The Rusted Musket

Check out this hilarious video from The Onion:

U.S. Condemned For Pre-Emptive Use Of Hillary Clinton Against Pakistan

I came across this post a while ago and haven’t gotten a chance to write about this yet… I find it a little strange that the US military has a budget of hundreds of billions and they can’t even create a decent firewall for their combat drones… This worries me because these drones are going to get bigger and more powerful, so its probably only a matter of time before one gets “hacked” and turned on us… Its like Battlestar Galactica, they created the cylons (for those who haven’t seen the show, cylons are bipedal sentient machines) as a work force, I’m sure at first they seemed very benign, but in the end humanity is decimated by their creations.

We ought to be very careful going forward…

So I was surfing the web and came across this headline story about Trijicon. Apparently the founder of Trijicon was a christian and decided to put discrete biblical references on the optical sights they make.

If you are like me those numbers/letters look pretty random at first glance. I only noticed that they were references to verses because the stories said that they were. The interesting thing about all of this is that Trijicon has been doing this for 20-30 years and no one has said anything in all of that time… Why you may ask? Because its not a big deal, in fact it is a total non-issue. Only people looking for trouble are going to call these sights Jesus sights or some such crap. This whole “situation” is laughable, people are so ignorant and intolerant now that they can’t stand a discrete biblical reference. Get a life!! It is not proselytizing by having these on military equipment, especially considering they didn’t seem to notice or care before it hit the spotlight… They aren’t trying to convert anyone or force their beliefs on anyone, its just a reference….

So a US senator had a very interesting comment about government universal health care in this AP article:

Sanders, an independent and socialist, said his approach is the only one “which eliminates the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, administrative costs, bureaucracy and profiteering that is engendered by the private insurance companies.”

You see his comment is rather interesting because as I was reading it I could have swore he was talking about the federal government, specifically medicare and social security… Very interesting that he seems to think a government run option will be so efficient and waste-less, I mean just look at their excellent record deficit and astronomical debt, or the broken and nearly un-fixable social security debacle… Yep, lets let the government run our health care.

The title of this post is the title of a newspaper article that I read, and I must say that parts of the article made me very sad. Why you may ask? Well the gist of the article is that people sometimes give bad gifts at Christmas. I’m thinking, okay, yeah it happens, some gifts are pretty bad and should have been thought out a bit more. But the article went on to talk about some specific circumstances where women broke up with guys in part because of some bad gift decisions. Maybe, they weren’t bad, but more un-tasteful. Has our culture become so selfish that if a gift isn’t good enough that we’ll breakup or divorce the person that gave us that “bad” gift? If that is the case it is very very sad.

I understand that some people’s love language is receiving and giving gifts, but as it often seems is the case people (read guys) can have a hard time picking something out for their lady (not that women are always better at it). It is a spot that guys can work on, but it is really the thought that counts and if the gift is that bad talk to him/her about it and try to view it from their perspective, or just be happy that you are special enough to someone for them to get/make you a gift…

So if you’ve been following the news you’ve probably heard about the story about a leading global warming research unit’s data breach. Basically someone released a few thousand internal emails from the organization (its not clear whether it was a hacker or a internal person) and they have verified that these are legitimate emails. Funny thing is, all these emails discredit all their findings because it is hinted that they manipulated data to serve their uses…

Hopefully they will be brought under scrutiny from this and that people will take a hard look at the whole global warming debacle.

Here are two articles that explain more in depth:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/11/24/the_fix_is_in_99280.html

http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/01/climategate-scandal-science-obama-opinions-columnists-shikha-dalmia.html

According to this article the University system of California is raising college rates by more than 30%, which means that college costs have more than doubled in the last decade. Really makes you wonder what happened and where all the money goes. One student had this to say: “I think it’s outrageous,” Moody said of the fee increase. “They’ve already cut out a lot of our majors and programs. I’d rather they cut some of their (administrator) salaries.”  and I totally agree. Why don’t they cut the excessive teacher benefits and pay? I’ve often thought of going to teach for a State University because they get it easy… TAs do a lot of the work and they get summers off, great benefits and a rather high wage to boot… Sound like a bum’s dream job (okay I’m being a little harsh, but teacher’s wages are never looked at and/or reduced instead they cut programs and raise costs).

Just when I thought the California government couldn’t get more stupid I read this… The gist of the story is that the divinely inspired CA government is dictating down to a T what people can and can’t do. Now you can’t buy “power hungry” TVs (well not effective till Jan 2011). Most TVs are actually under the 2011 limit, but wait it gets better, they have to be even more efficient by 2013, which means you can basically kiss Plasmas and many LCDs goodbye, hello LED TVs… This crap legislation is just that, crap, what the hell are these people thinking? Fix your economy and build more powerplants. Don’t force people to do things like this. This is setting a scary precedent, I mean what is next? Probably cars I’m guessing, you won’t be able to drive a car longer than 60 inches or something like that, or they will all have to use CLFs, or buy solar panels for your house.

I’m just speechless about this… Some of the comments on the article are very worth reading, like one person comparing this to the book 1984….

So I just got a email today from the guys over at Front Sight and Ignatius gave his opinion of the Fort Hood shooting. Let me just say that I love his title: “The Swiss and Israelis Must Think We’re Idiots…” Ah, the Swiss and the Israelis, something like this is highly unlikely to happen in their countries…

He has some good insight and questions, I recommend reading his post… It is pretty sad when 13 soldiers die in a military base. This is the military, they should have been ARMED, they are soldiers after all. It is just mind boggling that something like this could happen at a army base. Can’t they trust their soldiers enough to at least allow them to carry pistols around base? How else are they going to get used to handling a gun? Like Ignatius I am pissed that something like this could happen and I think the blame lies mostly with whoever the idiot was that decided our soldiers couldn’t/shouldn’t be armed.

I’m glad to see the DC “Sniper” on death row, his ruthless killing should be harshly punished. Whats interesting in that article is that death penalty opponents are planning protests because they think that life imprisonment without parole is safe and punishment enough. I disagree; murderers, especially mass murderers like this guy, deserve to die for their crimes, why should he  get to live out the rest of his live when his victims didn’t get that chance? Also why should tax payers pay to feed and house this man for the rest of his life?