Oh yeah. Lawn Chair Larry. You know, I always loved that story and admired that guy at some level for following his dream.
Naturally we can't all do like him, or we'd have planes knocked down all over the place. But every once in a while, it's nice to see someone do something just because he thinks he can, and to hell with the consequences.
Too bad he ended up a suicide, but maybe making his flight delayed the inevitable for a few years.
This 'cycle of violence' cliche is total horse shit, a product of ivory-tower intellectuals whose wish is father to the thought. If it had any validity, we would dissolve our police forces, lest they incite a 'cycle of violence' among the friends and families of any criminals they might kill.
And I understand perfectly well why they are doing this. It's simple. They are doing it because they are religious fanatics who want to kill all Christians and Jews, and erase the state of Israel. We won't let them do it. Now we fight to see who gets to impose their will on the other once and for all.
As Mark Twain said, there are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy. What we are doing now is praiseworthy homicide. I hope it continues until bin Laden, the Taliban, and all their Arab mercenaries are dead, and every Muslim government knows with crystal clear certainty that the same fate awaits them if they support terrorism like the Taliban did.
Please note, I am not advocating killing innocent Muslims. Some will unavoidably be killed as a result of our actions, and of course we must do everything possible to minimize this. But those who take up arms against us have forfeit their lives, and we should not stop ruthlessly killing them until they are all dead or too terrorized to continue fighting.
In my opinion there is no way that the allied nations can win this war against terrorism. Just as hercules faced the hydra, cut off one head and (at least) another will form in its place.
You're forgetting that Hercules did finally kill the Hydra. We will too.
Hydra, also called the serpent of Lerna, was a beast with the body of a hound and 100 serpentine heads. As if this weren't bad enough, it also had poisonous breath and it was so hideous that it caused most people to die of fear from simply seeing it. One of Hercules' great tasks was to kill this monster. When he started to fight it, he discovered that every time he cut off one of the heads, three grew back in place of it. Seeing this was getting him nowhere, he had his charioteer, Iolus, burn the stump after each time he cut off a head, which prevented the unfortunate regeneration. The last head was immortal, however, so after cutting it off, they trapped it under a rock.
I'm glad we are killing this particular group of people. I hope we are killing them in large numbers, in the most gruesome way possible, in such a frightening display of force that their great-grandchildren will tell stories to each other of our determination to avenge our dead.
You do understand America has been backing the slaughter of Muslims in Isreal for 40 years. The Jewish feel for some reason that they deserve to displace Muslims because they are not Jewish.
Fuck you. We have been pouring out our blood and treasure for the ungrateful Mohammedans since the Suez crisis in the 1950's, and whatever we do they hate us more.
We have poured billions into Egypt and Jordan since the 1970's to help secure peace, we drove the Iraqi army out of Muslim Kuwait, we defended the Muslim Kurds and the Iraqis of the southern marshes against their own murderous secular government, we went into Muslim Somalia to save starving Muslims, and we attacked Christian Serbia to defend Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. And Clinton, for all his other faults, really sincerely tried to bring about peace and reconciliation between Israel and Palestine. Yet all we hear from these ungrateful freaks is Kill the Jews and Jihad against the great Satan. Fuck them and fuck you too.
If they are so dead set on living in the Middle Ages, then I say we occupy the major oil fields and drive them all into the wilderness, from the deserts of Libya to the jungles of Indonesia. We could do this in a matter of weeks if we summoned the will.
If we are going to be accused of imperialism no matter how hard we try to help, then I say it's time we acted like an empire and a Goddamn brutal and ruthless one too. These Mohammedan jackoffs have no idea -- no FUCKING idea -- how badly we could rock their world.
But there certainly are Bactrian (2-hump) camels in Central Asia, and I believe there may be domesticated dromedaries as well.
-ccm
Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...
on
Handling the Loads
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· Score: 1
The government of the United States of America has been bullying and harassing nations for a very long time, flaunting themselves as a superpower which is untouchable. They've stuck their noses in other nations' business too many times and someone had decided to cut it off.
I don't buy into this shit. We are hated because hundreds of millions of Muslims want to wipe Israel off the map and kill every Jew in the world, and the US won't allow it to happen.
Do you have any idea how Bad a thing it is to puncture a thin-skinned pressure vessel? Let alone one containing hundreds of people at altitude potentially over an inhabited area?
Rubbish. A hole the size of a bullet would make a slow leak that the pressurization system wouldn't even notice. Where do you think the air pumped into the cabin goes? It leaks out of thousands of little crevices and joints in flow volumes that are orders of magnitude greater than the air leak through a bullet hole. Airplanes can lose windows and even doors and fly perfectly well. That's what the emergency oxygen masks are for.
I can't quote stats (and under the circumstances I don't want to quote stats) but it occurs to me that the number of law enforcement personnel attacked or injured by their own weapon is non-trivial.
That's because they wear them on their hips in public places where any loon can run up behind and grab them. An air marshal would probably have a.45 caliber pistol with frangible ammunition tucked way in a shoulder holster under a jacket. I think it's a great idea.
Why don't you assholes mind your own business? Not everyone shares your refined esthetics. You busybodies have this elitist attitude, that if you can't afford a leafy country estate, you belong in a crackerbox apartment downtown.
Joe Sixpack could give a shit about infill and pedestrian malls and bicycle friendly design and all the rest of that communitarian/New Urban bullshit. The average working man wants a detached house, with a little piece of grass for his kids to play, at a reasonable price. The developers are just giving him what he wants.
While we're on the topic of strange creation myths, check out Tenrikyo.
What is it about people? Why do they make up such stuff? Are we that far removed from the caves and jungles after all?
-ccm
Re:Anti-Mainstream Mainstream is the Mainstream.
on
The Pledge
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· Score: 1
The United Kingdom has, of late, set up a highly succesful method of making films which is government funded, though indirectly. Government owned television stations, such as Channel 4, make excellent films such as Trainspotting, Shallow Grave and 4 Weddings and a Funeral. These films are designed to be good to watch, not to make money. And they represent the true counterculture sweeping the film world from Europe.
It would be good if America, through PBS, were to implement a similar profit free, for the love of it system. It would give us some innovative and interesting films, and a relief from Hollywood.
Counterculture, my ass. Monoculture of elitist assholes is more like it. You are saying that you can't stand to be seen watching the pap that Joe Sixpack watches, but you have no problem pointing a gun at his head and taking his hard-earned money to fund your own dreary tastes.
I say the masses ought to descend on San Francisco and Manhattan and burn down all the enclaves where the undeserving rich piss away the taxes of the working man: the operas, the symphony halls and every public television station. Let them mug every black-clad nihilist pantywaist they see, take their money back, and spend it on striptease bars and truck pulls and Britney Spears concerts. Let our taxes fund rodeos and professional wrestling matches and free subscriptions to People magazine. Defund PBS and NPR, and subsidize a quest for the tackiest possible daytime soap opera.
This would be more fair and make more people happy than your proposal.
The laws that came into effect after Dunblane will not stop normal, day to day criminals. It does, however, stop massacres like Dunblane. And seeing that one more Dunblane could double the amount of deaths by guns in the UK, IMHO our gun control laws are justified.
What if it were shown that the increase in random murders, resulting from disarmament of the honest citizen, far outweighed the number of those killed in shocking but vanishingly rare massacre incidents? This has been fairly conclusively proven in the US, and I think it is true for Britain as well.
When my dad was born, anyone could buy a pistol licence in the post office for four pounds, and the only people in the land who could not carry guns were the police. The various gun laws have always been promoted on the grounds of crime prevention, but over the years they seem to have been enacted primarily as a result of the Government's fear of Bolsheviks, Irish republicans, anarchists, and the like.
In actual fact violent crime has increased by orders of magnitude since the days when any honest Englishman could carry a revolver, and in particular the spectacular massacres-by-nutter, which were unheard of before gun control.
It may be worth pointing out that since bringing in the laws we have not had another massacre.
So when the next massacre happens-- and it will, because even the Government admits there are three million or more illegal firearms in the country-- then by this 'logic' you will be prepared to admit that the handgun ban is a failure? Did you know the violent crime rate has already jumped dramatically this year, according to the Government's own figures-- just as it did in Australia after their gun ban-- and will you be prepared to press your MP for repeal if the ban continues to show its inefficacy? Or do you really care less about crime and just want to stick your thumb in the eye of the law-abiding firearms community?
The politicians are trying to blame the free market to cover for their own problems. They forcibly separated generation from distribution, de-regulated pricing on the supply side, enacted regulation that made it virtually impossible to build new capacity, and maintained strict control over retail rates. A recipe for disaster.
Typical Santa Claus economics from a state full of liberal idiots. They want all of the benefits of free enterprise and liberty, but none of the risk or responsibility. Let them freeze in the dark.
I subscribe to my local rag (the Arizona Republic) and read it every day for the local news, sports, classifieds etc. They have their own website but I hardly ever read it.
I usually hit national news three or four times a week-- NY Times, CNN, Wash. Post. Often they have the same Reuters or AP stories as the Republic, but usually there is more hard news as well as a wider range of opinion columns.
I have relatives in England and occasionally visit.
Their international news is superb, with long thoughtful policy articles, as well as a great many amusing short fillers about cannibal warfare in New Guinea, or which politician got seen going into a whore house, etc. Here is a funny one from today:
Bad photofit traps vain robber AN Austrian teenager who robbed a tobacconist was caught after he complained to his mother that a photofit picture of him was a bad likeness. The 19-year-old held up the shop in Schwanenstadt, near Linz, with an airgun and took £150 last December. This month, when he saw the photofit picture in local newspapers, the teenager complained to his mother that it was a terrible likeness - and she handed him over to the police. Michael Leidig, Vienna
They have great coverage of domestic U.S. news, albeit from a jaded-British-reporter-amongst-the-Yankee-rubes perspective.
I think they are easily the best quality newspaper in terms of their Web design. It's free (after registration) and they have on-line archives going back to 1996 or so.
Slashdot, Salon, Free Republic and the Drudge Report get regular visits too, and are nothing like real-world newspapers.
Slashdot Mirror
Naturally we can't all do like him, or we'd have planes knocked down all over the place. But every once in a while, it's nice to see someone do something just because he thinks he can, and to hell with the consequences.
Too bad he ended up a suicide, but maybe making his flight delayed the inevitable for a few years.
-ccm
And I understand perfectly well why they are doing this. It's simple. They are doing it because they are religious fanatics who want to kill all Christians and Jews, and erase the state of Israel. We won't let them do it. Now we fight to see who gets to impose their will on the other once and for all.
As Mark Twain said, there are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy. What we are doing now is praiseworthy homicide. I hope it continues until bin Laden, the Taliban, and all their Arab mercenaries are dead, and every Muslim government knows with crystal clear certainty that the same fate awaits them if they support terrorism like the Taliban did.
Please note, I am not advocating killing innocent Muslims. Some will unavoidably be killed as a result of our actions, and of course we must do everything possible to minimize this. But those who take up arms against us have forfeit their lives, and we should not stop ruthlessly killing them until they are all dead or too terrorized to continue fighting.
-ccm
You're forgetting that Hercules did finally kill the Hydra. We will too.
-ccm
-ccm
Fuck you. We have been pouring out our blood and treasure for the ungrateful Mohammedans since the Suez crisis in the 1950's, and whatever we do they hate us more.
We have poured billions into Egypt and Jordan since the 1970's to help secure peace, we drove the Iraqi army out of Muslim Kuwait, we defended the Muslim Kurds and the Iraqis of the southern marshes against their own murderous secular government, we went into Muslim Somalia to save starving Muslims, and we attacked Christian Serbia to defend Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. And Clinton, for all his other faults, really sincerely tried to bring about peace and reconciliation between Israel and Palestine. Yet all we hear from these ungrateful freaks is Kill the Jews and Jihad against the great Satan. Fuck them and fuck you too.
If they are so dead set on living in the Middle Ages, then I say we occupy the major oil fields and drive them all into the wilderness, from the deserts of Libya to the jungles of Indonesia. We could do this in a matter of weeks if we summoned the will.
If we are going to be accused of imperialism no matter how hard we try to help, then I say it's time we acted like an empire and a Goddamn brutal and ruthless one too. These Mohammedan jackoffs have no idea -- no FUCKING idea -- how badly we could rock their world.
-ccm
-ccm
The government of the United States of America has been bullying and harassing nations for a very long time, flaunting themselves as a superpower which is untouchable. They've stuck their noses in other nations' business too many times and someone had decided to cut it off.
I don't buy into this shit. We are hated because hundreds of millions of Muslims want to wipe Israel off the map and kill every Jew in the world, and the US won't allow it to happen.
-ccm
Rubbish. A hole the size of a bullet would make a slow leak that the pressurization system wouldn't even notice. Where do you think the air pumped into the cabin goes? It leaks out of thousands of little crevices and joints in flow volumes that are orders of magnitude greater than the air leak through a bullet hole. Airplanes can lose windows and even doors and fly perfectly well. That's what the emergency oxygen masks are for.
I can't quote stats (and under the circumstances I don't want to quote stats) but it occurs to me that the number of law enforcement personnel attacked or injured by their own weapon is non-trivial.
That's because they wear them on their hips in public places where any loon can run up behind and grab them. An air marshal would probably have a
-ccm
Joe Sixpack could give a shit about infill and pedestrian malls and bicycle friendly design and all the rest of that communitarian/New Urban bullshit. The average working man wants a detached house, with a little piece of grass for his kids to play, at a reasonable price. The developers are just giving him what he wants.
--ccm
What's your point? I'm a member of the militia and probably you are too. See Title 10, Section 311 of US Federal Code.
-ccm
What is it about people? Why do they make up such stuff? Are we that far removed from the caves and jungles after all?
-ccm
It would be good if America, through PBS, were to implement a similar profit free, for the love of it system. It would give us some innovative and interesting films, and a relief from Hollywood.
Counterculture, my ass. Monoculture of elitist assholes is more like it. You are saying that you can't stand to be seen watching the pap that Joe Sixpack watches, but you have no problem pointing a gun at his head and taking his hard-earned money to fund your own dreary tastes.
I say the masses ought to descend on San Francisco and Manhattan and burn down all the enclaves where the undeserving rich piss away the taxes of the working man: the operas, the symphony halls and every public television station. Let them mug every black-clad nihilist pantywaist they see, take their money back, and spend it on striptease bars and truck pulls and Britney Spears concerts. Let our taxes fund rodeos and professional wrestling matches and free subscriptions to People magazine. Defund PBS and NPR, and subsidize a quest for the tackiest possible daytime soap opera.
This would be more fair and make more people happy than your proposal.
-ccm
What if it were shown that the increase in random murders, resulting from disarmament of the honest citizen, far outweighed the number of those killed in shocking but vanishingly rare massacre incidents? This has been fairly conclusively proven in the US, and I think it is true for Britain as well.
When my dad was born, anyone could buy a pistol licence in the post office for four pounds, and the only people in the land who could not carry guns were the police. The various gun laws have always been promoted on the grounds of crime prevention, but over the years they seem to have been enacted primarily as a result of the Government's fear of Bolsheviks, Irish republicans, anarchists, and the like.
In actual fact violent crime has increased by orders of magnitude since the days when any honest Englishman could carry a revolver, and in particular the spectacular massacres-by-nutter, which were unheard of before gun control.
--ccm
So when the next massacre happens-- and it will, because even the Government admits there are three million or more illegal firearms in the country-- then by this 'logic' you will be prepared to admit that the handgun ban is a failure? Did you know the violent crime rate has already jumped dramatically this year, according to the Government's own figures-- just as it did in Australia after their gun ban-- and will you be prepared to press your MP for repeal if the ban continues to show its inefficacy? Or do you really care less about crime and just want to stick your thumb in the eye of the law-abiding firearms community?
-ccm
Typical Santa Claus economics from a state full of liberal idiots. They want all of the benefits of free enterprise and liberty, but none of the risk or responsibility. Let them freeze in the dark.
-ccm
I usually hit national news three or four times a week-- NY Times, CNN, Wash. Post. Often they have the same Reuters or AP stories as the Republic, but usually there is more hard news as well as a wider range of opinion columns.
I read the London Daily Telegraph on-line almost every day, because:
- I have relatives in England and occasionally visit.
- Their international news is superb, with long thoughtful policy articles, as well as a great many amusing short fillers about cannibal warfare in New Guinea, or which politician got seen going into a whore house, etc. Here is a funny one from today:
- They have great coverage of domestic U.S. news, albeit from a jaded-British-reporter-amongst-the-Yankee-rubes perspective.
- I think they are easily the best quality newspaper in terms of their Web design. It's free (after registration) and they have on-line archives going back to 1996 or so.
Slashdot, Salon, Free Republic and the Drudge Report get regular visits too, and are nothing like real-world newspapers.-ccmay