I was trolling the Purser's List and found that The Anchoress had discovered a gem of an essay that nicely dovetailed with my previous rant:
"The anti-western left has, over the course of history, fallen time after time for the propaganda of murderous tyrants who offered a handy platform for bashing the home society by providing the alibi of conscience. The investment of personal, political and moral identity that this represents is so immense that after a short while such gullible dupes are simply incapable of recognising reality even when it stares them in the face. Hence their stupefaction when confronted with the enormities of Robespierre, Stalin or Mao. To that list must now be added the Islamic jihad and Saddam Hussein. The difference is that this time these useful idiots have taken the middling people of Britain and Europe – and increasingly, it seems, of America – with them into the land of deluded wishful thinking. The result could be that this war against the jihadi terror could be lost -- at home."
The excerpt above is the conclusion of the essay. Read the rest at Melanie Phillip's Diary.
Ms. Phillips writes much better than I do. She has also included a delightful chronology of some of the history of al Qaida terror, Iraq, and just how intellectually hollow leftists and dishonest media deal with the reality they cannot bring themselves to accept.
Spoiler: They lie like cheap rugs. But then you already knew that.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Independence And Responsibility.
Howdy, whoever may wander by here.
My work has become a day/night/weekend pursuit and has bitten a huge chunk out of my life. Most of the time I arrive home after six p.m. and spend two or three hours just getting ready for the next day. I also catch up with the family, pay bills, and do chores, in that brief interval, too. My ability to keep up with current events suffers, of course.
In the end analysis, I don't think that I'm missing too terrible much.
I believe in history. By that I mean that by a disciplined study of past events, of the individuals who were involved, and the motivations or interests at stake, you can usually make a reasonable wild-assed guess about how a given situation may work out.
As an individual and a citizen I desire to live, work, and raise my family in an environment reasonably free of state interference and secure from identifiable threats. I believe that I share my basic desires with a huge majority of my fellow citizens. My politics, and the agendas to which I lend support,are means to those ends and in no way represent pursuit of any rigidly defined utopic objective.
This brings us to our current Democrat/Left/Liberal/Moonbat (and Establishment Uber Media) posture that they have adopted since the President's speech the other night.
Who are these people, and how did they end up any place but the quiet wing of their respective State Hospitals?
I am forced to depend on CBS radio news for hourly updates during the work day. Since the Downing Street Memo story went the way of the Texas ANG documents (not as forgeries, but rather by failing in their purpose to incite mobs to storm the White House), CBS radio has shifted into Tokyo Rose mode. There is NO good news from Iraq. I get the exact number of U.S. deaths in Iraq since OIF with every hourly update. The loss of a single helicopter over a battle zone has become news on par with that missing girl in Aruba, or even the Michael Jackson trial. GDP growth has to be reported, but by God they don't have to mention how many months GDP has expanded, and they spend more time explaining how short term interest rate raises my knock our economy into the dark ages...
Meanwhile the Democrats have decided that even if American voters don't believe them when they try to sell income redistribution, punitive taxation, and international oversight of our national security, they can go ahead and attempt to represent the failure to find significant WMD caches in Iraq as a lie vice an intelligence failure. They deny that the democratization of Iraq (and hopefully the wider mideast) as being remotely related to the war on terror in general, or the 9/11 attacks in particular.
Recent history has shown that when Democrats commit to a script for a big propaganda push it usually bites them in the ass. Afghanistan was not the eater of U.S. armies, Baghdad wasn't Stalingrad, and car bombings and assassinations across Iraq are truly horrible NOW but are all too understandable as the flailings of a murderous, all but defeated, class of barbarians who know all too well what a secure Iraq will mean for regimes like Saudi, Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, and all the other failed thugocracies in the region.
They are talking themselves into a corner that not even NPR/CNN/Oprah can get them out of. I said earlier that I don't get the minute to minute stuff any more, and that I don't need it. The new script is that Democracy in Iraq is insulated totally from 9/11, and that the meme for measuring victory in both is... is.... in short, impossible to attain for any Rethuglican administration.
We aren't stupid, folks. Not the people that went to school before the eighties and have paid even a modicum of attention to the world while we went about building careers and families.
OBL committed 9/11 because WE ARE INFIDELS. Not because Bush was president. Not because we harbor designs on the barbaric world of the Mideast. Paying their price for their product, then ensuring the security of the rest of the world's access fails the "imperialism" test. The Islamists find themselves in the same boat as the Soviets in that their repressive regimes fail when they have to compete with free societies - even if they kill their own without restraint to keep the dictatorships and mullahocracies in place.
Satellite TV, the internet, Uncle Samir in Kansas and his letters home. Those are what is killing Wahhabist Islam. It took thirty years of public bluster and periodic slaughter capped by 9/11 for us to take them seriously. Now we do. At least the adult portion of American, Australian, Brit, and Japanese society does.
The other people in the West that have missed the jihadist message are too busy trying to keep what little power remains in their rustic political enclaves to do more than exploit the costs associated with defending western civilization. And they do so with breathless histrionics and such clumsy denial of current history (and their parts already played) that the picture, as a whole, transcends the outrageous and moves right into the piteous.
What fucking morons these people are. This war has not been run perfectly. The nation's border security and immigration controls are a farce. We have no energy policy, in a time when we really need to work at taking the legs out from under the jihadist money pipeline. That bastion of Constitutional oversight known as the Supreme Court has just legalized the state seizure of private real estate for transfer to other private interests, all in the name of economic improvement.
Yet our economy grows. Nascent democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq are indeed rising, as well as in other, wholly unplanned places like Lebanon and the Ukraine. People are dying for freedom. It's not good, but it is the historical price paid to overthrow tyranny. And as pathetic as our homeland security truly is, it has sufficed (in conjunction with our international efforts to locate, kill, or capture jihadists) to prevent a second 9/11. So far.
Which party stands for progressive ideals of democracy, justice, and individual pursuit of happiness? Not the Democrats, who carp and bray and belittle the goals we have undertaken to accomplish - all without offering any alternatives, and all with perfect immunity from prying media inquiry...
They prioritize regaining their lost power, which has been removed from them by the acts of free citizens in free elections, over defending us from and ultimately defeating jihadist terror masters responsible for murdering thousands of our citizens in the past and currently in combat with our forces in Iraq and elsewhere.
We fired a government back in 1776. We tired of being the cash cow for a disconnected and unaccountable regime - a regime that presumed to dictate our economic and intellectual lives in exchange for the privilege of our being their subjects. That process cost blood and much treasure, and took a decade just to get us disconnected from England. Beginning in 1980 we began to fire another government that had failed to deliver on their duties as enumerated in our Constitution. The difference then was that we revolted by voting, and the revolution continues to this day. We must find a way to reach the Judicial Branch, soon, and temper them, as well, lest their fiat legislative machinations do irreparable damage to the concept of representative government.
The Democrats have commissioned a dozen, a score, a hundred polls over the last few years. They see a tiny blip where support for the war is concerned and they seize on it as proof they are gaining traction. They would never even consider that the dissatisfaction on display is because we aren't prosecuting it vigorously enough. There's no room behind their foreheads for any thought like that.
This weekend I've got four days off. The flag will fly all four days. We will cook ribs in the driveway with family and friends on Monday. We will read the Declaration of Independence. We will ooh and ah at the fireworks. We will remember at what cost our holiday was bought.
It's kind of sad. The jihadists fight because their world is doomed by the spread of freedom. The liberal/left/democrat franchise is based on victimhood and a moral vacuum, and they are just as threatened by individuals pursuing their own freedoms AND the exercise of civic responsibility as are the jihadis.
I await the door into face moment for the Left; it must come if history repeats its recent cycles. They are out there on their plank, sawing furiously behind themselves.
I wish you the very best of Independence Days. Remember where we came from, what we face, and what we must do to make this grand experiment keep on working.
My work has become a day/night/weekend pursuit and has bitten a huge chunk out of my life. Most of the time I arrive home after six p.m. and spend two or three hours just getting ready for the next day. I also catch up with the family, pay bills, and do chores, in that brief interval, too. My ability to keep up with current events suffers, of course.
In the end analysis, I don't think that I'm missing too terrible much.
I believe in history. By that I mean that by a disciplined study of past events, of the individuals who were involved, and the motivations or interests at stake, you can usually make a reasonable wild-assed guess about how a given situation may work out.
As an individual and a citizen I desire to live, work, and raise my family in an environment reasonably free of state interference and secure from identifiable threats. I believe that I share my basic desires with a huge majority of my fellow citizens. My politics, and the agendas to which I lend support,are means to those ends and in no way represent pursuit of any rigidly defined utopic objective.
This brings us to our current Democrat/Left/Liberal/Moonbat (and Establishment Uber Media) posture that they have adopted since the President's speech the other night.
Who are these people, and how did they end up any place but the quiet wing of their respective State Hospitals?
I am forced to depend on CBS radio news for hourly updates during the work day. Since the Downing Street Memo story went the way of the Texas ANG documents (not as forgeries, but rather by failing in their purpose to incite mobs to storm the White House), CBS radio has shifted into Tokyo Rose mode. There is NO good news from Iraq. I get the exact number of U.S. deaths in Iraq since OIF with every hourly update. The loss of a single helicopter over a battle zone has become news on par with that missing girl in Aruba, or even the Michael Jackson trial. GDP growth has to be reported, but by God they don't have to mention how many months GDP has expanded, and they spend more time explaining how short term interest rate raises my knock our economy into the dark ages...
Meanwhile the Democrats have decided that even if American voters don't believe them when they try to sell income redistribution, punitive taxation, and international oversight of our national security, they can go ahead and attempt to represent the failure to find significant WMD caches in Iraq as a lie vice an intelligence failure. They deny that the democratization of Iraq (and hopefully the wider mideast) as being remotely related to the war on terror in general, or the 9/11 attacks in particular.
Recent history has shown that when Democrats commit to a script for a big propaganda push it usually bites them in the ass. Afghanistan was not the eater of U.S. armies, Baghdad wasn't Stalingrad, and car bombings and assassinations across Iraq are truly horrible NOW but are all too understandable as the flailings of a murderous, all but defeated, class of barbarians who know all too well what a secure Iraq will mean for regimes like Saudi, Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, and all the other failed thugocracies in the region.
They are talking themselves into a corner that not even NPR/CNN/Oprah can get them out of. I said earlier that I don't get the minute to minute stuff any more, and that I don't need it. The new script is that Democracy in Iraq is insulated totally from 9/11, and that the meme for measuring victory in both is... is.... in short, impossible to attain for any Rethuglican administration.
We aren't stupid, folks. Not the people that went to school before the eighties and have paid even a modicum of attention to the world while we went about building careers and families.
OBL committed 9/11 because WE ARE INFIDELS. Not because Bush was president. Not because we harbor designs on the barbaric world of the Mideast. Paying their price for their product, then ensuring the security of the rest of the world's access fails the "imperialism" test. The Islamists find themselves in the same boat as the Soviets in that their repressive regimes fail when they have to compete with free societies - even if they kill their own without restraint to keep the dictatorships and mullahocracies in place.
Satellite TV, the internet, Uncle Samir in Kansas and his letters home. Those are what is killing Wahhabist Islam. It took thirty years of public bluster and periodic slaughter capped by 9/11 for us to take them seriously. Now we do. At least the adult portion of American, Australian, Brit, and Japanese society does.
The other people in the West that have missed the jihadist message are too busy trying to keep what little power remains in their rustic political enclaves to do more than exploit the costs associated with defending western civilization. And they do so with breathless histrionics and such clumsy denial of current history (and their parts already played) that the picture, as a whole, transcends the outrageous and moves right into the piteous.
What fucking morons these people are. This war has not been run perfectly. The nation's border security and immigration controls are a farce. We have no energy policy, in a time when we really need to work at taking the legs out from under the jihadist money pipeline. That bastion of Constitutional oversight known as the Supreme Court has just legalized the state seizure of private real estate for transfer to other private interests, all in the name of economic improvement.
Yet our economy grows. Nascent democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq are indeed rising, as well as in other, wholly unplanned places like Lebanon and the Ukraine. People are dying for freedom. It's not good, but it is the historical price paid to overthrow tyranny. And as pathetic as our homeland security truly is, it has sufficed (in conjunction with our international efforts to locate, kill, or capture jihadists) to prevent a second 9/11. So far.
Which party stands for progressive ideals of democracy, justice, and individual pursuit of happiness? Not the Democrats, who carp and bray and belittle the goals we have undertaken to accomplish - all without offering any alternatives, and all with perfect immunity from prying media inquiry...
They prioritize regaining their lost power, which has been removed from them by the acts of free citizens in free elections, over defending us from and ultimately defeating jihadist terror masters responsible for murdering thousands of our citizens in the past and currently in combat with our forces in Iraq and elsewhere.
We fired a government back in 1776. We tired of being the cash cow for a disconnected and unaccountable regime - a regime that presumed to dictate our economic and intellectual lives in exchange for the privilege of our being their subjects. That process cost blood and much treasure, and took a decade just to get us disconnected from England. Beginning in 1980 we began to fire another government that had failed to deliver on their duties as enumerated in our Constitution. The difference then was that we revolted by voting, and the revolution continues to this day. We must find a way to reach the Judicial Branch, soon, and temper them, as well, lest their fiat legislative machinations do irreparable damage to the concept of representative government.
The Democrats have commissioned a dozen, a score, a hundred polls over the last few years. They see a tiny blip where support for the war is concerned and they seize on it as proof they are gaining traction. They would never even consider that the dissatisfaction on display is because we aren't prosecuting it vigorously enough. There's no room behind their foreheads for any thought like that.
This weekend I've got four days off. The flag will fly all four days. We will cook ribs in the driveway with family and friends on Monday. We will read the Declaration of Independence. We will ooh and ah at the fireworks. We will remember at what cost our holiday was bought.
It's kind of sad. The jihadists fight because their world is doomed by the spread of freedom. The liberal/left/democrat franchise is based on victimhood and a moral vacuum, and they are just as threatened by individuals pursuing their own freedoms AND the exercise of civic responsibility as are the jihadis.
I await the door into face moment for the Left; it must come if history repeats its recent cycles. They are out there on their plank, sawing furiously behind themselves.
I wish you the very best of Independence Days. Remember where we came from, what we face, and what we must do to make this grand experiment keep on working.
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Howard Pulls The Trigger
... and finds out that the weapon is indeed loaded.
There's a reason you aren't supposed to thumb back the hammer when the pistol is in the holster, Mr. Dean. You are just about out of feet by now, nyet?
I have admired Dennis The Peasant's wit and wisdom for years, extending back to when I was a regular commenter on Roger L. Simon's blog. Since Dennis established his own site he's just gotten better.
Aside: Last weekend's shooting outing was relaxing and fun. Oldest Goddess likes the new Bushmaster and Youngest Goddess has grown into the Ruger 10/22. The 500 yard watermelon survived, alas; I need new glasses. Mrs. Tmj shot her Ruger nine with the cool accuracy that never fails to impress.
Coaching tip: Never tell a student that "this pistol is only effective to fifty yards". They will never try to shoot milk jugs at a hundred if you do. And if they can hit a milk jug at a hundred yards with a semi-automatic pistol they can hit just about anything.
There's a reason you aren't supposed to thumb back the hammer when the pistol is in the holster, Mr. Dean. You are just about out of feet by now, nyet?
I have admired Dennis The Peasant's wit and wisdom for years, extending back to when I was a regular commenter on Roger L. Simon's blog. Since Dennis established his own site he's just gotten better.
Aside: Last weekend's shooting outing was relaxing and fun. Oldest Goddess likes the new Bushmaster and Youngest Goddess has grown into the Ruger 10/22. The 500 yard watermelon survived, alas; I need new glasses. Mrs. Tmj shot her Ruger nine with the cool accuracy that never fails to impress.
Coaching tip: Never tell a student that "this pistol is only effective to fifty yards". They will never try to shoot milk jugs at a hundred if you do. And if they can hit a milk jug at a hundred yards with a semi-automatic pistol they can hit just about anything.
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Saturday, June 18, 2005
Dawn Patrol
The Team is crossing Utah Lake for a Father's Day a.m. shooting fest.
We'll be somewhere south of the gravel pit and west of the road to Goshen. Look for funny hats, black rifles, and a silver mini van.
Oh, and watermelons. Out to five hundred yards. It's going to be that kind of day.
There may be pictures later.
We'll be somewhere south of the gravel pit and west of the road to Goshen. Look for funny hats, black rifles, and a silver mini van.
Oh, and watermelons. Out to five hundred yards. It's going to be that kind of day.
There may be pictures later.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Recycled Content
Here's a post I put up at Roger L. Simon:
What we attempted to do beginning on September 12, 2001 is dying the the death of a thousand cuts.
This conflict will not be won by surgical strikes, regime changes, and free elections. At one time it could have been. We should have adopted a "hot pursuit" policy and wiped out Syria's Ba'athists in 2003. We should have declared war via an act of Congress, and identified the enemy explicitly as any identified jihadist group, or any state providing haven, support, or transit to the same.
The enemy has taken our measure, and knows that it has friends in high places in our councils.
A democratic republic united to face a common threat and committed to the principles of justice and simple survival might have pulled off an unprecedented low-mortality solution to this clash between civilization and barbarism. We've blown that opportunity. Our political Left, fresh off losing thirty years' worth of elections, has transferred their emptiness and anger to the politics and persons chosen by the electorate to replace them.
And our right has failed to lead effectively.
The Left are wilfully blind to the fact that if they sabotage our effort to win this war as a domestic political tool, they will have set the machine to gotterdammerung on rails. They will not see past the loss of petty political fiefdoms to a future guaranteed to hold events much worse than 9/11. Losing Vietnam killed millions of Asians - but the cameras turned away in embarassment. The veterans were in turn vilified, pitied, and exploited as domestic political pawns. Let us declare defeat now, and it will take more than a remote control selection to insulate us from the consequences.
I fear for my family. And we are about to allow a betrayal of our servicemen and women on a scale that will make post-Vietnam look like a noble era.
Thousands, if not millions, more infidels are going to have to die at the hands of Islamists before idiots like Durbin and Truth and AI and the readership of Common Dreams gets it in their head that there are worse things than a Bush presidency. The muslim man in the street will just go back to business as usual once we are gone from the region. They will align with the powerful, or await the midnight knock on the door, as they have lived for generations.
It's not about country, it's about POLITICS, and they would gladly rip the beating hearts out of babies on an altar if they thought it would get them one step closer to power.
I am not a happy camper these days. History does not predict the future. It does provide a damned good analytical tool for predicting consequences for actions - especially where matters of cultural conflct are concerned.
Vietnam redux. I'd cry, but I'm too busy refreshing antibiotic prescriptions and ordering in a fresh supply of meds for my wife's chronic medical condition. And the water store and the food supply and the contact records...
What we attempted to do beginning on September 12, 2001 is dying the the death of a thousand cuts.
This conflict will not be won by surgical strikes, regime changes, and free elections. At one time it could have been. We should have adopted a "hot pursuit" policy and wiped out Syria's Ba'athists in 2003. We should have declared war via an act of Congress, and identified the enemy explicitly as any identified jihadist group, or any state providing haven, support, or transit to the same.
The enemy has taken our measure, and knows that it has friends in high places in our councils.
A democratic republic united to face a common threat and committed to the principles of justice and simple survival might have pulled off an unprecedented low-mortality solution to this clash between civilization and barbarism. We've blown that opportunity. Our political Left, fresh off losing thirty years' worth of elections, has transferred their emptiness and anger to the politics and persons chosen by the electorate to replace them.
And our right has failed to lead effectively.
The Left are wilfully blind to the fact that if they sabotage our effort to win this war as a domestic political tool, they will have set the machine to gotterdammerung on rails. They will not see past the loss of petty political fiefdoms to a future guaranteed to hold events much worse than 9/11. Losing Vietnam killed millions of Asians - but the cameras turned away in embarassment. The veterans were in turn vilified, pitied, and exploited as domestic political pawns. Let us declare defeat now, and it will take more than a remote control selection to insulate us from the consequences.
I fear for my family. And we are about to allow a betrayal of our servicemen and women on a scale that will make post-Vietnam look like a noble era.
Thousands, if not millions, more infidels are going to have to die at the hands of Islamists before idiots like Durbin and Truth and AI and the readership of Common Dreams gets it in their head that there are worse things than a Bush presidency. The muslim man in the street will just go back to business as usual once we are gone from the region. They will align with the powerful, or await the midnight knock on the door, as they have lived for generations.
It's not about country, it's about POLITICS, and they would gladly rip the beating hearts out of babies on an altar if they thought it would get them one step closer to power.
I am not a happy camper these days. History does not predict the future. It does provide a damned good analytical tool for predicting consequences for actions - especially where matters of cultural conflct are concerned.
Vietnam redux. I'd cry, but I'm too busy refreshing antibiotic prescriptions and ordering in a fresh supply of meds for my wife's chronic medical condition. And the water store and the food supply and the contact records...
Monday, June 13, 2005
Required Reading
I stopped taking the Democrats seriously when they selected Dean for the DNC chair. In all honesty I haven't regarded them as much of an asset to the nation since Jimmy Carter happened... but over at Done With Mirrors Callimachus has struck a chord on just why I don't think of them much more than a faction to be beaten.
"I don't care if this writer doesn't want to criticize terrorists. There are plenty who will roll up their sleeves and take on the Islamist killers, if he doesn't have the nerve to. If he want to only criticize governments that won't try to kill him for it, that's his affair. Frankly, with his fuzzy brain, I'd rather not have him trying to do the same thing I'm trying to do."
Read the whole thing, and the links.
"I don't care if this writer doesn't want to criticize terrorists. There are plenty who will roll up their sleeves and take on the Islamist killers, if he doesn't have the nerve to. If he want to only criticize governments that won't try to kill him for it, that's his affair. Frankly, with his fuzzy brain, I'd rather not have him trying to do the same thing I'm trying to do."
Read the whole thing, and the links.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Idyllic Days Of Summer
The day started with an iron overcast.
It spat hail as we set up our GPS base unit. Sandbags on the tripod legs and the radio and receiver units tucked deep into their packing cases to keep out moisture.
By the time we had searched for the non-existent ponds that were supposedly built by last year's contractor it was raining horizontally.
We tooled across the jobsite to the front gate, where the current contractor attempting to finish the guard shack (that costs more than either of our houses - unless Gerard Van Der Luen is reading this) showed us the latest, FINAL, developer-approved dimensions for the traffic islands and curb noses. We staked them out in between the worst of the rain and gusting winds. The cuts and fills will come tomorrow - if the NEW, FINAL plans aren't tacked to the side of the dressed stone building.
We had run up there to wimp out, actually. By the time we'd finished making things work and coordinating with the contractor we were already about as soaked as we could get in raincoats. The grading contractor's crews had driven out for home while we were staking. There is no sense in pushing mud to make more mud, you see. We climbed back in our truck after finishing up the guard shack work, and the rain turned to snow. It's JUNE seventh, folks. It began to snow around ten thirty.
We got crushed last Friday by bad terrain. Six hours total spent to locate and tie (measure and locate by GPS) one of three section corner monuments that are part of our property. The other two we need turned out to be inaccessible (without ropes) from where we started.
Monday we returned to the project ready to hike in a mile from a state park on the reverse of the mountain, only to be chased off the trail by driving (inch-an-hour) rain and lightning.
I carry a character defect - I tend to embrace liability when the circumstances are patently beyond my control (but I'm much better now).
I survey because I like to see the results of my work: roads, bridges, buildings, and homes. I hate driving an hour and change just to turn around and drive home. It sucks. It makes it harder for me to charge in the next day. As the flakes got bigger and the mud began to freeze I thought it over and asked my second man if he still had his winter bag in the tool box. He did.
We went ahead and staked 1500 feet of curb (both sides) in just over five hours. We had to break once, for thirty minutes, when the snow warmed up enough to penetrate my GPS controller keypad cover. We wolfed lunch while drying the unit out and then went back out and finished the job. One day earlier than the contractor expected us to start it.
The last few hours were actually pretty nice, with blue sky breaking through as we took down our base. We were able to check into some of last year's work as we slammed our stakes in the ground, too, and were on the nut where those stakes hadn't been disturbed.
Life is GOOD. Tomorrow we button up the last issues with the guardshack. And we go for a walk in the park to close the day.
I hadn't realized how testy I've been until I returned home this evening and reread my posts of the last few days. My gripes are valid - but the tone is a little harsh, I think.
I hope you had a good day, too. I hope it was worth it.
It spat hail as we set up our GPS base unit. Sandbags on the tripod legs and the radio and receiver units tucked deep into their packing cases to keep out moisture.
By the time we had searched for the non-existent ponds that were supposedly built by last year's contractor it was raining horizontally.
We tooled across the jobsite to the front gate, where the current contractor attempting to finish the guard shack (that costs more than either of our houses - unless Gerard Van Der Luen is reading this) showed us the latest, FINAL, developer-approved dimensions for the traffic islands and curb noses. We staked them out in between the worst of the rain and gusting winds. The cuts and fills will come tomorrow - if the NEW, FINAL plans aren't tacked to the side of the dressed stone building.
We had run up there to wimp out, actually. By the time we'd finished making things work and coordinating with the contractor we were already about as soaked as we could get in raincoats. The grading contractor's crews had driven out for home while we were staking. There is no sense in pushing mud to make more mud, you see. We climbed back in our truck after finishing up the guard shack work, and the rain turned to snow. It's JUNE seventh, folks. It began to snow around ten thirty.
We got crushed last Friday by bad terrain. Six hours total spent to locate and tie (measure and locate by GPS) one of three section corner monuments that are part of our property. The other two we need turned out to be inaccessible (without ropes) from where we started.
Monday we returned to the project ready to hike in a mile from a state park on the reverse of the mountain, only to be chased off the trail by driving (inch-an-hour) rain and lightning.
I carry a character defect - I tend to embrace liability when the circumstances are patently beyond my control (but I'm much better now).
I survey because I like to see the results of my work: roads, bridges, buildings, and homes. I hate driving an hour and change just to turn around and drive home. It sucks. It makes it harder for me to charge in the next day. As the flakes got bigger and the mud began to freeze I thought it over and asked my second man if he still had his winter bag in the tool box. He did.
We went ahead and staked 1500 feet of curb (both sides) in just over five hours. We had to break once, for thirty minutes, when the snow warmed up enough to penetrate my GPS controller keypad cover. We wolfed lunch while drying the unit out and then went back out and finished the job. One day earlier than the contractor expected us to start it.
The last few hours were actually pretty nice, with blue sky breaking through as we took down our base. We were able to check into some of last year's work as we slammed our stakes in the ground, too, and were on the nut where those stakes hadn't been disturbed.
Life is GOOD. Tomorrow we button up the last issues with the guardshack. And we go for a walk in the park to close the day.
I hadn't realized how testy I've been until I returned home this evening and reread my posts of the last few days. My gripes are valid - but the tone is a little harsh, I think.
I hope you had a good day, too. I hope it was worth it.
Monday, June 06, 2005
It's Worse Than I Thought
... for the Democrats.
I had assumed that Howard Dean of the subtle riposte ("Republicans are eeeeevil") ended up as DNC chair because the Clintons had arrived at the easiest way to clear the decks for Hillary's run in 2008: allow Dean to stumble onto his sword a few times, and then quietly supplant him with Hillary wearing a "savior of the party" button.
The problem is that Howie has fallen on his sword repeatedly and nobody of import (editorialists from coastal papers/network talking heads) seems to have noticed. Media is still treating him with the respect typically granted an iconic statesman of the Left like, say, Ted Kennedy or even Al Sharpton.
Joe Biden made a milquetoast attempt to distance himself from the chairman's rhetoric and has been thoroughly thrashed across the Lefty blogosphere... and ignored by major media.
You only get coverage for being critical of a fellow politician if you are bagging a republican... preferably while standing in front of an overseas/foreign audience, see?
This doesn't work for the Clintons. The trog media may not realize it but the last few decades of national elections have made it pretty clear that a slim majority of American voters have gotten past their public education and pop culture and are looking for someone to vote for. Bill Clinton ran on an end of history (heavy lifting all done - we can play now)/MTV platform that worked before North Korea went nuke and we buried three thousand of our fellow citizens, murdered at the hands of an enemy we had ignored.
The Clinton are willing to lose as many Democrat seats in congress as it takes in 2006 to galvanism the party to embrace Hillary as their only choice. They aren't worried about dealing with a Republican congress. The presidency isn't about policy or agendas to them - it's about power. I believe that the Clinton have taken a good long look at the (lack of) quality in the current Rep leadership and feel pretty comfortable about their chances for doing business with what has become of the majority party.
They still have to get the actual election out of the way, though.
This story in the New York Times illustrates what happens when a real grifter runs up against the reality that she's competing for marks that not only bought bridges but still actually believe they own them.
"I know it's frustrating for many of you; it's frustrating for me: Why can't the Democrats do more to stop them?" she continued to growing applause and cheers. "I can tell you this: It's very hard to stop people who have no shame about what they're doing. It is very hard to tell people that they are making decisions that will undermine our checks and balances and constitutional system of government who don't care. It is very hard to stop people who have never been acquainted with the truth."
Hysterical? Yes. Outrageous? Yes. Absolutely necessary to garner the small-state primary votes that open the ball for the 2008 race? You betcha. That's moonbat prime territory, beginning with Iowa and running deep blue well into the fourth or fifth week of primaries.
Back in 1991 the Clinton used the media to reinvent Bill Clinton from the womanizing, corrupt, and ineffective governor he'd been into the second coming of Kennedy's Camelot. In 2006 they have to shift from nuttier than Howard Dean in the primaries to more adult than Ronald Reagan in the general, and I just don't think they've got the tools in the box to make it happen.
What they can do is aim for that mark and hope that the flaccid Republican congressional caucus continues to piss away support at the rate it is now and go on to win on an apathy vote.
I can see that happening.
Blogs v. Media worked out the way it did in 2004 because the facts floated to the top: Kerry wasn't much of a candidate, less of a senator, and not nearly a credible war hero. The full-court press on the part of the media to sink Bush became so laughable that it brought votes to the Republicans. But if the Republicans decline to lead, the facts will be there, on the blogs left/right/middle, to pin them to the mat in 2008.
I had assumed that Howard Dean of the subtle riposte ("Republicans are eeeeevil") ended up as DNC chair because the Clintons had arrived at the easiest way to clear the decks for Hillary's run in 2008: allow Dean to stumble onto his sword a few times, and then quietly supplant him with Hillary wearing a "savior of the party" button.
The problem is that Howie has fallen on his sword repeatedly and nobody of import (editorialists from coastal papers/network talking heads) seems to have noticed. Media is still treating him with the respect typically granted an iconic statesman of the Left like, say, Ted Kennedy or even Al Sharpton.
Joe Biden made a milquetoast attempt to distance himself from the chairman's rhetoric and has been thoroughly thrashed across the Lefty blogosphere... and ignored by major media.
You only get coverage for being critical of a fellow politician if you are bagging a republican... preferably while standing in front of an overseas/foreign audience, see?
This doesn't work for the Clintons. The trog media may not realize it but the last few decades of national elections have made it pretty clear that a slim majority of American voters have gotten past their public education and pop culture and are looking for someone to vote for. Bill Clinton ran on an end of history (heavy lifting all done - we can play now)/MTV platform that worked before North Korea went nuke and we buried three thousand of our fellow citizens, murdered at the hands of an enemy we had ignored.
The Clinton are willing to lose as many Democrat seats in congress as it takes in 2006 to galvanism the party to embrace Hillary as their only choice. They aren't worried about dealing with a Republican congress. The presidency isn't about policy or agendas to them - it's about power. I believe that the Clinton have taken a good long look at the (lack of) quality in the current Rep leadership and feel pretty comfortable about their chances for doing business with what has become of the majority party.
They still have to get the actual election out of the way, though.
This story in the New York Times illustrates what happens when a real grifter runs up against the reality that she's competing for marks that not only bought bridges but still actually believe they own them.
"I know it's frustrating for many of you; it's frustrating for me: Why can't the Democrats do more to stop them?" she continued to growing applause and cheers. "I can tell you this: It's very hard to stop people who have no shame about what they're doing. It is very hard to tell people that they are making decisions that will undermine our checks and balances and constitutional system of government who don't care. It is very hard to stop people who have never been acquainted with the truth."
Hysterical? Yes. Outrageous? Yes. Absolutely necessary to garner the small-state primary votes that open the ball for the 2008 race? You betcha. That's moonbat prime territory, beginning with Iowa and running deep blue well into the fourth or fifth week of primaries.
Back in 1991 the Clinton used the media to reinvent Bill Clinton from the womanizing, corrupt, and ineffective governor he'd been into the second coming of Kennedy's Camelot. In 2006 they have to shift from nuttier than Howard Dean in the primaries to more adult than Ronald Reagan in the general, and I just don't think they've got the tools in the box to make it happen.
What they can do is aim for that mark and hope that the flaccid Republican congressional caucus continues to piss away support at the rate it is now and go on to win on an apathy vote.
I can see that happening.
Blogs v. Media worked out the way it did in 2004 because the facts floated to the top: Kerry wasn't much of a candidate, less of a senator, and not nearly a credible war hero. The full-court press on the part of the media to sink Bush became so laughable that it brought votes to the Republicans. But if the Republicans decline to lead, the facts will be there, on the blogs left/right/middle, to pin them to the mat in 2008.
Saturday, June 04, 2005
Brother WON'T Spare A Dime
What was that the president said so long ago?:
"We will make no distinction between the terrorists or those who support them."?
Is it possible thatthat policy goal went the same place that limited government, fiscal discipline, and principled conservatism did?
Is it a negotiable position - like, say, shitting on the Constitution to play nice with a MINORITY that got that way because a MAJORITY of voters wanted to see CONSERVATIVES in control of the advise and consent part of appointing judges?
I am very unhappy. Very tired. We can lose this war, and it appears that our leadership is capable of allowing that to happen. We will not be beat on the field. We will fold up from within.
Occupying the White House, holding majorities in Congress, and having a bunch of squealling fucktards running the party opposite them has allowed the Republicans slide into crony politics.
I registered back to Independent last week. I hope I have candidates that I can vote for in 2006. The Republicans get no donations, no favorable comment, no volunteer time until they grow some balls and start leading and governing instead of sucking the Washington teat.
"We will make no distinction between the terrorists or those who support them."?
Is it possible thatthat policy goal went the same place that limited government, fiscal discipline, and principled conservatism did?
Is it a negotiable position - like, say, shitting on the Constitution to play nice with a MINORITY that got that way because a MAJORITY of voters wanted to see CONSERVATIVES in control of the advise and consent part of appointing judges?
I am very unhappy. Very tired. We can lose this war, and it appears that our leadership is capable of allowing that to happen. We will not be beat on the field. We will fold up from within.
Occupying the White House, holding majorities in Congress, and having a bunch of squealling fucktards running the party opposite them has allowed the Republicans slide into crony politics.
I registered back to Independent last week. I hope I have candidates that I can vote for in 2006. The Republicans get no donations, no favorable comment, no volunteer time until they grow some balls and start leading and governing instead of sucking the Washington teat.
TmjUtah Weighs In On Guantanomo, The Koran, And Terrorists:
It would be cheaper to shoot them where we catch them.
They bring one, they can keep it as long as they need it. See the first sentence.
See the first sentence.
Even after all this time, I am still blindsided by the stupidity of what passes for "elite" media in this country. Rueters never fails to come through in the clutch, either.
It's an uproar only because the Leftist western media has run out of anything else to sling against the wall.
Show me dead terrorists and elected governments. That's currency I can count.
We shouldn't be taking any prisoners. None. Issue our guys with something like a business card with a cite from the appropriate article in the Geneva conventions dealing with illegal combatants on one side. The reverse should offer bounties to be paid for information leading to the location of more terrorists, printed in the local language.
Print them by the pallet. Drop one on every dead terrorist.
The enemy hopes that we aren't serious about this war, and they have good reason to hope. Worse, there's only so many Iraqis or Lebanese or Ukrainians who are going to believe we are serious if we don't get to the business of killing the barbarians where they live. In Saudi, Syria, Iran, and WHEREEVER else we trace their trails.
(Via Captain's Quarters)
They bring one, they can keep it as long as they need it. See the first sentence.
See the first sentence.
Even after all this time, I am still blindsided by the stupidity of what passes for "elite" media in this country. Rueters never fails to come through in the clutch, either.
It's an uproar only because the Leftist western media has run out of anything else to sling against the wall.
Show me dead terrorists and elected governments. That's currency I can count.
We shouldn't be taking any prisoners. None. Issue our guys with something like a business card with a cite from the appropriate article in the Geneva conventions dealing with illegal combatants on one side. The reverse should offer bounties to be paid for information leading to the location of more terrorists, printed in the local language.
Print them by the pallet. Drop one on every dead terrorist.
The enemy hopes that we aren't serious about this war, and they have good reason to hope. Worse, there's only so many Iraqis or Lebanese or Ukrainians who are going to believe we are serious if we don't get to the business of killing the barbarians where they live. In Saudi, Syria, Iran, and WHEREEVER else we trace their trails.
(Via Captain's Quarters)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)