Oh, YEEEEAH!

You know, as much as I bitch about Puerto Rico (and let's be blunt, there's plenty to bitch about. Third-world healthcare, crap all over the streets, assholes on every road) there are still advantages to living down here. They're few and far between, but they are there. This is one of them. It's what, March third? You all enjoying your snow?

Yeah. I bet you are.



Just so you all know, that's me, today, with a cigar and a beer, at the beach.

Uh huh. Yep. Yessir.

Ok, yeah, that's not the best shirt for me to be wearing. It looks like I'm wearing a tent. Fine, granted. But I'm at THE BEACH, BEEYACHES! So I don't care how I look, because five minutes after this picture was taken I had the shirt off and I was in the water! HA!

Alright, so I'm still not thrilled to be here, and once summer comes I'll once again be sweating my ass off. But I'm going to enjoy the benefits of living here as much as I can.

Just so ya know

When I spoke of the beach in the post below, this is what I meant:


Sand, sun, palm trees and beer.

Ahhhhh, the beach.

It's a beautiful day

What shall I do today? Mow the lawn? Well, it does need to be mowed.

Trim and edge the bushes? That needs to happen as well.

Change the oil on my truck? It's about 100 miles overdue, needs some TLC.

Make sausage? We've got the pork sitting in the fridge, waiting for us to chop it up and spice it.

Clean the house? Lord knows it needs it.

Maybe I'll just pick two of the things from the list above and try to get them done. That might work.

But you know what? It's a sunny day. I'm in Puerto Rico. So fuck it, I'm getting some beer and going to the beach. I'll see you all later.

John McCain

Should be toast right about now.

Republican presidential contender John McCain, a staunch backer of the Iraq war
but critic of how President Bush has waged it, said U.S. lives had been "wasted"
in the four-year-old conflict. Democrats demand the Arizona senator apologize
for the comment as Sen. Barack Obama did when the Democratic White House hopeful recently made the same observation.

"Americans are very frustrated, and they have every right to be," McCain said Wednesday on CBS' "Late Show With David Letterman." "We've wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives."

Look, I was never going to vote for McCain to begin with. And I can give you my reason in two words: McCain-Feingold. After that gutting of the 1st Amendment, there was no way I was going to vote him into office any higher than "Dog Catcher".

But this crap just confirmed any suspicions I had about him. They guy is a political opportunist. He's not a "maverick", he's just another wet-fingered politician trying to see what votes he can buy.

So, Senator McCain, here's my response to your presidential campaign: Piss Off.

OOO! OOO! OOOOOO!

I WANT ONE!

The London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reports that Israel will supply the U.S. Marines in Iraq with specially equipped armored “Golan” vehicles which are specifically suited for urban warfare and can sustain attacks by RPGs and road mines.

Especially when the Humvees that the US military is using were never intended for urban combat. Hell, they really weren't intended for combat at all, but rather for the many different jobs that the military does in and around a combat zone. So they were designed to take a hit or two, but not the up-close and nasty stuff they're dealing with now.

So while the Democrats American Communist Party whines and seeths about up-armored Humvees (which they know nothing about and only use for political purposes, since the Democrats American Communist Party doesn't care about the military and would happily bleed every soldier dry if they could use the soldier's blood to get elected) what the military truly needs is a new vehicle designed for urban combat. THAT would save more lives than any new armor.

Of course, that would cost money, and the Democrat American Communist Party's faux concern for the troops only goes so far, and certainly doesn't extend to actually, yannow, SUPPORTING the troops or any real action that would save lives.

Found at SondraK's place.

Reader AC sent me this link

To this petition.

The attempt to renew and augment the expired federal "assault weapons ban", HR
1022, will not be tolerated.

Simple, direct, and to the point. Phil from Random Nuclear Strikes also wants to remind you to write your congresscritter pronto.

We need to send a very simple message. You do NOT mess with the 2nd Amendment. It really is that simple.

This guy is unbelievable

So Dave we're on the new Blogger

Like it or not.

The Mind Boggles

Let me see if I can wrap my brain around this - are you telling me that "Global Warming" screechmongers who advocate radical lifestyle changes to save the globe for "THE CHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIILREN!" are nothing more than rank hypocrites who lie incessantly and don't practice what they preach?

I'm stunned! STUNNED, I tell you! Shocked, even!

UPDATE: When realities collide! Check out this piece by some guy named Rob Sullivan:

The 4,000-square-foot house is a model of environmental rectitude.

Geothermal heat pumps located in a central closet circulate water through pipes buried 300 feet deep in the ground where the temperature is a constant 67 degrees; the water heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer. Systems such as the one in this "eco-friendly" dwelling use about 25% of the electricity that traditional heating and cooling systems utilize.

A 25,000-gallon underground cistern collects rainwater gathered from roof runs; wastewater from sinks, toilets and showers goes into underground purifying tanks and is also funneled into the cistern. The water from the cistern is used to irrigate the landscaping surrounding the four-bedroom home. Plants and flowers native to the high prairie area blend the structure into the surrounding ecosystem.

No, this is not the home of some eccentrically wealthy eco-freak trying to shame his fellow citizens into following the pristineness of his self-righteous example. And no, it is not the wilderness retreat of the Sierra Club or the Natural Resources Defense Council, a haven where tree-huggers plot political strategy.

This is President George W. Bush's "Texas White House" outside the small town of Crawford.

Sullivan then digs deep to find things to whip the President with, and falls victim to the most common problem you can find with Leftists - the kool-aid guzzling doesn't help them do research of think on their own, they can only regurgitate DNC talking points.

Yes, the same George W. who believes arsenic and drinking water might not be such a bad combo, the same man who reneged on his campaign promise to lower carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, the same man who is doing everything in his power to fling open the Alaskan Natural Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

Memo to Sullivan: Arsenic occurs naturally. I know that getting your memes straight from the Democrats American Communist Party is handy if you're in a rush, but perhaps you may want to back up and rethink your position a bit.

What George W. Bush did was veto legislation that would have made drinking water standards so damn stringent that the naturally occuring arsenic, which in no way reached dangerous levels, would have forced rural communities to build million-dollar water treament plants that they flat out couldn't afford. I know that in the simplistic, empty-headed, "Bush-bad-Clinton-good" world that most Leftists live in, thinking really isn't required, but us adults would appreciate it if you would give it a try once in a while.

Second - Air Pollution Levels are better under Bush than they were under Clinton. Look it up. I won't give Bush any credit for this, however, because the changes that occurred did so due to market forces. Blaming either president for the condition of the air when they were in office would be moronic at this point. But if you're going to make political points about the President's control over air quality, having facts on your side might just be a good place to start. Too bad you failed on that.

Third - the ANWR argument has been hashed out, re-hashed, flogged, beaten, killed, then flogged some more. You don't want to hear about the flourishing herds of Caribou near the Alaskan Pipeline. You don't want to actually LOOK AT THE PLACE THEY WANT TO DRILL AT, you don't want to hear about the technology that's involved. No, you eco-freaks just want to halt all human expansion, which might not be a bad thing if you assholes weren't so flat out hypcritical about it. Here's a clue - the area they want to drill in is, to put it lightly, an arctic swamp, filled with mud, crap, and biting insects. And it's one tiny little section that they want to poke around in. Yet the Leftists howl like Bush wants to clearcut the entire refuge and enslave the caribou to transport all the little brown children that Cheney enslaved when Haliburton went into Iraq. It's idiocy. And by the way, every day we DON'T drill in ANWR is another day we pay money to theocrats who want to kill us. Thanks, Liberals!

How does the President reconcile an eco-friendly abode for his own family with his persistent stand against anything that smacks of an environmentally friendly agenda for the nation as a whole? The answer to that perplexing question is a real mystery.

Maybe because since he actually practices ecologically friendly methods, he knows what works, as opposed to the Marxist pipedreams of Watermelon eco-freaks from the Left?

Perhaps sound ecological practices are only for those who can afford them: as a self-proclaimed strict constructionist of the U.S. Constitution, Bush must be aware that clean air and clean water are not guaranteed in that glorious document. Perhaps in Bush's Brave New Corporate World, clean natural resources are merely commodities in a free-market economy: if you can pay for them, fine; if not, tough. The rest of us will just have to put up with more toxic dumps and more public lands being turned over to logging, mining and oil companies.

There's so much wrong in one paragraph that I can't even think about where to begin. This Sullivan character didn't just drink the kool-aid, he had it put into an enema bag and shot up his ass until the pure flow of poisonous bullshit reached his brain and stunned it into a permanent coma. At least, that's the only explination I can give for why somebody would write such a pathetically wretched piece of propaganda-like garbage such as this. I suppose this Sullivan would be just fine with other countries stripmining their resources so long as he doesn't have to look at it and he still gets all the things that he wants. I'll bet this arrogant bastard drives a car (EVIL OIL CONSUMER!), reads magazines and newspapers (EVIL KILLER OF INNOCENT TREES!) and gets his water from a faucet somewhere (EVIL METAL USER! MINE ENABLER!)

Again, these people are Watermelons. Oh, they're green on the outside, but the inside is pure red, folks. Marxism at it's best. The Ecological movement is less about the ecology and damn near all about control - the control these supposedly enlightened people want to have over our lives.

If someone wants to fisk the entire piece for me, I'll post it. As it is, I've got other things to do, and I'm late in getting them done.

Another Assault on Christianity

Yay. Supposedly, Hollywierd director James Cameron says "WE FOUND THE TOMB OF JESUS!" Cause see, if Jesus was buried, then he couldn't have been resurrected, and all us godbags and yokels have been wasting our lives. Us hayseeds and small minded hillbillies.

Whatever. There are so many problems with this farce right on it's face that I have no interest whatsoever in watching it or hearing about it. So as to deal with this as objectively as possible, I'll even show how the crockumentary is wrong without invoking any religious theories. Of course, I doubt that will satisfy the anti-religionists who seek to destroy any and all mention of God, Christ, Jesus, or redemption in America, but I'll do it anyway.

First, history records that after the crucifixion of Jesus, Mary left Jerusalem and ended her days somewhere else. It's simple logic that they would not carry Mary's body hundreds of miles back to Jerusalem to put it in a tomb. She wasn't rich. She wasn't a high government official or priest. She was the wife of a carpenter. She died away from Jerusalem, and would have been buried close to where she died.

That's problem number one.

Joseph would not have been buried in Jerusalem either. He was from Nazareth, and he was a carpenter. Burying Joseph in an tomb in Jerusalem makes as much sense as Farmer Smith from Kansas being taken to New York City and buried. Second in this is that after Jesus reached adulthood, almost all mention of Joseph ends. Only Mary and an apostle were recorded as being present during the crucifixion. It's quite possible that Joseph was an older man, and died before the period of Jesus' life that attracted so much attention, and thus would have not accompanied either Jesus or Mary to Jerusalem. In any case, the chances of Joseph being buried in Jerusalem are slim to none.

That's problem number two.

During the early days of the Catholic Church, Catholics were hunted down and persecuted all over the Roman Empire. They were beaten, tortured, fed to lions in the coliseum, and hounded for over three centuries. Early churches were known to hold Mass in crypts in order to avoid being detected and arrested. Christianity at that time was in essence outlawed, and the Romans did everything they could to banish the religion from existance.

Knowing that, and also knowing that the Romans controlled that area of the Middle East, if Jesus was buried in plain sight with his family, why didn't the Romans unearth him and say "See? Your religion is founded on falsehoods"? As Captain Ed states:

Jesus was a well-known agitator whose crucifixion creates a cult following, in the eyes of the Romans and the leading Jews of the time. The basis of that cult formed around the notion that Jesus rose from the dead. If the Romans knew where his body was buried, why then did they not produce it as proof of his immutable death? In order to be placed in an ossuary, he would have to lie in the tomb for a year, decomposing to skeletal remains. During that time, the Romans could easily have produced the body -- or the cult followers could have stolen it and buried it elsewhere to prevent it.

That's problem number three.

And last but not least, when Cameron and his crew are unearthing caskets and exclaiming "LOOK! LOOK! IT SAYS 'JESUS' ON IT! AND LOOK! THAT SAYS 'MARY'!" I want you to keep one thing in mind. The name we use today, "Jesus", is not the real name that Jesus was known by. The closest approximation would be "Jeshua", or "Joshua" in modern lingo. The same with Mary and Joseph. Those names were translated from Aramaic, to Greek, to Latin, to German, to English, and they've changed a little bit each time. So when someone pulls out a box labeled "Jesus" and says that it's the coffin of Jesus, see right there, it's got his name on it and everything, the only response I have is outright laughter.

That's problem number four.

So, four major points of contention, without using religious dogma as points of arguments. If you still think that this crockumentary holds water, then I submit that your believe that Christianity is false is in fact your own personal religious belief, and requires as much faith, if not more, than my own religious beliefs.

If someone with more knowledge of Catholic history would like to correct any points I've made regarding church history (Perhaps the Anchoress or Mr. Poretto?) either leave a comment or email me.

I tried to post yesterday

And I kept getting a wierd error message. Not even a 404 type thing.

Ah well. Mebbee it's the intartube thingy down here in the tropics.

Anyways, the TV is now empty. As I've mentioned before, we got tired of paying money every month when they removed the channels that I watch, run infomercials all morning, and reruns every night.

I'm paying good money for that crap? I don't THEENK so, Lucy! So we are now a cable-less household. And I'm not signing up for jack down here.

Ain't gonna do it. I'll spend the money on a higher speed internet connection.

The Left's version of "Free Speech"

Doesn't include any speech that they disagree with. In fine Leftist tradition, they moonbats and screeching retards are doing their best to ensure that stories and posts from Little Green Footballs do not make the front page at Digg. LGF has a link up to something called "Digg Spy", where you can watch in real time as the Leftoid minions franticly push the "bury" button as often as possible on stories they don't like. Sometimes it's outright funny. A news story labeled as "spam"? Yeah, right.

I've been looking at it for about three minutes. In that time, I've seen mass burying of stories from LGF, Michelle Malkin, some website called "foehammer", and now www.debbieschlussel.com. They seem to go searching for a specific site, then bury as many stories from that site as they can, then move to the next site and repeat the process.

It's amazing what you can do with your day when you're nothing but a brainless Leftist (redundancy alert) who doesn't have a job (redundancy alert again).

Oscars

So, I heard that algore won an Oscar last night for his Crockumentary about "Global Warming".

And yes, I'm putting scare quotes around "Global Warming" from now on. Man made global warming is pure horseshit. Come talk to me when they're growing grapes in Greenland, as they were able to do when Eric the Red first landed there. THEN we'll talk. Until then, all "Global Warming" proponents will be laught and pointed at.

Anyways, where was I? Oh yeah. algore and his Oscar. I didn't watch the show last night, and I'm glad that I didn't. They've been nothing but pure partisan politics for years, as highlighted by The Fat Fuck from Flint getting an Oscar for HIS Crockumentary years ago, the various hardware tooled out to movies who's plot sucked, ticket recipts bombed, but they followed the proper political thought. It's all crap. It's a group of idiots masturbating furiously while damn near breaking their arms patting themselves on the back for being so "progressive". One big narcissistic orgy of mindless groupthink by people who haven't had one serious thought in the past forty years.

I don't go out to movies very much. But one thing that has held true for a while is that if a movie wins an Oscar, there's a 99% chance that I'll avoid it like the plague. The one exception in recent years was "Lord of the Rings". Other than that? Feh. The less money I fork over to the babbling throng of brainless fuckwits, the better.

Piss on Hollywood. The city, the business, and most of the people who live there.

Hash House Harriers

Went to a party on Saturday. Kind of a "Gathering of Gringos" thing, although there were plenty of Puerto Ricans there as well.

Got a loose invitation to this club. It's either a running club with a drinking problem, or a drinking club with a running problem, however you want to put it.

I'm so there!

Add-on to the Tie-in

OK, so Friday I spoke about my high school experience. And after reading it a few times over, I realized that people could take the post as if I was bragging about what I did in high school. Kinda like, "Oh yeah Dave, you thought you were a badass, didn't you?"

That's not the point I was trying to make. Let me expound a bit in this post, since the other post is quite long enough for my taste.

As I explained, I learned most of my violent behavior as a defense mechanism in high school. Kick enough ass, and people leave you alone. The problem with that is once you graduate and move into the real world, the people you meet are nothing like the idiots, assholes and predators in high school. Once I graduated, I went out into the world and found myself at a severe disadvantage to everyone else. While most people had eventually learned to deal with difficulty or a problem by acting logically, I had learned to deal with any problem with violence. And it took me YEARS to unlearn the lessons I had picked up. For years, I was damn near un-promotable. Who wants to promote a raving lunatic with a violence fetish? My work would be fine. I could handle responsibility. What I could not do at that time was learn to respond to hostility with anything other than overwhelming violence. When someone calls you a dirty name, you do NOT whip out the biggest gun you have and blow them to Kingdom Come. But that's what I was doing, metaphorically speaking.

And I'm still trying to unlearn those lessons, well over a decade since I left that particular jungle. It's taken years and the patience of God only knows how many people to bring me to the point where I don't jump up and pound someone for looking at me wrong. It's hurt my professional life in the past. It's hurt my personal life. And it's something that I struggle with to this very day. I thank God for the day that my wife decided she could put up with my bullshit, because she's the most calming influence in my life, and for some reason she was silly enough to say "I Do". But even she will tell you that I have a horrendous temper, and there has been plenty of times where she's looked at me with exasperation because I've gone off half-cocked and done something stupid.

I often think to myself what my life would have been like if I hadn't been forced into that school. My first years were in a Catholic school, and I excelled. But once I got into a public school after my father retired from the military, things just went downhill. It was hell. Here's something I've told my folks that they just don't get:

I hated school. I flat out hated it. I would never go back. I didn't go back for any reunions. I probably never will, unless it's to go laugh at the people who made my life a living hell for four years. And next to the day I got married, the happiest day in my life was when I graduated and knew that I would never be forced into that building against my will EVER AGAIN.

I understand the reasoning of students who went on a shooting spree at Columbine. Is that a horrible thing to say? Perhaps. But I understand why they did what they did, even while I cannot excuse it. At some point, humans will break. They can only deal with so much. So much harassment, so much being picked on, so much being beaten. In the real world, should someone try to beat you down, you have several options. You have no real options in high school, where moral equivalency and the rot of the NEA have made it impossible to deal with abusers and predators without being punished yourself. In a workplace, you can say "I quit!". In public, you can walk away. But you can't run from someone when they know where you have to be and when you have to be there. It's like tossing a snake into a cage of mice and telling the mice "Now, find a way to deal with the snake!"

It will not work.

It doesn't work. It's failing. It's failing our students, it's failing the parents to mistakenly believe that public school is doing some good, and it's failing the public at large by turning out people who cannot deal with the real world once they graduate. You cannot learn when you have to be concerned about protecting yourself for twelve hours. When it's fight or flight, you don't have time to deal with algebra, OK?

I consider my high school experience to be a detriment to my life, not a boon. And I daresay that many people will agree with me. I applaud the du Toit's for homeschooling their kids, because that is what will give those kids the best chance at making a decent life for themselves. And I honestly wish that my parents had done the same thing.