Now that's a firearms product endorsement!

Spike's Tactical has introduced an AR pattern rifle that it calls the "Crusader":

Features not only include Psalm 144, but sports a Crusader's shield logo and has a safety switch labelled "Peace", "War", and "God wills it".  Heh.

But the marketing stroke of genius?  Demonstrating epic level trolling:

A new assault rifle called the "Crusader" went on sale this week, bearing a Bible verse on the magazine to deter Islamic terrorists from using it, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations of Florida was swift to complain, reports Fox News.


Manufactured by Spike’s Tactical in central Florida, the $1,395 AR-15 has a Bible verse etched into it that says “Blessed be the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.” Etched on the other is a symbol of a Crusader's cross from the Middle Ages. The weapon's safety selector has three settings: Peace, War and God Wills It.

Company spokesman Ben Thomas, a former Navy SEAL, said the scripture is like an insurance policy to keep it out of the hands of terrorists:

“When you make a rifle, you have to understand that it could be used for ill deeds if it got in the wrong hands."

And the company didn't need to wait long:

Naturally, CAIR felt compelled to weigh in, presumably because they felt Islamic terrorists might be offended:

“Sadly, this manufacturer’s fancy new gun won’t do anything to stop the real threat in America: the escalating problem of gun violence,” a spokesperson said. “This is just another shameful marketing ploy intended to profit from the promotion of hatred, division, and violence.”

The spokesperson had nothing to say about the escalating problem of Islamic terrorism, or about the terrorists themselves promoting hatred, division, and violence.

I'd have much more sympathy for CAIR if they hadn't spent the last 15 years being pure, grade A insufferable prats.

Maybe I need to get one of these, just to bother the Right Sort™ of people.

Francesco Landini - Non avra ma' pieta questa mia Donna

On this day in 1492, Christopher Columbus' fleet of three small ships set sail from the Canary Islands.  The islands were the furthest outreach of Europe.  The ships pointed their bows towards the west, and history was changed.

The fleet was Spanish, but Columbus was Italian.  He was from Genoa, an independent city-state that was one of the great seafaring powers of the day - indeed, Columbus' resume started with his city of origin.

It's entirely unknown what music would have sailed with the fleet -almost certainly a rough seaman's music of easily portable instruments.  However, the music of this era - the transition from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance - has come down to us.

Francesco Landini was the most famous musician of his day, dating from about fifty years before Columbus.  A Florantine, his music would have been well known in Genoa, and Columbus as an educated man would have been familiar with it.  Landini's work was almost entirely secular, and the religious Columbus may or may not have approved.  But given the simplicity of the arrangement, it's possible that this or something very like it might have been heard on the ships as they sailed towards destiny.



Bootnote: If you have an interest in Columbus' voyage, I cannot recommend more highly Samuel Elliot Morrison's magnificent book on the subject, Admiral Of The Ocean Sea.

Dreams

I've been having a recurring dream where I'm taking a Real Estate Agent through my house so I can get it listed.  But there are a whole series of rooms that I didn't know about.  In my dream I keep saying "I've never been in this room before" - and the realtor typically says "And it needs a good cleaning".

I'm not sure if the dream means that my subconscious thinks I'll sell the house for more than I thought, or if cleaning will be harder than I thought.  Or both.

Or maybe it's just the fumes from Formula 409 ...

Everything's bigger in Texas

Even the Gun Safes:

I remember shortly after moving there, asking an employee at Cabella’s if he had any recommendations for a gun safe. “Well, son,” he said to me in complete seriousness, “m’boy moved away to college a few years ago so I reinforced the door frame and just turned the whole guest room into a gun vault. Have ya thought ‘bout doing sumthin like that?” Good God, I thought. And then, when we moved into a new house this year, it had a walk in closet turned into gun vault. Welcome to Texas.

Yeah, yeah: fire protection, are the walls reinforced, yadda yadda.  Don't mess with Texas, especially they're causing cerebral hemorrhages in East Coast Progressives.

Hat tip: Isegoria, who always finds cool stuff.

Does this nail polish make my ass look big?

The Queen got her nails done.

The ladies there didn't seem to mind the presence of, well, this.

Get kilted, get checked.

And donate.  Donations for Team Borepatch are appreciated, but the point it to fund prostate cancer research.  100% of donations go directly to research.

Things that make you go "Hmmmm"

What would they say about kilts at the Home Depot?  Inquiring minds want to know ...

Court strikes down Tom Brady's 4 game suspension

Says it violates the NFL's collective bargaining agreement.

Everyone needs to get their Captain on

A Utility Kilt is an interesting change from the regular kilt - it has pockets so you don't need to wear a sporan.  Other than that, it's a kilt.  You collect admiring compliments when you're out and about (always from the ladys).

Gents, take notice.  Get kilted, get checked.

And donate.  Donations for Team Borepatch are appreciated, but the point it to fund prostate cancer research.  100% of donations go directly to research.

Global Warming causes lousy weather forecasts

Well, in the UK, by Her Majesty's Meteorologic Office:

In September 2008, the Met Office forecast a trend of mild winters: the following winter turned out to be the coldest for a decade. Then its notorious promise of a ‘barbecue summer’ was followed by unrelenting rain. Last year, it forecast a ‘drier than average’ spring — before another historic deluge that was accompanied by the coldest temperatures for 50 years. Never has the Met Office had more scientists and computing power at its disposal — yet never has it seemed so baffled by the British weather. But there is no paradox. It is precisely the power of this technology in harnessing climate scientists’ assumptions about global warming that has scuppered the Met Office’s predictions — and made it a propagandist for global warming alarmism.

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Kilted To Kick Cancer - toast the kickoff

It's September, which means that the annual Kilted To Kick Cancer fundraiser has started.  That's worth raising a glass to kick off the Kick.

Your humble host is in the middle.

But there's a reason for this season - men, get yourselves checked for prostate cancer if you (like me) are of a certain age.  Prostate cancer took Dad, but he caught it in time to get another decade.

And get kilted.  Chicks dig it.

And donate.  Donations for Team Borepatch are appreciated, but the point it to fund prostate cancer research.  100% of donations go directly to research.  So what are you waiting for?

We played hookey yesterday

Rather than working on the house, we took the motorcycle out.   Roswell to Jasper on the back  roads is about as pretty as it gets, and I need to get more miles under the wheels.

There's a western wear store on Rt 5 just as you come into Jasper - it's a proper western wear store, as half of it sells livestock feed.  And they had this, which cracked me up:

Not what  you'd expect to find in Massachusetts, but par for the course in the north Georgia hills.


Then on to Rocco's bar where there were a dozen bikes parked out front and a Blues band playing B. B. King inside.  They were crazy good - it seems like local boys who like to get paid to have fun.

And yes, it was we that rode.  Co-blogger ASM826 was wrong when he said there are no women who want to meet men on the Internet.  Her kids call her the "Queen of the World" because she told them when they were little that all the fireworks on July 4 were because of her birthday.  Yes, she has as strange a sense of humor as I do, but we both seem to roll with each other's foibles.  And she likes to ride with me.

Pretty good excuse to play hookey if you ask me.  Sure beats painting the living room.

Bad idea

Roy Orbison - Uptown

America is a melting pot, and so is our music.  Country came from a mixing of many styles, including Gospel, Appalachian hill music, and western "Cowboy" music.  This morphed into Honky-Tonk, which became (with a smattering of Blues) the kernel of Rock 'n Roll.  The early days of Rock saw a lot of crossover artists - part Country, part Rock.

Roy Orbison was one of those artists.  This was one of his first songs that hit the Billboard charts.  It was influenced by the work he did with the "Nashville Sound" of Patsy Cline, but still has clear Honky Tonk roots.  I can imagine what this would have sounded like with Hank Senior singing it.

Charlie Daniels sends a love letter to Congress

Specifically, he'd love them all to resign:

I wish you bunch of sold-out, jaded, burned-out hacks would just go home and let some people who still have some vision and whose consciences haven't been seared past the point of reminding them when they're wrong take over and start to claw this nation back on to the path of sanity,

Your ratings are in the single digits, your morals are in the gutter, your minds are on self-preservation and somewhere along the way you traded your honor for political expediency.

You've violated your oaths, you've betrayed your country you've feathered your nests and you've sat on your hands while an imperial president has rubbed your noses in the dirt time after time.

You're no longer men, you're puppets, you're caricatures, jokes, a gaggle of fading prostitutes for sale to anybody who can do you a political favor.

Don't hide your feelings, Charlie - tell us what you really think.

Congratulations to Tam

Ten years of free bloggy ice cream.  That's like eleventy zillion years in Internet time.

Thanks for all the great posts, Tam!

What's the only thing powerful enough to stop the Surveillance State?

Bureaucracy:

OAKLAND, Calif.—Weeks after Ars published a feature on the scope of license plate reader use, the Oakland Police Department unilaterally and quietly decided to impose a data retention limit of six months.

...

According to Sgt. Dave Burke, who is in charge of the city’s LPR system, this change was not in response to Ars’ article, but rather was made primarily because the LPR computer—a Windows XP computer with an 80GB hard drive—was full and apparently "kept crashing."

"We had no money in the budget to buy an additional server," he told Ars.

They collected almost 5 Million license plate scans, and only stopped because the procurement bureaucracy has essentially infinite impedence.

"We don't just buy stuff from Amazon as you suggested," Burke added. "You have to go to a source, i.e., HP or any reputable source where the city has a contract. And there's a purchase order that has to be submitted, and there has to be money in the budget. Whatever we put on the system, has to be certified. You don't just put anything. I think in the beginning of the program, a desktop was appropriate, but now you start increasing the volume of the camera and vehicles, you have to change, otherwise you're going to drown in the amount of data that's being stored."

The irony of this is pretty shadenfreudalistic.

Quote Of The Day: ISIS edition

This is impossible to excerpt, but exposes the complete bankruptcy of our miserable pseudo-intellectual ruling class.

As TJIC once said on his late, lamented blog, this post is simply unimprovable.

Laptop computer deal alert

I just got a new laptop: Lenovo B50 laptop for $199:

I'm posting from it now (well, queueing the post last night. Work with me).  Loading Linux on it today.

UPDATE 26 August 2015 09:26: The price has gone up a little since yesterday.

Donald Trump: Ha, Ha, only serious

Computer programming culture (called "hacker" culture in the days before the term got co-opted by Black Hats; these were the original guys who figured out how to code supercomputers, the computers that landed Our Guys on the Moon, and who created the Internet) had a bunch of puns and plays on words.  This isn't surprising when you consider that most of these hackers were exceptionally bright and thought in ways very different from the mainstream.

You can find a huge collection of these in the Jargon File (highly recommended reading, but you are warned that you will lose hours reading through this).  Looking at the Donald Trump phenomenon, one of these sayings came to mind:

ha ha only serious

[from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, ‘Ha Ha Only Kidding’] A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or truths that are constructed on in-joke and self-parody. This lexicon contains many examples of ha-ha-only-serious in both form and content. Indeed, the entirety of hacker culture is often perceived as ha-ha-only-serious by hackers themselves; to take it either too lightly or too seriously marks a person as an outsider, a wannabee, or in larval stage. For further enlightenment on this subject, consult any Zen master. See also hacker humor, and koan.

I think that Trump entered the campaign in a ha-ha-only-serious way: an ironic joke with a hard core of disquieting truth.  He was the only one on the stage who would say what the Political Class refused to say but what a large part of the Republic believed in their heart of hearts - but were not permitted to say in "polite society" because shut up, hater.

And every time he opens his mouth and emits what the Political Class deems to be a "gaffe", his poll numbers go up.  I don't think that anyone understands this, including Trump.  However, half of having luck is getting yourself in a position where you can be lucky, and my opinion is that Trump is almost certainly too opportunistic to let an opportunity like this pass.

I'm not the only one who seems to think this way.  Heartiste (WARNING!!! Site is extremely non politically correct and many people - including perhaps all of my Lady Readers - are very likely to be offended by other posts there.  This post is entirely safe except for Democrats) posts an email tip that he received from someone claiming insider knowledge about Trumps campaign:

I just got told by a friend that Trump hired the former lawfirm of the RNC.
Why does this matter?
Word on the street in Chattanooga (where Trump has and retains many high end connections) is that Trump went into the campaign with two intentions.
One was to ‘shake things up’.

The second was to raise his profile with Chinese investors for fund raising for a new casino.

He really didn’t intend to get big numbers in the US and didn’t intend to actually ‘go for the goal.’ Which was why he came in with no primary ground game. He didn’t intend to even get 5%.

With the recent success the question was ‘what now?’ Go for closing the deal or back out? Some of his more inflammatory comments were tests to see if he could flame out. And his poll numbers just rise.

If he has retained a political lawfirm it can only be to create a ground game.

There's a lot more about how this is very, very different from the way that the GOP Establishment runs campaigns.  If true, it may be game changing - it would certainly be very difficult for the Political Class to combat this.  Heartiste comments:

I don’t doubt Trump entered this race thinking he couldn’t win, and that his initial motivation was partly narcissistic (in fact all politicians are narcissists to a degree), partly self-aggrandizement. But then he saw that he could win, and that he had tapped a deep well of dissatisfaction among people by simply speaking his mind the way he likes to speak (i.e., not like a weeping p***y).

The level of dissatisfaction with the Political Class in this country is at epidemic proportions.  The Political Class has assumed that if they offer the populace no real choice, that they can continue with their binge of crony capitalism and keep getting away with their lies.  And now someone has tapped into that dissatisfaction in a way that they may not be able to thwart.

Is this a good thing?  Beats me - he seems a bit Caesarish for my taste.  But the screams of the Political Class (including the media, but I repeat myself) are deafening.  Remember, it's the kicked dog that yelps, and I have precisely zero sympathy for any of them.

The Dinosaurs sniff a change on the breeze and roar their defiance.

The top 10 Ashley Madison pickup lines

I laughed and laughed.