en Gracia (Growing in Grace) church, the guy (who bills himself as "the Man Jesus Christ") goes right off the deep end:
"As the last manifestation of God in flesh, He has established the Government of God on Earth as written in the Gospel... He has promised that every religion including Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mormons, etc. will end, as all their leaders are corrupt." (Notice he doesn't mention Muslims, however. But even "the last manifestation of God in flesh" isn't looking for a fatwa, I guess...)
Miranda had a 'Worldwide Convention" in Miami last month. Having seen video of his 'church' festivities, I'm sure there were many juicy Cubanas jiggling to the band. And far too many deluded people (the church claims 1.4 million adherents worldwide) giving him envelopes full of cash to support his 'work'...

Is it just me or does that photo, with it's Dan-Rather-signing-off look, give you the willies?
And where are the likes of Nathuram Godse, Sirhan Sirhan, or Mehmet Ali Ağca when you need them...

(Can we get him and Sun Myung Moon together in a locked room, to see who comes out alive as the 'official' reincarnation of Jesus Christ? Then we can turn the jihadis loose on the winner...)

Dhimmitude

From Western Resistance, a full translation of a recent article by German historian Egon Flaig in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It covers some of the long ugly history of the interaction between Islam and the West, and exposes the futility of passive resistance and the resulting life of a dhimmi:
"According to the shari'ah, the Muslims are the masters and the followers of other 'book religions' - Christians, Jews, Parsees, Buddhists - are subjugated dhimmi. The subjugated were not allowed to carry weapons; unarmed, they were not 'real men'. Christians and Jews had to wear special colours or pieces of clothing so as to be visibly dhimmi; they were not allowed to ride on horseback, only on mules, to remind them of their subjugation; they paid a special tribute (jizyah), that they had to pay personally while being given a slap on the head. They had to let themselves be beaten by any Muslim, without being allowed to defend themselves; if a dhimmi retaliated, his hand would be cut off, or he would be executed. A dhimmi's witness did not count against a Muslim, who only had to pay half the fine for any crime committed against a dhimmi, and could never ever get executed for any such crime. On the other side, the most cruel methods of execution were reserved for the dhimmi."

I don't think I'll let that dhimmi shit happen to me. For one thing, I don't respond well to a "slap on the head"...

Gates gets his come-uppance

The voice is Bill Gates giving a feature presentation on Microsoft's new Vista OS. The video is some Mac freak showing all the same features already running in the Mac OS.

Quote for the day

"A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government."

George Washington

So much for those who insist the Second Amendment is about hunting and the National Guard...