Overnight Open Thread (4-3-2013)

Got $300?

Then you can get you some matching bubbly for living the AoSHQ Gangsta Lifestyle.

there is a section separated by chain-link. This is where the most valued items are temporarily housed, including a Melchizidek (30 liters) of Ace of Spades, the Jay-Z champagne of choice. The cost: $44,000.

And don't forget the rest of your accessories:

Patterico: Is Bob Menendez Being Protected By the Same Spinmeisters Who Protected Weiner?

For weeks, I have privately raised with some of the people who have been following this story closely the possibility that one or more of the girls who made these allegations were false flags of the type that appear to have been employed in the Anthony Weiner scandal. To me, that theory is starting to look more plausible all the time.

Here's how it works. Weiner had a genuine "talking inappropriately to an underage girl" issue and a genuine "sending inappropriate crap to women" issue. Breitbart had the goods on some of this, and Weiner likely knew it. So, next thing you know, someone comes along and creates some false underage girls who supposedly talk to Weiner. The girls try to get Andrew Breitbart to bite on the story but he doesn't. If he had, then the girls could have been triumphantly revealed to be fakes, and now everything Breitbart put out would be discredited. (This is ultimately what John Reid claimed to me in a series of angry emails: that everything I had said about an underage girl in Delaware was discredited because . . . something something. I didn't follow his logic but his claimed motivations were clear: he wanted to protect Weiner.)

So, apply the same strategy to Menendez. He clearly has a "sleeping with prostitutes" issue - the Dominicans are not the only hookers who have claimed he slept with them. So maybe, just maybe, someone who knows a hooker story is coming out, and who supports Menendez, creates some phony hookers whose stories can be reported and then discredited. Now every story about Menendez and prostitutes looks suspect.

It wouldn't shock me if the same Democrat spinmeisters were behind both operations.

Just a theory. Another theory is that the Dominican hooker story is true and the government is trying to whitewash it. Since everything that supposedly discredits the Daily Caller stories is coming through the Dominican government, I am perfectly willing to believe that theory as well.

Whether it's true or not it's still a brilliant strategy for muddying the waters until the story is just too murky for the media to cover.

Dirty Smell Hippies: The Early Days

And what does Leftism have against bathing anyway?

The Karl Marx depicted in Jonathan Sperber's absorbing, meticulously researched biography will be unnervingly familiar to anyone who has had even the most fleeting acquaintance with radical politics. Here is a man never more passionate than when attacking his own side, saddled with perennial money problems and still reliant on his parents for cash, constantly plotting new, world-changing ventures yet having trouble with both deadlines and personal hygiene, living in rooms that some might call bohemian, others plain "slummy," and who can be maddeningly inconsistent when not lapsing into elaborate flights of theory and unintelligible abstraction.

Still, it comes as a shock to realize that the ultimate leftist, the father of Communism itself, fits a recognizable pattern.

The Spirit Of The Bayonet Lives On

The US Army dropped bayonet training from basic training several years ago but now there's talk of bringing it back.

The U.S. Marine Corps still trains riflemen on how to use the bayonet, as does Britain. In fact, British troops were the last troops to actually use a bayonet charge in combat. This happened in 2004, when a patrol of 20 British troops in Basra, Iraq were ambushed by about a hundred Iraqi Shia militiamen. Help was still on the way when the commander of the British troops realized they were running out of ammo and the Iraqi gunmen were moving closer. So he ordered his troops to fix bayonets and charge. That thoroughly demoralized the Iraqis who, after some close combat with the British (Scots, actually) left 35 of them dead, all ran away. Some of the British troops were wounded but all survived. This, however, was one of the very few such incidents of bayonet use in the last decade. The problem is that Western troops tend to be well trained marksmen and Iraq or Afghan gunmen have learned not to get too close. So opportunities for launching a bayonet charge are increasingly rare.

And the last bayonet use before this was an assault by the Scots Guards on Argentinian positions during the Falklands War.

Plus bayonets are getting better:

In 2003, the Marine Corps replaced its standard-issue bayonet with a longer, sharper model, the OKC-3S. The new model, designed by New York's Ontario Knife Co., was also more effective when brandished as a hand knife - not to mention more ergonomically correct. Perhaps more vitally, the blades were also better able to pierce body armor, a concern particular to modern warriors. More than 120,000 bayonets were commissioned to supply one to each Marine, at an estimated price of $36.35 each, or $4.36 million total.

The EPA is Gunning for Wood Burning Stoves

If you like your stove, you can keep it...for now.

The EPA's new environmental regulations reduce the amount of airborne fine-particle matter from 15 micrograms to 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air.

This means that most wood burning stoves would now fall into a class that would deemed unacceptable under these new draconian measures. The EPA has even launched a nifty new website called "burn wise" to try to sway public opinion.

The local air pollution agency says I can't sell my old wood stove to help pay for an EPA-certified wood stove. Why is that?
Replacing an older stove with a cleaner-burning stove will not improve air quality if the older stove is reused somewhere else. For this reason, wood stove changeout programs usually require older stoves to be destroyed and recycled as scrap metal, or rendered inoperable.

How a Differential Gear Works

Simple and easy to understand. I think it's the build-up from the physical model that really makes it clear.

Can Sex Between Consenting Adults Be a Crime?

Well it was in Arkansas until the Supreme Court overturned the law.

David Paschal, a former teacher at Elkins High School engaged in a sexual relationship with one of his students in 2010. The student who was 18 years old, alerted authorities of her relationship with Paschal after the two separated.

The former history and psychology instructor was charged with four counts of sexual assault and was sentence to 30 years behind bars.

However, since the student was a legal adult and the sex was consensual, the Arkansas Supreme Court granted Paschal his freedom.

"Regardless of how we feel about Paschal's conduct, which could correctly be referred to as reprehensible, we cannot abandon our duty to uphold the rule of law when a case presents distasteful facts," the court said.

Paschal should have been fired of course but not sent to prison.

The Science of Hair Loss

Well since my maternal grandfather had more than a bit of gorilla in him this is one bullet that I dodged. Unfortunately my pelt does sometimes chafe when I'm wearing human clothes.

Teh Tweet!

Yahoo group. That is all.

Tonight's post brought to you by 1952:

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posted by Maetenloch at 10:45 PM

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