Author Archive

Glenn linked to this post at the Amazon.com food blog.

The author was shocked (shocked!) to find out that the tuna she has been using wasn’t from Italy, even though it has a vaguely Italian-sounding name. In fact, the tuna is caught in the middle of the ocean, and packaged by an American company.

So what does she do? The author swears off that particular brand of tuna! It was perfectly good when she thought it was from Italy, but it isn’t worthy enough to pass her lips now that she knows that a company based in the US is involved. Only tuna caught in the waters off Sicily, and packaged in that country, will be used from now on.

Most of the comments at the post accuse the author of being a snob, which certainly seems to be obvious. But I think it shows a much darker and vile tendency than simple snobbery. Isn’t the author exhibiting blatant racism?

Turn it around. If someone refused to use perfectly acceptable tuna from Sicily, just because it came from Sicily, they would be accused of being racist. How could they not? There isn’t anything wrong with the product, after all. They just can’t stomach the idea that those people touched the food.

So isn’t it racist to do the same thing, just because the tuna is sold by an American company?

As of this writing, the author hasn’t bothered to respond to the criticism. I doubt she will. Racists usually have a lack of backbone, after all.

A measure put to the vote recently in Switzerland was to give abused animals their own lawyers. It was handily defeated.

I’m at a loss here. How did this get on the ballot? Isn’t there a global economic crises going on right now? So, of course, money has to be spent on expanding another bureaucracy. There are already laws on the Swiss books to protect animals, so why not hire lawyers to represent them in court?

Yeah, yeah, I know. I hate the helpless little furry children, and want to see them suffer. The reality is rather different.

Special interest groups will drain us all. Luckily the voters in Switzerland told them to get lost.

I came across this rather odd news article a little while ago. “Ultimate Thrill: Get Abducted For $1,226“.

Well heeled executives in France are paying big money to a company that arranges faux kidnappings. It seems that the thrills of bungee jumping and alpine skiing have faded, and adrenaline junkies with more money than sense are looking to add a little spice to their life.

After the contracts and liability waivers are all signed, and I suppose the check has cleared, the kidnapping kompany will lie in wait, lurking until the best time to strike! That way the surprise and emotions are at their most fevered.

A spokesperson for the firm which arranges these hijinks goes all psychobable in an attempt to justify the service. The clients are facing their worst fears in a controlled setting, hence it is good for their mental health!

I loved this part….

“While paying “victims” might find the experience cathartic, however, there’s little guarantee of how innocent bystanders might react to witnessing a kidnapping in broad daylight.”

For some reason, I don’t see an American version of the company having too much success if they set up shop in Texas.

(Cross posted over at Hell in a Handbasket.)

Anyone else see this? The Obama administration declared neutrality on the issue of the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands!

Go ahead and click on that last link. The author of the op-ed, James Corum, seems to think that the Obama administration is lacking a coherent foreign policy. Adding to the chaos is a clueless President, and a Sec. of State that does not have the intellectual resources necessary to do the job.

I think Mr. Corum is wrong on all counts, but I can certainly see why he would form such opinions.

This essay by Walter Russell Mead makes the case that Obama is pursuing a Jeffersonian foreign policy. This is where the US would limit alliances and foreign entanglements, and dismantle our military as much as possible.
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Last year, I read about an incident in a water park in the United Kingdom.

A father took his kids to the park so they could frolic in the cool and refreshing waves. When the children said they wanted to hurl themselves down the water slide, the proud father decided that this would be a perfect opportunity for some action photos of the apples of his eye.

He positioned himself at the end of the slide, camera at the ready, only to face a muttering and hostile crowd that apparently wanted to lynch him then and there!

The justification for the violence was that he must be a pedophile. After all, what other reason would a grown man have of snapping shots of young children in swimwear? The explanation that he was only photographing his own progeny were rejected out of hand. What else would child molesters say to escape just punishment when the righteous crowd gets their blood up?

Lucky for all concerned, the police were notified by someone in the mob. A police officer arriving at the scene averted any ugly actions.

Unfortunately, I cannot now find the online article to prove to my readers in the United States that such a ridiculous incident actually occurred. It seems unbelievable, that such a climate of suspicion and paranoia can actually exist in Old Blighty. I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you thought that I was simply writing as fact a bad comedy I once viewed on cable TV, or some uncomfortable dream I once had where everyone around me turned into bizarre and violent zombies.

But such an environment of hatred and prejudice is all too prevalent in Great Britain, and simply scanning the online news article from that country proves it to be so with appalling regularity.
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More revelations concerning the university professor who allegedly slaughtered some of her colleagues. (Hat tip to Ace.)

Seems she killed her brother with a shotgun 24 years ago, fled the scene of the crime after the death, and tried to carjack a passing motorist. It is tough to say if this is a true account, since police reports of the incident have been missing since 1988.

I worked for some years as a fingerprint technician for the local police force. Standard procedure was to keep all arrest records on hand until the person taken into custody died, and the death was verified via fingerprints taken from the corpse. Some of the cards were from before the First World War, and were the very first set of prints taken by the police.

Of course, I live in Columbus, Ohio. I have no idea what guidelines the cops in Alabama use. Something tells me that it is not all that different, though.

I found the following passage from the news article I linked to above to be interesting…

“After she left the room, the police said, she dumped the gun — for which she did not have a permit — in a second-floor bathroom.”

I’ve seen that mentioned in several news stories now. She did not have a permit! (”No permit! No permit!“) It seems the reporters writing these articles want to make sure that their readers know this.

In Alabama you don’t need a permit to purchase a firearm, only to carry a concealed handgun.

One of two things are happening here.

It could be that the journalists working on this story want to include the fact that the crime was premeditated, as the suspect cannot claim that she just forgot to leave her gun in the car when she came onto the university campus that morning. Not only is it illegal for someone in Alabama to carry a firearm on to school grounds, CCW permit or not, but it was illegal for the suspect to even carry a concealed handgun at all. This strongly indicates that she was planning this attack in advance.

The second possibility is that the reporters writing these news items hail from places with such draconian gun laws, that they simply cannot conceive of anywhere you can purchase and own a firearm without government permission. The fact that the suspect owned a gun at all when she didn’t have a license is a crime in their eyes.

Considering how much anti-gun bias I’ve encountered in the news over the past two decades, I’d have to say that the latter explanation is more credible than the former.

But, whatever their motivations, it turns out that they are actually doing a favor for those who advocate armed self defense. The suspect wasn’t one of us!

(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)

Via Glenn we find out that the TSA is using legal muscle to go after a couple of bloggers.

It seems that new security procedures were rushed into place right after the Panty Bomber incident, but the Feds say that the directive wasn’t supposed to be revealed to the public. They want to know who leaked the info.

The fact that bloggers are in the litigation cross hairs will be of primary interest to other people who write online. But I want to know how the TSA thinks it can keep out terrorists who are aching to blow up commercial airliners if they can’t keep their internal, secret security directives from being emailed to those who are supposed to be kept in the dark. Since they allowed some known al Qaeda stooge without a passport or luggage who was carrying a syringe full of acid just waltz on a flight to Detroit, I suppose that is a silly question.

On a side note, fellow gunblogger Breda has the final word on the failures of TSA security…

“…tell me again why I have to bear the humiliation of being groped and swabbed every time I fly? Someone please explain it to me because, clearly, I don’t understand. Can’t they just put me on a terrorist watchlist so that TSA will leave me alone?”

I have just read the most astonishing op-ed from the Miami Herald. What is so astonishing about it? Mainly how the author, Frida Ghitis, acts as if the perfectly obvious is suddenly revealed wisdom.

Ms. Ghitis solemnly informs her readers that various sections of the world still hate the United States, even though President Obama is in the White House. How can this possibly be? Because, she says, other countries may have goals that conflict with ours!

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I hail from Columbus, Ohio. It is more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) from the US-Mexico border.

Things are pretty hairy down ol’ Mexico way. The government declared war on the drug cartels three years ago. So far there isn’t much progress, even though any gains by law enforcement usually sets off a turf war between the gangs as they try to seize lucrative smuggling routes from suddenly weakened rivals. If the big boys ever get organized instead of simply looking to grab what they can, then I really don’t think the Mexican government has a prayer of winning. Or even surviving.

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I haven’t been paying much attention to the whole Copenhagen climate summit debacle because my doctor told me that I should watch my blood pressure. Good advice, as even the few details that have leaked through my self-erected Wall of Silence threatens to blow the top of my head off.

A few weeks ago, back on Dec. 11, it was announced that the European Union was going to pony up $10.5 billion for aid to developing countries so they would be able to fix power-wasting infrastructure, and invest in cleaner technology.

But that cash wasn’t going to be passed out all at once. It was going to be doled out over three years. If my grade school math skills haven’t degraded away to nothing, then it seems to me that the EU will spend $3.5 billion per year.

It may be simple enough in concept, but it certainly isn’t enough in reality. The figure needed to actually make a dent in the increasing amount of pollution produced by the developing world will start at around $100 billion a year. And that money will have to be raised and passed around every year for pretty much forever!

Where is that kind of scratch going to come from?
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Megan McArdle, an AGW true believer, seems to think that most of the problems highlighted by Climategate are due to confirmation bias. That is where the experts tend to accept data that is in line with what they expect, while assuming that anything which goes against the prevailing theory must just be faulty in some way.

I’d agree with her except for the way the people involved in the scandal went against the law to delete emails, hatched plans to punish other scientists whose work showed different results, and even worked to discredit scientific journals which dared to publish contrary research.

That sort of willing participation in unethical and illegal behavior doesn’t fit any definition of “confirmation bias” I’ve ever come across. Crooks, liars, cheats and con artists act like that, not respectable scientists who simply put a bit more weight on one side of the scale.

It is certainly true that the history of science is rife with examples of confirmation bias. But, while debate and disagreement might become heated, it is rare to come across a case where one side of the issue actively schemes to silence their opponents through purposely causing them some form of harm.

In this instance, I suppose the AGW dissenters should be grateful that only their careers were damaged.

UPDATE
The Belmont Club has a post that is worth your time.

A few weeks before the Climategate scandal started to bounce around the blogs, I wrote an essay here about how the global warmists were acting just like every other doom-shrieking huckster from the past five decades. Since all of the others were wrong, terribly and horribly wrong, I said that I wasn’t too worried about any toasty catastrophe.

That is why I haven’t been paying too much attention to the collapse of the latest doom-of-the-week. After all, it isn’t like I haven’t seen this tired process play itself out over and over again.

But it is tough to avoid it altogether if you rely on blogs for your news. And there is a recurring theme that gives me pause.

Most climate scientists that appear on news programs, or who write op-eds for the various news outlets, all say the same thing. This scandal might cast more than a decade of work done by the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia into doubt, but it doesn’t invalidate research done by other scientists which support the idea that this planet is warming due to human action.

Well, gee, why in the world doesn’t it invalidate their work as well?

Didn’t the CRU boast the largest and most comprehensive collection of climate data in the entire world? Didn’t this massive collection of data inspire, if not directly influence, just about every other climate scientist’s work? Aren’t the people who authored the Emails which prove dirty tricks, data manipulation, and collusion to hide problems with their research the most prestigious and influential climate scientists in the world?

So why in the world should anyone take any climate scientist’s word for their integrity, and soundness of their work? Isn’t the onus on them to prove that they aren’t crooks and liars, like the big guys were?

This seems perfectly reasonable to me, but I may be missing something.

President Obama was awarded an honorary black belt in Tae Kwon Do by the President of South Korea. It seems that Obama dabbled in that particular martial art for years, but never had the fortitude or discipline to actually advance beyond an intermediate rank.

There is a joke going around. Why didn’t the Nobel Committee give Obama the prize for literature, as well as peace?

Because he has already written two books.

Some criminals in Australia are using toy guns to rob people.

Well, why not? Gun control laws in Australia are, to my American eyes, rather severe and draconian. Only about one-in-twenty people own guns for hunting or sport shooting. No one is allowed to carry concealed for self defense.

This means that there is pretty much no risk, either to the criminal or victim, if someone paints a toy gun black and uses it to hold someone up. The victim might get scared, but they are certainly in no danger from the gun. The criminal, on the other hand, is also operating without risk of getting shot by any law abiding citizen who is licensed to carry a concealed firearm. Which means this particular crime should prove to be extremely popular.

But that isn’t good enough for government in Australia. It seems that they are now planning on banning toy guns! There will be exceptions if those who want toy guns first get a license.

This paragraph blew my mind…

“NSW Police Minister Michael Daley said new national minimum standards affecting the possession, penalties and safe storage of imitation firearms were at a meeting in Perth yesterday.”

WTF? “…safe storage of imitation firearms…” Does that mean they are planning on locking people up if they don’t lock up their toys?

So what do you think the safe storage criteria would be for the slick, dangerous piece of hardware below?

I know what you are thinking. The cops are worried about imitation or replica arms, stuff that can easily be mistaken for the real thing. The gun above looks like something a circus clown might use, and is not a serious example.

The only thing I can say in my defense is that the Australian government is beclowning themselves without any help from me.

(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)

Long time readers know that I am an accredited self defense and home security expert with close to two decades of experience. Ever since my state legalized concealed carry, I am routinely armed not only with a concealed firearm, but also a variety of less-lethal self defense devices.

Lethal force is considered to be a reasonable response to a threat of grievous bodily harm or death. At least it is here in Ohio.

So what presents this threat? When would a reasonable person think that they are in danger of losing their lives, or becoming disabled or disfigured? Easy enough to determine if the criminal attacker is armed with a knife or gun, but it can be tricky if they aren’t.

Interesting video over at Gateway Pundit, where two people were the victims of an unprovoked attack by protesters taking part in a sidewalk chant organized by ANSWER, the Communist group.

Notice that the victims are outnumbered, and the attackers are using the wooden shafts of their protest signs as weapons. Also note that one of the victims was young and fit, and was smart enough to use the tripod of his video recorder as a makeshift self defense device against the perps.

Am I suggesting that the victims should have shot their attackers? No, and not least because I agree with comment #16 at the GP post. But I am wondering if it would have been legal.

Any lawyers amongst our readers want to tackle this one?

It is pretty well established that Maj. Hasan, the person captured while engaging in a murderous shooting spree at Ft. Hood, was well known to coworkers and the FBI as a potential terrorist. He was trying to contact al-Qaeda and members of other terrorist groups, but nothing was done about this. It would be accurate to say that a fair amount of pressure is going to come to bear on the authorities for their inaction.

Federal prosecutors moved to close down four mosques and a Fifth Avenue skyscraper that is allegedly a front for Iranian organizations that funnel funds to terrorist groups. Big money is involved, and there should be headlines for weeks.

When it comes to operations of this scale, it obviously takes a great deal of time to investigate and collect enough evidence to prosecute. It isn’t like some cop on the beat who stumbles across a jimmied lock and catches a thief red-handed. But I do wonder if things weren’t speeded up a bit in order to provide some good press for the Feds in the midst of their performance with Maj. Hasan.

I posted here last week about how doomsayers always get it wrong. It seems that Livescience beat me to it by a day.

Worth a read. Interesting stuff.

(Hat tip to Glenn.)

Citizens of Japan, with very few exceptions, are barred from even touching a single round of ammunition. Defy the law and they could end up in jail for five years.

Convicted felons in the United States, or people who received a Dishonorable Discharge from the armed forces, are pretty much operating under the same restrictions. This section of Federal law has been the subject of much debate amongst those interested in armed self defense. I’ve decided to post about it because John of The Zeray Gazette fame is asking his readers if they agree with the practice.

Just keep in mind that this is my opinion only, and I am certainly not a lawyer or government official by any stretch of the imagination. I’m sure that there will be plenty of stuff in the rambling post below to piss just about everyone off. But this is how see it.

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How many dooms have been promised me since I was born?

Rampant pollution was going to choke me, rampant population crush me. Fresh water was going to run out, fresh air was already gone. Deforestation was going to create droughts, desertification was going to bring sand to my front door. Food additives were going to cause my body to fall apart, artificial hormones were going to cause the human race to die out due to sterilization. A new ice age was going to bring a global freeze, while burning the last of the Earth’s oil reserves would bring the end of our technology.

Tipping points were all the rage. Species going extinct in the rain forests due to urbanization would eventually start a global cascade of extinction that would lead to the human race itself going extinct. Pump enough CFC’s in the atmosphere and the Arctic ozone hole would eventually race to cover the entire world. Dump enough pollution in the environment and acid rain would wash your face off of your skull during a gentle Spring shower.

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Think I’m pulling your leg? Think again! Put this down as solid proof to the saying “Truth is stranger than fiction”.

A climate change filmmaker and lobbyist is accosted by a gang of ne’er-do-well girls, one of which is carrying an iron bar. The victim is physically handled, shoved up against a car, and threatened. Then Boris Johnson, the Mayor of old London town, just happens to pedal on by. He stops to lend a hand, even going so far as picking up the iron bar and using it to help convince the gang to clear off.

I’m a fully accredited self defense instructor with close to two decades experience in the trade. What do you think would happen to me if I had been the one to stop and help? Johnson is damn lucky that he is the Mayor!

The old saying would have you believe that a Conservative is a Liberal who has been mugged by reality. The filmmaker certainly would fit the bill, but don’t expect her to change her political stripe any time soon.

(Hat top to Milo, and cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)