System of a Down

Janet Reno, err, Napolitano has issued clarification of her ridiculous weekend statement that the "system worked" during the Great Northwest Airlines Underwear Bomb Attempt.

This of course comes in light of facts like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Nigeria was on a terrorist watch list, yet not on a no-fly list. Terribly sorry for the racial/ethnic insensitivity you are about to read. However, anyone with a name and country of origin such as Umar's should be subject to immediate and invasive scrutiny.

But we've also been treated to uncorroborated reports that the, uh, "suspect" had paid cash, checked no luggage, been aided by an airline employee through security, that another passenger 20 rows back had filmed the entire flight, and that al Qaeda practices methods to evade advanced detection techniques.

Naturally, the only rational response is to........ invade the privacy of, increase the hassle to, and maximize confusion among the 99.999% of innocent flyers worldwide, particularly infants and the elderly. Seriously.

Imagine you're a 74 year-old guy with a bum prostate who's been fed only salty peanuts and several half-cans of diet Coke during the first 4 hours of your cross-continental flight. On a very good day you're capable of squirting a couple ounces at a time, usually every 10 to 15 minutes. Now, you've gotta hold that for the entire last hour of your flight while strapped in between two fat people and jostled in heavy turbulance?

Or what about the 2-year old who sucked down 20 sippy cups worth of juice, water, and ginger ale in that same span? Now she's gotta pee like Sea Biscuit or puke over an entire 3-row quadrant.

So now the calls are coming loud from hard-ass security types, well-connected scanner manufacturers, and politicians looking for cover alike: INSTALL FULL-BODY SCREENERS EVERYWHERE IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!

Sorry, I'm not sold. As Dr. B commented in the post below, we're looking for folks of a "certain type". They're not all that hard to find. Especially when their own prominent & wealthy fathers call their home government and the US freaking Embassy -- several times! -- to express grave concern about their son's increasing radicalism.

In the words of George Clooney's "Up in the Air" character when charged with being racist: "I'm like my mother, I stereotype. It's faster."

Oh, by the way, we have an exclusive image of Dr. B crossing security at Edmonton Airport:

"Life is a waterfall

we drink from the river,

then we turn around and put up our walls..."

Diesel Power vs Ox Power

I'm not sure which one I feel safer with, but they both remind me of each other.

Janet

- or -

Ox

Pantywaists

Foreigners wear messed up underwear. This jackass who tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines (why is it NWA? the pictures all show a Delta jet.) is a case in point.

Now I realize the dainties pictured below are cut up and singed. But these are a man's pair of u'tralls?? I guess that cotten liner is to absorb the flames. At least that stupid sonovabitch burned off whatever junk he had.

Hot Air and Global Warming

You might already know I'm a Global Warming skeptic. Or more specifically, an Anthroprogenic Global Warming skeptic. A key reason is well explained by the linked article below.

In an age of teleconferencing, our leaders can't even understand the even simpler concept of carpooling. If the planet's viability were truly on the line, wouldn't they (yes - "THEY", not 'us' who have to live by rules they'd like to impose) show as much honesty & consistency as urgency?

PS President Obama cut short his Copenhagen visit to get back to Washington DC in advance of an impending blizzard. Now this doesn't necessarily refute warming. But if the Warmists want better visuals to bolster their case, I suggest future Global Warming Conferences be scheduled during August. In the Sahara.

From the UK Daily Mail:

50 Days to Save the World? I Might Listen to the Doomsayers If They Weren't Such Ludicrous Hypocrites

by Steven Glover

Not many people understand climate change. But they can recognise hypocrisy when they see it, and are also likely to count their spoons whenever wild-eyed politicians invoke the impending end of the world.

On Tuesday, Prince Charles flew to Copenhagen to attend the climate change summit, where he delivered a keynote speech. He informed his audience that 'the world has only seven years before we lose the levers of control'. Not at all long, then.

For the Prince this was an important speech with an important message. If we have so little time, and man-made climate change is such a terrifyingly imminent threat, he might have taken a boat or train to Copenhagen, or even, as a symbolic gesture, decided to walk. But he commandeered a jet belonging to the Queen's Flight, generating an estimated 6.4tons of carbon dioxide, 5.2tons more than if he had used a commercial flight.

Meanwhile his fellow prophet of doom, Gordon Brown, was making his own way to Copenhagen the same day. This is the man who proclaimed in October that we had '50 days to save the world'. Before leaving he conjured up on a television programme the certainty of 'floods and droughts' with 'climate change evacuees and refugees' if agreement is not reached in Copenhagen.

Mr Brown chartered a 185-seat Airbus to take him and 20 aides to Denmark. Was a smaller plane producing less carbon dioxide not available?

Could he perhaps have shared an aircraft with Prince Charles? Might he have considered taking a scheduled flight to the Danish capital, of which there were 16 on Tuesday?

Evidently not. It is odd, isn't it, how climate change doomsayers such as Prince Charles and Mr Brown are so often unprepared to make the smallest sacrifice in their own daily lives to address a threat which they assert is literally deadly. Presumably any contribution would be helpful. And it is not easy in life to persuade people to give up things if you are almost ostentatiously unwilling to do so yourself.

The Copenhagen summit, supposed to produce an agreement limiting greenhouse gases, has, according to experts, the same carbon footprint as a medium-sized African country such as Malawi.

There are an amazing 34,000 delegates attending the event, and the grander among them are forced, says my colleague Robert Hardman in Copenhagen, to park their private jets in Norway because Denmark has run out of Tarmac, and to procure their gas-guzzling limousines from Germany.

Show me a climate control zealot and I can often show you a hypocrite, and a hypocrite, moreover, who speaks in apocalyptic terms about the world coming to an end - at a time not long hence and usually implausibly specific - if the rest of us do not immediately curb our lifestyles so as to produce fewer greenhouse gases.

The double standards and the grotesque exaggeration go hand in hand.

Some, at least, of the zealots do not really, honestly believe that things are as bad as they say. If they did, they might not go on serenely generating carbon emissions on such a scale. They are trying to shock us into action by employing emotive language and invoking terrible dangers. In other words, they are treating us as fools. Politicians shamelessly twist the facts to scare us witless.

There has been an appalling case in Copenhagen this week.

full story...