9-11-01 the tribute

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Our Heroes

I heard the dems were squealing about this ad. As I watched I'm thinking, "yeah I can see they wouldn't like this ad," and then the returned soldier walked away from the camera and I was in tears. Tears of gratitude for our heroes who are keeping us safe--and tears of anger at people like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Barak Obama who are trying to lose this war for their own personal power. They are despicable and they should be stopped, no must be stopped!



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This is a rant!

Having been a mechanic for about four years I think I know a little bit about cars and how to treat them and the customer. After being a mechanic and finding out that working on other people's cars wasn't as fun as working on your own, what with the customer wanting it just right and right now! and dealing with bosses who want you to be a wizard with a wrench and be able to diagnose a problem using just touch and smell, I quit to go to the university and get a less demanding career. Yeah teaching. So much less demanding, right...

Anyway I can fix most things on my car myself, but for anything major, I hire a mechanic since I want it just right and right now!













Breaker Bar

A couple of months ago I had the rear struts replaced by a mechanic since I didn't have the tools to do the job myself. Today I rotated the tires and found that the lug nuts had been torqued down so tight it took a breaker bar and a cheater pipe to break them loose! For those who don't know, a breaker bar is a solid bar, about 18 inches long, that attaches to sockets when you need the extra leverage a ratchet wrench won't give you. If you really need extra leverage, you "cheat" and put a piece of pipe on the bar to lengthen it for even more leverage.










Woman using an air impact wrench













Air impact wrench

The problem is that when you have a flat or blowout on the highway, very few people have more than the lug wrench that came with the car. For most people, the only time they ever change a tire themselves is when they have a flat. So unless they have a good mechanic who torques the lug nuts properly, anyone who has a flat finds that the tire is impossible or nearly impossible to remove. I've been reduced to standing on the lug wrench and jumping up and down on it to loosen overly tightened lug nuts before. This is nonsense! When mechanics take those high powered air impact wrenches and hammer those lug nuts as tight as they'll go, it shows how ignorant and stupid they are.










Woman using a torque wrench










Torque Wrenches

I think from now on I'm going to tell them I want a torque wrench used on them and have them torqued to factory specifications so I can be sure it's done right. You can tighten them properly with an air impact wrench if you're careful. I do it. If you stop almost as soon as the impact wrench starts to chatter, they're tight enough. Simple!

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Fixed the link!

I fixed the tag below so that when you click on "If you're seeing this blog in a frame..." It actually works when you click it and will actually take you out of the frame!

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Sarah Palin's speech

The speech! Home run!

Full remarks as prepared for delivery and provided by the McCain campaign of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as she accepts the 2008 Republican vice presidential nomination on Sept. 3, 2008, at the Xcel Energy Center in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin accepts the GOP vice presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. Palin and Sen. John McCain will face Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden in a battle for the White House.

(The Associated Press)
More Photos

Mr. Chairman, delegates, and fellow citizens: I am honored to be considered for the nomination for Vice President of the United States...

I accept the call to help our nominee for president to serve and defend America.

I accept the challenge of a tough fight in this election... against confident opponents ... at a crucial hour for our country.

And I accept the privilege of serving with a man who has come through much harder missions ... and met far graver challenges ... and knows how tough fights are won - the next president of the United States, John S. McCain.

It was just a year ago when all the experts in Washington counted out our nominee because he refused to hedge his commitment to the security of the country he loves.

With their usual certitude, they told us that all was lost - there was no hope for this candidate who said that he would rather lose an election than see his country lose a war.

But the pollsters and pundits overlooked just one thing when they wrote him off.

read the rest here: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Conventions/story?id=5720910&page=1

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National Review article on Obama's Disturbing Connections

What a disturbing article! The following is a National Review article reprinted, with the unflattering smoking picture added, in the Information Vault way back in April of this year. It points out that Obama hates his country and his wife is a racist. Obama should be judged by the company he keeps and that company ain't pretty!

Obama's Disturbing Connections

Friday April 25, 2008 22:09

The Company He Keeps Meet Obama’s circle: The same old America-hating Left. By Andrew C. McCarthy National Review Why is Barack Obama so comfortable around people who so despise America and its allies? Maybe it’s because they’re so comfortable around him. He presents as the transcendent agent of “change.” Sounds platitudinous, but it’s really quite strategically vaporous. Sen. Obama is loath to get into the details of how we should change, and, as the media’s Chosen One, he hasn’t had to. But he’s not, as some hopefully dismiss him, a charismatic lightweight with a gift for sparkling the same old vapid cant. Judging from the company he chooses to keep, Obama’s change would radically alter this country. He eschews detail because most Americans don’t believe we’re a racist, heartless, imperialist cesspool of exploitation. The details would be disqualifying.

The rest of the article is here: http://theinformationvault.com/politics/campaign-08/obama/37-obama/59-obamas-disturbing-connections.html

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Michael Moore does it again!

Michael Moore believes that he is so important that God will smite innocent people just so he can smirk that hurricane Gustav has ruined the Republican convention! I've known for some time that he is an arrogant blowhard, but this is beyond anything he's said before. Now he did apologize, but is he sorry for what he said, or sorry he got in trouble?



DNC national chair Dan Fowler was also amused that the hurricane was disrupting the Republican convention, but his comments were overheard on an airline and the video was apparently taken without his knowledge so I'm not posting it here.

But this is typical of the Democrat party. They are hateful and vindictive. There were no Republican operatives with feces and urine arrested trying to disrupt the Democrat convention, but there were Democrat operatives with feces and urine arrested trying to do just that at the Republican convention.

I keep pointing out to people that we have two parties in this country, the evil party and the stupid party. The Democrat leaders are evil and the Republican leaders are stupid for not recognizing they're evil. They just keep trying to get along with them.

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Blogger woes

When I started this blog I ftp'd it from Blogger to my webhost. Then I had the blog load in a frame on one of my web pages. Lately I wanted to add some things I'd seen on other blogs, but found out I had to have BlogSpot host the blog to use those features. So I moved the blog over to BlogSpot and wrote a redirection page as my home page.

It worked but I missed not having the blog embedded in a window on my page. I decided that I could leave the blog at BlogSpot but still embed it in the page of my site. Unfortunately I'd deleted the code and forgot how to do it! It took me hours to rediscover the method and still retain my style sheet format! The trick turned out to be this: put a table with one row and one column where you want the blog to appear and use the IFRAME tag with a width of 100%. (Apparently percents are an undocumented feature of the tag. You're supposed to use pixels. I had to use a set height in pixels, though.)

So it works. Yay... Now I'm going to bed!

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An inspired choice

An absolutely inspired choice! I can now vote with confidence! I should have seen this coming as I had heard that the mccainpalin.com domain name had been registered but none of the other possible pick name combinations had been.

This woman is a real conservative and the fact that she's a woman is not (or rather, shouldn't be) relevant. And, since she's the only governor in the race, she is better qualified than John, Barry, or Joe who are all senators who make poor presidents! Now this is change!

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Folding Electric Super Car

Peugot has a new green car that's pretty cool. Not that I like green stuff for the sake of being green, but when it's practical I'm all for it. Part of the article follows:

Peugeot 888 future car is a concept done right: shape-shifting and green

The Peugeot 888 is billed as the "personal vehicle for the future Metropolis." For designer Oskar Johansen from Norway, that means a car with space for two with room for luggage, as well as a nifty shape-shifting body. On the highway, the Peugeot 888 stretches itself out flat so that it's stable and aerodynamic. In the city, however, it scrunches up for easier parking and taking up less of the road in general.

Just to make sure it'll fit in with the eco-minded future, the 888 is powered by electric motors in each of its wheels, runs off of an array of lithium-ion batteries stored in the trunk, which, in turn, is covered with solar panels.

Check out the gallery below for more views of the Peugeot 888.

Read the rest here: http://dvice.com/archives/2008/08/peugeot_888_fut.php?p=1&cat=undefined#more

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My friend's blog

A good friend, a man I've known since junior high school has his own blog. As you can see he likes to fish! He keeps asking me to go up and visit so we can go fishing. I've really got to do that some time!

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This is so cool! Schlock Mercenary is probably the best comic strip on the web. I've had a link to it on my comic page ( http://www.richardbush.net/comics/comics.htm ) for a long time now. Now Howard Taylor has released a script so I can put the strip right on my comic page. I'm happy and grateful to now have his fine strip on my own website. I left the link to his website on the page, because, it's just so cool and Howard's website is worth the visit for more than just the comic strip.
Check it out! I'll post it below just once so you can see the current strip.



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A company is ready to start building plants that convert trash to oil. The following is from World Net Daily.

BLACK-GOLD BLUES
U.S. green lights 'anything into oil'
Defense Department OKs facilities turning natural produce into energy

---

Posted: August 13, 2008
8:45 pm Eastern

By Joe Kovacs
© 2008 WorldNetDaily

A Georgia company looking to solve America's energy problem has finally teamed up with the federal government, hoping to make millions of barrels of oil every day from virtually anything that grows out of the Earth.

Bell Bio-Energy, Inc. says it has reached an agreement with the U.S. Defense Department to build seven test production plants, mostly on military bases, to quickly turn naturally grown material into fuel.

Read the rest here: http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=72275

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Quite by chance found this parody of the "I'm in love with Obama video." Unfortunately it's not as well done as the original but it is funny just the same!



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The biotic (fossil) versus abiotic oil rages. On the one side the peak oil crowd argue that since we find microscopic bits of animals and plant in the oil then oil is biotic and thus a limited resource. They argue that if it seems capped wells are refilling it is just residual seepage from the surrounding rock. They further argue that if there is abiotic oil (thus giving support to the abiotic theory!) it’s way too deep for us to get at! They even admit that Russia is pulling oil out of the ground that has no sign of biological organisms at all. You can see the true agenda of some of these groups when you discover that they are alarmed at the abiotic theory because if the oil doesn’t run out soon, the earth will die faster! Here’s the quote:

If it's true that there's plenty more oil, it just changes the character of the coming crash -- it will be through toxicity or ecological catastrophe instead of lack of energy, it will take longer, and the earth is a lot more likely to die. Here's an excerpt from William Kötke's summary of the 1972 "Limits to Growth" study:

http://ranprieur.com/crash/abiotic.html

You notice the reference to the “Limits to Growth study” that has been wrong in almost all its predictions of disaster so far.
More of these arguments can be found here: http://www.rense.com/general58/biot.htm

The abiotic theorists point out that never has a fossil been found below 18,000 feet but we regularly find oil below 30,000 and that we’ve already used more oil than could have come from plant remnants deposited in some ancient ocean.

This abiotic theory just received an enormous amount of support with the find of hydrocarbons on Titan: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/02/titans-organic.html and http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47675

A good overview of the abiotic theory can be found here: http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/1130.html and a good list of links and articles can be found here: http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/Theory/SustainableOil/

An interesting commentary that I’m taking with a large grain of salt can be found here: http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Geopolitics___Eurasia/Peak_Oil___Russia/peak_oil___russia.html The grain of salt is because of his claim that oil companies and Dick Cheney conspire to hide the abiotic oil origins. Yeah, sure they do…

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This is a cool song! I heard it first on Geekbrief


Ones and 0s by Geoff Smith from Cali Lewis on Vimeo.

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Okay, I've got the 2007-2008 student pictures up at Winkflash. I had so much trouble with the site I might stop using them entirely. I was using Dot Photo but they didn't allow right clicking, which is stupid. Anyway, they are up here at rabush.winkflash.com. I hope the link works. I can't get it to show the latest year without using Internet Explorer. Firefox will only show the 2006-2007 pictures. if that link doesn't work there is a link on each of my other webpages that does try here and look for the link under pictures on the right. That link works but it's hard to type.

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Okay I haven't published the 2007-2008 student pictures yet., but I have done a redesign of the site layout. I saved the other home page here and put the blog up as the new home page.

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I've decided to—instead of putting this blog in a window on one of my website's pages—make this blog the home page of my website. This may mean I update more often. May mean, we'll try it.

To show you how far behind I am in my reading, I just finished reading an excellent article in the November 2007 issue of Guns Magazine. It’s the gun rights column called “A Fair Question” by David Codrea. Here’s an excerpt:

“Would banning firearms reduce murder and suicide?”

What with all the calls to do just that, and all the laws building up to it, that sounds like a fair question.

It’s posed by Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser in the Spring 2007 Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.

Kates is an American criminologist, lawyer and constitutional scholar. Mauser is a Canadian criminologist and university professor. Both are published authors of numerous articles and books. Both are well recognized as top experts in their fields. You don’t earn their reputations in academic and legal circles by being demonstrably wrong, so people on both sides of the gun control debate would do well to consider their findings…

You can find the rest in the Guns Magazine online archives here: http://www.gunsmagazine.com/Rights11.html

The writer, David Codrea, has a blog at http://waronguns.blogspot.com/

I’ve decide I need to use key words for better searching of these articles. I realize not many read this blog, but I’ve often searched my own work and have had considerable trouble finding what I wanted. “Did I post that? Where did I read it? Etc.” so tentatively I’m going to use the labels that follow”:

Climate change
Commentary
Cutting edge science
Energy
Freedom
Global warming
Guns
Gun rights
Political
Science
Science fiction
Space
Technology

Wow I didn’t think I’d come up with so many! Let’s try them for now

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Mutiny at the American Physical Society (APS)! Although the society (in this case physical refers to physics) has accepted the notion that man-made gases are affecting our climate, some of their member aren't buying it. The following article excerpted from the APS Physics site uses extensive analysis to show that the models used to prove global warming are flawed and in fact exaggerate the affect of CO2 as much as 500 to 1000%, there has been no warming since 1998 and in fact a cooling trend is indicated for the last six years

Here's an excerpt:

Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review, since that is not normal procedure for American Physical Society newsletters. The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007: "Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate."

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Abstract

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) concluded that anthropogenic CO₂ emissions probably caused more than half of the “global warming” of the past 50 years and would cause further rapid warming. However, global mean surface temperature has not risen since 1998 and may have fallen since late 2001. The present analysis suggests that the failure of the IPCC’s models to predict this and many other climatic phenomena arises from defects in its evaluation of the three factors whose product is climate sensitivity:

1. Radiative forcing ΔF;
2. The no-feedbacks climate sensitivity parameter κ; and
3. The feedback multiplier ƒ.

Some reasons why the IPCC’s estimates may be excessive and unsafe are explained. More importantly, the conclusion is that, perhaps, there is no “climate crisis”, and that currently-fashionable efforts by governments to reduce anthropogenic CO₂ emissions are pointless, may be ill-conceived, and could even be harmful.

See the entire article here: http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/monckton.cfm
Warning! There's a lot of math, this is not light reading!

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