ricketyclick

Filling out forms is more important than saving lives:

A volunteer coastguard crew face disciplinary action after going to the rescue of a teenage swimmer in a boat that had recently been repaired and was awaiting a seaworthiness inspection.

The four crewmen were on duty at Hope Cove in South Devon when the 15-year-old girl was swept out to sea by a powerful rip tide. They braved heavy surf to launch their 17ft rigid inflatable.

The girl was rescued by a diver and the coastguard crew brought her ashore. But within hours their boat had been confiscated and the station officer and his crew had been threatened with disciplinary action.

…

Ian Pedrick, 49, the station officer, radioed for permission to launch the boat because the girl was already 150 yards out to sea but the crew lost radio contact with coastguard headquarters at Brixham and went ahead with the rescue.

…

Mr Pedrick, who runs the Hope and Anchor pub near the beach, said that he had been ordered by the MCA not to comment on the incident.

Oh, this is priceless.

Giant footprint outlined in yellow fireworks.

Part of the Olympic opening fireworks display — a series of giant footprints in the sky –  was faked.

Steven Den Beste comments:

What I like best about this story is the reason why the Olympic committee did it: they were afraid that Beijing smog would make a real fireworks display look terrible.

Snort.

No, I’m not going to be oohing and aahing over the damn Olympics this year, any more than I’ll be praising the next Arafat Peace Prize winner. Billy Beck explains why:

I can’t help it: it really does strike me that the Chinese might’ve thought much better than to hire one Albert Speer as a central planner on the Olympic Games. That would be: the son of that Albert Speer.

Bonus curiosity: the Taipei Times article is written by Nina Khrushcheva. That’s Nikita Khrushchev’s grand-daughter.

Now that, right there, is what we can reasonably call diagnostic. But it’s not the quote of the day, just a plain reciting of fact.

Beck’s trade is lighting rock shows. When he sees a show, he can tell exactly what was involved in putting it on.

All over the net, I’ve seen various ravings about the Opening Ceremony. That was the biggest cued lighting production I ever saw. The scale of automated lights control was out of hand.

…

The fly-rigging was amazing, and I’d love to see the drawings. What you saw the other night was the biggest extension of rock production technology to date, and make no mistake that that’s not what it was. None of it will ever tour, but almost everything about the hardware and a great deal of the design (color saturation, for instance) can be traced directly back to San Francisco acid shows in the 1960’s, the principles and aspirations of which rock-tour crews have been dragging around ever since.

The development of that hippie technology, by the way, is the result of applied capitalism, not applied socialism, much  less communism.

From the cold eye of technique, this show was a stupendous integration of applied technology. This is what the craft can do today: show you a real-live illusion of a man running along an unfolding scroll over a hundred and fifty feet in the air along a circumference of over fifteen hundred feet.

What it cannot do is abstract the ethical purpose to which it’s put.

It was all very pretty, but I couldn’t like the look of it. If I had the fruits of over a billion peoples’ labor at my disposal, I should hope that I could paint big pretty pictures, too.

You want to know about another venue for pretty pictures?

North Korea, whose beloved leader Kim il Poofy Hair has a thing for huge flash card displays and mass dance routines. Watch the video at that link, and understand: those thousands of faceless performers are not fulfilling their own dreams, they are acting out the commands of a ruthless dictator who could order any of them to his bedroom, his torture chamber, or the firing squad, as easily as he could order these displays.

I haven’t seen the Olympic opening show. I plan not to, and I plan to spoil the enjoyment of anyone who tries to watch it in my presence.

It’s bright paint on the face of a hideous demon.

Beck has more words on the technicalities and its implications in a follow up here.

I first heard a bit of the Irish traditional “Molly Malone” as a bit of parody by comedian Alan Sherman. Now comes Sinead O’Connor to sing it as it should be sung.
Fair warning: have the tissues ready, or a hand to hold, or a child to hug.

[link, in case the embed doesn't work.]
Tip o’ the hat to Breda.

I poked around on Youtube after that, and found…lots more, after the jump:
Read the rest of this entry »

The United Nations thinks rape as a military tactic is a bad thing, m-kay?

They want us all to spread this cross-armed gesture in protest:

However, this reminds Breda of Oleg Volk’s version of the same gesture:

Except, of course, the UN doesn’t think anyone but them should have a gun to actually do something about rape:

Probably because, of course, if women were armed they’d shoot at the UN personnel raping them.

US out of UN. UN out of US. The United Nations is a scandal. It’s been hijacked by tyrants and pirates. It advocates the cowardly peace of surrender, not the bright clash of liberty. I’m sick of my nation hosting it and supporting it.

To believe in gun control, you must believe a woman lying raped and strangled with her own pantyhose is morally superior to a woman standing over a dead rapist with a smoking gun in her hand.

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representative, represents these San Franciscans, attending the “Up Your Alley” street political demonstration. This is not a private party on private property, closed off from the public, but a public event, officially sanctioned by the SF city government. Budweiser is a sponsor, although their presence is much reduced after last year’s Folsom Street Fair.

The given link goes to a content-warning page, rather than directly to the photos.Take that warning very seriously, but click through, blurred or unblurred, and take a quick look.

These are the folk who put Pelosi in office, that she is beholden to.

We’re supposed to be tolerant of “gays”, because, hey, there’s not enough love in the world, is there? And who are we to deny it wherever it blossoms?

Do you see anything here suggestive or supportive of stable, long-term loving relationships?

Gay Marriage? See anybody here you’d trust to so much as sell you diapers, much less raise children of their own?

I regularly see charity panhandlers here in Houston, soliciting for “AIDS Awareness”. Do you really believe that these people are not intimately, personally aware of AIDS and its risks? Seriously, folks, how much do think the government needs to spend to make this kind of behavior even remotely “safe”? And why should I pay for it?

I’m told that one of the pictures shows a hepatitis testing station; I don’t want to go looking for it. Gosh, I don’t remember seeing one of those at the last gun show I attended. (Although perhaps a cholesterol testing station wouldn’t be totally out of place….) I’m struggling to imagine behavior this careless being tolerated at a gun show. I’m struggling to imagine the kinds of restrictions placed on personal behavior at gun shows  being enforced here. Tell me again, who are the dangerous, irresponsible ones?

Oh, yeah: I dare you to try to get a permit to hold an open-air gun show on the streets of SF. Or here in Houston, for that matter. Go ahead. I dare you.

And yes, which public event supports an activity explicitly protected by the Constitution? What’s that you say? There’s a “penumbra” around the First Amendment right to assembly that permits public fornication, but the Second Amendment doesn’t really mean what it says about a “right of the people” and “shall not be infringed”? You know what, asshole? Piss off. But in private, please.

And again, don’t you dare, don’t you fucking dare, try to lecture me about how angry I get here.

By the way, I still support these guys. I still say that, barring felony records, even the people in Zombie’s photo have the right to keep and bear arms.

These pictures are courtesy of the anonymous Zombie Time, who devotes a lot of time photographing leftist, socialist, Democratic, homosexual, and antiwar public demonstrations in the SF area, and putting the pictures up for all to see.

For instance, here’s Zombie’s photo essay on the Code Pink demonstrations and vandalism at the Berkeley Marine Recruiting Station, officially sanctioned by the Berkeley city government. The Marines, by the way, were recently denied a permit to film one of their drill teams for a recruiting video in the Bay area. Do you really think the Marines would be more disruptive, more dangerous, more in violation of American ideals, than Up Your Alley?

Mike at Cold Fury excerpts two great articles contrasting the fascination of the socialist left with tyranny,  and what happens when you really do speak truth to power.

Excerpting his excerpts, here’s a whiff of Ralph Peters:

The extreme left loves to pretend it stands for freedom. It never has and never will. From the Reign of Terror in Paris onward, its core agenda has been the tyranny of egomaniacal intellectuals. The hard left hates an open debate - especially these days, when it’s out of new ideas.

The truly outrageous aspect of such comparisons is that the American left, with its Stalin-redux willingness to rearrange history, neglects to mention that, outside of Japan, all of the 20th century’s great totalitarian regimes had roots on the political left.

[Note: Japan's regime arose from a true imperialism, not capitalism or libertarianism.]

And a good strong snort of Christopher Hitchens, himself a leftist who seems to be waking up:

The simplest way of phrasing it is to say that Solzhenitsyn lived “as if.” Barely deigning to notice the sniggering, pick-nose bullies who followed him and harassed him, he carried on “as if” he were a free citizen, “as if” he had the right to study his own country’s history, “as if” there were such a thing as human dignity.

Read the whole things, all three of them.

I’ll be updating for as long as Reliant Energy, Comcast, and the elements allow.

18:50 OK, then. Yeah, it rained some. Yeah, there’s some leaves on the ground, so we evidently had some wind while I napped this afternoon. Yeah, some neighborhoods lost power. Mostly, though, this was a practice exercise, a drill for emergency procedures. Good. Everybody has fresh batteries, fresh bottled water, well-stocked pantries. We’re ready if/when a real storm or other disaster hits.

Nothing, however, nothing to justify the intense news coverage.

10:45 Hm, the second band, now approaching, seems wider and heavier than the first, and is getting heavier.

10:37 Edouard continues to non-eventuate. There’s two main rainbands; I’m currently in the quiet zone between them. The first one was moderately heavy, light gusting winds.

I had to go out as the first one went over to, yes, clean my gutters. I have to have gutters to keep the water away from the house, particularly the back patio, but they clog repeatedly through the season. Yes, I should have cleaned them yesterday.

A year or two after mine went up, leaf-shedding covers became popular. My sister and parents have them; they seem to work. I’m looking at a retro-fit, because I’m tired of looking out my kitchen window and seeing a waterfall, and having to go out in the rain to clean them. It doesn’t help that I always forget that if I just wait half an hour, the rain will let up, as just happened.

09:00 Non-event so far. Light rain, no significant wind, no lightning. Current radar is yellow over my area, and the red bands fade out as they approach.

Here’s my favorite radar, which presents a synopsis of the storm’s history.

07:05 Eduoard makes landfall, per KHOU. We’re on the “dirty side”, which, oddly, is the west side.

06:45 I woke up at about 6:30. It has just started raining; the ground is just getting wet, and water hasn’t started coming out of the house gutters yet. It’s calm and muggy.

Yeah, yeah, Edouard, baby, if you want center stage, you have to make your cue. You’re late.

And, cripes, man: you aren’t following your designated path, but The Big Too Easy is right on target:

Well, OK, “Freud” would be the next one, but of course, wrong sex alternation.

Damn you all who failed to follow Lord Obama’s advice to keep your tires properly inflated and thus avert global warming and Hurricane Edouard!

You sexist pigs, don’t you know women and children will be hardest hit? Particularly the ones with darker skins, you racist bastards?

Don’t you wish St. O was already in the Oval Office, pre-emptively sending necessary storm aid directly to your front door?

So, anyway, it’s probably gonna start blowin’ and rainin’ pretty darn hard sometime late tonight, or early tomorrow morning; center should make landfall early Tuesday afternoon. Unless something completely freakish happens, we’ll probably see 5-10″ of rain here.

Per Kim Du Toit, re a headline that came out just before Mr. E started to get himself organized:

Texas plagued by heat, drought, water parasite, wildfires

So… everything’s normal, then.

I guess we don’t have to worry about that now.