Saturday - July 31, 2010

To court for swearing ….  More fun with Law and Disorder …

It’s Sat. After a cloudy and very cool start this summer day, toward the end as we are, the sun shines bright and the sky is blue dotted by puffy white clouds.
One of those days where you look out the window and think, all is well in the world without a care.  Uh huh.  Unless you’re reading the days papers and see red along with the blue sky.

This is is one of those really loony stories I can’t pass without sharing. 
I’ll tell you the happy ending first.  Her name is Natalie Harrop and .. She was cleared of any wrongdoing by magistrates at Bolton, Greater Manchester on Thursday but was warned not to offend in the following 12 months and threatened with a £100 fine.

See? Good news.  She was cleared with a warning.  Her offense?  I’ll get to that in a second.

So our Natalie and her boyfriend are at home one evening when there’s a resounding crash.  An upstairs window has been broken.  Not to worry. Just yoots having some fun.  Except Natalie finds nothing funny about it after the boyfriend goes outside and ends up being chased by a gang of street punks.

Well, by coincidence a police car comes by and stops, seeing a possible confrontation. They tell what happened.  And she’s is one angry lady.  Policeman tells her to go back into her house.

She was drinking a can of beer and shouted towards the youths. She swore at one of them.

Miss Natalie Harrop, was charged with using language that could possibly have alarmed or distressed the youths.

THE ENTIRE FREEKIN STORY IS RIGHT HERE

Posted by peiper     on 07/31/2010 at 10:18 AM   
Filed Under: • Crime • UK •  
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   Friday - July 30, 2010

task switching

No, I’m not cleaning windows today. I wanted to, and I should be. I put 11 hours in on the job yesterday and made great progress, but even coming home at 7:30 I got stuck in a traffic jam. You can’t win in NJ; rush hour lasts most of the day. And the car was on the very verge of boiling over, and now the radiator is done and dead. So today I’m putting the new one in, and I’ll do the rest of the windows tomorrow. I’ll do the parts swap but I won’t fill it yet, since I’m still waiting on Fed-Ex to get here with my new hoses. UPS got the radiator here days ago. Fed-Ex: union free but lame.

Too bad; today is nice and cool, dry with a bit of overcast. Maybe going to hit the low 80s this afternoon. Perfect window washing weather.

Update 1pm: Well that was easy. Taking my sweet time it took me barely an hour to take everything apart and get the radiator out. It figures: the car that almost never needs maintenance is easy to work on. I looked things up on one of the Saturn forums and found that when everyone’s radiator goes it breaks in exactly the same spot, a big crack in the top of the left tank. Design flaw I’d say. So I’m stopping for lunch and then I’ll put the new one in. Piece of cake, so far. I just wish the new hoses would show up. Though the 14 year old factory originals are still in fine shape, if needs must.

Update 5:30pm: All done. I tool several breaks in the heat of the afternoon, so it didn’t take all this time. But I did have to mess with it a little. The CSF brand aftermarket radiator was a 95% exact fit: the mounting pads for the A/C condenser are about 1/4” too far apart. So I had to make the condenser flange hole a little longer. Probably later models had a groove flange instead of a mounting hole; that allows for more adjustment. Anyway, all finished. No leaks, so leftover mystery parts, and I’m actually not even bleeding. Talk about just in time delivery: the Fed-Ex guy showed up just as I was finished getting the condenser mounted. I could not have used the new hoses one minute before he delivered them. 

Posted by Drew458     on 07/30/2010 at 09:24 AM   
Filed Under: • work and the workplace •  
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Busted

Police seize $1.7bn worth of marijuana in California

Police in California say they have seized $1.7bn worth of marijuana plants in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

They have also arrested 97 people over the past three weeks, most of them Mexican nationals believed to have ties with Mexican drug cartels.

White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske said police had found industrial-sized plantations of marijuana.

Experts say Mexican cartels are increasingly growing marijuana in the US, rather than smuggling it there.

450 officers from local, state and federal agencies took part in the raids in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in California.

California authorities said on Thursday they have made dozens of arrests and destroyed marijuana plants worth billions of dollars on farms that officials said are controlled by Mexican drug traffickers.

The street value of the marijuana destroyed in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains was put at $1.7 billion.

Authorities destroyed some 270 acres of marijuana plants, which were irrigated and spread with fertilizer.

“The mission is a collective fight against organized crime,” Madera County Sheriff John Anderson said.

A series of raids that began in January in three northern and central California counties—dubbed Operation Trident—netted 97 arrests and more than 400,000 marijuana plants,

Authorities also seized nearly 500 pounds of harvested marijuana, 74 ounces of cocaine, 49 ounces of methamphetamine and numerous weapons.

Those arrested were charged with cultivation of marijuana, possession of marijuana for sale, weapons possession and immigration offenses, the sheriff’s office said.

Related?

Leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel killed
One of the top three leaders of Mexico’s most powerful drug cartel, Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel,” has been killed in a gun battle with soldiers.

The death of Coronel, 56, is the biggest strike yet against Sinaloa cartel led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman - Mexico’s top drug lord - since President Felipe Calderon launched a military offensive against drug traffickers in late 2006.

According to the FBI, which offered a $5 million reward for Coronel, he was believed to be “the forerunner in producing massive amounts of methamphetamine in clandestine laboratories in Mexico, then smuggling it into the US.”

Sources from the Ministry of National Defense (SEDENA) confirmed the joint elite army/air force operation, composed of at least 150 soldiers and supported by two helicopters, also detained at least 10 men who made up Coronel’s personal bodyguard team.

Troops were deployed on at least five residential streets and restricted the traffic of vehicles and people during the clash. Residents reported gunfire and detonations during the operation

Pictures here, not much to see really. Notice the soldiers are using G3A3s, not M16s. No poodle shooting going on here!



Gee, too bad. Hope the cartels keep right on killing each other. And those poor mistreated Mexicans, just simple farmers, growing a crop for market. While armed to the teeth and cooking up pots of meth on the side. Arrested for doing the jobs Americans won’t do, as usual. And charged with immigration violations. The indignity.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/30/2010 at 08:39 AM   
Filed Under: • Crime • Illegal-Aliens and Immigration •  
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   Thursday - July 29, 2010

inverted design

I don’t want a cellphone with a rudimentary camera in it.

I want a decent pocket camera with a rudimentary cellphone in it.

I have this little POS prepaid card phone from LG. Hey, 10¢ a minute, great. And it has the usual crap - a couple of games, an assortment of ringtones and wallpapers, a world clock. Shit I never use and never will. So a plain vanilla cell phone is good enough for me. This phone in my pocket also has a camera. One that utterly and totally sucks. I mean, the phone didn’t even come with any instructions on how to use the camera, and for the life of my I can not figure out how to get the damn pictures off the phone and onto my computer. Hey, I could send them to someone as a text message attachment, but this camera won’t even do email, so I can’t get them off that way. Screw it. And it turns out that the thing has been taking pictures somehow while it’s in my pocket. I had 285 shots of total blackness.  Oh joy. And there’s no Delete All feature either. Grrr.

The sun came out this afternoon, and I took a break out in the yard of this giant cottage in the woods I’m cleaning. The house is empty, and has been empty for a while now. So I’m sitting there in the yard, and an 8 point buck comes strolling around the corner of the house, nosing about under the hickory tree to see if there’s anything to eat. Son of a gun wasn’t 15 feet away from me, didn’t even realize I was there. I said “boo” and he froze. And stayed frozen, looking exactly like one of those rubber 3D archery targets, for a good 5 minutes. I took his picture several times. The camera has no zoom, so it focused on the bushes next to the tree. The buck is the size of a pinhead. Even under maximum zoom looking at the picture on the phone, I can’t tell if the 1/16” high brown thing is a deer standing point, or a mexican bent over picking lettuce. I’m going with deer, because there isn’t any lettuce growing around here. But the camera is that bad. Totally useless POS.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/29/2010 at 07:50 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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THREE CHEERS FOR SARKOZY OF FRANCE. MAYBE. HOPE HE STAYS THE COURSE AND WISH BRITS WOULD FOLLOW

I am no expert on France or it’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy.  In fact, I don’t really know a heck of a lot about what goes on across the channel unless it’s reported in our papers or BBC radio news.  And not just France.  I don’t seem to know a hell of a lot about anything outside my narrow world, unless I get it from books or the papers.  Or the net.
It’s quite enough for me to keep tabs on this place, with everything else I have on my plate these days.  Which is a lot. That’s one reason for checking in every so often with the Europe News website.  So I do try.

Back to Pres. Sarko if I may.
Now I know BMEWS likes to poke fun at the French and their govt from time to time, and I suppose there are some laffs to be had there.  But I ask you.
How bad can President Sarkozy be when he gets the left and those “civil rights” groups angry at him? 

What I do know about Sarkozy is that he is pro-American.  He is far and away (from what I have been able to gather) not an American hating Frenchman.  He likes us. Mostly.
He is right of center, maybe not as far right as some of us, but hey.  We can’t have everything exactly as we’d like it and anyhow, it’s his country.

Which brings me to Tony Blair, who I don’t admire.
In a speech in 2004, Blair promised that his govt. was going to crack down hard on illegal gypsy/traveller sites.  There was by gosh and by golly going to be a penalty paid for breaking laws and occupying land illegally.
Well, any of you who have followed or even simply breezed past some of my rants from the past year on this subject, know what kind of empty promise that was.
The problem only got worse and worse yet. 

So now back to President Sarkozy, who has incurred the wrath and the angst of the liberal left in France for his stand on the problem of those ppl in his country.
He has issued orders for the bulldozing of illegal sites and has said publicly that Romas (as they are also called) have a responsibility to obey the laws and the rules of citizenship of France. 

I’m not clear on whether the problem the left has is with the word bulldoze or responsibility.  Perhaps both.  In any case, they are screaming race (as usual) and uman rights (as usual), while as usual ignoring the basic premise with regard to land ownership, legality and good citizenship.

If he manages to get his way and he holds to his word (he is a politician after all),
then we must applaud Mr. Sarkozy and say well done sir.

Meanwhile, back at the battered Brit ranch, Pakistan North, (thanks for that one Rich)
there appeared on Saturday, July 17th , an article in The Telegraph written by Matthew Moore under the headline;

EVICTING GIPSIES IS TOO COSTLY, SAYS COUNCIL

According to the article, a city council has scrapped plans to evict travellers from an ILLEGAL site in order to save money.
Seven unlawful plots remain occupied without any planning permission, after 11 were bulldozed at a cost to the taxpayer of almost one million dollars last summer. 

Here comes the part BMEWS readers will just love.  Oh boy.  Try this one stateside.

The legalisation of the site is recommended to remove the “stress of uncertainty” for the gipsies, who have a “cultural aversion” to living on authorised sites.

How ‘bout them apples BMEWS?  So there.  Well actually, here. There’s more.

The following appeared in The Daily Mail in July of 2009

This land theft by ‘travellers’ sickens me...
By Robin Page

Robin Page is angry at the way gipsies behave.

Will someone please explain why some sections of the gipsy community are called ‘travellers’?
As far as I can see - and I live on a farm in the heart of the country - the last thing they seem to do is ‘travel’.
From my experience, they appear far more interested in ‘settling’ than ‘travelling’.

For make no mistake, the illegal traveller ‘settlements’, which can now be found across Britain, have become a national scandal.
Exploiting phoney human rights laws, lame legislation - and the Government’s commitment to so-called diversity - a small minority are occupying land wherever they please.
Instead of the Government tackling the problem, the ordinary, rural taxpayers, who are so often impacted by these settlements, are left to pick up the pieces.
Before going further, I had better explain that I can empathise with the gipsy way of life, and I have known and worked with real gipsies all my life.

MORE TO THE STORY WITH PIX HERE

Posted by peiper     on 07/29/2010 at 03:57 AM   
Filed Under: • Travelers/Gypsies/Squatters •  
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   Wednesday - July 28, 2010

Summer Fun

Doing windows in the summer sun and heat is no fun. I never knew how much I could sweat until today. Holy cow. I was soaked all day long. I should get a set of swimming goggles to wear to keep my eyes clear.

And this job gave birth to another job, 2 “cottages” (3000 sq ft) back in the woods and a garden house. So I’ll be busy for a solid week at least. Fine by me, though I’d like to find half a day in there to install my new radiator. Phah, just keep a few gallon jugs of water in the car. Make hay while the sun shines, or at least get the windows clean for cash. Fix the radiator later. And this is repeat business too, something I hope I’m finally starting to see after chugging away at this for 2+ years now.

So I’ll be away from the old blog pretty much. Maybe I can get a couple posts up in the evening. Sans links, but heck, these stories are everywhere.

I hear Arizona’s immigration law was shut down by a Clinton appointed in-the-pocket judge. That was expected; this one has to go to the Supremes. I hope AZ governor Brewer simply ignores the court until her appeals bubble up through the system. Like, what are they gonna do, bust her for smoking come and arrest all the AZ cops for carrying out a federal law? It’s high time the states started flipping off DC and their minions. And We the people should too. And it could all start with her. Far out. ( I heard last week Arizona had to take down all it’s traffic cams because nobody was paying the tickets mailed out that the cams generated. Seems AZ has this law that says tickets have to be hand delivered. Tens of thousands of tickets ignored by the people. Maybe it’s starting already. Fantastic. )

Looks like the libs are trying to throw Charlie Rangel under the bus, calling for his resignation. Greasy smarmy bastard has been living large and laughing about it for far too long. I hear he’s suddenly trying to cut a deal. No friggin way. Kick him out, bust him, perp walk him on international TV, investigate him inside out, make him pony up the full millions he owes in back taxes, then send his uppity ass to jail for 20 years. Then tell the rest of them they have 60 days to get their finances in order or they’ll get the same. And watch the billions come rolling in over night. The power brokers have been above the law for too damn long. It’s time for major payback. TV news says old yellow belly, John Freakin Kerry, is going to pay his home state the $500,000 luxury taxes on his expensive toy boat, “whether they’re owed or not”. And he did it without mentioning that he’d served in Vietnam, which means he’s running scared already. So, two done, more than 500 to go. Roaches scurrying when you turn on the spotlight.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/28/2010 at 09:35 PM   
Filed Under: • News-Briefs • work and the workplace •  
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   Tuesday - July 27, 2010

Interesting Emails and bowling stuff

Here are two of my newer BMEWS fans:

That’s Harold on the left, a domesticated “Rouen” Mallard, and Skokie, a “Khaki Campbell” on the right. I hear that they are Conservative, home schooled ducks, who would rather climb than swim. Their owners go to great lengths to protect them from the leftist turkeys in the woods who try to harass them all the time.

What, you were expecting a bowling post, just because it’s Tuesday night? Ok fine. We won 2 games but lost the wood by 12. My team was utterly dead tonight, so I had to bowl my ass off so we’d win anything. I threw a 166, 188, 224 for a 578 series against that family team of spaz bowlers who is still in first place. So we narrowed the gap by 1. Whoopee-do. Sorry, I’m a bit cranky. Even fun-time summer league is hard to stay completely emotionally detached from, and when your #2 team mate throws 7 opens in a row it gets nerve wracking. Like, Dude, could you do any worse if you tried? Actually, yes he could. He threw a gutter ball on a double in game 2. Then recovered and threw 9 with the 2nd ball.

So I said to hell with it all and stopped off at the beer store on the way home. I’ve got to work in the morning so I’m limiting myself to 2. So I bought the Sam Adams Imperial Double Bock, which turns out to be nearly 10% alcohol. So my “just two” is closer to “almost four”. Tastes great; really really heavy beer. Not overly sweet either. Thick enough to cut slices off of and eat them with a fork. Half a pound of malt goes into making every bottle they say. Yikes.

Harold and Skokie, the home schooled fowl that are BMEWS fans. And yeah, that’s a real log cabin. Ain’t that great? 

Is it true that right wing ducks fly in counter-clockwise circles? They should, if you think about it.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/27/2010 at 08:49 PM   
Filed Under: • Animals • Bowling Blogging •  
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Two More Years

Busy busy today. Getting set up for tomorrow’s window job; I’m building a sort of easel to clean storm windows on. The house I’m doing has lots of them, the old flat kind in the raw aluminum mounts. What I’m going to build is a rack that attaches to the back of my 6 foot ladder, made out of a couple of L brackets, some adjustable shelf channel, and a 3 foot plastic flower planter. The shelf channel bolts to the L brackets and forms a non-intrusive shelf for the storm windows to rest on. The flower planter also bolts to the ladder, but below that. It gets a towel in it, and it’s function is to catch drips. Easy on, easy off if I make it with wing nuts, and the easel arrangement lets me wash those windows at a comfortable waist height. Trust me, cleaning storms across your knee while holding on with one hand sucks. And squatting down on the ground to do them is a back buster. Sure, I could buy a rig like this, for $300, or I could make my own for $10. Guess which one wins? You got it.

But why “Two More Years”? Because I’m gluing two posts in one here. After an insanely long download, I found out that my good old PC does not have the processing power to properly play HD movies. I have the software to do it, and I’ve got a good monitor that can handle that resolution. But this PC is from 1999 and so is it’s graphics card. I get the picture on the screen just fine, but everything plays at 1/8 speed. And since I don’t have a Steve Austin slo-mo fixation, that’s not really good. So that got me looking around, and burned up a couple hours learning about where the PC market is today. And that’s the Mac market too you know, since they both use the same chips and architecture these days. And what I found out is phenomenal.

The current cutting edge CPU is the Core i7 970X from Intel. Holy cow. This is a 6 core monster that runs at 3.2Ghz with a 12MB L3 cache and built-in overclocking that can run it as fast as 4Ghz for short time periods. Assuming your software has parallelism built into it, each core can be split in half, so that it operates as if it had 12 CPUs. Insane. Even 6 CPUs is insane. And even though this chip just came out a couple months ago, the prices are dropping already and a little-brother chip (no overclocking) is now on the market. Performance-wise, this new chip is about unfrickin believable faster than my steadfast old 733Mhz Pentium III. The bus speed is more than 10 times faster on the latest motherboards, and the memory chips they can use is 6 times faster and more than 10 times larger. Hard drives? Phah, you’re stuck in the past. Samsung has a solid state drive out now. Half a flippin’ terabyte, and it’s on a single chip. Expensive? You betcha. But your software will load almost instantly:

The new 512GB SSD makes use of a 30 nanometer-class 32 gigabit chip that the company began producing last November. The toggle-mode DDR structure together with the SATA 3.0Gbps interface generates a maximum sequential read speed of 250 Megabyte per second (MBps) and a 220MBps sequential write speed, both of which provide three-fold the performance of a typical hard disk drive. At these speeds, two standard length DVD movies (approximately 4GB each) can be stored in just a minute.
...
Samsung also provides streamlined boot time and application access with this new SSD, showing an approximately nine-fold improvement in random performance over HDDs.

So even boot time is down to only a bit slower than “hit the On button”. Unreal. And the SSD uses almost no electricity, so it’s “green”. And no moving parts. Ought to last forever, but you can always pick up a 10,000rpm 1TB super ATA II regular HD as a Raid 1 backup for about $100. You do NOT want to know what I paid for a 32Mb Seagate ST-4096 hard drive in 1989. I’m not telling, but it was a full width, double height piglet that weighed 8 pounds. Today, that puny amount of storage might fit on the head of a pin. With enough room left over to land airplanes on probably.

So I indulged myself, and spent a little time over at Dell building out one of their ultimate PCs. With liquid cooling even. And they’ll build it with ultra fast RAM chips that have more capacity than the 32 bit architecture can address. Say what? That’s right, 32 bits worth of binary is only 3.2GB. You build your PC with 8 or even 16GB of RAM. Wasteful? No, because the extra memory can be addressed by the latest generation of video cards, I’m not sure how, and they’ll use it as a buffer or something. Dell “recommends” that I build a PC with more than one video card in it. I guess so I can use 2 or 3 monitors? Not sure how just one monitor can use 2 or more video cards at once. Whatever ... my dream box at Dell topped out at nearly $8000. Horry Clap. Which is why ...

I don’t want one of these PCs. Not now. This latest chip uses the Nehalem architecture which is due to be updated to the Sandy Bridges architecture in just a few months. That will increase efficiency and use less electricity, resulting in a considerable speed improvement. But wait, that’s not all!!! One major reason that the latest Core i7 chip is so fast is because Intel shrunk things down by a third. By which I mean that the latest and greatest i7 chip is built on a 32nm (freaking NANOMETERS!!!) scale, compared to the slightly older chips built on a 45nm scale. ( I think my first PC, a Dell 80286, was built to the nearest quarter inch). Now that they can do 32nm, the next step is 22nm. That’s the Sandy Bridge thingy, which will shrink to that size around the time Obama gets voted out of office in 2012. But like everything else in computer world, as soon as 22nm architecture manufacturing stabilizes, and improved version that takes advantage of that smaller scale will hit the market. That’s the Haswell architecture, itself slated for a 16nm upgrade about a year after that. The smaller the nm numbers get, the closer the microscopic parts are inside the computer chips, and the faster things run while using even less electricity.

So when the Haswell architecture starts phasing in sometime in 2012-2013, today’s insanely fast and expensive chipsets will be old hat, and found in the bargain bin at Kmart. And that’s when I’ll strike, even though the Haswell series of computers will have FMA, “fused multiply add”, an instruction simplification which will make every non-FMA machine a canoe anchor. It’s going to be that big of an improvement, seriously. Down at the very bottom of things, almost everything a computer does is binary math, followed by assignment. Do the math and the assignment at the same time, and you can cut the instruction set in half. Which doubles the effective speed of things, except for reading back and forth to the drives. Which will all be solid state by then, and 16 times faster than the latest solid state drives (and 32 times bigger), which are 3 times faster than the best mechanical drives you can buy, which are at least twice as fast as the ones you actually bought. Probably 20 times faster than my dear old 27Gb piggy wiggy HD on this system. So a cutting edge Haswell machine ought to be at least twice as fast, if not four times as fast, as the best machines money can buy right now. We are on the real verge, finally, of all-encompassing cheap computing power. Beam me up, Scotty!

Today’s cutting edge machines are about 60 times faster than my old tank, yet this old tank does everything I want eyeblink fast and I hardly ever have to wait for it other than the boot. But I would like to watch HD movies, which I can’t even do on my perfectly fine and sturdy old CRT 32” TV. It’s a decade old too. And it works fine, especially after I had it in to the shop a few months back for a minor fix and a full physical. The cable company called up today, trying to sell me some package deal. I think they are at the point where every package they offer will include HDTV, whether I use it or not. So I’m way behind the technology curve there too, but the newest TVs are so damn expensive, and they keep getting better every 6 months. I want today’s TV but at 1/5 the price. $3000 is just too damn much to spend on a TV if all that’s on is Idol. Blech.

So please, let this old warhorse make it through the next 2 years. Let it last longer than the Obama presidency. Then I can score an insanely hot PC for less cash than I paid for this thing back in 1999, even though that cash won’t be worth 1/10th as much.

Ok, break time’s over. Have to get down to the hardware store and get the parts for the easel thingy.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/27/2010 at 01:08 PM   
Filed Under: • work and the workplace •  
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WAS MCCARTHY CORRECT?  WERE THERE REALLY REDS UNDER OUR BEDS?

A couple of nights ago I tuned into BBC Radio 4 to catch this program.  I have no idea at all if any of you will be able to listen outside the UK.
My guess is that you can.
Give this a listen. It won’t be up and running more then 5 more days I don’t think.
According to this program, while his drinking finally did him in, he apparently had it right from the get go.  He may have used whatever he had for personal political gain. ?  What’s new there if he did?  But the bottom line is, he did have it right. Not only did he have it right, reds were so well infiltrated at almost every level that we’re still paying the price of a left wing liberal agenda.

I’m aware that many of you already knew or at least suspected this to be true, no matter what the personal faults and demons that plagued the senator.
I think what surprised me about this broadcast, was that it aired at all.  American radio doesn’t have time or scheduling for this sort of thing and so I am posting it here.  The BBC does have a reputation for being somewhat liberal leaning. Maybe they are. But they also are giving airtime to a subject that clears the air for many and appears to support what very many if not all right wingers have believed all along.

McCarthy had it right.  Ann Coulter said so last year and what flack she took.  Remember?

There is no way to embed this so here’s the link directly below.  I hope you’ll listen if you can.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00t7hhf/McCarthy_There_Were_Reds_Under_the_Bed/

http://search.bbc.co.uk/search?go=toolbar&q=McCarthy%3A+There+Were+Reds+Under+the+Bed

David Aaronovitch thinks the unthinkable about the McCarthy period.

The hunt for the so called ‘Reds under the beds’ during the Cold War is generally regarded as a deeply regrettable blot on U.S history. But the release of classified documents reveals that Joseph McCarthy was right after all about the extent of Soviet infiltration into the highest reaches of the U.S government.

Thanks to the public release of top secret FBI decryptions of Soviet communications, as well as the release under the fifty year rule of FBI records and Soviet archives, we now know that the Communist spying McCarthy fought against was extensive, reaching to the highest level of the State department and the White House.

We reveal that many of McCarthy’s anticommunist investigations were in fact on target. His fears about the effect Soviet infiltration might be having on US foreign policy, particularly in the Far East were also well founded.

The decrypts also reveal that people such as Rosenberg, Alger Hiss and even Robert Oppenheimer were indeed working with the Soviets. We explore why much of this information, available for years to the FBI, was not made public. We also examine how its suppression prevented the prosecution of suspects.

Finally, we explore the extent to which Joseph McCarthy, with his unsavoury methods and smear tactics, could have done himself a disservice, resulting in his name being forever synonymous with paranoia and the ruthless suppression of free speech.

Hearing from former FBI, CIA and KGB operatives as well as formerly blacklisted writers, David Aaronovitch, himself from a family of communists tells the untold story of Soviet influence and espionage in the United States.

Producer: Kati Whitaker
A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.
Broadcast

Latest episode on BBC iPlayer

McCarthy: There Were Reds Under the Bed

David Aaronovitch challenges popular conceptions about the McCarthy period.
BBC Radio 4, broadcast on 25 Jul 2010

Posted by peiper     on 07/27/2010 at 07:24 AM   
Filed Under: • Commies •  
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   Monday - July 26, 2010

Not the first time and given muzzie attitudes, won’t be the last. Bus bars guide dog. Again.

Caught yet another not new outrage by ppl of the ROP.

It has to be said that not ALL of them are this stupid and not all of them agree with this sort of thing. Lets be fair about that.  However, it just seems that there’s enough of these folks to make a misery for the majority of those who they move in on.  Sort of like the Gypos and Travelers. A cancer. And it grows and spreads it’s disease, unchecked, because even many cons spelled with a small ‘c’, have become PC with caps. And no matter what party is in office, the left rules and spreads it’s obnoxious poison of diversity and multi culture.

Muslim bus drivers refuse to let guide dogs on board
Blind passengers are being ordered off buses or refused taxi rides because Muslim drivers or passengers object to their ‘unclean’ guide dogs.

One pensioner, a cancer sufferer, told how had twice been confronted by drivers and asked to get off the bus because of his guide dog, and had also faced hostility at a hospital and in a supermarket over the animal.

The problem to carry guide dogs on religious grounds has become so widespread that the matter was raised in the House of Lords last week, prompting transport minister Norman Baker to warn that a religious objection was not a reason to eject a passenger with a well-behaved guide dog.

While drivers can use their discretion to refuse to carry non-disabled passengers with dogs, they are compelled to accept guide dogs under disability discrimination law.

Yesterday both the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and the National Federation of the Blind confirmed the problem was common, and, according to the latter organisation was ‘getting worse’.

The tension stems from a strand of Islamic teaching which warns against contact with dogs because the animal’s saliva was considered to be impure, the Muslim Council of Britain said.

It urged Muslims to show tolerance and common sense over the issue.

‘We need to be flexible on this,’ a spokesman said.  ‘Muslim drivers should have no hesitation in allowing guide dogs into their bus or car.

‘If a dog does lick you, it’s not the end of the world. Just go home and wash yourself.’

George Herridge, 73, a retired hospital maintenance manager, told the Daily Mail he was ‘stunned’ to be twice asked by bus drivers to leave their vehicles because of his guide dog Andy, a black Labrador.

Mr Herridge, who lives with wife Janet, 69, in Tilehurst, Reading, said that on the first occasion two years ago, he got off at the request of a Muslim driver because some Muslim children on board were ‘screaming’ because of the dog.

He found himself in a similar scenario in May last year, when a Muslim woman and her children became ‘hysterical’. Mr Herridge this time refused the driver’s request to alight. 

He complained to the bus company which launched an investigation. It later informed him the matter had been dealt with ‘internally’.

Jill Allen-King, spokesman for the NFB, said she had been repeatedly left on the kerb by Muslim taxi drivers who refused to take her dog.

One cab driver told her he would have to ‘go home now and wash myself’ when she tried to enter his car with her dog.

Mr Baker yesterday warned bus and cab companies that, while there were within their rights to ask a passenger to leave if the dog was causing a nuisance, it was ‘much more questionable to be asked to remove a dog for religious reasons’.

He added: ‘One person’s freedom is someone else’s restriction.’

In 2006, Muslim minicab driver Abdul Rasheed Majekodumni was fined £200 and ordered to pay £1,200 costs by magistrates in Marylebone, central London, after being prosecuted for failing to comply with the Disability Discrimination Act when he refused to take a blind passenger because her guide dog was ‘unclean’.

MORE

Posted by peiper     on 07/26/2010 at 11:06 AM   
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OK so ….. question for today, there will be a test. How many Brits does it take to change a bulb?

I need to ask my doc for meds that might keep me asleep for longer.  Maybe just sleep through all the PC,H&S lunacy that abounds on both sides of the water.
Nah, never work.  I’m bound to wake up with something else just as silly.  Like those damn chairs without wheels I wrote about Saturday.  Funny thing with all the other stupid stuff, like keeping white middle class males out of some govt.posts (I’ll get to that later) I keep remembering those wheeless chairs.

So here .... 

Workmen have refused to change broken street lamps because they are too close to the wires above .  See the photos at the link below.

Three years and £8,000: What it takes for a council to change TWO LIGHT BULBS

By Daily Mail Reporter

A church hall and picturesque village green were plunged into darkness when two light bulbs stopped working in 2007.

Now, three years later, the bulbs have yet to be repaired, elderly residents fear to go out in the dark - and the council is about to spend £8,000 moving the street lamps on the grounds of health and safety.

Parish councillors and locals in picturesque Glemsford, near Sudbury, have been fighting to get the lights repaired but workers from Suffolk County Council said they were unable to fix them due to a ‘G39’ health and safety issue.

The council claims their proximity to power lines and trees make it too dangerous to use a ladder to replace the bulbs as suggested by residents.

And they have now told the parish council that they will need to be moved and new lights rewired at a safer location which comes at a total cost of £8,000.

Frustrated councillors are being forced to pay for the work - more than ten per cent of their annual £70,000 budget.

Angry residents have slammed the county council for refusing to fix the lights on safety grounds, leaving older members of the community in danger.

Len Young, 76, Benburgh district councillor for Glemsford and a retired court worker, said the council had taken health and safety too far and were intent on wasting money.

‘It’s another case of council jobsworths,’ he said. ‘Someone could have just got up there on a ladder three years ago and changed a bulb but of course it’s never that simple.

‘Apparently they have to divert the power source 40ft away to a new light but I can’t understand it when they already have a power source going to the light that is there.

‘£8,000 is a lot of money for a small village and it could have gone towards something positive to benefit the many clubs and societies we have.’

the rest with pix are here. have fun.

Posted by peiper     on 07/26/2010 at 08:29 AM   
Filed Under: • Humor • Stoopid-People • UK •  
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Not a bad way to start the blog day but I’ll get worse as day goes on no doubt. Good for a laff tho.

I found this in the morning paper and thought it might be new. But the story has been around awhile.  Maybe the new part is that this time, it’s written in stone.
Try and steal this rock.  I suppose someone will at some point.
Anyway .... it’s light hearted and as good a way to start the day as any, especially since anything else I might post today will be gloomy. That’s cos this aside, that’s almost all there is.  Or if not gloomy then down right anger inducing. Oh boy. There’s plenty of that.  Maybe I’ll just go back to bed and start the day over again.

Shitterton and a sign of the times
Villagers living in Dorset hamlet of Shitterton refuse to be beaten by thieves with lavatory humour.


By Stephen Adams

The residents of Shitterton have grown used to being the butt of jokes. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t proud of their pretty hamlet in the Dorset countryside.

So it was a source of great dismay that the signpost announcing its name was repeatedly stolen by souvenir hunters with a fondness for lavatory humour.

So bad was the problem that, three years ago, the fed-up district council stopped replacing the sign, meaning that drivers passing through the hamlet could be unaware that they were ever in Shitterton at all.

Now, in a move that could exemplify David Cameron’s Big Society, a group of public-spirited Shittertonians has decided to take matters into their own hands. They each chipped in £20 to purchase a lump of Purbeck Stone weighing more than a ton and had it engraved with the hamlet’s “interesting” name to act as a proud, and permanent, sign.

Ian Ventham, 62, chairman of the parish council, who lives at Shitterton Farmhouse with his wife Diana, 61, said: “We have lived here for the last 20 years and during that time the sign has been nicked at least three times. We think it was kids who would like to have it stuck on the wall in a den somewhere because it’s quite an interesting sign.

“I don’t think it was malicious, they just did it for fun, but it was exasperating for us. We would get a nice new shiny sign from the council and five minutes later, it was gone.”

Not only was the lack of a sign annoying, he said, but “it could make life confusing for delivery drivers”. “It was my wife’s idea to carve it out of stone,” he said. “We thought, ‘Let’s put in a ton and a half of stone and see them try and take that away in the back of a Ford Fiesta’.”

Mr Ventham, a retired RNLI director, wrote to neighbours asking them to donate £20 towards the cost of the immovable sign. Of 50 households, well over half contributed. After being told of the plan, Purbeck district council agreed to give £70 towards the cost.

Mr Ventham said he felt the project was a good example of community empowerment as proposed by the Prime Minister in his Big Society.
“I am not sure if he is expressly thinking about Shitterton signposts, but I think he is talking about people getting off their backsides and doing things, rather than expecting them to be done for you,” he added. Not all are happy that the name is now set in stone, however. A few in the hamlet, on the outskirts of Bere Regis, prefer the more genteel Sitterton.

Mr Ventham said: “In Victorian times prudes decided to call it Sitterton, so even today in Shitterton we have Sitterton Close and Sitterton House. The rest of us prefer the rather more earthy Shitterton.”

SOURCE

AND MORE HERE

Posted by peiper     on 07/26/2010 at 08:22 AM   
Filed Under: • Humor • UK •  
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   Sunday - July 25, 2010

Bwhahaha!

Alright. Let’s set the stage. Here’s the song:

Okay. We’ve set the scene. Now, here’s the fun part:

I got a big kick out of this. Me and my sisters used to do this sort of thing. We usually used the Archies or Josie and the Pussycats, (yeah, I’m dating myself) but we all were taking guitar, and I was doing drums. The only thing missing was the Internets.

Been there. Done that. Showed my sisters, who are embarrassed.

Posted by Christopher     on 07/25/2010 at 06:25 PM   
Filed Under: • Fun-Stuff • Humor • Music •  
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WHEN THINGS GO HORRIBLY WRONG WITH NATIONAL HEALTH … THIS IS ONE RESULT.

I won’t make any personal comments on this story but saw it in this mornings paper and wanted to bring it to the attention of folks back home.
It is troubling, or will be for many I would imagine.

Axe falls on NHS services
NHS bosses have drawn up secret plans for sweeping cuts to services, with restrictions on the most basic treatments for the sick and injured.

By Laura Donnelly, Health Correspondent

Some of the most common operations — including hip replacements and cataract surgery — will be rationed as part of attempts to save billions of pounds, despite government promises that front-line services would be protected.
Patients’ groups have described the measures as “astonishingly brutal”.

* Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends.

* The closure of nursing homes for the elderly.

The rest of this article is HERE

Posted by peiper     on 07/25/2010 at 02:18 AM   
Filed Under: • Health-Medicine • Scary Stuff •  
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