Passed By

Sometimes when you travel, you step out of the ordinary. Away from the highways, sometimes away from the pavement, you find places where time has seemingly passed by.

Todd, North Carolina is one of those places. A railroad line once terminated there, there were mills and shops, a growing community. Lumber fueled everything, and when the trees were all cut, the trains stopped running.

Today, there is the Todd General Store, a church, and a canoe/kayak rental shop in one of the old train buildings. The tracks are gone, a paved road now follows the old rail bed. An old caboose and a diesel locomotive sit on a tiny piece of track, faded and rusting.

We rode our bicycles for several miles along the river and stopped in the general store. A mix of old hardware and new tourist memorabilia, antiques upstairs. They sell some basic groceries and serve food from behind the old meat counter. An eclectic collection of unmatched tables and chairs fill the center of the room clustered around an old wood stove. Every Friday night they have a dinner special and live bluegrass music.

Six o'clock, baked chicken and homemade mashed potatoes, homemade soups and cake. The food was good and plentiful. By seven almost every seat was taken. Two guitars, a banjo, a bass, a mandolin, and a fiddle. They played for two hours. Old Hank Williams tunes, gospel hymns, Foggy Mountain Breakdown, and Tom Dooley, all played for twenty-five people sitting in an old store.

You can fall in love at first sight with a place as with a person.
--Alec Waugh

Outside the Ordinary

Every year, to celebrate out wedding anniversary, we try to get away. We've been doing a fall trip to the mountains, staying outside of Boone, NC. in a very old cabin.

It is a chance to step away from the ordinary. We hiked along a creek with a series of small waterfalls yesterday. It has been damp and rainy, but the woods are beautiful. The colors of fall are just about gone and there is the feeling that winter is close.
For all the pleasures of the other seasons, autumn has been our time. Being up here brings back memories of all the other times and places, of how young we were and how we thought we were all grown up.

Love vanquishes time. To lovers, a moment can be eternity, eternity can be the tick of a clock.
--Mary Parrish

Victim

Now most people are going to think, when they read this story, that Taylor Mitchell was the victim of coyotes.

I think she was a victim of her upbringing, that mindset that lets so many people wander through life thinking that bad stuff just won't happen, nature is like a Disney movie, and people really are good once you get to know them.

I love the woods, I will be out hiking later today, but I do not pretend that nature is benevolent. Bad stuff happens. Nature is tooth and claw. Some people are good, but some are monsters.

A medium framed revolver chambered in .357 Magnum would have allowed her to continue her hike in peace. Even a stout walking staff and the will and training to use it might have driven off a couple of coyotes.

Before anyone bothers to say that letting people carry guns in parks is bad, let me point out that people are carrying guns in that very same park today. Men with rifles are hunting those coyotes, using guns to make the place safer for other unarmed hikers in the future.

Self-defense is Nature's eldest law.
--John Dryden

Everything is a Weapon

Everything. A tightly rolled magazine, a cup of a hot coffee, the ground you stand on.
Here is a link to a true story titled Don’t bring a knife to a coffee fight. Of course, a tool made for a specific task will usually work better than one you have to improvise. After sharing the coffee, there was one of these.
No shots fire, bad situation dealt with. Kudos to the author of the article.

Arms in the hands of citizens may be used at individual discretion... in private self-defense.
--John Adams

Our Tax Dollars at Work

The Washington Post has the story today of a Foreign Service officer that has resigned his position in protest over the U.S. military's presence in Afghanistan. He's not a pacifist, he's a former Marine with combat tours in Iraq. He has what seems like solid reasons for his decision, and I think he'll do well at whatever career he chooses in the future.

In the interview, as he was describing his work overseas, there was this quote:

"At one point," Hoh said, "I employed up to 5,000 Iraqis" handing out tens of millions of dollars in cash to construct roads and mosques. His program was one of the few later praised as a success by the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

Tens of millions of dollars spent to build mosques? That would be U.S. tax dollars. The same U.S. government that won't allow a high school football team to collectively bow their heads at a team meal, the same U.S. government that recently had a case before the Supreme Court in an effort to tear down a WWI memorial in the middle of the desert because it consisted of a cross, the same U.S. Government that has spent the last 50 years stripping any mention of any sort of Christianity from schools and public life, is spending our money to build mosques.

I don't want my tax dollars spent on religion. Any religion, even my own. I especially don't want my tax dollars spent on building mosques in a part of the world where we should be bombing, shooting, and killing our way to victory. In Japan in 1945, we forced them to give up their religion and join the modern world. We could do that because we had won so completely that the enemy had surrendered unconditionally. That seems like a better plan, looking at Japan today. Let's try it again, or as Matthew Hoh suggests, let's recognize the utter failure of what we are currently doing and get out.

A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
--Sigmund Freud

And If They Shrug?

I have a confession. Sometimes in the car I listen to NPR. I don't send them money, so every year during their fund-raising drives they tell me I'm a bad person. That seems like a fair trade-off. By any measure they would use, I am a bad person. I take the money I might send to a balanced public radio station and buy ammo.

Anyway, yesterday there was a report that just 41,000 taxpayers pay half of the taxes collected in New York City. This is an interesting statistic. Let's add a couple more. 1,100,000 people left New York City in the last eight years. New York City has a current population of 8,400,000 people.

Why have so many people left? Overwhelmingly they cite the tax rates. Why hasn't the overall population dropped in New York City? Immigration has kept pace with emigration. What is one of the major differences between those leaving and those moving in? Income. So there is a net loss for every new immigrant that uses more of the provided services than they support with the taxes they pay. There is also a net loss for every person who leaves, taking their income and the excess taxes they used to pay out of the city with them.

Faced with these statistics, what does the New York City Council want to do? Raise taxes on the wealthy. It's popular with the voters. Soak the rich, make those greedy bastards pay.

And what if they finally decide Ayn Rand was right? What if more of those 41,000 flee New York City and move to Texas, or Montana? How many more will have to leave before New York City cannot tax the remainder enough to pay for all the new immigrants? Doesn't each one that leaves put that much more pressure on those still there? Where is the tipping point?

Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes.
--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Semper Fi

All we need is the will and the vision. We have the finest trained, best equipped military in the history of the world.

The music in this video can be purchased from iTunes, profits to support the men and women of the Armed Forces.

Details here.

Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men.
--General George Patton Jr.

The Real Question

Is the health care bill a good one? Should the government create a "public option"? Is the cost acceptable?

Should the government own GM? Should it "bail out" failing companies and banks? What is the cost of the bailout? Will it work?

Should we sign on to a global treaty on "climate change"? What effect will it have? What are the costs?

And so on. We consider each issue, discuss various points of view about cost vs. effectiveness, need vs. available resources, and we continue to fail to even ask the first question.

Is it Constitutional?

Does the Executive Branch have the Constitutional authority to take over GM?

Does Congress have the Constitutional authority to sign a treaty that would supersede the Constitution?

Where in the Constitution does it mention having the federal government responsible for health care? Notice that I am not asking or discussing the merits of the current system, the effectiveness of the proposals, or the cost of anything. I am saying that they have no Constitutional authority to do it at all. If Congress wants this power, they need to write a Constitutional Amendment, send it to the States, get it ratified, and then write legislation to manage the new power. That's the system. It's slow and difficult. It's meant to be.

The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.
--Patrick Henry

Rooting Around

I don't care what sort of modern electronics, nice cars, furniture, or home you own, when the outlet pipe from your house gets clogged with roots, you have a problem. Plumbers, especially plumbers with big-motorized-root-grinding snakes, will always have work.

I'm supposed to be his first stop tomorrow, I'll bet he has a nice truck.

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society that scorns excellence in plumbing just because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its philosophy will hold water.
- John William Gardner

.17 HMR

If you own a Remington semi-automatic rifle in .17 HMR, you might want to hit the Remington site. They are recalling the rifles and offering to buy back any ammo you might have.

It isn't just Remingtons either, Magnum Research recalled theirs in August. The issue is that .17 HMR is a rimfire case that has been bottlenecked down to increase pressure and velocity. In a semi-auto, this results in a dangerous overpressure on the unsupported case head as the bolt begins to travel back before the bullet has left the barrel. This condition would not exist in a bolt action, as the bullet would be long gone before the shooter could work the bolt.

Some injuries and many broken guns have already resulted. I personally know of one club member that has had this happen. Remington is not offering replacement guns or to refund your purchase price, they are only offering $200.00 on a gun that probably cost almost double that. As the uproar builds, that may change. Magnum Research was offering purchase price or comparable replacement, something that will go far to maintain good customer relations.

In any case, with any gun, as was discussed recently, use hearing and eye protection at all times when on the firing line. A sliver of hot brass in the hand or cheek is painful, the same sliver in your eye can be life changing. A modern gun is a marvelous tool that does it's task extremely well, so well that we sometimes forget what sort of energy we're tapping into, and what can happen when that tool fails.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
—- Isaac Newton

Social Security

Social Security. I'm not going to bore with you with the history of it. That's what Wikipedia is for. If you're getting money from the system, good for you. Money is a good thing. My parents get money from Social Security. They have Medicare and Medicaid. They had children in the 1950s and 1960s and retired in the 1990s and have generally benefited from the system.

But it is a Ponzi scheme. Everyone who works pays in. Assuming you live long enough, you get to take out. With the amount of the lifetime payouts exceeding the contributions taxes, the only way to make it work is to have more people paying in. This worked so long as the population increased by a high enough percentage in each generation.

Yesterday I got asked if I thought I would get Social Security. I said, "I don't think so. I think it's a lot more likely I'll die in a ditch." There's really not a lot of fun and happy places for a conversation to go from there, but even after reflection, it feels true.

We are now trillions of dollars in the hole, and the government is still digging. They are going to pass a government health care bill and add by their estimate, another $900,000,000 to that debt. I think they are lying, even if they are lying to themselves, and the cost will exceed that by a factor of 10.

Nothing much is made here. Look at the labels when you go to the stores. China, Korea, Vietnam, Philippines. From underwear to big screen TVs. We have oil and natural gas, but it sits in the ground while we pay whatever the bill is to the Saudis. We are going bankrupt, making nothing, spending like a drunk in Vegas, and pretending that making up money and giving it out will fix the economy through "stimulation".

The 2010 election is our next chance to try to put on the brakes. I'm not suggesting you vote Republican. I'm suggesting that you vote for someone, anyone, who is not the incumbent. Unless you have a rare special case where your Congressman is a libertarian on personal freedom, a fiscal conservative, a strict constructionist on the Constitution, and an Objectivist on business, it time for a change.

Because if we keep going, fat, dumb, and happy, the collapse is inevitable. We no longer lead the world, if we ever did. The money will run out. If the Saudis doubled the price of oil tomorrow and the Chinese stop buying our bonds and quit sending us everything we sell to each other the next day, the collapse wouldn't be just inevitable, it would be imminent. We wouldn't even need to worry about the wars or terrorism, we'd fold up like a termite ridden shed in a hurricane.

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
--Abraham Lincoln

One Person

Irena Sendlerowa

A gentile social worker who rescued over 2,500 Jewish children and babies from what would have been certain death at the hands of the Nazis. She worked as part of the Polish Underground to smuggle children out, provide them with false documents and join them to families that would raise them. Most of the parents died in the camps, but she had kept the names with a plan to reunite the children after the war.


In 1943, She was caught, arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, her legs and feet broken, and was sentenced to death. Bribery rescued her and she survived. She died last year at the age of 98. Honored as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, her story reads like fiction, but it is the true story of one woman who made a stand in the face of evil.

I bring her story to you because I heard of her this week during the discussion of Barack Obama's Nobel Prize. Irena was nominated in 2007 for the Nobel Peace Prize. It was given that year to Al Gore for his work on global warming.

Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth
--Irena Sendlerowa

The Secret of American Prosperity

Looks like we're forgetting what our grandfathers knew. This takes a few minutes to get rolling, but the conclusions the narrator makes near the end are as true today as they were in 1948.

We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today.
--Henry Ford

At the Range and on the Internet

It's a cold October. We had a club workday yesterday, and between the damp cold and the opening day of rifle season for deer, only six people came out. We replaced the target backers, policed the ranges, emptied the trash, and then it was time to go shooting.

I was sighting in a new old rifle, a Winchester 190. A 190 is a semi-automatic, tube fed rifle that came from the factory with a small Weaver scope.

It was not a 100% reliable, every once in a while it wouldn't eject the casing. Maybe I'll figure it out, maybe better or different ammo would help, and maybe I'll take it to my gunsmith. Still, the fun value of picking up a cheap semi-auto plinker and finding out how it shoots was there. A couple of small adjustments and it was putting great groups on the target and knocking down rows of old cans.

One of the other guys was practicing with a pistol, and he came over to see what I had. I had just loaded the tube, and handed it over to him. He sat down at the bench and sighted in, took a few shots. Then he looked up and ask, "Does this scope seem out of focus?"

I had been using it, not a fancy scope, but clear enough, "No, it seems fine to me."

"Then it's my eye", he said, and he told me the following story.

Years ago, before hearing protection and safety glasses, he and a couple of friends were out shooting. He had bought a .44 Ruger revolver and they were all taking turns shooting with it. He was standing off to one side watching when a fragment of lead was ejected from the forcing cone and struck him in the eye. It was painful, but initially he thought it was just hot gases or a powder fragment. Eventually, a doctor found the fragment embedded in his cornea and surgically removed it. It didn't take his vision, but it left a scarred spot that he notices looking through some rifle scopes because of how his eye lines up with the optics.

Then when I got home, I saw that Brigid had posted on the same topic, and in great detail, including her review of options for protecting your eyes. I'm going to take this advice myself and order some prescription wraparounds.

Safety is something that happens between your ears, not something you hold in your hands.
--Jeff Cooper

An addition to the Blogroll

Ye Old Furt left a link in the comments.

I chased it to find, lo and behold, another Marine, libertarian, gun owner, who thinks the country is riding greased skids into the totalitarian pit of Hope'N'Change. So, here is a link to GunRights4US. Here's something about him in his own words.

I am a small “L” libertarian in that I want Gubmint to leave me the hell alone! My ideal society would involve widespread citizen ownership of virtually every kind of small arms known to man. I base that view on the 2A. How else could we throw off an oppressive Gubmint? Besides…an armed society is a polite society. Obama and his cabal of socialist democrats make me want to retch (as do most liberals in general). But to be honest, I have almost nothing but contempt for the Republicans these days as well. Their spinelessness disgusts me utterly! One last thing: My great-grandfather and most of his relatives were Confederate soldiers in the Georgia 5th Cavalry, so my heritage as a Southerner is a point of pride. Want to know more than that? Then read the blog.

Then there's this.
One last thing, when I peer at the tiny photo on his profile, I'm pretty sure he's wearing a Nation of Riflemen T-shirt, placing him on the list of readers of Kim Du Toit.

I read a half a dozen of his post today, and his take on the USMC rules for gunfighting will be the quote for today.

Forget about knives, bats and fists. Bring a gun. Preferably, bring at least two guns. Bring all of your friends who have guns. Bring four times the ammunition you think you could ever need.
--GunRights4US, writing on his blog

Just to drive the point home

What are these things sitting on the shelf of a pawn shop?

When you think something cannot be made to serve another function, consider this: (click to biggify)
Even a simple walking stick or cane becomes a powerful tool in the hands of an adept. You know, what someone might call a broom handle.

The (jo)staff can be used to strike like a sword, sweep like a naginata, thrust like a spear (yari). Its two ends can be used, unlike the single point of a sword, and its ma-ai (fighting distance) can be varied according to the hand grip you take. Because of its speed and changeable ma-ai, it is a formidable weapon.
-- Muso Shindo-Ryu Jodo

Weapons

The news of the last few days has been following the Cub Scout who was so excited with Scouting that that he brought his silverware kit to school to eat lunch with and was suspended for 45 days. Following the storm of attention and the scorn heaped on them, school officials lifted that suspension yesterday. That's a step toward good, but it's only a step. The Scout needs an apology and he should be allowed to use his Scout utensils to eat with every day.

The problem is bigger than one 6 year old. Bringing a knife to school to threaten or cut someone? That's a crime. Have the person arrested and removed from the school.

Having a small pocketknife in a survival kit locked in the trunk of your car? That is not a crime or action that threatens anyone, yet a high school senior from upstate New York has been suspended and barred from campus for 20 days for this very thing. He's also an Eagle Scout, who attended 10 weeks of military training last summer, who is trying to get into West Point.

This needs to be reversed. The administrators and school board need to know that come the next election, they will all be replaced if it is not. How was that pocket knife more of a threat than the tire iron, or the gasoline in the tank, or the ton and a half of automobile running 50 miles an hour?

A warehouse full of knives and guns will eventually rust away, never harming anyone. People will find or make some improvised weapon and kill their adversaries if that is their intent, like that student beaten to death with boards in Chicago last week.

I'm going to tell you all a secret, one handed down from Leonidas, from Sun Tzu, from all the warriors that ever strapped on armor or a uniform. The things we call weapons? Knives, guns, baseball bats, crowbars, rusty spoons, swords, tanks, fighter jets? They are misnamed. They are all tools. It is the will and the intent of the individual holding them that determines what they are used for.

Think about this. If I took 50 pacifists and gave them firearms, knives and ammo, and also took one Navy Seal, wearing a swimsuit, and put them on a island in a fight to the death, who would you bet on?

It is easy to kill someone with a slash of a sword. It is hard to be impossible for others to cut down.
-- Yagyu Munenori

Reminder

Those pictures of people coming through Ellis Island could be my relatives.
They came here to be free, to live in a place where their children could prosper, they came because they believed in the dream of America.

There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream.
--Archibald MacLeish

Local Warming Trend

I got home from the dojo tonight to find a fire in the woodstove and a very pleasant local warming trend. I don't know about global warming, but living room warming is happening right now.

We are facing a global climate crisis. It is deepening. We are entering a period of consequences.
--Al Gore

Rt. 66 Bar Shootout, Oct.8th, 2009

No one was wounded or killed. An amazing display of pistolcraft.

Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything.
--Xenophon Greek historian, B.C. 431

Memory

From The Chronicles of a South Carolina Gunslinger comes this story of the guns of his father.

What is it about those things that we inherit that they hold such meaning in our lives? Inanimate objects that can bring us the memory of people long past, so that we can hear their voice and see them in our mind's eye.

Show me your original face, the face you had before your father and mother were born.
--Zen Koan

Somebody should have had a plan, at least

Remember boys and girls, when bikes are outlawed, only outlaws will have bikes.

A sword is never a killer, it is a tool in the killer's hands.
--Seneca

Saturday Canoeing

We went canoeing today. Got the morning chores done, packed our gear. It's cool, cloudy, a subdued sort of fall day. With everything else ready, I went to get the canoe.

As I put my hand on it, it started to rain. It couldn't have been more perfect.

<\touch canoe -> rain>

I loaded it anyway. It rained off and on, we drove out and put it in the river, it kept raining. We paddled upstream for an hour, explored a side creek, found a sandbar and sat and ate our lunch.

As we came back down stream, a large bird flew across the river a couple of hundred yards off the bow. I marked the tree it landed in and we paddled over to see if we could get close. It was a wild turkey, and we got right under the tree branch it was in. We got a great look at it before it flew off with a loud whirring.

Back at the landing, I loaded the canoe and the gear and we made the half hour ride home with the wipers running. I unloaded everything, hung the PFDs to dry, and put the canoe back on the rack. A three and a half hour trip.

<\untouch canoe -> no_rain>

It's still cloudy, but there are bands of blue sky in the northwest, and the rain has completely stopped.

The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Premature Coronation

Obama took office less than two weeks before the Feb. 1 nomination deadline for the Nobel Prize. What did he accomplish in those 2 weeks to merit the award? Here, from the Times of London:

Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world.

Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace.

I know what you're thinking, 'cause right now I'm thinking the same thing. Actually, I've been thinking it ever since I got here: Why oh why didn't I take the BLUE pill?
--Cypher, speaking in the Matrix

Roman Polanski

Just a quick observation. Whatever else happened in his life, it does not explain, justify, or excuse the fact that he drugged, raped, and sodomized an unwilling 13 year old that repeatedly asked to be taken home.

I would say more, but how do you gracefully say that the guy ejaculated in the butt of an unconscious 8th grader?

The Munchkin Wrangler poured out a full bucket of win on the subject with just the title of his post.

I know it wasn’t rape-rape. It was something else but I don’t believe it was rape-rape. He went to jail and and when they let him out he was like ‘You know what, this guy’s going to give me a hundred years in jail I’m not staying,’ so that’s why he left.
--Whoopi Goldberg, speaking about her support for Roman Polanski and his decision to flee the U.S. after pleading guilty to intercourse with a 13 year old

Who are we?

High court to decide if war memorial violates Constitution. The memorial in question is a cross erected in the middle of the desert by a WWI vet in 1934. Currently the cross is boxed in plywood. By some insane logic, that prevents anyone from seeing it and being offended. Except that someone is still offended and wants it torn down.

Instead of doing the sensible thing and telling them to go pound sand, this is now on the docket at the U.S. Supreme Court. We are so far off track here that words fail me.

Let's try pictures.
That's the Canadian Cross of Sacrifice. It was dedicated on Armistice Day 1927, a gift from Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King honors U.S. citizens to honor the many Americans who served in the Canadian Forces in the First, Second and Korean Wars. It's on federal land. It's in Arlington National Cemetery.

These are everywhere in National Cemeteries. Millions of headstones. Almost all of them have a religious symbol, usually a cross, but a fair number of them have the Star of David.
At Point Du Hoc in France, the stones are cut in crosses and stars. That cemetery is on French soil, but it is maintained by the U.S. government.

Planning to replace them all? Dynamite them? Chisel the crosses off all the tablets? Because someone might see one of them and be offended.

I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses ... Whether we look to the first Charter of Virginia ... or to the Charter of New England ... or to the Charter of Massachusetts Bay ... or to the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut ... the same objective is present ... a Christian land governed by Christian principles. I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible and their belief in it: freedom of belief, of expression, of assembly, of petition, the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of the home, equal justice under law, and the reservation of powers to the people ... I like to believe we are living today in the spirit of the Christian religion. I like also to believe that as long as we do so, no great harm can come to our country.
--Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren

When Do We Decide?

10 more dead Americans. When do we decide to fight? When do we decide to eliminate the support the Taliban are getting from the villages? When do we look at where their motivation comes from? When do we decide that our soldiers are worth more to us than this?

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.
--Winston Churchill

Rio

I think Obama&Sons got out-corrupted. The IOC looked at it and the money to be made amid the construction contracts and tourists that will come to Rio just looked better. Not that there wouldn't be money made in Chicago, but the whole pay-to-play mentality of Illinois machine politics just didn't look as juicy.

Whatever the reason, I think we can breathe a sign of relief that we won't have the spectacle of Pr. Obama presiding over an Olympics while he's in office.

The sportive, knightly battle awakens the best human characteristics. It doesn't separate, but unites the combatants in understanding and respect. He also helps to connect the countries in the spirit of peace. That's why the Olympic Flame should never die.
--Adolf Hitler

No Clue

Just one line in this article jumps out. I highlighted it in bold.

Afghan soldier shoots dead two American troops
Sat Oct 3, 2009 11:25am EDT

KABUL (Reuters) - An Afghan soldier on guard at a joint base with U.S. troops shot dead two American servicemen and wounded two others as they slept, a provincial official said on Saturday.
Shahedullah Shahed, spokesman for the governor of Wardak province west of Kabul, said the shooting took place after a combined team of Afghan and U.S. forces had returned from a joint operation late on Friday.
"The Americans were in the middle of sleep when an Afghan soldier on duty opened fire on them," Shahed said.
"We have no clue as to why he shot them."
A press officer for the Western troops said he could give no further details of the incident.

No clue, eh? You no good lying son-of-a-bitch. You know why he killed them. I know why he killed them. Everyone who has been paying attention since the fall of the Shah of Iran knows why he killed them.

He killed them because they are Americans. He killed them because they were not Muslims and he considered it his duty under Islam to kill the infidels wherever and when ever he could. Whatever oath he took was meaningless, his creed allows him to lie, to take oaths and break them, to do what ever is necessary to violently advance Islam.

I just wanted to clear that up. Add it to the tally.

Sons of Islam everywhere, the jihad is a duty - to establish the rule of Allah on earth and to liberate your countries and yourselves from America's domination and its Zionist allies, it is your battle - either victory or martyrdom.
--Ahmed Yassin

Out in the County

I had the day off today, and went with my wife out to visit a friend and see his collection of antique cars. We looked at and poked around in a '31 Ford Model A, a '40 Cadillac, and a '56 Buick Special, to name a few.

After we left his house, we to lunch at a family owned restaurant. To get there, we had to drive across the county. I had the windows down, the radio on, and we were taking our time. We took the back way, and it's like we went to visit America.

Shortly after I left the numbered highway, coming into a 3 way intersection I stopped to let an old Allis-Chalmers tractor putter by. The man in the seat looked to be in his 70's, wearing a straw hat and overalls. The bush hog on the back looked well used. After he passed, I made the turn.

I passed an older farmhouse, freshly painted. The white standing out against the trees. A woman was gardening, the flower beds neatly laid out along the side yard.

The houses and barns rolled past. Some yards were cluttered with children's toys, some with farm equipment, and others are clear. A lot of people were flying flags.

Along one curve, there was a brick ranch house, a paved driveway held an old pickup with a dog box in the bed. A metal garage stood open and there was a man on a riding lawnmower working on the back yard. What caught my eye was the flagpole in the front yard. It stood center, straight out from the front door, good sized, maybe 25 to 30 feet tall. The base was ringed with rocks and a small raised bed.

On the pole flew an American flag. A good sized flag, maybe 4' by 6', catching the breeze and standing out. Right below it flew a Gadsden flag. Same size.

I don't know who lives there, and all I have is a mental snapshot as I drove by, but I bet if he and I sat down in the shade and started talking, we'd find some common ground. I wonder how long he's had the flagpole, if he was in the military, or just patriotic, and I wonder when he added the Gadsden flag to the pole, and what it means to him.

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.
-- Samuel Adams