Al Gore’s light bill is $1200 a month.

Wow! And I thought I left too many lights on all the time. Memories of my father finding a superfluous light on in my childhood, and demanding indignantly: “What do you think? Have you got shares in the PP&L?” often bring a smile, and I’ve sometimes thought of buying a few shares of PPL, just so I could rhetorically justify my irresponsible habits in my own mind.

A day after a film about his efforts to combat global warming won an Oscar, former Vice President Al Gore was called a hypocrite by a Tennessee group that said his Belle Meade home is consuming too much energy.

The home’s average monthly electric bill last year was just under $1,200, according to bills that The Tennessean acquired from Nashville Electric Service.

“As the spokesman of choice for the global warming movement, Al Gore has to be willing to walk (the) walk, not just talk the talk, when it comes to home energy use,” said Drew Johnson, president of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, identified as a free-market think tank.

Al Gore’s house.

But Al Gore is rich enough, you see, to justify himself in even better and more creative ways.

Gore purchased 108 blocks of “green power” for each of the past three months, according to a summary of the bills.

That’s a total of $432 a month Gore paid extra for solar or other renewable energy sources.

The green power Gore purchased in those three months is equivalent to recycling 2.48 million aluminum cans or 286,092 pounds of newspaper, according to comparison figures on NES’ Web site.

But this greenie site points out that Gore is buying those credits from his own firm.

So, where does Gore buy his ‘carbon offsets’? According to The Tennessean newspaper’s report, Gore buys his carbon offsets through Generation Investment Management. a company he co-founded and serves as chairman:

Gore helped found Generation Investment Management, through which he and others pay for offsets. The firm invests the money in solar, wind and other projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe…

As co-founder and chairman of the firm Gore presumably draws an income or will make money as its investments prosper. In other words, he “buys” his “carbon offsets” from himself, through a transaction designed to boost his own investments and return a profit to himself. To be blunt, Gore doesn’t buy “carbon offsets” through Generation Investment Management – he buys stocks

Cool! Albert Gore takes some money out his right pocket, buys some carbon offsets from himself, and then puts the money in his left pocket, and voila! he has saved enough of the planet by that clever transaction to immunize himself from Don Surber’s description of him as some kind of an alleged:

born-to-the-manor, overfed, limousine liberal who consume(s) 22,000 kilowatts of electricity each year* in just one of his three homes.

• More than 20 times the National average.

link

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

Waves freeze as they crash on the beach in Newfoundland.

5:11 video

The unintelligible language being spoken in the background is Newfie.

The Internet offers some very interesting video offerings these days.

Here is a vintage movie short, titled Salar the Leaper, made in 1957 on New Brunswick’s Miramichi River by the illustrious fly-fishing authority Lee Wulff (1905-1991).

Part 1 – 3:43 video (Unfortunately interrupted right in the middle.)

Part 2 – 4:21 video

An Army Times article by Mathew Cox describes the problems still afflicting the US military’s primary long arm, and identifies Heckler & Koch’s 416 as the generally desired, but unavailable, alternative.

Ever since the Army’s adoption of the M16 in the mid-1960s, a love-hate relationship has existed between combat troops and the weapon known as the “black rifle.”

It’s accurate and easy to shoot. Plus, the M16’s light weight and small caliber helped soldiers carry more ammunition than ever before into battle.

The M16, however, has always required constant cleaning to prevent it from jamming. The gas system, while simple in design, blows carbon into the receiver, which can lead to fouling.

The Army has decided to replace most of its M16s with the newer M4 carbine. The Army started buying M4s in the mid-1990s but mainly reserved them for rapid-deployment combat units. Its collapsible stock and shortened barrel make it ideal for soldiers operating in vehicles and tight quarters associated with urban combat.

Experts, however, contend that the M4 in many ways is even less reliable than the M16.

Special Operations Command documented these problems in a 2001 report, “M4A1 5.56mm Carbine and Related Systems Deficiencies and Solutions: Operational and Technical Study with Analysis of Alternatives.”

The M4 suffers from an “obsolete operating system,” according to the report, which recommended “redesign/replacement of current gas system.” It describes the weapon’s shortened barrel and gas tube as a “fundamentally flawed” design and blames it for problems such as “failure to extract” and “failure to eject” during firing. “The current system was never designed for the rigors of SOF use and training regimens — the M4 Carbine is not the gun for all seasons,” the report concluded.

Read the whole thing.

HK 416 Wikipedia article

Fox News reports:

The professional genealogists, who work for Ancestry.com, found that Sharpton’s great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was a slave owned by Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was Strom Thurmond’s great-great-grandfather. Coleman Sharpton was later freed.

It’s a small world after all.

Kyuso Mifune

Kyuso Mifune (1883-1965), probably the greatest exponent of judo of all-time, astonishes in this 7:19 video.

Kudokan bio

Kyuzo Mifune’s Rules of the Dojo.
——————————————————————
The above excerpt was taken from the 1:3:16 The Essence of Judo, also happily available on-line.

The Goddess Virginia may have Tyranny down, but Stupidity has gotten the better of her.

If you ever needed a demonstration of the worthlessness and cowardice of today’s politicians, you received it yesterday in Richmond, when both houses of the Virginia General Assembly bowed to pressure from journalists and race-baiting agitators, and voted to apologize for Slavery, and for some unspecified “exploitation of Native Americans” to boot.

AP story.

Well, the poltroons in the Virgina Assembly and the PC agitators waving the bloody shirt can go to Hell, as far as I am concerned. I reside in the Commonwealth of Virginia these days, and I do not apologize.

In the first place, not one single member of my family had even left Lithuania for the United States until 30 years after the War Between the States was concluded and Slavery abolished.

And my wife is entitled to excuse herself as well on the same grounds. Her father’s ancestors departed from Odessa in the 1890s, and her mother was a war-bride from Belgium who arrived in America during the later days of WWII.

Secondly, I do not support any form or concept of hereditary group guilt or entitlement. Whoever may have held slaves, or been enslaved, a century and a half ago, they are all dead and gone. Most living people cannot even trace their ancestry that far back. Events so distant and remote in time have no authentically identifiable current significance, and no one alive today ought to feel either personal guilt or animosity on the basis of events which took place three to five generations before his birth.

In a better age, crowds of irate citizens would have descended upon that Assembly of nincompoops and tarred and feathered the ringleaders behind this travesty in order to discourage with certainty a repetition of such dishonorable and cowardly forms of pandering to stupidity.

The London Times tells us that the Pentagon is riddled with pacifists, cowards, and traitors.

Some of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources.

Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learnt that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack.

“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”

A British defence source confirmed that there were deep misgivings inside the Pentagon about a military strike. “All the generals are perfectly clear that they don’t have the military capacity to take Iran on in any meaningful fashion. Nobody wants to do it and it would be a matter of conscience for them.

“There are enough people who feel this would be an error of judgment too far for there to be resignations.”

Can you imagine the unmitigated gall of more than one US military officer confiding a lack of confidence in the elected civilian administration they are serving to foreign journalists?

Cowardice in the face of the enemy has been traditionally treated as a capital offense by the military. These generals could be court-martialed, then taken out, stood up against the wall, and shot.

But, from the point of view of the good of the service, their separation ought to be regarded as so significant a benefit that I’d even say their lives should be spared, and they should be permitted quietly to resign.

Will Collier evidently successfully confirmed the authenticity of this amusing email war story:

Hi everyone. I’m still alive but freezing my tail off. We got 8 inches of snow last week and it reached 5 degrees below zero that night. That’s not why I’m e-mailing though.

You may have heard about a suicide car bomb attack in Kabul last Thursday. It was at one of our FOB’s (Forward Observation Bases) about 27 miles from here.

But the real story is why no one was killed. We employ several thousand Afghans on our various bases. Not to mention the economy that is fed by the money these locals are making. Some are laborers and builders, but some are skilled workers. We even have one Afghan that just became OSHA qualified, the first ever. Some are skilled HVAC workers.

Anyway, there is this one Afghan that we call Rambo. We have actually given him a couple of sets of the new ACU uniforms (the new Army digital camouflage) with the name tag RAMBO on it. His entire family was killed by the Taliban and his home was where our base currently resides. So this guy really had nowhere else to go.

He has reached such a level of trust with US Forces that his job is to stand at the front gate and basically be the first security screening. Since he can’t have a weapon, he found a big red pipe. So he stands there at the front gate in his US Army ACU uniform with his red pipe. If a vehicle approaches the gate too fast or fails to stop he slams his pipe down on their hood… He’s like the first line of defense.

Last Thursday at 0930 hrs a Toyota Corolla packed with explosives and some Jack Ass that thinks he has 72 Virgins waiting for him approached the gate. When he saw Rambo he must have recognized him and known the gig was up. But he needed to get to the gate to detonate and take American lives. So he slams his foot on the gas which almost causes the metal gate to go up but mostly catches on the now broken windshield.

Rambo fearlessly ran to the vehicle, reached thru the window and jerked the suicide bomber out of the vehicle before he could detonate and commenced to putting some red pipe to his heathen ass. He detained the guy until the MP got there. The vehicle only exploded when they tried to push it off base with a robot but know one was hurt.

I’m still waiting for someone to give this guy a medal or something. Nothing less than instant US citizenship or something. A hat was passed around and a lot of money was given to him in thanks by both soldiers and civilians that are working over here.

I guess I just wanted to share this because I want people to know that it’s working over here. They have tasted freedom. This makes it worth it to me.

Hat tip to PJM.

Jim Zumbo was never the equal as a writer, or nearly as famous, as some of the great men preceding him as editors at century-old Outdoor Life magazine. But he had a pretty good career going as an Outdoor writer, serving as Hunting Editor for Outdoor Life, appearing weekly on the Outdoor Channel, representing Remington, and publishing a long series of books and a host of magazine articles, until now.

All that success evidently went to Zumbo’s head, and he recently started throwing around censorious and intolerant opinions on his blog about the alleged lack of sportsmanship of long-range game shooting, and the inappropriateness of using semi-automatic rifles of military style for shooting varmints, like coyotes and prairie dogs.

on 2/5:

Long range shooting

While at the SHOT Show recently, I ran into a guy who complained that too many hunters were taking excessively long shots. He’s an outfitter, and witnessed plenty of people shooting at elk at distances greater than 350 yards. He suggested that that was too far, primary because the majority of those hunters had no clue of ballistics. Most were “Hail Mary” shots. I agree. We read about people making 500 yard shots and more, and that, to me, is ridiculous.

Then at the SCI convention last week, I talked to a guy who bragged that his custom gun kills deer out at 800 yards and better. To each his own, I suppose, but that isn’t hunting. It’s shooting. And I don’t care how great a marksman you are. The risk of wounding an animal at extremely long ranges is high, and where’s the sportsmanship, the ethics, the satisfaction of taking outrageously long shots? I understand there’s a group in PA that shoots deer at 1,000 yards and more. More power to them. Just don’t ask me to support that kind of “hunting.”

and on 2/16

(the url used to be: http://outdoorlife.blogs.com/zumbo/2007/02/assault_rifles_.html – but the post has since been removed.)

Assault Rifles For Hunters?

As I write this, I’m hunting coyotes in southeastern Wyoming with Eddie Stevenson, PR Manager for Remington Arms, Greg Dennison, who is senior research engineer for Remington, and several writers. We’re testing Remington’s brand new .17 cal Spitfire bullet on coyotes.

I must be living in a vacuum. The guides on our hunt tell me that the use of AR and AK rifles have a rapidly growing following among hunters, especially prairie dog hunters. I had no clue. Only once in my life have I ever seen anyone using one of these firearms.

I call them “assault” rifles, which may upset some people. Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. I’ll go so far as to call them “terrorist” rifles. They tell me that some companies are producing assault rifles that are “tackdrivers.”

Sorry, folks, in my humble opinion, these things have no place in hunting. We don’t need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them, which is an obvious concern. I’ve always been comfortable with the statement that hunters don’t use assault rifles. We’ve always been proud of our “sporting firearms.”

This really has me concerned. As hunters, we don’t need the image of walking around the woods carrying one of these weapons. To most of the public, an assault rifle is a terrifying thing. Let’s divorce ourselves from them. I say game departments should ban them from the prairies and woods.

A bit over a week later, Outdoor Life has fired him, Remington has severed his corporate sponsorship ties, and the Outdoor Channel has reportedly dropped him.

Thw Washington Post is publishing tomorrow a shocked story on the Unforgiving Response from U.S. Gun Culture.

A firestorm of criticism swept Internet shooting sites, and Mr. Zumbo apologized very profusely 2/18:

I was wrong, BIG TIME
Someone once said that to err is human. I just erred, and made without question, the biggest blunder in my 42 years of writing hunting articles.

My blog inflamed legions of people I love most….. hunters and shooters. Obviously, when I wrote that blog, I activated my mouth before engaging my brain.

Let me explain the circumstances surrounding that blog. I was hunting coyotes, and after the hunt was over and being beat up by 60 mph winds all day, I was discussing hunting with one of the young guides. I was tired and exhausted, and I should have gone to bed early. When the guide told me that there was a “huge” following of hunters who use AR 15’s and similar weapons to hunt prairies dogs, I was amazed. At that point I wrote the blog, and never thought it through.

Now then, you might not believe what I have to say, but I hope you do. How is it that Zumbo, who has been hunting for more than 50 years, is totally ignorant about these types of guns. I don’t know. I shot one once at a target last year, and thought it was cool, but I never considered using one for hunting. I had absolutely no idea how vast the numbers of folks are who use them.

I never intended to be divisive, and I certainly believe in United we Stand, Divided we Fall. I’ve been an NRA member for 40 years, have attended 8 national NRA conventions in the last 10 years, and I’m an advisory board member for the United States Sportsmen’s Alliance which actively fights anti-hunters and animal rights groups for hunter’s rights.

What really bothers me are some of the unpatriotic comments leveled at me. I fly the flag 365 days a year in my front yard. Last year, through an essay contest, I hosted a soldier wounded in Iraq to a free hunt in Botswana. This year, through another essay contest, I’m taking two more soldiers on a free moose and elk hunt.

When I started blogging, I was told to write my thoughts, expressing my own opinion. The offensive blog I wrote was MY opinion, and no one else’s. None of the companies that I deal with share that opinion, nor were they aware of what I had written until this firestorm started.

Believe it or not, I’m your best friend if you’re a hunter or shooter, though it might not seem that way. I simply screwed up. And, to show that I’m sincere about this, I just talked to Ted Nugent, who everyone knows, and is a Board member of the NRA. Ted is extremely active with charities concerning our wounded military, and though he’s known as a bowhunter, Ted has no problem with AR 15’s and similar firearms. My sincerity stems from the fact that Ted and I are planning a hunt using AR 15’s. I intend to learn all I can about them, and again, I’m sorry for inserting my foot in my mouth.”

Of course, Field & Stream’s David E. Petzal, in 1994, got away with endorsing the original Assault Weapons Ban (which he, however, did criticize for being too broad):

Gun owners—all gun owners—pay a heavy price for having to defend the availability of these weapons. The American public—and the gun-owning public; especially the gun-owning public—would be better off without the hardcore military arms, which puts the average sportsman in a real dilemma.”

I certainly felt back then that Field & Stream had no business employing a man with Petzal’s views as Shooting Editor, and I told them precisely that in the letter I sent canceling my subscription, which I had maintained continuously since the late 1950s.

Petzal is more careful today, but he actually has the chutzpah to deny that he endorsed the Assault Weapons Ban back in ‘94.

I guess my personal position is that all this should have happened to David E. Petzal back in 1994, and then it wouldn’t be happening to Jim Zumbo today.

Beavers (Castor canadensis) are back in New York City’s Bronx River.

AP story (with video link):

Beavers grace New York City’s official seal. But the industrious rodents have not been seen in the flesh here for as many as 200 years—until this week.

Biologists videotaped a beaver swimming up the Bronx River on Wednesday. Its twig-and-mud lodge had been spotted earlier on the river bank, but the tape confirmed the presence of the animal itself.

“It had to happen because beaver populations are expanding, and their habitats are shrinking,” said Dietland Muller-Schwarze, a beaver expert at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. “We’re probably going to see more of them in the future.”

Beavers gnawed out a prominent place in the city’s early days as a European settlement, attracting fur traders to a nascent Manhattan. The animal appears in the city seal to symbolize a Dutch trading company that factored in the city’s colonial beginnings, according to the city’s Web site.

But amid heavy trapping, beavers disappeared from the city in the early 1800s, according to the city Parks & Recreation Department.

The beaver that has made its way to the Bronx appears to be a male, several feet long and 2 or 3 years old, said Patrick Thomas, the mammals curator at the nearby Bronx Zoo.

Biologists have nicknamed the animal “Jose,” as a tribute to U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano’s work to revive the river. The Bronx Democrat lined up federal money for a cleanup.

I can tell those biologists that before very long that beaver, and his cronies, will have a nice dam built, which will cause the river to overflow its banks, and make a nice swampy mess for the Parks & Recreation Department to clean up.

That beaver’s name will then be mud, and the New York authorities be busying themselves to see to it that the city’s future will be as beaver-less as its recent past.

Beavers are amusing animals, but they generally produce big trouble for people.

The earliest American report seems to have been January 30 at The Manic Mechanic:

So, this man in Portugal buys a farm (as opposed to ‘buying the farm’, as it were). Apparently the property owner died and the farm was put up for sale. Pretty satisfied of his purchase he wanders about the property sizing up what might need attention. An old, unused barn that will probably need cleaning out was part of the deal. Upon making his way inside the barn he finds that, indeed, the place needs more than a little cleaning…

The story was originally linked from this Dutch site, which has since removed the link. The Dutch site led to a Norwegian Mazda owners site (Google-cached version) leading to the conclusion that the lucky buyer was Norwegian.

It is still unconfirmed, and an urban legend/hoax of some kind is suspected, but the story is he found 180 vintage cars.

photos

I first came across the story at Maggie’s Farm.

The liberal view of the universe

Liberals confuse a consensus of journalists, celebrities, and do-gooders, combined with activist science, with something meaningful. If they lived in the 1920s, they’d be championing eugenics. If they lived in the 1880s, they’d be worried about sex as a health threat and the rising tide of inferior races. These kinds of consensi are always wrong.

Sophisters, calculators, and economists have cooked up models and projections based on various kinds of data, but we really know perfectly well that mankind does not understand the typical duration and causes of climate cycles and periods of glaciation, and cannot accurately predict weather more than a week in advance.

The theory of Global Warming is ultimately based on nothing more than the unavailability, post-1980, of a continuing pattern of cooler weather. When it had been getting colder for a few years, the same kinds of authority were projecting a new Ice Age, brought about by mankind’s hubris in creating industrial civilization with attendant contamination of pristine Nature. The vital remedy was more taxes and greater regulatory restriction of American productivity and energy consumption. When temperature trends reversed, curiously enough, the causes and the cure remained exactly the same. The only change is that the media and the left went from agitating over Global Cooling to agitating over Global Warming without missing a beat, and essentially the same agitprop has simply increased in volume and alleged urgency for years.

What depresses me is the fact that Americans can emerge from 16+ years of education still capable of falling for this kind of ridiculous nonsense. To believe in Global Warming, I’d say, you have to be basically unconscious of the highly limited state of human knowledge of the earth’s past. We know that there were periods in which the planet’s climate was considerably cooler than at present, and we know that there were periods when it was considerably warmer. We do not have anything like exhaustive knowledge of the climate throughout earth’s geologic history. Nor do we now why periods of different climate occurred.

The rise of modern science of geology goes back roughly two lousy centuries. Continental drift, a fairly basic factor in geologic matters, was not even accepted before the 1960s, within many of our lifetimes. When that bozo on the evening news starts describing today’s temperature as an all-time record, what kind of records do you suppose he’s working with? Exactly how meaningful is anything of the sort? What can 20+ years of slightly warmer weather signify?

I attribute this lunacy to a combination of too much city living and Hollywood. There has been an endless stream of horror movies about Godzilla rising from Tokyo Bay, giant ants, mutated this, or catastrophic that, all attributable to the wickedness of mankind’s pursuit of material gratification. Today’s citified Americans all believe that they are the absolute center of the universe, and that the world and man’s position in it resembles the old New Yorker cartoon of the view from 9th Avenue. If I dropped all the liberals somewhere west of the Missouri and they had to walk out, their view of man’s centrality in the universe would be changed mightily.

And have been recently been equating some opinion polls showing high percentages of opposition to the War in Iraq with an electoral mandate.

Let’s see how they like this poll by Public Opinion Strategies (POS).

reported by New Media Journal:

57% of those polled agreed with the statement, “I support finishing the job in Iraq, that is, keeping the troops there until the Iraqi government can maintain control and provide security for their people.”..

57% of those polled believed that Iraq was central to the War on Terrorism and our struggle against global Islamofascist aggression…

53% believe the Democrats are going too far in pressing the president to withdraw troops.

56% believe that even if they harbor concerns about the president’s policies that Americans should stand behind the president in Iraq because we are at war.

59% believe that it would hurt American prestige more to pull out of Iraq immediately than it would to stay there for the long term, until the job was finished successfully.

and the New York Post:

53 percent to 43 percent… believe victory in Iraq over the insurgents is still possible…

Only 25 percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement, “I don’t really care what happens in Iraq after the U.S. leaves, I just want the troops brought home.” Seventy-four percent disagreed…

When given a choice of four policies, an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops was the least popular (17 percent).

AP reports that a mugger in Costa Rica picked the wrong group of seniors, one which obviously included a retired American with expertise in hand-to-hand combat.

A tour group of U.S. senior citizens fought off a band of muggers in eastern Costa Rica, sending two of the assailants fleeing and killing a third, police said Thursday.

One of the tourists — a retired U.S. serviceman whom officials estimated was in his 70s — allegedly put Warner Segura in a headlock and broke his clavicle after the 20-year-old and two other men armed with a knife and gun held up their tour bus Wednesday, said Luis Hernandez, the police chief of Limon, 130 kilometers (80 miles) east of San Jose.

The Americans had arrived in Limon on the Carnival Cruise Lines ship Carnival Liberty.

“It was a group of 12 senior citizens from the United States who were going to spend a few hours in the area, but their tour bus entered a dangerous sector known as Cieneguita”, Hernandez said.

The tourists drove Segura to the local Red Cross branch but he was declared dead, Hernandez said. He declined to give the names or hometowns of the tourists.

The Red Cross also treated one of the tourists for an anxiety attack, Hernandez said.

Costa Rican authorities said they did not plan to file charges against the tourists, who left on their cruise ship after the incident.

“They were in their right to defend themselves after being held up,” Hernandez said.

Hernandez said Segura had previous charges against him for assaults.

It certainly sounds like he broke the mugger’s veterbrae, not his clavicle.

An elderly man would be likely to be pessimistic about his chances in a contest of speed or strength with a significantly younger opponent. Consequently, the American retiree must have resorted to a lethal attack. If he were younger, doubtless, he would have incapacitated and not killed the mugger.

The New York Post identifies the American hero as Allan Clady, a 70 year old retired Marine.

The Washington Post reports that House Republican inquiries have revealed that Sandy Berger’s removal of Clinton Administration secret memos from the National Archives was treated with surprising incuriosity by certain elements in the Justice Department.

A report last month by the Republican staff of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said for the first time that Berger’s visits were so badly mishandled that Archives officials had acknowledged not knowing if he removed anything else and destroyed it. The committee further argued that the 9/11 Commission should have been told more about Berger and about Brachfeld’s concerns, a suggestion that resonated with Philip Zelikow, the commission’s former executive director.

Zelikow said in an interview last week that “I think all of my colleagues would have wanted to have all the information at the time that we learned from the congressional report, because that would have triggered some additional questions, including questions we could have posed to Berger under oath.”

The commission’s former general counsel, Dan Marcus, now an American University law professor, separately expressed surprise at how little the Justice Department told the commission about Berger and said it was “a little unnerving” to learn from the congressional report exactly what Berger reviewed at the Archives and what he admitted to the FBI — including that he removed and cut up three copies of a classified memo.

“If he took papers out, these were unique records, and highly, highly classified. Had a document not been produced, who would have known?” Brachfeld said in an interview. “I thought [the 9/11 Commission] should know, in current time — in judging Sandy Berger as a witness . . . that there was a risk they did not get the full production of records.”

In an April 1, 2005, press conference and private statements to the commission, the Justice Department stated instead that Berger had access only to copied documents, not originals. They also said the sole documents Berger admitted taking — five copies of a 2001 terrorism study — were later provided to the commission.

Those assertions conflicted with a September 2004 statement to Brachfeld by Nancy Kegan Smith, who directs the Archives’ presidential documents staff and let Berger view the documents in her office in violation of secrecy rules. Smith said “she would never know what if any original documents were missing,” Brachfeld reported in an internal memo.

In a letter to House lawmakers last week, Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard A. Hertling did not address the issue of why the department told the commission so little. But Hertling wrote that in numerous interviews, “neither Mr. Berger nor any other witness provided the Department with evidence that Mr. Berger had taken any documents beyond the five.”

There must have been something very damaging in there. Possibly some very conspicuous failure to deal with Osama bin Laden during the late 1990s, well before 9/11, which was sufficiently embarassing to William Jefferson Clinton that Sandy Berger was willing to take some serious risks to remove from the record.

The Clintons apparently have dodged another bullet. You almost have to admire their adroitness at doing exactly as they please, and then baffling their opponents with brilliant and brazen maneuvers when in danger of being called to account. Remember the missing Rose Law Firm records which turned up in the White House finally, very shortly after the Statute of Limitations had expired?

says Virginia blogger SWAC Girl:

America is not at war.
The Marine Corps is at war;
America is at the mall.”

Hat tip to F22Strike.

Hillary Clinton goes to a primary school in New York to talk about the world. After her talk she offers a question time.

One little boy puts up his hand. The Senator asks him what his name is.

“Kenneth.”

“And what is your question, Kenneth?”

“I have three questions: First – whatever happened to the medical health care plan you were paid to develop during your husband’s eight years in the office as President? Second – why would you run for President after your husband shamed the office? Third – whatever happened to all those things you took when you left the White House?”

Just then the bell rings for recess. Hillary Clinton informs the kids that they will continue after recess.

When they resume, Hillary says, “Okay, where were we? Oh, that’s right, question time. Who has a question?”

A different little boy put his hand up. Hillary asked him what his name is.

“Larry.”

“And what is your question, Larry?”

“I have five questions: First – whatever happened to the medical health care plan you were paid to develop during your husband’s eight years in the office as President? Second – why would you run for President after your husband shamed the office? Third – whatever happened to all thosethings you took when you left the White House? Fourth – why did the recess bell go off 20 minutes early? Fifth – what happened to Kenneth?”

AP reports: House votes to “support troops,” but opposes sending additional troops to complete the mission.

Hat tip to Roger de Hauteville at Maggie’s Farm.

nyc-architecture.com has a photo collection on New York City’s lost Pennsylvania Station:

Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.” – “Farewell to Penn Station,” New York Times editorial, October 30, 1963

Hat tip to The Barrister, who writes:

There was a fervor for tearing down old buildings in urban American during the 1960s and early 70s. Many historic, but dilapidated, downtowns were bulldozed, as were countless wonderful “Union Stations” – and anything else that seemed “old”.

Today, we cherish towns like Savannah which were left untouched by the government scourge of “urban renewal.”

19th century housing was replaced by “modern” Soviet-style planned and government-subsidized housing projects (which finally are beginning to be dynamited themselves, for good reason). And the buildings were replaced with parking lots and sterile semi-high rises, and malls – that horrible concept which turns its back on the town in an effort to create an unreal, soul-less consumer paradise for the masses.

When you drive through downtown Bridgeport, CT, Hartford, or Nashville, you will be hard put to find an old building. Lucky towns escaped this frenzy of “modernization,” which I term “dehumanization.” Nobody wants to be in those sorts of downtowns.

Pennsylvania Station on the West Side of Manhattan – one of the masterpieces of the beaux-art movement – did not escape the epidemic of destruction. Grand Central Station escaped – but only barely. Just tell me – where would you rather wait 40 minutes for a train to meet your girlfriend or boyfriend – the new Penn Station, or Grand Central?..

Who would have the nerve to knock this thing down and replace it with the new (and truly terrible in every way) Madison Square Garden?

Investors Business Daily condemns the House democrat leadership’s “slow bleed” strategy

As chairman of the House panel that oversees military spending, (John) Murtha plans to advance legislation next month attaching strings to the additional war funds Bush requested on Feb. 5.

Murtha plans to stop the Iraq War by placing four conditions on combat funds through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. The Pentagon would have to certify that troops being sent to Iraq are “fully combat ready” with training and equipment, troops must have at least one year at home between combat deployments, combat deployments cannot be longer than a year, and extending tours of duty would be prohibited…

It’s not that the Democrats think we’re losing or that the war is unwinnable. They simply don’t want to win it. As House Minority Leader John Boehner said of Murtha’s proposals: “While American troops are fighting radical Islamic terrorists thousands of miles away, it is unthinkable that the United States Congress would move to discredit their mission, cut off their reinforcements and deny them the resources they need to succeed and return home safely.”..

Neville Chamberlain’s naivete may have helped bring on World War II, but at least he supported his country when war began. Norway’s Vidkun Quisling and France’s Vichy government under Marshal Petain may have collaborated with the Nazi enemy, but after their countries’ defeats, not before.

We’d have to go back to Benedict Arnold to find Americans as eager as Murtha & Co. to see an American defeat on the battlefield.

Read the whole thing.

————————————

But Robert Farley argues that these kinds of accusations have serious implications.

IBD seems to be claiming that the vast bulk of the Democratic Party (and no small part of the Republican) are the equivalent of the most notable traitor in American history, a man who undoubtedly would have been hanged or shot if he had been caught. The editorial has been linked to approvingly by Captain’s Quarters, Powerline (sic), Instapundit, and the Gateway Pundit. Reynolds further notes:

To some people, Vietnam wasn’t a defeat, but a victory. To them, the right side won. And lost. Naturally, they’re happy to repeat the experience.

Undoubtedly, the Perfesser and his ilk will claim that they aren’t actually calling for treason trials and executions of members of the Democratic Party. But why not? If Democrats really are the equivalent of Benedict Arnold, and if opposition to the war and the Surge is traitorous, then why shouldn’t we be tried and executed, or at least imprisoned? The rhetoric leads only one place. Either Glenn Reynolds believes that Democrats are traitors, or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, he should tell us why, and should explain why he so often suggests that Democrats have committed treasonable offenses. If he does believe that Democrats are traitors, then he ought to step up and start calling for arrests. Treason is a capital offense; there’s not really a middle ground. We’re guilty, or we’re not.

Sadly, but perhaps fortunately, Reynolds et al are too gutless to pursue the logical consequence of their accusation. So far, anyway..

The problem is that the current administration has tried to make war while neglecting this particular line of logic. America’s Vietnam experience demonstrated the capacity of the radical peace movement to use its relations with the academic clerisy and the media to turn treason and defeatism into a de rigeur fashion statement of membership in the American elite.

During WWI and WII, the wars which America won during the last century, preaching defeatism and rendering aid and comfort to the enemy were simply not tolerated.

The US Government has the obligation to the members of its armed forces whom it sends into harm’s way to prevent their service and sacrifices being made futile by the domestic demoralization of the American public by a defeatist minority of radical leftists and pacifists.

Victoria Toensing, who in 1982 as chief council to the Senate Intelligence Committee played a key role in the drafting of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, believes the law was never violated in the case of Valerie Plame, and suggests a number of persons and entities she considers more worthy of charges in the Plame Affair than Scooter Libby.

I found this morning that I’d had another of the SQL database corruption incidents overnight.

The last backup, it turned out, was done in the midst of an upgrade, and was consequently defective. And my support guy is out of town at a conference.

I’m lucky that I was able to get things fixed myself.

I need to restore some posts, and then we will be back in normal operation again.

My apologies to readers for the inconvenience.

The McCain campaign has some very professionally produced videos on its website, which are worth a look. Some of the left blogs are screaming in indignation about them.

The tribute to Reagan (and to Goldwater) is very nice indeed. Pity that John McCain is not a Reagan and Goldwater Republican after all.

Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University, has a son who wanted a WWII-themed birthday party last Fall, and some of their suburban neighbors were not amused.

His wife, Brigid Schulte, described the responses in the Washington Post last December 11th:

How do you explain to your neighbors in Alexandria that you’re hosting a war party? More, why are you hosting a war party? I wasn’t sure myself. I only knew that Liam had his heart set on it.

One mother said no right away. “We’re trying to get him away from guns.”

Others were wary. I assured them that the Germans would be an imaginary enemy. We’d have boot camp, a map-finding activity—granted, for a sniper’s nest, ammo dump and secret war plans—and have them jump off picnic tables for the parachute drop.

I promised it would be an, uh, “educational experience.” I had Liam write a short “Road to D-Day” history that he would read to his troops in the ratline. We wrote up the military alphabet, cleaned up the words to the airborne infantry song, downloaded Glenn Miller tunes to play in the mess hall and even printed out a program for the party.

One mother worried that her daughter would be left out. No, no, I assured her, she was going to be a medic, and a friend was building a cool field hospital and ripping up sheets for bandages.

“In that case,” she said, “I’ll bring the blood.”

Turley reflects on the reactions in USAToday this week.

As soon as the invitations went out, a couple of parents politely declined to let their children come to a war-themed party. Afterward, Brigid — a Washington Post reporter — wrote a short piece about the party, and the response from outraged readers was fast and furious. Describing the whole affair as deeply disturbing, one reader chastised Brigid for giving into the base, violent inclinations of her son: “Here’s a novel idea: Say no. Tell him that war is sad and horrible and should never be a cause for celebration.”

There is a palpable sense among such playground objectors that boys harbor some deep dormant monster that, once awakened, inevitably ends with the invasion of Poland or a massacre at My Lai. Of course, millions of men played war games as kids without becoming war criminals. To the contrary, playing war was for most men an early type of morality play, defining values of sacrifice and selflessness. George Orwell once observed that a war-weary parent “who sees his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do.”

To teach that all war is immoral is to deny the absolute values that frame a truly moral life. Arguably, the view of all war as immoral is itself amoral. Whether it is World War II or the first Gulf War, there are wars worth fighting and causes worth dying — and yes, killing — for. The failure of the world to fight in Rwanda and Darfur are, in my view, amoral acts of omission.

Read the whole thing.

Jonah Goldberg has fun scaring himself, and the rest of us, thinking about a democrat winning in 2008, and being in charge of defending America against Islamic terrorism. Hillary is certainly ruthless enough, but still…

There is an idea out there. Perhaps not a fully formed one. Perhaps more like the whisper of one gusting like a sudden draft through the rafters of the conservative house, causing some to look toward the attic and ask fearfully, “What was that?”

This wisp of a notion is simply this: Maybe a Democrat should win in 2008…

The idea goes something like this: If you believe that the war on terror is real — really real — then you think it is inevitable that more and bloodier conflicts with radical Islam are on the way, regardless of who is in the White House. If the clash of civilizations is afoot, then the issues separating Democrats and Republicans are as pressing as whether the captain of the Titanic is going to have fish or chicken for dinner…

..if you really think that we are in an existential conflict with a deadly enemy, there’s a good case for the Democrats to take the reins. Not because Democrats are better, wiser or more responsible about foreign policy. That’s a case for Democrats to make about themselves and certainly not one many on the right believe. No, the argument, felt in places we don’t talk about at cocktail parties, is that the Democrats have been such irresponsible backseat drivers that they have to be forced to take the wheel to grasp how treacherous the road ahead is.

Try sleeping tonight after thinking about that!

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to David Larkin.

Too cowardly to take an open stand insisting upon American defeat and withdrawal, which might have political consequences, the democrat leadership in the House of Representatives has devised a strategy in which John Murtha, now Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Committee, will bring to bear the same low cunning which served him so well during theAbscam investigation, when he declined to accept a bribe (while being taped) “at this point.”

At this point, Murtha will not try to defund the US military effort in Iraq, he will simply attach a variety of restrictions on spending and troop deployments, threatening Republicans with a complete cutoff of funds if they try to oppose such restrictions.

The Politico reports:

new restrictions on how the president can deploy combat forces from the United States to Iraq, allow combat veterans to have at least one year stateside before returning to the frontlines and prevent the Pentagon from keeping soldiers and Marines already in Iraq in uniform after their enlistments expire.

“This vote will limit the options of the president and should stop the surge,” Murtha predicted of next month’s floor fight over the wartime supplemental appropriation. “We’re trying to force redeployment [of troops outside Iraq], not by taking money away but by redirecting it.”

Murtha is not pushing a total cutoff of funds for the war in Iraq…

The strategy being employed by Murtha and other House Democratic leaders would force Bush and Republican congressional leaders to accept the new troop restrictions, or face the possibility the supplemental spending bill would falter, thus cutting off all funding for the war.

Democrats are betting that Bush and the Republicans won’t take that risk and will go along with the Democratic proposals. And Republican leaders are not taking Murtha’s threats lightly.

The Telegraph finally reaches the conclusion which has been obvious to many Americans all along: Gun control laws impact only law-abiding citizens. The criminal, who has already decided to commit robbery or murder, will hardly shrink from the footling addition of an additional charge of illegal gun possession.

For James Andre Smartt-Ford, 16, Michael Dosunmu, 15, and Billy Cox, 15, the hand-wringing by police and politicians over the escalation of gun crime comes a little late: all three have been shot dead in south London over the past 10 days…

We have… the toughest gun control laws in the world. They have actually proved strikingly ineffectual.

Gun crime has doubled since they were introduced. Young hoodlums are able to acquire handguns – either replica weapons that have been converted, or imports from eastern Europe – with ease. With no dedicated frontier police, our borders remain hopelessly porous. The only people currently incommoded by the firearms laws are legitimate holders of shotgun licences, who are subjected to the most onerous police checks.

... what a price we are paying.

The University of Illinois is declining to fight NCAA sanctions, and is surrendering its 81 year old mascot Chief Illiniwek.

Of course, the poltroons running the University of Illinois are a long way from the first academic administrators to bow to the forces of political correctness. Indian mascots have been dropped by a great many colleges, universities, and high schools all over the United States. The most famous examples are probably those of Dartmouth and Stanford who gave up mascots completely when they dropped their beloved Indians.

Why do the PC busybodies always get to win these things?

There seems to be a basic rule of life that to become a college president or high school principal, you have to be a small-minded conformist, coward, and lickspittle, who can be relied upon to cringe and kowtow in the face of any fashionable cause.

They abolished the Newtown (Fairfield County, Connecticut) Indian back in the 1990s. The Indian mascot had been selected by the Newtown High School’s predecessor, the Newtown Community School, in 1919, as part of a whole body of symbolism adopted in enthusiastic identification with the supposedly virtuous characteristics of pre-18th century Indian residents of Newtown’s immediate Connecticut environs.

The Indian was replaced with a wholly imaginary and entirely bogus mascot called “the Night Hawk,” a choice based obviously entirely upon alliteration. I wrote a letter to the local paper (including illustrations) explaining that no actual nocturnal raptors which were not owls, in fact, existed, and that the nighthawk was, in reality, a name conventionally applied to Chordeiles minor, one of the Caprimulgidae, wide-mouthed, insect-devouring relatives of the whippoorwill, traditionally called “goatsuckers,” on the basis of a folk belief in the purpose of their wide and hairy mouths.

Before long, Newtown students were appearing at games, attired in “Newtown Goatsuckers” t-shirts.

The school administration responded by banning the wearing of Goatsucker, as well as Indian, mascot devices.

photo by Linda Davidson—The Washington Post

Today’s Washington Post profiles the Conservative blogosphere’s female answer to George Patton, our own lovely and talented Michelle Malkin, offering this (overly mild) representative quotation:

The donkey party,” she wrote last fall, “is led by thumb-sucking demagogues in prominent positions who equate Bush with Hitler and Jim Crow, call him a liar in front of high school students and the world, fantasize about impeachment and fetishize the human rights of terrorists who want to kill me. Put simply: There are no grown-ups in the Democrat Party.”

Read the whole thing.

Paolo Uccello. The Hunt in the Forest. c. 1465-70. Oil on canvas. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK.

(above) 15th century Italian gentlemen hunting the roebuck.

Like the blade of grass pushing through the concrete sidewalk, natural human instincts, well known and understood in the past, continue to assert themselves even in today’s deracinated urban sprawl.

In contemporary Glasgow, for instance, young men are secretly breeding and training dogs (lurcher and greyhound crosses), and going out early in the morning in organized groups, just as their ancestors once did, to hunt the roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), who, long unhunted, have adapted to life in modern suburbs and grown numerous and bold.

Being deprived of the right to own and carry more useful and practical arms, they have nothing beyond airguns, pocket knives, and their boots and hands to use to kill a deer. And being unschooled in venery or sportsmanship, these covert hunters dispatch their quarry crudely when it is brought to bay.

Regrettably as well, they evidently have not learned how to unmake the deer and how to prepare him for the table. Nor, I fear, has anyone taught them to reward the hounds, as William Twiti advised, with “bowellis and fete” (bowels and feet).

As one might expect, the organized do-gooder organizations are howling, and the British Press, e.g., the Telegraph and the BBC, is suitably outraged and alarmed by the discovery of sporting activity by British youths.

All this is ironically occurring at the same time in which an excess population of rural red deer is leading British academics, environmentalists, and journalists to loudly advocate the reintroduction of the wolf (!) to curb their numbers.

Deer poaching, in defiance of authority, has a long and famous tradition in Britain, including not only Robin Hood but even Shakespeare himself.

Long may Glasgow’s Geordies divert themselves by the manly pursuit of the swift and ingenious roebuck, say I. Over time, it is likely that with greater experience there will evolve among the more skillful sportsmen the same sort of better practices and aesthetic code which naturally evolved among their predecessors.

Unfortunately, better sportsmanship is far more likely to evolve in circumstances in which sport is openly and proudly pursued, rather than in those in which sport is inevitably stigmatised and equated by bigots and Puritans with crime.

The democrats in the House of Representatives, and a disgraceful handful of soi disant Republicans, are supporting the following disgraceful Resolution, specifically crafted to allow lawmakers to “support the troops” and to lend aid and comfort to the enemy at the same time.

Congress and the American people will continue to support and protect the members of the United States Armed Forces who are serving or who have served bravely and honorably in Iraq;

and Congress disapproves of the decision of President George W. Bush announced on January 10, 2007, to deploy more than 20,000 additional United States combat troops to Iraq.

Let’s hope that real Republicans in these people’s home districts remember their names in 2008.

At American Thinker, Noel Shepherd explains the fundamental necessity of Global Warming for the socialist left.

In the end, that indeed is what this is all about: Global warming represents the Democrats’ weapons of mass destruction. With it, they hope to scare enough Americans into sacrificing their own financial well-being all for the noble goal of saving the planet…

.. by cleverly claiming that seas are going to rise and begin killing innocent people in ten years if nothing is done to stop it, the liberals have created an urgency about global warming that the Bush administration failed to with Social Security. As a result, the population is now ripe for listening to solutions for a problem that is significantly more a figment of the imagination than the mathematical certainty that America’s largest entitlement program will go bankrupt if changes aren’t enacted.

Put another way, two years ago, the left and the media were able to convince the American people that there was no consensus about when Social Security would run out of money, and though they agreed it will certainly happen at some point, Americans were more than happy to defer concern for this seemingly distant problem. Yet, two years later, these same politicians and press representatives have created an hysteria over an unproven theory, professing a consensus that they advertise as incontrovertible even though none exists, all over a calamity that might never actually occur.

Isn’t that extraordinary?

Read the whole thing.

One of the banes of country life in recent decades has been the arrival in Paradise of the urbanite seeking the rural life style, but who brings his urban attitudes and outlook with him, including the fortress mentality. As soon as the ink dries on the deed to his five acres, up goes the No Trespassing / No Hunting signs.

The aboriginal Yankees in Vermont have found a solution to thwart the inclination of flatlanders to wall off passage to their neighbors. As the Wall Street Journal reports, they are resurrecting town claims to forgotten (“sleeping”) roads.

Vermont has scores of old public roads that haven’t been used as such for decades and haven’t been kept up. Some resemble paths through the woods or private driveways, while others, at least to the casual observer, are indistinguishable from their surroundings. Now, with more retirees and second-home buyers acquiring Vermont real estate, some towns are rushing to stake claims to these “sleeping roads.”

Disputes center on differing perceptions of public and private property here. Known for its woodlands and rolling hills, Vermont has vast networks of trails, some of which run through people’s land. And Vermonters have a long tradition of letting people pass through their property for snowmobiling, hunting, hiking, and other forms of recreation. Locals worry that some of the outsiders now moving to the state are less open to that idea and are too fond of no-trespassing signs.

Some Vermonters are helping to guard this trail network by combing through old records to show that some of these roads are, in fact, still public. The Vermont Association of Snow Travelers, which represents about 38,000 snowmobilers, has been giving PowerPoint presentations to members on how to compare road atlases from the 1850s with today’s highway maps to find roads that might have gotten lost over the years.

That alarms some property owners and has spooked the state’s biggest title insurer, which threatened to stop writing policies in three towns where a number of old-road cases have cropped up.

Some folks think those land-posting flatlanders have a certain amount of highbindery of this kind coming to them.

Carlos Alberto Montaner identifies the true identity of the sides fighting the battle over Global Warming, and proposes that the liberals, like Al Gore, who want to save us from Global Warming need to give up automobiles, electricity, and private jets first, before we start letting them apply new taxes to us.

On the surface the topic is global warming, but the issue goes a lot deeper. It is another modality of the near-cosmic debate that collectivists and individualists have engaged in for at least two centuries. The collectivists—in this case, those who look after the interests of the collective—assume that, because of industrial activities and the combustion of fossil fuels, the planet’s temperature will rise several degrees, bringing catastrophic consequences: a polar meltdown, coastline flooding, extinction of species, and the rapid expansion of deserts over large areas of the planet.

Individualists, for their part, affirm that climate predictions are closer to witchcraft than to science. Not long ago, for instance, Ãlvaro Vargas Llosa recalled sardonically that three decades ago the prevailing fear was the inevitable beginning of a glacial period that would freeze our bones, while George F. Will wondered which was better: today’s frozen and inhospitable Greenland, or the warmer and more hospitable island discovered by the Vikings one thousand years ago, where they established settlements and planted vineyards…

After the barely scientific debate—because it is based on educated guesses or questionable statistical probabilities, not on proven cause-and-effect relations—what remains is another form of the ideological and moral battle between the left and the right, or, broadly speaking, between those who defend society in the abstract (they usually write Mankind with a capital M) and those who focus their discourse on protecting human beings of flesh and bone.

That is why it is not surprising that in the ranks of the environmentalist collectivists, the Greens, you’ll find socialists of every ilk, the communists who survived the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, their clothes still covered with ideological rubble, and, in general, all the members of the happy-go-lucky, vast and illusional family of the “progressives,” while on the other side, the side of the individualists, you’ll find the liberals (in the European and Latin American sense of the word) who are more interested in the rights of people here and now than in the unforeseeable fate of future generations.

Read the whole thing.

.cnI redruM has fun mocking the brave Shiite militia commander’s prudential border-crossing in the face of the imminent American offensive.

What a guy! What a leader of men. Muqtada Al Sadr has pointed tens of thousands of brave Islamic warriors down the road to paradise. He’s hooked them up with the 72 virgins. Presumably, he even provided them each a heart-shape bed.

But when the going got tough, and the tough got surging, Muqtada wasn’t musically inclined towards Teddy Pendergrass and Barry White. No 72 virgins for the Mighty Mook.

He left town so fast that an enterprising squad of MI types followed a residual trail of tire rubber all way to the Iranian border. Yep, he went straight to the Iranian border. That country bordering Iraq, whose president swears up and down isn’t helping Iraqi insurgents.

No wonder Saddam Hussein derisively snorted “Muqtada al Sadr?” in response to the crowd’s chanting that name just before the trapdoor dropped.

A former employee reveals 14 icompany secrets about HP printers.

1: Many HP Printers, like their laser printers, have a built-in page-count after which they won’t work. This resides in the a transpart sometimes called image or drum kit. Rather than get the printer fixed, it’s often cheaper to buy a new printer, OR you can do a NV ram reset. It resets everything in the printer, including all the page counts, but it’s not without risks.

2: To get past the voice prompt system, repeatedly say “Agent.” It will take two or three repetitions, but it will get you to a human.

3: If a set of cartridges cost more than the printer, don’t buy the printer. It’s considered a “throwaway” printer. HP service techs are told to spend no more than 30 minutes working on these because at that point, you are costing HP money.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

America’s first Muslim Congressman has obviously been the beneficiary of the conspicuous American tradition of tolerance, but to Minnesota’s Rep. Ellison tolerance is clearly a one way street.

The Hill reports Ellison’s Office called the Capital police to report a colleague for smoking.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) believes it is his right as a Muslim to be sworn into Congress with the Quran. But apparently, the freshman lawmaker doesn’t believe it’s Rep. Tom Tancredo’s (R-Colo.) right to smoke a cigar in his congressional office.

Ellison’s office called the Capitol Hill Police on Tancredo last Wednesday night as Tancredo was in his office smoking a cigar. The lawmakers have neighboring offices on the first floor of the Longworth House Office Building.

Tancredo was still stunned a day later. “It’s very bizarre,” said Tancredo, who has never met Ellison. “Seemed to me not a good way to say hello.”

And let’s face it. Calling the cops on a colleague takes the cake for the nerviest behavior so far among members of this year’s freshman class of Congress.

This is how it all went down. On Wednesday evening, around 6 p.m., Tancredo was preparing for his trip to Mississippi. And as he so often does, he was unwinding with a cigar.

Soon enough, however, a police officer walked in to check on the smoke. The officer told Tancredo that the officer came because he was required to do so and not because the officer wanted to. The officer had already told Ellison that Tancredo was permitted to smoke in his office. The visit was more a formality.

Tancredo said he would not stop smoking in his office. “Heck, no!” he said. “If he [Ellison] would have [had] the courtesy to say something I’m sure I would have been more accommodating to his wishes.”

To help keep his office free of impurities, Tancredo has three air purifiers. And he has no plans to meet Ellison anytime soon. “I’m sure we will, but I’m not going to make a point [of it],” the presidential hopeful said, adding that he supported Ellison’s right to be sworn in with the Quran.

Sucking up to California liberals at San Francisco’s Churchill Club, Rudolph Giuliani hurriedly jumped on the environmental bandwagon.

I do believe there’s global warming, yes,’’ said Giuliani, in response to reporters’ questions following his talk to the Churchill Club. “The big question has always been how much of it is happening because of natural climate changes and how much of it is happening because of human intervention.’’

But “the overwhelming number of scientists now believe that there is significant human cause,’’ he said, adding the debate on the existence of global warming “is almost unnecessary … because we should be dealing with pollution anyway.’’

Meanwhile, the ever-liberal John McCain was editorializing with Joe Lieberman in the Boston Globe:

THERE IS NOW a broad consensus in this country, and indeed in the world, that global warming is happening, that it is a serious problem, and that humans are causing it. The recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded there is a greater than 90 percent chance that greenhouse gases released by human activities like burning oil in cars and coal in power plants are causing most of the observed global warming. This report puts the final nail in denial’s coffin about the problem of global warming.

In addition, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has identified a warming climate, and the resulting melting of sea ice, as the reason polar bears may now be threatened as a species.

Right!

Ice Storm Cancels Congressional Global Warming Hearing

A recent scientific study shows that glacier melting can vary from year to year. Surprise!

And some Indian scientists think Himalayan glaciers are not changing, and reports to the contrary have been sensationalized by a few individuals.

Matt Drudge:

Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it’s a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It’s neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment. Also, it’s an undignified slapstick that people don’t wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the “but’s” are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses. This is clearly such an incredible failure of so many people, from journalists to politicians. If the European Commission is instantly going to buy such a trick, we have another very good reason to think that the countries themselves, not the Commission, should be deciding about similar issues.

Hat tip to The News Junkie at Maggie’s Farm.

Bizzyblog notes:

US Tax Revenues Up 9.7% through four months, Deficit Down 57%; US Media Outlets Mostly Ignore the News.

Treasury Report

“Introducing the book,” i.e. the codex. A medieval user has problems with that piece of technology, the book.

2:24 video

Hat tips to David L. Larkin and Karen L. Myers.

Bush does a comedy routine with impersonator Steve Bridges at 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner.

11:24 video

The Telegraph reports more definitive proof that Iran is arming insurgents with another weapon producing a serious toll of Allied and American lives.

More than 100 of the.50 calibre weapons, capable of penetrating body armour, have been discovered by American troops during raids.

The guns were part of a shipment of 800 rifles that the Austrian company, Steyr-Mannlicher, exported legally to Iran last year.

The sale was condemned in Washington and London because officials were worried that the weapons would be used by insurgents against British and American troops.

Within 45 days of the first HS50 Steyr Mannlicher rifles arriving in Iran, an American officer in an armoured vehicle was shot dead by an Iraqi insurgent using the weapon.

Over the last six months American forces have found small caches of the £10,000 rifles but in the last 24 hours a raid in Baghdad brought the total to more than 100, US defence sources reported.

The find is the latest in a series of discoveries that indicate that Teheran is providing support to Iraq’s Shia insurgents.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, yesterday denied that Iran had supplied weapons to Iraqi insurgents. But on Sunday US officials in Baghdad displayed a range of weapons they claimed had originated in Iran.

They said 170 American and British soldiers had been killed by such weapons.

Strategy Page on Steyr’s rifle sale to Iran.

Never Yet Melted has been out of service since yesterday as the result of a type of database error which seems to strike about three times a year. I can usually fix this error quite easily, but every now and then the easy fix will not work, and repairs are more difficult.

We have some planned inprovements which, we hope, will eliminate these kinds of lengthy outages in future. But, you know how it is….

In an earlier posting, we noted that a Montreal policeman had gotten into big trouble for writing a humorous song urging Third World immigrants to make some effort to assimilate or go home.

At that time we were only able to find a video of the song. We could not find the text anywhere on the Net, and our own modest abilities were insufficient to enable us to produce an accurate transcription.

One of our readers was kind enough to send us a link to a site which did publish the text.

On pense que ça commence à faire lÃ
On pense qu’on a assez ri de nous autres lÃ
Pis pour ceux qui n’seraient pas contents
Crissez-moi votre camp

On veut bien accepter les ethnies
Mais non pas à n’importe quel prix
Si tu veux te joindre à notre beau pays
Tu devras faire certains compromis

Lorsque accueilli dans une place
Il faut se fondre à la masse
Parce qu’on peut dire qu’ici tu es bien
Plus que d’où tu d’viens!

On peut maintenant porter le kirpan
Parce que nous autres on est tolérant
Changer les règles du YMCA
Pis un coup parti du CLSC

Nous sommes-nous fracturé la raison?
Pour les caprices de chaque religion
Vos accommodements raisonnables
On est pu capable!

Y’est maintenant temps qu’on soit entendu
Quand notre culture se fait cracher dessus
Si tu n’es pas content de ton sort
Y’existe un endroit qu’est l’aéroport

Toi ma minorité ethnique
Arrête un peu ta musique
Sinon dans ce cas-là tu devras
Retourner chez toi
Retourner chez toi

(roughly translated by JDZ)

We think that enough is enough;
We’ve had enough of being ridiculed by strangers.
Too bad for the malcontents;
Do us a favor, and decamp.

We are happy to accept ethnic immigrants,
But not at absolutely any price.
If you want to be part of our beautiful country
You ought to compromise a bit.

When you are welcomed to a place,
You ought to try to fit in.
Because, after all, you’re better off here
Than you were where you came from.

You can now carry your kirpan
Because we’re tolerant of others,
Change the rules of the YMCA,
Stage a coup against the CLSC.

Have we lost our reason?
Over the whims of each Religion,
Of your reasonable accomodations
We are now less capable.

Now is the time for us to be heard,
When our culture has been spat upon,
If you are not content with your lot,
You can try the option of the airport.

All you ethnic minorities
Should stop playing your own tune for a bit,
And, if you won’t, you will have to
Go back where you came from.
Go back where you came from.

Special thanks to Nelle Chan and Dominique R. Poirier, and thanks to Dominique R. Poirier again for some corrections.

Six US helicopters have been shot down in Iraq during the last three weeks causing some of us to wonder what is producing this recent string of successes for our adversaries.

The not-necessarily-reliable Mossad-mouthpiece Depkafile claims to know the answer.

DEBKAfile’s sources in Tehran and Kurdistan disclose that, last month, two Iranian QW-1 and SA-7 missile consignments reached Iraqi insurgents allied with al Qaeda and one, radical Shiite Moqtada Sadr’s Shiite militia, the Mehdi Army. Israeli sources report the same anti-air weapons were delivered at about the same time to Hizballah units in Lebanon including the south.

Our military sources add that Iran’s arms industry has succeeded in replicating a quality version of the Chinese QW-1 and improved its electronics. It is 1.447meters long and packs 16.5 kilos of explosives. The IDF estimates that the first of these missiles used experimentally by Hizballah caused an Israeli helicopter to explode during take-off near the Litani River in the Lebanon War last summer.

Iranian markings have been erased from the equipment going into Iraq and Lebanon to suggest they were bought on the black market. Dated Soviet-era models of the SA-7 were indeed bought by Iran on Far East black markets and supplied to Iraqi insurgents and also pro-Tehran governors in western Afghanistan. Iran is preparing the ground for a Shiite insurgency against NATO forces there.

According to our sources, all three consignments to Iraq went through the North Iraqi Kurdistani town of Suleimaniya not far from the Iranian border. An Iranian clandestine center operates there like “the liaison center” the Americans raided in another Kurdish town, Irbil, last month. The Suleimaniya center operates with permission from Iraqi’s Kurdish president Jalal Talabani.

They weapons were smuggled in concealed compartments of trucks transporting building materials and iron from Iran for a Kurdish building company. After unloading their legitimate freight, the trucks drove on south up to the regional border where Iraqi insurgents off-loaded the missiles to their vehicles and distributed them to their networks in Baqouba, Ramadi and Tikrit — north of Baghdad and Hilla to the south.

In January, two-man teams of Iraqi insurgents and Hizballah operatives were trained in the use of the new weapons against American and Israeli helicopters as instructors for missile crews in Iraq and Lebanon. One crewman was taught to locate the target and help the second to aim. The training facilities were set up in Kermanshah and Qasr-e Shirin close to the Iraqi border.

Tehran is stepping up its provocations in reprisal for the US president George W. Bush’s directive to US forces to capture or kill Iranian agents, America’s refusal to release the Revolutionary Guards officers captured in Irbil and finally by the seizure last week of an Iranian diplomat in Baghdad.

Depkafile could be tellling the truth.

Old Painless, at The Box of Truth, investigates the old story of the shirt pocket bible saving the soldier’s life by stopping a bullet, testing the book penetration capabilities of a variety of pistol and rifle rounds.

Repeating the blood libel, the accusation that Jews used human blood in religious rituals and performed human sacrifice, was a crime in Poland and Lithuania in the Middle Ages; while, in most of Europe, it was merely an opportunistic means of debt restructuring. After the rioting was over, Jewish moneylenders were dead or had vanished from the land, and no one, particularly the king, owed anybody anything.

Enlightened Christians, including Popes as early as Innocent IV (1195-1254) and Pope Gregory X (1271-1276) have consistently rejected the accusation as inconsistent with well known teachings of Judaism.

This week, however, several reports appeared indicating that a forthcoming book by Arial Toaff, professor of Jewish History at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and author of a number of previous well-received and respected titles on Jewish Life in Medieval Italy, gives credence to the legend.

The Jerusalem Post reports that Toaff’s latest book, soon to be published in Italy, is titled: Bloody Passovers: The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murders.

According to a review by Sergio Luzzatto, appearing in Corriere della Serra:

from 1100 to about 1500…several crucifixions of Christian children really happened, bringing about retaliations against entire Jewish communities – punitive massacres of men, women, children. Neither in Trent in 1475 nor in other areas of Europe in the late Middle Ages were Jews always innocent victims…

A minority of fundamentalist Ashkenazis…carried out human sacrifices.”

The Telegraph has a less informative report.

Washington Post.

The journalistic accounts reaching English readers make Toaff’s thesis sound extremely implausible and his reasoning unpersuasive. One is curious as to what the book actually says.