If someone says, “But once we eat the rich, by what means will the society accumulate and invest capital?

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” -- On the Incivility of Socialists | John C. Wright's Journal

From American Digest 

A little girl is serving her father tea while her mother is out shopping. 

The mother comes home and the father says, "Watch this!" 

The little girl goes and serves the mother tea. 

The mother responds, "Did it ever occur to you that the only place she can reach to get water is the toilet?

Rich Lowry over at National Review published this add in the Penn State newspaper, spoofing Dr. Mann, who falsely but with a straight face claimed to have won the Nobel Prize.  On this rock is built the theory of anthropogenic global warming!

Halloween treats, so satisfying.

Reporter gets the respect he deserves.

Your Halloween story of the day.

A tree uprooted by super storm Sandy reveals a human skeleton in the roots.

   "Long before the New Haven green was a spot for concerts and gatherings in the elm city, it was a cemetery.

Starting with haphazard burials in shallow graves in the 1650s, until the cemetery was moved to the Grove Street cemetery in 1821.

All of the headstones were moved, but all of the bodies were not.

Historians say there could be more than 1,000 souls still resting under the New Haven green."

A thousand dead people buried in the village green?  Would that make a future Zombie army?

Of course, no surprise, he's a Democrat.

Fairfax, VA - Virginia Congressman Gerry Connolly (D - 11) shocked constituents by suggesting that military veterans are unqualified to serve in Congress because their deployments prevent them from putting "sweat equity" into the districts they hope to serve in Congress.

Hey pal, stupidity also disqualifies for service in Congress, and you clearly appear to be suffering from a serious case of idiocy.

It's just as scary to us taxpayers, kid.

Hillary Clinton, Kareem Abdul-Jabar, a minister, and a teen with a backpack are on a small plane. The captain announces, "Folks, we're in trouble, and will crash before too long. Unfortunately, there are only three parachutes in the passenger compartment for the four of you. Bye."

They all watch in dismay as the pilot bails out with a parachute of his own.

Kareem says, "I'm a role model for inner city kids. It would be too great a tragedy if I were to die. Besides, I'm stronger than all of you put together." He then grabs a parachute and jumps.

Hillary Clinton says, "I'm the smartest woman in the world, and if I don't become first female POTUS, all women and girls in America will die of despair." She grabs a parachute and jumps.

The minister grabs the last parachute and holds it out to the kid. "Son, I've spent my life getting folks ready to meet their Maker, and I guess it's now my turn to go..."

The teen says, "Shut up and strap it on, Preach. The smartest woman in the world just took my backpack."

Breitbart puts the stinging rebuke on Obama.

Obama said at a press conference:

  "This is a tough time for a lot of people; millions of folks all across the Eastern Seaboard, but America's tougher. And we're tougher because we pull together, we leave nobody behind, we make sure we respond as a nation and remind ourselves that whenever an American is in need, all of stand together to make sure we're providing the help that's necessary. " (emphasis added).

That language, with this picture.

Ouch, that has to hurt.  Obama has no idea what he is saying, someone just shoves the language in front of him, and he mindlessly repeats it.  Couldn't be any other way or he would realize, one would hope, the inappropriateness of what he is being asked to say.

New York, still there.

Freckles, they are good

Here is a great rig, one that excites my lust for cool, off beat stuff (which requires me to constantly fight to keep under control - I got kids to educate and there is no money for the cool stuff).

Nice GM truck from the fifties, it looks like, hooked to a downright huge Airstream trailer house. 

I could do Route 66 in something like this.

Update: Brock is right, that is a 53 Ford F 100.

Let's take this opportunity to admire the magnificence of the Ford F 100 from that classic year, 1953!

Molly Powell over at National Review tells it like it is.

  "Sunday, during the Fox New Sunday panel discussion, Obama broke in for a live nationwide emergency-awareness announcement about Hurricane Sandy. We’ve been hearing about the storm nonstop for days on every single TV and radio station, but our president wants to reassure the nation that he and emergency responders are prepared. Follow evacuation orders, he urges in his best comforting baritone. Get ready! The government is standing by to help. What a true leader. He’s the go-to president we need in a national emergency.

If you need a reminder to buy bottled water and tape the widows before a hurricane, Obama is your man. If you’re running a machine gun, soon to be covered in your own blood, on the roof of a building under fire in Libya at 3 a.m., if you’ve called three times over a period of almost seven hours for air cover that is within a couple of hours away (or, as we might learn, in the armed drone directly above) — well, you’re on your own. The president will get back to you."

Ha!

When a soldier comes home after an eight month deployment, his dog is, to say the least, happy to see him.

An interesting picture from earlier today at Nag's Head, North Carolina, showing knee deep sea foam blown onto the pier.

I wonder if that building in the background is still standing now.

What with the winds, the flooding, the rain, and even Godzilla, at least someone knows how to have fun in the storm.

Underwater ConEd powerplant in NYC explodes dramatically.  Go to about 3:10 in the video to see the fireworks.  I wonder how expensive that will be to replace?

OMG!  As if the hurricane wasn't enough trouble!

Things just got real!

Best Halloween costumes:

Baby Missah Tee!

Where's the gold bling, Missah Tee?

What Atlantic City looks like at this moment. More like Altantic in the City.

Link to real time web cam on top of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. 

Via Small Dead Animals

 

 

Characteristic of the American military, the guards at the tomb of the unknown soldier are undetered by Hurricane Sandy.

 

Makes a lump come to my throat.

 

Hoorah!

 

Via I'm not sure where I saw this first, so I'll give credit to Free North Carolina!

 

As this article from the fabulously named Ambrose Evans - Pritchard shows, cheap energy makes industry of all kinds both possible and cost competitive with the rest of the world.

I can only hope that one of Romney's goals is to make energy of all kinds as cheap as possible in his first term.  There will be all kinds of intense resistance, but it must be overcome, for the good of everyone.

And frankly, I have no idea why even liberal governments don't promote this, as a booming economy products loads of tax income, allowing them to do all the cute legislating they want.  It is simply a testament to their clear stupidity that they hinder energy development instead.

Khaaaaannnnnn!!

Mondays, they're like that.

Cher: "I shall cry forever if Romney wins."

And Cher dear, I shall hand you tissues while laughing, if Romney wins, and you cry forever.

Jez, what a drama queen.  Sonny must have had his hands full trying to keep her from spinning out of control.

Phobos, the doomed moon of Mars.  Mars, the red planet named for the Roman god of war, has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, whose names are derived from the Greek for Fear andPanic. These martian moons may well be captured asteroids originating in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter or perhaps from even more distant reaches of the Solar System. The larger moon, Phobos, is indeed seen to be a cratered, asteroid-like object in this stunning color image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, recorded at a resolution of about seven meters per pixel. But Phobos orbits so close to Mars - about 5,800 kilometers above the surface compared to 400,000 kilometers for our Moon - that gravitational tidal forces are dragging it down. In 100 million years or so Phobos will likely be shattered by stress caused by the relentless tidal forces, the debris forming a decaying ring around Mars.

Cat attack!

Campaign news from the Ohio battleground:

DEFIANCE, OHIO — There’s a moment that arrives now and again in presidential campaign speeches when the candidate says, “If I’m president,” and then corrects himself: “when I’m president.” This is a crowd favourite and usually gets a healthy round of cheers. Then the candidate moves on. When Mitt Romney said this on Thursday morning in Cincinnati, the crowd reacted as if it was election night and he’d just been declared president — and they’d been given a new car. For 30 seconds, they screamed and cheered.

More rank gossip surges through the internet, due of course to the administration's lack of clarity about what happened in Benghazi.

If there is any truth to this, it will come out immediately after the election. Imagine if Obama wins and then the voters find out about his incompetence/treason.  Clinton needs to remember that she has a greater duty to her countrymen than to Obama or the Democratic Party.

   "Appearing on TheBlazeTV’s “Wilkow!” on Wednesday night, Klein told host Andrew Wilkow that Bill and Hillary Clinton have been having “big fights” for “two or three weeks” about the issue, according to his two sources on Clinton’s legal counsel. While Bill Clinton wishes his wife would “exonerate” herself by releasing the documents that show she wasn’t at fault for the tragic security failure in Libya, the secretary of state refuses to do so because she doesn’t want to be viewed as a traitor to the Democratic party."

Out in New Hampshire, the Feral Irishman went outside to check out the sky in front of the hurricane they are expecting, and saw these interesting double sun dogs.  Notice the arc above the sun as well.

An omen for the storm?  Stay safe, Irish, and keep blogging.

The Pomegranates are the last thing that ripen in the fall, and our one tree produced three buckets of them.  The trees look like an ugly if tallish bush, and they require absolutely no maintenance, not even watering.  In spite of that, they put out a pretty good crop, as our tree did this year. That is the kind of tree I like!

The fruit fresh off the tree.  A couple of the pomegranates had already split in half, and I left those for the birds.  This one was about to split open, so I popped it open the rest of the way for the picture.

Here my wife has separated the fruit kernels from the "apple," and they are ready for juicing.  She will do jelly, molasses and simple juice.  All good stuff for holiday eating later.

Wow!

Romney wins endorsements from all four major Iowa newspapers.

Another battleground state looks like they have had quite enough of Obama.

Interesting urban planning in Denmark.

Democrat pollster Pat Caddell puts the smackdown on Obama, the current Democratic Party, and the media.

Well worth the read and watch.

Sounds as if he is on the verge of switching parties.

Yoga chicks, they are "looc."

Your fun fact and educational moment of the day.

What is a nautical mile?  Read on....

A nautical mile is based on the circumference of the planet Earth. If you were to cut the Earth in half at the equator, you could pick up one of the halves and look at the equator as a circle. You could divide that circle into 360 degrees. You could then divide a degree into 60 minutes. A minute of arc on the planet Earth is 1 nautical mile. This unit of measurement is used by all nations for air and sea travel.

A knot is a unit of measure for speed. If you are traveling at a speed of 1 nautical mile per hour, you are said to be traveling at a speed of 1 knot.

A kilometer is also defined using the planet Earth as a standard of distance. If you were to take the Earth and cut it in half along a line passing from the North Pole through Paris, and then measure the distance of the curve running from the North Pole to the equator on that circle, and then divide that distance by 10,000, you would have the traditional unit for the kilometer as defined in 1791 by the French Academy of Sciences.

A nautical mile is 1,852 meters, or 1.852 kilometers. In the English measurement system, a nautical mile is 1.1508 miles, or 6,076 feet.

To travel around the Earth at the equator, you would have to travel (360 * 60) 21,600 nautical miles, 24,857 miles or 40,003 kilometers.

Freckles, good in black and white

Someone is getting a lump of coal for Christmas.

Posted because it's cool

"Remove dictator Obama" banner flys over Obama fundraiser in La Jolla for over an hour.

Measure the men on the front line in Libya who gave it all, then compare their stature with those in Washington.

  "Not knowing exactly what was taking place, the two SEALs set up a defensive perimeter. Unfortunately Ambassador Stevens was already gravely injured, and Foreign Service officer, Sean Smith, was dead. However, due to their quick action and suppressive fire, twenty administrative personnel in the embassy were able to escape to safety. Eventually, these two courageous men were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers brought against them, an enemy force numbering between 100 to 200 attackers which came in two waves. But the stunning part of the story is that Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty killed 60 of the attacking force. Once the compound was overrun, the attackers were incensed to discover that just two men had inflicted so much death and destruction."

They Seals earned their tridents and then some.

Those in Washington, whoever they were, who denied them the help they needed and deserved, have richly earned our contempt.  They are truly loathsome. 

From here.

Heh!

Knife porn

A knife by Randy Lee out in St. Johns, Arizona, using a mammoth tooth for the handle.

The mammoth couldn't have realized what use his old tooth would be put to thousands of years after his death!

Great knife

More Halloween goodness

84 years young and still blacksmithing, and he says he will never retire.



Thanks to The Feral Irishman for this.

More complete gossip on the whole Benghazi raid fiasco.

If this is true, Ham better come out and tell what he knows, since his career seems to be over anyway.


"The information I heard today was that General Ham as head of Africom received the same e-mails the White House received requesting help/support as the attack was taking place. General Ham immediately had a rapid response unit ready and communicated to the Pentagon that he had a unit ready. 

General Ham then received the order to stand down. His response was to screw it, he was going to help anyhow. Within 30 seconds to a minute after making the move to respond, his second in command apprehended General Ham and told him that he was now relieved of his command. 

The story continues that now General Rodiguez would take General Ham's place as the head of Africon. 

I found this story when I got home after hearing this story. "

quote:

---

President Barack Obama will nominate Army Gen. David Rodriguez to succeed Gen. Carter Ham as commander of U.S. Africa Command and Marine Lt. Gen. John Paxton to succeed Gen. Joseph Dunford as assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced Thursday.

---

Again, this is complete internet gossip.  Take it with a grain of salt, but the sad thing is how believable it seems to be.  The Obama administration has simply blown it's credibility with a large part of the population.

On the other hand, however, doesn't this story from Leon Panetta at the Pentagon support this story in a broad sense?

Cold mountain trailer house.

I knew guys who lived kinda like this. It's actually not as bad as you might think. The trailer warms up fast, everything is right there at hand, and the rent, or ownership costs, are dirt cheap. You can save money like crazy.  

"Mom and Dad, meet my new girlfriend, Rastafaria. She's taught me lots of new things."

A classic American travel trailer. Reminds me of several from my youth, and the good family times that were had in various places all over the western US 

Great Halloween prank.  Props to this guy for making this work like a charm.

Mark Steyn nails the shame that is the Benghazi fiasco.

  "We also learned that, in those first moments of the attack, a request for military back-up was made by U.S. staff on the ground but was denied by Washington. It had planes and special forces less than 500 miles away in southern Italy — or about the same distance as Washington to Boston. They could have been there in less than two hours. Yet the commander-in-chief declined to give the order. So Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods fought all night against overwhelming odds, and died on a rooftop in a benighted jihadist hellhole while Obama retired early to rest up before his big Vegas campaign stop. “Within minutes of the first bullet being fired the White House knew these heroes would be slaughtered if immediate air support was denied,” said Ty Woods’s father, Charles. “In less than an hour, the perimeters could have been secured and American lives could have been saved. After seven hours fighting numerically superior forces, my son’s life was sacrificed because of the White House’s decision.”

Why would Obama and Biden do such a thing? Because to launch a military operation against an al-Qaeda affiliate on the anniversary of 9/11 would have exposed the hollowness of their boast through convention week and the days thereafter — that Osama was dead and al-Qaeda was finished. And so Ty Woods, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith, and Chris Stevens were left to die, and a decision taken to blame an entirely irrelevant video and, as Secretary Clinton threatened, “have that person arrested.” And, in the weeks that followed, the government of the United States lied to its own citizens as thoroughly and energetically as any totalitarian state, complete with the midnight knock on the door from not-so-secret policemen sent to haul the designated fall-guy into custody."

Kaboom! Taste my nightstick!

Head of the CIA, former general Petreaus, tosses Obama under the bus.

The article states this:

   "The CIA spokesman, presumably at the direction of CIA director David Petraeus, has put out this statement: "No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate. ”

"

So who in the government did tell “anybody” not to help those in need? Someone decided not to send in military assets to help those Agency operators. Would the secretary of defense make such a decision on his own? No.

It would have been a presidential decision."

 

The long knives are out and being used expertly.  The next few days will be very, very interesting.  And politically bloody.  And it's about time.

Looks like it's coming out that there was an AC 130 flying gunship on scene in Benghazi, but the Obama adminstration's representatives refused to let it attack the Muslims fighting our people there.

  "The security officer had a laser on the target that was firing and repeatedly requested back-up support from a Specter gunship, which is commonly used by U.S. Special Operations forces to provide support to Special Operations teams on the ground involved in intense firefights. The fighting at the CIA annex went on for more than four hours — enough time for any planes based in Sigonella Air base, just 480 miles away, to arrive. Fox News has also learned that two separate Tier One Special operations forces were told to wait, among them Delta Force operators."

What were they thinking at the CIA??

Whoever it was that denied this request should be identified, their employment terminated and publically shamed for costing the lives of our people there.  This is a true abdication of duty and common sense.  Then the survivors families should sue each and everyone in the chain of command that participated in this travesty, for everything they are worth. 

Check out the article for the full story, but also recall those stories last month about tungsten filled gold bars, the making of which is apparently big business in China.  This action by the Bundesbank shows that those who argue that an audit of our own gold holdings are not engaging in tin foil hattery, but may well have a good reason for their concern.  God help us if it turns out the gold isn't there or that any significant portion is counterfeit.

  "Today, in a surprising development, via the Telegraph we learn that none other than the same Bundesbank which is causing endless nightmares for all the other broke European nations due to its insistence for sound money, decided to voluntarily pull two thirds of its gold holdings held by the Bank of England. According to a confidential report referenced by the Telegraph, Buba reclaimed 940 tons, reducing its BOE holdings from 1,440 in 2000 to 500 in 2001 allegedly "because storage costs were too high." This is about as idiotic an excuse as the Fed cancelling its reporting of M3 in 2006 because "the costs of collecting the underlying data outweigh the benefits." So why did Buba repatriate its gold? Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has an idea.

The shift came as the euro was at its weakest, slumping to $0.84 against the dollar. But it also came as the Bank of England was selling off most of Britain's gold reserves – at market lows – on orders from Gordon Brown.

Peter Hambro, chair of the UK-listed gold miner Petropavlovsk, said the Bundesbank may have withdrawn its bullion in self-protection since it did not, apparently, have its own specifically allocated bars in London. "They may have decided that the Bank of England had lent out too much gold, and decided it was safer to bring theirs home. This is about the identification. Can you identify your own allocated gold, or are you just a general creditor with a metal account?"

The watchdog report follows claims by the German civic campaign group "Bring Back our Gold" and its US allies in the Gold Anti-Trust Committee that official data cannot be trusted. They allege central banks have loaned out or "sold short" much of their gold.

The refrain has been picked up by German legislators. "All the gold must come home: it is precisely in this crisis that we need certainty over our gold reserves," said Heinz-Peter Haustein from the Free Democrats (FDP). "

On this day, St. Crispin’s Day, in 1415 King Henry the Fifth and his band of brothers won the Battle of Agincourt.

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered-

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition;

And gentlemen in England now-a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”

Henry V (Act IV, Sc. iii)

Over at Every Day Dutch Oven,  Liddy put up a recipe for apple streusel cobbler that sounded both good and super easy to make.  To start the fall weather dinners here, we made some down home potato and sausage soup, scratch made bread and this cobbler.  

Turned out very tasty!  An excellent recipe to put in the card file.

                               Out it comes from the oven, looking really good.

The finished product.  I could eat this pretty much every day.  Next time I think I'll add some cranberries to the apples for a bit more tart taste.

Freckles, they are good.

This kid is Brazilian super model Cintia Dicker.

Freckles?  In Brazil?

Gun porn!

This is a custom job on a Sako A1 action that was tuned and trued by Idaho gunsmith Tony Barnes.  It's chambered in 6.5 TC/U.  It has a 15 inch tapered octagon barrel, and exhibition grade fiddleback walnut stock.

What a beauty.

This story about Beluga whale learning to imitate the sound of human speech has been all over the internet.  Apparently, they have been listening to their trainers, and trying to copy the sounds they are hearing.  The trainers say that when the whales do this, they sound like two people talking at a distance where you can hear the conversation but not the words.

Here is a cool example

Ever get tired of the hairy chested truck commercials government dependent car companies put on TV?

If so, this one will make you laugh.

From Free N. Carolina.

This article beggars belief, but if true, it means that the Obama administration was using the Benghazi consulate to collect the massive piles of weapons left over from the Gaddafi regime, and send those to Islamic extremists fighting in Syria through Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.  Note that it was a Turk that our ambassador was meeting just before the attack, and the two large warehouse like buildings, whose purpose is undisclosed, were raided by the attackers. 

What could go wrong with this policy? 

Read it all.

I saw this over at Curmudgeonly and Skeptical, but I see that Brock has it up at Free North Carolina as well.  This story definitely needs wide distribution, so pass it on, Bloggers!

Heh

Professor Meow at your service.

Probably was held back in third grade.

Fail

Boeing has developed a missile that destroys everything electronic, but nothing else.

Seems like a lot of places in the middle east are crying out for a demonstration of this fully operational death star... I mean new technology.

You know the Democrats see a landslide for Romney coming when they pull out the long knives to sacrifice someone for the debacle.

Looks like some of them are already pushing Bill Clinton onto the alter.

Honestly, if any Lib thinks Bill or Hillary is going to go under the bus without a fight, they are in for a nasty surprise.  I am looking forward to the contest, as it promises to be nasty, very public and highly entertaining.

But in a larger sense, the battle is between the more centrist Democrats like Clinton, and the hard left socialists like Obama and his crew.  That is the battle that will determine the nature of the Democratic Party for the next ten or twenty years, as well as their fate for that period.

If the Democrats suffer a crushing defeat this election, expect the Clintons and their ilk to come out swinging, and the Obamabots to take it in the chin.  Pass the popcorn.

An interesting statistic that tells a lot about the economic and political issues facing us.

In only four years since 1963 have annual new-home sales come in below 400,000 units. Barack Obama was president in each one of those years: 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.

The worst year for new-home sales under George W. Bush was 2008 at 489,000 units. Obama's best year seems to be 2009: 375,000. (The September 2012 pace of 389,000 is the highest of all of 2012. But when adding up the year until now, it's doubtful that new-home sales will hit the 2009 levels.)

Keep in mind how much smaller the economy was in the sixties, seventies and eighties, and that number becomes even more descriptive of how really bad the economy is right now.