From Where Great Britain Used to Be

KevinLeave a comment

How’s that gun control working out again?

Terrifying arsenal of weapons found in teaching assistant’s Newall Green home

Terrifying. Their word. Another Glock 18?  No. 

The weapons – described by police as some of the most destructive they have ever seized – were linked to a series of shootings in Manchester and the north west, including one incident where a bullet narrowly missed a baby.

In a raid at the house in Burbage Road, Newall Green, police found a frightening array of firearms and ammunition, including two 9mm pistols, a 12-bore shotgun for use in combat, a Skorpion sub-machine gun, and lethal hollow-point and soft-tip bullets.

Terrifying or frightening?  Make your mind up.  There’s about an order of magnitude difference.  And you know, not one of those is legal to possess in the UK. Let’s see:

A compact Glock. Must’ve purchased that at an American gun show.

That’s a “Tariq 9mm believed to have been smuggled from Iraq” that “has been linked to three shootings in Greater Manchester, including a 2009 incident where a bullet narrowly missed a sleeping baby.” Wow. Don’t they know that handguns are illegal in the UK?

That’s your generic 12 gauge semi-auto short-barreled shotgun. I can’t tell from the photo make or model, but quite effective.  Benelli, maybe? And with the extended magazine tube, quite illegal. Not that it matters, obviously.

The pièce de résistance:

A Czech Skorpion submachinegun, probably chambered in .32ACP, but it might be .380. With one magazine.  That’s unpossible! Full-auto weapons have been banned in the UK since 1937!

Four guns. Four guns described as a “terrifying arsenal.” Kinda reminds me of Tams snark:

It’s good to have goals. Mine is that, when they finally come after me for felony jaywalking or confuse my address with the crack house two blocks down, and in the aftermath spread all my stuff on bedsheets in the front yard, I want the kids on the intarw3bz gun boards to look at that junk-on-the-bunk display and say “Wow, that is an arsenal.”

If they saw what I have in my safe, they’d wet themselves. And I don’t own anything full-auto.  I haven’t seen it, but I doubt my collection is but a shadow of hers.  She probably owns more Smith & Wesson revolvers than I own guns.

Nuke the Site from Orbit, Part Who-the-Hell-Knows

KevinLeave a comment

More evidence that the public school systems are working about like you’d expect from a .gov system, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars “invested” in it over decades, despite the creation of the Dept. of Education ($1.2 trillion alone – not inflation adjusted – since its establishment in 1980):

Literacy study: 1 in 7 U.S. adults are unable to read this story

Key grafs:

A long-awaited federal study finds that an estimated 32 million adults in the USA — about one in seven — are saddled with such low literacy skills that it would be tough for them to read anything more challenging than a children’s picture book or to understand a medication’s side effects listed on a pill bottle.

—

How low? It would be a challenge to read this newspaper article or deconstruct a fuel bill.
“They really cannot read … paragraphs (or) sentences that are connected,” says Sheida White, a researcher at the U.S. Education Department.

Well, good to know we spent $1.2 trillion to find that out!

But all is not bleak!

In many cases, states made sizable gains. In Mississippi, the percentage of adults with low skills dropped 9 percentage points, from 25% to 16%. In every one of its 82 counties, low-skill rates dropped — in a few cases by 20 percentage points or more.

Still, there’s more bad news:

By contrast, in several large states — California, New York, Florida and Nevada, for instance — the number of adults with low skills rose.

Why, you might ask did Mississippi improve so remarkably? Need you even ask?

David Harvey, president and CEO of ProLiteracy, an adult-literacy organization, says Mississippi “invested more in education … and they have done innovative programming. We need much more of that.”

We need more money! MUCH more money!

I swear, it’s the only play in the playbook. WE NEED TO SPEND MORE (of other people’s) MONEY!

The Entitlement Mentality

KevinLeave a comment

I found this today courtesy of a Facebook friend.  You HAVE to watch it all the way to the end (seven minutes worth).  I wish I could say “Unbelievable,” but I’d be lying.

var VideoID = “15915”; var Width = 425; var Height = 344;

Our tax dollars at work.

Hey!  I know!  Let’s raise taxes on the wealthy!  They don’t pay their fair share!

Would you hire this guy?

Quote of the Day – Adaptive Curmudgeon Edition

KevinLeave a comment

Each digital book format will be oh so much cooler than the last.  Right up until you’ve bought the same book six times and decide you’d prefer to stare at the sun until you’re blind than do it again.

It has happened before.  Somewhere there is a person who has purchased the same rendition of Up And Away on 33 RPM LP, 8 track, cassette, CD, and now he has it on iTunes.  The day when he loses his iPod in a Dubai airport is the day he’ll start fondly dreaming of that big cabinet full of LPs he lugged around in college.  Then, ever so slowly, like the setting of the sun, the realization that he’s spent the better part of a car payment on just one song will seep into his bones and kill his soul. — My Theory Has a Hole In It

Another case of no original ideas, but I’ll tell you about the one I found. I think I’m becoming Say Uncle!

Well, Limbaugh Got What he Wanted

KevinLeave a comment

A while back, Rush Limbaugh was excoriated for saying “I hope Obama fails.”

Looks like he got it:

Singer Harry Belafonte, subject of an upcoming HBO documentary about his political activism, was asked what he would say to the White House and Congress about the gamesmanship in which they are engaged over the national debt.

“My question would be, to Congress and the president: What happened to moral truth? What happened to moral courage?” Belafonte said.

He’d also like to tell them: “Politics without moral purpose, really more often than not, winds up as tyranny.”

“Barack Obama and his mission has failed because it lacked a certain kind of moral courage, a kind of moral vision . . . a kind of courage we are in need of,” said the King of Calypso.

When you’ve lost Harry Belafonte . . . .

Quote of the Day – Thomas Sowell Edition

KevinLeave a comment

All the overheated political rhetoric about needing to tax “millionaires and billionaires” is not about bringing in more revenue to the government. It is about bringing in more votes for politicians who stir up class warfare with rhetoric. — Ideals Versus Realities, Townhall

For the first time I don’t agree with Sowell’s conclusions, but on this he’s still correct.  Incomplete, but correct.  It’s also about “fairness” as defined by President Obama – in other words, “redistribution of wealth.”  Bringing in more votes is the byproduct, not the goal.

A Repeat

KevinLeave a comment

This is all I’ve got to say about the current budget / debt ceiling debate, and it was already said in February.  Remember this?

Well, Chris Muir took the the meme and ran with it:

Really, it’s not an unreasonable question: If Obama actually was intent on the destruction of the Republic, how could you tell the difference?

I’m wondering if I should cash in my 401(k) that has finally recovered to what it was in 2001 before that crash.  The kleptocrats in Washington will be coming after that pot-o’cash soon, I’m sure.  You know, in the interest of “fairness.”