Of Course it's True, I Saw it on Tee Vee

Like that gasbag Al Gore, Arafat also got a Nobel Peace Prize for appearing to do the right thing, and getting the gullible to go along with him:

(T)he famous scenes of Yasser Arafat donating blood after the 9/11 attacks were, like the footage of the IDF killing al-Dura, staged.

The blood donation story made headlines around the world. It was reported by esteemed news agencies like the BBC, and photographs of Arafat lying with an outstretched arm ran on many front pages. But the whole scene was staged, Enderlin said. Arafat didn’t like needles, and so the doctor put a needle near his arm and agitated a bag of blood. The reporters took the requisite photographs.

And now a word from our sponsor . . .

Trying to Get Walter Straight

Photo swiped from Duluth Shipping News, which is a kickass site.

It's January 19th, 10 below zero, with a wind chill of minus 32 and you've got a thousand-foot ship to get righted.

The water fills the engine room to a depth of 20 feet, covering the ship’s four 3,500-horsepower General Motors Electro Motive Division diesel engines. Response personnel estimate that approximately 450 gallons of miscellaneous oils have been removed from the flooded engine room, the Coast Guard said. There are an additional 2,500 to 3,000 gallons of oil and fuel in adjacent tanks, engines and generators, but there is no threat of those liquids escaping, the Coast Guard said.

Once the engine room is pumped dry, officials will be able to determine if the ship can be repaired where it is or whether it will have to enter dry dock.

And I make a big deal of my annual task of fluid handling around the winterizing two motorcycles.

The Importance of a Two-Paper Town

No one benefits from only one voice.

The Times said in a front-page story on Sunday that it had found 121 cases of Iraq and Afghan war vets committing a homicide in the United States. But veterans and right-wing critics crunched the numbers and discovered that the murder rate for returning vets is only one-fifth of that of young Americans who did not serve in the war zones.

Yea, but if the NYT had bothered doing event he most basic number crunching (that would have blown their bias and premise sky high), how could they have justified nine pages and half-a-dozen reporters working on it.

Efforts to obtain a response from the Times yesterday were unsuccessful.

But of course.

Justice Department statistics show that Americans in the veterans' age group, 18 to 34 years old, commit about 150 murders a year - an identical number of their civilian peers would've committed 700 to 750 murders in the same time-frame.

More here on the, uh, "unusually high rate" of murder connected to failed, flunky journalists:

Unrelated incidents, or mounting evidence of that America's newsrooms have become a breeding ground for murderous, drunk, gun-wielding child molesters? Answers are elusive, but the ever-increasing toll of violent crimes committed by journalists has led some experts to warn that without programs for intensive mental health care, the nation faces a potential bloodbath at the hands of psychopathic media vets.

"These people could snap at any minute," says James Treacher of the Treacher Institute for Journalist Studies. "We need to get them the help and medication they need before it's too late."

Nyuk, nyuk. I like the chart best.

O dhimmi Canada

Pat casts his wisdom across the pond.

Wintertime Pests

We've got the vermin situation pretty well policed up here at Ravenscroft Dog Farm, but there is one more pest in all out midsts:

One day, life seems completely normal. The next, you’ve got an anorexic in a train-conductor hat scurrying across your kitchen in the middle of dinner. This, understandably, can be a pretty disconcerting sight.Not to worry, though. While hipsters can really slaughter a nice mood, they are otherwise harmless and probably just as frightened of you as you are of them. Still, they are a nuisance, of course, and need to be treated as such. Following are suggested measures to pinpoint the location of hipsters in your home, coax them out from their hiding places, and capture and return them to their natural habitats.

While we are waiting for the right warmish day to let our mice go at the off leash park, returniing hipsters to their natural environments is a bit trickier:

The best thing for them, and for you, is to simply return hipsters to the habitat from which they came. And don’t think you can just pile into the SUV and drive them there—they will spurn you for your wanton consumerism. Get that archaic road bike out from the garage—they’ll probably buy it from you when all is said and done—and cruise them around the local arts district to coffee shops and record stores until they are all given low-paying jobs based solely on their stylish appearances and morose demeanors.

When you Vote Stupid, you Get Stupid Elected

"The axe I have to grind has blinded me to the facts." Representative Marcy Kaptur, Ohio Democrat and dumbass of the week:

As you see, she's winding up to use the "You were the CEO of [the eeeeeeeeeevil] Goldman-Sachs" avenue of attack....and it stopped dead in her tracks by the fact that she was too unprepared to know that that is an entirely different person. It's a little tougher to attack someone for their steal-from-the-poor history and supposed economic ignorance when that person turns out to be not the former CEO of an [eeeeeeeeeeeeeevil] corporation, but the former head of an Ivy League Economics Department.

I wonder what she'll do next week; accuse Seattle Seahawks quarterback David Hasselhoff of blowing it against the Packers?

Oh, Canada . . .

. . . get you act together and start acting like a legitimate nation. Watch all three clips, especially the second one.

Recycled Spam

Aside from the Homel product, which can be quite tasty fried in honey, I'm not a spam guy but, sometimes it's worth the cut & paste:

"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed." -Mark Twain

"I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle." -Winston Churchill

"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul." -George Bernard Shaw

"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." -Frederic Bastiat

"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free!" -P.J. O'Rourke

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools." -Herbert Spencer

"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have." -Thomas Jefferson

E-Commerce

Got this coming. Orderd this today. Can this be far behind?

Off Another Deep End They Go

How Did Hillary win in New Hampshire? Simple: Bush/Cheney/Haliburton/Diebold rigged the whole thing!

Obama internal polls had him winning by 14 points. Hillary's camp had him winning by 11 points. Even the Hillary camp conceded virtual defeat early on. Even Hillary believed she had lost before the polls closed. I can't recall a primary where a candidate had a double-digit lead the day of the election, but finished several points behind. Even the exit polling showed no sign of a Hillary win. The exit polls showed about even. Exit polls have a history of accurate projections. Despite this, Hillary maintained about a three point difference the entire evening. AP called it for Hillary with only 61% reporting. CNN still refused to call if for Hillary, as they explained and demonstrated on an electronic map how several key precincts had not come in yet. But that didn't stop NBC calling it for Hillary. With 94% reporting, those key precincts STILL showed zero per cent reporting. NONE of the TV pundits could explain the differences. Here's one pundit's excuse: "Maybe it has to do with the voting curtain in New Hampshire (private voting) whereas Iowa was public voting."

This doesn't explain New Hampshire, this explains the far-left's interpretations of everything. Whether its the cost of college, the private tax burden or global mean temperatures, it's all about "I don't remember this happening before . . ." and other lame rationalities.

Life can be quite an adventurous ride when you allow your damaged imagination to color everything you see.

Stitting on an Unstylish Fence

Oh, then one day,

I saw you walkin' down that little one-way

Where, the place I'd catch my ride most everyday

There wasn't a damn thing I could do or say

Up in the skyway

-Paul Westerburg

Jay Wallljasper writes on perhaps the most definitive urban trait of Minneapolis/Saint Paul; the human habittrails we call skyways, and he's of a mind that they are crushing a large part of the livability of our two cities, especially in Winter:

People around the world from Copenhagen to New York are figuring out how to keep things lively throughout the colder months. City streets bustle with festivals and outdoor attractions showing that winter is something to enjoy rather than endure.

In an increasingly globalized economy where businesses and skilled workers now have a choice in where they locate, Frost Belt cities can't afford to appear lifeless for a quarter of the year. Places like Minneapolis can no longer pretend that winter doesn't exist. It is essential to make the city inviting all year, not just when it's warm.

The word skyway more accurately describes a bridge or overhead tram, but never letting proper English get in our way, we do call them skyways 'round here. Anyway, there is a lot to comment on with this topic:

First, I like winter and I like being able to hack it. I can cope, unlike folks who call the Red Cross when the temperature drops to 40 Fahrenheit. I also lament how so many locals become weather wimps, and spend 4 months every year hunched and gloomy. Skyways enable the climatic sissies among us, so for that reason alone, they are evil. On the other hand, average daily high temperature here is significantly colder that in other "winter happy" towns listed by the author, so we should be cut some break for seeking shelter.

Second, the skyways are architecturally vile. They are sterile, square steel tubes that clumsily tie together two different buildings that are less than 100 feet apart in the first place. On the flips side of that - it's hard to wholly describe either downtown as pure. Both cities went on 30-year, postwar, Inqusitionesque "renewals" that resulted in the toppling of many classic and signature buildings. Once wrecking ball had left, the replacments were droll, lifeless monoliths that ignored both the sidewalk stroller and the river that runs through both towns.

As much as I have enjoyed other cites that have a very distinct character (San Francicso, New York, Chicago, Rome . . . Lanesboro), you cannot make somehting what it is not, and you cannot make Minneapolis in to Copenhagen. As much as I think urban planning and municipal politics have been dominated by decades by dullards, I don't exactly cotton to some outa-towner show up and tell us we're doing it all wrong.

That's why (Jan) Gehl is no fan of Minneapolis' skyways. "When you glass in the city, you eliminate the 'bad' days but also all the 'good' days. That is too much of a price to pay. You miss the fresh air, the street life. You may have 20 bad days a year when you want to stay indoors, but 200 good ones you miss. I say you make the city as good as possible for the good days, and that will carry it through on the bad days."

It's a good read, interesting to ponder and makes all good points in principle, but I'm afraid Wallljasper's pleas for us tundra dwellers to drop skyways are akin to telling folks in Edmonton to take up surfing, or folks in Venice to mop up.

Hunt for Blue January

Recall the opening of the film "Hunt for Red October:"

''Nothing of what you are about to see ever happened."

That blip seems to be the marching orders at always-reliable Iranian Tee Vee news with regard to the incident earlier this week their plastic speedies joy riding in the wake of a US Navy combat group.

Iran on Wednesday called video and audio released by the Pentagon showing Iranian Revolutionary Guards boats confronting U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz "fabricated," a state-run television station reported. "The footage released by the U.S. Navy was compiled using file pictures and the audio has been fabricated," the English-language channel Press TV quoted an official in the Revolutionary Guards as saying.

(Vice Adm. Kevin) Cosgriff also has disputed Iran's claims that the incident was a routine encounter, saying Iran's "provocative" actions were "deadly serious" to the U.S. military.

Here's some video of what didn't happen. Hey; who says life doesn't imitate art?

Yea, I Watched Some Debates

via Michael Ramirez

Stop Being Stupid

Why is the world going to hell? Because there are no consequences for people when they are shitheads. What's worse, is when the sanction falls down the person who was doing the right thing:

Schultz said he told the shoplifter he was making a citizens arrest and to wait for the police to arrive, but the shoplifter broke away from the group and ran across Washtenaw Avenue and toward a gas station at the corner of Huron Parkway. Before the man could cross Huron Parkway, Schultz caught up and grabbed the man's jacket and put his leg behind the man's legs. When the manager arrived at the intersection, Schultz said, the manager told him to release the shoplifter, and he complied, and the shoplifter got away.

Last time I was in Whole Foods, I paid for my groceries. What a chump I was. It's evident that if I walk out with an arm load of food, I won't be restrained.

Schultz . . .was fired because he violated a company policy prohibiting employees from having any physical contact with a customer. Kate Klotz, a company spokesperson, said the policy is clear and listed in a booklet that all employees have to acknowledge that they received before they can start work.

All you sheep just stand by while we let thieves dictate the rules for the rest of us.

"The fact that I worked at the store at (the time of the robbery) is coincidental," he said. "If I had went over to the book store on my break and they were being ripped off, I would have helped them."

Schultz has exactly the right attitude and gets canned for it. Just more erosion of quality of life brought to you by trial lawyers.

What Looks Like a Mustang?

Sort of - the '09 Camaro:

Another Reason to Smash Al-Qaeda

Like we need any more reasons, but this is another good reason to kill all of them:

The ASO said there had been "direct threats against the race issued by terrorist groups." "ASO's prime responsibility is to ensure the security of everyone involved, the statement said, adding that organisers would never take any risks with safety matters. "The terrorist menace has wiped out a year's hard work carried out with conviction and passion by the participants and all those involved," it said. It was the first time in its turbulent 30-year history that the controversial race has failed to go ahead and will cast doubts over future editions.

A local radio guy had a good idea: Operate the race as usual, but arm the vehicles, especially the heavy trucks. At the first sign of a threat by these petty havoc merchants, open up on them with M2 .50 calibers. Perhaps some strafing air cover, too, just to be thorough.

Rearview on Iowa

Stephen Green is harsh on the rurals and its' hard to find fault with his take:

The news coming out of Des Moines (literally, French for “tell me about the rabbits, George”) tonight is distressing in the extreme. 32 years ago, your Democratic brethren took one look at Jimmy Carter -- the worst 20th Century President bar Nixon, and the worst ex-President ever -- and declared, “That’s our man!”

Three decades later, and along comes Mike Huckabee. Same moral pretentiousness, same gullibility on foreign affairs, only-slightly-less toothy idiot’s grin. Then you so-called Republicans took a look at Carter’s clone and said, “That’s our man, too!”

Thumpa Thumpa

Wild 6, Stars 3

The Wild hang three goals on Turks and three more on Backup Boy. It was a good night to catch a good team with its breezers down.

A Rat, Fink, Weasel and Coward

There's a lawyer in Chicago in need of a severe beatdown:

(S)omeone didn't like the Marine sticker, or the pro-military plates, and decided to stage an anti-war protest, with a key or hard piece of metal, on the shiny black finish of Sgt. McNulty's car that caused $2,400 in damage.

There's nothing lower than taking out your emotional problems on another man's wheels.

(I)t wasn't an accident, but a deliberate key job, not done by some kid or street thug, but by a Chicago lawyer who apparently can't stand the military. Private attorney Jay R. Grodner, 55, of Chicago has been charged with a class A misdemeanor -- criminal damage to property -- punishable by up to one year in jail and up to a $2,500 fine, said Andy Conklin, spokesman for the state's attorney's office.

"My brother should be commended for not just smashing that guy's windpipe right there for all the stuff he said about our military, and the insults," William McNulty said. "Instead, my brother called the police, as he should have." According to the police report I read, other investigative accounts and interviews, Grodner was upset to have been accused of purposely scratching the car. So upset, that he accused his accusers of being anti-Semitic.

Grodner should get his beatdown from someone who is Jewish for that.

Simply Unacceptable

Goalless draw at the Midlands Sunday and a draw at Anfield today. Ug. This is no way to chase the top of the table.

Maybe there's room on the Tractor Boys' bandwagon.