Hot Chicks Noodling Catfish and Aerial Bowfishing...Oh Hells Yeah!

With the recent news about Chinese Silver Carp making their way ever closer to the Great Lakes, I was looking for some video. Then I came across this...it's called Aerial Bowfishing. Someone is going to get hurt.



The glowing arrow shots are the best.

It's Saturday night, so how about some hot chicks noodling catfish!!!

Vaginaplasty?

This was on Drudge (via the BBC), but I couldn't let it pass without comment.

Women are undergoing surgery to create perfect genitalia amid a "shocking" lack of information on the potential risks of the procedure, a report says.

And by perfect they mean...

...which generally involves reducing the amount of tissue that protrudes from the lips which cover the vagina.

OK, so its called labioplasty, but what kind of man would want LESS of that. Am I alone on this? When I saw the headline I assumed the doctors would be going the other way with that.

I have to wonder if this is some sort of pedophillic desire to make women look like little girls.

Whatever. I'm against it.

Thomasville AL: The Police Blotter Edition

Nothing. I mean nothing going on.

So let's check into the bad girls of the Clarke County Sheriff's report.

Bad girls, bad girls...whatcha ganna do when they come for you!

Arrests booked through the Clarke County Jail during the week of Oct. 20-27 include:

Betty Ann Morgan, 27, assault third degree, $1,000 bond, arrested by Clarke County Sheriff's Dept. (Assault? That's kinda hot for a girl.)

Valerie Southall, 22, theft by deception second degree, $10,000 bond, arrested by Clarke County Sheriff's Dept. (mmmmm she's got sticky fingers...)

Aleah Janez Green, 29, five counts possession forged instrument second degree, theft of property second degree, $30,000 bond, arrested by Clarke County Sheriff's Dept.
(One bad check meh, lots of bad checks...bad bad girl.)

Sherida Lanette Foreman, 31, possession of marijuana second degree, drug paraphernalia second offense, $1,600 bond, arrested by Jackson Police Dept. (Kronic)

Gina Louise Collins, 44, possession of controlled substance, drug paraphernalia/ first offense, $9,000 bond, arrested by Clarke County Sheriff's Dept. (Party Girl!)

Green Scare: Its About The Money, Not The Earth

Now that the Obama administration is serious about cap and trade, and all of the side benefits for campaign contributors who will broker the carbon credits, who really stands to gain from Earth saving green coal technology? No one. And that's why just about all the major green enviro groups are out there protesting a modern, capture and sequester plat in New Jersey.

Just think of all the poor brokers on Wall Street without a carbon credit to trade in the future. If green coal has a future, then these guys stand to lose billions of dollars in fees. No politician ever made a living with a solved problem.

To whit:

Clean Coal? Not Here, Thanks [William Tucker]

There’s another article in yesterday’s New York Times worth noting. On the Metropolitan page, Peter Applebome recounts a bitter public debate going on now in Linden, N.J.

It seems a farsighted power company named PurGen wants to build a 750-megawatt coal plant with complete carbon capture and storage, commonly cited as one of the major breakthroughs needed to fend off global warming. The plant, on an old DuPont site, would capture 90 percent of its carbon-dioxide exhaust, liquefy it, and pump it through 70 miles of pipeline to an offshore rock formation near Atlantic City, where it would be permanently sequestered. Almost any environmental group you can name lists “carbon capture and storage” as one of its highest priorities in reducing carbon emissions.

So who is opposing the plant? The Sierra Club of New Jersey, the New Jersey Environmental Federation, the Edison Wetlands Association, the Arthur Kill Watershed Alliance, and every other environmental organization within driving distance. They’re not being nice about it, either. The Sierra Club calls the project “A $5 billion Ponzi scheme that not only won’t work but will lead to environmental disaster.” Edison Wetlands says it’s “A recipe for another Exxon Valdez toxic catastrophe.” The Environmental Federation is telling local residents, “The worst polluters continue to put Linden in their crosshairs, but this time the stakes are even higher.”

“Support globally, oppose locally.” That should be the motto of the environmental movement.

Look, the political establishment already has plans for the hundreds of billions of dollars in carbon tax credits. From the campaign contributions to the earmarks back home, there are a lot of people invested in the non-solution solution.

This kind of problem solving will not be appreciated by anyone in Washington and will be punished summarily. Of course, this is not a shock to anyone paying attention...if this was about carbon and saving the earth, Obama would have started a "Manhattan Project" for nuclear power plants. But he didn't and I don't know of any of the environmental groups pushing for Nuclear Now.

This whole carbon thing is starting to feel like one of those Soprano episodes at the construction site in New Jersey, complete with fat guys in lawn chairs.

!Sarah! Let's Get It On In NY 23

Rogue agent Palin takes on McCain, endorses Conservative Party candidate Hoffman after McCain supports the GOP-backed Dede Scozzafava in NY 23.

From Palin's Facebook page.

Doug Hoffman stands for the principles that all Republicans should share: smaller government, lower taxes, strong national defense, and a commitment to individual liberty.

Political parties must stand for something. When Republicans were in the wilderness in the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan knew that the doctrine of "blurring the lines" between parties was not an appropriate way to win elections. Unfortunately, the Republican Party today has decided to choose a candidate who more than blurs the lines, and there is no real difference between the Democrat and the Republican in this race. This is why Doug Hoffman is running on the Conservative Party's ticket.

The GOP is thinking that the caucus is getting so small, that they need to run someone from the other team to keep the seat. Bunk. Run good candidates who can balance a checkbook and can string a few sentences together and you have a winner right now. Budget busting spend and taxers are not looking good now or in 2010.

The Bush Recovery of 2009

How about another installment of Democrat Logic.

As I understand the current state of Democrat thinking, here are the basic assumptions regarding our current economic state.

1. The recession of 2008/2009 was entirely Bush's fault.

2. The recession is either over, or nearly so.

See: Bernanke, AP Economic Revival, Obama: Worst Behind Us

3. TARP Money has been spent, but the so-called Stimulus (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) has had very little of its funds obligated...actually spent. The numbers range from 10.2 to 18 percent. The higher numbers may reflect a different accounting method: one that puts the money on the "spent" side of the ledger as soon as it is given to the states.

4. Bush was primarily responsible for TARP.

5. Obama was responsible for ARRA (he signed it after all).

If the above 5 items are true, as Democrats tell us there are, then #2 is attributable to #4 since #5 has not had enough time or expendature to have made a difference. In other words, this is President Bush's recovery.

Furthermore, it is entirely logical to attribute part of the stock market resiliency to the Bush tax cuts set to expire next year.

So, thank you Mr President (Bush), according to your political enemies, this is your recovery.

The Twilight Zone (formerly known as the USA)

What kind of parent

#1 Builds a flying saucer?

#2 Pretends his six year old son is in it when it 'accidentally takes off

#3 Call the Federal Aviation Administration for help in the search, wasting God only knows how much money??????

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,568420,00.html

Well I guess this bogus story took our minds off the bogus crap coming out of the White House these days.

We have an idiot -in-chief who would rather travel to Oslo to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for what? you guessed it...nothing! He would prefer to dance at the Fiesta Latina or travel to Switzerland to persuade the Olympic committee to bring the Olympics to Chicago, rather than actually do his job.

Perhaps that is because the narcissistic man-child bit off more than he could chew. Running a nation isn't exactly the same as community organizing. The 143 days he spent as a senator is certainly not helping him do a bang up job as president. The budget Obama proposes for this year increases federal spending by a fiscally insane 34% over the budget adopted for last year, with a total of $4 trillion in federal spending, the highest EVER.Under the Obama budget, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the national debt will more than double over the next 10 years from 40% of GDP today to a shocking 82%!

Obama's concept of being patriotic is redistribution of wealth; taking from people who have actually worked....and giving it to the less fortunate (i.e. druggies, pimps, prostitutes, non-taxpayers) aka those who have never held a real (or at least legal) job in their lives.

Obama's plan...is failed distributionism wrapped up in pretty new paper. This isn't change. It is a failure of imagination. And it is a betrayal of trust in the American people and of the ideals on which this great and free nation was founded.

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined. "
Patrick Henry, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 5, 1778

Hey conservatives, WAKE UP! Our liberties are being lost or trampled on daily. It is time for us to stand up for our beliefs, stop being the "silent" majority and make our voices heard.

Just last week Rush Limbaugh was "not allowed" to invest in the St. Louis Rams due to quotes attributed to him, quotes he NEVER made. Ohhh...it was posted on Wikipedia...it must be true! Could this have anything to do with Mr. Limbaugh being very vocal with his low opinion of Obama? I think yes.

The Obama white house has led a public assault on Fox News, "A lot of their news programming, it's really not news. It's pushing a point of view," senior adviser David Axelrod said on ABC's "This Week."

"The way we -- the president looks at it and we look at it, is, it is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel added on CNN's "State of the Union."

More attempts to silent the opposition. The Obama administration and the left in general are reminiscent of the cultural revolution in China. They are always trying to create enemies of the people so they do not have to come up with real solutions to problems and they can hide the real harm they are doing to this great nation. As long as people remain uniformed or even angry with the "evil" insurance companies, they can hide their anti-capitilism agenda. FOX NEWS and Rush Limbaugh are two the biggest threats to the Obama agenda.

This is all sad but true, and all the while the Canadian (yes you read correctly) dollar climbs toward parity with the US dollar.

Be silent and the USA will truly become a Twilight Zone of sorts...Americans waiting for health care services we used to take for granted, our dollar virtually worthless, redistribution of wealth and US border agents will be handing out welcome letters to the illegals as they cross the border.

I don't know what kind of change the idiots in this country were voting for, but I am with good ol' Hank Williams JR. "Give me my God, my guns and you jackasses can keep your change!"

Time for me to put on my gold bracelets, break out my golden lasso and research more Democrat crime!

IG Nobel

To start with. This whole thing is a joke. Seinfeldian... It really was "about nothing" and thats fine, its their award.

My first response was to laugh. The DNC's first response was to accuse those who found this funny of siding with the terrorists. No shit. We are all terrorists now (to turn the Newsweek phrase).

“The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists – the
Taliban and Hamas this morning – in criticizing the President for receiving the
Nobel Peace prize,” DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse told
POLITICO.

I laugh at your perpetual candidate and now I'm a fucking terrorist. Really? I bet you cocksuckers at the DNC would keep GITMO open if you could throw your political enemies in there. Check that, I guarantee it.

At least I didn't get called a raaaacist.

Here's a picture of the ceremony in Olso. Let's play a game of "Where's Waldo" or in this case, where's the black guy.

I know the image is kind of small, but those bald roundheads are easy to spot.









Here's one Scandi that isn't too bad. Princess something or anaother.

Counting Tree Rings: Global Warming Makes It Hard For Scientists To Count

I'm ripping this from Andrew Orlowski again. This is about as boring as a scientific scandal can be. Hockey stick graph excluded of course.

A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent peer-reviewed climate papers.

At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC's assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors.

At issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy, or dendrochronology. Using statistical techniques, researchers take the ring data to create a "reconstruction" of historical temperature anomalies. But trees are a highly controversial indicator of temperature, since the rings principally record Co2, and also record humidity, rainfall, nutrient intake and other local factors.

Picking a temperature signal out of all this noise is problematic, and a dendrochronology can differ significantly from instrumented data. In dendro jargon, this disparity is called "divergence". The process of creating a raw data set also involves a selective use of samples - a choice open to a scientist's biases.

Yet none of this has stopped paleoclimataologists from making bold claims using tree ring data.

In particular, since 2000, a large number of peer-reviewed climate papers have incorporated data from trees at the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. This dataset gained favour, curiously superseding a newer and larger data set from nearby. The older Yamal trees indicated pronounced and dramatic uptick in temperatures.

How could this be? Scientists have ensured much of the measurement data used in the reconstructions remains a secret - failing to fulfill procedures to archive the raw data. Without the raw data, other scientists could not reproduce the results. The most prestigious peer reviewed journals, including Nature and Science, were reluctant to demand the data from contributors. Until now, that is.

At the insistence of editors of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions B the data has leaked into the open - and Yamal's mystery is no more.

From this we know that the Yamal data set uses just 12 trees from a larger set to produce its dramatic recent trend. Yet many more were cored, and a larger data set (of 34) from the vicinity shows no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages.

In all there are 252 cores in the CRU Yamal data set, of which ten were alive 1990. All 12 cores selected show strong growth since the mid-19th century. The implication is clear: the dozen were cherry-picked.

The scientists essentially flattened out the Midieval Warm Period and exaggerated the data in recent decades...making the now imfamous Hockey Stick Graph, used to great effect by ALGORE and the UN. The whole thing is an elaborate fake.

Go here for more to learn more on the fake graphs. And then maybe you too could get millions in grants.

Thomasville, AL: End Of Summer Purge

Its been a long summer. Football is here and now is a good time to clear out the notebook.

Notables:

My nephew got a ticket for driving without a seat belt. It cost him $25. No I'm not missing a zero. As you recall, the Thomasville Times warned you on June 4th about the click it or ticket program this summer. Tsk Tsk.

.................

A local Doctor from India brought back some seeds to plant in Alabama soil. Shhhhh...Don't tell the USDA, but I think we have a new invasive species.

And grow they did. "He told us they would run, but we didn't think they'd take over the whole world," Stephens joked. The two vines have grown so rapidly of late, they have become intermingled and it's hard to tell one vine from another at first glance.

The broad green leaves resemble Kudzu and the vines have flowers that bloom in the early evening. The leaves when rubbed, give off a faint smell of peanut butter.

When taunted, the flowers growl and have a faint smell of flesh.

.....................

Ozelle Hubert sets a new record for the most meaningless election protest. He lost by 60%.

You should probably call Obama...oh you did. I'm sure he'll be putting you on his to do list...right after rewriting the national anthem.

He (Ozelle) said he also believed that the actions was a conspiracy of a special interest group in retaliation to Barack Obama being elected the nation's first African American president.

He sent a copy of the letter to Obama, state officials, the state Democratic Party, the U.S. Justice Department and the local media.

We'll be checking in on Ozelle to see how things progress.

...................

And as I understand things, the mayor is still tired of conspiracies.

...................

And for the reallly big show the Canebrake Players of Demopolis to put on the musical "Big River.

North East Passage...Open For First Time?

The sea lane or passage, from northern Europe to Asia, was sailed earlier this month. According to the Reuters and UK Telegraph, this was the first time:

They travelled from Ulsan, South Korea, in late July to Siberia by way of the North East Passage, a sea lane that, in years past, was avoided because of its heavy ice floes.

Scientists report that the Arctic Ocean ice cap has been shrinking to unprecedented levels in recent summers, because of global warming, opening up many passages that were ice-choked in earlier times.

The passage.



Turns out, believe it or not, they were wrong. Way wrong.

Andrew Orlowski at the UK Register, tracked down the original reporting and found more sloppy reporting (at best) or eco-terror mongering (standard operating procedures) from the MSM.

The route offers significant gains over the alternatives via Suez or the Cape, it's shorter, quicker and cheaper. But until technological advances in the early 20th Century it was considered too hazardous for commercial operation.

Since the 1930s the route has seen major ports spring up, carrying over 200,000 tons of freight passing through each year, although this declined with the fall of the Soviet Union.

The UK Independent still has this headline on their website:

A Triumph for Man, a Disaster for Mankind
Two ships are finishing the first commercial navigation of the fabled North-east Passage. It is an epic moment – but also a vivid sign of climate change in the Arctic

Media hype. Check. But where is the hysterical quote from Greenpeace? Oh hells yeah, we got that too.

"This is further proof that climate change is happening now," said Melanie Duchin, Arctic Expedition leader on board the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise, who added that the development put greater pressure on world leaders to agree a major emissions cut at their Copenhagen meeting in December. "This is not a cause for celebration but cause for immediate action," she said.

I believe this is getting Salem Witch Trial crazy...in that these people really believe what they "feel" is true, therefore science must back it up. When you believe, facts back you up naturally. And when someone does research, they are apostates that are going straight to HELL!

Latest ACORN Video: San Diego

Summary.
Whaaaat? Twelve underage girls? No problem. I got people that do that. And how much for the girl (Hanna).

So what do these 5 videos say about the main stream media. This story has been there for years. What about the big bad right wing conspiracy? Not to scary.

Here is the unlikely pair. I'm guessing it was Hanna that sold the image and not the guy. Maybe its just me.



Here is Jon Stewart's take as only he can do.

9-12 Protest: Revenge Of The Gray Panthers

To be honest, I was really surprised by the number of young people that showed up today at the 9-12 rally. That was very encouraging.

To be really honest it was the Gray Panthers at the daytime/weekday townhalls who have done all the heavy lifting. Bravo to them. The members of congress thought that by holding town hall meetings at 10:00 AM on Wednesday, they would eliminate most of the opposition who have jobs and pay taxes.

What was forgotten is that the Gray Panthers wake up at 5 AM and are just getting loose by about 10 AM with a couple of pots of full-on cafinated coffee. It's their energy that carried the protest movement through the summer. It's their voting block that made the Democrats and their media wing at ABC/CBS/NBC reluctant to go after them harder than they did.

One of my favorite Gray Panthers.



A really old guy breaks down with emotion.



9-12. Ordinary Americans doing what they have always done best. Where do we go from here?

Watch the crowd build. Amazing video.

You Lie!

If Rep. Joe Wilson was looking to sell some T-shirts, he certainly is off to a good start. Its a pithy little slogan that has gotten everyone's attention.



How about this little video, Bush getting booed by the democrats while he discusses the need for social security reform.


Wilson was not only right to do it, but it should have been more coordinated. They should have chanted "let us in" or "talk to US" and made the issue about Obama refusing to discuss any republican ideas. The ideal time was right after Obama said, "I'll take ideas from everyone..." Its a shame that opportunity was missed.

Thomasville, AL: The Week That Was

It was another exciting week in Thomasville. The Marvin's store is moving forward, high school football is back, and then there was this:

Hunter Martin killed this 5-foot, six-inch rattlesnake while visiting with his dad, Moose Martin, in Millry over the weekend. The snake had seven rattles and two buttons. Martin, while attending Alabama Southern Community College, lives with his grandparents, Wilmer and Nancy Odom in Thomasville.

That's SEVEN rattles and TWO buttons people.

Obama Joins The Other Firsters: To Become UN Security Council Chair

So Obama can't play God...it's above his pay grade. And now he is going to chair the Security Council at the UN.

It has never happened before. I guess other presidents had a full plate. Isn't this, to turn his own phrase, below his pay grade?

Here's a funny:

“The council has a very important role to play in preventing the spread and use of nuclear weapons, and it’s the world’s principal body for dealing with global security cooperation,” Susan Rice, US envoy to the UN, said last week.

OK, where. Which country has been stopped exactly?

Maybe Obama just feels more comfortable with like minded people. You know the ones who blame this country first for everything.

Here is the current council:

The Council is composed of five permanent members — China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States — and ten non-permanent members (with year of term's end):

Austria (2010)
Japan (2010)
Uganda (2010)
Burkina Faso (2009)
Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (2009)
Viet Nam (2009)
Costa Rica (2009)
Mexico (2010)
Croatia (2009)
Turkey (2010)

Now there is a group we can count on to do the right thing. Maybe this will give him a chance to catch up with family?

So Is It Tsars or Czars?

Really, it's important. The windbags at wiki cover Nixon's one czar, but fail to mention the 59 czars in the current White House.

From Wiki:

Tsar or czar[1] (Bulgarian цар, Russian: царь (help·info), Ukrainian: цар, in Serbian: цар / car, in scientific transliteration respectively car' and car), occasionally spelled csar or tzar in English, is a Slavic term with Bulgarian origins used to designate certain monarchs. The first ruler to adopt the title tsar was Simeon I of Bulgaria [2]

Originally, the title Czar (derived from Caesar) meant Emperor in the European medieval sense of the term, that is, a ruler who claims the same rank as a Roman emperor, with the approval of another emperor or a supreme ecclesiastical official (the Pope or the Ecumenical Patriarch).

Occasionally, the word could be used to designate other, non-Christian, supreme rulers. In Russia and Bulgaria the imperial connotations of the term were blurred with time and, by the 19th century, it had come to be viewed as an equivalent of King.[3][4]

"Tsar" was the official title of the supreme ruler in the following states:

Bulgaria in 913–1018, in 1185–1422 and in 1908–1946
Serbia in 1346–1371
Russia from about 1547 until 1721 (replaced in 1721 by imperator, but remained in common usage until 1917).
Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the last Tsar of Bulgaria, is the only living person who bore the Slavonic title Tsar.

So it's interchangable?

Maybe we should Americanize it even more... Xar!

I was going to do a Xena Warrior Princess thing here. You think it would be easy to find a pic of her, and you would be wrong. Apparently every half decent looking chick (and a few that were not) from the 1990's dressed up like Xena and it's on the internet now.



Like, I can't believe we had the same idea for a costume here in 1995.


OK, what was I talking about again?

Paint The Town (Venice) Red: Firsters Rail Against Capitalism

UPDATE: A picture of the lovely couple. Chavez blows kisses while Oliver Stone...naw that's just too easy.



Looking at the headlines from the Venice Film Festival, its hard not to notice the strong anti-capitalist theme throughout. Hollywood's favorite dictator, Hugo Chavez, is there and he brought his personal media consultant, Oliver Stone, with a fresh "documentary" about the beloved leaders "great life story."

Up on the screen, its Michael Moore's latest, "Capitalism, A Love Story."
A 2 plus hour scab picking exercise that concludes "Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil."

Taken as a whole, this Venice Film Festival looks like a gussied up political rally for Hate America Firsters...or just Firsters.

As the master scab picker, Moore has gutlessly picked subjects that play to his Firster base. Why not examine the horrors of political repression by modern-day dictators or the treatment of women in Muslim countries. Instead Moore chooses to make films that come across as being made by an overweight, hormonal teenager who is angry at a slightly overbearing father. Good thing for him he keeps choosing his father subjects well, because the really evil ones cut peoples throats, or worse - disinvite you to those fabulous Hollywood parties with the 10 count shrimp.

And how about ol' reliable, Oliver Stone. His "documentary" plays like a pre-teen girls' love letter complete with XOXOXO and a Hello Kitty stamp. Stone, the Lion of Hollywood Firsters, lovingly presents Hugo's story as Venezuela's "peaceful revolution" since Chavez came to power in 1998: that "he(Chavez), who grew up in a peasant family, is an emblematic figure of bottom-up change."

I guess being a Firster is like living a life of a perpetual child: you know where the dangers are and are able to avoid them while living at home and complaining about Dad.

UPDATED: Things That Are Racist

Signatures on truther petitions.

Now that Van Johnson has been busted, his name on the dotted line was a ruse perpetrated by the man who could see that this would be a problem in the future...using his future cast computer the way that he does. Kind of like Thom Cruise using in Minority Report. Which sounds racist too.

Soooo, does that make the future racist?


...

Health Care Reform protesters (except for the ones biting the fingers off old people)

College Football Coaches (except for the black ones)

NHL Hockey.

Credit Cards.

Mortgage Applications.

Home Ownership.

Cash Money.

Smoking.

Breast Cancer.

Tax Reform.

Welfare Reform.

Death.

High Blood Pressure.

Flu. (all types)

Unites States Constitution.

Taxes.

Hurricanes.

Global Warming

Republicans.

Everything before 1848.

Rockwood Tn Youth Crying Tears of Blood: Channeling The Regal Horned Lizard

No really! Tears of blood. They said they took him to a specialist (in blood tears?) and they were stumped.



Now for the news you won't get from the State Controlled Media.


And of course this seems like a good excuse for...From Dusk Till Dawn.

Skip Day? Obama Addresses Our Kids

Actually, the address to skool kidz on September 8th will be pretty bland. The real disturbing part is in the Dept of Education's website activities to follow the speech to our kids.

Michelle Malkin has a good wrap up here.

From the Dept of Ed website.

*What do you think the President wants us to do?

*Does the speech make you want to do anything?

*Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us?


Create posters of their goals. Posters could be formatted in quadrants or puzzle pieces or trails marked with the labels: personal, academic, community, country. Each area could be labeled with three steps for achieving goals in those areas. It might make sense to focus on personal and academic so community and country goals come more readily.

• Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.

I will probably send my kids, with their own essays and information. But not sending them would feel soooo right.

Weekly Check Of Thomasville Alabama

My adopted hometown. Sister city to no ghey French towns. Where men are men and women know what that means.

Mayor: tired of "conspiracies"

Thomasville Mayor Sheldon Day lashed out at one of his most outspoken critics, council member Charles Allen at Monday night's meeting.

"I'm tired of everything being a damn conspiracy," Day said. "Every time we make a mistake around here, it's some kind of conspiracy."

Oh hells yeah mayor! Note: Mayor day is a big-time deacon at a church.

There were no other big events last week. No 100 lb watermelons or anything.

Combination Nazi Bastards and Racist Pigs

First the background. The song of the summer? Maybe, maybe not - but the inspiration for this post anyway. Hearing the left constantly repeat racist and nazi reminded me of the Das Racist song.



So what are opponents of socialist takeovers? Nazi's? or Racists?



OK, so opposition to tax hikes is racist.



So they are Nazi's?

Meh. Maybe the left needs a new Thesaurus.

Now if I could only get that damn song out of my head.

Fox Has Just embarrased Themselves Again With Another "Hottest..." Slideshow

This time it's the Hottest 10 Female Athletes. To be fair, they claim they got their list from the readers of radaronline.com.

1. Serena Williams
2. Amanda Beard (I'm on board with the first 2)
3. Anna Kournikova (OK, ten years ago, but OK)
4. Gabby Reece (ditto)
5. Laila Ali (What? Who even has her name in the mix?)
6. Danica Patrick (She has to be driving NASCAR before she earns the right)
7. Venus Williams (Uh...NO. Not today, not 10 years ago. NO)
8. Maria Sharapova (OK, but there are other sports)
9. Steffi Graf (Are you fucking kidding me?)
10.Misty May-Treanor (Enough!)


I had to head over to radaronline.com to see how this list could happen. It was very clear...immediately. The joint is pink and full of gheyness.

Three glaringly obvious misses.

1. Allison Stokke


2. Leryn Franco. Javellin. Paraguay


3. Natalie Gulbis.


Fox needs to go somewhere else for their "hottest" lists. They always miss Marissa Tomei in the hottest 40 over 40 and this list was terrible.

By the way, a google image search for Leryn Franco with the filter turned off is well worth it. She is a calender model as well.

There Are A Few Meanings

Purple Monkey Dishwasher is a non-sequitur that has evolved into commonly used response to opinions stated based on hearsay and unconfirmed rumors.

This blog is the response to the opinions and unconfirmed rumor mongering in the media today.

From the Urban Dictionary, the other ways this phrase is used.

1. purple monkey dishwasher
Despite claims this phrase originated on "The Simpsons", it actually existed long before it was used in the show. The phrase is intended to portray the distortion of facts when passed from person to person.

Its use in "The Simpsons" was accurate; Bart starts a rumour by whispering to one person who whispers it to another, etc. By the time the rumour reaches the front of the crowd, the phrase "Purple monkey dishwasher" has been added to the end due to people mishearing the original rumour as it passed from person to person.

Due to the popularity of "The Simpsons", the phrase has since become a commonly used response to opinions stated based on hearsay and unconfirmed rumours.
Person A - "I heard from a friend of a friend that John cheated on Linda with Karen!"

Person B - "Purple monkey dishwasher."

2. purple monkey dishwasher
A nonsense phrase seen widely in an early Simpson's episode. Added at the end of a Chinese whisper, ironically, as there are few if any phrases which can be mistaken for "purple monkey dishwasher". For this reason, it is sometimes used to check if communications are working properly, instead of ie. "testing" "mic check" "test test 1 2 3 check" and/or "syphilis".
"Say purple monkey dishwasher, if you can hear this."

3. purple monkey dishwasher
Derived from the simpsons, a term that should now be applied to the end of every game of chinese whispers - broken telephone.
Person 1: "The Sky is blue"

Person 17: "The man eats poo, purple monkey dishwasher"

4. purple monkey dishwasher
Originating from an episode of the Simpsons (episode 2F19 "The PTA Disbands")
It has taken on a comical nonsensical interjectional use... appropriate as comic relief or as a tension breaker
-'Jeezus!! who the hell ate the last jos louis?'
- 'purple monkey dishwasher?'
get this def on a mug
by whiskymack Jul 14, 2004 share this

5. Purple Monkey Dishwasher
A dishwasher made by the world famous 'Purple Monkey' brand. Comes with one year garantee.
"That dishwasher is l33t"
"I know, it's Purple Monkey"
get this def on a mug
by fire extinguisher Nov 1, 2004 share this

6. purple monkey dishwasher
the answer to any "why" question you do not know.
"Why didnt you eat your veggie?"
-"Purple Monkey Dishwasher."
get this def on a mug
by melissa Nov 25, 2003 share this

7. purple monkey dishwasher
A quick inconspicuous phrase to alert your friends of the pressence of a suspicious looking/acting character.
in other words - 'lets get out of here'
Out shopping with friends you notice a stranger eyeing off your handbags but your friends are too distracted to notice....
friend - "do you think this dress will look good with my red heels?"
you - "purple monkey dishwasher!!!!"

100 Pound Watermelons And Small Town Living

It's August, small town Alabama. A man brings his 98 pound watermelon by the local paper to be photographed for the weekly edition.



From the Thomasville Times:

Allison Driver of Sweet Water brought this huge, 98 lbs. watermelon by The Thomasville Times office last week. The melon was so big, it had to ride shotgun in the car with him. Rather than trying to get the massive melon out of the car, Driver just got back in the driver's side to pose with his prize.

In other news, The Surginer Volunteer Fire Department has barbecue for sale for $7 per pound.

A simple way of life.

This Is Why FRM, Stuff And The Others Were Started

After years of having gay men mock women like this as fat in US Weekly and any other rag with a "fashion" section.


And who could forget the awful Jennifer Love Hewitt.



I think I will go buy a subscription to Maxim.

Black Guy Creates "White Supremacist" On Facebook

What a dummy. The Feds are always going to run this kind of stuff down.

African-American man has pleaded guilty after being accused of impersonating a white supremacist in a fictitious Facebook account to make death threats against an African-American university student.
...
A court document provided by the U.S. attorney's office said Hart told an FBI interviewer that he intended the threat to be a prank "to get a reaction."

Lone nut theory?

One white guy does this and the State Controlled Media will exaust every resource looking for a conspriacy. Ask a tough question of Obama, 12 hours later all of your personal information is out there courtesy of you state departments.

Hart admitted creating the fictitious account in November, pretending to be a white supremacist outraged by the election of Barack Obama as the nation's first African-American president, the statement said.

Remember When Dissent Was Patriotic?

The good old days. We used to be able to cover our faces and run around howling at the moon about any damn thing.

Remeber when they "understood our anger." Our patient representatives like Nancy Pelosi used to like disruption.



And the louder and more virulent the language...well that just meant you really meant it.

Politicians could call out other politicians.


Remember when yelling at a president was considered "cool?"

Detroit Public Schools Filing Bankruptcy - Time For A 100% Charter System

The Detroit Free Press has been covering the final gasps of the failed Detroit Public Schools.

The Detroit Public Schools may have no choice but to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, which would make it the first big-city school district to use bankruptcy court to avoid paying millions to vendors, employees and bondholders, experts said Thursday.

The insider mismanagement, embezzlement, and shameless disregard for the kids has been captured by Mike Thompson at the Freep.



I can only imagine the outcry if an outside group, say white conservatives, were stealing from the poor and mostly black inner-city kids of Detroit. Yet in Detroit, we get reelections of criminals like Kwame Brown and can barely elect an honorable man like Mayor Bing. How long before the Mayor is run out of town for trying to curb the rampant cronyism and pay-to-play? A recent audit showed that there were at least 257 "ghost" employees - people who get paid but don't actually work.

DPS is almost 300 million in debt, yet it's infrastructure/legacy costs are just as high as when the system served a much larger population. While shrinking by almost 65,000 students between the years of 2002 and 2008 (157,003 to 94,054) may seem like a large number, the district is now approximately half the size it was in 1970. In fact, DPS spends a large part of it's budget closing schools - and it's still not enough.

DPS has a few "select enrollment" schools that are doing well. They hold these up as some sort of shield to the vast majority that are providing third world education.

A very wealthy man, Bob THompson, opens up charter schools and leases them for $1 per year as long as the kids are served properly. The Charter School System is now up to 54,000 students. More importantly, 90% of those kids are going to college. As you would expect, DPS is fighting this "black flight" tooth and nail.

For these charter kids, 83% of those who attended a four year university re-enrolled for a second year, and 57% of those who attended a two year college re-enrolled for a second year, beating national re-enrollment averages of 73% and 45% respectively. (wiki Detroit News and Free Press)

Detroit families are grabbing every opportunity to get their kids out. That any are still being forced to remain in the DPS system is criminal. Instead of using stimulus money to prop up the DPS, the money should be spent to close the remaining schools and ensure the kids get a good education in the charter system. After three decades of miserable failure, the unwinding of DPS is now inevitable - the only question is how much money is spent on a facade.

Obamas DOJ Going After the CIA Officers Who Interrogated Zubaydah And KSM

Obama has a political tin ear. We know that now, and this report from the LA Times is just another line of evidence.

U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. is poised to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA abuses committed during the interrogation of terrorism suspects, current and former U.S. government officials said.

A senior Justice Department official said that Holder envisioned an inquiry that would be narrow in scope, focusing on "whether people went beyond the techniques that were authorized" in Bush administration memos that liberally interpreted anti-torture laws.

Remember all of the other special prosecutors? Yeah, the ones that went far afield from their original charge? Narrow in scope and special prosecutor do not go together. This is destined to go on until the final moments of the Obama administration.

Bracing for the worst, a small number of CIA officials have put off plans to retire or leave the agency so that they can maintain their access to classified files and be in a better position to defend against a Justice investigation.

"Once you're out, it gets a lot harder," said a retired CIA official who said he had spoken recently with former colleagues. The inquiry would probably also target private contractors who worked for the CIA during the interrogations.

And who were these techniques used on?

One passage of the CIA report declassified this year said that the method had been used "at least 83 times during August 2002" on Abu Zubaydah, the first senior Al Qaeda figure captured by the agency. Waterboarding was then employed "183 times during March 2003" on Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The initial complaints were that the techniques were supposedly used on hundreds of people. That the CIA was just grabbing any Joe (or Muhammad) and torturing them for fun. Turns out the CIA used these techniques on just a couple of the worst - hundreds of times. Meh.

Not to make light of this, but this was one of those Jack Bauer situations with the clock ticking. It's easy now to look back say you did not like how we rolled up Al Qaeda. We had the masterminds and they had the intel to stop more attacks.

Politically, this will play out poorly for Obama. This plays into the anti-American theme he keeps stumbling into. From apology tours to glad-handing vehemently anti-US dictators, Obama seems to be mixing adulation overseas for success here at home. A mistake that leads to an early exit from the White House.

Navy Rolls Out The F-35 Lightning II JSF

Meet the Lightning IIfrom the Naval Air Station JAX News.

By MC2(SW) Rebekah Blowers Chief of Naval Operations Public Affairs

The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) welcomed the Navy’s first Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35C Lightning II, to the fleet in a July 28 ceremony. The F-35C is the Navy’s first stealth fighter and possesses uncompromised carrier suitability and low-maintenance stealth materials designed for long-term durability in the carrier environment.

CNO Adm. Gary Roughead said this aircraft adds tremendous capability to the fleet and that “Our Sailors will never be in a fair fight because this airplane will top anything that comes its way.

The F-35C is on schedule to meet the Navy’s initial operational capability in 2015. It combines stealth with supersonic speed and high agility. The Lightning II employs the most powerful and comprehensive sensor package ever incorporated into a fighter.

This is one bad MF-er.




Performance

Maximum speed: Mach 1.67[164] (1,283 mph, 2,065 km/h)
Range: A: 1,200 nmi; B: 900 nmi; C: 1,400 nmi (A: 2,220 km; B: 1,670 km; C: 2,520 km) on internal fuel[165]
Combat radius: A: 610 nmi; B: 500 nmi; C: 640 nmi (A: 1,110 km; B: 910 km; C: 1,150 km) on internal fuel[165]
Service ceiling: A/B/C: 60,000 ft[166] (18,288 m)
Rate of climb: classified (not publicly available)

Thrust/weight:

With full fuel: A: 0.89; B: 0.92; C: 0.81[40]
With 50% fuel: A: 1.12; B: 1.10; C: 1.01[40]
g-Limits: F-35A: 9 g, F-35B: 7.5 g, F-35C: 7.5 g
Armament


Guns: 1 × GAU-22/A 25 mm (0.984 in) cannon — slated to be mounted internally with 180 rounds in the F-35A and fitted as an external pod with 220 rounds in the F-35B and F-35C.[40]
Hardpoints: 6× external pylons on wings with a capacity of 15,000 lb (6,800 kg)[40][43] and 2× internal bays with 2 pylons each[43] (Total weapons payload of 18,000 lb on A and C models.)[167],
Missiles:

Internal: 4 air-to-air missiles, or 2 air-to-air missiles and 2 air-to-ground weapons.
External: 6 air-to-air missiles, or 4 air-to-ground weapons and 2 air-to-air missiles[47] with combinations for the following missiles:
Air-to-air missiles:
AIM-120 AMRAAM
AIM-132 ASRAAM
AIM-9X Sidewinder
Air-to-ground weapons:
AGM-154 JSOW
AGM-158 JASSM
Bombs:

Mark 84 general purpose bombs
Mark 83 GP bombs
Mark 82 GP bombs
Mk.20 Rockeye II cluster bomb
Wind Corrected Munitions Dispenser capable
Paveway-series laser-guided bombs
Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) (Quad launcher counts as a single air-to-ground weapon above.)
JDAM-series

White House Snitch Program

Time to settle in for some ol-timey fascism. Six fucking months and this President has snitch lines. I can only imaging the outcry from the left if Bush had started a snitch program for people talking badly about the Iraq war.

I've said it before and I'll say it for the 4th time. This guy is the Democrats Nixon. He has the same thin-skin and can't stand anyone anywhere disagreeing with him.

It's now our duty to report on our fellow citizens, who quote:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

Freedom-lovers, that's right from the Whitehouse.gov website.

Sure, that kind of language conjures up images of Hitler youth turning in their Jew-loving parents to the authorities for their beloved leader. But why not have fun with it. I have sent over 20 tips to the "won" to help him track down and eradicate the kind of non-standard and unapproved subversive thought. Have fun: flag@whitehouse.gov.

Remember, our beloved leader needs YOU to snitch on your friends and family.

Peak Oil...Again...Really?

Peak oil alarmists have been at it for a long time and they have been wrong every single time. The old doomers (peak oil advocates) have since merged with the new doomers (global warming theorists) in an uncomfortable eco alliance. I'll explain below.

A new report in the Independent claims, yet again, we are heading to catastrophe sooner than we thought.

The world is heading for a catastrophic energy crunch that could cripple a global economic recovery because most of the major oil fields in the world have passed their peak production...warned Dr Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the respected International Energy Agency (IEA).

... the IEA concluded that the global energy system was at a crossroads and that consumption of oil was "patently unsustainable", with expected demand far outstripping supply.

Oil production has already peaked in non-Opec countries and the era of cheap oil has come to an end, it warned.

Compare that with the (now) famous comments from Jimmy Carter in 1977:

Unless profound changes are made to lower oil consumption, we now believe that early in the 1980s the world will be demanding more oil that it can produce ... Each new inventory of world oil reserves has been more disturbing than the last. World oil production can probably keep going up for another six or eight years. But some time in the 1980s it can't go up much more. Demand will overtake production. We have no choice about that.

More importantly, if the peak oil doomers are right then our carbon based economy has a built in expiration date that doesn't require a cap/tax system.

Here is the Hubbert "peak oil" curve.




There are Hubbert-ian (more here at Wiki) peak curves for all fossil fuels with a consistent theme...we will be running down the back side of the curve starting in 2020 - at the latest. Which is coincidentally, the timeframe where the draconian carbon caps are scheduled to kick in.

The obvious conclusion is that natural and market forces will do all the heavy lifting promised in cap and tax - and in a similar timeframe. So if the old doomers are right, the carbon economy is resource limited and we will be forced to come up with a non-carbon alternative. If the new doomers are right, cap/tax will become a conservation program that will prolong our carbon economy by decades.

We need a new curve, let's call it the Gore Curve, to quantify how wrong both of these groups have been - and will continue to be.

Obama Joker Face Socialism Poster

It's been showing up in LA.

Remembering The Good Times

Dan Lacey. Perfect

RIP Pontiac 1926-2010

From the 1959 Bonneville to the 1969 GTO to the Firebird T/A, Pontiac was a legendary car company. Nothing said performance like that arrowhead logo on the hood. Like all American car companies, GM lost it's way by the 1980's and forgot about the "main thing." You had a bunch of Harvard B-school pricks running a car company. They drove BMWs of course and too many of the white collar and union guys were buying Toyota's.

Lot's of blame to go around, but this is what we are left with in 2009...lots of blame and no leaders.

If this didn't work for you, there was just no hope:




Marketing. Man this is marketing.

Honor Killings

Mark Steyn has THIS up on his page, about the mysterious drownings of 7 Muslim women in a Ontario.

The third Muslim girl found in the swimming pool has died. That's seven drowned young Muslim females showing up in the same morgue within a month. In other circumstances, they'd be planning the movie with Ashley Judd or some such as the crusading feminist Assistant DA. But as the M-word's involved I expect poor Zainab Shafi and the rest will be quickly forgotten.

The Boston Globe profiled several of the more public killings in the US:

In the Atlanta suburb of Jonesboro last month, a Pakistani immigrant allegedly strangled his 25-year-old daughter with a bungee cord because she was determined to end her arranged marriage and had gotten involved with a new man. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Sandeela Kanwal's father, Chaudhry Rashid, "told police he is Muslim and that extramarital affairs and divorce are against his religion [and] that's why he killed her." In court last week, a detective quoted Rashid: "God will protect me. God is watching me. I strangled my daughter."

In Upstate New York a few weeks earlier, Waheed Allah Mohammad, an immigrant from Afghanistan, was charged with attempted murder after repeatedly stabbing his 19-year-old sister. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported that Mohammad was "infuriated because his younger sister was going to clubs, wearing immodest clothing, and planning to leave her family for a new life in New York City" - she was a "bad Muslim girl," he told sheriff's investigators.

On New Year's Day in Irving, Texas, the bullet-riddled bodies of the Said sisters - Sarah, 17, and Amina, 18 - were found in an abandoned taxi. Police issued an arrest warrant for their father, an Egyptian immigrant named Yaser Abdel Said, who had reportedly threatened to kill them upon learning that they had boyfriends. According to the Dallas Morning News, Yaser Said was given to "gun-waving rants about how Western culture was corrupting the chastity of his daughters."

These are brutal, premeditated, and bloody crimes intended to send a message and our government is treating this as a series of isolated incidents. In a strange way, these honor killings seem to be treated like black on black killings in the inner city. As long as they are not affecting the "good" people, meh why bother. Maybe it's more about political correctness and a fear of profiling a protected group.

Either way, I can only imagine the government response to any other religious group if they had a comparable year. Terror cells in the churches...frequent honor killings of their daughters and wives...Afghan training camps. I'm sure there would be memos from Janet "Big Sis" Napolitano. Maybe a few jack-booted wake up calls at 2AM.

I am reminded of a story from Detroit, about an honor killing nearly 90 years ago. The young woman was thrown into a river, legs weighted with concrete. She was literally torn off the family tree and family members born after her death knew nothing of her existence. The Detroit News covered the story in 2007. The story below is a fascinating read.

Frances Costa was thrown into the river in 1920, when she was 16, her legs weighted down with concrete. She has long since become a part of the river, one of its innumerable watery secrets, lost forever. Lost, until a great-niece started asking questions of family members, and found horror in the answers.

It was Costa's two older brothers, relatives said, who killed the girl.

"When I first heard about it, I thought, 'oh my God, I have the blood of murderers running through my veins,' " said Tintori, standing by the river off Belle Isle on Tuesday. The West Bloomfield mother and wife, 59, is a successful author.

She is also the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter of a Sicilian family that came to America in the early 20th century harboring secrets, as well as the unshakable rule that family secrets must never be told.

Omerta is what they call it in Sicily: the code of silence.

Tintori has shattered her family's omerta with her memoir "Unto the Daughters" (St. Martin's Press, $24.95), about her quest to find out what became of her great-aunt.

To Tintori's sorrow, after persistent questioning of older relatives, she discovered that Frances' murder was an honor killing.

Parts of the narrative changed in the telling, recalled from the fading memories of older people. But several facts remained consistent in Tintori's interviews: Frances was murdered by two men, most likely her older brothers; she was drowned at Belle Isle, and her sin was some sort of sexual impropriety, as decided by her male relatives.

"I thought about writing it as fiction, with everybody's name changed," Tintori said. But instead, she felt it important to revive Frances' name.

"Otherwise, she was a woman who would be lost to history, she was dispensable."

Family name changed
Costa is not the family's real surname; Tintori changed that in the book, and her grandparents' surname as well, in order not to embarrass relatives who had nothing to do with the crime, or descendants who don't know about it. But she brushes off the idea that telling the story brings her family shame.

"It's a horrible thing in our family's past," Tintori said. "But to the people who are humiliated or embarrassed, or feel this should be kept secret, that is giving more credence and protection to the perpetrators. Women in the Middle East are just starting to stop being afraid and speak out for the victim."

The Costa family drama played out in the early 1900s on Monroe Street on Detroit's near east side, an area known as Little Sicily.

The family emigrated from Corleone, Sicily, several years after the patriarch, Domenico, and his two oldest sons, Rocco and Pasquale, came to Detroit to escape their life of rural poverty and find jobs. In March 1914, Domenico brought his pregnant wife, Concetta, and their younger children to New York on a steamship, and then to Detroit by train.

Tucked away in Little Sicily, the Costa family still lived by the customs of the homeland. Women were under the supervision of their male relatives, and were worked hard, first in their father's home, then their husband's.

Once, Tintori's grandmother Giusippina handed her fiance, Nino, his hat at the house on Monroe Street, a simple act that earned her a beating from her father. As a young woman, she wasn't allowed to touch him. Earlier in Sicily, as a 7-year-old, she'd had teeth knocked out by her mother for taking bites out of an apple used to scent a linen drawer.

Such violence doesn't surprise Donna Gabaccia, director of the University of Minnesota's Immigration History Research Center and author of a book on Sicilian immigrants, "From Sicily to Elizabeth Street."

The violence in the Costa family "struck me as being the kind of everyday violence that was very common," Gabaccia said.

The "gender dynamics" in Sicilian families were different than in most American families. Disrespect or disobedience by a daughter was met with instant punishment, usually by the mother.

And yet, Gabaccia said that brothers killing a sister was a relatively rare phenomenon. Usually, she says, an honor killing would be a husband taking action against an unfaithful wife

The missing daughter
The family secret started to unravel in 1993, when Tintori was 45. She found out there were six young Costa children who came to America to join their two older brothers, not just five. She was in her aunt Grace's kitchen, poring over old family papers, when the subject of Frances came up. Opening an old family passport, her aunt Grace pointed to an entry on the long list of children that had been crossed out with a pen.

"That's the one they got rid of," she told Tintori. "Did your mother ever tell you?"

Reeling in shock, Tintori pressed her aunt for details. "That's the one they murdered, Frances," her aunt said. "The next sister after Gramma."

Frances, her aunt told the author, was "oversexed" and was always being caught in the alley with boys. "They just said she had to go away," Tintori quoted her aunt, who died in 2001. "Everyone understood what that meant."

Later, after Tintori implored relatives to talk, more details emerged, both from Grace; from Tintori's own mother, Jenny, and her great-uncles Louie and Michael, Frances' younger brothers.

It was one of the oldest stories in the world, Romeo and Juliet played out on Detroit's east side. Frances' Romeo was a young barber whose name is lost in the mists of time.

Her father objected to the barber, adamant that Frances marry a much older man who was high up in one of the local Italian gangs. But Frances was in love, and she would sneak off to the alley to meet her barber.

Family members told Tintori that Frances and the barber got married. When she returned to tell her parents, her two older brothers Rocco and Pasquale resolved to punish her for disobeying their father.

The brothers were rough characters who ran with gangs back in Sicily, Tintori discovered. In Detroit they worked at Ford, but they soon quit for the even more lucrative bootlegging trade, and were known to run with the neighborhood gangs.

Rocco and Pasquale thought they would impress the local gangsters by getting rid of their sister and restoring "honor" to the family.

That they chose Belle Isle to kill Frances disturbed Tintori greatly. She thought back on the many picnics on Belle Isle, and happy wedding photos taken in front of the Scott Fountain. What did her older relatives think when they went there, Tintori wonders. Did they think of Frances?

When Rocco and Pasquale told the gang capo who hoped to marry Frances that they had killed her and restored honor to the family, he was horrified. A hit was ordered on the brothers, which created a whole new set of problems. Their father went to the gang boss, begging that his sons' lives be spared. Domenico's plea: That he had already lost a daughter.

As for Frances' barber, he disappeared. "He thought he would be next," Tintori said.

Police kept out of it
It's hard to imagine today how such a thing could happen in the 20th century, in a North American city, without raising the interest of the police.

"Omerta," Tintori said. "You don't tell."

Detroit was also a densely populated, somewhat lawless place in 1919, when Prohibition went into law in Michigan. Organized crime was just taking shape and rival neighborhood gangs fought over turf.

JoEllen Vinyard, a history professor at Eastern Michigan University, describes what the city was like in the newer immigrant enclaves.

"There were more blind pigs after Prohibition, than there had been bars," Vinyard said. "The city was packed to the gills because of all the new migration from the South that had come in, and a booming auto industry. It was lawless, the gangs were pretty much in control of their territory."

Detroit's newer ethnic neighborhoods, where Italians and Poles lived, were particularly impenetrable.

"These were very closed, ethnic societies," Vinyard said. "They had their own churches and social groups, they associated with each other. Many did not even speak English, especially the women."

Many girls from the ethnic neighborhoods didn't even go to school. Because the older Costa daughters Giusippina and Frances already could read and write, they didn't attend school, so there was no sudden absence to explain after Frances disappeared. After Tintori found out what happened to Frances, she summoned up the nerve to ask her mother Jenny about it. Her mother's reaction was immediate, profane and angry. "Forget about that (expletive)" she shouted. Jenny had never even told her husband, Tintori's father, about Frances.

Faced with either outright hostility, or with tears from the older generation -- her great-uncles Louie and Michael both cried when recalling their sister Frances -- Tintori pressed on for years, trying to piece together how such a thing could happen in 20th century Detroit.

Tintori's great-uncle Louie, who was a boy when his older sister Frances was killed, spoke to her several times over the years about Frances' murder, usually insisting that only "family" be present, no in-laws.

His story varied at times, but key details remained the same. After one of the brothers told his parents what they had done to Frances, Louie said his father cried, and his mother screamed all night, so loudly that she could be heard for blocks.

Although Frances' generation, the one that guarded the secret, are now all dead, the family's younger members, many years distant from the crime, were more supportive of Tintori's quest.

One of Grace's daughters, Donna Schepke, 45, of Warren remembers when her cousin started digging for the truth about Frances in the early '90s.

"I found out about (the murder) right as Karen was starting to, because my mom was still alive and bits and pieces were slipping out here and there," Schepke said. "Every time we'd get together with Karen it'd be, 'What else did you find out?'

"It's a little bit disturbing to know that this happened in your family, basically you only see stuff like that on TV," Schepke said.

"But you know what? I'm not ashamed, I'm not disgusted. I'm just really happy that she wrote the book to tell the story of my great-aunt Frances, to finally let her rest in peace."

Speaking out for others
While Tintori's family happens to be Sicilian, honor killings of women have occurred in many cultures and religions.

Today we hear about such practices in the Mideast and Africa, but "it's quite common around the Mediterranean and in all the religious groups that live around the Mediterranean," said researcher Gabaccia.

"You find concerns about honor in Greek Orthodoxy, you find it in Catholicism, you find it in Islam, you find it in the non-Islamic parts of Africa as well."

Tintori said she hopes her book helps to show how far we've come as a society, "and how far some societies still need to come."

Tintori and her cousins plan to have a memorial service for Frances, with a priest. "But, I thought, where would I go? Where would she be?"

In the river, at Belle Isle.

"I'm glad the roses ended up on the rocks," Tintori said, after tossing a dozen into the river. "They'll stay there longer."

Russian Navy Realeases The Alien Files

Is this the Russian "Blue Book?" From Russia Today.

The Russian navy has declassified its records of encounters with unidentified objects technologically surpassing anything humanity ever built, reports Svobodnaya Pressa news website.

The records dating back to soviet times were compiled by a special navy group collecting reports of unexplained incidents delivered by submarines and military ships.

Actually, the story here is better than either of the X Files movies.

On one occasion a nuclear submarine, which was on a combat mission in the Pacific Ocean, detected six unknown objects. After the crew failed to leave behind their pursuers by maneuvering, the captain ordered to surface. The objects followed suit, took to the air, and flew away.

Many mysterious events happened in the region of Bermuda Triangle, recalls retired submarine commander Rear Admiral Yury Beketov. Instruments malfunctioned with no apparent reason or detected strong interference. The former navy officer says this could be deliberate disruption by UFOs.

“On several occasions the instruments gave reading of material objects moving at incredible speed. Calculations showed speeds of about 230 knots, of 400 kph. Speeding so fast is a challenge even on the surface. But water resistance is much higher. It was like the objects defied the laws of physics. There’s only one explanation: the creatures who built them far surpass us in development,” Beketov said.

Navy intelligence veteran, Captain 1st rank Igor Barklay comments:

“Ocean UFOs often show up wherever our or NATO’s fleets concentrate. Near Bahamas, Bermudas, Puerto Rico. They are most often seen in the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, in the southern part of the Bermuda Triangle, and also in the Caribbean Sea.”

Another place where people often report UFO encounters is Russia’s Lake Baikal, the deepest fresh water body in the world. Fishermen tell of powerful lights coming from the deep and objects flying up from the water.

In one case in 1982 a group of military divers training at Baikal spotted a group of humanoid creatures dressed in silvery suits. The encounter happened at a depth of 50 meters, and the divers tried to catch the strangers. Three of the seven men died, while four others were severely injured.

One could say it all sounds a little fishy. Or maybe this is the silvery creature they were chasing?



That's Victoria's Secret model Natasha Poly by the way.

More here and here.

Science Bi-czar: Obama's New Science Czar's Book Promoted Forced Abortions and Sterilizations

From the IBD:

Our new science czar, John Holdren, once backed compulsory sterilization and forced abortion as part of a government population-control program. The only thing missing was a Soylent Green recipe.

In a recently rediscovered 1977 book, "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment," ...Holdren, (Science Czar) revealed his views on all three topics. They are disturbing.

On page 837, Holdren writes "it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society."

So our new Science Czar turns out to be another leftist lunitic that looks to communist China for policy making and has no regard for the constitution. Sounds like his boss.

Overproducing children? On the next page, Holdren asserts that "neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mentions a right to reproduce."

On page 943, Holdren proposes "a comprehensive Planetary Regime (global constitution) could control the development, administration and distribution of all natural resources ... not only in the atmosphere and the oceans, but in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes."

Hmmm, where have we heard that before? Kyoto? Cap and Trade?

This guy takes the "blame America first" mantra to new heights. Let's just call it "blame humans first."

What is this, the 55th Czar Obama has appointed? I think that is ridiculous, but we did see what happens when you only have one... I wonder if he calls Michelle his little Czarina. Or maybe she calls him that?

Either way, Obama is acting like he will either be a Czar in 2113 or retired.

Wing Man City

For JD

Deficit Neutral Healthcare Reform: A Logans Run For Old People

Peter Orszag, President Obama's budget director, went on record today to describe the House bill on health care reform as "deficit neutral."

Orzag could just be your run of the mill administration lackey lying through his teeth, or he might be telling the truth. Let's assume for a minute he actually believes what he is saying. That means there are two very powerful items in the bill that offset the hundred of billions of extra costs the OMB sees in the legislation.

The cost savings from rationing and denial of care must be much stronger than others have assumed. We know about the provisions to cut back on "end of life" or "extraordinary measures" care. But that would only be a short term savings and that has been taken into account in the CBO estimate anyway. To offset the understood costs, the government would have to limit care to the sick and injured in their prime of life. To do that hospitals would have to close...a lot of hospitals. As long as we have the current number of health care points of entry, costs are going to rise faster than inflation.

Beyond that, the administration must see a gradual reduction in the number of doctors due to over regulation, high taxation, and reduced direct payments as the "government option" drives private insurance from the market.

The real savings, and the point of all of this, is when we start seeing the reduction in life expectancy. Old people cost a lot of money beyond health care: social security and the pensioners from failed companies that we have (and will assume in the PBGC).

Imagine the savings if you could drop a couple of million 80 year olds from social security AND Medicaid simultaneously! Believe me, the administration has and it could be the only basis on which they have deficit neutral projections.

Or they could be lying through their teeth.

Imagine a world...