I have been holding on to this site for a while. This is the kind of ad Bush needs. Watch it if you can, broadband recommended since it is a long flash animation.

Ever since 1994, when President Clinton signed the Assault Weapons ban into law, it also limited magazines to a maximum of 10 rounds. Well, it seems that the high capacity magazines are wearing out. Gun Control Harming U.S. Troops details this situation.

As with all gun control ideas, this was a bad one. VPC, CPHV, et.al. never considered that criminals were smart enough to bring extra magazines along and actually reload. How novel of an idea, reloading.

The article also goes on to decry the use of 5.56mm rounds in use by the US military. This I think is also justified, as the 5.56 is not a killing round. It is simply too light of a bullet at 55 grams to bring down a human being. Then of course you have the logic that if you wound everybody rather than kill them, you swamp the medical facilities, plus it takes 2-3 guys off the battle line transporting the wounded to the hospital. So I can see both sides, but I would rather have actual casualties than wounded on their side.

Most gun laws are stupid. Beyond restricting ownership from those with felony criminal or mental records (and yes, I am in the latter category), there should be very few laws that restrict ownership and use. I firmly believe that if you want to carry a firearm for self protection, then the government should get out of the way and let you do it.

I also believe that if a criminal gets killed in the commission of a crime, we should stick his head on a pike to serve as a warning to others.

UPDATE: The 5.56mm round is 55 GRAINS, not grams. 55 grains comes in at just over 3.5 grams. Big difference in weight.

Well, the cable modem came back when I tried it last night. I still wanted the service tech out here this morning, and he came and told me I had a marginal signal. He said he would talk with the maintenance guys about boosting the signal since I am at the end of the physical line. Hopefully no more interruptions.

Senator Kerry made fun of President Bush’s scrapes when he fell from his mountain bike while riding around his ranch. Kerry pokes fun at Bush mishap.

Of course, the Senator forgets his own bicycle mishap on level ground. He’s the one who should be asking about training wheels. But then again, Kerry needs training wheels on his snowboard, since he can’t stay upright on that either. It seems the score for mishaps is Kerry 2, Bush 1.

Another article from Slashdot. Password Memorability and Securability brings up some very interesting points.

It seems that “buster4513″ is a lot more memorable and just as secure as “f49T22Hecs”.

Are your passwords like this? Or just something simple as a family or pets name? How often do you change your passwords?

I just had to change mine because I was starting to get spam where I was the sender. Either I have picked up a worm or virus (unlikely) or someone hacked my email password. So, just for securities sake, I changed the passwords on all of my important accounts.

How is your security?

One thing you can always count on about Liberals is they always stick to their beliefs no matter the facts staring them in the face. This seems to be changing, at least as far as gun control is concerned. Whither Gun Control? asks this very same question.

It seems that they are starting to come around and they are conceding about how the Assault Weapons ban is nothing more than about appearances rather than functionality. They are also conceding that massive gun grabs such as in England and Australia only disarm citizens, leaving criminals able to purchase firearms on the black market.

I don’t their beliefs are changing, but they are changing tactics and it will bite us in the bottom if we don’t keep our eyes open and our ears up.

Bill Whittle at Eject!Eject!Eject! has come up with a new essay over the weekend, STRENGTH (Part 1). As always, a deep and thoughtful read.

He is also close to publishing his book of essays, of which I will purchase one to read while off-line. You should consider the same.

I have never been disappointed by one of his essays, and this one continues that trend.

A Classic story of time travel from the 50′s is being made into a movie. Slashdot has the story, “A Sound of Thunder” Movie This Summer.

The Twilight Zone did this when it was black and white, I don’t know how they will turn this into a two hour movie, but I am looking forward to it.

I found this article on Slashdot: Cell Phone Directory Coming Soon.

It references a Yahoo! story about how 75% of cell phone numbers are now suddenly “open” to telemarketers. Thankfully, it lists the Do Not Call web page, where you can register your phone number to keep those pesky guys at bay.

Go and sign up now, before they waste your daytime minutes and interrupt you during meetings.

This is my first time quoting Ann Coulter. I don’t think it will be my last. On May 19, she posts this op-ed, against the LA Times. I quote the entire article here because there is no page other than the front page for me to direct you to.

The Other Lame “Times”

If liberals won’t move on from the prison abuse photos calculated to incite hatred toward the very troops liberals loudly claim to “support,” I’m not moving on from the fact that the editor of the Los Angeles Times, John Carroll, is instructing journalists on ethics. The editor of the Los Angeles Times telling reporters how to behave ethically is a complete contradiction, like … oh, I don’t know … giving Yasser Arafat a Nobel Peace Prize or something. You know, just patently silly.

This is the same L.A. Times that engaged in desperate, 11th-hour attempts to sabotage Arnold Schwarzenegger during the California recall election with lurid sex stories from anonymous assistant crudite girls who worked the craft services tables on Arnold’s movies from the 1980s and were still trying to break into show biz 20 years later.

This is the same L.A. Times where reporters had to be told in an internal memo (from Carroll himself) to stop injecting opinion in news stories, specifically the practice of prefacing the term “pro-life” with the term “so-called.”

This is the same L.A. Times that in recent years instituted racial and gender quotas for sources on “so-called” news – oops, I mean, news stories – which puts reporters in the position of having to round up a black expert on nuclear fusion, a Native American expert on cubism, and a female expert on great moments in football.

This is the same L.A. Times that responded to the largest number of canceled subscriptions in the paper’s history from readers enraged by the paper’s liberal bias by putting Michael Kinsley, one of America’s leading leftists, in charge of the editorial page.

And this is the same L.A. Times that pays unrepentant Castro fan and former North Korea defender Robert Scheer for his hysterical anti-American rants every Tuesday, after hiring him mostly because his wife was on the editorial board.

The title of Carroll’s speech was “The Wolf in Reporter’s Clothing: The Rise of Pseudo-Journalism in America.” One has to admit: If you wanted an expert on the practice of partisan pseudo-journalism, you could do a lot worse than the editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Alas, Carroll’s speech wasn’t the “how-to” lecture dozens of would-be yellow journalists were expecting when they showed up for his presentation. Like the “ombudsman” at the New York Times, Carroll chastised his own newspaper for some small, irrelevant infraction no one would ever complain about while ignoring the paper’s consistent Soviet-style reporting that has led thousands of readers to cancel their subscriptions.

Instead, Carroll’s speech was an attack on Fox News Channel. If conservatives complained about CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Reader’s Digest, NPR, etc. etc. half as much as liberals scream about Fox News, even I would say conservatives were getting to be a bore on the subject.

Carroll’s case-in-chief of Fox News’ “pseudo-journalism” is “The O’Reilly Factor.” (Only liberals could force conservatives into defending Bill O’Reilly.) Carroll lyingly says of O’Reilly: “Where, he asked, was the L.A. Times on the so-called Troopergate story?”

In fact, O’Reilly never mentioned “Troopergate.” He didn’t mention the Arkansas State Troopers. And he certainly didn’t mention “so-called Troopergate.” He compared the L.A. Times coverage of Schwarzenegger’s alleged inappropriate behavior decades earlier with that paper’s coverage of the scandals of various Democrats – among them the stunning, contemporaneous sexual assaults by Bill Clinton on identifiable women.

I suppose it’s easy to confuse sex scandals involving Bill Clinton – I keep a “Women Bill Clinton Has Raped or Groped at a Glance” file on my Blackberry, just as a time-saver – but O’Reilly was referring not to the 1993 allegations from Arkansas State Troopers, but to the 1998 Clinton sex scandals involving allegations from specific women, such as Kathleen Willey. We know this because while the word “trooper” never passed O’Reilly’s lips, he did expressly refer to “Kathleen Willey.”

When it came to these Clinton sex assaults, how did the L.A. Times do? Reporter Richard A. Serrano described Willey as “embittered” and said her accusations were “fraught with contradiction” – unlike the truth-tellers who waited 20 years to make anonymous accusations against Schwarzenegger. The Times angrily editorialized that Clinton’s impeachment was “grounded not in what is right for the country but what best helps House managers save face.” (How anyone can use the expression “save face” in defense of Bill Clinton is beyond my understanding.)

You don’t have to enter the “No Spin Zone” to see the “disconnect,” as liberals love to say, between the L.A. Times’ frantic, wild-eyed search for a woman – any woman, even anonymously – to accuse Schwarzenegger of groping her at some point during the previous quarter century, and the Times’ equally determined efforts to discount the many credible accounts of women, all named, who plausibly accused Bill Clinton of raping, groping or otherwise sexually assaulting them.

But Carroll dearly wishes O’Reilly had said “Troopergate” because apparently that’s the last time Carroll can remember the L.A. Times going after a Democrat the way the Times goes after Republicans as a matter of policy. The Times’ Troopergate story came out in December 1993. But Carroll is still citing that one time over a decade ago when the L.A. Times engaged in nonpartisan reporting, bragging: “At one point, it had nine reporters in Little Rock.” OK, but there were 24 reporters on the Schwarzenegger story.

What do you think? Reasonable reporter or Republican attack dog?

Bill Cosby gave the NAACP a run for its money the other day. Cos gives ‘em pause show what can happen if one black man stands up for what is right and the truth.

“These people marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we’ve got these knuckleheads walking around,” he declared. “The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids – $500 sneakers for what? And won’t spend $200 for ‘Hooked on Phonics.’

“I can’t even talk the way these people talk: ‘Why you ain’t,’ ‘Where you is’ … You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!”

This is so true. When I drive through the neighborhoods of Memphis, it is mostly in the black areas that I see boarded up and abandoned houses, dilapidated houses, trash in the streets, unmowed lots. Not to say there aren’t white areas like that, but it’s an 80/20 split.

The educations system and the parents are failing these black children, committing most of them to such conditions as a life sentence. If has got to stop.

Theodore Shaw, head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, was quick to tell the crowd that most people on welfare are not black.

That is true. Blacks make up about 17% of the population and about 40% of welfare recipients, which means they are drastically out of proportion.

Something must be done.

My cable connection was out for a week last week, then they had a service outage yesterday, then my connection crapped out again today. I’m waiting for a callback to schedule hopefully a priority service call. I have stuff on the hook and my alarm set for 6am to get them up for you to read. See you tomorrow.

No blogging this morning, more when I get back after more classes and some family time.

Well, I turned the ripe old age of 43 today. I celebrated by eating a Philly Cheese steak pizza (the whole thing) and having a non-alcoholic beer. Some wild party animal I am…

See you tomorrow.

I have training classes this morning and tomorrow, so more posting this afternoon and a repeat tomorrow. Later.