You can tell when a politician is lying because their lips are moving. And so it is with North Korea. N. Korea Agrees to Stop Building Nukes.
While the negotiators might be acting in good faith, Kim Jong Il will not give up his paranoia so easily. I fully expect them to continue with whatever nuclear program they currently have, despite any promises to the contrary. Hence the title to this post.
We are still technically at war with the North Koreans, we just agreed to a cease fire in 1953. No negotiated end to the conflict has been reached.
The DPRK (Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea) as how North Korea is officially known, is neither Democratic nor a Republic. It is a multi-generational dictatorship with no economy, reports of starvation and cannibalism and so on. Not too long ago I saw a night time picture from space of the Korean Peninsula, and South Korea was awash in light and activity. The North was the exact opposite. It was 99% dark, only a few spots here and there. The DPRK has no economy to speak of and the citizens must be constantly taught how wonderful their lives are.
Such a wonderful place, don’t you agree?

Here you go. My latest painting pieces, all fresh from their opening day double header.
Click on all pictures for a larger view
This picture is my Thrower (who is currently dead; I’m 10K short of hiring a new one) and her two Catchers, the long arm of my throwing game.

These are my two Blitzers. Their job is to throw blocks to knock over my opponents so the Catchers have clear shots to the end zone.



These two pictures are my Linewomen, the backbone of my team. Their job is to gang up on the linemen of the other team and beat them down.




As you can see, some of them have partially flocked bases, I’m having trouble filling the gaps in the slotabases that they are on. I’m working on it, but I thought you’d like to see them as soon as possible.
What do you think of my Babes?

Well, my son and I went down to the San Francisco Bread Company in Cordova today and played a pair of games of Blood Bowl, the football game that makes the XFL look like a garden party.
This will be a league, about 20 games or so scattered over the next three months.
I got whomped 3-0 the first game, as well I should, with it being my first game ever of BB. I faced Elves, which were faster than my Amazons. Once they get into open territory, they just turn on the afterburners and leave me in their dust. My quarterback got killed (literally. she’s dead), but I managed to kill one of my opponents players and severely wounded another. I did get enough money from the game to buy myself a new quarterback.
Anyway, the second game I did much better. This time my puny Amazons faced Ogres. Despite the Ogres being almost twice as strong as my team, it was a rare thing when he could knock one of my players over blocking them. You see, there is a special die that you roll to determine if either player gets knocked down, or the defender gets pushed back. While my quarterback got killed (again), this time I managed to seriously injure a Goblin and even kill one of his Ogres, which was a 1:207 shot. I rolled boxcars to seriously wound him, then another six to actually kill him. This game came out tied at 2-2 at the end of regulation, and I managed to score a touchdown in overtime to win the game!
Being in a multi-game league over the course of a “season,” you have to generate money to buy more or replacement players. While it takes a lot to kill a player, I’ve already managed to inflict a couple of kills (and suffered two of my own) and managed to severely hurt a couple more players. Luckily I haven’t managed to get a serious injury other than death, serious injuries can result in nagging minor injuries, that may cause a player to miss a game.
I’m sorry I haven’t posted pictures of my Memphis Babes yet like I have promised, but I wanted to paint their bases first and that will take another week or two while I get in the mood to fill the cracks in twelve bases, flock them with sand and then paint the bases. Don’t worry, it will be soon, they’re the only project on my painting bench at the moment.
I think I’ve done a fantastic job with them, I even painted the eyes and teeth of the players, something that I never would have even thought of before now. While some work does remain to be done, they are 99% ready, and now they are battle tested.
It’s late and I’m tired, 6 straight hours of gaming has me ready to sleep a sound sleep.

Well, it was two years ago today that I made my first post. I didn’t publish it until the next day, because I didn’t know about the Publish button, so I guess I can say today and tomorrow is my Blogaversary! 1,494 posts in two years, not too bad. And I’m still going strong, no sign of burning out on all of this. In fact, it’s the opposite. It helps keep me grounded. Lets me know there are things bigger than me in this world.
Have a piece of cake to help me celebrate!

I told you anybody who believes this garbage has serious problems. Air America Hosts: Farrakhan Not Wrong on Levees.
First of all, I want to proclaim the commercial success Air America has become. They are on a whopping *70* stations nationwide! Every other nationwide Talk Radio host that I know of has at least 260 stations, so maybe they aren’t all that. Plus the fact that it takes an electron microscope to measure their ratings, but I digress…
Anyway Chuck D, once a Co-Host on Unfiltered, now I don’t know what he does, as that show has been canceled, backed up Farrakhan’s assertion that the levees in NO were blown up.
Here is the whole story:

Two hosts at the liberal radio network Air America are defending Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan – saying he’s not wrong to suspect that white people deliberately blew up the levees in New Orleans.
“You cannot blame people for coming up with conspiracy theories,” Air America host Chuck D. said, after he was asked Thursday about the paranoid pronouncement by MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson.
“They look on television and see that the government is four days late in saving people [who are] supposed to be their citizens,” Chuck D. explained.
Carlson gave him a second chance to denounce Farrakhan’s lunatic declaration, saying, “You’re a smart guy. You know that white people didn’t blow up the levees to kill black people. You’ve gotta know that didn’t happen.”
But the Air America host refused to budge, insisting instead that there was a chance Farrakhan could be right.

Like I said. Serious problems.

I was going to put up a post about Michael Newdow and his friends getting the 9th Circus overturning (again) the Pledge, but I have a time critical project.
I am getting into a new miniature game called Blood Bowl, an extremely violent version of American Football set in the future. I am “coaching” a team of Amazons, and I have to have them ready to go for a demonstration game this evening.
I’ll post pictures either tonight or tomorrow so you can see my team.
Later.

I always knew this guy was a nutcase. Here’s the proof: Louis Farrakhan: Levees Were ‘Blown Up’.

“I heard from a very reliable source who saw a 25 foot deep crater under the levee breach,” Farrakhan explained. “It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry.”

Suuuure. Of course, Mr. Farrakhan. And I’m sure the number 27 figures into this as well somewhere.
This needs no explanation. If you buy into this, then you have some serious problems.

Read this. It’s the real reason why the levee’s failed in NO. Why New Orleans Flooded.

A steel barge that came crashing into one of the levee walls, and not the failure of that levee to hold back an immense tidal wave, was to blame for much of the flooding that drowned parts of New Orleans.

And so starts a wonderful article based on facts as to the whys.
Most telling is this:

• Another huge wave came across Lake Pontchartrain in the north. It sent a steel barge ramming through the Industrial Canal, a major shipping artery that cuts north to south through the city, possibly creating a breach that grew to 500 feet, letting water pour into nearby neighborhoods of the city’s Ninth Ward.
  The barge’s remains were found lying on the bottom of the gap. An early eyewitness reported seeing the barge smash through the levee. His report was never followed up by the media.
  Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, said that break was particularly surprising because one of the levee breaks was “along a section that was just upgraded.”
  “It did not have an earthen levee,” Dr. Penland told the New York Times. “It had a vertical concrete wall several feel thick.”

• Vital repairs for which a whopping $600 million had been appropriated by the federal government were stopped after residents of the Ninth Ward complained about the noise created by the repair project and sued to halt it.

$600 Million. Authorized by the Bush Administration to fix the levees. Doesn’t sound like they don’t care, does it? And the residents are the ones that halted the work. Sounds like it was the residents who didn’t want the levees upgraded.
The article goes on to talk about the shortcomings of the local government and how they failed in their jobs.
Go and read. It’s very enlightening.

Found on NewsMax:
Enticed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plunging approval ratings, California Democrats are courting some heavy hitters to run against him next year – including Bill Clinton.
“We hear that major donors are reaching out to former President Clinton, once governor of Arkansas, to run,” Paul Bedard writes in his U.S. News & World Report column, Washington Whispers.
A Democratic strategist quoted by Bedard says: “On first blush, it might sound nuts. But he’d be governor of the fourth-largest economy in the world and have the ability to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for Hillary” if she ran for president.
Other potential candidates being considered include ex-Lakers star Magic Johnson, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and activist actor Rob Reiner, aka “Meathead” of “All in the Family” fame.
Says Bedard: “Imagine a ‘Meathead vs. Terminator’ race in 2006.”

…According to Senator Mary Landrieu.
Normally I get the jump on Rush and comment on stores that he covers on his show later in the day. But I missed this story and so now I get to play catchup.

Asked on “Fox News Sunday” why New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin failed to follow the city’s evacuation plan and press the buses into service, Landrieu blamed Bush administration cuts in mass transit funding.
“Mayor Nagin and most mayors in this country have a hard time getting their people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out of the city in front of a hurricane,” she said. “And it’s because this administration and administrations before them do not understand the difficulties that mayors . . . face.”
Landrieu then added: “In other words, this administration did not believe in mass transit. They won’t even get people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out.”

If you can’t get people to work on a sunny day, then you are hiring people with the wrong work ethic, if they have one at all. I would have thought that if the first people you put on those buses were the immediate families of the drivers, that they would be all too glad to drive them out of town ahead of the hurricane. But I could be wrong.
After all, 1/3rd of the NOPD quit, in fact some were caught on tape participating in the looting. It appears that almost every one involved in this whole debacle, from the Governor of Louisiana to the citizens of New Orleans, expected someone else to do their jobs for them. This is the Liberal attitude that produces a citizenry that wants everything done for them, and they don’t have to do a thing.
And Senator Landrieu is making excuses for those who are responsible and blaming those who are not. Of course, she must. She is a Liberal. She, in Rush’s words, exhibits, “The bigotry of low expectations.” She doesn’t think those responsible could have done any better. Their lackluster effort really was their best, so don’t blame them and hurt their fragile egos.
Bullshit. The only way people grow is to constantly try. The failure is not in not accomplishing the task, but rather to give up in the trying. If your best isn’t good enough, then you need to let someone else do the job and you step aside.
You want to do the honorable thing? Accept blame when you are at fault. Then head back in and do your best to correct the problem, or let someone more qualified do the job.

Well, John Kerry finally got in on the Katrina thing. John Kerry’s Katrina Aid Arrives Late.
John Kerry sure didn’t want to get left out of the photo op for this one. He coordinated the donation of 5,000 bottles of baby formula, 5,000 pairs of sneakers and an array of cleaning supplies. He got people to donate everything, including the Boston’s Children’s Hospital, the New England Shelter for Homeless Veterans and the New Balance sneaker company. UPS donated the use of the 757, the fuel and the crew.
This would have been a great donation, if it had come about a week earlier. Now, the evacuees have been dispersed throughout the southern states, and it is very unlikely that this stuff will see its’ intended use for some time, if at all.
But the point of all of this, is a Billion dollar man like John Kerry could have actually used some of his (wife’s) own money. He could have easily bought everything with this weeks allowance, including the transportation.
So, Lieutenant “Reporting for Duty” Kerry (who served in Vietnam, dontchaknow) screws the pooch, again. What could have been a wonderful and kind gesture becomes another Liberal boondoggle. Between Kerry and Sean Penn, you get the feeling that Liberals are worthless.
I am hopeful that there are many Liberal organizations out there who are donating time, money and materials to ease the suffering and help in the rebuilding effort. The important difference is they are not tripping over themselves to get in front of a camera to show how wonderful they are. There is a difference between raising awareness and actually getting your hands dirty in the work that needs to be done.
If you have the time or money, please donate it.

Lifted from the Letters to the Editor from the Atlanta-Journal Constitution

Monied America lacks moral goodness
Congratulations, monied America: You wanted your gated communities to keep out the poor, to protect yourselves from crime, to separate yourselves from undesirables. You took the high roads and built your gated communities on them so you would stay dry and clean while the stormwaters of filth and despair flooded their neighborhoods.
You did it. You kept out the poor, you concentrated the crime in the poor neighborhoods, effectively ensuring those neighborhoods would remain poor and broken. You separated yourselves from the undesirables.
And then you left them, to die in attics and on rooftops and in the streets and in the disgusting halls of commerce and sports. The richest nation in the world is the most destitute when it comes to true moral goodness. God could not bless this America at all.
SAM MARIE ENGLE
Engle, of Atlanta, is director of the Kenneth Cole Fellowship in Community Building and Social Change and senior program associate in the Office of University-Community Partnerships at Emory University.

Such a wonderful display of class warfare. “The rich keep the poor down.” Actually, the poor keep the poor down. From the Black social meme that says, “Learning is a White thing” to the active destruction of the Black nuclear family by Liberals, the only thing in the way of the Black man from success is himself.
And the rich left the poor on the rooftops? It was the armed gangs that did that, firing at the rescuers as they tried to rescue people. I just don’t understand that. This is the first time I have heard of this happening.
The rich should let criminals into their gated communities so that they can spare the poor of crime? Hogwash. Like that will ever happen. Criminals will always prey on the weak, even if they have better pickings uptown.
Do you want to know how to cure poverty? You can’t. That’s the answer, you can’t. There will always be a group of people to the left of the bell curve and they keep themselves there. They don’t get an education, they have four children out of wedlock from four different fathers, you can’t stop this no matter how hard you try. These people have to do it themselves, you can’t do it for them.
And the rich do more than you’ll ever know. Not only do they provide jobs, by and large the rich donate millions of dollars to various programs to help the poor. The just do it anonymously, because they don’t need the ego boost of doing it in front of cameras doing it. Unlike Liberals. They have to constantly prove how much they are doing, and they put more effort into the showing and not enough into the doing.
The rich are, by and large, where they are because they worked their way there. They deserve to live in gated communities because they earned their wealth. They worked 80 hour work weeks, they studied and went to school. They took risks and hard work paid off for them. EIGHTY PERCENT of American millionaires are first generation. That means that they started with nothing and built it all themselves.
So your arguments, Ms. Engle, are bullshit.

Mayor Nagin has entered the ranks of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Mayor Nagin Joins Race Baiters.
This article was read by Tim Russert on Meet the Press yesterday, and Mayor Nagin did not back away from it.

“The more I think about it, definitely race played into this,” he told the paper.
“How do you treat people that just want to walk across the bridge and get out, and they’re turned away, because you can’t come to a certain parish?” the embattled mayor complained. “How do resources get stacked up outside the city of New Orleans and they don’t make their way in? How do you not bring one piece of ice?”

Well, when Louisiana officials don’t allow them in, where is the only place you can point the finger? When City officials won’t allow food and water into the SuperDome, how can you point fingers?
Those displaced by the storm need to be concentrated into an area where help can be delivered to them, not disbursed across the surrounding parishes where they have no support.
Those people should have been bused out of the area before the hurricane hit. It’s in the NO Hurricane plan. President Bush can’t help it if a third of the New Orleans police force quits and no one shows up to drive the school buses. But it is the responsibility of the Mayor of New Orleans, and he gets rewarded for it, good or bad.
To declare race was an issue is ludicrous. If you have a city that is 80% Black, then 80% of the people stuck will be Black. How does race play into that?
This just makes me want to throw up.

Here’s a good article, Jack Kelly: No shame. The federal response to Katrina was not as portrayed.
The MSM and Democrats (generally the same thing) have been relentlessly Bush-Bashing in the “fact” that aid didn’t come fast enough. Hence the title to this post.
But, as noted below, Federal aid has been faster in the aftermath of Katrina than it has with other natural disasters.

Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:
“The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne.”
For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 2002. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.

And of course, the blowhards in the opinion pages waste no time in roasting Bush:

Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.
So they libel as a “national disgrace” the most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history.

These “Gratificationists” (how’s that for a new word!) expect everything to be put back the way is was, like they see in those 30 second insurance commercials. They expect rescuers to be rescuing people the second the rain stops, if not in the middle of the storm. They expect things to happen instantaneously, and it is just not possible under these rules of physics.
Yes, there were screwups and miscommunications on all levels of the disaster relief. Supplies were turned away, or sent to the wrong area, but on the whole, things have gone well. Just not fast enough for the Gratificationists.
The outpouring of generosity of the American people has been unprecedented, approaching $1 Billion dollars in private aid. Then you have the thousands of workers who have donated time and effort to feed and house the survivors. Thankfully, stories abound in the local news. One that I heard was about a couple invited 52 people into their home. The neighbors provide bags and bags of groceries every day to feed them, and the lady whos house this is breaks down and wonders if she’s doing enough.
That, my dear readers, is the real America.

Those two words, I think, sums up the attitude of the American People. Not just on that day, but today as well.
Today, on this 4th anniversary of our darkest day I still cry over the losses, still play the songs inspired by that day, still think we have done the right things that we have done since.
These, animals, who perpetrated this act upon us, have been paid back in blood for their back-stabbing. Their blood. Our blood.
The tree of freedom must be, from time to time, be watered with the blood of Tyrants and Patriots. We have three trees blossoming with the blood shed starting with This Day. The American, Afghanistan and Iraqi trees are growing, all from the blood of the finest and worst examples of humanity.
Let’s Roll.