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July 11, 2015

Look! Up In The Sky!

"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" ~ Chicken Littovich

Relax, it's just the Russian air force.

From The Week:
The flights began last year. The government of Russian President Vladimir Putin, eager to send a message, began flying nuclear bombers on training missions near the United States and its allies around the world.

The message was one of intimidation and defiance: Russia is still a power to be reckoned with, and meddling in the Ukraine, Syria, and Russia itself — particularly on human rights issues — is not appreciated.

Now, after months of aggressive flying, Russia's overworked air force is falling out of the sky. On July 5, a Su-24M tactical bomber crashed during takeoff at Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East. The plane banked sharply after takeoff and hit the ground. Both pilots were killed.

Five Russian combat planes have crashed in the past month. Russia's attempt to demonstrate strength has backfired spectacularly and demonstrated weakness instead.

[...]The vast majority of Russia's Air Force was built and operated by the Soviet Union, making the youngest of these planes 24 years old. The Tu-95 "Bear", MiG-29 "Fulcrum," and Su-24 "Fencer" fighters and bombers that crashed in the last month were all inherited from the Soviet Union.
More here and here and here.

Thugg Cuomo Backs Off AmmoScam

It didn't work with the so called NY State Police "Gun DNA" program and it ain't gonna work any better with background checks of sales of pistol and rifle ammunition. All it will do is create a highly lucrative black market in NYS for felons to obtain pistol ammo.

New York's highest elected Thugg just got shot down by state Republicans.
ALBANY – Gov. Cuomo is backing off a key element of his much-heralded gun-control law of 2013, the NY SAFE Act.
In a major concession to Senate Republicans and new Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan (photo), the Cuomo administration has agreed to suspend development of a troubled statewide database of ammunition sales. The agreement also gives Flanagan a veto over the database’s future development.

“This is a clear victory for Second Amendment rights in New York,” said Sen. James Seward (R-Oneonta). The NRA, in a statement, also applauded the moveas a way “to restore a degree of sanity after the SAFE Act’s over-the-top demonization of lawful New York gun owners.”

Conceived as a way to track ammunition sales and provide for background checks of purchasers, the database has been a technical headache.
Idiots in NYS have tried a variety of gun control measures that do not work. In 1999  under Gov. Patacki, NYS initiated the CoBIS program which required firearm manufacturers to fire a test round through every handgun sold to NYS dealers and send the casing to the NY State Police lab. Tens of millions were spent in this ill-conceived, ill-advised program which did not save a single life or prevent a single crime. The program was budgeted at $4 million/year and it ran for eleven years.

Turn, Turn, Turn


In The News


Modifying The Shawshank Model

Prison officials in California are not sure if this was a murder or a botched prison break where the inmate tried to mail himself to freedom ... in pieces.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- Nearly 15 hours after a riot at a Northern California prison, guards found a missing inmate sawed nearly in two, with his abdominal organs and most chest organs removed, his body folded and stuffed into a garbage can in a shower stall a few doors from his cell.

[...]The grisly discovery raises obvious questions about the prison's security: How could such a gruesome killing happen inside a locked facility with security and surveillance? How could someone obtain weapons sharp enough to dissect a body? And why did it take so long to uncover?

Assignment For Climatologists: Make Up Your Minds
Will polar bears and penguins inherit the Earth? How can we possibly enter another Ice Age with all the global anthropogenic warming going on?
The Earth could be headed for a 'mini ice age' researchers have warned.

A new study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles - and says that between 2020 and 2030 solar cycles will cancel each other out.

This, they say, will lead to a phenomenon known as the 'Maunder minimum' - which has previously been known as a mini ice age when it hit between 1646 and 1715, even causing London's River Thames to freeze over.

[...]Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the 'mini ice age' that began in 1645, according to the results presented by Prof Valentina Zharkova at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno.
More climate fear mongering at it's finest. The next time any one says anything about the weather other than, "It's a beautiful day!"... I'm going to slap them.


Perhaps This Will Catch On
Let's start in Washington, DC. Please.
A rash of lynchings of suspected criminals has shocked even violence-hardened Brazilians, baring dark undercurrents in the land of sun and samba.

The latest incident took place in the western outskirts of Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday night, when vigilantes tied up and badly beat a man accused of stealing a woman's cellphone, Brazilian media reported Friday.

[...]Brazilians are used to extreme violence, with heavily armed police confronting drug gangs in Rio and other cities daily. Lynchings are also something of a tradition in a huge country of 200 million where the police are far from always trusted.

 If You Know How Many Guns You Have, You Don't Have Enough
After I read this I had to change my shorts.
IWI US, Inc. , a subsidiary of Israel Weapon Industries (IWI) Ltd., announces the highly anticipated UZI PRO Pistol for the American consumer market is now shipping to distributors.

Retailers can expect the iconic pistol to hit their shelves in the next few weeks. Demand from UZI fans and gun enthusiasts has been overwhelming. IWI US is proud to return this updated version to the American public.


[...]The new UZI PRO features three safety mechanisms: a conventional manual thumb safety, a firing pin block and a proven grip safety that must be fully depressed before the gun can be cocked and fired.

Simple maintenance on the UZI PRO requires no special tools for quick and easy field stripping. Each UZI PRO Pistol comes with one 20-round and one 25-round magazine.
Anticipated cost is $1,109.

July 9, 2015

Galaxies




There is nothing like a view of the universe to make you realize just how small and insignificant you are. Even just a tiny portion of the universe is more than we can comprehend. Distances are so vast that the numbers are almost meaningless to us. The number of stars and planets boggles the imagination.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is part of a galactic group; there are three major galaxies in this group. Only 2.5 million light years away from Earth, the largest is Andromeda,which contains a trillion stars in a spiral approximately 200,000 light years from end to end. Next in size is the Milky Way, about half the size of Andromeda and 600 billion stars. Third largest is the Triangulum Galaxy, less than half the size of the Milky Way with about 40 billion stars. Everything else in this group orbits around these galaxies. Smaller galaxies in our local group are a mere 160,000 light years away.

Those are the galaxies closest to us. And what about those farthest away...


And yet, David writes in Psalms 8
Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:
All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;
The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.
O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!


So Happy


July 8, 2015

Guess They're Not Batty Over Batts No More

There isn't much to this news announcement; Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts has been given his walking papers.
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has fired Police Commissioner Anthony Batts, the mayor's office said on Wednesday.

Batts will be replaced on an interim basis by Deputy Commissioner Kevin Davis, the mayor's office said in a statement.

Batts had headed the department during unrest triggered by the death of Freddie Gray, who died in April from an injury sustained in police custody.
Batts isn't the only one that needs to go. Mayor Rawlings-BrokeBaltimore needs to find other employment where she is unable to get people killed and that incompetent fruit loop State's Attorney who indicted the six cops should be right behind the Mayor polishing up her resume'.

Heaven's Door


July 6, 2015

Game On

Bring it.
It's the moment we've all been waiting for: two giant fighting robots - one Japanese and one American - will square off in a melee one year from now.

That is, if the robots' two owners keep their word.

Last week, MegaBots, an American engineering company, challenged Japan's Suidobashi Heavy Industry to a duel.


In this corner - six tons of 'Murica

The battle would pitch the 12,000 lbs (850-stone) MegaBots Mark II against Suidobashi's Kuratas, which weighs 9,000 lbs.

Now, Suidobashi has responded, saying it accepts the challenge - on one condition.
And in this corner - 4.5 tons of Kuratas-san
The Japanese don't want the American robot to be armed, they want a hand-to-hand combat match - no guns. Wusses.

Source

Can't Fight This Feeling


July 5, 2015

4th Of July Musings

I did not celebrate Independence Day. There is nothing to celebrate.

Rather it should be a day of mourning for what once was.
America is toast.
We are no longer free.
The document that secured our freedoms has been trashed, pounded into dust by self serving politicians, craven judges and an uncaring populace.

The latest Supreme Court decision on on same sex marriages was celebrated and hailed by perverts and poo-pooed by ignorant pundits who did not bother looking into the warnings of the minority opinion. What will happen with this landmark decision is that the constitutional freedoms of religion   and free speech, both 1st Amendment rights, have just been cast into the dung heap of History.

Quite frankly, Chief Justice Roberts hits the nail squarely on the head with this in his dissent:
Those who founded our country would not recognize the majority’s conception of the judicial role. They after all risked their lives and fortunes for the precious right to govern themselves. They would never have imagined yielding that right on a question of social policy to unaccountable and unelected judges. And they certainly would not have been satisfied by a system empowering judges to override policy judgments so long as they do so after “a quite extensive discussion.”
Marriage was created for one purpose, to procreate, that is, replace the aging population by promoting and protecting the most beneficial family environment for rearing children - a union between a man and a woman. This is true throughout human history, even in cultures that embraced homosexuality, such as the ancient Greeks. The continuance of any civilization is dependent upon procreation; if there is insufficient renewal, that civilization dies within a few generations.

But what really should alarm every American who believes that homosexual intercourse is a sin is this nugget from  Roberts:
Respect for sincere religious conviction has led voters and legislators in every State that has adopted same-sex marriage democratically to include accommodations for religious practice. The majority’s decision imposing same-sex marriage cannot, of course, create any such accommodations. The majority graciously suggests that religious believers may continue to “advocate” and “teach” their views of marriage. The First Amendment guarantees, however, the freedom to “exercise” religion. Ominously, that is not a word the majority uses.
This is very important. We can "teach" and we can "advocate" but the 1st Amendment right to "exercise" our religious beliefs may have just disappeared courtesy of five liberal judges, one of whom is a sodomite. Indeed, lawsuits will flourish as sodomites will flock to churches to insist that their unholy unions be sanctified. Churches and para-religious organizations (hospitals, colleges, adoption agencies, etc.) will lose their tax exempt status.

Of course the sodomites will target Christian outlets; Christians are low hanging fruit and there is little consequence in offending them. It should get interesting if they decide to go after the mosques.

I can see where any discussion expressing doubt about the legitimacy of homosexual behavior will be criminalized as hate speech. That'll just about do it for the 1st Amendment.

NOTE: Interesting enough, of the three female Justices (Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan) only Ginsburg is married and has borne children.

Happy Birthday Canada!

Late to the party. Dang it!

July 1st was Canada Day! Thanks for being great neighbors for all these years. Hope ya don't mind the 1812 incursions.  Kinda embarrassing.

We got a little freedom happy... but anyway

Happy Birthday Canada!


Frequently referred to as "Canada's birthday", particularly in the popular press, the occasion marks the joining of the British North American colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the Province of Canada into a federation of four provinces (the Province of Canada being divided, in the process, into Ontario and Quebec) on July 1, 1867. Canada became a kingdom in its own right on that date, called the Dominion of Canada, but the British parliament and Cabinet kept limited rights of political control over the new country that were shed by stages over the years until the last vestiges were surrendered in 1982, when the Constitution Act patriated the Canadian constitution.

Gadda-Da-Vida


Putin's Panties In A Wad

The Rooskies are in a lather after the Poles decided to destroy a Soviet WWII memorial. BTW, it was on Polish soil.

Like my ex-wife, the Rooskies have a very convenient memory when it comes to events that they'd rather forget. Especially when it relates to massacres:
MOSCOW/WARSAW (Reuters) - Russia said on Saturday it was outraged by Poland's destruction of a Soviet war monument, warning Warsaw of the "most negative consequences" after what it said was a flagrant violation of an agreement between the two countries on protecting memorial sites.

Poland has been one of the most vocal critics of Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in 2014. Russia and Poland share a history of conflicts and the disagreement over war memorials is likely to add to tensions.

[...]Authorities in the western Polish town of Nowa Sol took down the brotherhood-in-arms of Polish and Red Army soldiers memorial at the end of June, reducing it to a pile of rubble.

Apparently a little walk in the Katyn Forest for an estimated 22,000 Polish soldiers and civilian slipped the Rooskies' minds.
One of the earliest--and certainly the most infamous--mass shootings of prisoners of war during World War II did not occur in the heat of battle but was a cold-blooded act of political murder. The victims were Polish officers, soldiers, and civilians captured by the Red Army after it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. Strictly speaking, even the Polish servicemen were not POWs. The USSR had not declared war, and the Polish commander in chief had ordered his troops not to engage Soviet forces
 
 So much for the celebrated "Brotherhood-in-Arms of Polish and Red Army Soldiers."

At the end of WWII, the Soviets were so embarrassed by their Katyn indiscretion that for the next 50 years they blamed it on the Nazis and forbade any mention of it in Poland.
Katyn was a forbidden topic in postwar Poland. Censors suppressed all references to it. Even mentioning the atrocity meant risking reprisal. While Katyn was erased from Poland's official history, it could not be erased from historical memory. In 1981, Solidarity erected a memorial with the simple inscription "Katyn, 1940." Even that was too much. The police confiscated it. Later, the Polish Government, on cue from Moscow, created another memorial. It read: "To the Polish soldiers--victims of Hitlerite fascism--reposing in the soil of Katyn."
Doesn't that remind you of Hillary's accusations against the maker of that infamous anti-Islam video after the Benghazi debacle?  Perhaps Hillary was channeling her inner Stalin.

In 2010 President Putin delivered a half-assed apology of kinds in a ceremony commemorating the victims but it fell far short of what the Poles wanted. Putin's words were:
“... it would also be a lie and manipulation to place the blame for these crimes on the Russian people.”
*cough***bullshit!***cough*
To this day the Russians have refused to release all Soviet era documents relating to the Katyn Forest massacre.

The Polish Foreign Ministry stated that their agreement only extended to cemeteries and did not include monuments; the Mayor of Nowa Sol had this to say:

“The monument was large (dozen tonnes of concrete), ugly, always dirty with rust leaking out of the abyss of its emptiness, like blood or tears,” Wadim Tyszkiewicz, Nowa Sol’s mayor said on his Facebook profile earlier this week.

FTR - The victims were transported from Soviet-occupied eastern Poland to Byelorussia where they were exterminated. It is estimated that over 300,000 Poles were seized by the Russians and relocated or murdered. Nowa Sol is in western Poland near the border with Germany.