Sunday, March 2, 2014

Bosnia's bloody riots

Via comment by  Dave on Chinese Soldiers Are Too Fat For Their Tanks Now

 UNREST IN SARAJEVO. People watch police vehicles set ablaze during a demonstration in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 07 February 2014. Dzenan Krijestorac/EPA

The failure of Bosnia's political leaders to address grinding poverty and growing unemployment has prompted the first violent protests since the 1992-95 war, with dire warnings of worse to come.

Starting in the northeastern industrial hub of Tuzla last week, the protests spread across the country, turning into riots that left hundreds injured and government buildings in flames.

More @ Rappler

Pierre Omidyar co-funded Ukraine revolution groups with US government, documents show

Via III Percent Patriots


centeruatop 

Why, who would have thunk'........?

Just hours after last weekend’s ouster of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, one of Pierre Omidyar’s newest hires at national security blog “The Intercept,” was already digging for the truth.
 
Marcy Wheeler, who is the new site’s “senior policy analyst,” speculated that the Ukraine revolution was likely a “coup” engineered by “deep” forces on behalf of “Pax Americana”:
“There’s quite a bit of evidence of coup-ness. Q is how many levels deep interference from both sides is.”
These are serious claims. So serious that I decided to investigate them. And what I found was shocking.

More @ Pando

Gay activists have met their match with Muslim barbers

Via Angry Mike

Gay flag Islam

.......just not politically correct enough. It’s like poker.

A white, Christian male has the lowest hand — it’s like he’s got just one high card, maybe an ace. So almost everyone trumps him.

A white woman is just a bit higher — like a pair of twos. Enough to beat a white man, but not much more.

A gay man is like having two pairs in poker.

A gay woman — a lesbian like McGregor — is like having three of a kind.

A black lesbian is a full house — pretty tough to beat.

Unless she’s also in a wheelchair, which means she’s pretty much a straight flush.

The only person who could trump that would be a royal flush. If the late Sammy Davis Jr. — who was black, Jewish and half-blind — were to convert to Islam and discover he was 1/64th Aboriginal.
So which is a better hand: A lesbian who wants a haircut or a Muslim who doesn’t want to give it to her?

More @ Toronto Sun

Carolina Beach Music: I'm on my way to a better place

Via Charlie "Brock this song has been around for a few years and I've heard it before,but somehow I guess I never actually heard the words until today. It's the perfect mix of Beach Music and Christianity in my opinion and just became an instant favorite with me.   Thought I'd see if you want
to post it on the blog.

Me?  Post Carolina Beach Music?  No way.......:)



Honor Roll: Greenbrier Military School

Unfortunately, the large plaque listing all the cadets who served was stolen and evidently melted down. I mentioned to Oleg who helped me with this picture that they should be shot and he replied with "Shot? Only if in the kneecaps and elbows first." :)



Putin Smashes Washington’s Cocoon

Via Ryan

A Politico report calls it “a crisis that no one anticipated.” The Daily Beast, reporting on Friday’s US intelligence assessment that “Vladimir Putin’s military would not invade Ukraine,” quotes a Senate aide claiming that “no one really saw this kind of thing coming.”

Op-eds from all over the legacy press this week helped explained why. Through the rose tinted lenses of a media community deeply convinced that President Obama and his dovish team are the masters of foreign relations, nothing poor Putin did could possibly derail the stately progress of our genius president. There were, we were told, lots of reasons not to worry about Ukraine. War is too costly for Russia’s weak economy. Trade would suffer, the ruble would take a hit. The 2008 war with Georgia is a bad historical comparison, as Ukraine’s territory, population and military are much larger. Invasion would harm Russia’s international standing. Putin doesn’t want to spoil his upcoming G8 summit, or his good press from Sochi. Putin would rather let the new government in Kiev humiliate itself with incompetence than give it an enemy to rally against. Crimea’s Tartars and other anti-Russian ethnic minorities wouldn’t stand for it. Headlines like “Why Russia Won’t Invade Ukraine,” “No, Russia Will Not Intervene in Ukraine,” and “5 Reasons for Everyone to Calm Down About Crimea” weren’t hard to find in our most eminent publications.

Chinese Soldiers Are Too Fat For Their Tanks Now

Via WiscoDave

Chinese Soldiers Are Too Fat For Their Tanks Now

Dated.

Servicemen who are too big for their equipment sounds like an American problem. But as China catches up to, or beats, the U.S. in certain stats, they also face problems faced here.

According to The Washington Post, a recent study of the People's Liberation Army revealed many soldiers are "too big and too fat" for some pieces of equipment in use. This includes people driving tanks who can no longer fit in them. The report revealed that people serving in military forces have an average waistline that's 5 centimeters larger than 20 years ago. 

More @ Jalopnik

Ukraine's president says Russian forces issued ultimatum on Crimea

Via Ryan

Russian troops in Crimea

The Russian military set an ultimatum Sunday for Ukrainian army and navy units “to surrender weapons and leave their bases” in the Crimean peninsula, Ukraine’s acting president, Olexandr Turchinov, said in televised remarks.

According to Turchinov, the ultimatum demanded that the troops abandon their bases by 5 a.m. Sunday. But as of late afternoon, the Ukrainian military was still occupying the bases, although they were kept effectively confined to them by Russian troops blocking access.

Turchinev said the ultimatum came from the Russian military’s North Caucasus division. He said his efforts to speak about it with leaders in Moscow had been futile.

More @ LA Times

Checkmate: Crimea forms its own fleet

Via Ryan

Denis Berezovsky (Screenshot from RT video)

The region's Prime Minister Sergey Aksyonov announced the creation of Crimea's Navy forces and appointed Berezovsky its head.

The Republic will have its own navy, which will be commanded by rear admiral Berezovsky,” Aksyonov told the journalists Sunday.

“Subsequently, this day will be considered the birthday of the naval forces of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea,” he added.

"All Navy troops dislocated in Sevastopol are ordered to disregard any commands coming from Ukraine's new self-proclaimed authorities," the PM also declared. "Do not take any orders of using arms till my personal instructions."

Aksyonov promised that “all soldiers, who’ll swear allegiance to the Crimean people, will retain their allowance, health and social benefits, military rank and position.”

As for those, who wouldn’t want to join the Crimean navy, they have the full right “to retire” and “won’t be prosecuted” afterwards, the PM stressed.

More @ RT

Down Dixie Way: Notes of a Fed-Up Southerner

http://www.rebel-son.com/images/RSLogo-flag-big.jpg

 VERBATIM

Man, did this make my day and now that I've finally stopped laughing, I'll post it.:)

Coming up as I did a Southern boy, usually barefoot, lots of times with a cane pole and a string of bream I caught in Machodoc Creek, and other signs of higher civilization, I believe I could get tired of Northerners huffing and puffing about how moral they are. Ain’t nothing like a damn Yankee for smarmy hypocrisy. They can spit it out in chunks like saw logs. A Yankee can’t open his mouth without preaching about how everybody else ought to do something he won’t do himself.

It’s always the same thing, about how the South keeps blacks in poverty and has lynch mobs.

(Actually, it’s been at least three weeks since I was in a lynch mob.) To listen to these pious frauds, you’d think Northerners just loved black people and spent most of their time with them at the country club, talking the stock market. Why, how else could it be?

I couldn’t lie so much if you gave me a bird dog and a buzz saw. It ain’t in me. The worst schools in the country are in Mississippi, which doesn’t have any money, and the second worst in Washington, DC, which has all our money. Yes, Washington, so virtuous it makes your teeth curl.  How many white kids are in those schools? Uh-huh. It’s you and him integrate, not us.

You’ve heard about white flight. In nearly about every city in the North white people streak for the suburbs so’s not to be near black people, and then they talk about how bad Southerners are for doing the same thing. I guess talking moral is more fun than being it.

Fact is, you can see more social, comfortable integration in a catfish house in Louisiana than you can in probably all of Washington.

Now, sometimes I have to yield to the truth. I don’t like to, but it’s forced on me. Blacks do live miserable in Southern cities.It can't be denied. There's a shameful list of awful cities and it hurts me to write it: Newark, Trenton, Camden, Detroit, Flint, Chicago, and Gary. Pretty much the entire South.

Facts is, the South itself was always poor, dirt poor, pea-turkey poor, especially after 1861, and a lot of what it was and how it felt came out of that. Songs like Ode to Billy Joe to Yankees are funny, the kind of thing you’d expect from those hicks down there. But they tell how it was for a lot of folk. Red dirt hills where nothing much wanted to grow, and there was nothing much to do and sometimes nothing much to eat. It was ugly, Tobacco Road, and the North laughs it. Even in the mid-Fifties you saw—I saw—kids from the countryside of Alabama with their teeth black from decay, and in some regions school vacations came at cotton-picking and cotton-chopping time. You could easy find people living in fall-down shacks, white people too. Thank you, Mr. Lincoln.

Piety quiz: Everybody take out a sheet of paper. Who said the following: “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people….” (1) Mahatma Ghandi (2) Mother Theresa (3) Tinker Belle or (4) Abraham Lincoln. Hint: It wasn’t any of the first three.

Let me remind us that the South has generally had to bring to the North the benefits of culture. It figures. Industrial society is so full of stench and soot and misery and crowding that people can’t even do a good job of being unhappy. That’s why the great blues men like Mississippi John Hurt and Lightnin’ Hopkins came out of Dixie. So did jazz, and country music, and Dixieland jazz, which is different, and bluegrass, and rock’n’roll thanks to Big Boy Crudup and Elvis. Yankees can play long-hair music pretty good, but they stole it from Europe.

The South, though. It was a different place, mostly kind of sad I guess if you looked close, but it could grow on you. Those hot, quiet cotton fields in the Delta, where time passed sweet and slow like sorghum syrup dripping on busted china, and it was so peaceful and the air so soft you figured maybe there was a God after all. There wasn’t, though. At the time you could stand there and think that it would go on forever, that there was something comfortable and familiar that wouldn’t turn into something else you didn’t want. But it did. Nothing lovely can last when next door you have an infernal industrial smoke pit.

There was a wildness to the South, a sense that anything could happen. It didn’t feel controlled. Maybe it wasn’t obvious. People talked soft and slow like the Good Lord intended, instead of honking through their noses the way they do in Brooklyn, and they were polite and friendly. You didn’t want to lean on them, though. That wasn’t a good idea.

If you knew the place, it wasn’t surprising the moonshine runners came from there, and later turned into NASCAR. Hopped-up flathead mill, tank of bust-head corn in the trunk, flying through the Tennesse night with the dam federals after them. Back then, like now, Washington didn’t want people to drink what they wanted or smoke what they wanted. They was always sticking their long possum noses where they didn’t belong. And not just in the South. They’d invade anybody they’d ever heard of. Mexico in 1846 and 1916, Spain in 1898, Europe in 1917, on through Iraq and  Yemen, wherever that is, and Afghanistan and I don’t know where all. Anything but mind their own business.

And now we got another Yankee president from Chicago messing with the whole country, turning America into Russia. That sort of thing never did set too well below Mason and Dixon’s Line.

Piety quiz: Which of the following in the decades surrounding the Civil War said over and over that he wanted to send all the black folks to Africa? (1) Susan Anthony (2) Pallas Athena (3) Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst (4) Abraham Lincoln. Hint….

But enough about Washington, the world’s central deposit of oleaginous purity. Let’s talk about cars. Dixie was a car culture from when it first got the chance. It still is. I remember when, come summer, at umpty-dozen tracks the night howled and yowled and roared as muscle cars raced, taching high and sometimes blowing rods but things don’t always turn out perfect.  In the stands they drank beer out of paper cups and hollered for Jimmy Jack or Joe Bob to take the lead. It was their place in the world and they were doing what they liked with people they liked and there were no dam feds telling them they had to put catalytic converters on the race cars. Yet.

That was something the South always liked. Being left the hell alone.

On the weekends of races at Road Atlanta, from all over the South, from little towns like Farmville, Virginia, trailers and motor homes towing race cars streamed in. They’d set up and bring out the tool boxes and start prepping for the races the next day. Wives and girlfriends would help and everyone hollered greetings at new arrivals.

The wives and girlfriends were real women, and seemed to think being a woman was a good thing. Men thought it was a good thing, that’s for sure. It was like there were two kinds of people, men and women, instead of just one. It’s a novel concept, I reckon. But we liked it. And they were just nice.

 You could easy tell a Southern gal from a menopausing crocodile. Up North, you’d need a DNA test.
Anyway, half the crowd already knew each other and the others didn’t have to because it was a coomon culture and if you had a race car, you were in.

Greasy-purity quiz: “I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” (1) George Wallace (2) David Duke (3) Nathan Bedford Forrest (4) Abraham Lincoln.

Uh-huh. The Great Emancipator. Himself. How I do love goodness.

Ukraine’s New Navy Chief ‘Defects’ to Russia, Is Now Wanted for Treason


Ukrainian armed forces suffered an immediate setback on Sunday, as its new Navy Chief declared allegiance to the (now Russian-controlled) Crimea.

Rear Admiral Denys Berezovsky had been appointed only the day before, as a new Ukrainian government takes over and finds its first task defending its eastern border against encroaching Russian forces.

Berezovsky made his announcement while standing next to Sergiy Aksyonov, a locally-elected and pro-Russian prime minister, who countermanded orders from Kiev to the Ukrainian navy stationed off the coast of the Crimean peninsula. Berezovsky said he planned to “strictly obey the orders of the supreme commander of the autonomous republic of Crimea.”

He was promptly fired. Kiev has opened a treason investigation against him.

More with video @ Mediaite

1964 Ford GT40 Prototype GT/104, Factory Team Car, Lightweight Chassis

 S147.1 1964 Ford GT40 Prototype GT/104, Factory Team Car, Lightweight Chassis Photo 1

The spark that detonated the famous war between Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari flashed in the spring of 1963. From the drag strips to NASCAR to Indianapolis, Ford’s “Total Performance” image campaign was in full bloom and looking to reach across the ocean to encompass the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Manufacturer’s World Championship. Speculation that Ford was angling to buy Ferrari to those ends proved to be true, but the negotiations went down in flames when Enzo Ferrari suddenly had last minute misgivings and walked out on the pretense of suffering under Ford’s “suffocating bureaucracy.”

Ferrari’s stagecraft left Ford enraged and still with nothing to challenge the competition in Europe, but he did have one very valuable asset: Carroll Shelby, who even then was preparing his own Cobras to contest Le Mans and who bore his own personal grudge against Ferrari. Shelby had also won the 24 Hours for Aston Martin in 1959 and, when Ford asked him to find someone capable of building a Le Mans winner, he considered both Lotus and Cooper before eventually choosing Englishman Eric Broadley, whose Lola GT coupe was very similar to existing Ford designs for a GT endurance racer and was already in testing.

More @ MECUM

The Boneless Wonder Works Magic in Ukraine

 

It took a while for me to figure out how Obama kept drawing red lines that other countries wouldn’t respect.

But now it all seems clear to me: Obama’s using all of the government’s supply of the color red on the deficit. Hence there’s no red left for the lines he draws in foreign policy.

More @ Townhall

Video shows witness body-slamming armed robber at gas station

 Screen grab from a video showing a witness body-slamming an armed robber at the AM/PM at 12890 San Pablo Ave., Richmond, Feb. 26, 2014.

A man attempting to rob a gas station store early Wednesday morning was abruptly stopped thanks to a quick-thinking patron, police said.

Around 1:30 a.m., Michael Corbin, 50, walked into the AM/PM located at 12890 San Pablo Ave. armed with a revolver, said Sgt. Nicole Abetkov. Corbin pointed the gun at the clerk, who grabbed Corbin's hand and tried to wrestle the revolver from his grasp.

Abetkov said another man inside the store heard the commotion and came running, body-slamming Corbin and knocking the gun from his hand.

The man then held Corbin down until police arrived.

More with video @ San Jose Mercury-News

Global Warming Alert: Great Lakes Approaching 100% Ice Cover – For The First Time On Record

 lice-00 (1)

Lake Ontario is the only major holdout, and the forecast there is for extreme cold during the next two weeks.

More @ Real Science

Ukrainian Navy flagship takes Russia’s side – report

Via Ryan

The Ukrainian Krivak class frigate Hetman Sahaydachny (Reuters / Gleb Garanich)

Ukraine’s Navy flagship, the Hetman Sahaidachny frigate, has reportedly refused to follow orders from Kiev, and come over to Russia’s side and is returning home after taking part in NATO operation in the Gulf of Aden flying the Russian naval flag.

There has been conflicting information on where exactly the vessel is, but a Russian senator has confirmed to Izvestia daily that the frigate defected to the Russian side.

Ukraine’s Navy flagship the Hetman Sahaidachny has come over to our side today. It has hung out the St Andrew’s flag,” Senator Igor Morozov, a member of the committee on the international affairs, told Izvestia daily.

More @ RT

Hypocrites of the Worst Sort

 http://www.realverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/real-verse-liberal-hypocrisy.png

The hardest thing for a rational person to understand about the left is its inherent hypocrisy. It is not just the average bit of hypocrisy that all people have simply by being human, it is an intentional type of hypocrisy that allows them impossible political positions. It goes beyond mere justification, or a shrug of the shoulders at some incongruity of opinion, it is an evil sort of ideological hypocrisy that revels in the cleverness of the lie.

One example of this was the Monica Lewinsky affair with Bill Clinton.