August 25, 2013
— Purple Avenger Drudge is headlining this Telegraph story
...Government sources said talks between the Prime Minister and international leaders, including Barack Obama, would continue, but that any military action that was agreed could begin within the next week...
Tee off time scheduling hardest hit
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03:29 PM
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— andy ICYMI
Cam Edwards of NRA News was the invited guest on this week's podcast. He left the door open or something and NR's Jim Geraghty slipped in behind him for the podcasting version of a photobomb. There's a good discussion of guns, "gun safety" as gun control and other on-topic material for the gun thread in there, so give it a listen.
Consequences
NRA-ILA has a nice recap of gun manufacturers fleeing gun control states over at the DC.
Additionally, Jim Chelsea Geraghty reports that the Colorado recalls continue apace. Gabby Giffords' illegal-contribution-accepting PAC (DKos link) is supporting the gun-grabbing Dems.
Gun Of The Week
(answer below) more...
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06:04 AM
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— andy Sanitized for your protection.
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03:38 AM
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— Gang of Gaming Morons! They had 8 years to make a decent UI and with the new console release and yet Sony is going back to the godawful XMB
Don't get me wrong, I've had the sneaking suspicion when they showed photos of it but I still had a sliver of hope that they weren't going to continue their trend of having the worst UI in videogames. I do believe this is what you call a sucker.
More gaming stuff below.... more...
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01:27 PM
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— Purple Avenger Translation: the "classic" body style VW bus is moving into the history books.
Introduced in 1950, the iconic vehicle had an incredible production run. Over the years, there were many mechanical changes, but the styling remained largely unchanged. The last one to be produced, in Brazil, is still as instantly recognizable as they were 50+ years ago, even though this model looks to be equipped with an Ethanol burning 1.4L water cooled engine, rather than the old air-cooled flat 4 "bug engine".
I used to have a 1957 VW bus. Swing axles, scary single master cylinder, drum brakes. I paid a princely $300 for it in grad school, and it even ran. Not well, but it kinda moved on a couple of gears and stopped after a fashion. I bought it from a hippie who didn't want to bother changing the transmission out. I got a used trans at a local junk yard and changed it out in the UCSD dorm parking lot, did the brakes...then drove it all the way back to NY and rebuilt the engine. Good times, good times.
H/T commenter Mike Hammer
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12:00 PM
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August 24, 2013
— Open Blogger Who comes up with this stuff?
A Department of Defense teaching guide meant to fight extremism advises students that rather than “dressing in sheets” modern-day radicals “will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place,” and describes 18th-century American patriots seeking freedom from the British as belonging to “extremist ideologies.”
You'll love this:
The guide also repeatedly tells readers to use the Southern Poverty Law Center as a resource in identifying hate groups. The SPLC has previously come under fire for its leftist bias and tendency to identify conservative organizations such as the American Family Association as hate groups.
Yeah, that's a real reliable source.
Here is the link to the Judicial Watch post containing the training materials obtained from DoD.
Update: link fixed. Sorry
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05:41 PM
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— CDR M
.jpg" width="250">NSA officers spy on love interests. LOVEINT. Oh I'm sure there is a lot of that going on and then some. I'm sure some POLINT is happening too. One would be naive to think it isn't, especially when you see what is happening at the IRS and what has happened to such people as Joe the Plumber, Christine O'Donnell and even the Presidential candidates in 2008 when a State Department employee improperly accessed their passport files. Oversight is a joke and nobody is punished. We're only seeing the tip of the iceberg with all of this stuff. Can't wait for the ObamaCare navigators that have had no background checks and little to no training to begin handling your PII (personally identifiable information), your medical history and records, your IRS records, financial data, criminal records, etc. Hell, census workers have more training. more...
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06:15 PM
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August 25, 2013
— Open Blogger
Good morning morons and moronettes and welcome to AoSHQ's stately and prestigious Sunday Morning Book Thread.
All Who Hate Me Love Death - Prov. 8:36b
In this month's Imprimis newsletter from Hillsdale College, there's an article by children's book reviewer Meghan Cox Gurdon adapted by a speech she gave at the college back in March. She decries current trends in Young Adult (YA) fiction, which has become "increasingly lurid, grotesque, profane, sexual, and ugly." For example:
A teenaged boy is kidnapped, drugged, and nearly raped by a male captor. After escaping, he comes across a pair of weird glasses that transport him to a world of almost impossible cruelty. Moments later, he finds himself facing a wall of horrors, “covered with impaled heads and other dripping, black-rot body parts: hands, hearts, feet, ears, penises. Where the f— was this?”
ThatÂ’s from Andrew SmithÂ’s 2010 Young Adult novel, The Marbury Lens.
And
A girl struggles with self-hatred and self-injury. She cuts herself with razors secretly, but her secret gets out when she’s the victim of a sadistic sexual prank. Kids at school jeer at her, calling her “cutterslut.” In response, “she had sliced her arms to ribbons, but the badness remained, staining her insides like cancer. She had gouged her belly until it was a mess of meat and blood, but she still couldn’t breathe.”
ThatÂ’s from Jackie Morse KesslerÂ’s 2011 Young Adult novel, Rage.
I can't imagine my kids, when they were younger, reading this crap. But naturally, all of The Usual Suspects whom you might expect (i.e liberals and other deviants) think this is just wonderful and want there to be more of it. Free expression and all that. And yet, it never really is. Free, I mean:
Secular progressives...have their own list of books they think young people shouldn’t read—for instance, books they claim are tinged with racism or jingoism or that depict traditional gender roles. Regarding the latter, you would not believe the extent to which children’s picture books today go out of the way to show father in an apron and mother tinkering with machinery. It’s pretty funny. But my larger point here is that the self-proclaimed anti-book-banners on the Left agree that books influence children and prefer some books to others.
I'm sure the irony whizzed right over their pea heads without them even feeling the breeze. Of course, censorship is an inescapable concept. It's just a matter of what gets censored.
And who gets to decide what gets censored..
All YA fiction can't be this bad, can it? The last YA I read was The Hunger Games trilogy. Yeah, parts of it were brutal, but not explicit, if my memory is correct. So I think that if the books had been around when my kids were 16, I would have let them read them, if they had been interested. But YMMV.
Incidentally, Gurdon's original Wall Street Journal article, the one that got all of The Usual Suspects' panties in a wad, is here.
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August 26, 2013
— Monty [I asked Juliette Ochieng -- our own "baldilocks" -- to write a short essay for the HQ on the topic of race and violent crime. She very graciously agreed. (Keep the comments civil!) You can find more of her very insightful stuff at her personal site. You can also find information on her book, Tale of the Tigers, at her author's site. --Monty]
A few weekends back, I made my way from my home in South Central Los Angeles to Albuquerque--where my parents and the vast majority of my family reside--for the wedding of my oldest nephew. During the twelve-hour drive, I contemplated the personalities of my nephew, his brother, his sisters, his male and female first-, second-, and third-cousins and his male cousins by marriage. All are great young people.
Something that remains perennially in the news is the rate of unemployment for black teens, just over 40%. But here's a thing about my family: my five nephews and my six first- and second-male cousins are all employed! (My nieces are all under sixteen and my two female cousins--both lawyers, like their father--are in their thirties.) How could that be?
more...
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04:13 AM
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August 24, 2013
— Purple Avenger Citing a long and sordid history of serial distortion, misquote, fabrication, and plagiarism, Alex Pareene has had enough.
...Any single one of those errors might’ve gotten a cub reporter fired from the Times. But no non-superstar would’ve been allowed to get away with all of those mistakes* — especially the ones that seem very much like the intentional sexing up of material. Maureen Dowd has gotten away with it because she is influential and decorated. She’s a Pulitzer winner! But her influence and fame should cause her to be held to a higher standard, not a more lax one. Mistakes — and outright dishonesty — coming from someone as prominent as Dowd are worse. If a back-of-the-Metro Section news story misquotes someone, it’s bad, but the damage is limited to the people who read the story. If Maureen Dowd manufactures a quote, it can live forever. It travels. It becomes part of “the narrative...Others are noting Dowd's proclivity for serial distortion and veritas challenged style as well. The NYT of course is stonewalling. more...
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