"The Zeonians came equipped with the answers to the universe. Vern, regrettably, came with thick glasses and a deer rifle."
- Gary Larson, The Far Side
A Fairfield man was arrested Thursday morning after buying a high powered rifle to stop an alien invasion, police said.
Fairfield Police Sgt. James Perez said Dane Eisenman, 57, responded to a classified advertisement for a .30-06 rifle about a month ago. While filing out the paper for the rifle, police said, he mentioned to the seller what he would be using the weapon for.
"He said he was going to use the weapon to kill aliens," Perez said.
The seller was unsure if Eisenman was referring to space aliens or illegal aliens, Perez added. Sgt. Perez said Eisenman told the seller of the rifle every 36,000 years, aliens who live under the sun come to Earth to kill humans, and he needed to be prepared because "They're going to be coming soon." Well, Mexicans do live under the sun, along with the rest of us, but the 36,000 year cycle would seem to indicate something a bit more exotic than our friends from south of the Rio Grande.
After the sale of the rifle, the man reported Eisenman to police. Sgt. Perez said Eisenman, who is a convicted felon, is legally prohibited from buying or owning a hand gun or rifle. Check out this freak's mugshot. Meth: Bad for America, bad for ET.
Eisenman turned himself into police thursday morning and was charged with charge of criminal possession of a firearm. He will be arraigned in Bridgeport Superior Court on July 9.
As the convoy charged north, we flew south, blistering along at well over one hundred knots, Parker working with his M-60 from the right side of the aircraft. His tracers were impacting on the spider holes as we ripped past, his targets not more than ten to twenty yards from his muzzle. We were so low that if someone had reached up out of a truck or tank turret, they probably could have caught our skid.
"Suddenly, not more than a hundred yards to my front, a five-thousand-gallon tanker truck took a direct RPG hit, and the diesel fuel it was carrying exploded like a nuclear bomb. Sheets of flame, parts of the truck, smoke, and dust shot up, momentarily blinding me. The little OH-6 lurched violently with the shock of the explosion, as though a giant unseen fist had landed a smashing blow to the nose of the aircraft.
This excerpt is from Low Level Hell: A Scout Pilot in the Big Red One, written by Lt. Col. (Ret.) Hugh Mills, who served three tours in Vietnam as a pilot in the 1st Infantry Division. The 300 pages of the book maintain the same intensity seen in this brief excerpt, depicting Mills actions in Vietnam that inspired his nomination for the Order of St. Michael award.
Named after the biblical archangel charged with the waging war against evil, the Order of St. Michael award is bestowed upon aviators who have significantly contributed to Army aviation. The legendary image of St. Michael standing over a defeated dragon is a symbol of Army aviations prowess on the battlefield.
Leaders of the Combat Aviation Brigade, 1st ID inducted Mills and four active-duty, 1st ID aviators in to the order, Jan. 23, 17 years after Mills retirement from the Army.
Its a ceremony thats steeped in tradition, said Lt. Col. Kenneth Chase, commander of the 1st Squadron, 6th Cavalry Regiment. Chase individually knighted each aviator using the command saber, a ceremonial sword symbolic of the cavalrys direct lineage to the days of horse-mounted combat.
I was totally shocked, it didnt occur to me that I was going to be included in the ceremony, said Mills.
To many air cavalry pilots, however, Mills induction is no surprise. First Lt. Kurt Hunt, a pilot with Troop C, 1-6 CAV, is among the many aviators who have read Low Level Hell.
A combination of his and his fellow scout pilots tactics, techniques and procedures are still being widely used today, said Hunt, whos copy of the book is full of brightly colored pieces of paper, marking passages that hold special importance to him.
It is an integral part of history for myself, said Hunt. He was a lieutenant platoon leader in a scout platoon, in the Big Red One, much like I am today.
It is hard to find a cavalry pilot who has not read Mills book, or at least heard of him. Mills recognizes the success of his book, but holds that it is the only difference between him and his peers.
Im not any better than my brothers who were scouts, its simply because I took the time to write the book, he said.
For the aviators that continue in the spurs of Mills and his peers, it is important to recognize the service of their predecessors with awards such as the Order of St. Michael.
We look up to aviators like Mills, said Hunt. I dont see how we couldnt. I could only hope that later on people will look back at my generation the way we look back at Mills.
Lt. Col. Kenneth Chase, commander of the 1-6 CAV, CAB, knights Lt. Col. (Ret.) Hugh Mills as CAB Commander Col. Frank Muth dons Chief Warrant Officer 4 Mike Lee with the Order of St. Michaels medal during an induction ceremony, Jan. 23. Mills and four other 1st Infantry Division aviators were inducted in to the Order of St. Michael, one of the highest honors bestowed upon an Army aviator.
Share in BP rose 3.5pc to 333.3p in London, following weekend speculation that the company had been in contact with sovereign wealth funds about them buying stakes.
Shokri Ghanem, the chairman of Libya's National Oil Corporation, told a newswire that: "BP is interesting now with the price lower by half and I still have trust in BP. I will recommend it to the Libyan Investment Authority."
He later added: "I think that BP shares are good value for bargain hunters,"
BP denied that it was planning to issue any new equity, but a weighty shareholder buying up stock on the open market could still help provide a floor on the company's plummeting share price. It declined to comment on any talks with sovereign wealth funds.
The oil giant has lost half of its market value since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank on April 20, triggering a catastrophic leak. Qatar, Abu Dhabi and the Kuwait Investment Authority, which already holds 1.8pc of BP, have also been linked to the company as possible investors.
One City analyst with a buy rating on BP said any formal deal with Libya would "most likely alienate the US even further" and potentially annoy big shareholders if the deal was done as a placing that dilutes the stock.
Religious liberal Nasr Abu Zayd, an Egyptian Koranic scholar declared an apostate for challenging mainstream Muslim views on the holy book, died on Monday in a Cairo hospital, aged 66.
Abu Zayd held a liberal, critical approach to Islamic teachings that angered some Muslim conservatives in his homeland in the 1990s, a decade when President Hosni Mubarak's government was combating an uprising by armed Islamic militants. Abu Zayd critiqued the use of religion to exert political power. He argued the Koran was both a literary and religious text which clashes with Islamic teaching which sees the holy book as the final revelation of God. "I am anti-dogma," he told Reuters in 2008. "It's a meaning produced by humans, and I don't find that I am going outside the domain of religion if I challenge this dogma."
Analysts said his approach challenged Egypt's mainstream Islamic thinkers and popular sentiment in a country where conservative Islamic trends have been on the rise, reflected in part by the prevalence of the Islamic veil. Islam should be understood in its historical, geographic and cultural background, he argued, adding that "pure Islam" did not exist and even the Koran was "a collection of discourses."
In 1995, an Egyptian sharia court declared Abu Zayd an apostate from Islam, annulled his marriage and effectively forced him and his wife into exile. Abu Zayd and his wife moved to the Netherlands after he received death threats, notably from the Islamic Jihad group led by Ayman al-Zawahri, who has since become deputy leader of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. But he had quietly returned to his homeland in recent years, first for lectures and later staying for health reasons.
"His methodological approaches toward Koranic revelation are based on Western critiques of the Bible or the application of social and historical readings to text," said Hossam Tamam, head of Islameyoon, a website about Islamist movements.
Abu Zayd compared Arab rulers unfavorably to leaders elsewhere in the Muslim world such as Iran and Turkey, where he said religious debate was comparatively free-flowing. "Religion has been used, politicized, not only by groups but also the official institutions in every Arab country," he told Reuters in 2008, adding the distinction between "the domain of religion and secular space" had been eroded. "I'm sure that I'm a Muslim. My worst fear is that people in Europe may consider and treat me as a critic of Islam. I'm not. I'm not a new Salman Rushdie, and don't want to be welcomed and treated as such. I'm a researcher," he told the weekly [sic].
Egypt's official news agency MENA said he died on Monday in Sheikh Zayed Hospital in Cairo where he was being treated for an unidentified illness. He was buried the same day in his village near Tanta, in the Nile Delta, witnesses said.
Shoaib Choudhury, a Muslim Zionist in Bangladesh, told Israel National Radios Yishai Fleisher last week, Political Islam and hate speech are our biggest enemies. Choudhury is the editor of the Weekly Blitz, which he calls the only anti-jihadist newspaper in the Muslim world. He is also an author, lyricist, movie director and peace activist and was held in solitary confinement for 17 months because he wanted to visit Israel.
I started this newspaper in 03, Choudhury told Fleisher, and at the time, the Hebrew Writers Association in Tel Aviv invited me to take part in a symposium. On my way to Israel, I was stopped and arrested at the international airport in Dhaka. They labeled me a Zionist and an Israeli spy, interrogated me and tortured me for ten days, and then imprisoned me for 17 months in solitary confinement, until 2005.
Choudhurys latest book, Inside Madrassa, published in October 2009, gives extensive information on education in Muslim schools known as madrassahs, including material on Jihadist orientation, hate speech and other aspects of radical Islam taught there. He opened a branch of the Israel-based International Forum for Literature and Culture of Peace in Bangladesh, and has authored articles critical of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic attitudes in Muslim countries.
Asked how he came to sympathize with Jews, Choudhury said, My father used to tell me not to believe the weekly hate speeches against Christian and Jews that we would hear in the mosques. I tried to follow this advice, and later on I kept an open mind when I met Jews - and now I have thousands of Jewish friends.
Among them he mentioned Dr. Richard Benkin, who did not give up and worked to have me freed from jail Many of my relatives abandoned me, but Benkin did not, and he got me out of jail. Benkin is currently helping Bangladeshi Hindu refugees in West Bengal and elsewhere secure basic rights, especially protection from attempted genocide by Islamist radicals. He is a strong pro-Israel advocate who believes Jews and Hindus must unite to defeat radical Islam.
Choudhury described his newspaper as the only paper in the Muslim world in which you can find untwisted news about Israel We have tremendous adversity, though we have 37,000 readers of the print version I believe that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and as a Muslim, I believe that the only problem is political Islam and the hate speech, and if these can stop, then all Muslims will be like me "
"We have been able to get an Islamic anti-Semitism group banned in Bangladesh, and theres another group thats on its way to being banned as well. The problem is political Islam, which is present in all Islamic countries and is now growing in the West, too. In the U.S. there are 600 congregations preaching jihad. We must raise our voices against the misinterpretation of the Quran.
On an optimistic note, Choudhury noted that changes have been made; there are voices now in favor of Israel in Bangladesh, which would have been impossible in 2003.
If you can't pay your bills, you can't keep your job.
That's what it has come down to for 39 employees at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service. The employees have been terminated or indefinitely suspended after they were found "ineligible" to meet security requirements of the job.
The majority of DFAS employees cleared the background check without an issue. But for the 39 employees, the background checks for most revealed a long-term "pattern" of financial mishandling coupled with personal misconduct. Only a few had solely financial issues.
[Iran Press TV Latest] Exit polls in Poland's presidential run-off show liberal Bronislaw Komorowski has defeated the late president's identical twin Jaroslaw Kaczynski by a narrow margin.
That would be the European definition of liberal, which is equivalent to what Americans think of as conservative.
Bronislaw Komorowski of the ruling Civic Platform is projected to have won 53.1 percent of the vote against conservative leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski of the opposition Law and Justice Party with 46.9 percent, according to exit polls by the TNS OBOP institute released late on Sunday.
The run-off came after both main rivals -- Komorowski and Kaczynski -- failed to secure an overwhelming majority of ballots needed in the first round of the vote, which was forced by the death of former President Lech Kaczynski in an air tragedy on April 10.
Buoyed up following the release of the exit polls, Komorowski addressed his supporters at his campaign headquarters, saying "This is a victory for Polish democracy".
On the other side of the campaign, Jaroslaw Kaczynski conceded defeat in Poland after exit polls suggested he had lost, BBC reported.
Both candidates are former anti-communist activists with conservative Roman Catholic background, but they have portrayed contrasting visions for the future of the country with population of 38 million.
Komorowski campaigned on the platform of privatization particularly directed at state-run companies and slicing the welfare benefits, while Kaczynski has vowed to block the drive.
Exit polls also indicate that the turnout was around 56.2 percent, 2 points higher than in the first round. Official results are expected on Monday.
Congratulations, Poland, and good luck.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/05/2010 00:00 ||
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[Dawn] MUZAFFARGARH: Fourteen people are reported to have stripped naked a woman and her daughter on Saturday and thrashed them in the presence of a large number of people in Shehr Sultan, a town near Mirwala.
Sources said the suspects got hold of 50-year-old Allah Wasai and her 14-year-old daughter Ashraf Mai when they came out of their home in Berwali to go to their fields.
They then proceeded to teach the women "a lesson for the wrongdoing of Allah Wasai's son".
SHO Mahboob Tangwani said the main accused, Safdar, alleged that Allah Wasai's son Saddam Husain had an affair with his daughter. He and his 13 accomplices held the woman and her daughter at gunpoint, stripped them naked and thrashed them.
A large number of people were there but none of them came forward to rescue the women from the assailants.
Local resident Allah Ditta later informed police.
A police team freed the women from the accused and gave them clothes.
A case was registered against the 14 accused, including Safdar, Mirza Khan, Siraj, Haji Afzal, Jameel, Akbar and Athar under 354/148 and 149 sections of the Pakistan Penal Code. Akbar and Jameel have been arrested.
According to police, the accused justified their action and said that a dispute over distribution of irrigation water had caused a clash in which people from both sides were injured.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/05/2010 00:00 ||
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#1
Well, now that the women have shamed the family I guess they will kill them for the family's honor.
#4
This kind of crap can be fixed, quickly. Round up all the barbaric assh*les involved, put them in the public square, and shoot them all. Rinse, repeat as necessary.
Remember how the Brits got rid of suttee in India?
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
07/05/2010 13:45 Comments ||
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#5
I might go for public castration as a first step, followed by public shaming. THEN shoot the sons of b*tches if they so much as look sideways.
Using super-high pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth or on a giant planet, researchers from Washington State University (WSU) have created a compact, never-before-seen material capable of storing vast amounts of energy. Described by one of the researchers as "the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear energy," the material holds potential. The researchers created the material in a diamond anvil cell -- a small, two-inch by three-inch-diameter device capable of producing extremely high pressures in a small space. What could go wrong with this?
I remember an episode from the Road Runner and Coyote that had something like this. As I recall it came from 'Acme' ...
#5
"The real question is 'Does it store more energy than it took to make it?'"
Shhhhhh, Slindsey - they don't appreciate anyone asking logical question.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
07/05/2010 19:03 Comments ||
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#6
"questions"
Wratts.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
07/05/2010 19:04 Comments ||
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#7
This sort of thing would be of value for warheads that might, say, penetrate deeply buried, hardened targets. Like tunnels inside mountains, just to pick an example at random.
Iran on Monday released a catalogue for male hairstyles approved by the culture ministry to help Iranian men choose appropriate Islamic haircuts.
The catalogue was presented by ministry officials in a press conference ahead of the "Modesty and Veil Festival". It includes pictures of men sporting short and conservative haircuts, some styled with gel. "These hairstyles are inspired by the Iranians' complexion, culture and religion, and Islamic law," said Jaleh Khodayar, who is in charge of the festival, which will be held later this month. "We are happy that the government has backed us in designing these hairstyles."
The move, which is being implemented together with the University of Tehran and the local association of barbers, is to distribute the permitted haircuts for men in the Islamic Republic, "in order to avoid inappropriate hairstyles and encourage an Islamic culture."
The catalogue was distributed in accordance with a clothing law approved by the Iranian parliament four years ago at the start of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's first term as president. Iranian police occasionally raid barber's shops offering 'Western hairstyles". Their owners are warned or "guided" and must commit not to repeat their actions.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Religious liberal Nasr Abu Zayd, an Egyptian Koranic scholar declared an apostate for challenging mainstream Muslim views on the holy book, died on Monday in a Cairo hospital, aged 66.
Shoaib Choudhury, a Muslim Zionist in Bangladesh, told Israel National Radios Yishai Fleisher last week, Political Islam and hate speech are our biggest enemies. Choudhury is the editor of the Weekly Blitz, which he calls the only anti-jihadist newspaper in the Muslim world. He is also an author, lyricist, movie director and peace activist and was held in solitary confinement for 17 months because he wanted to visit Israel.
Iran on Monday released a catalogue for male hairstyles approved by the culture ministry to help Iranian men choose appropriate Islamic haircuts. 
