Monday, December 19, 2011
Stupidity: Some guy is terrified of Nerf guns or something
I wonder what Barbie dolls do to him?
Via Slate:
...The Barricade is a pretty scary toy, and it’s not even close to being the scariest Nerf gun. (Nerf doesn’t use the g-word; it calls its guns “blasters.”) Indeed, Nerf has become a lot more frightening since I was a kid. In addition to semiautos like the Barricade, today’s arsenal also includes several single-action weapons—guns that don’t use batteries and require you to cock the firing mechanism each time you pull the trigger—and, at the high end, a few full autos, which allow you to keep the trigger depressed while they spew out all their ammo. Nerf weapons feature many other accoutrements, including a variety of ammo-feed mechanisms (Uzi-style replaceable clips, drum magazines, Rambo-like bandoliers); tactical rails, aka places on the gun to mount accessories like the red-dot sight you’ve seen in first-person-shooter video games; and barrel extensions a la James Bond.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been playing with some of the new Nerf guns, and I’ve tied myself in knots thinking about whether ultrarealistic weapons are just harmless fun or whether they reveal something terribly wrong with modern American boyhood...
Scary: EPA wants vastly expanded regulatory power to implement “sustainable development,”
Sustainable development is about making the EPA more “anticipatory” in its approach to environmental issues. In other words, they will implement regulations on unproven models and predictions, not actual occurrences or events. This will be the "future crimes" version of environmentalism. It is time to disband the EPA and start over again.
(Fox News) — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to change how it analyzes problems and makes decisions, in a way that will give it vastly expanded power to regulate businesses, communities and ecosystems in the name of “sustainable development,” the centerpiece of a global United Nations conference slated for Rio de Janeiro next June.
The major focus of the EPA thinking is a weighty study the agency commissioned last year from the National Academies of Science. Published in August, the study, entitled “Sustainability and the U.S. EPA,” cost nearly $700,000 and involved a team of a dozen outside experts and about half as many National Academies staff.
Its aim: how to integrate sustainability “as one of the key drivers within the regulatory responsibilities of EPA.” The panel who wrote the study declares part of its job to be “providing guidance to EPA on how it might implement its existing statutory authority to contribute more fully to a more sustainable-development trajectory for the United States.”
Or, in other words, how to use existing laws to new ends.
Read more here…
Clueless VP Joe Biden: ",the Taliban per se is not our enemy"
Weren't the Taliban hiding, protecting and giving comfort to Osama bin Laden when 9/11 went down? Didn't they continue that after we asked them to stop? If that doesn't make someone our enemy, I don't know what does.
Via The Daily Beast:
Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests. If, in fact, the Taliban is able to collapse the existing government, which is cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us, then that becomes a problem for us.
Eric Holder Plays the Race Card
AG Eric Holder blames criticism of him and Obama on the fact they are African-Americans. The actual reason is incompetence.
(NYT) — [...] In the interview, Mr. Holder offered a glimpse of how he viewed the criticism. He said he thought some critics — like Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who favors allowing the military to handle terrorism suspects over the criminal justice system — are expressing “good faith” arguments about their policy disagreements.
But Mr. Holder contended that many of his other critics — not only elected Republicans but also a broader universe of conservative commentators and bloggers — were instead playing “Washington gotcha” games, portraying them as frequently “conflating things, conveniently leaving some stuff out, construing things to make it seem not quite what it was” to paint him and other department figures in the worst possible light.
Of that group of critics, Mr. Holder said he believed that a few — the “more extreme segment” — were motivated by animus against Mr. Obama and that he served as a stand-in for him. “This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” he said, “both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”
Read more here…
Goodbye and good riddance: North Korea’s Kim Jong Il Dead
Let's hope the next ruler is sane.
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s mercurial and enigmatic longtime leader, has died of heart failure. He was 69.
In a “special broadcast” Monday from the North Korean capital, state media said Kim died of a heart ailment on a train due to a “great mental and physical strain” on Dec. 17 during a “high intensity field inspection.” It said an autopsy was done on Dec. 18 and “fully confirmed” the diagnosis.
Kim is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008, but he had appeared relatively vigorous in photos and video from recent trips to China and Russia and in numerous trips around the country carefully documented by state media. The communist country’s “Dear Leader” – reputed to have had a taste for cigars, cognac and gourmet cuisine – was believed to have had diabetes and heart disease.
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