Maggie's Farm

Many Asians, as I understand it, like to use their fingers. The French like bidets. Boy Scouts use Poison Ivy leaves, and Grandpa grew up using pages from the Sears Roebuck catalog. But the civilized world, despite Cheryl Crowe's suggestions, prefers nice, soft toilet paper made from friendly trees.

What did people use in the past? Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has the fascinating facts for you.

My Goldfinches in Yankeeland have finally molted into their breeding plumage. This photo was yesterday.

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We missed this report, by Paul Hollrah from The New Media Journal:

Tuning in to C-Span recently, I found myself listening to a speech by Senator Barrack Hussein Obama, Jr. He was standing in the pulpit of a black church in Selma, Alabama, and as I studied the body language of the dozen or so black ministers standing behind the senator, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the little head-bobbing dolls that people used to place in the rear windows of their 1957 Chevrolets. If their reactions are any indication, the new Schlickmeister of the Democrat Party is actually a pretty accomplished public speaker.

However, as he spoke, I found my bull_ _ alarm going off, repeatedly. But I couldn’t quite figure out why until I actually read excerpts of his speech several days later. Here’s part of what he said:

A propos of Dr. Bliss' recent approval of spanking and corporal punishment (A Good Spanking), a friend offers the following alternative to the humiliation of spanking:

When my kids act up, act disrespectfully, or disobey orders repeatedly, we never do physical punishments.

Instead, we take them for a nice little car ride to calm them down. Here's a recent photo of our disciplinary technique, which is designed to keep them out of jail in adulthood:

Lt. John Renehan in The New York Sun. A quote:

Two years ago, I worked as a lawyer in one of the high buildings in this city. Today, my clothes carry a first lieutenant's bar and say U.S. Army on them. I wear the American flag on my shoulder, under which festers a smallpox vaccination pustule, with anthrax in the other arm. In less than a month I will be in Kuwait, thence to Iraq. My life these days is inexhaustibly surreal.

I am not an Army lawyer, but a platoon leader in an artillery battery. So the same friends I used to debate the 2000 election results with are now harangued with the principles of fire support and counterfire missions. I tell them about Army life and I console them with my claim that I may very well spend most of my tour safe in the confines of the base, which may or may not be the case. And when we are done with the Army talk, and my perfunctory questions about how things are going back here in the city, I find there is not much else I have the interest or energy to discuss.

Is it overly dramatic to say that this city seems frivolous to me now? Well, it does.

Read the whole thing.

From Lieberman's speech this week:

I do not need to tell you about these threats because you in AIPAC already understand them. That is why you work so hard and so well not just to preserve a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship but to uphold the cause of freedom.

Unfortunately, many in our country today do not seem to share that critical understanding of the threats we face.

Increasingly, the debate over our foreign policy is becoming so polarized, so partisan, so bound up in the battles we are having here in Washington, that it seems blind to the real battle outside of America, the challenge of our time from the Islamist extremists who want to destroy us all, who attacked America on September 11, 2001, and intend to do so again.

In this regard, if I may have a point of personal privilege, as we say in the Senate, I'd like to talk with you about my own experience over the past year.

First, let me again say thank you. Your support helped me win an election, and even more importantly, to continue the fight for the principles and policies we believe in.

I don't think it's any secret that much of my fight for reelection was about the war in Iraq.

Given all the mistakes made in Iraq, all of the setbacks and disappointments, I understand how well-intentioned people have come to disagree about the war.

I also understand the frustration and exhaustion that so many people feel about Iraq, the desire just to throw up our hands and say, "Enough."

The entire speech here.

The “carbon credits” scam actually increases pollution.  

Simple example: let’s say companies are required to reduce their emissions to X parts per million (ppm). Now let’s say that Company A, or an underdeveloped agricultural nation without flatulent cows, already operates entirely on hydroelectric power and produces zero ppm.  Similar-sized Company B operates on coal and produces an excessive 1.5X ppm.  With carbon trading, dirty Company B pays A (who already doesn’t pollute) and gets the right to increase its pollution to 2X ppm through burning cheaper and dirtier coal, for example.  If B couldn’t buy carbon credits it would have to reduce its emissions to 1X ppm (and B taken with A would average 0.5X ppm). 

Carbon trading allows people to continue to pollute and the atmosphere to continue to degrade.  Non-polluters make money, but my lungs see no change. 

Then they made it even dumber – funds that buy shares in green companies (like enterprises which plant trees) can sell carbon credits to polluters and allow them to keep polluting!

Finally, if that’s not bad enough, now we have Al Gore buying his carbon credits from his own investment fund, Generation Investment Management LLP of which he is chairman and a founding partner.  Generation is a boutique international investment firm that invests other peoples’ money, for a fee, into the stocks of ‘green’ companies.  Al uses these credits to compensate for flying himself and his wife around in private jets, driving his SUVs and compensating for his famous $1,200/month electric bills.  See http://www.ecotality.com/blog/?p=350 and http://neveryetmelted.com/?p=2237.

What is clear is that Al himself doesn’t believe his own propaganda.  Ecotality said it this way:

Hypocrisy, after all, abounds. Even Gore’s huge electric power usage at his Nashville home isn’t the only example of how the prophet of environmental doom hasn’t always lived as if he believes his message. During the eight years Gore was vice president, he voted in four national elections. Every single time, he and his entourage and security detail and accompanying media flew to Nashville on a large government jet, burning thousands of gallons of fossil fuels and pumping huge amounts of carbon emissions directly into the earth’s atmosphere, and then rode in a caravan of fossil fuel-burning vehicles from Nashville International Airport about 40 miles east on I-40 to Carthage, Tennessee, so the local and national TV cameras could get video of him at the voting booth. And then the whole caravan headed back to Nashville for the plane ride back to DC. Traffic had to be halted on Nashville’s interstates and side streets every time - sometimes during rush hour - idling thousand of vehicles that just sat there, burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon pollution, just so Gore could create a media photo-op.

He could have instead voted by mailing in an absentee ballot - that would have been the “green” thing to do - and a skillful press aide could easily have turned that into a widely publicized pro-green photo-op.

Image: Gwynnie's favorite location for, and method of, carbon pollution.

 "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs."

That was the famous marketing quote for the sale of Papal indulgences to which Martin Luther took strong exception in 1517.

Ever wonder how Al Gore with his three houses and SUVs, and Suzuki with his mega-bus, and Hollywood, etc. claim to be "carbon neutral"?

Exactly the same way indulgences worked. Here's how. One quote:

Example: a mid-sized 30 mpg car driving 12,000 miles/year will create about 3.55 tons of CO2/year. Using Carbonfund.org's calculator we figured this would cost only about $19.50 or $1.63/month to be offset! This means that for a very small amount of money you can drive the equivalent of a zero-CO2-emission car!

As quoted by Gore's office yesterday:

What Mr. Gore has asked is that every family calculate their carbon footprint and try to reduce it as much as possible. Once they have done so, he then advocates that they purchase offsets, as the Gore’s (sic) do, to bring their footprint down to zero.

Another alternative for no footprints: Make yourself a helium-brained airhead and just float over the landscape without your feet touching.

Instapundit found this Stalinist-sounding defence of Gore's hypocrisy, which truly gives me the creeps:

Al Gore lives a life different from most folks. I'm not one to defend elitism, not as a matter of practice, but some elitism is inevitable. There must be a leadership class. There always has been and there always will be. Even societies organized around the principle of the equality and preeminence of the proletariat have had an elite class. It is the natural order of things. The key for a society is to create a responsible, responsive and fluid elite.

With him in it, no doubt. Would somebody remind this hideous un-American creep that, when searching for elites, the last place anyone would search is amongst politicians. They are the least-respected profession in America, and should be.

You want an American Elite, Mr. Smarty-Pants who probably thinks he is elite himself? Try my plumbing, heating, and A/C guy Greg. He is honest, direct, gives sound advice; is smart, skilled, takes my calls, is overly-humble, and efficient - and has never overcharged me. More often, undercharges me, I think. Is God-fearing and God-loving, with  a charming young family who understand that he needs to make house calls on Sunday night. And who quotes Shakespeare, and sometimes Milton. That is the American elite, my poor misguided friend: the people, and the government is our servant. Servant. Don't misunderestimate the wisdom of the regular folks, because being in real life can be worth a million-dollar education, especially if you have a curious mind and can learn from experience.

Image: Al Gore owns three homes. This is a recent photo of his carbon-neutral home, in the Belle Mead neighborhood of Nashville.

1. Mexico: Remember our post about an American trying to get a job in Mexico? With this border story, it seems worth remembering now. No, you are not welcome in Mexico unless you are on vacation.

2. Hillary and the Black Panthers: Remember this one? We posted it, but I can't find it in the archives:

Back in 1969 a group of Black Panthers decided that a fellow black panther named Alex Rackley needed to die.

Rackley was suspected of disloyalty. Rackley was first tied to a chair.  Once safely immobilized, his friends tortured him for hours by, among other things, pouring boiling water on him.  When they got tired of torturing Rackley, Black Panther member, Warren Kimbo took Rackley outside and put a bullet in his head. Rackley's body was later found floating in a river about 25 miles north of New Haven, Conn.

Perhaps at this point you're curious as to what happened to these Black Panthers.

In 1977, that's only eight years later, only one of the killers was still in jail. The shooter, Warren Kimbro, managed to get a scholarship to Harvard and became good friends with none other than Al Gore. He later became an assistant dean at Eastern Connecticut State College. Isn't that something?  As a '60s radical you can pump a bullet into someone's head, and a few years later, in the same state, you can become an assistant college dean! Only in America

Erica Huggins was the lady who served the Panthers by boiling the water for Mr. Rackley's torture. Some years later Ms. Huggins was elected to a California School Board. How in the world do you think these killers got off so easy?

Maybe it was in some part due to the efforts of two people who came to the defense of the Panthers. These two people actually went so far as to shut down Yale University with demonstrations in defense of the accused Black Panthers during their trial.  One of these people was none other than Bill Lann Lee. Mr. Lee isn't a college dean. He isn't a member of a California School Board. He was the head of the US Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, appointed by Bill Clinton.

So who was the other Panther defender?  Is this other notable Panther defender now a school board member?  Is this other Panther apologist now an assistant college dean?  No, neither!  The other Panther defender was, like Lee, a radical law student at Yale University.  She is now running for the Presidency.
.TruthOrFiction.com reviewed this report in 2001 and found that it was TRUTH.

John Elvin of Insight magazine looked into the Hillary-Panthers eRumor as well as how it was handled by some urban legends sites and wrote his findings in an article that appeared in July of 2000.  He quotes former sixties radical David Horowitz as saying that both Hillary Rodham and Bill Lann Lee organized demonstrations at Yale against the Panther trial.  Elvin also says, "Insight reviewed biographies of Hillary Clinton by Milton, Brock and Roger Morris for this story and lengthy selections from such other biographies as Barbara Olson’s Hell to Pay. Together, relying on primary and other firsthand sources, they unquestionably back Horowitz’s contention that Hillary was a campus leader during the Panther protests."

 

This ill-tempered, violent, foul mouthed, hateful and abusive woman wants to be your president and have total control as commander-in-chief of a military that her party so openly and proudly admit they detest.  I can see someone like this gaining the respect of other nations, and especially from their leaders, who refuse to do as she tells them ...or else.  No thanks, my country deserves a better leader, not a dominatrix.

Here is our collection of quotes from Mrs. Clinton:

 "Where is the G-damn f**king flag?   I want the G-damn f**king flag up every f**king morning at f**king sunrise."(From the book "Inside The White House" by Ronald Kessler, p. 244 - Hillary to the staff at the Arkansas Governor's mansion on Labor Day, 1991)
"You sold out, you mother f**ker!   You sold out!"From the book "Inside" by Joseph Califano, p. 213 - Hillary yelling at Democrat lawyer."It's been said, and I think it's accurate, that my husband was obsessed by terrorism in general and al-qaida in particular."(Hillary telling a post-9/11 world what a 'great' commander in chief her husband was; Dateline, NBC 4/16/2004.)"I have to admit that a good deal of what my husband and I have learned [about Islam] has come from our daughter."(Tru thInMedia.org 8/8/1999 - Hillary at a White House function, proudly tells some Muslim groups she is gaining a greater appreciation of Islam because Chelsea was then taking a class on the "religion of peace")"F**k off!  It's enough that I have to see you shit-kickers every day, I'm not going to talk to you too!!  Just do your G*damn job and keep your mouth shut."(From the book "American Evita" by Christopher Anderson, p. 90 - Hillary to her State Trooper bodyguards after one of them greeted her with "Good morning.""You f**king idiot."(From the book "Crossfire" p. 84 - Hillary to a State Trooper w ho was dr ivi ng her to an event.)"If you want to remain on this detail, get your f**king ass over here and grab those bags!"(From the book "The First Partner" p. 259 - Hillary to a Secret Service Agent who was reluctant to carry her luggage because he wanted to keep his hands free in case of an incident.)
"Get f**ked!  Get the f**k out of my way!!!  Get out of my face!!!"(From the book "Hillary's Scheme" p. 89 - Hillary's various comments to her Secret Service d etail ag en ts.)"Stay the f**k back, stay the f**k away from me!  Don't come within ten yards of me, or else!  Just f**king do as I say, Okay!!!?"(From the book "Unlimited Access", by Clinton FBI Agent in Charge, Gary Aldrige, p. 139 - Hillary screaming at her Secret Service detail.)"Many of you are well enough off that [President Bush's] tax cuts may have helped you.  We're saying that for A merica to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to have to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."(Hillary grandstanding at a fund raising speech in San Francisco; SFGate.com 6/28/2004.)
"Why do I have to keep proving to people that I am not a liar?!"(From the book "The Survivor," by John Harris, p. 382 - Hillary in her 2000 Senate campaign)"Where's the miserable c*ck sucker?"(From the book "The Truth About Hillary" by Edward Klein, p. 5 - Hillary shouting at a Secret Service officer.

More charming quotes from the quotable Mrs. Clinton on continuation page below -

China finds itself in a moral and spiritual vacuum, while its economy soars and "relative" freedoms grow. What else is growing in China? Christianity, especially among the better-educated. After two generations of state-worship and Mao-worship, perhaps their hunger for higher things hasn't been eliminated.

A quote from a book review in Trinity Forum, What to make of China?

Jesus in Beijing introduces a wild card into traditional analyses of China: the growth of its Christian church. Most people outside church circles would consider this topic incidental to the “main” events of economics and politics. Yet growth of the church, particularly in urban areas among highly educated people, is reaching the point where it could begin to influence the tilt of government decisions in the future. This is significant because the institutions that form the bedrock of our global world—democracy, capitalism, free trade, and global financial markets—are in and of themselves morally neutral. They are organizing principles that derive their present moral force from the faith and beliefs of Western civilization. China and the rest of the non-Western world have generally accepted these institutions and their moral anchors because of the dominance of the West. They are playing by the current rules, but they are not necessarily following their own moral beliefs.

This came in over the transom:

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. Then once the gate is lifted the vehicle moves on the 2nd gate where the US Army MP's are.  So 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 that 2nd 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.

JOHN W. HUNT, CPT, US ARMY
Operations Officer
Bagram, Afghanistan

Story from the AP:

RENO, Nev. (AP) -- It's not all checking hunting and fishing licenses. Sometimes the issues are bigger. Like when a Nevada game warden was Handed the chore of figuring out how to separate two bull elk who locked horns while sparring and couldn't untangle them.
The saga began Nov. 21 when a rancher in Reese River Valley spotted the two elk.

By the following day, the animals were gone and the rancher assumed they had separated.

A week later, according to Nevada Division of Wildlife biologist Tom Donham, the rancher was out looking for some of his cows and saw the elk again.

This time, he called the wildlife department and Donham, game warden Brian Eller and Bureau of Land Management wildlife biologist Bryson Code headed out to see what they could do.

When they reached Indian Valley, south of Austin, it was Nov. 29, one week after the elk were first seen.

"When we arrived where the rancher had last seen them, we found them pretty quickly. They were both lying on the ground and one of them was in a very uncomfortable looking position with his head directly above the others head and his nose pointing straight up to the sky," Donham said. Eller said he wondered if they had survived their ordeal.

"Once we found out they were alive, I was hoping they couldn't move and would stay where they were. That didn't happen. When they ran off, I was hoping that they could not go very far. That didn't happen either," he said.

The elk may have been sparring at the outset, but Donham and Eller say they used teamwork to run for nearly a mile to evade the newcomers. "It looked like they had been doing it all their lives; serious cooperation if I've ever seen it," Donham said.

After two unsuccessful attempts, Donham was able to get a tranquilizer dart into one of the elk. With one down, the other could not run, but was also partially tranquilized in order to separate the two.

Welcome to the Farm, Canadian Gun Nutz! Man, what a storm of new visitors. Please check us out, while visiting. You might like us.

This sniper carbine made by CheyTac is functionally accurate at over 2 km. It has an integrated computer, a weather station, and has night vision, of course. With the CheyTac round, it set the world record for smallest group size at distance.

Out my CT back door yesterday morning - Mr. Red-Tail. He is mainly looking for our fat squirrels. Bird Dog told me he saw one go for a duck decoy in his driveway.

The tree? One of those unpleasant, alien Norway Maples we have all over New England these days: it would be nice if they all caught a disease.

Most of the time, you want to be out a bit in front of your guides to get the shot, but, in this case, you just might want to lag a bit behind.

Warning: T and/or A Rated photo, below, on continuation page:

VDH, in Opinion Journal. A quote:

Our current crisis is not yet a catastrophe, but a real loss of confidence of the spirit. The hard-won effort of the Western Enlightenment of some 2,500 years that, along with Judeo-Christian benevolence, is the foundation of our material progress, common decency, and scientific excellence, is at risk in this new millennium.

But our newest foes of Reason are not the enraged Athenian democrats who tried and executed Socrates. And they are not the Christian zealots of the medieval church who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity. Nor are they Nazis who burned books and turned Western science against its own to murder millions en masse.

No, the culprits are now more often us. In the most affluent, and leisured age in the history of Western civilization--never more powerful in its military reach, never more prosperous in our material bounty--we have become complacent, and then scared of the most recent face of barbarism from the primordial extremists of the Middle East.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Whole piece here.

Pelosi sets a new standard for spin, explaining why our robust economy, with zero unemployment, a rising stock market, and no inflation, is an evil Republican scheme. Teapot Tantrums.

More about the physics of tops here. 

When I was 14, I hoped that one day I would have a girlfriend.
  
  When I was 16 I got a girlfriend, but there was no passion, so I decided I needed a passionate girl with a zest for life.
  
  In college I dated a passionate girl, but she was too emotional. Everything was an emergency; she was a drama queen, cried all the time and threatened suicide. So I decided I needed a girl with stability.
  
  When I was 25 I found a very stable girl but she was boring. She was totally predictable and never got excited about anything. Life became so dull that I decided that I needed a girl with some excitement.
  
  When I was 28 I found an exciting girl, but I couldn't keep up with her. She rushed from one thing to another, never settling on anything. She did mad impetuous things and made me miserable as often as happy. She was great fun initially and very energetic, but directionless. So I decided to find a girl with some real ambition.
  
  When I turned 31, I found a smart ambitious girl with her feet planted firmly on the ground and married her. She was so ambitious that she divorced me and took everything I owned.
  
  I am now older and wiser, and am looking for a girl with big tits.