The Rusted Musket

Last nights Superbowl, with its very unexpected Saints win, most entertaining commercials, and decent halftime show, had one advertisement in particular that got me thinking. I speak of the Audi green police commercial, which was an alternate reality farcical take on extreme enviro nazi/green police recycling that some fictional country, perhaps America, embarks upon in order to attain Mother Gaia’s favor. The only one who gets along in the commercial, unscathed and unharassed, is the owner of a brand new Audi super clean diesel car. Here was my thought, what enviro nazi’s are to the  normal people in the Audi commercial is to what cap and trade policies are to business.

Not saying things one way or another, but I find it interesting that we recoil at the thought of Audi’s alternate reality being real while we apply this very same pseudo reality for real, to business, in the form of cap and trade…

Would you ever buy a car without first knowing how much it was going to cost? Of course not, stupid question. Alas, we routinely walk into hospitals and partake of their procedures and products without having a clue as to how much their procedures and products cost. We’ll send you the bill, a bill which usually mimics the price of a new car, sometimes much more so.

This lack of common sense cost transparency reminds me of that parlor game where you have a peanut hidden under one of three cups; quickly move around the cups and guess where the peanut is. Guessing where the price will be after insurance and hospital finish manipulating their “cups” is no better. This situation, could in part, be remedied by a posted price index of services. I’d be totally okay with the folks in Washington forcing the hospital/insurers hand in this regard. Iron out the costs, put these online, empower the patient!

Once again, the car dealership scenario of buying a car, driving it home, then, for the first time, becoming aware if its cost! Nonsensical, preposterous, why do we the people tolerate this very same bewildering model in heath care?

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….

Air America, Al Franken’s and Rachel Maddow’s alternative to Rush will be shutting down this next week Monday because really, the media was saturated enough with identical ideology easily found on MSNBC, CBS, and ABC. Ironically, this could hurt conservative talk radio in the long run as the polar opposite liberal viewpoint has disappeared, whereby making the possibility of tantalizing options such as “The Fairness Doctrine“, a counter weight. Because of this, I, along with other Conservatives lament the lose of this outlet for professional Liberals.

If only Air America had followed a format similar to NPR maybe they’d still be in business. The bottom line is this, despite its Liberal bent, NPR is so well produced that even me, a well versed Conservative, can still enjoy it…

It’s something I’ve known for some time, even though I’m not military and don’t even own one of these fantastic cutting edge scopes, at least not yet. For me, it was a fun little trivia fact that the serial number on an ACOG looks something like this: ACOG4X32JN8:12. Notice the end of the serial number, the JN8:12 part, it’s a reference to John 8:12 which says: “Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, ‘I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” Apparently New Zealand does not think it’s a fun little trivia fact and wants it removed from all of their 260 scopes, scopes they’ve been using since 2004. The reason, supposed religious tension that may ensue, because, as New Zealand already demonstrated, it’s such an obvious faux pas.

Trijicon is a individually owned, free market business, as such, they should be free to make their products, and their serial numbers as they see fit. They not need remove the serial number from their products and if you insist on thinking it may be offensive, then let me put it this way. Do you think knowledge of an obscure scriptural reference on a scope would spur Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s usurpers of political freedom any more than a secular, mostly reference free, guest army?

New Zealand, not Trijicon, needs to make a decision, do we use the best scopes in the world, scopes with a scriptural reference on them that took us six years to figure out, or not…

Update: And it looks like Trijicon caved in.

Photo Credit: Rifleshootermag

One of my favorite things is when a Federal Judge decides it is his/her responsibility to legislate from the bench.  Ok, so I guess sarcasm doesn’t necessarily come through in a text posting.  This is just another case of “what the ( _ )…”  (fill in the blank.)

Enjoy this fine nugget, courtesy of the Associated Press.

Last week, a Professor of mine found himself in a situation that provoked an interesting rant, I think the irony of said rant is fantastic, so here’s the story. It was the beginning of class, and the Professor in question wanted to erase the dry erase board, a simple enough thing. But lo and behold, the classroom contained not a single ounce of spritz solution, a four dollar liquidy substance needed in order to easily clean the dry erase board. So, while he was in the middle of trying to eradicate last hours teaching points, he turns to the class, and in a serious/crotchety tone says, “This is what budget cuts do.” Here’s the irony; it just so happens, that immediately to the right of the Professor, and the budget cut induced hard to erase dry erase board, is a brand new, installed that semester, SMARTboard which cost between 3,000-5,000 buckeroos. Oh the irony…

Thumbnail Credit: worthingtondirect.com

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.

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

If anyone out there had any doubt as to the size of the cluster funk the civilian trail of 9/11 terrorist Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali is going to be just take a second to absorb this interview of one of the attorneys representing him. Watch as the attorney wiggles around on whether the folks in the twin towers were murdered or not. Honestly, there’s a possibility that the trial might be thrown out and this thug freed within the first five minutes because we never read him his Miranda rights…