Thursday - January 26, 2012

Lefty Fantasy Time

Aritist Ron English has sculpted President Obama as The Incredible Hulk. I’m sure it will soon be available as a rubber dolly for metro-diversity boys and gender neutral children to play with.

Even worse, the sculpture is entitled “America’s Back”, because, you know, Fearless Reader is such a strong military leader and international image fixer upper world saver kinda guy.

Controversial American contemporary artist Ron English is back at it again with his latest construction, “America’s Back,” a new sculpture which depicts Barack Obama as an angry, brown Hulk with huge bulging muscles, torn pants and a menacing look.

The President can be viewed as a hero who comes to the rescue when America is in trouble, but also as someone very angry.

It seems like Ron is a genuine artiste; he just had a little show at the MoMA. Then again, those museums will do anything brash to sell tickets.

Picture after the fold, if you dare.

Personally, I think if you put a straw hat on the artwork, and maybe let the steroids wear off for a week or two, it would look just like Big Jim from Gone With The Wind, but saying so is probably raaaaaaaaaaacist. But those pants, please. Straight outta Tara.

small update: nope, no “action figure” rubber dolly will be forthcoming. Too many property rights and branding issues probably.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/26/2012 at 11:23 PM   
Filed Under: • Art-Photography • Obama, The One •  
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Glue Ball

Strange weather this week for being in the middle of winter. What bit of snow we got the other day is gone, and it’s been cool and rainy all week. The weather affects the lane conditions, even though the alley is climate controlled. I’m pretty sure that is why the lanes were like glue this week, for both leagues I’m in. I wasn’t seeing much in the way of oil pickup on the ball, and the level of accumulated grime wasn’t too bad, but the mid lanes were like bowling through rubber cement. The balls weren’t turning early, but they sure did seem to slow down, and had the energy sucked right out of them. The only answer to that is to throw harder, and that’s a challenge to do accurately and with the proper amount of hand. Too easy to blast a shot down your line and have it not break at all, or break late. So I took a more inside line, and tried to loft the ball as much as I could. “Git ‘er out there”. Meh, that mostly worked. Mostly.

I bowled a bit over average all 3 games on Tuesday’s Greed League, and we won all 7. I was 35 under the first game tonight, 44 over the second, and 17 over the third tonight in Cheap League, and we won all 7 of those against the top ranked team. They beat us 5-2 last week in a position round, but this week their one power roller couldn’t get it together so they went down in flames. Big flames; we beat them by a total of over 300 for the night. Overkill, but we might just float back up to 2nd place because of it.

Right now my arm is really tired and my fingers are burning, so I’ve decided to soak them all in rum. From the inside. As a remedial treatment of course.

No phone call from the MIL either today or yesterday. Guess she’s happy with her new toy and has nothing to complain about. Phew.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/26/2012 at 10:54 PM   
Filed Under: • Bowling Blogging •  
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red and white

but no blue suede shoes ... playin’, playin’ in the snow.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/26/2012 at 01:22 PM   
Filed Under: • Eye-Candy •  
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Failure To Think Is Inexcusable

Let’s Get The Stoopit™ Out Of Government
We Could Start in Denver Colorado

Failure to think. Not jut circular logic, but spiral logic. Death spiral logic. Toss ‘em, start over. You ought not to be allowed to be this stupid or this dishonest and hold a job in government.

DENVER—A proposal to let Colorado residents carry concealed weapons without a permit failed Monday over concerns that it would make it easier for criminals and the mentally ill to have guns in public places.

A Senate committee rejected the bill on a 3-2 party-line vote, with Democrats voting against it. It’s the second year in a row the proposal has failed, but identical legislation is still running in the Republican-controlled House.

The bill would allow anyone legally able to have a gun to carry it concealed in public places, including colleges and private schools. Law enforcement officials testified against the bill, saying that removing the need for a concealed-carry permit would eliminate a safeguard authorities have to prevent some people from having weapons.

Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle said every year he denies conceal-carry permit requests from people who are mentally ill, are suicidal, or have substance abuse problems.

“These are people who otherwise are legally able to carry a firearm, and under this bill could carry a concealed firearm. These are people who are sometimes psychotic,” he said.

Stop me if I’m wrong, but the basic definition of a criminal is one who does not obey the law, right?  So how is a permitting process going to even slow these people down?

Let’s not forget the purchasing process is still in place, and it’s still run by the feds, with that NICS system and all. Which, by LAW, disqualifies proven hard core criminals and the mentally ill already. Which means that they can’t legally buy a gun to begin with. Well, at least they can’t legally buy a gun from a gun store. Not sure how the disqualifications extend to personal sales, but I bet they do. Guaranteed, right?

PS - the Sheriff ought to be horse whipped, shot, and then fired. Nervy mother fucker, ain’t he, carrying out his own laws? Last time I checked, Colorado is NOT a “may issue” state, it is a “shall issue” one. Run this corrupt badge the hell out of town ASAP.

Republicans argued that they are trying to protect Second Amendment rights and that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry a concealed weapon without a permit would increase public safety because people could more easily defend themselves.

...

Sen. Bob Bacon, a Democratic member of the committee that rejected the bill, said he worried about people being able to have firearms on college campuses, and he questioned Republicans’ argument that law-abiding citizens would be the ones taking advantage of the law.

“For me, law-abiding citizen is not a permanent condition,” he said. “All of us, on certain occasions, can snap,” he added.

And boy howdy, if the above quotes aren’t the clearest example of the core differences between the two parties, I don’t know what is. The Repubs want to pass the bill to increase your freedom and safety, both of which are your responsibility. The Dems don’t want to pass it because you can’t be trusted; you are a criminal in waiting and must be overseen by your masters in government. For your own good.

h/t to OCM

Posted by Drew458     on 01/26/2012 at 08:42 AM   
Filed Under: • Government • Guns and Gun Control •  
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   Wednesday - January 25, 2012

REMEMBERING DANIEL PEARL

Lest we forget, and honestly I never did.  I lifted this from Front Page today. I don’t know what I can say that would add anything. I think the article says it all.
I thought I should share it and I think you should read it.  The rest is as usual, at the link.

FRONT PAGE

The Unlearned Lessons of Daniel Pearl’s Murder

Bruce Thornton

Ten years ago this week, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped by Islamic terrorists in Pakistan, after he had been lured into what he thought was an interview with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani about the links between al Qaeda and the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid. The shadowy Pakistani group that kidnapped Pearl accused him of being a spy for the CIA, and made several demands, including the release of Pakistani detainees from Guantanamo. Nine days later, Pearl was murdered and beheaded, and on February 21, a video was released called “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.”

The footage showed Pearl’s “confession” and brutal decapitation, interspersed with images of dead Muslims, George Bush shaking hands with Ariel Sharon, and Palestinians allegedly killed by Israeli Defense Forces, including 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura, whose death was later exposed as a Palestinian fabrication. Later, captured 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would brag to interrogators that he personally had beheaded Pearl. As for his abductor, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, though tried and condemned to death, still lives in a Pakistani jail cell, from which according to some reports he has planned other terrorist attacks.

The killing of Pearl concentrated much of what Andrew McCarthy calls the “willful blindness” of many in the West to the Islamic roots of the perpetrators’ violence. At the time, most of the media mainly decried Pearl’s death because he was a reporter. Worse yet were the comments that scolded the terrorists for not understanding that American journalists are neutral observers whose impartiality could help them get their story out.  As a New York Times editorial put it,
“The terrible irony of Mr. Pearl’s murder is that he and other independent journalists have been trying to present a detailed and informed portrait of the mindset, motives and grievances of the Islamic fundamentalists in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the war in Afghanistan. That work will continue despite the killing, but the kidnappers have only undermined their cause by their acts.”

The professional corruption of the mainstream-media was revealed in this statement, with its claims that journalists are objective (mostly false) and have no loyalties to their own country and people (mostly true), and that the murderers had a legitimate “cause” and “grievances” (moral idiocy and cowardice).

Posted by peiper     on 01/25/2012 at 11:53 AM   
Filed Under: • muslims • Terrorists •  
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So How Was Your Day?

My mother in law isn’t in the best physical shape anymore. She’s old and ailing, and has been pretty much bed ridden for the past several months from a back injury. She finally seems to be healing, and wanted a walker to help her get around her house. She’d been using two little canes, the “stable” kind with the plate on the bottom that has 4 feet on it, but things were still quite wobbly, so a walker it was. But not just any walker, she wanted one with wheels on, and that kind is called a rollator. News to me. Naturally, being my mother in law, any old rollator wasn’t good enough. She’s short and heavy, so she needed the special kind built for people of her dimension. Hard to find. Oh, and it had to have a backrest, and a seat, a padded seat that is, extra wide. And it had to have a basket, thank you very much, or else it was no good. Oh, and exceptionally low handles, because the MIL is the size of a hobbit.

So we looked online, and went through dozens of different models. Hundreds? I’d never given these things a thought, and was rather surprised to find that there are hundreds of different models out there, in all sizes and materials, in a wide price range from “not bad” to “you’ve got to be kidding”. And good luck to you finding the useful specifications, such as seat size, seat height, and handle height range. They all look pretty much like this:

So we finally located one, and it turned out to be the least expensive model out there, and we could have even ordered it from Wal-mart. The box got shipped, she opened the carton, and without even putting the thing together we heard a solid week of phone calls telling us how no good it was. Gosh, so glad we spent hours and hours shopping online for you. We would have gone down there and put it together for her right away, but with work schedules and the snowstorm ... you know how it goes.

I was in the area yesterday morning so I stopped over and put it together, which was beyond simplicity itself. Take off the plastic wrapping, unfold it, and slide the handles into the frame. Turn 2 big knobs to tighten the handles. Done. 1 minute, no muscle required. And from her perspective sitting on the couch, it was still no good. The seat was too tall, her legs would dangle. The handles were too high, she couldn’t reach. Now, my MIL and I have a bit of an understanding, arrived at after all the projects I’ve done at her place over the years. The kind of crap she pulls on her daughters just doesn’t fly with me, and I’m not going to put up with her crybaby BS. I accept that there are many things she can’t do, and that’s fine, but I do expect her to at least give it a fair go. So I had her get up and give the thing a try. And after about 20 seconds of trepidation she was in love with her new gizmo, positively zooming around the house, doing donuts and K turns all over the place. It turned out that the handle height she’d been using with her canes was too low, and the slightly higher height on the rollator handles allowed her a better stance. And the high seat worked in her favor, allowing for a shorter drop to a sitting position so sitting down was easy, and which nearly stood her upright when she slid off the seat to stand up. And the higher seat lets her park the walker by the stove and she can cook sitting down. Given that little epiphany, I sawed off 4 little chunks of a 2x4 and slid them under the feet of her very low bed, and now it’s much easier for her to get in and out of that as well. And she’s zooming around the house like a kid on a sugar high at the country fair. Woo hoo!

While I was down in the basement cutting the lumber with the only saw in her house - a joke of a tool, a plastic mini saw from the $1 store - I found the big monkey wrench. Finally! See, she lives in an old one floor house, and the P-trap for the bathtub is in the basement, and her pipes have been terribly clogged for a long time now. The monkey wrench let me open the clean out tap on the old rotting iron P-trap and use a wire to try and clean out some of the gunk. It didn’t work, so I decided to take the thing apart. Like everything else in her home, which is one of what I call an “I built it” home, handmade by somebody with no idea how to do anything, her plumbing is a nightmare. So the 1 1/2” thin wall brass drain in the bathtub mates up to a few lengths of various diameter PVC downpipe, which has a rubber collar on the end to mate to the old 2” galvanized P trap, which in turn feeds into the 2” hub on the sanitary tee on the main stack. The whole thing dangles 4 or 5 feet from the bathtub up above. Hey, the rubber collar used to be held in place with twisted bailing wire. At least I got some good radiator clamps on it a few years ago.

What on earth is a sanitary tee? This is:

I didn’t know beans about pipe, so I learned a little, and found a whole new vocabulary of terms that only plumbers know. Pipe terms, not swear words. The sewer line in your house has a vertical part. This is called the stack. It is usually made up of many pieces of cast iron pipe, stacked together. Duh. The top end of the stack is open to the air, sticks through your roof, and is called a soil vent. It lets smell out and air in, so that no suction builds up in the pipe and things keep moving along. The bottom end of the pipe, the horizontal bit that runs out the side of your basement wall, is the sewer line proper, and is joined to the stack with a corner pipe called an elbow that has a removable plate on the side called a clean out. This is where the Roto-Rooter guy goes to do his thing when the line gets clogged. One end of each pipe piece is flared out to accept the next piece of pipe, and that flare is called a hub. The other end, unflared, is called the spigot. Spigots fit into hubs, and with the aid of poured lead and oakum are joined together permanently in a watertight manner. When side pipes - drain lines for tubs and sinks etc - have to join the stack they do so via a special pipe called a sanitary. There are sanitary tees, crosses, double tees, and so forth; a whole menagerie of interesting and unusual shapes. But they’re all called sanitary because the secondary pipes join in through a specially shaped corner bend, which is designed to minimize siphoning. That design keeps the poop in the line from being sucked back up into your bathtub, and thus the name sanitary. There are also regular pipe junctures - tees, whys, elbows, bends, four ways, Ess Offsets, etc - that don’t have that special corner, but they aren’t called unsanitary. They’re just regular junctures. Pipe is sized according to its inner diameter, so a 2” gavlanized mild steel pipe is actually a bit more than 2 1/4” in overall diameter, and the socket part of a 2” pipe hub is even larger, so that the plumber can have room to put the lead seal in. Or not, as the general move lately is away from lead anything, so gaskets, o-rings, and several types of adhesive are used these days instead. To make matters more complex, sewer pipe is made in 2 varieties, Service Weight (marked “SV” because it originated during WWII as a lightweight pipe that saved metal for the War Effort and thus was at first called “Service Victory") and regular weight (marked “XH” for extra-heavy duty), and the outer diameters of these pipes are not the same for a given inner diameter. The hub sizes are also different for the same reason.

So when I went to unscrew the top elbow for the deep P ( a regular P-trap keeps about 2” of standing water on either side of the bottom U-bend. This keeps the rank smell of the sewer line in the sewer line and not the rest of your house. A deep P does the same job, but uses about 4” to 6” of water on either side. I have no idea if one works better than the other as stink catching, or if the deeper design has some other advantage or meets some special need. ) the whole horizontal pipe pulled right out of the hub fitting. This was only a small surprise, as the hub was covered over with generations of caulk and putty to seal the join. Obviously it never was a proper tight fit; a well done joint is the closest thing to forever that exists, and usually needs two oxen and a large application of fire to take apart. Like I said, this is an “I built it” home, where stupid battles with lazy and cheap on a regular basis, and nobody wins in the end. But I finally had the whole P-trap thing removed as a unit, and I proceeded to removed the clogs with a stiff wire and a screwdriver. Then I went after the throat of the sanitary, which was also crusted almost solid. And that’s when I found the heart of the problem. Somehow a small plastic cup had got down the pipe, and was stuck right on the very end of the corner. A little thing, hardly bigger than a bottle cap, a hard to see bit of clear plastic the size of a quarter that was blocking most of the opening. Using two large screwdrivers like the most maniacal pair of chopsticks ever, I was able to capture the little bastard and get it out. Ta friggin’ Da! Now the tub drain should run like Niagara Falls. I put everything back together and sealed the hub with a whole handful of window caulk, which should be right. Then I noticed that the rotting old P-trap was cracked up the side. I had neither torch nor solder with me to seal it properly, so I kept the “I built it” motif going and slathered the thing with a big blob of roofing asphalt that happened to be sitting there in a can. That should hold for a couple days, especially since the old lady isn’t even using the tub right now at all because her knees are too weak to let her lift her calves up over the side of the tub.

And that’s why she has the salesman from one of those walk-in tubs for seniors coming Saturday. So we all have to go down there for that, to make sure he doesn’t twist her arm into signing up for some $10,000 deluxe spa device when all she really needs is a low edged shower stall, or one of those conversions where they cut a door into the side of your tub. I’ll use that visit to do some more work on the P-trap. It’s rotting apart, like I said. I want to replace the old galvanized parts with some nice new PVC parts, and that means I’ll have to clean out the hub on the sanitary tee. You can’t fit plastic PVC to a cast iron hub with the old poured molten lead method. You have to use a special rubber seal instead, and that means I need a Fernco Donut. Fernco is the company that makes the thing, and a donut is another name for the O-ring kind of seal:

They come specially sized for whatever kind of pipe you’re using, and I’ll be using standard Schedule 40 2” DWV PVC . This is a fairly common fitting these days, assuming I can figure out whether her stack uses SV or XH, and in theory you just have to hammer it in. Short work, easy project. Which means a 2 or 3 day effort at my MIL’s place. Call a plumber? Are you kidding? They’d charge hundreds just to remove the old seal, and hundreds more to put in a new one and rig up a new PVC P-trap. Plus, I know that my “I built it"s will last forever, because I build things to a standard that would make Mike Holmes blush.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/25/2012 at 10:05 AM   
Filed Under: • Daily Life •  
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Welcome To America

A city girl recounts her introduction to firearms, from fear to fervor, in this essay in Elle magazine.

at first -

I’d never seen an actual gun, except in the holsters of police officers. To my mind, guns were verboten, menacing, violent. They were unpredictable contraptions beloved of white supremacists or paranoid meth heads in creepy desert hideouts.

And then a fair number of paragraphs recounting several nasty situations she had either just missed or been involved in ...

and later on -

The daylong class I opt for, called Women on Target, is sponsored by the National Rifle Association and is so popular that the first time I try to register, all the spots are full. I’m forced to wait another three months. When the day finally comes, I arrive at the range at 7 a.m. to find approximately 35 women of various ages, from twentysomething to 60-plus, sitting at the sort of long fake-wood tables on which bingo is played in church basements.

and eventually -

My hands start shaking. All that’s left to do is shoot the damn thing. I’m intimidated—I’m petrified!—but people are watching. Peer pressure always motivates me. I squint, hold my breath, and…fire.

Fuck.

My first thought is, I can’t believe how loud that was.

...

My next thought is, I want to do that again!

A revolver now rests on my nightstand. It’s small and sleek and black, a Ruger LCR. Weighing 13.5 ounces and no bigger than a half-sandwich, it’s easily slipped into a purse. I’ve tucked it not quite out of sight, among books I hope to read but maybe never will.

She’s getting there. For more information about the NRA’s Women On Target program, go here; for more information about a variety of NRA programs for firearms training, including their First Steps and Basics classes, go here.

via Insty

Posted by Drew458     on 01/25/2012 at 09:08 AM   
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control •  
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Must Be An Election Year

U.S. military forces helicoptered into Somalia in a nighttime raid Wednesday and freed two hostages, an American and a Dane, while killing nine pirates., U.S. officials confirm.

The Danish Refugee Council also confirmed the two aid workers, American Jessica Buchanan and Dane Poul Hagan Thisted, were freed “during an operation in Somalia.”

Buchanan, 32, and Thisted, 60, had been working with a de-mining unit of the Danish Refugee Council when they were kidnapped in October.

President Obama confirmed the operation and rescue early Wednesday in a statement. He said the operation serves as yet another message to the world that the U.S. “will stand strongly against any threats to our people.”

The two aid workers appear to have been kidnapped by criminals, sometimes referred to as pirates, and not by Somalia’s Al Qaeda-linked militant group al-Shabab. As large ships at sea have increased their defenses against pirate attacks, gangs have looked for other money making opportunities like land-based kidnappings.

A pirate who gave his name as Bile Hussein said he had spoken to pirates at the scene of the raid and they reported that nine pirates had been killed. A second pirate who gave his name as Ahmed Hashi said two helicopters attacked at about 2 a.m. at the site where the hostages were being held about 12 miles north of the Somali town of Adado.

Both Buchanan and Thisted were in Somalia as part of an international effort to remove land mines from former conflict zones; they were there risking their own lives for the benefit of the local population, and the pirates/gansters kidnapped them anyway. Low hanging fruit I guess.

Please, let’s make sure that Joe Biden doesn’t find out the names and units of the soldiers involved this time, and nobody let them all get on a helicopter together with an unidentified local. That kind of sell-out is just a little too blatant to have to swallow twice.

UPDATE: More details and pictures at the UK Daily Mail (warning: contains one explicit photo of Mooch. But to be fair and balanced, not only does she look slim in it, she looks pretty darn good. And less than angry. Amazing.) All the pictures are stock other than the 2 of the captives, but this article says that 5 pirates were also captured.

from CNN:

The special forces troops took fire as they fought their way into a compound where the hostages were held, the official said, adding the troops believed that the kidnappers were shooting. The official is not authorized to speak to the media and asked not to be named.

Nine heavily armed gunmen were killed in the strike, Little said, adding that they had explosives nearby. There were no known survivors among the kidnappers, he added.

The American assault team did not suffer any injuries, the Pentagon said.
...
The U.S. raid comes nearly three years after Navy snipers killed three pirates who had taken hostage the captain of the Maersk Alabama off Somalia.

U.S. forces did not coordinate the raid with local officials, but residents welcomed the outcome as a warning to other groups to cease the kidnapping of foreigners, said Abdirahman Mohamud Farole, president of Puntland, a semiautonomous region of Somalia.

Thisted, the rescued Dane, is a senior aid worker who had been in Somalia for some time, said Olsen of the Danish Refugee Council.

Dahl said Olsen told reporters she had tried to work with local people to get the hostages released but had not succeeded.
...
Local authorities gave conflicting casualty figures after the raid. Some officials said seven gunmen were killed, but Mohamed Ahmed Aalin, president of Galmudug state, said nine were killed and five others detained by U.S. forces.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/25/2012 at 08:35 AM   
Filed Under: • Military • Pirates, aarrgh! •  
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   Tuesday - January 24, 2012

jobsworth at the tax office

The IRS office sent an inspector to audit the books of a local hospital.

While the IRS agent was checking the books he turned to the CFO of the hospital and said, “I notice you buy a lot of bandages. What do you do with the end of the roll when there’s too little left to be of any use?”

“Good question,” noted the CFO. “We save them up and send them back to the bandage company and every now and then they send us a free box of bandages.”

“Oh,” replied the auditor, somewhat disappointed that his unusual question had a practical answer. But on he went, in his obnoxious way."What about all these plaster purchases? What do you do with what’s left over after setting a cast on a patient?”

“Ah, yes,” replied the CFO, realizing that the inspector was trying to trap him with an unanswerable question. “We save it and send it back to the manufacturer, and every now and then they send us a free package of plaster.”

“I see,” replied the auditor, thinking hard about how he could fluster the know-it-all CFO. “Well,” he went on, “What do you do with all the leftover foreskins from the circumcisions you perform?”

“Here, too, we do not waste,” answered the CFO.  “What we do is save all the little foreskins and send them to the IRS Office, and about once a year they send us a complete dick.”

Posted by Drew458     on 01/24/2012 at 01:31 PM   
Filed Under: • Humor •  
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taps for Capt. John Robson. One hell of a brave battling Brit.  rip

While I’m sure there were very brave soldiers in all armies, I’m living here and here is where my concern is.
But there’s something else. Now perhaps I’m all wet on this. I am after all married to a Brit, so it should go without saying I am very pro Brit.  I’ve read a bit of their military history, and the derring-do as exemplified by this crazily brave and outstanding soldier is repeated again and again by the men and women in service to this country.  It’s a damn crying shame these lions have been betrayed and the Great Britain they fought for is now only Britain.

RIP Captain John Robson

Captain John Robson, who has died aged 88, was awarded an MC in Italy in 1945 and subsequently had a successful career in industry.

On April 26 1945, Robson, then a lieutenant serving with the 12th Royal Lancers, was patrolling in an armoured car near Lendinara, northern Italy, with orders to carry out a reconnaissance on the approaches to the river Adige. He was in close country, there were enemy pockets of resistance everywhere, and he and his troop corporal decided that they must cover the last part on foot.
As they got near to the river, their way was barred by a strong German fighting patrol. Robson was short of time because the Engineers were in urgent need of his report. He and his comrade were unsupported and heavily outnumbered. If it came to a confrontation, they stood every chance of being killed or captured — but they immediately opened fire with their Tommy guns and charged the enemy.
In the short, fierce fight that followed, they killed four and made prisoners of another eight. They then went on to the river and, after getting back to the cars, were able to radio the vital information required. Robson was awarded an Immediate MC. The citation added: “This is only one of several occasions when he has shown outstanding qualities of determination and fighting spirit.”
John Edward Robson was born in London on April 8 1923. He was educated at Haileybury, where there were compulsory cold baths every morning and the loos – there were about 20 of them in rows facing each other – were in a roofless building that was known as White City.
In 1941 Robson went up to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, to read Natural Sciences but left in the summer of 1942 and, after completing a short course at Sandhurst, he was commissioned into the 27th Lancers. He was posted to the 12th Lancers and, having joined the regiment in Algiers in October 1943, landed in Naples the following April.
As they approached Venice, in the last days of the Italian campaign, Robson and a New Zealand company commander were told to secure the Hotel Danieli. The order came from General Freyberg, who had spent his honeymoon there. Robson commandeered a gondola and, as he wrote in his memoirs, “we were shot at by the fascists from the palazzos along the sides as we were punted down the Grand Canal”.

obit source, telegraph

Posted by peiper     on 01/24/2012 at 11:44 AM   
Filed Under: • OBITITUARIES • UK •  
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   Monday - January 23, 2012

eye candy, special edition?

Any gender questions?

Posted by peiper     on 01/23/2012 at 03:08 PM   
Filed Under: • Eye-Candy •  
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few sequins short of a tutu ….. read it all

I thought I’d heard the last (for awhile) on this topic.  But this morning’s column by one of my favorite people really woke me up.  I had not heard much about what she’s writing here.  Which btw I’ve edited. See full column at the link.
Anyway, I had not realized the extent of the thinking here and didn’t even know we had it in the USA as Miss Phillips describes.
I don’t understand how people come to believe these things. How do they come to these things?  Do they go out looking for it? Make things up as they go along? What?  How come they can not see how stupid it all is.
But ... I heard something on the radio late last night, after my computer crashed and I spent an hour with tech in India. Happily I got someone I understood, but it still took an hour.  By the time we were through I wanted nothing more to do with puters.  Too tired even to read, I turned on the radio.  The topic was not this story about the loon and her little boy/girl.  But while reading Phillips here, I immediately recalled the radio program. Let me share a bit of that and you’ll see a weird connection.

The program was about a newly emerging industry that deals with stag nights. Yeah, stag nights. Ah but with a difference.  Apparently, Krakow (Poland) is host to groups of Brit guys enjoying their last freedoms. Kind of.  There are actually companies that arrange tours, depending on what is paid determines how long your stag vacation is. Usually it’s a whole weekend. Yes, the guys do get pie eyed however, there isn’t the usual (we are told) stag films of old or sex for sale kind of thing. It’s supposed to simply be a group of friends enjoying the company of a guy about to become married. The groups are controlled quite expertly by a lady guide.  They are taken from one bar to another and visit various city attractions etc.  All very civilized we were informed. And here’s the part that you might say really woke me up.  It was to be quite honest, a bit embarrassing to listen to.

One of the guys on the program is a reporter who spent many months following this newest thing. The guided stag tour of Krakow. He interviewed the guys and drank with them, nothing sneaky because he wasn’t trying to uncover anything illegal. And then he came to this.

It was noticed how these guys have not acted in the expected macho traditional male on a bender (tho they were on quite a bender) way.  Here were guys he said, who were straight but not afraid to touch each other.  Not in a sexual way, but more or less we are informed, in the manner that women bond with their friends. They aren’t embarrassed or afraid to touch and show a softer side.  They were more touchy feely I suppose.  They were less the masculine stereotype.

I guess times have changed and apparently some men have too.  But I think it’s manufactured.  I just can not imagine guys having a girls night out.
Well, not if they’re straight anyway.  It just doesn’t seem natural. 

You’ve got to be a few sequins short of a tutu to raise your son as ‘gender neutral’

By MELANIE PHILLIPS

For more than three decades, Left-wing ideologues have been determinedly unravelling sexual and gender differences — on the grounds that the very idea that people are different amounts to a kind of prejudice.

Bizarre as it may seem, what started as a campaign for equal rights progressed into a movement to abolish altogether the differences between men and women.

This movement consisted of an alliance between, on the one hand, radical feminists who were consumed by hatred of men and, on the other, gay activists intent upon blurring the distinction between hetero-sexual and same-sex unions.

What arose from both was a push towards androgyny, based on the false belief that biology had little to do with gender differences — which were instead said to be artificially constructed by society.

LUNACY

Denying the biological facts of life in this way might be considered a form of lunacy. Indeed, scientists have shown there are many differences between male and female brains. And in general, men and women clearly have different approaches to their environment, relationships, children and so on.
Nevertheless, promotion of androgyny has become a kind of default position among progressive thinkers, writers and politicians.

It all started with the idea that men and women should have interchangeable roles both at home and in the work-place, and that fathers were no longer essential to the family unit at all.
Right from the beginning, however, there was a deeper agenda to redefine relations between men and women by nothing less than redefining men and women themselves.

Accordingly, radical feminists such as academics Judith Lorber and Susan Farrell wrote with a straight face that ‘being a woman and being a man change from one generation to the next’.

And the immensely influential psychologist Sandra Bem wrote that to free people from ‘culturally imposed’ definitions of masculinity and femininity people should become androgynous, adapting male or female behaviour according to their situation.

This would mean, she gleefully predicted, that distinctions between male and female would ‘blur into invisibility’.
Goodbye testosterone!

Astonishing as this may seem, this madness has now become mainstream. For example, the Council of Europe, no less, has drafted a definition of gender as an artificial social construct which has little to do with biology.

In the U.S., some therapists have demanded ‘genderless models of marriage and parenting’.

Recently, the California Teachers’ Association held a conference advocating ‘gender liberation’. It issued instructions on ‘gender etiquette’, which said it was polite to ask people with which sex they identified — and, accordingly, by which pronouns they preferred to be described. The instructions added helpfully: ‘Each of us can decide for ourselves in which bathroom we belong.’
And a few months ago on U.S. TV, a ‘gender coach’ was filmed indoctrinating children that they could choose whether to be a boy or a girl.

SINISTER

It all sounds too ludicrous to be true. In fact, it is deeply sinister. Our society is being brainwashed into pretending that the differences between male and female don’t exist — in order to reconstruct society into some unattainable utopia of sexual and gender identicality.

The dual goal is to marginalise men and to upend society’s fundamental moral codes. Having first been told they can behave sexually in whatever way they want, people are now being told they can be sexually whatever they want. And anyone who objects to this will be told they are a bigot.

The result will be an increasing tide of misery. Human identity is formed by the union of male and female. Sexual and gender differences lie at the very heart of what it is to be a human being.

Denying those differences to a child not only threatens that child’s own sense of identity and well-being, but also starts to unravel what it is to be a person.
Dressing a boy as a girl and pretending he can choose his gender is not merely bizarre and cruel. It is part of a wider agenda to re-order our society.
Far from ushering in a better world, this threatens to stamp out the individual right to know what we are, and to rob us of humanity itself.

MELANIE PHILLIPS

Posted by peiper     on 01/23/2012 at 02:13 PM   
Filed Under: • CULTURE IN DECLINE • EUro-peons • Insanity • UK • USA • weird stuff •  
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the entrepreneurial spirit, with a boost from the brit taxpayer

Don’t ya just love the entrepreneurial spirit?  Start with $2,335.75 and watch your profits grow.
Especially satisfying of course when that 2300 comes not from you, but the taxpayer. Free money. Hey,hey.  What could be easier.
That’s kapitalism. Right?

I’m wondering if I can leave this place and then sneak back in as an illegal. Wonder what they’d pay me to leave?  On second thought, even one hour in any jail does not sound like an inviting introduction to the world of the entrepreneur. 

Illegal immigrant who arranged sham marriages leaves jail with £1,500 rehab money - and sets up business in Pakistan offering UK passports

Ashar Rathore served 7 months of two-year sentence
Given taxpayers’ money to get out of jail and leave UK
He used cash to set up shop offering passports, visas… and ‘any enquiry related to the laws of cricket’
By NICK ENOCH

An illegal immigrant and sham marriage ringleader who left prison early with a huge pay-off has used the money to set up a new business in his homeland - offering UK passports.

Ashar Ali Rathore, 33, came to the UK with his wife Nadia Qadri, 34, on student visas then faked marriages to two Polish people to gain residency.

The fraudster was jailed for conspiring to breach immigration law, but was then handed £1,500 of taxpayers’ money - on condition of leaving Britain and returning to his native country - as part of a Government scheme for rehabilitating foreign nationals.

He had only served seven months of his two-year sentence.

Today, it emerged Rathore has used the money to set up Xpress Solutions - a company providing UK passports, visas and driving licences in Kotli, Pakistan, his home country.

Among its other services, it also bizarrely offers ‘any enquiry related to the laws of cricket’.

He is not currently under investigation by the Pakistani authorities.

Jonathan Isaby, political director of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, branded the payout a ‘sick golden goodbye’.

He said: ‘When all of us are having to tighten our belts and watch every penny, pay-offs for fraudsters like Rathore at British taxpayers’ expense are an utter disgrace.

‘Ministers must urgently review the operation of the Facilitated Returns Scheme to ensure that we are not being taken for a ride.

see more

Oh, you’re being taken for a ride alright. And this is only one case of very many.

Posted by peiper     on 01/23/2012 at 01:39 PM   
Filed Under: • Daily Life • Finance and Investing • Justice - LACK OF •  
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Let The Cheating Begin

Is it just old cynical me, or was your very first thought “here comes another Oil for Food scandal”?

BRUSSELS – The European Union formally adopted an oil embargo Monday against Iran and a freeze of the assets of the country’s central bank, part of sanctions meant to pressure the country to resume talks on its nuclear program.

Diplomats said the measures, which were adopted in Brussels by the EU’s 27 foreign ministers, include an immediate embargo on new contracts for crude oil and petroleum products, while existing contracts will be allowed to run until July.

EU diplomats are calling the measure part of a twin track approach toward Iran: increase sanctions to discourage what they suspect is Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons but emphasize at the same time the international community’s willingness to talk. Iran says its nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purposes.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague called the embargo part of “an unprecedented set of sanctions.”

“I think this shows the resolve of the European Union on this issue,” Hague said.

Rrrriiiight. Sure, I believe it. Embargo. Uh huh. Big noise now, but it won’t even start until July. So this is just a lot of noise right now.

Except they cut a deal where poor little Greece, who lives for cheap Iranian oil, can do an end run, right? No? Wanna bet? Wanna watch Greece suddenly become a next exporter of oil when the embargo starts?

To protect Europe’s economy, struggling with a two-year-old debt crisis, foreign ministers agreed to delay full implementation of the oil embargo until July 1, an EU diplomat said.

That will give countries such as Greece, which rely heavily on Iranian oil, to find alternative sources.

Alternative sources, like old Hugo down in Venezuela, who isn’t part of the embargo and will probably act as front man for the mullahs? Or China, who, despite assurances from the Saudis that they would match production, isn’t part of the embargo?

Oh, and of course the price of oil just jumped $12 a barrel, to $111, on top of the 30¢ price jack you’ve seen at the pump over the past couple of weeks. Here we go again, $4-5 gas coming soon.

Thank God Obama killed the pipeline. As politics shuts down one international source after another (Nigeria will tip soon), it’s so reassuring to know that our Fearless Reader has done whatever he can to stop our supply from any and all other sources. Not.

The only way to make an embargo real is to do it at the point of a gun. Genuine old school naval blockade at sea, and armies along the borders. And let them do what they do best. Anything less is just an exercise in bullshit.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/23/2012 at 09:28 AM   
Filed Under: • Economics • EUro-peons • Oil, Alternative Energy, and Gas Prices • War On Terror •  
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