Blah

You ever have one of those days where you're attitude is just "Meh. Whatever. Fuck it."

Yeah. I'm having one of those days.

I'm pretty sure

That when Monty Python made "Life of Bryan", they weren't out to completely stereotype the liberal mindset. But after watching the movie, the first have just about damn near pins the Leftists to a tee. Especially the scene where the crown is ascribing Bryan any miraculous motive they can think of.

I think I know where Al Gore got his ideas from. And the eco-freaks followed the script perfectly.

OK, all you muzzle loader shooters

Help out a newbie here.

I took the new boomstick out for a test run today. I've got maxiball bullets. Tried to load them with a patch, but it wouldn't go down. It was so tight that the starter was leaving an imprint on the top of the bullet as I tried to get it to go down, and the cotton was actually getting cut in a few places at the bottom of the bullet. They went in without a patch, but I had no accuracy, which I think is because I don't have the seal that a patch is supposed to give. The patches I've got are the pre-lubed cotton, .005 inch thick. I'm using .50 cal maxiball lead cast bullets. This is a brand new gun, the barrel is fine, and right now I'm assuming that any and all problems with accuracy are caused by operator headspace and timing.

Any ideas?

Going shopping today

There's a few things I need to pick up for my muzzle loader, and there's a miter saw at Sears that's calling my name.

Toodles!

So....

How was your New Year's Eve? Safe, I hope. The Ragin' Mrs. and I went over to a friend's house, and except for one quick jaunt to pick up chips and salsa, nobody left the house. Toasted at midnight, crashed into the bed provided, and woke up this morning with everything I had last night.

Not too bad, all in all.

On the violence in Israel

And yes, I'm calling the Gaza Strip Israel, because Israel owned it, built it up, and then gave it to that sickening group of terrorist, pig-fucking, sub-human scum in an attempt to live in peace.

See where that got them? Did anyone really remember that? Israel had greenhouses growing food in Gaza. The "Palestinians" turned those greenhouses into weapons smuggling centers.

As Captain Ed puts it, while answering Glenn(s) The Puppetmaster Greenwald:

That construct suffers from one problem — the lack of recognition of Israeli actions in the past. Israel has tried military action, occupation, withdrawal, a peace plan (Oslo), another peace plan (Wye River), yet another peace plan (Annapolis), blockade, ending the blockade, and a series of so-called “truces” that allowed the Palestinians to play a triangle offense and provoke Israel into action. What do all of these actions have in common? None of them worked.

Israel had tried to have peace. It didn't work. Peace is only possible when both sides want peace. Israel has shown through their words and their actions that they want peace. The palestinians have show through their words and their actions that they only want to kill Jewish civilians.

Well, they got their wish. They kept killing Jewish civilians. And now Israel is responding to protect itself. If anyone has a problem with that, I suggest they go live in Sderot, where even the bus stops have been turned into bomb shelters due to the constant rocket attacks by Hamas and Hezbullah. See how much they like it.

On houses

Found this post at Sippican Cottage via BabyTrollBlog, and I have to say I agree with this guy 100%.

Everyone looks around and sees houses like this. They pass unremarked now. After a while, if it doesn't look like this, people are going to think a house looks strange. And it's wrong, wrong, wrong. The situations where a house nailed on the ass end of a garage are appropriate are so few there's no use talking about them. Never do this.

There's Postmodern evil afoot here. Everything is boiled down to a pastiche, and you put all these disconnected totems into a blender and put the mixed up parts on a concrete rectangle. It's making us all crazy in a very subtle but profound way.

There has been a concerted effort to dismantle all standards of right and wrong and beauty and truth. If ever truthiness was put into sticks and bricks, this house is it. When you rebel against standard things, sooner or later you run out of ways to be original, and all that is left is to do the exact opposite of good. It's the only permutation of new that's left to you after a while. The American house is becoming that perfect distillation of bad ideas. Everything exactly at cross-purposes with its stated purpose.

When the Ragin' Mrs. and I were house hunting, we found several houses in the $100k price range that just made us shake our heads. You can put all kinds of fancy add-ons to a bad house, and it's still a bad house. A house has to flow. We were looking at one house for $90k where every bedroom and the master bath were up a steep set of stairs that were a pain in the ass to climb. There were other houses where rooms seem to have been added on just so that the owner could say "Look, I've got a four bedroom house!" Yes, an extra bathroom is nice, but if it's tucked into a corner that you have to crawl through a maze to get through, then people won't use it. And the garage should NEVER, EVER be the focal point of the house.

Period.

Modern houses are ugly things. The cookie-cutter syndrome has taken over in suburbia, and it makes the Ragin' Mrs. and I vomit to see these legions of soul-less houses rise up everywhere we go. There are styles of American houses that have names - Saltbox. Victorian. Arts and Craft. Back when real craftsmen build real houses out of real wood, not pressboard walls covered in tarpaper and plastic siding. What would the modern home of today be called 100 years from now?

Cardboards? Generics? Blahs? Fall-aparts? Will the homes built today even last 100 years?

Fight back! Get soul back into the house you live in. You'll be happier for it.

Supervolcano?

So Yellowstone Park is experiencing earthquakes. And everyone who's ever heard about it is thinking about the Supervolcano.

Well, if it blows it blows, and that'll be the end of that, won't it? I'm not going to worry about something I have absolutely no control over. Besides, maybe I'll live long enough to see the hippies in the liberal enclaves killing each other over a can of beans.

There's a silver lining in every cloud.

Blog surfing

OK, so Billy Beck got into a tiff with Og over at Roberta X's place, about political ideas such as anarchy, and I've mostly stayed on the sidelines watching people gabber at each other while I just read and observed and thought about what everyone had to say. But there was one comment that just made me shake my head enough to post about on this thread at Roberta's place. The comment is almost at the end, if you feel like checking it out yourself:

Mr. Nikoley would seem to fall into that category."

"Seem."

One immediate detectable difference between us is that I have no idea whether I would "wish [you] would stop claiming to be on [my] side."

Same goes for Roberta.

For one, I am an individualist, but that's a philosophical (and biological) distinction for another day, perhaps.

In any case, as I reserve judgment on such matters until such time as I've attained certainty in accordance with my own values, meaning: not the "side's" values -- whatever they are (feel free to tell me, though) -- I won't say one way or another what may or may not "seem" to me to speculatively be.

I think I learned this lesson back in around '91, in snail-mail correspondence with old friends, a year or so after concluding that rational anarchism was the only possible political position fully consistent with individualism, a principal grounded both in evolutionary biology and the rational nature of man.

Look, all of these individualists claiming to be for rational anarchy have managed to read probably a whole lot more philosophy than I have, and sat in their houses thinking and thinking and thinking until they figure that they've come up with the greatest political philosophy since man ever banged two rocks together. "Rational Anarchy"! Yay! And it totally and completely goes off the road from there.

But not in a good way.

I don't have a whole bunch of time this morning, but I can at least say this - The moment you bet your life that your fellow man will be civilized, you're going to lose your life. In anarchy, only the Strong rule. I didn't say the Just, or the Decent, only the Strong. "The rational nature of man"? Since when? SOME men are rational. Some men have so failed to rise above animal status that they don't deserve to be called human. I have dealt with both in my lifetime. And while I'm one of the most anti-government people you'll meet, I was still damned glad that there was a government around to drag the animal off to jail.

Humanity is a broad-ranging species. You've got your good ones, but you've also got the animals on two legs. Failing to take that into consideration only leads to failure. If you don't have a control for the bottom 10%, then the top 10% won't amount to a hill of beans.

And as for the proponents of Rational Anarchy, one of them has managed to get himself banned from a blog that lets just about anyone comment, and the others have managed to piss off quite a few people all on their own. If these are the people trying to convince others to give Rational Anarchy a try, they're doing a piss poor job.

9 inch nails is torture

Michael Laprarie at Wizbang reports Music no longer hath charm

"Earlier this month, Reprieve and the U.K. Musicians Union launched Zero dB, a "silent protest" over the use of music in interrogations. According to Reprieve, many of its clients have been subjected to hours of music played at deafening volume -- sometime for days or even weeks on end. And the BBC has reported on a particularly insidious practice: using the theme songs from Sesame Street and Barney to break the will of prisoners." -- Wired

What we have here is the convergence of two interesting ideas. First, the fact that groups like Nine Inch Nails are freely admitting that their music is a form of torture. Second, the fact that "torture" has been defined down to such things as forcing people to endure Nine Inch Nails songs against their will.

...does this mean that PBS is torturing our children whenever they air Sesame Street and Barney?

They would've tried breaking the terrorists at Gitmo with Barry Manilow but they knew the chances of survival were too low, and the risks of collatoral damage to the interrogators far too high, to justify using 'The' BMM.

Cross Posted at DANEgerus

When Democrats rule

I've said again and again, if you want to see just what the Democrat American Communist Party is proposing, and what the effects of their failed ideology brings, all you have to do is look at where they have been in control:

In a city often known as the nation's murder capital, with over 10,000 unsolved murders dating back to 1960, the police are in shambles through cutbacks and corruption trials. (They have a profitable sideline, though, as one of the nation's largest gun dealers, having sold 14 tons of used weapons out-of-state.) Their response times are legendarily slow. Their crime lab is so inept that it has been closed. One Detroit man found police so unresponsive when trying to turn himself in for murder that he hopped a bus to Toledo and confessed there instead

Detroit schools haven't ordered new textbooks in 19 years. Students have reported having to bring their own toilet paper. Teachers have reported bringing hammers to class for protection. Declining enrollment has forced 67 school closures since 2005 (more than a quarter of the city's schools). The graduation rate is 24.9 percent, the lowest of any large school district in the country. Not for nothing did one frustrated activist start pelting school board members with grapes during a meeting. She probably should've reached for something heavier.

An internal audit, which was 14 months late, estimates next year's city deficit to be as high as $200 million (helped along by $335,000 embezzled from the Department of Health and Wellness Promotion). With a dwindling tax base--even the city's three once-profitable casinos are seeing a downturn in revenues (the Greektown Casino is in bankruptcy)--the city has kicked around every money-making scheme from selling off ownership rights to the tunnel it shares with neighboring Windsor, Canada, to a fast food tax. It's perhaps unsurprising that Detroit now has the most speed traps in the nation.

It also has one of the highest property tax rates in Michigan, yet has over 60,000 vacant dwellings (a guesstimate--nobody keeps official count), meaning real estate values are in the toilet. Over the summer, the Detroit News sent a headline around the world, about a Detroit house that was for sale for $1. But it's not even that uncommon. As of this writing, there are at least five $1 homes for sale in Detroit.

(.........)

Over the last several years, it has ranked as the most murderous city, the poorest city, the most segregated city, as the city with the highest auto-insurance rates, with the bleakest outlook for workers in their 20s and 30s, and as the place with the most heart attacks, slowest income growth, and fewest sunny days. It is a city without a single national grocery store chain. It has been deemed the most stressful metropolitan area in America. Likewise, it has ranked last in numerous studies: in new employment growth, in environmental indicators, in the rate of immunization of 2-year-olds, and, among big cities, in the number of high school or college graduates.

Men's Fitness magazine christened Detroit America's fattest city, while Men's Health called it America's sexual disease capital. Should the editors of these two metrosexual magazines be concerned for their safety after slagging the citizens of a city which has won the "most dangerous" title for five of the last ten years? Probably not: 47 percent of Detroit adults are functionally illiterate.

This is just part of the article. Read it all. If I lived in Detroit, I'd be hiding in shame and denying my involvement in that city the way Elliot Spitzer denied his prostitution habit. Detroit is a shithole. Just driving through the place makes you depressed. I landed at Detroit on my way to Troy, and I couldn't leave Detroit soon enough.

It's broken down, broken apart, hell, it's just broken. And it has not had a Republican mayor since 1950.

The results of Democrat American Communist Party leadership are there for anyone to see. All people have to do is open their eyes. Everywhere the Left has had control turns into a shithole. How's that job growth and budget crunch going in California, hmmmmm?

How many mayors has Atlantic City, NJ gone through in the past year or two?

Anyone want to talk about the tax situation in Maryland?

The Leftist ideology is parasitic in nature - it can only survive while it drains the life out of it's host. But it always ends up killing it's host. America's only hope is to pry that fucking parasite off of us and throw it away.

Otherwise this country will end up just like Detroit.

Found at Cold Fury.

BWAAA HAHAHAHAHA!

*snort*gasp*cackle*wheeze*

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAaaaaaaa!

Christmas in Sparta

Christmas lights in Evans Bosshard Park, Sparta, Wisconsin.

Click for the full sized photo. It's over 4MB, so there's quite a bit of detail in there.