4 Mile Creek

Cutting Off Socialist Nose to Spite Communist Face

Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia have signed a trade agreement. 

With Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez seated nearby, President Evo Morales signed an updated version of the so-called Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, adding Bolivia as a third member.

"In Cuba and Venezuela we find unconditional solidarity," Morales said. "They are the best allies for changing Bolivia."

Not everyone was cheering this new-found unconditional solidarity. 

Their leaders' embrace of the socialist-tinged ALBA has rattled Bolivian and Venezuelan business leaders.

"The government should reach out more to the business sector and create a common agenda, figure out what markets interest us, where there are possibilities and separate the ideological and political from trade and economy," said Gary Rodriguez, general manager of the Bolivian Foreign Trade Institute.

Yeah, no shit. 

Last year, Bolivia delivered almost 300 million dollars worth of exports to the US.  According to this article in CNN, Bolivia exported just $5,291 worth of goods to Cuba.  That figure has no (in thousands) behind it.  Bolivia exported to Cuba, the entire country of Cuba, goods and services equivalent in value to a used 1999 Buick Lesabre.  There are only so many Che t-shirts to be sold on that island.  A changing Bolivia is what he's about to get, although it's hard to imagine Bolivia getting any more poverty stricken than it is now.   

In order to thumb their nose at President Bush and the US, Cuba, Venezuela (exports to the US in 2005, almost $34 billion) and Bolivia have signed a pact to trade with each other, instead of the most lucrative market on the planet (total value of goods imported into the US in 2005, $1.67 trillion). 

Looks like we've managed to export BDS. 

An Easy Choice

Some are proud of their efforts toward freedom.

Others are proud of their efforts to keep that freedom from them.

   

Nobody Asked You To

Imagine how cowardly you'd have to be to consider doing this.  Now imagine the courage it takes to really make a difference in the world.   

What on earth would make a bunch of prissy college students think that anyone would want them to fight a war?   "We won't fight your wars!"  Well duh, no shit.  Wars aren't something we want to lose, and we aren't in some kind of debate with islamic fascism. 

Looks like another "quiet, sensitive, guitar-playing would-be poet" got their girlfriend stolen by a soldier (or sailor, or airman, or marine....or all four) and they had to reassert their manhood somehow.  Good job, dude.  Next time, consider doing it when the ROTC students are inside. 

The Princess Bride

My kids loved the movie The Princess Bride.  I really liked it too.  All of the soldiers I've asked, who have seen the movie, also liked it.  Two of the captains in my unit drop quotes from the movie into their conversations.  Battle-hardened soldiers on their second tour in a war zone, laughing at each other's favorite quotes from a movie called The Princess Bride. 

I'm not going to miss the Army when I retire, but I will miss the soldiers. 

We Support the Troops, No Really

I'm gonna go waaaay out on a limb here, and say that these folk all voted for John Kerry. 

Jealousy is such an ugly thing.  A story about tongues gets these Lefties into such a rage, they write 350-word screeds about how much they hate all US servicemembers.

"THE TROOPS....

MURDEROUS LOSERS WITH NO PROSPECTS WHO FINALLY HAVE POWER... THE POWER OF LIFE OR DEATH OVER INNOCENT CIVILIANS, WOW, FINALLY! THEY'RE SOMEBODY "IMPORTANT". I MEAN THE POWER OF LIFE AND DEATH, THAT'S PRETTY IMPORTANT AIN'T IT?.

THE SAME LOWLIFE VERMIN WITH THE MURDER AND TORTURE GENES TURNED ON , JUST AS YOU FIND IN NAZI CAMPS AND ELSEWHERE. WHY DO YOU MORONS GLORIFY THIS SUBHUMAN SCUM? THEY'RE NOT ameriKKKa's finest, THEY ARE OUR SHAME, THE INTRUMENT OF OUR UTTER HYPOCRISY AND OUR GREATEST CRIMES. DON'T TELL ME THAT BATCH DOESN'T GET AN ORGASM OVER KILLING AND TORTURING. WE ALL KNOW THEY DO. ALL OF THEM, NOT ONE INDIVIDUAL EVER ABLE TO REDEEM THE COLLECTIVE CRIMINAL DEEDS.

And don't tell me that Lefty didn't have a woody when he wrote that little bit of Democratic Party boilerplate.  You know what they say; Those who can - do.  Those who can't - teach.  Those who don't have the balls to even try - become Liberals.    

I'm thinking that with this kind of public display being acceptable on mainstream Lefty blogs, by November the general public should have a pretty good idea where the Democratic Party stands on national defense.  I guess conservative bloggers could write about how much the Left hates America, but it's OBE.  They write it all down themselves.  In caps. 

(hattip to Mudville Gazette for noticing how much they really do support the troops)

Same Shots, Same Barrel, Different Fish

Some Lefty named DonaldJ really knows how to cut through the bull and get to heart of the matter.  He writes to me, wanting to comment on...well, I'll just let him take the floor.  (Note: all the "..." pauses are exactly as DonaldJ wrote them.  I'm just guessing, but I think they are the times he paused at the keyboard to take another hit off his bong.) 

The afterlife doesn't want bullies...  The greatest Samurai ever stated "Samurai who kill, killed his afterlife"...   America doesn't pay its soldiers enough...

I wonder, do all Samurai talk like the cook on Bonanaza? 

When the big picture finally comes clear, Arabia will probably be a hundred dish shaped impressions in the sands.. and the nuclear clouds will have extincted all the planet's fragile pollinators.. and Americans in radioactive protection gear will be mining all that free oil..

Extincted?  Mining oil?

and our forests and fields will be in the first stages of turning into desserts..

Yum!   I just love forest and field desserts. 

and most of us will be running out of food, as the planet and all life fades into oblivion...

Wait, I thought DonaldJ just said that our forests and fields were going to turn into desserts?  How can we run out of food?  Oh, I guess DonaldJ means healthy food, like granola.  Hey, if we mutate due to all the radioactivity, people may not even need food!  Did Donald J even think of that?

America started as the 13-colonies.. Britannia cast out from Britain... Criminals and terminally sick, banished to "the new world"... concentrating into their "13-colonies".. and doing things like giving their smallpox infected hospital blankets to the indigenous north Americans.. to exterminate then, to eliminate land claim controversy...

No controversy.  A people get to keep what land they can defend.  That's the way it has been for all of history.  American history too.  Not that DonaldJ knows much about history. 

Then America had their civil war.. and their Salem.. and their prohibition.. and their DEA concoction..

Once again, back to the heart of the matter.  Not enough drugs.  It appears to me that the DEA isn't having much effect on the quantity of drugs available to DonaldJ, but they may be affecting the price, which really seems to piss him off.

in which they perpetually terrorized and violated their own peoples, and the world's peoples...
Pot is just a nearly instant laxative, and a relaxant...

Not an image I want, but go ahead. 

What is America so afraid of, that it must terrorize the whole world to try to prevent humans from using THC?..

I thought this was about mining free oil?  Now it's about THC?

The old Indian chiefs put a little pot in the peace pipe, to make the Whiteman need to run to the bushes for a dump, to get and keep the whiteman's shit out of the party equation, so they could party all night, without having to listen to British vomituous religious shit... But through the stone the Brittanies saw through their religions, the evils their religions are.. and they blamed the Indian peace pipe for showing them the shit that they are.. and labeled the Indian evil for showing them the evil they are... so the Americans terrorized the Indian peoples till they were nearly none.. for god.. like America is slaughtering Arabia for god's oil...

Carlos Castenada would be very, very proud of DonaldJ. 

Heck!.. just a decade ago Nixon started a policy to air defoliate all the cocaine bushes on the planet..

Richard Nixon died on April 22nd, 1994, 12 years before this moron writes that it was "just a decade ago" that Nixon was in power setting policy to "air defoliate".  Dude, it may seem like just a decade, but dude, I'm tellin' ya', it's been nearly forty years, man!

till someone told him that's where our chocolate comes from... I bet ole Nixon sure had Cadbury and Hershy freakin' out for a while...

Cocaine comes from the plant Erythroxylum Coca Lam, chocolate comes from the plant Theobroma cacao.  Cadbury and Hersheys certainly know which plant they use to get chocolate from, so I doubt that they were freakin' out.  My guess is that a lot of stoners were freakin' out on this urban legend, though.

9/11 was the Arabs screaming at Amwerica, "GET YOUR HELL OUT OF OUR LIVES... It was the only option America left open to Arabia for them to get America's attention, to get America's insane DEA crap to get out of their lives...

Arabs and DEA? There's a new paranoid conspiracy theory for ya'. 

They had those herbals millenia before there was an America...Who in Hell is America to say they can't use them?..

My guess is that DonaldJ has been ignoring America anyway, and going right ahead and using "those herbals".

That would be like a North American T.Rex telling an Arabia T.Rex what critters it can and can't eat... Well SHIT on that!...

Whaaa?

Get out of our lives America! We DO Not want to be like you.. and we don't want anything to do with your goddamned insane god bullshit!... Build a mile tall wall around America.. then the "bad drugs" that your fear so much won't come into America... and get your hell the hell out of our lives! you kooks!.. We do not want you to destroy our planet with a nuclear war!.. This is our god damned fucking HOME!!!

Wow, okay.  The sheer intellectual force of DonaldJ's argument is enough to make me want to leave Baghdad and go home.  Why can't these great minds get together and put some people into political power who know the real deal, so America can start using its power for good instead of evil?  Oh, that's right, they have. 

Defiant Zarqawi

Good ol' CNN.  If Zarqawi can expect a soft landing anywhere, it's on CNN. 

Like last month, when everyone else was reporting that there were major fights breaking out all over Iraq between Sunnis and Al Queda in Iraq, CNN was reporting that al Zarqawi was "gaining ground"!  The first two sentences could have come straight out of the opening of a spy/war novel:

"Iraq is on a knife-edge, bleeding and possibly headed to civil war, if not already there.

And Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is tightening his grip on the handle of that knife, according to those close to the situation."

How close is close, you might ask?  I mean if you are taking the word of someone that Iraq is on a knife-edge, and al Zarqawi is tightening his grip, then you'd want to know that they had that information first hand.  Unless you are CNN; then the requirement is not that tight.

"Listen to Sheik Zeidan, once one of the most prominent tribal chieftains in Anbar province, now an exile across the border in Jordan."

Oh....across an international border.  In Jordan.  Once prominent, now in exile.  No ax to grind with this guy!  So sheik Zeidan is interviewed by CNN concerning al Zarqawi and his influence in Iraq, and the sheik isn't even in Iraq!  Good job.  It's like interviewing Juan Cole about current issues in Iraq, only to find his area of expertise is 18th century arabia, and he's never even been to Iraq.  But CNN doesn't have to depend upon chickenshit sheiks who abandon their family's historical tribal lands at the first sign of personal danger, to get the latest news on Zarqawi.  They need only wait for the delivery of a videotape directly from Zarqawi himself, and they are off and running. 

Defiant al-Zarqawi shows face on video

Followers told to keep faith; U.S.-led effort in Iraq mocked

Defiant!  US efforts mocked!  And that's just the headlines.  In the story, CNN goes on to display why they've become the preferred method for terrorists worldwide to get their story out.

One of the masked fighters in the video says that insurgents have been able to develop two missiles each with a 40-kilometer (25-mile) range and a payload of 50 kilograms (110 pounds).

One of the missiles seen has Qaeda 1 written on it. Another says Quds 1. Quds means Jerusalem in Arabic. An insurgent says it is capable of penetrating armor and that they plan to use it soon.

The fighter says militants were able to kill soldiers and infidels and that it performed well in an unnamed city in Anbar.

Does that seem plausible to you?  That a bunch of al Queda terrorists were able to develop a missile capable of delivering a 50 Kg warhead 45 Kms?  It apparently seems plausible to CNN, since they report it without question or comment.  Maybe they had help from the Iranian rocket scientists who developed that 250 mph torpedo, or the super modern flying boat (both of which were reported by CNN without the least bit of skepticism)!  One can only imagine a world where CNN allowed the same level of belief in a spokesperson when they report on any of the weapons that now comprise the US missile defense system. 

I guess you could plausibly say that al Zarqawi was "defiant" since he did take off his standard jihadi facemask.  And you could say that he "mocked" the US in the tape, being "shown standing in a dusty, barren field, wielding a firearm."  As far as I'm concerned, that's the textbook definition of defiance and mocking.  Standing alone in a dusty, barren field, wielding a firearm.  Next to a big cardboard missile with Queda 1 spray-painted on it.  Waiting on the flying boat. 

(Note: picture is from CNN.  Sure looks like Zarqawi, though I'm not sure what's up with the Maine lobsterman look)

Anzac Day

Today is Anzac Day.  Hello to all the diggers out there, I am proud to count you as mates. 

In Inverse Proportion to Reality

If you are going to be quoted in the local newspaper about how wrong you think President Bush is, it dilutes your effect when your quote instead just shows what an idiot you are. 

"It feels like a slap in the face having President Bush come here on Earth Day," said Curtis Harding, 24, who grew up in St. Helena and lives in Sacramento. "I could go yell somewhere else, but people would think I'm crazy."

Harding said Bush's policies are harming the environment, and added that "when a bomb goes off, that has a huge, indirect effect on global warming."

One bomb has a huge effect?  You sure about that, Curtis?  According to this study, it would take a lot more than one bomb. 

"Our baseline case, as in many other studies, was a 5000-megaton war with only a modest fraction of the yield (20 percent) expended on urban or industrial targets."

That's 5,000 megatons, buddy.  A little bit more than one bomb.  Five thousand megatons is the equivalent of five thousand million tons of high explosive.  Let's say the average bomb dropped today by the US has 500 lbs of high explosive.  A one-megaton bomb is equivalent to 4 million regular bombs.  5000 one-megaton bombs is equivalent to 20 billion regular bombs. So the study done by Carl Sagan to see what kind of effect a war would have on the environment used for a baseline, the equivalent of 20 billion bombs.  Curtis is almost correct, except he's off by a factor of twenty billion. When you are insulting Bush, that's close enough for most lefties.  They are, after all, the "reality-based community."

Oh, and the word he used, "indirect" is wrong as well.  According to the study noted above, the world would actually get cooler when 5000 megatons "go off".  The word Curtis wanted was inverse, not indirect.  Moron.  So he's only off by a factor of twenty billion, and 180 degrees out. 

Curtis, if you are that worried about global warming, you should be begging Bush to drop more bombs!  Several million more bombs.  According to Carl Sagan, that should about do the trick to fix the global warming problem. 

Sometimes commenting on how stupid Lefties are, is like shooting fish in a barrel. 

(hattip to Tim Blair for pointing out yet another moronic Lefty quote.)   

A Certain Cachet

We find a lot of weapons caches around here.  And there are reports of sectarian violence almost every day.  But that's not always what gets reported. 

A weapons "cache" is pronouned as "cash".  Easy for me, one of my favorite fishing spots was along the Cache La Poudre river, and the word poudre is harder for me to pronounce than the word cache.  Multiple weapons caches are pronounced as "cashes".  Around here, you will hear many soldiers pronounce it as cachet.  Both the singular cache, and the plural caches.  I guess they want to add a certain je ne sai qua to the rather bourgeois work of reporting on caches.

The pronunciation funnies don't end there.  Hearing how the word sectarian gets pronounced is amusing as well.  We hear a lot about "secretarian violence".  (I personally don't advocate secretarian violence unless the secretaries are...uh...well endowed.) 

The world of the soldier.  We have guys who can correctly pronounce Ayman al Zawahiri and Sheikh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.  There are soldiers who sound like a native when they tell stories about how cold it was stationed at Bad Kreuznach and Reykyavik.  But throw in cache and sectarian, and it's like English as a second language.