It is true, of course, that making a uranium weapon which is small and light enough to be placed atop an ICBM is not as "easy" as just taking a howitzer and making it into a gun bomb--but the hard work has been done thanks to Russia and the US, and all Iran needs is people with suitcases of cash to find the right greedy bastards who care nothing for the security of anyone but themselves who also know how to build efficient uranium weapons. It's physics; the laws of physics are the same for everyone and you can't keep secret a scientific fact.
The end result is that we're staring down the barrel of a nuclear shotgun, one which--Obama's good intentions notwithstanding--is aimed squarely at our collective face. The Obama administration's stated intention of "talking" to Iran works in Iran's favor, because it gives them time to build up an arsenal of the things.
Next step: put them in shipping containers and send them places. Then it depends on one insane man's mood; does he threaten and extort, or does he just let them go off? If it's the latter, you can say goodbye to Israel and several major coastal US cities.
* * *
Apparently Iran also has gotten details on Marine One, the President's helicopter.
Blueprints and avionics schematics, by themselves, won't do much for anyone who wants to shoot the thing down. But it makes it easier for them to find weaknesses--and finding weaknesses is what spying is all about.
"...I'm very troubled to hear this because there are obviously elements in Iran that are not friendly to the United States and it would be an understatement to say that this type of information could be very detrimental were it to fall into the wrong hands."That's Representative Jason Altmire as quoted in the linked article.
Note: Rep. Altmire is a Democrat. The article doesn't mention his party affiliation. I wonder why? But notice the typical understatement: "there are elements in Iran that are not friendly to the United States", he says. Oh, you mean like the entire freaking government of Iran maybe? It's not like there are a few Al Qaeda cells operating in Tehran, doofus; it's the entire freaking government of the country. This is why we say that "Iran" is working on developing atomic bombs and ICBMs and not "elements in Iran".
What a jerkwad.
* * *
I won't hold my breath waiting for concealed carry to be legal in Illinois. It would be nice--and I would seriously consider getting the license even if I didn't actually carry--but I'm not holding my breath.
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People who think this cannot happen in the United States don't know their history.
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"If anyone is well orchestrated it is the Moveon.org crowd that is funded by billionaire George Soros." Liberals are losing their shit over the "Tea Party" protests of the previous weekend. Remember, kids: when liberals protest it's a spontaneous outpouring of emotion. When conservatives protest, it's an orchestrated campaign paid for by big corporations.
* * *
No, no, no, this is impossible: you see, it's impossible for black people to be racist because they're an oppressed minority, and you can't be a racist if you're the victim of racism!
Except we elected a black President, so STFU race-baiters. This is an example of black people being racist and no amount of deconstructionist post-modernist bullshit will change that fact.
* * *
And while we're at it, WTF is Michael Steele taking? Or smoking? I mean, WTFF??
One more thing: When liberals sit there and accuse the GOP convention of looking like “Nazi Germany,” you might not want to sit there, nodding your head, and respond, “I agree.”The current de facto head of the GOP said he agreed that the convention looked like "Nazi Germany"?
Who the fuck elected this shithead?
Get this asshat out of the party chair immediately.
* * *
Let me, like Dick, clear this up:
I want Obama to fail. I want his plans to fail. I want them to fail because they are socialism and that will screw us up more horribly, and for much longer, than Obama will be in office even if he does get re-elected in 2012, which I fervently hope he doesn't.
It's not even remotely shocking to me that liberals are aghast that anyone could be against the policies of their President--the same people who desperately hoped for huge body counts coming out of Iraq and a massive failure of President Bush's policies now can't seem to understand that anyone might disagree with the government spending in one year more money than it has spent in its entire history to date.
I want Obama's plans to fail and I want him voted out of office in 2012.
* * *
But Obama isn't going to waste the crisis he's been given. No sir, he's going to ram through everything he possibly can now so that--by 2012--people will think they have to vote for him or else lose their health care.
Moving quickly also helps get his policies enacted before the mid-term elections. It's interesting that he's planning on losing seats, isn't it? The sitting party always loses seats at the mid-term and I'm sure Obama's Clinton cronies are remembering 1994.
And one of the policies is emissions caps and energy taxes, all of which will cause further decline in the Dow-Jones and--of course--the economy.
* * *
The Anchoress asks, "Will the Dow hit 5,000?" I fail to see how it can't. Let's face it; Boss Tweek just signed a bill that was $900,000,000,000 worth of pork. This is on top of the regular federal budget which is around $1,600,000,000,000 and the bailout bill of--what was it, $300,000,000,000? I'm forgetting; all these numbers cause a stack overflow in my brain. Go with it anyway--which makes for a grand total of $2,800,000,000,000 in one year...and it's only March 2nd. Boss Tweek has been in office for forty days.
We're spending money we don't have--a lot of money we don't have. In fact, it makes me think of a certain ACORN employee who bought an $87,000 house and--less than 5 years later--refinanced it for $270,000.
What do you think will happen in a couple of years when the mortgage payments start coming due? After the introductory period is up and the interest starts to hit? The people on Wall Street know where this leads; that's why everyone's getting out of stocks and the market is so cheaply valued.
The Dow-Jones Industrial Average hit 13,390 in October of 2007. Now it's worth 6,763.
On the plus side, if you have money to invest, now is the time to buy, because you can get a lot; and when the market recovers--as it always does, to one extent or another--you will make out like a bandit. This is a good thing; there is nothing wrong with honest profit. Ever. And people who say that there is are mainly either jealous or communists. (Or both.)
However, it's not such a good thing for everyone when the economy tanks. It's not wrong for people who have the appropriate resources to take advantage of the economic conditions, but the poor economy hurts everyone. (Yes, even the rich ones.) Just as a rising tide lifts all boats, so does an ebbing tide lower all boats. And the people on the lower end of the economic spectrum will hit bottom first.
So think about this: Obama and his cronies are glad the economy is in the shitter and they are doing their damnedest both to maximize it and to take advantage of it. They want you to panic and to agree to let them do this and that because it will increase the power of the Democrat party and--not coincidentally--their own power.
Power is always the end to which socialism strives. Always. No matter what the rank-and-file intend for socialism to accomplish, what it always accomplishes is to concentrate most (if not all) life-and-death decisions in the hands of a few certain people.
* * *
Scipio on the Romans and what they might think if they saw how we do things these days.
* * *
Here's a list of things Obama has done* which would have caused a media firestorm if Bush had done them.
*=(Some of these things were not actually done by Obama, but by government. Close enough.)
* * *
Last night I treated myself and my GF to a viewing of the Firefly pilot.
...it says on the box that the pilot was shown on 12/20/02. Right below that it says the first ep was shown on 9/20/02, three months earlier.
Now, here's how I remember it: I remember seeing the ads for the show and wanting to check it out, and then watching that first ep (on 9/20/02) thinking that I'd missed seeing the pilot. When the pilot was run on 12/20 I taped it and enjoyed it.
I don't think I'm particularly unique when it comes to my appreciation for SF in that I don't want a western masquerading as SF. Firefly looked like a western; all kinds of people on horseback plus a production design that closely resembled, well, westerns kind of combined to give people the impression that Firefly was one of those cheesy "Western looks like SF" vibe. Which pretty much sucks, universally.
So to speak.
The only problem with this is that Firefly is set in a universe where a lot of worlds were terraformed and then colonized by dropping colonists on the new worlds with basic tools and maybe animals. This leads, in most cases, to people using animal power, particularly if it's only been a couple of hundred years since colonization started using this method.
This is set up in the pilot of the series. Which, y'know, people might have watched if it had been shown first.
Network executives don't seem to get that some series are, in fact, serial in nature--that showing the episodes in order is required so that the viewers will know what is going on. The pilot of Firefly gave a lot of basic exposition for the entire rest of the series in addition to kicking all sorts of SF ass.
Instead of running Firefly in order, though, Fox apparently thought it was fine to skip past the expensive pilot--most of which took place in space!--and go right to the first episode, which featured a lot of "western" stuff and relatively little "spaceship" stuff, thus giving a lot of viewers the impression that Firefly was low-tech SF, "a western from another planet".
I told my friends about how good Firefly was. They watched it the next week, and the Monday after e-mailed me and told me they weren't impressed with it. Why? It was one of the "western" eps. (It was "Jaynestown" if I recall correctly. I could be wrong, though.)
So naturally the series failed, because although it was built on a solid SF foundation, it didn't look like SF to too many people--and that's why it didn't even make it to a full season before being canceled.
(I could go on about the scheduling of the thing, but won't; bad scheduling kills series unless they are outstanding--Battlestar Galactica comes to mind--and if the network doesn't feel like supporting a series they'll kill it even if it could be saved by changing timeslots or, y'know, promoting the thing. Joan of Arcadia, for some reason, comes to mind....)
Anyway, so Firefly--of course--is made of awesome, and I enjoyed seeing the pilot--and will enjoy the rest of the series.