How do you say "Hey Bubba, hold mah beer" in Russian?

Well, Hold mah vodka?

A drunk taxi driver was caught naked by police in Moscow following a rampage in which he smashed into 17 cars. City police became aware of Vitaly Grodi's erratic driving after he ignored a road sign and refused to stop.

The driver bumped into 17 vehicles including a police van. He also narrowly avoided hitting a school bus. The driver was finally caught by officers who were shocked to find him in nothing but his birthday suit when he emerged from his cab.

Must have been trying to complete Stolichnaya's Glorious Five Year Plan ...

Word

Kdzu wins the Internets with this:

ARTICLE I: You do not have the right to a new car, big screen color TV or any other form of wealth. More power to you if you can legally acquire them, but no one is guaranteeing anything.

ARTICLE II: You do not have the right to never be offended. This country is based on freedom, and that means freedom for everyone—not just you! You may leave the room, turn the channel, express a different opinion, etc., but the world is full of idiots, and probably always will be.

Yeah, there's more.  So why are you still here?

There is evil there that never sleeps

I was going to carve an AK-47 too, but life got in the way.  But really - does Hello Kitty with EYES OF FLAME really need an AK-47?  Only your Gormogons know for sure.

Have a Happy and High Voltage Halloween

Well, at least a Low Voltage one ...

A Civilization Starter Kit on a DVD

Wow:



The Global Village Construction Set is Open Source designs for the 50 industrial machines needed to make a civilization.  They have eight completed so far:

Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters building the Global Village Construction Set - a modular, DIY, low-cost, open source, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

The aim of the GVCS is to lower the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing. Its a life-size lego set that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, or in the developing world.

While some of these machines are agricultural - Tractor, Hay Cutter, Bailer - others are industrial: Aluminum Extractor (from clay), Dimensional Sawmill, Metal Roller Mill.  I'm not sure that this is an exhaustive list of machinery you'd need for civilization (chemical processing and pharmaceuticals are notable in their absence), this seems a damned fine start.

Best of all, the machines are designed to meet industry specs while being inexpensive and locally built and maintained.


LifeTrac All Terrain Tracks - Fab and Assembly from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.



If you believe that the problem facing the world today is too much centralization and not enough local autonomy and control, this is revolutionary.  And I mean "revolutionary" in a Jeffersonian sense.  Gunsmithing seems a natural addition.

Wow. 

Via Al Fin, so you know that it's wicked smart and entirely cool.

Smoking hasn't been this cool since "Casablanca"

This made me think about James Dean, and the Hollywood concept of "cool".  Cool isn't doing what people tell you that you should.  Never has been.

Now think on the fact that the Left has controlled the institutions that kids have grown up under.  The schools, of course, but also the media.  They've been increasingly hounded by intellectual harpies telling them that they must do this, and must not do that.

And now Cain's Chief of Staff smokes a fag*.  And the Usual Suspects are going out of their minds about it.  And so a musical tribute to the Cain Campaign, who know how to wage psychological warfare.



Cool.

* I used the term deliberately.  I expect that the Usual Suspects will go out of their minds.  But if I did what I was told by them, that wouldn't be cool.

Rick Perry's presidential moment

Via PJMedia:

In South Carolina this afternoon, TX Gov. Rick Perry held a press conference to detail his economic plans. The very first reporter tried distracting him by bringing up the birther nonsense. Perry was having none of it; he cut the reporter off in mid sentence, said the issue is a “distraction” and put the focus right back on his plan.

And that’s how it’s done. The rest of the reporters stuck to asking about his plans. The first never got to finish his, and ended up not asking any relevant questions, at least while I was watching. Every reporter who brings this up from now on should be treated with equal or greater contempt.

Yup.  Not sure about Perry, but this is exactly how you grab the idiot Media by their noses and pull them back around.  More, please.

Ideology

It's considered a truism on the right and among libertarians that government services are (or rapidly become) more expensive than private services.  The left will typically rebut that it doesn't have to be so.  After all, they say, couldn't The Right Sort Of People™ run government services efficiently?

Nope.

The problem is ideology.  Privately provided services have to deliver value for the customer's dollar.  While there are many possible "nice to have" enhancements to the core service, customers ultimately are purchasing the core service.  As long as there's competition, the core service is run efficiently - or the company goes out of business, is bough up by a more efficient competitor, or its assets are liquidated.

So what happens when the government runs services?  Particular groups lobby the government for their favorite "nice to have" enhancements, based on their ideological preferences.  If there is a critical mass of political power brought to bear on the government, those "nice to have" become "must haves".  Costs go up.

And at this point, it's worth pointing out that many of the "nice to have" enhancements are arguably nice to have.  But they're not doing anything to provide the ostensible core services; on the contrary, core services often get cut to fund the "nice to haves".  Case in point:

Facing a $12 million to $17 million budget shortfall next year, Portland’s TriMet transit agency is cutting bus service for lack of funds. But it has enough funds to spend $250,000 on a giant sculpture of a deer with a baby face.


The agency has already cut bus service by 13 percent and light-rail service by 10 percent in the last two years. Yet it is spending at least $3 million on “art” as part of its $200-million-per-mile light-rail line to Milwaukie, one of the most wasteful rail projects ever. As a matter of policy, TriMet spends 1.5 percent of its capital expenditures on art, even though it is not required to do so.

Ideology (driven by organized political lobbying) has captured the transit authority.  Actual transit is being cut to ensure the continued delivery of Correct ideologically-driven "nice to haves".  It's Rich People's Leftism.

For all the noise we hear form the Usual Suspects that we're a bunch of Baby-Eating Capitalists who don't have any compassion, you'd think they'd have some actual, you know, compassion for poor people who rely on mass transit.

But then they'd have to sacrifice their SWPL "art" for benefits aimed at poor people.  Got to have your (ideological) priorities, right?

Steampunking your Nerf pistol

Pretty cool step-by-step instructions.  You're basically just painting it steampunky colors.  And just in time for Halloween.

Modest Mussorgsky - Night On Bald Mountain

All Hallow's Eve is followed by All Saint's Day.  This juxtaposition of the diabolical and the blessed is only dimly remembered in today's Halloween festivities.  In earlier times, it was a much more serious affair.

By the 1860s it was less serious than olden times, but the great Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky used the device of a Witch's Sabbath to channel the anti-establishment bacchanalian rebellion of his artistic community.

Walt Disney took this, and paired it with Ave Maria in his 1940 Fantasia film.  It may be the musical pinnacle of All Hallow's Eve/All Saint's Day.



Mussorgsky's rebellion caused him to burn brightly, but also to burn out early.  By the agen of 42, he had drank himself to death.  Much of his music was arranged after his death by friends such as Rimsky-Korsakov or, as in this case, Leopold Stokowski.

Romney's position on the World Series

(Image source)

Also via Legal Insurrection, George Will's new article that skewers Romney as lack[ing] the courage of his absence of convictions. 

I keep saying that I'll vote for Obama before I vote for Mitt.  With Obama, at least I know what he is, and that divided government is needed to hobble his agenda.  With Mitt, there's simply no telling, and Congress likely won't be in the mood to hobble him.  Will points out just how damaging Mitt may be.  RTWT.

Compare and Contrast

OK, OK, I forgot.  The Team Party is racist.  Or something.



Via Theo.

Falsification

We're constantly told that the public is stupid, especially about things scientific.  I'm not at all sure that I believe that.  After all, everyone lives in an actual, physical world, interacting with physical and chemical reactions every second of every day.

Sure, some are idiots, and win the Darwin Award lottery, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't know how gravity works, just that they ignored the implications.  Hey Bubba, hold mah beer ...

And so to the weeping, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments over the rapidly falling belief in the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) - the proposition that climate is changing dramatically, and catastrophically, and that it's our fault.

We're told that the public are scientific ignoramuses, who lack appreciation for the subtlety of the climate computer models, or the "gridding" and "adjusting" modifications performed on the historical temperature databases.  Why, they simply won't listen to the Very Smart Scientists who are telling them that they have to reduce their children's standard of living, and that it's an emergency and ZOMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!1!!eleventy!!!!

Now why might the public be skeptical about all this scienciness?

It's not even Halloween.

The public lives in a physical reality.  They see what is happening around them.  This actually helped the CAGW crowd in the 1990s, when a series of hot summers and 1998's super El Nino even convinced a lot of folks that it was getting hotter.  But since then, it's been getting cooler, and no amount of data fiddling is going to convince people that they aren't seeing record cold.

In a very practical sense, CAGW is being falsified for the entire Northeast seaboard this weekend.  Sure, sure - this is weather, not climate.  But riddle me this, CAGWman: if the Earth truly were warming, why wouldn't we be seeing records being set the other way - hotter records, late snowfalls, that sort of thing.

It's a cold dead fact that after a "century of warming" and the "hottest year in a millennium" that the highest recorded temperature in the USA happened in 1913.  You can look it up, even.

What a strange warming, that increases average temperature, but not record temperature.  And where we see record early snowfall.  You might almost wonder if the hypothesis was falsified.

Charlie Daniels Band - The Legend Of Wooley Swamp

(Image source)

The ghosts come out on Halloween.  Yeah, there's a country song for that.

Perhaps it's better to say "Southern Rock".  While this song didn't do very well on the country charts, it became a big crossover hit in 1980, taking the song well into the Top 40, and the album platinum.

The story is the sort you heard around the campfire when you were young: an old rich miser living in the woods, some young, foolish bad guys ("white trash" in the song) who kill him for his money, and the poetic justice that snares them.

Oh, and the ghosts of all involved who come out at night ...



The Legend of Wooley Swamp (Songwriters: Charlie Daniels, Tom Crain, "Taz" DiGregorio, Fred Edwards, James W. Marshall, Charles Hayward)

Well, if you ever go back into Wooley Swamp,
Well, you better not go at night.
There's things out there in the middle of them woods
That make a strong man die from fright.
Things that crawl and things that fly
And things that creep around on the ground.
And they say the ghost of Lucius Clay gets up and he walks around.

But I couldn't believe it.
I just had to find out for myself.
And I couldn't conceive it
'Cause I never would have listened to nobody else.
And I couldn't believe it.
I just had to find out for myself
There's somethings in this world you just
can't explain.

Spoken:
The old man lived in the Wooley Swamp way back in Booger Woods.
He never did do a lot of harm in the world,
But he never did do no good
People didn't think too much of him
They all thought he acted funny
The old man didn't care about people anyway
All he cared about was his money.
He'd stuff it all down in mason jars
And he'd bury it all around
And on certain nights
If the moon was right
He'd dig it up out of the ground.
He'd pour it all out on the floor of his shack
And run his fingers through it.
Yeah, Lucius Clay was a greedy old man
And that's all that there was to it.

Cable boys was white trash
They lived over on Carver's Creek.
They were mean as a snake
And sneaky as a cat
And belligerent when they'd speak.
One night the oldest brother said,
"Y'all meet me at the Wooley Swamp later
We'll take old Lucius's money
and we'll feed him to the alligators."

They found the old man out in the back
With a shovel in his hand,
Thirteen rusty mason jars
was just dug up out of the sand.
And they all went crazy
And they beat the old man,
And they picked him up off of the ground.
Threw him in the swamp
And stood there and laughed
As the black water sucked him down.

Then they turned around
And went back to the shack
And picked up the money and ran.
They hadn't gone nowhere
When they realized
They were running in quicksand.
And they struggled and they screamed
But they couldn't get away
And just before they went under
They could hear that old man laughing
In a voice as loud as thunder.

And that's been fifty years ago
And you can go by there yet.
There's a spot in the yard
In the back of that shack
Where the ground is always wet.
And on summer nights
If the moon is right
Down by the that dark footpath,
You can hear three young men screaming.
You can hear one old man laugh.

Have a fun Halloween.  Just stay out of the woods ...

You go, girl!

Drunk, topless woman leads police on 128 MPH chase.  I'll bet the arresting officer tells this story for years. 

Here's an earworm tip o' the chapeau to our, err, "heroine" ...

T'hee

No 5 mph bumper for me

I was in the Wrangler, stopped at a light, when sumdood ran into me yesterday.  And not just a little "bump" - a big ol' crunch.  Enough to hit my hear hard on the headrest.  A little on the grumpy side, I got out to see the damage.

Sumdood was fine, and very apologetic (which was good).  I looked at my bumper, and then did a double take.  No damage.  At all.

Well, to the Wrangler.  His front end was all stove to heck and gone.  Crumpled hood, fluids leaking onto the road.  Not a good day for him.

I have to say that I was a bit impressed, although it makes sense.  If you're taking something out in the back woods, you don't want the bumper cover peeling off (to the tune of $700) the first time you kiss a tree.

Progressive's "support" for free speech

Interesting.  The OWS Exposed web site that documents all the crime that's been occurring at the OWS rallies has been under cyber attack.  Currently the DNS maps the URL to 127.0.0.1 (the loopback address - this is the one that points you to your own computer).  Nice.

Interesting how we're always lectured on the necessity of being tolerant by these same sort of people.  As with "hate speech" (speech that Progressives don't like) and campus speech codes (rules to suppress same), we see the limits of tolerance.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

- C.S. Lewis

Stupid burglar is stupid

Man, you can't say that Atlanta's criminal population is looking to join Mensa anytime soon.  Offered for your consideration:

Idiot #1:

A burglar who ignored a warning blast from a shotgun was shot in the leg early Thursday after breaking into a mansion on West Paces Ferry Road in Buckhead, police said.

The homeowner has the patience of a saint.  First blasting a 12 gauge warning hole into his high priced crib, and then (when the warning didn't take) shooting the perp in the leg.  Must be a cat burglar, because he obviously has more than one life.

Idiot #2:

According to Cobb police, a woman identified as Alexandrea Brooks infiltrated the Walgreens at 3033 Johnson Ferry Road in Marietta and made off with 26 boxes of condoms and a pregnancy test valued at $562.68. Walgreens workers saw Brooks enter the store on Sept. 11, fill a shopping basket with condoms and march out the front door. She got into a vehicle, and the driver took off, but not before workers wrote down a tag number. Police eventually tracked down the driver, who gave police Brooks’ name.

26 boxes of prophylactics and only one pregnancy test?  Someone must be feeling lucky.

I guess that it's a good thing that most criminals are idiots, but come on, Atlanta, step up your game.  You're making the area look like, well, idiots.  You want people to think we're California?

Firefighters and deputies said they are not sure why, but the man climbed into a narrow hole located near the base of the tree. The hole led inside the hollow tree trunk and about four or five feet underground, said Battalion Chief Kris Concepcion of the Orange County Fire Authority.

It took firefighters about 90 minutes to get the necessary equipment and safely cut through the branches of the tree to free the man from inside, he said. The only body parts visible outside the tree truck were the man's head and arms, he said. Part of the body was underground. "Why he's in a tree, I have no idea," Concepcion said.

I do.  He's an idiot.

First Person Shooter: Some assembly required

Win:



Because it's been too long since I've posted stop action Lego® shooty goodness.  This is so good that it has 11 Million views and a commercial (!).  Yeah, it really is that good.

Lego guns, of course, are provided by the indispensable Brick Arms.