Sunday, September 30, 2007

Par For The Course

A UN-African Union peacekeeper base in Darfur was overrun by "rebel forces", who grabbed every weapon and vehicle they could carry off and burned what they couldn't. At the end of the day the AU was down ten dead, seven severely injured and fifty missing-- which means that they ran like the clappers the moment the shooting started.

If it wasn't so horrifying it would be comic.

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Spines of Jello


In an effort to be "inclusive", Oak Lawn school district in Chicago, Illinois tried, unsuccessfully, banning Jello from the lunch menu and are now abolishing Christmas and Halloween celebrations because they might (all together now!) offend Muslims.

Parents expect that the announcement is going to add to the tension that has been building since officials agreed earlier this month to change the lunch menu to exclude items containing pork to accommodate Muslim students. News that Jell-O was struck from the menu caused such a stir that officials have agreed to bring it back. Gelatin is often made with tissue or bones of pigs or other animals.

That controversy now appears to have been been dwarfed by the holiday debate, which became so acrimonious Wednesday that police were called to Columbus Manor School to intervene in a shouting match among parents.

"It's difficult when you change the school's culture," said Columbus Manor Principal Sandy Robertson.
True, Principal Robertson-- especially when there's no justification for doing so other than political prejudice.

In normal circumstances, this sort of multicultural groveling would be merely offensive, but in a time of war it goes well beyond a mere eye-rolling moment. If we are going to win this battle against the Jihadists, then we must show confidence in our own institutions and traditions rather than dropping them like a live hand grenade at the first opportunity. Acts of preemptive dhimmitude such as this not only make the civilised world look weak before the barbarians who wish to kill and enslave us, but it also sends entirely the wrong message to moderate Muslims, who are equally threatened, by making it appear as if it is we who are suspect and that it is we who must justify ourselves to the Muslims rather than vice versa.

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Saturday, September 29, 2007

Gog


A vintage bit of Cold War sci fi with flame-throwing robots: Gog.

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Friday, September 28, 2007

Nowhere to Hide


So fed up with the nanny state that you want to go for a quiet ride in your car and get away from it all for a bit?

Don't light up, though. The Party has declared it a thoughtcrime "distraction".

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Maybe If He Had a Goatee

The speech that David Cameron should make-- if he were somehow replaced by a doppelganger from a parallel universe.

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Party Hints

Next time you're at a party, jump in and say,
Did you know there are more wild pigs than people in Australia?
It's guaranteed to stop the conversation dead in its tracks.

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Thursday, September 27, 2007

Dhimmitude in Canada

Vancouver, Canada is introducing strict new anti-smoking laws that will prohibit lighting up in almost all public places-- unless you're a Muslim having a go at the old hookah:

Vancouver's hookah-parlour owners are celebrating after winning an exemption Thursday from a proposed new bylaw that will ban smoking on most sidewalks in commercial districts, in bus shelters and even in taxis passing through Vancouver.

In giving the bylaw unanimous approval-in-principle, Vancouver city council members bowed to arguments that hookah lounges provide an important cultural space for the city's Muslims and granted them a temporary exemption.

So, can I claim that the pub is "an important cultural space" or is that line of argument off limits for dhimmis?

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Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Into Airstrip One, Probably


Labour's new slogan is "Strength to Change Britain."

The question is, into what, Mr. Brown? Into what?

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Criminal Lawyers

Hofstra Law School is hosting the Sixth Biannual Legal Ethics Conference "Lawyering at the Edge: Unpopular Clients, Difficult Cases, Zealous Advocates". Not very big news until you notice one of the "dynamic" speakers on their list:
Lynne Stewart, who has defended many unpopular clients over the years
What Hofstra fails to mention is that Lynne Stewart is also a convicted felon who was found guilty, sentenced to prison and disbarred from practicing law in 2006 for helping an imprisoned Jihadi terrorist who was behind the 1993 WTC bombing and the 1997 Luxor massacre pass messages to his followers so they could carry on his campaign of mass murder.

I'm not just stunned that Hofstra would let a traitor like her be touted as an expert on "ethics", but that she isn't still in gaol serving a life sentence.

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Dietary Dhimmitude

Oh, yeah. Violate my rights, baby!

Canada stands firm as a custard according to the Toronto Sun:
A Muslim inmate has won $2,000 and a partial human rights victory over a Correctional Service of Canada policy not to replace bacon with a halal diet for Islam-worshiping cons.
If this is a "human rights" violation, then Hot Pockets are a crime against humanity.

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By Any Other Name, It Would Still Leak


In 1933, Lawrence Kocher, "noted architect" came up with this revolutionary design for a house made of canvas stretched over a wooden frame.

When a casual observer pointed out that he'd invented the tent, Mr. Kocher wouldn't touch his porridge for days.

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Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Miliband Madness


The foreign secretary Mr.David Miliband at the Labour party conference rejected a referendum on the EU treaty as "institutional navel-gazing" and said that Kosovo must become a Muslim state and Turkey allowed into the EU because "Europe can't be a closed Christian club."

This man wants a rejected EU constitution imposed on Britain in the guise of a "treaty" without a vote and in a time of war with Jihadi fanatics who want St. Paul's turned into a mosque he wants a Muslim state squarely in Europe and to allow a barely secular country of 80 million Muslims into the EU without a single caveat.

And this man is Her Majesty's foreign secretary.

Sometimes I feel like we're fighting a war on two fronts and the second one is the government itself.

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Sputnik at Fifty


Fifty years ago the Soviet Union ushered in the Space Age with the launch of Sputnik.

A pity it had to also be a certified brown-trouser moment for free men everywhere.

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Monday, September 24, 2007

Bobby's Bike

Greater Manchester bans the police from riding their bicycles, fearing they might fall off and hurt themselves.

In other news, policemen are numbered in case they get lost.

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If It Flops, Blame The Audience

David Kahane has a beautiful summing up of Hollywood's current raft of anti-war films:
Now, what do all these films have in common — besides being passionate indictments?

They all flopped. Or will, soon enough. (Except for, maybe, The Kingdom, which apparently has an appalling whiff of vigilantism.) And this is something we out here in Hollywood just cannot wrap our minds around.

What the hell is wrong with this country? We support the troops, showing them as the dysfunctional, murdering, drug-addicted, red-state crypto-rapists in need of psychoanalysis we all know they really are. Hey — even the Marine officer in Alan Ball’s award-winning
American Beauty a few years back was humanized by making him a sadist and a closet queen. And this is the thanks we get?
Ungrateful so and sos. And after we gave them Gigli, too!

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Sunday, September 23, 2007

I Don't Want To Go On The Cart


According to the news sources, this video proves that Fidel Castro hasn't popped his clogs yet.

My Spanish isn't up to it and I haven't seen a translation of the old gasbag's interview, so I've no way to judge whether it's authentic or not, but since no one with better linguistic skills than I have has denounced it, I can only assume that the Earth is still heavier by the weight of one tyrant.

Still, I can't help feeling that the tone of the video was rather similar to this:

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Marcel Marceau: 1923-2007

Marcel Marceau has passed away at the age of 84.

He's to be buried in an invisible box.

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Saturday, September 22, 2007

Nativity

BBC headline:
Church gives birth to baby girl
The Age of Miracles is not past.

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Macbeth


And now your Saturday bit of culture: Macbeth.

It's a laugh a minute, I hear.

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Friday, September 21, 2007

Land of the Rising Vending Machine

An in-depth look at the insane array of Japanese vending machines.

Having fallen in love with the pastry vending machines outside of bakeries in the Netherlands that let you buy the odd bun at 2AM that does not taste of cellophane, I can accept most of these contraptions, but for some reason the umbrella vending machine strikes me as downright weird.

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Hand Me My Fowling Piece, Old Boy


Here's the new German UAV being deployed by the British police in action.

The technology is marvelous, I applaud its use by the armed forces and I seriously want one for myself, but, given given the Ingsoc proclivities of the government, putting this in the hands of the police makes two words spring to mind:
Skeet shoot.

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Thursday, September 20, 2007

Look Out For Pods


From the AFP:
Villagers in southern Peru were struck by a mysterious illness after a meteorite made a fiery crash to Earth in their area, regional authorities said Monday.
Professor Bernard Quatermass was unavailable for comment.

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A Cutting Issue

BBC headline:
TV cat poll was fixed, BBC says
And so was the cat, presumably.

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Many Eyes and None That See


  • 10,524 CCTV cameras in London.
  • Cost: £200 million
  • Unsolved crime rate: 80%
As I've said, it isn't just that these totalitarians are taking away our liberties, it's that they can't even accomplish what they claimed was the reason for doing so.

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Wednesday, September 19, 2007

The Truth is Out There


You've probably seen this video, but there are two interesting things about it.
  1. Notice that the gentleman in question is grabbed by the police right after he asks if Senator Kerry is a member of Skull and Bones.
  2. Notice the incident's striking similarity to this.
Coincidence or conspiracy? Raving paranoids & Goon Show fans need to know!

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Axis? What Axis?

The Telegraph reports that Iranian military engineers were injured during an attempt to mount a chemical warhead on a missile in Syria. This comes within a week of an Israeli strike against what may have been a secret North Korean nuclear cache being looked after by Boy Assad and company.

Move along, please. Nothing to see here.

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Going Cheap

Someone tried to sell Belgium on ebay.

What amazes me it that someone tried to buy it.

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Haute Couture

Having exhausted all the trivial issues of the day, the BBC weighs in on The Question of Our Times:
They do charity work. They want their contribution to British culture to be taken seriously. But why do people look down their noses at the fashion industry?
At a guess, it might have something to do with the industry being top heavy with a load of narcissistic, talentless frauds who have reduced the making of overpriced frocks to an irredeemable laughing stock.

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Not a Hope/Crosby Road Picture

Friedrich A. Hayek on The Road to Serfdom.

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King Canute, Call Your Service

From the BBC:
The European Union's goal of keeping the global temperature rise to 2C is unlikely to be met, a leading climate researcher has warned.
In other news, the EU projects for holding back the tide, making the Sun stand still and abolish death don't seem to be doing too well either.

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Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Eh, Eck

Breeam surgeons av discovered 'a' tinkerin wi' t' breeam can gerr rid o' 'a' northern call 'n mek theur call li' eur reet toff.

Henry Higgins wor unavailable for comment.

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Monday, September 17, 2007

We're at War; Don't Tell Anyone

You've got a Jihadist in camouflage paint running around the local park with an AK-47. Do you:
  1. Arrest him and fully inform the public so that they are aware of the threat we face and that our enemy can strike anywhere.
  2. Arrest him and try to cover the whole thing up to avoid the Inevitable Yet Never Seen Anti-Muslim Backlash.
If you choose 2, congratulations. You are now the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan.

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Davy Crockett

And now we present the smallest nuclear weapon ever fielded by the US Army: The Davy Crockett tactical nuclear system.

It had a range of only three miles, so it wasn't so much fire-and-forget as fire-and-run-like-the-clappers.

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If You Want Peace, Prepare for War

From the Telegraph:
The world should "prepare for war" with Iran, the French foreign minister has said, significantly escalating tensions over the country's nuclear programme.

Bernard Kouchner said that while "we must negotiate right to the end" with Iran, if Teheran possessed an atomic weapon it would represent "a real danger for the whole world".

The world should "prepare for the worst... which is war", he said.
At last we know where David Cameron shipped all those Conservative party spines.

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Squirrel for Breakfast

I was woken up this morning at about 6:30 by the wife asking me to "come and see what your dog did."

Whenever she calls Carl the Cattle Dog "my" dog it invariably means something unpleasant. Sure enough, as I stumbled blearily into the kitchen there was Carl sitting happy as a lark, wagging his tail and showing off the dead squirrel he'd brought in. It was not only dead, but rigid and dirty, which indicates that Carl had caught the little bugger the night before and had buried it until a more convenient time to show it off-- which turned out to be the crack of dawn. Thank God my wife intercepted him or he'd have plopped it on my pillow and I have no desire to go through a cheap remake of The Godfather.

If life keeps going on like this, I have GOT to get a Teasmade.

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Sunday, September 16, 2007

The Projected Man


It's been one of those days, so I'm handing over to Mike and the 'Bots with the classic bit of British Cheddar, The Projected Man.

Will Lembach stay? The tension is palpably bearable!

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Saturday, September 15, 2007

Shooting One's Foot

Al Qaeda has not only moved the Swedish Cartoon War from a question of "sensitivity" to deadly serious by putting a price on the head of the cartoonist and his editor, but they've also responded to their waning support in Iraq by declaring war on the very Sunnis they claim to champion.

Yup. All the foresight of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March.

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Foxhole Radio


This sort of fairy liquid bottle and string construction has always fascinated me, though in an emergency I think I'd fall back on the pocket-sized shortwave I keep in the car.

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Friday, September 14, 2007

Anti-Pigeon Device


http://view.break.com/365748 - Watch more free videos
I don't have a pool, but I WANT one of these!

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A Matter of Tenses

Reuters headline:
Cuban officials say Castro not dying
For once, I have no doubt they're speaking the truth.

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Thursday, September 13, 2007

The Machine Stops


The BBC's adaptation of E. M. Forsters classic 1909 science fiction parable.

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Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Boar Wars

Here's why I'll take good old-fashioned conservation over environmentalism any day. Two years ago animal rights criminals activists released 35 wild boars from a farm in order to "save" them. Since then, the giant porkers' numbers have risen to 175 and have wrecked so much havoc on the surrounding countryside, wildlife and livestock that the farmer, his business ruined, must hunt down and kill the lot.

Nice job of "saving" there.

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Brace Yourself, Svetlana

Today is Sex Day in Russia.

There is a Slavic sex manual joke here struggling mightily to get out.

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Tuesday, September 11, 2007

As If It Was Any Of Their Businees To Start With


The Eurocrats have announced that they've given up trying to force the metric system down the throats of the British people.

One word:

RESULT!

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