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calendar   Tuesday - March 15, 2011

Reporters and radiation

I’m reading with semi-professional interest the accounts of the Japan nuclear problems. I’m really appalled at the lack of decent info on the amounts of radiation being released.

I should inform you that I spent six years as a Navy Nuclear Operator, or ‘nuke’ ET. I’ve some knowledge of the subject.

Most of these articles don’t tell you anything meaningful. When an article tells you that radiation levels are 10x, 100x, etc over background, that’s meaningless unless they tell you what background levels are.

Here’s an Reuters article which at least gives some info:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/15/us-japan-radiation-leaking-directly-into-idUSTRE72E7B220110315

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), citing information it had received from Japanese authorities at 0350 GMT, said on Tuesday dose rates of up to 400 millisievert per hour have been reported at the Fukushima power plant site.

Okay, dose rates that high are reported AT the Fukushima plant. Doesn’t tell me a thing about the surrounding countryside radiation levels. I’m also unfamiliar with the ‘sievert’ as a unit of radiation measurement. Rads, Rems, Roentgens, even Curies, I can deal with. What’s a ‘sievert’?

Next article is even worse:

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/03/15/navy-detects-radiation-200-miles-japan-nuclear-plant/#ixzz1GitcrzFB

The U.S. Navy said Tuesday that very low levels of airborne radiation were detected at Yokosuka and Atsugi bases, about 200 miles to the north of the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

This is worse than useless. Trust me, I can detect ‘low levels of radiation’ from your spouse, your TV, cellphone, etc. Meaningless without actual measurements. Report the levels your instruments are reading! Is that so hard to do? I might agree with you, but sans actual readings, you’re hiding something.

Another Reuters article: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/16/us-japan-quake-idUSTRE72A0SS20110316?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=22&sp=true

Officials in Tokyo said radiation in the capital was 10 times normal at one point but not a threat to human health in the sprawling high-tech city of 13 million people.

No info on ‘normal’ levels, much less the 10x levels recorded.

Depending on where I am, my ‘normal’ radiation level could be 10x just based on location. Denver, CO, has much higher background than my home in Ohio. Denver is surrounded by exposed rocks that exude radon, for instance. It is also the ‘Mile High City’, which means there is less atmosphere to attenuate the sun’s radiation


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Posted by Christopher   United States  on 03/15/2011 at 09:57 PM   
Filed Under: • EditorialsNews-Briefs •  
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calendar   Sunday - March 13, 2011

brit journalist calls obama, the first npr president. some interesting thoughts from toby harnden

Fairly late for me and was about to close when I found this.
Don’t know why I missed it earlier today as I usually read this guy.

Anyway ... you might take issue with a bit of it but overall, I think he’s on our side.

He is a Brit reporter based in the USA, and writes this column with his take on the USA, politics and people.


American Way: Barack Obama, America’s first NPR president

By Toby Harnden
A VERY PUBLIC HUMILIATION

If proof were needed that some people at the top of National Public Radio despise the public then it was provided last week. In a delicious sting carried out by the young conservative troublemaker James O’Keefe, Americans were offered a glimpse of the different planet a certain class of liberal inhabits.

For the uninitiated, NPR (officially, they’ve actually dropped the radio bit as they pursue digital expansion) is viewed a little bit like the BBC is in Britain, only much more so: Left-leaning, worthy and a more than a little self-satisfied. Stereotypically, it’s preferred by those who much granola, sip lattes and seldom shave – especially the men.

Until recently, NPR seemed to be moving away from the stereotype. Then, it fired Juan Williams, a black commentator who professed to be a liberal but regularly expressed fairly conservative views on Fox News. When he said that he got “nervous” when he saw people wearing “Muslim garb” on an aeroplane, NPR pronounced that this “undermined his credibility as a news analyst” and canned him.

But Williams had the last laugh, immediately securing a multi-million dollar new contract with Fox, where he has happily denounced his former employer ever since.
Williams had been a popular broadcaster and the cack-handed way in which he was sent packing (Vivian Schiller, the CEO, suggested that the reasons for his remarks was a matter between him “and his psychiatrist”) infuriated its local member stations.  It also prompted calls for the end of federal funding, which amounts to an average of 10 percent of the revenue of the member stations.

Then, O’Keefe (who said he was motivated by the Williams affair) arranged for two members of a bogus Muslim charity to try to entice NPR executives with a donation of $5 million. And boy did he pull it off.

Ron Schiller (no relation to Vivian), NPR’s chief fundraiser, gave a display of such condescending smugness and disdain for ordinary Americans and everyone outside his little coastal cocoon that it would have been dismissed as caricature had the script been written for him.

Over a surreptitiously-videotaped meal at Georgetown’s Café Milano, known as a hang-out for wealthy Arabs, Schiller stated that the Tea Party was made up of “white, Middle-America, gun-toting… seriously racist people”.
He sniffed that “the thing that I guess I’m most disturbed by and disappointed by in this country which is that the educated, so-called elite in this country, is too small a percentage of the population – so you have this very large uneducated part of the population that carries these ideas”.

Sound familiar? Back in April 2008, Barack Obama was captured on tape at a San Francisco fundraiser stating that industrial decline meant that people “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them”.
Like Schiller (who resigned, along with his namesake), Obama was trying to get some money. And both of them did so by saying what they really thought with an unusual abandon.

Such haughty pronouncements is not only that they underestimate the power of the opposing arguments they face. For many Americans, they are a kind of declaration of war on what most of America is.
In the past, such views would not have been reported because the technology to do so barely existed. But the views still permeated the media class who ran the broadcast networks that told people what they should think.

Now, talk radio, blogs and Fox News means that there are ample outlets to build what amounts to a counter-culture – or perhaps, more accurately, a counter counter-culture.
The problem is that in hitting back against the liberal Establishment consensus, some figures – the weeping, ranting, apocalyptic Glenn Beck of Fox News is a case in point – do little more than mirror the worst excesses of the Left.

Over the past decade, I’ve found an increasingly tribal feeling among Americans, who readily identify themselves as conservatives or liberals, Republicans or Democrats. A Republican I met at a dinner recently proudly told me that when something bad happened his young children would invariable blame “the Democrats”.

There’s considerable justification in the view that the current occupant of the White House is the first NPR president. But seeking to replace him with a Fox News president probably isn’t the answer.

SOURCE


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 03/13/2011 at 04:35 PM   
Filed Under: • Editorials •  
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I’ve got the updating blues…

Yes, I finally decided to update to MacOS 10.6 Snow Leopard. (who names these things? Why the cat fetish?) As expected, some of my favorite third-party apps either no longer work at all, or are crippled. Sapiens is crippled. The ‘search’ function no longer works. Sticky Windows is completely busted. I expect I’ll have to buy the new version when available.

Meanwhile, to make up for the lack of Sticky Windows, I’ve increased my use of Spaces, an included function of MacOS.

Yeah, I know, Macker is laughing at me. Or with me. He may have had the same problems.

Which brings me to BMEWS. I had problems posting for the last two days. I normally use FireFox as my browser. I normally preview my posts. Three times I tried to preview a post in FireFox, it took me back to the Expression Engine page. Drew and peiper will know what I’m talking about. The post that I’d lovingly spent so much time on was lost.

I suspect I need to upgrade FireFox. Until then, I’ve found that Safari does the job.


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Posted by Christopher   United States  on 03/13/2011 at 08:57 AM   
Filed Under: • Computers and CyberspaceEditorials •  
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calendar   Friday - February 25, 2011

How will America handle the fall of its Middle East empire?

Not at all sure how this one will be received. Darned good points made I believe. But see for yourself.

Says lots about foreign policy of which I wish we didn’t need any. Just a huge wall to keep out liberals and immigrants.

By Peter Oborne
Daily Telegraph’s chief political commentator

Empires can collapse in the course of a generation. At the end of the 16th century, the Spanish looked dominant. Twenty-five years later, they were on their knees, over-extended, bankrupt, and incapable of coping with the emergent maritime powers of Britain and Holland. The British empire reached its fullest extent in 1930. Twenty years later, it was all over.

Today, it is reasonable to ask whether the United States, seemingly invincible a decade ago, will follow the same trajectory. America has suffered two convulsive blows in the last three years. The first was the financial crisis of 2008, whose consequences are yet to be properly felt. Although the immediate cause was the debacle in the mortgage market, the underlying problem was chronic imbalance in the economy.

For a number of years, America has been incapable of funding its domestic programmes and overseas commitments without resorting to massive help from China, its global rival. China has a pressing motive to assist: it needs to sustain US demand in order to provide a market for its exports and thus avert an economic crisis of its own. This situation is the contemporary equivalent of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), the doctrine which prevented nuclear war breaking out between America and Russia.

Unlike MAD, this pact is unsustainable. But Barack Obama has not sought to address the problem. Instead, he responded to the crisis with the same failed policies that caused the trouble in the first place: easy credit and yet more debt. It is certain that America will, in due course, be forced into a massive adjustment both to its living standards at home and its commitments abroad.

This matters because, following the second convulsive blow, America’s global interests are under threat on a scale never before seen. Since 1956, when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles pulled the plug on Britain and France over Suez, the Arab world has been a US domain. At first, there were promises that it would tolerate independence and self-determination. But this did not last long; America chose to govern through brutal and corrupt dictators, supplied with arms, military training and advice from Washington.

The momentous importance of the last few weeks is that this profitable, though morally bankrupt, arrangement appears to be coming to an end. One of the choicest ironies of the bloody and macabre death throes of the regime in Libya is that Colonel Gaddafi would have been wiser to have stayed out of the US sphere of influence. When he joined forces with George Bush and Tony Blair five years ago, the ageing dictator was leaping on to a bandwagon that was about to grind to a halt.

In Washington, President Obama has not been stressing this aspect of affairs. Instead, after hesitation, he has presented the recent uprisings as democratic and even pro-American, indeed a triumph for the latest methods of Western communication such as Twitter and Facebook. Many sympathetic commentators have therefore claimed that the Arab revolutions bear comparison with the 1989 uprising of the peoples of Eastern Europe against Soviet tyranny.

I would guess that the analogy is apt. Just as 1989 saw the collapse of the Russian empire in Eastern Europe, so it now looks as if 2011 will mark the removal of many of America’s client regimes in the Arab world. It is highly unlikely, however, that events will thereafter take the tidy path the White House would prefer.

Far from being inspired by Twitter, a great many of Arab people who have driven the sensational events of recent weeks are illiterate. They have been impelled into action by mass poverty and unemployment, allied to a sense of disgust at vast divergences of wealth and grotesque corruption. It is too early to chart the future course of events with confidence, but it seems unlikely that these liberated peoples will look to Washington and New York as their political or economic model.

CONTINUE READING HERE


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 02/25/2011 at 09:31 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials •  
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calendar   Thursday - February 17, 2011

A BMEWS podcast?

Over a year ago I subscribed via iTunes to the Ricochet podcast. You can still subscribe to it if you have iTunes.

The Ricochet guys (Peter Robinson, Rob Long) spent most of their ‘advertising time’ promoting the upcoming launch of the website Ricochet.com.

Well, Ricochet.com launched. I was still listening to the weekly podcasts, which featured Peter Robinson (former Reagan speech-writer), Rob Long (squishy RINO, but writes Hollywood scripts), and Mark Steyn (undocumented alien who subs for Rush Limbaugh from EIB Ice Station New Hampshire.) I should mention that James Lileks seems to be taking over as eemcee of Ricochet podcast.

Why do I mention this? Simple. I’m now a paid subscriber to Ricochet.com.

Why does this matter to BMEWS? Also simple. I want BMEWS to expand. I’d have to research the technical crap, but Drew, peiper, and myself might be able to do a podcast.

Might. Just asking opinions. (and waiting for Drew and/or peiper to say ‘nyet’.)


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Posted by Christopher   United States  on 02/17/2011 at 04:49 PM   
Filed Under: • Editorials •  
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calendar   Thursday - February 10, 2011

cities cut services to save money in hard times while top dogs keep their high salaries and perks.

The economy is a mess all agree. What isn’t agreed is how to cure it but the coalition govt. is in charge and so they set the agenda. 

There are serious and deep cuts being made in many social services, some which are actually not wasteful or bloated. Of course, as you’d imagine, many are.

Local councils are also cutting back on services and finding ways of saving BUT,
hands off our salaries.  The Prime Minister says “We’re all in this together.” What we all know is, that’s bullshit.  Only in his dreams and maybe not even then, are we all in this together.

For example, the head of the Manchester city council, the countries third largest city, is a Labour Party member, as are ALL members of that city council.  His basic salary is £233,000 per annum. That’s even more then the Prime Minister gets. None of the council salaries or perks have been cut. But they are proposing to close city libraries and the public swimming pools among other front line services.
They are politically targeting the front line services to make sure when the next election rolls around, that the Tory Party, that is the conservatives, get the blame.
But their fat cat life style continues.

Well, among the things the city apparently can afford is the following.
You could not make this up. And it’s only the tip of the dung heap. I wouldn’t bet against cons playing the very same game.

· Translating a guide to pigeon-feeding into Urdu – just one of the documents which contributed to a bill of thousands for translation services last year.

· Spending £2,000 giving 16 residents the chance to try stand-up comedy last year, in order to help them develop their confidence and make friends.

· Pumping £120,000 into B of the Bang, Britain’s tallest public sculpture, later nicknamed ‘Kerplunk’ after its giant metal spikes began falling off. The architect and contractors paid the council £1.7million in an out-of-court settlement over safety problems which led to it being scrapped in 2009.

· Spending £8,000 on a sex guide for the over-50s, featuring advice including watching a ‘sexy movie’. Around 5,000 free copies of what campaigners branded ‘an extraordinary and misguided pamphlet’ were sent to men and women across the city in 2009.

· Advertising three communications posts on salaries of up to £39,000 in October despite a recruitment freeze, including a social media manager described by critics as a ‘Twitter tsar’.

Just another example of politicians at work play.  No wonder so many have so little faith in govt. of any party these days.  How do you justify spending even one lonely penny on a translation service for feeding pigeons?  And get this. The city will close all but one of it’s public restrooms.  But the council chief gives up what?  Right.

Meanwhile, back at the treasury, millions are still being given away to foreign countries as aid. Millions and millions. While Brits are being told to tighten their belts.

It’s really discouraging.


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 02/10/2011 at 11:33 AM   
Filed Under: • EconomicsEditorialsUK •  
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calendar   Friday - February 04, 2011

An English tribute to our great President Reagan … from Charles Moore of the Telegraph

He was the best Governor that Calif. had in my lifetime, and the best President too. Sure miss him.

I thought my countrymen and women passing through BMEWS, might be interested in a Brit’s view of Ronald Reagan.

In an age when conservatives find it embarrassing to talk frankly about their true beliefs, the example of Reagan is very important. He never compromised on his creed,


Ronald Reagan: warming to the cold war warrior

Ronald Reagan would have been 100 on Sunday. Charles Moore says our current leaders could learn a lot from the great man.

By Charles Moore
The Telegraph

To understand the genius of Ronald Reagan, one should focus on his handling of an event that occurred days before his 75th birthday. On January 28 1986, the space shuttle Challenger crashed on take-off, killing all seven astronauts on board. Millions watched it happen on television.

Reagan, a year into his second term as President of the United States, paid tribute: “The future doesn’t belong to the faint-hearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.” He ended by saying: “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God’.”

Reagan’s great friend and close ally, Margaret Thatcher, immediately sent him a public message of commiseration at the disaster. But what privately impressed her most was what she saw as Reagan’s uncanny ability to find the words that expressed the deep feelings of a nation in its best idiom. She considered this the mark of a great democratic leader.

Analyse the Challenger tribute, and you find most of the best Reagan tricks – the celebration of human courage, the very American belief in the future and in technology, the capacity to capture, through some gift of imagination, a moment that people can hold in their minds. To do this in mass-communication politics requires an element of hokum. If you think, after all, about his use of the words (from a poem written by an American, British-educated fighter pilot whose plane crashed fatally in the young Margaret Thatcher’s Lincolnshire in 1941), you could argue that they do not fit the facts: it was precisely because the shuttle failed to “slip the surly bonds of earth” that the astronauts were killed. But that is pedantically to miss the Reagan magic. He had a way with him that was utterly persuasive. The sentence which includes the phrase is long and difficult to say, yet Reagan paced it beautifully. I remember watching the tribute that day and feeling it working, even on my own hard, journalistic heart.

I use the word “tricks” to describe Reagan’s methods, and that is what they were. But this does not mean that he was dishonest. He understood that the President of the United States, being head of state as well as head of government, is inevitably an actor. The presidency is the greatest stage that modern politics offers. The man elected to occupy it must act as well as he possibly can, and he is no more “lying” by doing so than was Laurence Olivier when he played Henry V. As a former Hollywood professional in the first age of American world domination, Reagan knew what the dreams of the people were, how to appeal to them and how to make them global.

But he also shared them. However corny and repetitive he was, Reagan believed completely in the American version of liberty, opportunity and limited government. He spent his youth on the moderate Left, but came to think differently: “Americans are, in their time of discontent, encouraged by doom and gloom criers who would have us believe our only salvation lies in becoming docile sheep for the government shepherd. I happen to believe government is not the solution to our problems – government is the problem.”

PLEASE READ ALL THE REST OF MOORE’S TRIBUTE HERE

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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 02/04/2011 at 02:30 PM   
Filed Under: • Editorials •  
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calendar   Thursday - December 23, 2010

Extreme violence of this nature is rare, says a cop who should know better, or is an idiot.

Detective Constable Darcia Babb said: ‘This was an outrageous and prolonged attack on a defenseless victim by a gang of thugs.

‘Extreme violence of this nature is rare but when it does happen we will make sure those responsible are brought to justice.

Scuze me while I take some time off to figure out just what planet the lady constable is on. Not this one. Is she dizzy er what?  Crimes of this nature are most certainly NOT rare. And as for brought to justice, gimme a break. Justice?  She isn’t dizzy. She’s crazy. Gotta be. Justice?  For what these sub-humans with unpronounceable names did?  What justice? Where’s it hiding?  I saw it somewhere a long time ago. Must have got lost in the immigration shuffle along with the mad hatters that voted Labour and allowed those traitorous lefties to totally screw up the country and the police and the courts.

Take a good look at this ... and take a gander at the time these pukes will serve. A guy gets beat up this badly and some of the thugs are charged with,
violent disorder?  wtf! What’s with that?  And what the hell were the ppl in the restaurant thinking when they closed the door on the victim, afraid to allow him sanctuary. Jeesh what a fucked up world.

The way the headline reads, you immediately think they’re gonna be in jail for a long time. Not so cos it’s 20 years split up among the whole gang of punks.

Grab the link for a couple of photos of the sub-human scum. This is what England and most of Europe will one day look like.  I’m glad I won’t be around to be witness to it. But sure as hell it’s on the way. Can it be halted? Sure. Maybe. Depends on how serious the electorate get about crime. How far they are willing to go to set examples to discourage others.  Somehow, someway the people have to make lawmakers sit up and take notice.  It might be they have to organize vigilantes along the line of San Francisco in 1849.  String up a few lawyers who defend scum like these. Take out a weak judge or two. And by all means do away with some of the violent thugs who’ve been let out early and committed crimes while on release. You think I’m over the top?

In the news this week is a story of unimaginable horror.  The guy is called the Crossbow Cannibal.  He even ate one of his victims raw. How’s that for bad?
AND ...  he’s just another case where he could have been stopped had authorities not been asleep.  Another case also of some mentally deranged wacko who was deemed ok and safe to release, you got it, he killed a total stranger.  Want more?  Some punk darkie released from prison for violent crime, killed someone 6 months after his release.  You’ve heard it all before and many times I’d bet. Same crap but different names.

Just how much is the public supposed to be subjected to? And to add insult to injury, be expected to support these miserable bastards either on benefits or while in jail.  Why?  For what purpose?  Of what use can they be, unless used for medical experiments.

Gang who battered pedestrian with crowbar in brutal road rage attack jailed for nearly 20 years

By Rebecca Camber

A gang of thugs who stabbed a pedestrian in a road rage attack, torturing him with a crowbar, hammer and broken bottle have been jailed for almost 20 years.

A 30-year-old man was subjected to a brutal attack after almost being run over by a car as he left a popular Indian restaurant in Whitechapel, east London.

When the pedestrian swore at the driver in anger, he was confronted by three thugs who got out of the convertible BMW and another car following behind.

Rashel Hussain, 20, and his friends, twin brothers Jubhare and Taharak Hussain, both aged 21, battered the victim with a crowbar, causing serious injury to his left hand.

Terrified, the man ran back to Tayyabs restaurant - regarded as one of the best Indian restaurants in London - only to find himself trapped in the doorway as the doors had been locked by frightened staff.

Taharak knifed the man a number of times before running off with the others to get more weapons.

As the victim attempted to get help, stumbling towards the Royal London Hospital nearby, his attackers returned with a larger group of men who leapt on him.

Rashel Hussain battered him with a hammer, while another man, Shah Alom, 22, slashed him with a glass bottle and two others, Jubhare Hussain and Shofiqul Islam, 21, rained down punches on the defenceless man leaving him with serious neck, arm and thigh injuries.

The extraordinary onslaught of violence was caught on CCTV, which showed the bloodied victim desperately attempting to escape.

Horrified members of the public who witnessed the attack around 9pm on Sunday, May 30 this year called 999 for help.

Two police officers rushed to the scene and wrestled with the attackers, pulling them off the victim and saving his life.

Rashel Hussain was arrested at the scene while the others fled. But detectives later rounded up the other members of the gang.

On Monday they were sentenced to a total of almost 20 years at Snaresbrook Crown Court.

Rashel Hussain, 20, was jailed for six years after pleading guilty to grievous bodily harm and violent disorder.

Taharak Hussain, 21, got seven years for grievous bodily harm.

His non-identical twin Jubhare, 21, received a two year sentence for violent disorder.
Two other gang members, Shofiqul Islam, 21, got a two year sentence and Shah Alom, 22, was sentenced to 27 months for violent disorder.

source and more

Let me tell you just how frightened some are of the law and the police.  If you are aware of the “student” riots last month, here’s something you probably didn’t
know.  One of the very left groups, not all students btw, give points for damage to property, maybe 50 points for assaulting an officer, 100 points for injury and drawing blood. I haven’t a clue what they do with the points but what I’m saying is, does that sound like a society in control of itself? Does that look to you like a culture in charge?  Does that look like a country that’s pointed in the right direction?  Not to me it doesn’t.  Vandals do their best to rile and entangle the cops doing their job, bullying cops if I can use that term and it sure looks like bullying. But cops aren’t supposed to smack em down. It ok to spit at a cop and then sue the city if the cop defends himself cos as we all know, cops are all guilty all the time.  I really am sick to tears of all the BS flung about and the useless thugs of all colors running the show.  The state may be holding them off somewhat. But what the state is not doing, is fighting back.  They won’t even use water canon on rioters, I have read.  What does that tell you?

And I haven’t even started on the unions. I’ll leave that for another time.


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 12/23/2010 at 06:40 PM   
Filed Under: • CommiesCrimeCULTURE IN DECLINEDaily LifeDemocrats-Liberals-Moonbat LeftistsDIVERSITY BSEditorialsJudges-Courts-LawyersJustice - LACK OFUK •  
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calendar   Saturday - November 06, 2010

america for sale?  this guy says yes it is.  I suspect he may be a liberal of some kind. although ..

Mr Hari thinks America is now officially up for sale.
I guess he doesn’t like the election results? Just a wild guess.
To be fair and honest about it as well, I don’t know the facts or truth of what he says about Boehner.  He doesn’t have entirely kind words for the Democrats either I want you to know.

I think after last night’s radio panel show, I’ve become overly sensitive and perhaps thin skinned re. the T.P. It feels like we’re being ganged up on.  And to make matters even worse, some idiot commenter online in the Mail said my favorite president (Reagan) wasn’t a good president. How the hell would he know? The commenter wasn’t even one of us.  Just gets to me sometimes. Critiques by foreigners who think they know all about us. nuts!

Johann Hari: America is now officially for sale

It’s the Tea Party spirit distilled: pose as the champion of Joe America, while actually ripping him off

The laws and policies of the legislature of the United States of America are now effectively on e-Bay, for sale to the highest bidder. Are you a Wall Street boss who wants to party like it’s 2007? Are you a Big Coal baron who wants to burn, baby, burn? Are you an insurance company that wants to be able to kick sick people off your rolls? Meet John Boehner, the most powerful Republican and soon-to-be Speaker of the House. But – of course! – you already have.

Here’s an example of how you have worked together. In 1995, the House was going to finally repeal subsidies for growing tobacco, because an addictive cancer-causing drug didn’t seem like the most deserving recipient of tax-payers’ cash – until Boehner walked the floor of the House handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists to his fellow elected representatives. They changed their minds. The subsidy stayed. Explaining his check-dispensing, Boehner says: “It’s gone on here for a long time.” So get your bids in: the House is open for business.

Cancer or no cancer the product is legal.  And there are other ‘addictive’ products out there also. How about a total ban on everything Hari doesn’t approve of?

As for Ins. companies kicking ppl off their rolls, well, um ... that is probably true. I say that cos it happened to me long ago.
okay now ...  here come some more Tea Party slams. Get ready.

To understand what has happened in the mid-term elections, the best guide lies in an unexpected place – the dusty vaults of Hollywood. In 1957, Elia Kazan directed a film called ‘A Face In The Crowd’ that read the tea-leaves of the Tea Party back when Sarah Palin was merely a frosty zygote.
One morning a poor wandering Arkansas chancer named Larry ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes is lying passed out on a jail cell where the local sheriff has detained him overnight.

Lonesome Rhodes becomes one of the biggest stars on US television, he starts receiving offers. Advertisers say that if he endorses their lousy products, they’ll shower him with millions. He knows how to sell to ordinary people – and he is pushed to go further. They ask him to sell the political causes that will make them richer too. He starts railing against social security and the old age pension and anything that taxes the rich to help the rest. He uses the tunes and slanguage of working class Americans to get them to emotionally identify with the people who are screwing them over. He’s brilliant at it – a gurning hyperactive huckster, saying that support and security for ordinary Americans is a betrayal of America. He makes himself rich by lying to the people he came from.

Fast-forward to 2010. John Boehner came from a poor family of twelve children, and heroically worked three jobs (including as a janitor) to put himself through business school. But when he got to elected office, it turned out that there was alot more money to be reaped from serving the interests of rich people than serving the people he came from. He took money from the insurance companies, and voted to deny healthcare coverage to sick children and to the people who hurried to the World Trade Centre on 9/11 to try to dig people from the wreckage, exposing them to deadly toxins. He took money from defense contractors, and supported every war going. He tirelessly champions the overdog, while hoovering up their cash and flying on their private jets to some of the most luxury resorts in the world.

Beck and other on-air promoters “are either the worst financial advisors around or knowingly lying to their loyal viewers.” It’s the Tea Party spirit distilled: pose as the champion of Joe America, while ripping him off.

There is, however, one significant difference from ‘A Face In The Crowd’. At the end of the film – spoiler alert – Lonesome Rhodes is finishing a show and, as the end credits roll and the music swells, he rants against his viewers, believing they can’t hear him. But in the control box, a producer deliberately flips a switch. Suddenly millions hear him say: “Those morons out there. I’d give ‘em dog food and make ‘em think it’s steak. Good night you stupid idiots. Good night you miserable slobs. They’re like a bunch of trained seals – I toss ‘em a fish and they lap it up.” John Boehner and Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are ridiculing their followers just as crudely. Can’t somebody at Fox flip the switch?

Above all very much edited so you might want to go here for the whole editorial comment.


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 11/06/2010 at 09:11 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials •  
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calendar   Thursday - November 04, 2010

What a shame we can’t have a Tea Party in Britain, says Richard Littlejohn in daily mail

This is just a portion of the Littlejohn column today. I thought you’d enjoy it and there’s more HERE


What a shame we can’t have a Tea Party in Britain

By Richard Littlejohn
Last updated at 3:41 PM on 4th November 2010

Victorious Tea Party candidate Rand Paul put it succinctly. ‘People don’t understand why they should have to balance their family budget, but Congress doesn’t.

What has been refreshing in America this past week was to see ordinary citizens on the streets and on the airwaves demanding massive reductions in government spending and more control over their own lives. Americans don’t believe government has all the answers. It’s not what are they going to do about such-and-such. It’s what can we do about it.

All we seem to get in Britain, and on the BBC in particular, is a procession of entitlement junkies lining up to denounce the ‘cuts’ and demand ever more unaffordable State largesse.
America’s Tea Party movement is lazily, deliberately, misrepresented as a bunch of bigots, zealots and racists – the standard Washington insider, mainstream media slur.

Those Tea Party supporters I’ve met tend to be decent, concerned citizens, worried about their families’ futures, who believe their voice is ignored in Washington. They are small business owners, lawyers, housewives, none of whom fit the received-wisdom stereotype.
Of course, all manner of nutters attach themselves to any cause. We’ve got more than our own fair share of bigots and zealots. What could be more bigoted, for instance, than comparing modest reductions in housing benefits to the Holocaust?

As for the condescending allegations that Tea Party supporters are all ‘angry’ and motivated by hatred, how would you characterise the deranged reaction of the British Left to the Coalition’s plans to cut our own crippling budget deficit, bequeathed by Labour?

Angry doesn’t begin to describe it. Foaming-at-the-mouth would be more accurate.

Nor are we in any position to sneer at some Tea Party candidates as crazies, given that until recently Parliament contained the likes of barking mad Lembit Opik, famous Cheeky Girl enthusiast and flying saucer obsessive; and George Galloway, last seen wearing a leotard and pretending to be a cat in the Big Brother house.


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 11/04/2010 at 11:43 AM   
Filed Under: • EditorialsUKUSA •  
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calendar   Sunday - October 31, 2010

Nail ‘em on it!

The contrast could not be starker.

Imam Obama, since His Inauguration, has done nothing but attack Americans.

He’s attacked the auto industry.
He’s attacked the oil industry.
He’s attacked my doctors.
He’s attacked my insurance companies.
He’s attacked my bank.
He’s attacked ‘Wall Street’ where I invest my retirement funds.
He’s attacked mortgage companies for complying with Federal law. Forcing you and me to pay for deadbeats.
He’s attacked my restaurants.
He’s attacked the Chamber of Commerce.
He’s attacked you and me as ‘clinging to our guns and religion.’
He bows to foreign despots.
He apologizes for your and my alleged ‘sins’ from the past.

I could continue the list of attacks Imam Obama has perpetrated upon the American people. It is (so far) endless.

In fact, the only people he hasn’t attacked are the actual enemies of the United States.
Islam.
Illegal ‘immigrants’ (I call them hostile invaders).
China.

He does NOT represent America.

Remember when we had a President who did represent America? Maybe not in practice, but the goal which is worth striving for?

I know of no Democrats, and pitifully few Republicans, who stand for the Constitution and America.

We’re two days from an historical election. The choices are clear: you can vote Democrat. Or you can vote America.

You cannot vote for both.


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Posted by Christopher   United States  on 10/31/2010 at 10:50 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat LeftistsEditorialsGovernmentHistory •  
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calendar   Monday - October 25, 2010

Obama’s Democrats are about to take a hiding in the mid-term elections…..

The exact dimensions of the Democrats’ rout are not yet clear. Nor is it clear whether Republicans will advance serious policies to roll back their expansion of government, and whether voters will support them if they do. Britain may give us some clues on that. But we do know that Americans who embraced “hope and change” two years ago are now rejecting the change they were given.

For the entire commentary of course, see the link.
America does get covered over here as you see.  I found this to be very interesting but also rather long.  So of course it’s cropped for space and breathing room.


Why the US has turned against Obama

Obama’s Democrats are about to take a hiding in the mid-term elections. Michael Barone explains why the US has turned its back on big government.

By Michael Barone

Why have American voters gone so sour on Barack Obama’s Democratic party? It’s a question that must puzzle many in Britain who – Conservative as well as Labour and Lib Dem – welcomed Obama’s election two years ago and saw him leading America and the world into broad, sunlit uplands. But now it appears that Obama’s party is about to take what George W Bush called a “thumping” in the mid-term elections on November 2.

It looks to be quite a fall. Obama won the popular vote in 2008 by a 53 to 46 per cent margin. That’s not quite a landslide, but he won a higher percentage of the vote than any Democratic candidate in history except for Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. More than John Kennedy, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, Grover Cleveland; more even than Bill Clinton.

And Democrats won the popular vote for the House of Representatives – a key index of public support – by a 54 to 43 per cent margin. That was their best showing since 1986.

Polls now suggest that those percentages could turn upside down. Republicans lead on the generic ballot question – which party’s candidates will you support for the House of Representatives – by an average of 49 to 42 per cent. In no previous election cycle since the Gallup organisation started asking the question in 1942 have Republicans led by more than 4 per cent. Now in Gallup’s “low turnout” likely voter model they lead by 17. Republicans seem very likely to win more – perhaps many more – than the 39 seats they need for a majority in the House and might, if they get lucky, win the 10 seats they need for a majority in the Senate.

After the 2008 elections, Democratic strategist James Carville predicted that Democrats would dominate US elections for 40 years; Republican strategist Karl Rove had predicted something similar for his party after George W Bush’s narrower win in 2004. And Tony Blair’s New Labour dominated British politics for nine or 10 years after its first landslide victory in 1997. But the Obama Democrats’ dominance turned out to last not 40 years but 40 weeks – until Republicans overtook Democrats in the polls in August 2009.

What gives?

read it all here


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 10/25/2010 at 05:48 AM   
Filed Under: • EditorialsPoliticsUSA •  
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calendar   Wednesday - September 01, 2010

It’s a puzzlement…

Why is it that the Leftists support Muslims?

I’ve seriously puzzled over this.

And then… as I stepped into the shower this afternoon, a possible answer came to me:

Sharia law is exactly what liberals want! Group law vs. individual law.

Follow me:

Liberals apply the law NOT to benefit the individual but to protect a group. If, as an individual, you are not a member of the ‘protected’/favorable group, the law does not apply. You’ve obviously cheated the ‘protected’ class. The SNOFU has done this constantly during his regime. Just remember how he treated the GM/Chrysler bond-holders.

(SNOFU: Situation Normal: Obama F@cked Up)

Sharia law does the same: it protects a special group, not an individual. If you are not a Muslim, by definition you’re a cheating, lying scoundrel.


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Posted by Christopher   United States  on 09/01/2010 at 06:33 PM   
Filed Under: • Editorials •  
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calendar   Thursday - August 19, 2010

Healthcare ‘monovision’ cr@p

It’s that time of year again; time to scramble and get all those little annoying health items attended to, paid for, and file the refund claims on your healthcare flexible spending account.

That’s the bad thing about FSA’s: You guess what your out-of-pocket medical expenses will be for the next year––that much is withheld from your paycheck––if you don’t use it, you lose it. The government just keeps your money. I wish I qualified for a plain medical savings account. Then what I don’t use just rolls over.

I’ve had an healthcare FSA for the last six years. I/we have used it all every year.

But this year I’m worried: I increased my ‘guess’ at our out-of-pocket health expenses this year. My goal was to goad my wife into getting a full physical, with the attendant co-pays and deductibles. My mistake...I know how she feels about doctors...she’s never had a full physical in our 20+ years of marriage. It’s not for lack of my encouragement either: whenever I suggest a physical it starts a figh...er...an argument. So, I still have a full FSA to spend…

Today I decided to take care of one of the little items I’ve neglected: new glasses/contacts.

I was shocked! The expense...was...far cheaper than I’d expected. So today I got an exam for both glasses and contacts. I ordered two pairs of bifocals, and walked out with a test set of contact.

That’s right. Contact. Only one. In my __ eye.

( __ eye = ‘dominant eye’. In the interest of identity protection, you do not need to know which of my three eyes is ‘dominant’. grin)

I’d never heard of this before. It’s called ‘monovision’. The doctor knew which of my eyes was ‘dominant’. I never knew eyes were ‘dominant’ or ‘submissive’. When I questioned him about how he knew which eye was dominant, he handed me a small box, told me to hold it like a camera. ‘Now, put it to your eye like you’re looking through the viewer’. Guess what? I do use my __ eye for that. I started remembering...it is indeed my __ eye I use when star-gazing through my telescope. Who knew?

(The Doctor Knows...mwhahahahaha!)

With the ‘monovision’ option, he’s just putting one contact in to correct my dominant eye to see far away (I’m near-sighted). The other eye is still free for reading and other close work. My other option was bifocal contacts, which are more expensive. The downside is (and this I got off a Wikipedia article when I got home) some disorientation due to loss of depth perception (particularly in the uncorrected eye).

BTW, this is all out of my own pocket. No health insurance coverage for this. (maybe the insurance would cover some small part of the eye exam itself, but it’s so small as to not be worth the time to file, or even the envelope and postage stamp.)

ObamaCare went entirely the wrong way.

Ideally, I’d have a medical savings account that I fund with my own money. This would be for out-of-pocket expenses. What I don’t spend this year would roll over. I’d also shop around for medical insurance to cover me/wife/us for something catastrophic. These would get the same tax-breaks that employers get for providing health insurance. This would mean freedom. This means I can shop around for the best and/or cheapest medical service. And…

soapbox !

It would save the government money by removing healthcare from the Federal budget. Period!


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Posted by Christopher   United States  on 08/19/2010 at 04:44 PM   
Filed Under: • Amazing Science and DiscoveriesEditorialsHealth-MedicinePersonal •  
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:
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