Iraq ‘inten­si­fies’ attacks

Nige­ria: Sen­a­tor Wants Use of Firearms Legalised. A mem­ber of the Sen­ate Com­mit­tee on Police Affairs, Sen. Lekan Balo­gun yes­ter­day in Abuja called for the law­ful pos­ses­sion of firearms by all Nige­ri­ans for self protection.

Balo­gun told that News Agency of Nige­ria (NAN) that the law­ful pos­ses­sion of firearms was the only panacea toward cur­tail­ing the polit­i­cal killings in the country.

He said: ‘If I’m armed, you would not come to my house and harass me with a gun because you don’t know who will die in the process.’

Balo­gun, a gov­er­nor­ship aspi­rant on the Plat­form of PDP in Oyo State, who recently escaped assas­si­na­tion bid in his bed­room in Ibadan, said that nobody should be allowed to monop­o­lise vio­lence because of pos­ses­sion of firearms. [FirearmNews.com]

Here’s a rarity–a politi­cian who actu­ally cares about the peo­ple he rep­re­sents, and not just his own power. I won­der if he’d con­sider mov­ing the Cal­i­for­nia and run­ning for US Senate?

Apple among com­pa­nies with worst BODs [The Mac­in­tosh News Net­work]

No kid­ding.

Anti-semitism, or some­thing worse?. There is an inter­est­ing move afoot in some US uni­ver­si­ties. Vocal fac­ulty and stu­dents, by no means a major­ity, are call­ing for their insti­tu­tions to divest their endow­ment port­fo­lios of stock in com­pa­nies that do busi­ness with Israel. The move­ment com­pares itself to the divest­ment strat­egy used to put pres­sure on the Apartheid gov­ern­ment of South Africa. In that case, the goal was to com­bat obvi­ous oppres­sion of the black pop­u­la­tion by a white minor­ity. The case can be made, whether one agrees with it or not, that the Israelis’ behav­ior toward the Pales­tini­ans is com­pa­ra­ble. The move­ment has been dubbed anti-Semitic by Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Pres­i­dent Lawrence Sum­mers, and the pro­po­nents vil­i­fied as racist. Why, the ques­tion is asked, aren’t they agi­tat­ing for pres­sure against coun­tries like China, or sev­eral African nations, or any num­ber of places where a spe­cific eth­nic pop­u­la­tion is being severely oppressed by those in power. Why indeed? [kuro5hin.org]

The author the­o­rizes that the attacks on Israel are moti­vated by ras­cism, because the Israelis (like the for­mer South African gov­ern­ment) is made up of white “Euro­peans.” An inter­est­ing the­ory, but I don’t think that’s quite it. I think the left­ists attack Israel because Israel is friendly to Amer­ica. In other words, “the friend of my enemy is my enemy.”

“Inno­cents Betrayed” Goes Into Pro­duc­tion!. Jews for the Preser­va­tion of Firearms Own­er­ship -

“Inno­cents Betrayed” Goes Into Pro­duc­tion! — They hope to release
it early in 2003. They still need dona­tions. [End the War on Free­dom]

This is a doc­u­men­tary on the role gun con­trol has played in the geno­cides of the Twen­ti­eth Century.

Den­ver Spy Files Tar­get Lib­er­tar­ian Party. The Col­orado Free­dom Report -

Den­ver Spy Files Tar­get Lib­er­tar­ian Party — The Den­ver Police have
clas­si­fied the Lib­er­tar­ian Party as “Mili­tia type orga­ni­za­tion, pro
gun rights.” Hehe. [zem] [End the War on Free­dom]

The report includes this rather naïve com­ment: “Why the Den­ver Police Depart­ment tar­geted for inves­ti­ga­tion the Lib­er­tar­ian Party for peace­ably advo­cat­ing the Bill of Rights and obey­ing the Col­orado Con­sti­tu­tion remains a mys­tery.” Obvi­ously the ques­tion is the answer.

NV Cat­tle Rustling: An Eye­wit­ness Report. The Nevada Live­stock Asso­ci­a­tion at Sierra Times -

NV Cat­tle Rustling: An Eye­wit­ness Report — seems that a hun­dred
armed b.l.m. nazis stole two hun­dred head of cat­tle. That’s a hangin’
offense where I come from. I hope the locals start shoot­ing, real
soon. [sierra] [End the War on Free­dom]

Appar­ently some unarmed locals tried to watch what the Feds were doing, but they were run off at gun­point. The Feds cer­tainly are spend­ing an awful lot of our money rustling cattle.

Fire on the Moun­tain Part 2.
Fire on the Moun­tain Part 2
It appears the silly bas­tards who started a fire on the moun­tains above us, by doing some rit­u­al­is­tic sac­ri­fice of a goat a cou­ple weeks ago, must have thought they didn’t get the job done. This time it appears they had to bring the BBQ to fin­ish the job but instead they’ve burnt down the entire moun­tain.
Sun­day after­noon in the 106 degree heat, a plume of smoke started ris­ing up near Glen­dora, a town about 3–4 miles North of us. The fire started quickly and the smoke bil­low­ing off the moun­tain was grow­ing larger by the minute. The neigh­bor­hood was a buzz with the phrase “Fire on the Moun­tain” as we looked out our patios and pointed toward the plume. It didn’t look like it was much worse than the ear­lier fire. How­ever within hours ash and smoke was cov­er­ing the entire val­ley and the LA County Fair­grounds. Every extra fire truck, forestry fire fighter and con­ser­va­tion fire crew was run­ning full tilt toward the moun­tain. The news was report­ing it was about 4,300 acres and over 1000 fire fight­ers were on the moun­tain. Oh damn it was going to be a long night.
By Mon­day, the plume was in mul­ti­ple places along the ridge­line and grow­ing. How­ever it was begin­ning to move down the moun­tain toward houses and cab­ins of friends of ours. It was rain­ing ash over our yard and begin­ning to look like Pom­peii. A phone calls were in order, Do you need help? We can take both trucks and move your stuff out. Yes. Do you need help mov­ing out the horses? Again the answer was yes. We hooked up the trailer and loaded the trucks up with water, tow­els and blan­kets.
Most of Mon­day we moved horses and live­stock to Indus­try and Chino. The most of the horses were more than happy to get out of the smoke. It was a long day. By 7 PM I real­ized I hadn’t eaten when a sher­iffs shoved a ham sand­wich in my hand and told me we needed to get out of the canyon, because the wind had changed direc­tion and was headed our way. We threw the belong­ings of our friends in the trail­ers and headed out with the sprin­klers run­ning and the fire chop­pers head­ing in to start the water drops on the prop­erty. I felt like I was in the mid­dle of a bomb­ing run.
By the time we got off the moun­tain we decided to group over at another friends home and eat a real din­ner. From their patio about 3 miles from the fire and a mile from us we got our first glimpse of the real scope of the fire. The fire-line stretched along a line includ­ing Azusa, Glen­dora, San Dimas, La Verne and Clare­mont. It was the longest stretch of fire Doug had ever seen since they moved from LA to the val­ley when he was a child. The last time the fire had burned up there was when he was in Kinder­garten about 1960.
As we watched the fire was danc­ing as it ate up the brush and trees. We kept in touch with the guys as they headed back up the moun­tain to check on the house despite the evac­u­la­tion order. So far the fire­fight­ers had held the fire back from the prop­er­ties. We tried to rest at the house but ended up mea­sur­ing time by lis­ten­ing for the heli­copters tak­ing water from the lake nearby for mak­ing the water drops. It was a long, long night.
By this morn­ing the fire had grown to over 10,000 acres and it was obvi­ous the crews couldn’t get a han­dle on it yet, despite the back­fires and the water drops. The tem­per­a­tures were all ready climb­ing over 80 degrees. We had to go check on the live­stock and horses while the kids unloaded the trailer into the garage. While we were out it was offi­cially announced the Ange­les National For­est was com­pletely closed to the pub­lic for the rest of the fire sea­son.  They also are try­ing to declare it a dis­as­ter area.

The entire day was spent run­ning between the live­stock and the moun­tain. The fire has grown to nearly 18,000 acres and still not con­tained. Over 3000 fire fight­ers are on the moun­tain. It had burnt down over 50 cab­ins and homes up on the moun­tain. The ham tower at John­stone Peak was down from the fire. Hams were work­ing other repeaters help­ing out. Friends called to tell us the flames and smoke were vis­i­ble from the down­town Los Ange­les. South Coast Air Qual­ity Man­age­ment Dis­trict in Dia­mond Bar put out a warn­ing because of the smoke and ash in the air for the Los Ange­les basin.
We drove up the canyon tonight to check on friends who lived on one of the back canyons to find they’d had a water drop slightly miss and hit their house. While their were a few bro­ken tile, every­thing was still stand­ing and okay. The fire had come within 20 feet of the house.
As night fell tonight the fire fight­ers announced that the fire had bro­ken the Glen­dora Ridge and Baldy Vil­lage on Mt. Baldy was being evac­u­ated. At this point every­one we know are all right, but the sight of fire danc­ing on the hills directly out­side my win­dow are not a com­fort­ing sight. [Mary Wehmeier’s Blog Du Jour]

A very inter­est­ing eye-witness account of the cur­rent rather large fire. Brush fires are very com­mon in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, but this one is the worst in quite a while. These fires hap­pen because most of the peo­ple in SoCal spend nearly all their lives in the city, and have no idea how to behave when they get out­side of it. Throw­ing matches or cig­a­rette butts away is merely lit­ter­ing in a city, but can eas­ily start a large fire in the dry brush.

Boston Globe.  The impact of Schroeder’s crass anti-american cam­paign tac­tic in the Ger­man elec­tions con­tin­ues to back­fire.  Like the US, Ger­many should be focus­ing on fix­ing its econ­omy.  With 10% unem­ploy­ment (2x the US), and nearly 0% growth (vs. a slow 1% in the US), indulging in US bash­ing and tales of woe about the fate of Iraq (a coun­try most Ger­mans, like most Amer­i­cans, prob­a­bly couldn’t place on a map) dur­ing a cru­cial elec­tion, is dis­heart­en­ing. [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]

Here’s a quote from the arti­cle that illus­trates nicely where the anti-American votes in Ger­many are com­ing from:

bq. In West Berlin’s Shon­eberg neigh­bor­hood, a lib­eral strong­hold, Marie Brinck­mann, 21, wore a black beret and held a red rose she had just received from a Red party cam­paign worker. She was asked about the anti-American tone of the elec­tion. ”It is cool to be anti-American,” she said flatly.

BBC: “Some crit­ics have been less than impressed with Google’s news ser­vice.” [Script­ing News]

I won­der how many of those critic work for com­pet­ing news services–like the BBC, for instance?