A Mighty Vote from Little Acorn Grows.

H/T The Superduperpunditilous, from JOHN FUND at the WSJ:

...on Thursday local prosecutors indicted seven workers for Acorn, a union-backed activist group that last year registered more than 540,000 low-income and minority voters nationwide and deployed more than 4,000 get-out-the-vote workers. The Acorn defendants stand accused of submitting phony forms in what Secretary of State Sam Reed says is the "worst case of voter-registration fraud in the history" of the state.
The list of "voters" registered in Washington state included former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, New York Times columnists Frank Rich and Tom Friedman, actress Katie Holmes and nonexistent people with nonsensical names such as Stormi Bays and Fruto Boy. The addresses used for the fake names were local homeless shelters. Given that the state doesn't require the showing of any identification before voting, it is entirely possible people could have illegally voted using those names.... (my emphasis)

Huh -- "entirely possible people could have??" Wouldn't "HIGHLY Likely they did" - be a better and even more reasonable choice of words?

"Of the 1,805 names submitted by Acorn, only nine have been confirmed as valid, and another 34 are still being investigated. The rest--over 97%--were fake."

Last year several Acorn employees told me that the Acorn scandals that have cropped up around the country are no accident.
"There's no quality control on purpose, no checks and balances," says Nate Toler, who was head of an Acorn campaign against Wal-Mart in California until late last year, when Acorn fired him for speaking to me.

Activism and fraud joined at the hip, driven by an agenda - this is in-your-face Socialism at work.

Cadillac Workstand

[on-click to giantize]
I had to get a decent lift-stand if I wanted to continue my own working-on-bikes stuff, I'm fed-up with low-squats and bending over - things that torque my L2-L3 vertebrae and works the minor scoliosis.
Riding itself is fantastically good for bad backs, strengthening the stomach muscles and giving an overall good cardio-aerobic workout and shaking up the arms - but working on bikes is the opposite. Being all cranked-over and twisted around bent, especially when applying force usually has negative results. Just doing the damn air filter is a pain, let alone the axle pinch-bolts or any normal maintenance type things. So I got this garage-bling lift-stand thing to bring the work up to me. It's hot.

A storm tried to blow in

But it doesn't really rain here in the Summer. The weather was just mushy, as a strange-for-summer storm-front tried to move through. It promised rain but lied and just created drizzle and clouds and traffic-jams. And I went riding. I went dirtbike riding by myself yesterday.

Workmen were coming to tear-down and replace the staircase in preparation for a full paint-job later this summer, and there would be no access - so what to do? Go riding. It was gray and dismal and I loaded up and drove south through scattered drizzle - enough to use the wipers even.

We have rednecks here too, thank God

Metcalf looked promising but uninteresting so I kept going, down to Hollister. I felt a little anxious about that decision because I was alone and riding is a buddy-sport. You shouldn't really go alone because the injury-risk and mechanical-failure chances are pretty evident, and self-rescue isn't easy alone. But I was just scaring myself.
Once clear of the pass into the valley, the weather was clear and sunny and cool, with just white fluffy clouds dotting everywhere and a bit of breeze. Hollister was mostly empty with just a few campers at Walnut Camp. The Rangers didn't collect the entrance fee and said they'd either meet-up with you to do that, or asked you to pay double next-time. It's quiet during the week.

I realized I had forgotten my chest-protector and rode over to the little store hoping it was open. That was one reason I chose to keep driving south, because Metcalf has no such amenities. Fortunately the store was open and they had what I needed - cheap insurance at $50 or so especially since I was on my own.

Headless Horseman inspects steed
So I rode around, staying within myself except for a good blast up empty Rancho Road in 5th - and I skipped all the black-diamond trails. All the trails were burned-in with a blue-groove like at a speedway track or half-mile dirt-track - so traction was actually really pretty good - it wasn't dusty-slippy because all the dust had been blown off.

I made a loop up to the lake where it was dark and stormy but not raining. The storm-front was trying to get over the top of the hills but was breaking up right there. While coming down a short-cut on Olive Orchard, I saw a deep series of dried-up ruts and grabbed too much front brake - and slid-out down on my left side killing the motor. No injuries - that was the only little fall. After a couple hours I packed-up and left, driving out Cienega Road to see what was there.

It's a dead-end after about seven miles because a few years ago during an El Nino rain-season the road washed-out and they never repaired it - I guess there's nobody living out at the end who needs it. I passed a couple wineries, (Calera among them - they make a really good, flinty, Pinot Noir) and a grade-school closed up for summer.

Driving home the weather had all blown apart and was back to Summer again. My boots still suck - they started hurting after an hour or so, I knew they would - I gotta get new boots.
UPDATE: Oh yeh, surrealism remembered: Having a snadwich around 11:30, a sudden loud noise is coming in through the treetops, and looking up right in the clear - ZOOM - roaring out of the hills flying low-over came a P-51 Mustang painted in WWII colors with the yellow stripes on the wings and stuff...and then it was past and gone. Woosh. Did that happen?

Happy Weeekend

All this old-talk is getting to me. It's too nice outside, to sit in here doing this. I'm gonna put my surfer-dude disguise on and go splash in the pool - but not everybody has a pool (I don't even like ours, it's cold and small - I remember what it was like a thousand miles away) - or drive around in the truck listening to the Ventures or Dick Dale... or The Mermen. Check them out.
You go do what you want to do, cheers!


But I will say you should go donate to Michael Yon.

Slam Dancing Through Life

The Chiclet-Guava shirted Loud Left and the rest of the black-shirted Anarcho-hipoixousie like to chant the Get Out of Iraq slogan and are happy to dance on the corpses of millions. Dance Anarchist hipsters, dance - this is what the dance of pull-out looks like. Iraq is not Vietnam, it's Cambodia...

My brushes with celebrity amount to a blind pig's acorn finding chances - tertiary, tangential, and accidental at best for your basic dork. One of my college housemates was a girl who's boyfriend was a campus radio-station DJ and the roommate and "best friend" of Jello - and I sorta met him once when he came down from The City to do a gig at the Not-Catalyst - some less-distinguished venue down the street in Santa Cruz. To meet with the munchkin was to be fully engulfed and understand the Psychologist's reference-desk literature about the Napoleonic Complex.
Anyhow it was an interestingly brief meeting, from a disengaged backstage perspective. No free tickets for me.

In the Kitchen

Thanks to Sebastian we have discovered the social-set requirements and found our status-level. Makes me pause - it may be a lot like belonging-or-not to a club that would have you.

I mean would you really want to go to a snooty A-list party full of jocks, soshs, and cheerleaders?

UPDATE: OOps forgot the link.

Econometrics

Watching Le Tube last night there was some muffled mention of a stock rally, with bell-ringing money-happiness on Wall Street and indecipherable econobabble. That euphoria was quickly followed by a cold TV Negativecaster splashing a dour pronouncement of, "Let's not be too quick or happy, the down Housing Market will sink it all and we'll drown in the arctic waters of overseas imports" - or some such doom-and-gloom crap. Is that all the idiot-box is good for anymore - The Big Downer delivered yet again by sour-faced Charlie Gibson? Bah.
This morning I was induced to follow another lead via the Incredible Monsterpundit Instapoodle to a second source:

2004 - $413 billion
2005 - $318 billion
2006 - $248 billion
2007 - $205 billion

There you go folks, like a hemorrhoid slathered with Preparation H, the deficit is shrinking. But would you know that from the flappy mouthpieces of Taxation? The New York Sun reports:

The New York Times's Paul Krugman, in December, wrote that President Bush "plunged the budget deep into deficit by cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains even as he took the country into a disastrous war."
Senator Clinton went to the Senate floor in February of this year to speak of the "fiscal recklessness" of the Bush administration, which she charged had contributed to "record deficits."
In March, Senator Schumer, who is now the chairman of Congress's Joint Economic Committee, spoke of "budget excesses of the past six years" that have brought us "a mounting debt to the rest of the world."

Liars. No wonder the Democrats want to regain control and capture in taxes the "excessive" wealth currently being made. They know that what's up economically will float their leaky boatfull of Socialist agenda and Pork on a sea of taxes - they want their healthcare disaster to drown us. Bah.

Global Geology Goracle Gorming

We are doomed, say climate change scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that is organizing most of the climate change research occurring in the world today.
Carbon dioxide from man-made sources rises to the atmosphere and then stays there for 50, 100, or even 200 years. This unprecedented buildup of CO2 then traps heat that would otherwise escape our atmosphere, threatening us all.

Bullcrap.

"This is nonsense," says Tom V. Segalstad, head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the same IPCC. He laments the paucity of geologic knowledge among IPCC scientists -- a knowledge that is central to understanding climate change, in his view, since geologic processes ultimately determine the level of atmospheric CO2.

Catastrophic theories of climate change depend on carbon dioxide staying in the atmosphere for long periods of time -- otherwise, the CO2 enveloping the globe wouldn't be dense enough to keep the heat in. Until recently, the world of science was near-unanimous that CO2 couldn't stay in the atmosphere for more than about five to 10 years because of the oceans' near-limitless ability to absorb CO2. "This time period has been established by measurements based on natural carbon-14 and also from readings of carbon-14 from nuclear weapons testing, it has been established by radon-222 measurements, it has been established by measurements of the solubility of atmospheric gases in the oceans, it has been established by comparing the isotope mass balance, it has been established through other mechanisms, too, and over many decades, and by many scientists in many disciplines."

Then, with the advent of IPCC-influenced science, the length of time that carbon stays in the atmosphere became controversial. Climate change scientists began creating carbon cycle models to explain what they thought must be an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These computer models calculated a long life for carbon dioxide.

In the real world, as measurable by science, CO2 in the atmosphere and in the ocean reach a stable balance when the oceans contain 50 times as much CO2 as the atmosphere. "The IPCC postulates an atmospheric doubling of CO2, meaning that the oceans would need to receive 50 times more CO2 to obtain chemical equilibrium," explains Prof. Segalstad. "This total of 51 times the present amount of carbon in atmospheric CO2 exceeds the known reserves of fossil carbon -- it represents more carbon than exists in all the coal, gas, and oil that we can exploit anywhere in the world."

Read it.

Behind the Eight Ball

I've been tag-teamed by the Eight Things Meme, from both Defiant Infidel and Ah Shoot! -- that's probably well and good since laziness, procrastination, and distraction make completing such a thing difficult without some encouragement or "enforcement." So, what can thematically tie these 8-Things together? Nothing, they're supposed to be random - but there are rules, I Googled them:

List 8 facts/habits about yourself
Post the rules at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed
Tag 8 people and post their names, go to their blogs and leave them a comment, Letting them know that they have been tagged and ask them to read your blog.

Yeh ok, the thing is not everybody follows the rules - which is OK with me since a Blogosphere Meme is the equivalent of a chain-letter without the promise of money, good-luck, or dating a hot chickk - which since I'm married really doesn't interest me.
Googling it also revealed that it is chummy goofy sharing-ness all across the Blogosphere (and probably beyond) among sensitive Leftosphere Loonie-Libtards, us Gunbloggers, the Rightosphere, the Atheistic Anti-Godosphere, the I'm-Still-In-School-Getting-My-Degreeosphere, and even (maybe especially) dancing all around the Fabulous Flaming Queerosphere. So we're in good Diversity...

1. Coffee with milk.
2. Guns without scopes - except the M1 Carbine.
3. Failed pre-Calculus, twice - never passed it.
4. Medieval German (sounded-out has an Austrian accent, Elmer Fudd is an Austrian based on his consonantal pronunciation in particular the W's).
5. Tangential - see (above) I've already digressed - and since that last distraction visited eight or so more blogs...
6. Procrastinator.
7. Uh....
8. I used a Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) quote in my Thesis' frontispiece - a quote that could equally have come from Buckaroo Banzai, and one which evokes the relative merits of Cultural Anthropology while employing a notational amount of "Thick Description" (literally) besides - and one that applies to this circumstance,

"Every serious cultural analysis starts from a sheer beginning and ends where it manages to get before exhausting its intellectual impulse." (Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture )

Water is wet - serious or non-serious, I've exhausted the intellectual frothiness here... Ok, I'll go ahead and post this while I think of eight Bloggers to tag, if I can think of eight Bloggers to tag.

Gun Limbo

Today around 1:00PM I sat eating a Taco Bell tostada (no drink), in the truck with the engine idling and running the A/C because it's hotter than hell outside (well, not really that bad) to celebrate Global Whoreming and the upcoming concert of Dunces lead by the robotic dancing Goracle.
I was thinking about tomorrow. It's the first Saturday of the month so it's Practice. But my powder-dispenser is at PACT getting fixed - the trickler stopped trickling - and so I have no handloads. I shot the last of my CMP Lake City stuff a while ago and finished off the Danish too - I have no surplus ammo. I could shoot the M1898 Krag-Jorgensen since I do have some of that .30-40 stuff - I think...but it's just Practice and it doesn't make sense in a way, because there's no base-standard to measure performance - and the same goes for the Swiss K-31. I'm slumping.
I had been to a gun-shop just to get my jones, and had stared abstractly at a case full of black Tupperware guns feeling lethargic and failing to recognize any of them. Another case of gigantic, nitro-express sized revolvers failed to illuminate other than remind me of hand-weights on the carpet by the fireplace. About the only spark of resonance that emerged like a pixie was a blue-steel wood-paneled Browning Hi-Power in .40 S&W that sparkled in the case-light. Above the handguns a thick row of silvery and black barreled hunting rifles marched skyward, patches of black synthetic forest broken by real wood with the occasional fat belly of a Garand-son stuck between the civilians - an M1A1. They had some Remington .30-40 Krag - $30 for a box - nevermind I have some at home. I drove out of the are and down to the freeway and home. Maybe I'll go online and see what Midway has...

Leave the Kid Alone

Poor bastard never had a chance, just read it: "Al Gore's Kid" - besides the utter banality of being #III there's the complete reality-disconnect his dad displays -would you want the Goracle as a Dad?? Reading bedtime stories? Probably never happened, but Good-Lord no!
Doing "the Ton" on a bike is something, it's refreshing and exhilarating - it's like freedom and electricity. My FZ would only do about a Buck-and-a-Quarter, a bit more if you laid-down on the tank and waited, listening to the cam-tappets, but up to a Hundred, ¡ZING! you were there. On a faster bike you simply hold the throttle open longer - and see a Buck Fifty. But a Priapus? How tedious. How excruciatingly long does it take to get there? That's like climbing stairs in a slow-moving elevator where somebody farted. And once you're there what have you got? It's TV. No wonder the other paraphernalia in the car with him. I say leave him alone with his embarrassment. He's not as obnoxious as the supremely stupid Media-Frankenstein thrust upon us as Budapest Motel - he hasn't sought that limelight. Poor sonuvabitch never had a chance.

Quote from a Jihadist

It's newsworthy when someone from inside the organization speaks to it's drive and causes - especially when dumbass apologists outside chant the opposite. It shows the inner nature that is different from the disconnected wishful delusions of the external chattering-class. Hassan Butt is a former member of the radical Islamist group Al-Muhajiroun who raised funds for extremists and called for attacks on British citizens - but he's changed his mind:

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

The numbskull Leftists and anarchists who use the conventional Media-driven line are the age-old "useful idiots" as Stalin called them, heedlessly advancing the cause of the enemy by their self-imposed imbecility.

Lying Sack of Shit Medicine

Fat turd Michael Moore has gassed-up another propaganda piece in favor of the most idiotic idea in a long time, Socialist Utopian Medicine. As pdb indicates, there is a titanic level of fatuous ignorance and a downright contempt for knowledge and facts associated with the notion:

Know that government interference always results in higher prices and shortages. It is not a matter of opinion, it is as much a physical reality as gravity or evolution. If your proposed solution involves government interference and promises lower prices or greater availability, you have just proven yourself to be an idiot who has no understanding of how the world works.

That's a fact, jack. Bad ideas don't improve in the hothouse of Gubb'mint - they multiply like a fungus or a flesh-eating virus though...
UPDATE: HT Tam at View From The Porch.

Rock Stars Against Live Earth

Les Jones has a round-up of The Goracle's latest debacle and attempted popularity hounding which includes the appearance of Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) - who formerly wrote such hits as "Peace Train," but since his conversion to Islam has called for the death of author Salman Rushdie... Oh great. Could Madonna badgering people about materialism be any less of an irony-deficient stupid crap-head...?

"But why is (Gore) actually organizing them? To make us aware of the greenhouse effect? Everybody’s known about that problem for years. We are all fucking conscious of global warming."
-- Boomtown Rats singer and Live Aid/Live8 founder Bob Geldof

Check it out, Rock Stars Against Live Earth.

Happy Independence Day!

We cleaned the windows and sliding glass doors. I would have gone out and shot guns but we kept busy with the cleaning - plus it's warmed-up quite a bit and it's cooler inside than out. God Bless America.

I watched the "Tales of the Gun: Early Machine Guns" DVD and enjoyed it immensely. Go buy it. Now I understand why they call the Colt gun a "Potato Digger" and ANYBODY can clearly see what an utter pile of shit the Chauchat was - just seeing it, it's evident crap. I just wish they had delved into the specifics of the German Spandau aircraft guns.
The word  machinegun  stands out in my memory as one of the first big and long (ten-letter) words that I learned to spell as a kid. To me it coalesced into a single word. We were overseas in a distant land and I was around 7 years old and I loved WWI airplanes - and they had guns. Before "Snoopy and the Red Baron" came out on a record, I was building tissue-paper and balsa wood flying airplanes that had roundels and Maltese-crosses on them with my brother. Living in a fairly poverty-stricken foreign country we had limited English language (and many other) resources, but we had an Encyclopedia Britannica and a stack of those Reader's Digest Condensed Books left there by previous inhabitants (those seemed to be in every Missionary's house). Since I had few friends to play with and my older siblings regarded me mostly as a nuisance, I read a lot - a helluva lot. A freakin' lot. I read the Encyclopedia Britannica that was in the house - skipping the dry stuff like "The Per-Capita Exports of South Dakota" - and mostly anything about the airplanes and pilots of WWI. I also bought books based on the covers, mostly the Biggles pulps that were a Rupee or two at the booksellers on the train platform. It was some of the only English-language writing available to a boy anyhow. Biggles was AWESOME, WWI ace pilot who in the post-war era became a mercenary-adventurer, shooting-up (or -down) the Bad Guys of Bastardistan and Assholia, while rescuing the occasional babe and stealing the plunder - jolly good stuff that, with guns!
In the Encyclopedia also were occasional diagrams. One that stands strong in memory of a gas-operated machine-gun - with little arrows and tiny writing describing the events and impulses and it's sequence of operation. To see it clearly, that was great stuff! But very tiny - reading like that may have contributed my poor eyesight - which went un-diagnosed for another two years. But now I could understand how the machine guns on a Nieuport, Spad XII, Sopwith or Fokker Triplane actually worked!
As I searched through the Encyclopedia for interesting material I came upon a similar diagram of a Submarine and digested it as well - the valves and pipes, the control surfaces and means of raising or descending - brilliant!! Here were Answers!! But it was the Planes that continued to hold my fascination. Another diagram showed how aircraft controls operated - which I kinda already knew from building the damn things - but more revealing was the one that showed the actual stick-procedure for take-offs and landings. Super!! I read about Otto Lilienthal and the pioneers of Aviation, and began to design in my head (and on paper) an airplane that could be launched from the roof of our house. Dammit to Hell! My parents never let me build the full-sized glider, I could have flown! Instead I got sent off to Boarding School and the vicious little monster 5th Graders of Phelps Hall, with whom I fought and bled and prayed with for a year before I could finally go home - and then we left that Foreign Country for good.
Returning to the USA in '69 a lot of thing were different. My friends had all changed, School had changed, there was a War on, and I had changed - I started to read Science Fiction. But it was America, God Bless her, and I had glasses and I could see - and it was great. Happy Independence Day!

Jihadi Smackdown by John Smeaton

Out-West here where a few cowboy legends still remain, the Main-Stream-Media plays a fast, loose, and deceitful editorial game of Three-Card-Monty - it's hide and seek with facts. The policy in effect is to capture and maintain their Drumbeat-of-Doom Journalistic Narrative, "Don't Mention Positives, Emphasize the Negatives." We are given tantalizingly little to go-on, vague references to a disconnected War-overseas, various Jihadi attacks, and spurious reports that often go un-corrected. In the latest occurrence a car-bomb was found in Londonistan, then another, and then a firey vehicle crash at an airport further north. We've had no word out here from the MSM whatsoever that any human intervention occurred - as far as the Media is concerned their Allies the Jihadi freedom fighters are spectral Ninjas who can pass through walls, nothing we little people can do will stop them - that's the message.
Naah, it aint true now is it?
On a break outside to have a smoke, airport worker John Smeaton went down to help a Cop and kick some Jihadi butt. If ya want you can buy him a pint.

Some Glaswegian please translate, I only got part of it.
Part II

Translation II: Your not hitting the police mate no chance. I ran straight down and other members of the public did the same as me. They all ran towards the guy and tried to get a kick in...take a boot. Just subdue the guy.

Man that's a beautiful thing.

And it turns out in another counter to the constantly streaming subtext that serves to explain-away and give credence to terrorism while blaming "U.S.Bush Foreign Policy is All Afault, Desperate and Poor Palestinian People Will Pop and Bomb" - the Terrorist-guy (now in the hospital burn-ward) is a Doctor in the UK practicing medicine - not some "oppressed minion of the poor and poverty-stricken," not a wretch only trying to better his family. Not that narrative but a different one of Immigrant Success BUT Multiculturalism Gone Sour. A wealthy and educated man, on fire and in flames attacking a policeman while yelling, "Allah! Allah! Allah!"
Some respect for the Hippocratic Oath, huh?
HT: Ghost of a Flea.

As Strategy Page notes June 29, 2007:...recently, the troops have been passing around an interesting discovery. Namely, that the Japanese psychological warfare effort during World War II included radio broadcasts that could be picked up by American troops. Popular music was played, but the commentary (by one of several English speaking Japanese women) always hammered away on the same points;

1 Your President (Franklin D Roosevelt) is lying to you.
2 This war is illegal.
3 You cannot win the war.

The troops are perplexed and somewhat amused that their own media is now sending out this message. Fighting the enemy in Iraq is simple, compared to figuring out what news editors are thinking back home.