BMEWS
 
Death once had a near-Sarah Palin experience.

calendar   Friday - June 24, 2011

Middle Class Crowder


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 06/24/2011 at 07:39 PM   
Filed Under: • HumorPolitically-Incorrect •  
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Spineless GOP thinks they’re the UN

Dear GOP: YOU SUCK



House Rebukes Obama on Libya, Stops Short of Funding Cutoff

The House on Friday delivered its strongest rebuke yet to President Obama over his handling of the U.S. military intervention in Libya, refusing to endorse the U.S. operation three months after it began. But the House stopped short of stripping funding for the mission.

In the last of two votes Friday afternoon, the House rejected a Republican-authored bill to strike funding for the Libya operation. The House voted 238-180 against it, with 89 Republicans opposing.

The vote ensured that, at least for the moment, the Obama administration has the money to sustain its involvement in the NATO-led campaign—though the funding bill was unlikely to pass in the Senate anyway.

However, the vote came after the House, in a 295-123 decision, rejected a resolution to “authorize” the mission in Libya—even a limited operation with no ground troops. One-hundred-and-fifteen Democrats and only eight Republicans voted for the proposal; in a blow to Obama, 70 Democrats voted against it. Though that resolution is non-binding, it represents the most definitive statement the chamber has made about the conflict.

Gosh, how gutsy. They essentially wrote a strongly worded letter. All hat, no cattle: they called their own bluff and wouldn’t even vote for their own bill.

Dickless chicken fuckers. Cut the funding. Period. Slash. Zero.  You are either 100% in, or 100% out. Choose.

If they can’t stand up to the tyrant for crap like this, they won’t be able to stand up to him for anything.

Vote them all out.

Michelle Bachmann was one of the NO votes. Thanks.

The funding measure would have barred drone attacks and airstrikes but allowed the United States to continue actions in support of NATO.

So it was a half-assed pussy bullshit bill to begin with. If they had even one pair of working nalgas amongst them, the bill would have been to cut ALL funding and cease ALL activity immediately.

So I guess the War Powers Act is dead. The Legislature does not have the balls to halt combat operations for even a single day to force a meeting to discuss the Libya thing.  All by himself the President can send troops into harm’s way and spend hundreds of millions on blowing things up, and do so WHENEVER and FOREVER, without so much as a nod of approval from the legislature, much less a debate and a vote (forget about asking the people what they want), or anything so archaic as an actual Declaration of War. They are his toothless useless running dogs and he holds the leash.

You know what that means don’t you? It means our President is now actually a dictator.

All hail Obamacles, the Mighty, the Won!!!


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 06/24/2011 at 03:28 PM   
Filed Under: • Politics •  
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Gah!

I reached the point of no return with my home email on Monday. I’ve used the same address since 1997, when like everyone else I thought it would be cool to look towards the future and have a ‘2000’ after my handle. Over the years that address has been used everywhere; at forums, on commercial websites, at all sorts of blogs, online credit cards, you name it.

Every once in a while I get tired of the 200 or so bits of mail that come in every day and I clean house. I’ve spent at least an hour each day this week unsubscribing from absolutely everything. Even the emails that I want. Unsubscribe. My plan is to see what I find myself missing, and then after a week sign up for it again. My guess is that I won’t miss much of it at all, and I can have a bit of peace in my inbox for a change.

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I gather that Peiper whacked himself worse than he realized backing the car out of the garage the other day. So he’s lying around moaning and groaning and looking for whatever kind of serious pain pills National Health will let him have. Poor guy. But he’s taking a few days off from blogging until he feels better. My hope is that he takes a few days off from reading the Brit newspapers. Heck, I get muscle cramps just reading them online.

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The internet is my enemy today. I do not know what is going on, but everything seems to be set on 1/3 Turtle today. Slower than heck for me no matter where I go. Maybe some of our phone lines are under water or something. There have been some significant local floods in the past couple of days due to a freak rainstorm that hammered the area to the north of us. Short and furious, kind of like my wife when the kitchen is a mess, the storms put down several inches of rain in just a couple hours. One report said that at one point it was raining at a rate of 5 inches per hour. Savage.

Speaking of flooding, Rich K sent me a link the other day that I’ve been pondering. Not quite sure what to do with it, because the content is either a really far out cracker-dawg conspiracy theory, or evidence that the lefty bi-coastal greenies are out to destroy Red America: There is an essay at American Thinker that says that the horrendous flooding across the midwest is deliberate, because the environmentalists have taken over the directing of the Army Corps of Engineers ... and that they believe preserving wetlands, allowing “natural” flooding, etc., is more important than protecting the people and croplands otherwise impacted.

The Missouri River basin encompasses a vast region in the central and west-central portion of our country.  This river, our nation’s longest, collects the melt from Rocky Mountain snowpack and the runoff from our continents’ upper plains before joining the Mississippi river above St. Louis some 2,300 miles later.  It is a mighty river, and dangerous.

Some sixty years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) began the process of taming the Missouri by constructing a series of six dams.  The idea was simple: massive dams at the top moderating flow to the smaller dams below, generating electricity while providing desperately needed control of the river’s devastating floods.
...
But after about thirty years of operation, as the environmentalist movement gained strength throughout the seventies and eighties, the Corps received a great deal of pressure to include some specific environmental concerns into their MWCM (Master Water Control Manual, the “bible” for the operation of the dam system).  Preservation of habitat for at-risk bird and fish populations soon became a hot issue among the burgeoning environmental lobby.
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Things turned absurd from there.  An idea to restore the nation’s rivers to a natural (pre-dam) state swept through the environmental movement and their allies.  Adherents enlisted the aid of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), asking for an updated “Biological Opinion” from the FWS that would make ecosystem restoration an “authorized purpose” of the dam system.  The Clinton administration threw its support behind the change, officially shifting the priorities of the Missouri River dam system from flood control, facilitation of commercial traffic, and recreation to habitat restoration, wetlands preservation, and culturally sensitive and sustainable biodiversity.

Go read, and form your own opinion. Pretty damn upsetting if true, but we’ve seen many times before that what the enviro folks REALLY want is to eliminate all but a handful of the human race. Couple such a deliberate act with the continuation of the corn ethanol subsidy, and you get a huge loss of grain harvest with enormous amounts of what’s left being wastefully destroyed to create a fuel source we don’t really need. Bottom line: worldwide starvation and insane price increases in all types of food. And only the elite rich will have enough cash to pay for it. So, a terrible twist of fate because Stupid Rules, or a created tragedy that won’t go to waste? Let’s face it, starvation is the easiest way to cleanse the world of those mud races the eugenicists and abortionists “don’t want too many of”. Is this their moment? Very frightening. Ethnic cleansing on a global scale as a side effect of protecting endangered species. We saw nearly the same concept play out when this same crowd shut off the water to California’s crop lands last year, to save some worm or lizard or some other shitty little critter.

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Here’s a picture of a gorgeous young model. I call the picture “Fall in Eden”. I hear she’s a ballet dancer as well. Cool.

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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 06/24/2011 at 12:42 PM   
Filed Under: • Daily Life •  
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calendar   Thursday - June 23, 2011

Ship Of Fools, Again

Still Stuck On Stupid

Yet another flotilla to “free Gaza” is about to set sail

Boatloads of hippies, leftists, commies, and noted anarchists aboard

International cruise to support terrorism and anti-Semitism




rolleyes The stupid never stops. I can’t say for certain which aspect of these twits is more annoying: their utter blindness to reality, or their blatant racism. Either way: “Losing!” rolleyes


Victoria resident Kevin Neish knows the risks of breaking Israel’s blockade on the Gaza Strip. Last year as a human-rights observer on a Turkish-owned vessel, the Mavi Marmara, he witnessed a bloodbath after Israeli commandos boarded the ship. Nine passengers were killed and 54 were wounded.

“It was a free-fire zone,” Neish said during a recent interview at the Georgia Straight office. “There was blood dripping down the stairs—and I’ve got the photographs to prove it. So it was just a nightmare, a horrendous nightmare. People that I broke bread with and had tea with just the day before, I watched die in front of my eyes. It was unbelievable.”

Yeah, well, you commit an act of war, you pay the price. Be glad you weren’t shot or sent to prison forever, idiot.

Organizers of the ‘European campaign to lift the Gaza siege” announced that the second Gaza-bound flotilla will set sail as scheduled, next week. According to an organization activist, the sail will include “hundreds of activists form 40 countries.” The group did not specify when exactly the flotilla will set sail.

15 ships full, from what I hear. Every super-lefty who can save up some welfare checks and sell enough dope to afford the ticket price. Bill Ayers, Alice Walker, and a host of others.

The boat from the United States has been dubbed “The Audacity of Hope.” (Now where have we heard that title before?) On it are 36 passengers and four crew members, including some members of the Soros-funded Code Pink. Journalists from The Nation, CNN, NPR, CBS, The New York Times, Democracy Now, and the Palestinian News Agency Ma’an are “embedded” within the flotilla. “Embedded”? Isn’t that the word used to describe journalists who accompany troops in active battle?

For a partial list of this group of audacious activists and their bios, go here.  It reads like of Wannabe Who’s Who of Leftyville, from aging hippies to “social justice activists” to anti-war progressives to “a freelance cultural explorer” (translation: hippie free love slut). I would not want to be downwind when this ship passes by.

Around the world, only a little common sense has bubbled up: Germany has refused to allow it’s government members to take part. Right? Because having a bunch of Germans involved in a blatant act against the Jews ... might cause Mercedes Benz sales to drop amongst the doctors and lawyers on the Upper East Side. It’s a little too blatant.

BERLIN – The German Left Party earlier this month issued a resolution prohibiting its Bundestag deputies from participating in the Gaza Flotilla slated for late June and intended to break Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

Billed as a resolution that would end the criticism that the Left Party is fundamentally anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, the resolution failed to impress the head of Germany’s Jewish community, Dr. Dieter Graumann, and media commentators who see an anti-Semitic agenda driving the Left Party’s domestic and foreign policy platforms.

But that’s about it. The crazy is in full swing everywhere else. And I mean crazy:

American Jews comprise more than 25 percent of the pro-Hamas flotilla that aims to challenge the IDF on the high seas and reach Hamas-backed Gaza, throwing cold water on the allegation of a unified pro-Israel “Jewish lobby” in the United States.

“It’s important that Jews are in this boat… The Jewish lobby in this country is so powerful,” New York Jewish labor attorney Richard Levy told media agencies.
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Jewish activist Leslie Cogan told the French news agency AFP, the flotilla is “a cargo of friendship, a cargo of peace.”

Last week, Jewish anti-Zionists in London rallied in memory of the nine IHH members who were killed by Israeli Navy commandos last year after brutally attacking the soldiers, who reached the deck of the Mavi Mamara ship virtually unarmed except for paint guns and small revolvers.

After last year’s clash on the high seas, the leader of the German-Jewish organization Jewish Voice for Peace in the Middle East said the group actually wants to “preserve” Israel.

“Some see what we are doing as a betrayal. But the question is what do they really know about the whole thing. Some people don’t want to be educated,” Kate Katzenstein-Leiterer told the German news agency DPA.

In contrast to the American Jews’ efforts for the flotilla, pressure from French Jews prevented the departure of a ship to Gaza, according to the Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman.

Meanwhile, over in Turkey ... our NATO ally Turkey ... that secular, peaceful nation ... flotilla supporters and peace activists have found a new banner to rally around:

image“The protesters are not concerned about peace,” Gunaysu explained. “They are calling for more violence and more bloodshed. Because they—particularly Islamic protesters, at times backed by leftists groups as well—are not against a particular Israeli government and its particular policies, but against the existence of Israel itself.”

The best piece I’ve found written about the whole affair is Phyllis Chesler’s post, “Flotilla of Fools” at Front Page Magazine.

Spurred on by the anti-Potemkin Village images of Palestinian Arabs living in wretched refugee hovels, fenced in by an allegedly “apartheid” Israeli wall, oppressed by “Nazi” Israeli soldiers for “racist” reasons (and not because the Palestinian leadership practices both Islamic gender and religious apartheid as well as terrorism)–the Good People are sailing to the rescue.

She spends two delicious pages slicing, dicing, and pureeing this latest crop of floating idiots and their benighted quest. Read it and be wonderful.

So, what’s my opinion? Need you ask? Let me tell you ...

Do you know what a swashplate engine is? I didn’t either, but I learned today. A swashplate engine, also called a barrel engine, is an axial internal combustion engine that has no crankshaft. The pistons and cylinders are all parallel to the axle, just like the cylinders in a revolver are parallel to the central crane axle. As the pistons push away from the combustion chamber, rods and rollers on their nether end push against a wobbly plate called a swashplate in circumferential succession, which turns the axle. Think of a crowd in a stadium doing the wave, but in a circle. Give everyone in that circle an edge of a big blanket to hold, and put a ball on the blanket. Time things right and the ball will roll around and around as each step of the wave erupts behind it. Or think of a Gatling Gun in reverse: instead of the sinusoidal cam spinning the barrels and loading and firing the chambers, when reversed the recoil of the rounds going off cause the cam to rotate. Same principle. Another way to understand a swashplate is to envision a CD on an dowel axle. Position the CD at an angle and glue it in place. You now have a camshaft equivalent, that will make one sine curve motion (2Π radians) per revolution if you’re looking at a fixed spot edge on. [ shut up Drew, nobody finds this stuff interesting but you. I know, but I bet the engine is a two stroke, and I bet the first cylinder to fire on starting is the one halfway down the sine curve. That way it would not need to be cranked, and it would never start in reverse. ]

So, who cares? Well, a 500hp swashplate engine powers the Navy’s Mk-48 torpedo. The internal combustion engine runs on an evil liquid called Otto fuel 2, which is a mix of a combustable (gasoline, alcohol) with a very strong oxidizer (pure hydrogen peroxide). It’s almost like liquid gunpowder, and lets the engine run deep underwater with no bottled air. The Mk-48 carries a 650lb explosive warhead, can reach speeds of at least 63mph, and has a probable range of over 21 miles. It’s jet propulsion system, a ducted muffler, and various other silencing technologies allow to run very stealthily for very long distances.

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It sure would suck if a few of those accidentally fell into the Med, wouldn’t it? Seriously: think of the environmental impact of several hundred sunken hippies dirtying up the water. I’m all for peaceful solutions, but sometimes accidents do happen.

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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 06/23/2011 at 02:53 PM   
Filed Under: • IsraelWar On Terror •  
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soggy

I’m a-Workin’ In The Rain

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Yes you can actually clean windows when it’s raining. Or when it’s a typical New Jersey summer day with humidity about 105%. But it isn’t much fun. Rather hard to actually get the glass dry. And you can forget about polishing the panes; everything takes a haze from the very air itself.

But I take work where and when I find it, so that’s what I did this morning.  At least there was no ladder work on this job. The moment I got the job done and the car packed up the skies opened and it poured for half an hour. In New Jersey, the humidity actually drops when it rains.

And now the storm is past and it’s 5 or 10 degrees cooler out, and it feels wonderful. I’ll dry out eventually. And I have a new happy customer. Yeah, I did a super job on her place, double and sometimes triple cleaning her dirty glass. That’s to my benefit actually; in 6 months when she calls me back for a fall cleaning the windows won’t be so bad. And she’ll have had half a year of getting used to looking through nearly invisible pristine windows, so her sensitivity to what constitutes “dirty” will be raised, and I’ll have another regular customer.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 06/23/2011 at 12:07 PM   
Filed Under: • work and the workplace •  
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Those Damn French Drivers!

Airbus 380 Clips Building At Paris Air Show

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Airbus flew a double-decker Airbus A380 to the 2011 Paris Airshow to put on display and to hopefully attract additional customers. However, while taxiing, the world’s largest airliner’s wing clipped a building ripping off the right winglet and putting the aircraft out of service and unable to fly.

Luckily an A380 owned by Korean Air came to the rescue and flew one of their A380s t0 the Paris Air Show. Being the largest airliner has its benefits and challenges — this is not the first time the A380s size has been an issue. Recently, an Air France A380 struck the tail of a CRJ 700, causing it to spin out.

A spokesperson for Airbus told AirlineReporter.com that the A380, “took the taxiway it was instructed by ground control to take.”

A similar crunch happened a few years ago in Thailand.

The A380’s wingspan is much wider than the B747-400, at 79.8 meters (261.6 feet) compared to 64.5 meters. Even the Boeing 747-8 wingspan is “only” 68.5 meters (224 feet).

Only two larger aircraft have ever been built. Howard Hughe’s Spruce Goose, which sort of flew but once, has a wingspan of 319 feet (97.5 meters). The Soviet Antonov-225, of which only one was ever fully built, has a wingspan of 290 feet (88.4 meters).

Maybe the French pilots should learn to look to the side as well as out the front.

While Airbus draped the exhibition with billboards touting the world’s largest passenger plane as “Love at First Flight,” the A380’s initial rendezvous was with an airport building which kissed a wingtip and forced a return to the factory for repairs.

The wing strike was a rare misstep at a show dominated by orders for Airbus’s A320neo single-aisle model. With the damaged A380 gone for the first two days of the show, Boeing’s 747-8 Intercontinental in red “sunrise” livery made its debut in the expo’s static display and to add insult to injury won 19 orders or commitments as Airbus’s superjumbo came away empty-handed.
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The run-in with the structure wasn’t Airbus’s only mishap. The A400M, Airbus’s military transport, couldn’t perform a daily flight routine because of a glitch in the gearbox.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 06/23/2011 at 07:55 AM   
Filed Under: • FRANCEplanes, trains, tanks, ships, machines, automobiles •  
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A Win For Common Sense

Geert Wilders: Not Guilty

Dutch MP cleared of hate crime charges for speaking out against pisslam



A Dutch court acquitted populist politician Geert Wilders of hate speech and discrimination Thursday, ruling that his anti-Islam statements, while offensive to many Muslims, fell within the bounds of legitimate political debate.

imagePresiding judge Marcel van Oosten said Wilders’ claims that Islam is violent by nature, and his calls to halt Muslim immigration and ban the Muslim holy book, the Quran, must be seen in a wider context of debate over immigration policy.

The court said his public statements could not be directly linked to increased discrimination against Dutch Muslims.

Wilders sat stone-faced while the judge read the ruling, but smiled broadly and shook hands with his lawyers after the verdict was announced. He waved to cheering supporters who hugged each other in the public gallery, and grinned as he left the courtroom.

Wilders, one of the most powerful and popular politicians in the Netherlands, was accused of inciting hatred and discrimination against Muslims through numerous public statements, and with insulting them by comparing Islam with Naziism.

“I’m incredibly happy with this acquittal on all counts,” Wilders said outside the courtroom.

“It’s not only an acquittal for me, but a victory for freedom of expression in the Netherlands. Fortunately you’re allowed to discuss Islam in public debate and you’re not muzzled in public debate. An enormous burden has fallen from my shoulders,” he said.

Lawyer Ties Prakken, who represented some complainants, was quoted by local media as saying Dutch courts are failing to protect a religious minority from discrimination. With legal avenues in the Netherlands exhausted, she said she’s preparing an appeal to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva.

The court found that Wilders’ rhetoric was “on the edge of what is legally permissible” but not illegal.

On the edge? If anything, Wilders’ statements were fairly mild IMO. The Netherlands is suffering from a tsunami of mooseslime immigration, and those new “citizens” are responsible for a huge part of the rapes and violence in that nation. Their anti-Semitic tirades are very similar to Hitler’s in Mein Kampf. Wilders’ film fitna may have been rough, but it pointed out a core truth: the koran is a nasty hate-filled book that incites people to violence. To ignore all this, to stifle it under the oppressive stamp of “hate speech” would be asinine and suicidal. Were he calling for mass deportations, I’d be right with him.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 06/23/2011 at 07:10 AM   
Filed Under: • FREEDOMRoPMA •  
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calendar   Wednesday - June 22, 2011

Hurtigruten!!!

Ratz, Missed It By A Day

Biggest Travelogue Evah!

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Between June 16 and June 22, Norwegian Barents Sea cruise line Hurtigruten made the scenic trip along Norway’s wild and lovely western coast, and the entire 1280 mile trip was broadcast live on Norwegian TV station NRK. What the heck, daylight was lasting 20 or more hours a day until the Solstice. The travelogue was live the whole journey, and lasted 8040 minutes, which is a bit more than 5 1/2 days. More than 1.3 million people clicked in to see the streaming media online, and who knows how many watched it on EU cable stations.

And me, I came home from bowling (we won 4-3 and remain in 1st place!) and decided to do a News From The North post, which I haven’t done in a long time. And there it was. Hurdy Gurdy? No, Hurtigruten!

After months of planning and technical preparation, state broadcaster NRK was ready to “go live” Thursday night with its marathon coverage of a Hurtigruten voyage from Bergen to the line’s turnaround point in Kirkenes.

Viewers will be able to follow every minute of the trip on NRK’s channel 2, until it ends on Wednesday morning June 22. All other programs, also news broadcasts, have been removed from the channel’s schedule for 5.5 days.

The voyage is also being streamed on NRK’s web site.

The journey is known as “The World’s Most Beautiful Sea Voyage”. The broadcast will amount to more than 134 hours of continuous coverage as NRK cameras mounted all around the Hurtigruten ship MS Nord-Norge chart the five-day voyage.

NRK officials hope the program will be registered in the Guinness book of world records as the world’s longest documentary program.

Passengers who took the round trip voyage had 34 ports of call on the trip north, with activities like dog sledding, a stopover at an ice hotel, a 3 hour Viking feast in a genuine longhouse, plus seeing the beauty of the nearly fractal coastline’s bays and inlets. Said by National Geographic to be the prettiest natural coastline on earth, it’s a fabulous journey for those who can a-fjord it. ( Come on, it’s Norway. I am legally required to make at least one fjord pun )

From the southern city of Bergen up “over the hump” of the North Cape to Kirkenes on the Finnish border covers almost the entire Norwegian coast. Greatest tourist advert ever, and nearly everyone at the TV station got the week off.

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What else is happening up north above Europe? Well, a multi-level natural gas field has been found north of North Cape, the Russians are ready to start drilling their part of the Barents Sea oil fields now that the apportioning agreements with the Norse countries are finalized; the find at the Fedinsky High undersea plateau is purportedly significant, the oil and gas boom will probably give a new lease on life to the dying Russian Arctic port of Amderma; the boom is so big that Gazprom has negotiated to build and lease several more LNG tankers, and Gazprom is hiring support workers for it’s arctic oil derricks. Unfortunately for now the jobs are limited to housekeeping and cooking, and they really would prefer to hire local men.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 06/22/2011 at 10:18 PM   
Filed Under: • Fun-Stuff •  
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An Easy Test

Spot The Guys





Take a scrap of paper and write down your choices. Look at each picture and decide whether

A) the person on the left, or
B) the person on the right

is actually a guy in drag.





Question #1:
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Pretty easy, right? Ok, let’s make it a little harder.



Question #2:
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Still not challenging enough? Ok, let’s move on.



Question #3:
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Question #4:
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That concludes our little exam. Click below to check your answers.

See More Below The Fold

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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 06/22/2011 at 12:28 PM   
Filed Under: • Fun-Stuff •  
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Kill The Economy, Win A Prize!

JPMorgan to pay $153.6M to settle fraud charges

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has agreed to pay $153.6 million to settle civil fraud charges that it misled buyers of complex mortgage investments just as the housing market was collapsing.

J.P. Morgan Securities, a division of the powerful Wall Street bank, failed to tell investors that a hedge fund helped select the investment portfolio and then bet that the portfolio would fail, the Securities and Exchange Commission said.

The settlement announced Tuesday is one of the most significant legal actions targeting Wall Street’s role in the 2008 financial crisis. It comes a year after Goldman Sachs & Co. paid $550 million to settle similar charges.

Still, the settlement amounts to less than 1 percent of the bank’s 2010 net income of $17.4 billion—or less than what JPMorgan earns in one week.

JPMorgan neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing under the settlement. The bank released a statement saying it lost nearly $900 million on the investment. It also noted that it reviewed similar mortgage investments and voluntarily paid $56 million to compensate some investors in those deals.

The bank agreed to settle the charges two weeks after Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., complained to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that new financial regulations designed to prevent another financial crisis were too burdensome on banks.

Magnetar wasn’t charged in the SEC action. SEC enforcement chief Robert Khuzami said the hedge fund “was not responsible for those disclosures to investors.” But he said such deals “remain a high priority for the SEC.”

Magnetar essentially made a $600 million bet that the investments would fail once the deal closed in May 2007, the SEC said. Just one month earlier, JPMorgan had launched a “frantic global sales effort” going beyond its traditional customers to sell mortgage securities, according to the agency’s suit.

Khuzami said the JPMorgan case, at its core, is about getting investors truthful information about their investment options.

“The appropriate disclosures would have been to inform investors that an entity with economic interests adverse to their own was involved in selecting the portfolio,” he said.

The penalty is the biggest since Goldman Sachs & Co. settled civil fraud charges last summer. The $550 million that Goldman paid was the largest penalty against a Wall Street firm in SEC history. The Goldman settlement amounted to less than 5 percent of Goldman’s 2009 net income of $12.2 billion after payment of dividends to preferred shareholders—or a little more than two weeks of net income.

Goldman was accused of steering investors toward mortgage investments without telling the buyers that the securities had been crafted with input from a client that was betting on them to fail.

Not even a slap on the wrist. In most other parts of the world, these guys would have been shot.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 06/22/2011 at 11:57 AM   
Filed Under: • EconomicsFinance and Investing •  
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Setting the Stage For Obama

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/06/clinton_unzipped_one_of_the_worst_presidents_ever.html

Read it, and the first two dozen or so comments.

This is why I shy away from blogging about politics. It just doesn’t do any good. The inmates have been running the asylum for generations. If I had a podium I’d be up on it, banging it with my shoe, yelling “Where are the Republicans?” (note for my young readers and those that failed that civics test: that’s an historical reference)

I think old Nikita may have been right after all. From Wilson forward the termites have been eating away at the woodwork. It’s pretty much over at this point. Hey, let’s watch the federal government give La Raza another $50 million to help them overthrow the country and to support criminal actions. We’d be raaaaacist if we didn’t. Thank Gaia we have one of them on the Supreme Court. Oh hey, let’s put Hillary in charge of the world bank next. No reason for her to be President at this point when it’s the bankers who have the real power.

But I will not go peacefully into Camp Ayers for reeducation.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 06/22/2011 at 11:13 AM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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wasted effort

As President Obama is expected to announce in a speech Tuesday that 30,000 U.S. “surge” forces will be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2012, CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh takes a look at one town in Afghanistan. A flag flies openly, the white banner of the Taliban. The message: we, the Taliban, are back in power here. Small Taliban fiefdoms are popping up while NATO’s surge is at full strength, leaving many wondering what they’ll do as NATO starts to leave?

Link to CNN video.

You can’t impose democracy and freedom on primitives. They don’t want it. These people have barely evolved to the point of tribalism. It will take another thousand years for them to grow into and then past the idea of theocracy and the divine right of kings. You can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear in a land where pigs are illegal.

I think it’s past time to admit the truth of that. Bring them all home, Obama. And the next time we have trouble with this worthless corner of the world, nuke them into oblivion.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 06/22/2011 at 10:24 AM   
Filed Under: • War On Terror •  
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Say Whatski?

Russian President: We Must Reduce Government Role In Economy

“this economic mode is dangerous for the country’s future.”



No there’s a thing. Even the quasi-former-commies now believe in a free market. Meanwhile, here in the land where the free market was invented ...

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday challenged the legacy of his powerful predecessor, Vladimir Putin, condemning the centralization of economic and political power at the Kremlin in what was interpreted by some as an early campaign move ahead of next year’s presidential election.

Medvedev’s statements in a keynote speech to investors at the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum were a strong indication that he wants to distance himself from Putin, Russia’s prime minister, in the run-up to next March’s presidential vote.

Medvedev has been widely seen as the weak half of Russia’s ruling pair, a placeholder while Putin awaits the opportunity to return to the presidency. Putin stepped down in 2008 because the constitution limited him to two consecutive terms; neither he nor Medvedev have announced whether they will run in next March’s election.

Medvedev acknowledged that the government’s expansion in managing the economy and the centralization of authority in the Kremlin under Putin was necessary in an earlier period of the country’s post-Soviet development. But, he said, “this economic mode is dangerous for the country’s future.”

“The proposition that the government is always right is manifested either in corruption or benefits to ‘preferred’ companies,” he said.

“My choice is different. The Russian economy ought to be dominated by private businesses and private investors. The government must protect the choice and property of those who willingly risk their money and reputation.”

While Putin has hailed stability fueled by high oil prices as a major achievement of his time in office, Medvedev on Friday attacked the whole concept, warning that attempts to preserve stability could lead to stagnation.

Medvedev said that the country must begin to tackle the problem immediately to avoid “the point of no return from the (economic) models that are moving the country backwards.”

“Corruption, hostility to investment, excessive government role in the economy and the excessive centralization of power are the taxes on the future that we must and will scrap,” he said.

In other words, Medvedev has seen the dangers of zombienomics. A fully stable economy is a flatlined one; no risk means no growth, no change, no development. And the way to avoid that is to get the government - the always prone to corruption and favoritism government - off of the people’s backs and out of the marketplace.

The world has turned upside down.

h/t to Rich K


avatar

Posted by Drew458   United States  on 06/22/2011 at 07:59 AM   
Filed Under: • Economics •  
Comments (0) Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

calendar   Tuesday - June 21, 2011

Huh?

I Blame Bush Scott








----- Original Message -----
From: Tim E
To: DREW458@BARKING-MOONBAT.COM
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2011 3:00 PM
Subject: Request for a removal of a link

Dear Drew,

I am the director for MesotheliomaSymptoms.com and recently I discovered an article on your site that has a lot of links to our site (http://www.barking-moonbat.com/index.php/weblog/gop_vs_epa/).  While I appreciate the mention, I would much rather our links be on sites that are directly related to our audience of people suffering from a terminal cancer. 

Because of this, I would like to ask you to either remove the Mesothelioma links from the article, or remove the article all together.  Please feel free to call me directly if you have any questions about this at xxx-xxx-xxxx or email me.

Best Regards,

Timothy E
Director

------ Reply -----
From: Drew458
To: Tim E
Subject: RE: Request for a removal of a link

Dear Tim,

Let me get this straight. Your website, which is all about distributing information about mesothelioma symptoms, finds it objectionable that you’ve been linked to as a source of mesothelioma symptom information, because someone who might not already have the disease might be interested in it, might wonder about it, and click the link to your website?

So you feel your website is some kind of exclusive insider’s country club? Yet you don’t run the site as a subscription service, nor do you pigeonhole your pages within a relatively closed network like WebMD. No, you are a public site, open to all and sundry. Oh, your subject matter is about a terminal illness. That’s sad, but that doesn’t make you any different than anyone else’s web site.

Your own About Us page states

The web resource MesotheliomaSymptoms.com is sponsored by Seeger Weiss LLP. The site has pulled together as a single resource everything related to asbestos in order to promote education and awareness for victims, their families, and the general public.(emphasis mine)

Well, my blog is about as general public seeking education as it gets.  Yet you find it bothersome that a single hyperlink helps the general public find your pages, while at the very same time your pages encourage readers to follow and befriend you on Facebook and Twitter, which is as open a form of linking as exists. It’s hard for me to follow that chain of logic.

Hang on, it actually turns out that you aren’t really a medical information organization at all, you’re a law firm. Good golly. Not much different than that one on the afternoon TV ad with the gravelly voiced announcer pushing mesothelioma patients to sue.

Let me ask you, since your home page mentions how “as many as 3,000 Americans a year are diagnosed with mesothelioma” and considering that there are likely thousands of websites (Google returns almost 20 million hits on “mesothelioma” - your site does not show up in the first 4 pages; however Google only returns 1.47 million hits on “mesothelioma symptoms” and your site does get the 1st and 2nd non-paid slots) ... how many hits have you received from my blog? How many are you receiving daily? Especially since this particular post is from more than two months ago, and at an average of 4 posts a day, is now utterly buried in the archives at this point.

The whole concept of the internet is the free and open dissemination of information across a massively multiconnected network; getting links from other places is what makes it tick. If you find this kind of open networking distasteful, why are you even online?

You can’t make the argument that our post was at all unsympathetic or derisive to the malady at all. If anything, it was making the point that mesothelioma was deserving of more funding.

So you have left me rather confused. Everyone else on the internet is only too happy to get linked to; there is no bad publicity. But you object to it, even when such a linking is sympathetic to your cause. That makes no sense to me ... unless your whole site really isn’t really about promoting education and awareness, but about promoting more business for your law office.

Oh, and it wasn’t “a lot of links”, it was one. And what makes you think that a vast number of my thousands of readers don’t already have this disease? I’ve never asked them about it.

Drew

image

I run one lousy guest post, and this is what I get. Sheex.  Yeah, I pulled his stupid assbiscuit link. Mostly. Well, you can’t say I didn’t edit that post to remove a direct hyperlink to his website.


avatar

Posted by Drew458   United States  on 06/21/2011 at 07:30 PM   
Filed Under: • Blog StuffJudges-Courts-LawyersMedical •  
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