The Knews Hound

Ground Zero Mosque Supporters UNITE !

2010-08-29T16:13:00.000-07:00

I ask of you you who support the Ground Zero Mosque to please help my cause.

I am the Founder and Pastor of the Church of Perpetual Condescension.

You can call the Church of PC for short.

I light of your belief that a Mosque founded by a hate spouting Imam supported by dubious financing 2 blocks from where planeloads of devout Muslim men murdered 3000 people is a great idea, I would like to ask you support for my own project in the same vein.

As you are aware, the US dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. The devastation was enormous.

I propose to build my Church on the hillside above Hiroshima and like the founder of the Ground Zero Mosque, I will say again and again that this Church is all about "tolerance and understanding". The symbolism must be ignored by any true believer in the Church of PC. Any resident or Japanese countryman that would feel insulted is an obvious racist, PC-Phobe or closet bigot.

In order to "simulate debate" at the new Church location, I am proposing that a statue be commissioned and erected in full view of the residents of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It will of course be as culturally sensitive as the Ground Zero Mosque is to New Yorkers and many other Americans.

Imagine the feeling of inclusiveness the residents of Hiroshima will feel when the monument is finally standing. looking out over downtown Hiroshima.

As a supporter of the Ground Zero Mosque, you will naturally agree that my concept for my monument deserves at least as much support.

Please send Cash.

*this article is SATIRE*

Building the Beast

2009-01-27T10:12:00.000-08:00

Building The Beast

I am a long time homebrewer and have always strived to produce the very best product that I can, given the variables inherent in any hobby that involves nature and science.

One of the most difficult to control and most important to the finished product is temperature. Keeping close control of the fermentation process yields big rewards in consistency, clarity, finish and flavor profile.

I built a version of the venerable Son of Fermentation Chiller and used it successfully for many years but was never happy with it. It was a royal pain to change ice, sometimes daily, in the hot Sacramento summers and you could never leave a batch in it and go away for even a 4 day weekend. The variability and temperature swings were troublesome from a brewing standpoint and I grew weary of bending down to the ground attempting to gently lower 6 gallons of beer in a glass carboy into and out of it.

I was convinced I could do better.

I spent hours hashing over ideas with various people including The Engineer (a licensed and skilled Mechanical Engineer and brewer) and the Asperger Kid, a brewing buddy that has read and experimented with more brew-tech and methodology than even he would care to admit.

In the end, I came up with several requirements that the new fermentation chiller must have.

It must be self contained. Once set, it should not require any intervention to maintain temperatures for extended periods up to months at a time
It must accommodate the capacity that I need to my brewing schedule and if possible, enhance that schedule.
It must be able to maintain two separate temperature zones. One at fermentation temperatures of 50 – 70 degrees F. and one at lagering/cold conditioning temperatures of 32 – 45 degrees F.
Normal fermentation chores such as changing blow off reservoir fluids, monitoring Co2 production and visually checking progress should be accomplished without having to open the chamber.
The fermenter should be at a convenient height for the loading and unloading of full carboys, ideally with enough room to transfer directly from the fermenter eliminating the need to move full carboys more than one time.
It should cost less than 50 dollars to make.

A tall order you say? Read on.

I started by obtaining for free, a small “dorm fridge” from someone who was not using it. They were glad to have it gone and I was happy to have obtained one with an actual freezer compartment rather than a bar fridge, counting on its low temperature surface and higher cooling ability to assist my efforts in redesigning it for my needs. A small dorm fridge would not ordinarily be considered for a project such as this. After much consideration and consultation, a strategy of efficiency increases, insulation improvement and potentially huge cold sinks available, I could pull it off.

The difference in the project insulation on the left and the insulation in the standard fridge is striking.

I spent a couple of hours carefully dismantling it to its component parts being careful to not bend or kink any of the hoses and lines for the coils and once it was disassembled, I could see what I had to work with. The fridge was one of the larger of the dorm fridge styles and the compressor and motor seemed in good shape. Since I had confirmed that it worked perfectly, I moved forward with confidence.

I took my tentative plans to the local home supply store and after a few minutes of careful selection for weight and straightness, I returned home with 8 2X4’s for the frame. I knew I would need several more but I had a few old studs left over from a recent remodel that I would use to make up the difference.

I laid out my lines and assembled the frame, using either half-lap or rabbeted joints for strength and screws for durability. I covered the “floor” in the top and bottom sections with plywood, again left over from my remodel.

So far, I had 22 bucks into the project.

A Note on Scrounging

I am in inveterate scrounger. I look for situations and trade or scrounge for what I need. The insulation used in this project is a prime example. I was driving by a major construction project and saw the crew putting insulation on the roof. I drove into the loading area, looked for the construction manager and asked if I could grab some of his scraps. He was happy to keep the excess out of his trash and I got a truckload of 4X4 foot scraps that I have used on numerous projects. The moral of the story is; you get your bargains where you find them.

I used the aforementioned insulation to completely enclose the frame that I had now built, caulking the joints to seal the entire enclosure.

After considerable thought, I rebuilt the same general form that the pervious fridge had, including the compressor kickout. I thought about several configurations but in the end I opted for the factory look. The extra space it gave was a bonus.

From this

To this.

When I say that laying these pieces out was an exercise in geometry would be an understatement. The third hand I got from my neighbor Mark was a big help in laying out the pieces so that everything came out square. Well, for the most part anyway.

I spent another 18 dollars on 1X3 KD boards and the Asberger Kid gave me a hand assembling some doors. With a carful selection of boards and a few minutes with some basic joinery we had manufactured the doors.

I still had the dilemma of the uneven face frame surface to contend with however. I gave serious thought to rough sanding it and laminating some mahogany veneer I had laying around but in the end, my friend Mark suggested just belt sanding the whole thing and square it up that way. We spent about an hour with his 18” belt sander and a straight edge and it came out nearly perfect.

I had most of the engineering details worked out so I started the rest of the fabrication. I had long ago decided to use 2 inch PVC pipe and 12 volt computer fans (also free) for the air transfer. I placed the supply and return at opposite ends of the chamber and plumbed them through the upper and lower sections.

Supply Side

Return side

I roughed the openings in, placed my fasteners and then disassembled it all to get ready for paint. I pulled in wire that I knew I would need to run the various fans, thermostats and other hardware and installed a separate 120 volt outlet for my stir plate. I intend to make starters at the same temperatures that the beer will ferment at and there is no place better than the same cabinet!

I was torn on paint choices but in the end, my cheap side won out and I ended up using some pure white gloss that I had laying around the house. It may not have been ideal, but the price was right!

And what a difference a coat of paint makes.

It was finally starting to look like a fridge!

After considerable thought I made the door insulation recess into the door frame and the doors face frame cover it. We hung the doors first, and then custom cut each piece of insulation to fit. Once the door frame and insulation were both ready, we secured the insulation to the door with a lot of caulk and a few screws to keep it all together while it dried.

At this point I finally ran out of caulk that I had lying around, so I had to spend money again. Chalk up another $3.20 from the orange store. Total cost so far; 43 bucks.

I spent the next few days tending to the minor but important details like fan height, sealing up some iffy caulking, completing the 12 volt wiring, installing fans and general fabrication. I am somewhat detail oriented but firmly believe in the K.I.S.S. principal. I try to build things to be as simple as needed but with attention to detail as this project reflects.

In an effort to increase efficiency I mounted a hardcore PC CPU fan and heatsink to the freezer coil. The Engineer has assured me that it will have a big payback in efficiency IF I can keep ice off it. We shall see.

The cool factor alone is worth it to me.

The Kid and I knocked out the final painting over a few beers after work and it was basically ready to go. I hacked a thermostat and moved the Thermister (the part that actually senses the temperature) to the end of a 4 foot piece of wire that can be taped to your fermentation vessel for more precise temperature measurement. I knocked out a few more minor details, double checked my systems and fired it up to test. In testing, it took the lower chamber from 62 to 34 degrees in 3 hours. So far my plan is looking good but I will need some much warmer weather to do any actual testing.

I bought some foam insulation from the orange store and I put The Kid in charge of splitting the round foam into two pieces. I ran a generous bead of caulk around the edge, applied the foam gaskets we manufactured and we were good to go. The door seals are exceptional and should last for years.

The fact that the door gaskets cost only 4 bucks was a bonus.

I brewed 15 gallons of beer in celebration, put it in the fermenter (no bending over, yeah !), put a few empty kegs in the bottom and called it good. It is far too cold in my shop to need the refrigerator capability for a while, in fact I had to put a keg of hot water in the bottom chamber to keep the upper chamber at 63. When spring and summer arrive I will be able to do much more thorough testing.

In totally, I kept it below my 50 dollar budget without compromising any of the significant details.

As you can see, it has a huge capacity for both fermentation and cold conditioning.

The totals;

Out of Pocket cash - $47.00

Labor hours - Aprox. 60 between The Kid, Mark and myself.

Capacity – up to 6 carboys in fermenter, up to 9 kegs in fridge section.

The numbers;

I postponed publishing this until I had data as I knew it would be the first question anyone asked.

I decided to torture test the system by dropping the temperature as low as I could make it for the entire system empty, then again with beer in the upper half then once again with pre-cooled kegs of sanitizer in the lower half.

The results are as follows;

Test 1 – Entire system empty, Lowest air temperature achieved

Starting temp of 63, down to 42 in 36 hours

Test 2 – Lower chamber empty, Carboys in upper cooling from 63 to 52.

Cooled 13 gallons of 63 degree wort to 52 in 9 hours

Test 3 – Lower chamber with 6 kegs of sanitizer or beer at 40 degrees, upper chambers with carboys cooling from 62 to 52.

This is the test that most closely duplicates real world performance, it cooled the 62 degree wort down to 52 degrees in 6 hours.

To say I am impressed is an understatement. To take my 62 degree wort down to 52 in 6 hours in test 3 was beyond my wildest dreams. I am thrilled with my results so far and look forward to further experiments as time goes on.

Out of my original list of “must have features I have accomplished most of them,

It must be self contained. Once set, it should not require any intervention to maintain temperatures for extended periods up to months at a time - DONE
It must accommodate the capacity that I need to my brewing schedule and if possible, enhance that schedule. - DONE
It must be able to maintain two separate temperature zones. One at fermentation temperatures of 50 – 70 degrees F. and one at lagering/cold conditioning temperatures of 32 – 45 degrees F. - DONE
Normal fermentation chores such as changing blow off reservoir fluids, monitoring Co2 production and visually checking progress should be accomplished without having to open the chamber. COMING SOON
The fermenter should be at a convenient height for the loading and unloading of full carboys, ideally with enough room to transfer directly from the fermenter eliminating the need to move full carboys more than one time. - DONE
It should cost less than 50 dollars to make. - DONE

I strongly urge any serious brewer using ice based cooling systems to look into building one of their own. The freedom to be relieved of the tedious task of changing ice and the issues associated with it is a godsend. The added space for storage/lagering/carbonating is a bonus.

That being said, this was a serious bit of fabrication. I don’t think it is for a casual weekend warrior. It involved a lot of thought and imagination to come up with some of the ideas and a cheap and/or easy way to get around problems.

Comments, questions and offers of cash can be sent to knewshound@yahoo.com

Edit; I have had several questions regarding the operation of this thing. Rather than try to explain it, I have created this block diagram describing how it works. I hope this is helpful to you guys.

Edit #2 - Press Eject at Wort-O-Matic has cross posted this and I have had several Comments that I will post here also;

triple-oh_six on 03/30/09 08:28 pm writes

Nice work man, great idea!

knewshound on 04/01/09 07:38 am writes

Thanks, I appreciate the kind words.

I have since discovered that the "observation ports" or "windows" in the doors are a must have. The opening and closing of the doors to observe the fermenting brews was causing me no end of problems with icing on the freezer coil.

The only answer was to either stop opening the doors to check the fermentation progress (not a real option) or to put the windows in the doors and check it that way.

I opted for the window solution.

I will document any other changes I make as I learn more about the Beast.

These are some of the issues you have when you do something that has never been done before, lots of trial and error!

Cheers,

knewshound

Jamman on 04/11/09 07:33 pm writes

This is awesome. I may have to think about something similar. Can you separately control the temperatures on the upper and lower cabinets? How/where do you have the fans set? Could temperature control be maintained with fans on/off?

The Engineer on 04/14/09 01:28 pm writes

The upper chamber draws air from the cold box via fans, so theoretically it can have much different temperature than the lagering area. However, there is a catch. If you try to cool the top down too much, the top and bottom chambers will eventually come to the same temperature since the cooling is not sufficient to keep the entire box at 33 degrees. We going to try adding a fan to the condensor coil to up the cooling effectiveness and see what that does. Worst case: Add another dorm fridge.

Sante,
The Engineer

knewshound on 04/15/09 03:16 pm writes

Thank you Tom for the assist :)

The Engineer is entirely correct as usual.

You asked - Can you separately control the temperatures on the upper and lower cabinets?

I hacked a regular household thermostat I had lying around the shop by removing the thermistor in it and putting it on the end of a 4 foot piece of light gauge wire. I affix the thermistor to the fermenting carboy for very precise temperature control. In experiments, I have found as much as a 4 degree difference between the observed air temperature vs the carboy temperature.

You asked - How/where do you have the fans set? Could temperature control be maintained with fans on/off?

I use the existing relay built into the thermostat to switch a 12 volt power supply "wall wart" that used to power a calculator and run it to a fan I liberated from an old PC I had lying around to move the air through 2 inch PVC pipes.

Through trial and error I have discovered that having a "heat sink" of full kegs in the lower chamber is a big help in bringing 60ish wort down to 48 degree pitching temp quicker and with less effect on the temperature stability of the lagering brews in the lower chamber.

As The Engineer has said, I am going to experiment with a small fan and a hood for the condenser coil on the back to get some airflow and hopefully, a few more percentage points of efficiency.

Cheers,

knewshound

bud on 06/08/09 08:15 am writes

I don't have a dorm fridge, but I have a full sized fridge that I don't use much. Could I use a full sized fridge and if so, how would I incorporate it into your design? Thanks.

knewshound on 06/09/09 07:46 am writes

Sure you can. Obviously, the configuration would need to be changed.

Obviously, the larger the fridge, the greater the capacity and the better performance you will achieve.

If I had to do it all over again, I would start with a larger fridge from the beginning. The dorm fridge is struggling a little with the Sacramento heat. Not enough to make it too warm in the storage compartment, but the fridge is working HARD.

Since this was a custom, one off design, it is up to you for the configuration and design.

Give it a shot !

If you get it running, please lets us all know.

I for one would love to see how it turns out !!!!

bud on 06/15/09 09:18 am writes

Another question. What kind of hinges did you use for the doors? Are they spring loaded to help hold the doors shut or did you use some kind of latch? I can't tell from your pictures. Thanks.

knewshound on 06/22/09 08:44 am writes

Well, since I am cheap, I just used regular door hinges I had laying around the shop.

I thought about using Piano hinges just for the nice slick look, but as usual, I was cheap and used what I had on hand.

Since the hinges support very little weight ( the doors are really just a face frame with foam insulation ) they don't really need to be all that much.

Experiment !

Thats all I do !

fastdogbrewing on 06/23/09 11:03 am writes

I am about to start a build of a couple fermentation cabinets myself and was wondering what the insulation is, and where you got it. This is the biggest issue I am looking at right now.

I will be using modified window Air Conditioners, and my layout will be more along the line of a chest freezer.

Thanks for the inspiration.

Pleepleus on 06/24/09 05:12 pm writes

I built something similar using a converted cabinet, 1.5" foam, and mini fridge components. I completely closed in the bottom like a chest freezer though. My problem is that the compressor is running constantly. I'm able to keep the top portion at 60F for fermenting, but the bottom never will drop below 45F for adequate serving temps. The ambient temp in my basement is currently in the low to mid 70's so it shouldn't be working too hard. Currently I don't have anything in the bottom, which might be part of the problem since it's just exchanging air and has nothing else to hold the temp.

Do you, or anybody else, have suggestions on how I might make this thing more efficient?

knewshound on 06/25/09 10:37 am writes

Fast Dog - I scrounged my insulation from a construction job. I gave the foreman a couple of bombers plus a 6 pack of home brew and he couldn't give me enough insulation.

If you cannot find a source like that, you CAN use the white "open cell" foam you can get a Home Depot or Lowes as an acceptable substitute. It is not quite as efficient as the closed foam but the price is right :).

Pleepleus - I have the very same issue actually. With the chamber empty, no kegs inside, it rarely gets below 45(ish). I attribute it to several factors.

#1 - The temps in my shop are pretty high, in the high 70's - low 80's or more. According to The Engineer, 35 - 40 degrees below ambient is about as good as I can realistically expect. Your mileage may vary of course. That being said, mine never shuts off, ever, when I have the thermostat maxed as it usually is.

One thing I have noticed is that if it does get into the 30's, it tends to stay there if there is a quantity of full kegs. I think of it as a "cold sink" rather than a "heat sink". Have you tried cold crashing some kegs in some other way, a freezer for instance, into the low 30's then throwing them into your chamber?

You might be surprised at how well that works.

Once it gets to temp, it wants to stay there.

That being said, if you are trying to do the air recirculation for fermenting, you will have a very difficult time keeping the lower half at serving temps. It is just too much a load for the fridge in Summer.

Most of my baseline tests were done in cold weather, when I do most of my brewing. I use the chamber for storage only during the summer and just don't brew in summer.

This was a specialty build to suit myself and how I brew. Using the chamber to both serve and ferment, in the summer, may simply be more than the equipment can provide. I suspect that you would need an actual freezer with its higher capacity to use it year round.

I have asked The Engineer to respond for a more informed opinion for you.

Cheers,

knewshound

The Engineer on 06/25/09 11:36 am writes

Pleepleus: There are only a few factors that can effect the run times. Heat transfer and moisture being the top two.

If the box is sealed well and is well insulated, you may want to look at the other factor of the heat transfere: The Condensor Coil.

If it is tucked away and the natural convection currents that it relies on to do the cooling are being restricted in any way, it will reduce the cooling capacity of the unit. Just for a simple test, place a small fan directed at the cooling coils to see if that helps.

In the end however, we have to be realistic. The small fridge that it came out of was designed to run 20% of the time at 70 degree room temp with a small water vapor leakage factor. We just quadrupled (or 6x for the knewshound) the size of the box and made it much more leaky. In a perfect world it would run 80% of the time and with the vapor leakage and such, 100% is not unexpected.

Pleepleus on 06/26/09 08:46 pm writes

Thanks to both for the responses. I don't have any cornies yet, but adding some gallon jugs of water and a case+ of beer did help some with maintaining temp around 50 so the compressor didn't run constantly. It still didn't drop to where I wanted at the setting I had though. When I cranked it up a little more it went back to it's constant run.

The condenser coil doesn't have a ton of breathing room (maybe a couple inches) and I already have a fan blowing on it. However, I think it's getting more air than it did when it was in the fridge. The fridge I acquired didn't have the same sort of coils knewshound's had (external), but instead had copper tubing running underneath the metal shell and was pretty well wrapped up in the foam they injected in there (talk about a bitch to get apart).

I know that I'm pushing the compressor and cooling ability to it's limits so I'm not expecting miracles, just looking for any bump in efficiency I can. It may not be realistic for me to use it for both purposes at the same time, and may have to switch back-and-forth as my needs dictate.

Thanks again.

Homebrewing 1A

2007-11-08T20:24:00.000-08:00

Homebrewing 1A

I have received several requests for a column about Homebrewing, but at a beginner’s level. My previous column was for experienced brewers and not for the novice. If you have ever thought about brewing, you might be inspired to give it a shot. After all, it is inexpensive and you likely have most of the needed equipment around the house.

This is meant to be a quick introduction and not a complete guide to every facet of the hobby. For a in depth explanation, discussion and guide, please refer to John Palmers excellent on line book available at http://www.howtobrew.com/intro.html

This guide is meant for the novice looking for an easy to follow, low dollar investment that will still produce a decent brew. Long time brewers will no doubt feel I should have improved the brew with additional steps or equipment, I disagree. Much of a novices concern is in the initial cost to get involved, I believe a low buck, low tech solution is perfect for the aspiring homebrewer.

What you are making

Beer has been brewed nearly as long as there has been civilization. The earliest recipe dates from Mesopotamia in 4000 BC. It was not however until the 1700s that Beer as we brew it today came into being. We will take advantage of modern methods and have most of the hard work done for us.

Typically, homebrewed beer contains only a few ingredients.

Malt - is Barley that has been dried and the outer hull removed. It is milled, much like Coffee, and is to beer what grapes are to wine.
Hops - are a bittering agent. It gives Beer the bite that makes you come back for more. A member of the Cannabis family, the flower is the seasonings of beer.
Yeast - is a single celled organism that consumes sugars and leaves in its wake, Carbon Dioxide and, thankfully, Alcohol.
Water - the higher quality the better. 95% of Beer is water; its quality is key.

Malted barley

Brewing beer starts with steeping or “mashing” barley that has been “malted” or encouraged to start to sprout, then dried and milled roughly. The resulting “tea” of steeped grain is then boiled to release sugars and flavors. A popular shortcut is to purchase malt extract. This extract is essentially the same tea or liquor made in normal mashing, but boiled down and concentrated into a honey like liquid that can be the basis for some fine beer. It cuts down on time and trouble, both of which are key to an enjoyable homebrewing experience.

Getting startet

A trip to your local Home Brew Store should be your first stop. If you don’t have a local store, I highly recommend Northern Brewer and More Beer as good places to mail order from. Either way, feel free to ask questions. You will generally find most Homebrewers eager to help and can be a wealth of information.

Once there, you need to decide what you want to brew. The choices can be daunting. Shall I make a crisp Pilsner or a smooth Lager? Perhaps a hearty stout, or an ale perhaps? How about a fruit beer? Or a seasonal like Hefeweizen?

The choices are endless but I will make a few suggestions;

Pilsners (Pilsner Urquell, Becks, St. Pauli Girl and *allegedly* Bud, Miller and Coors) are tough to make for beginners. They can be difficult to brew and are not very tasty without a lengthy cold rest. Save this one for your 6 month brew.
Lagers (Sam Adams, Heinekin) have many of the same issues as Pilsners. Some varieties can be made at somewhat higher temperatures, but again, get some experience under your belt before trying these more unforgiving styles. Like Pilsners, they also require storage at low temperatures to be their best.
Ales, Stouts, and flavored beers (Guiness, Sierra Nevada, Newcastle Brown) are always a good choice for the beginning brewer. Their more hearty styles help to make the most of the flavors available and tend to mask any minor problems in the brew. With their ability to ferment at normal room temperatures, they are much less fuss for the beginner.

I selected a Brown Ale kit, well, two actually since I am making a 10 gallon batch.

Mike rang up my purchase along with 12 pounds of Light Malt Extract. My bill for the 10 gallon batch was $42 bucks. Even the cheapest swill produced by the national mega-breweries is far more expensive.

Once home, I opened up the kit and beheld my booty. Your kit may of may not contain all of these ingredients.

Steeping Grains and Liquid Malt Extract

Plus a whole bag of goodies

The ingredients in the bag were

Hops, both boiling and aroma varieties.
Yeast. I personally prefer liquid but oh well.
Priming Sugar for bottling.
Cheesecloth bag for steeping grains.
Clarifiers for giving your brew that clean look.
“Kettle sugars” to increase Alcohol and body
Dextrin for mouth feel and body

That’s it for the software, now lets talk about hardware.

Equipment

In all my hobbies, few rival Homebrewing for the number of gadgets, goodies and oddball hardware that allege to make the brewing process easier and or quicker. Sometimes, that’s even true. That being said, brewing is as complicated as you wish to make it. I will endeavor to make this batch much the same way you will, avoiding the pitfalls of complication.

For hundreds of years, Brewers made do with little more than a big pot and a spoon. We will go a bit beyond that but will keep it simple. The first and most important piece of hardware is a B.A.G. or Big Ass Pot. For years I used this 7 gallon model my wife bought me for Christmas. This is the ideal size but any very large pot will do.

Plan on using the biggest pot you can possibly find. Stainless Steel or Enamel are preferred over Aluminum. Use what you feel is the best and biggest you can get. If you don’t have a big pot lying around, ask friends and family. Everyone has an Aunt who used to can vegetables. Let’s put her pot back to work!

Buy a fermenter.

This is the single most expensive piece you need. Any supplier will have them for as little as $20 bucks. Spend the extra 3 dollars for the spigot in the bottom. You will never have to siphon your beer if you do. Along with a few other incidentals, you should be able to get started for well under 50 bucks. All of the hardware can be re-used for years to come.

One indispensable piece is a bubbler or airlock, they come in many styles. Here are two common types.

Both are inexpensive and a must have item for a successful brew. Be sure you get the appropriately sized bung or stopper for your bubbler that matches your fermenter

6 Feet of 3/8" food grade plastic hose, available from most hardware stores.

Additionally some small items found around the house or from your supplier will be needed;

Large Spoon, the longer the better
Kitchen Thermometer, digital is quicker and more accurate
Large Tea Kettle or 2 gallon pot for water
Measuring Spoons
Bottles, recycled from your normal beer consumption
Packet of Sanitizer, available from your supplier.

Getting started

The liquid extract that came with our kit is great for body and a basic brew, but we are opting for some extra flavor by steeping the specialty grains that came in our kit.

Many brewers and kits will tell you to steep them on your stove top in a pot of water at 152 degrees for an hour. Personally, I am way too lazy to be bothered to keep an eye on a pot of water to such a precise degree. We are going to cheat and use a small drink cooler to do the work for us.

Start by cleaning the cooler out and rinsing very carefully to remove any soap residue. Once that’s done, fill it with the hottest tap water you have on hand. Fill it to the very brim, drop the lid and let it sit for 10 minutes

Meanwhile, have a pot of water on the stove set to boil.

Turn off the heat and empty your cooler, open your bag or bags of grain and place them into the cheesecloth bag. Pick up any stray grains and put them into the bag.

You should have something like this.

Add a half inch of cool tap water to your cooler and drop in your bag of grain. Ladle in the boiling water until it covers the grain bag completely by several inches. Using a common household thermometer, take the temperature of the grain bags center. Add boiling or cool water until the temperature of your grain ball and water is 156 degrees (or whatever temperature is called for in your instructions). Mix well between measurements

Ahhh, just right.

Close the lid on the cooler and crack a cold one. You are making beer.

Once you have rested from your exertions, you should start getting your kettle ready. Using the biggest pot you have, fill it with 5 gallons of the freshest, best quality water you can get. I am blessed with excellent tap water. Not everyone is. If you do have nasty tap water, I highly recommend spring water purchased on sale at any grocery store for a few dollars. The quality of your beer is directly tied to the quality of your water. Don’t be cheap.

I am making a double batch and am using huge 15 ½ gallon converted kegs. Boiling 11 gallons is a snap. If however, you are using a smaller pot and are unable to do a full 5 gallon boil, don’t worry, you will still make a fine brew. All the instructions will remain the same but for an additional step I will remind you of later on. If you are using a 3 ½ or 4 gallon pot just do the same thing as I am now. The Turkey Fryer setup I am using for heat can often be borrowed from a friend or relative if you don’t have one, otherwise a stovetop and a 3 ½ gallon pot may be better suited for your first brew.

A helpful hint; Put your liquid extract in a pot of very hot water and keep it next to the stove or burner you are using to heat your boil water. It will soften it up nicely and will make adding it to your boil later much easier later on.

Keep an eye on your pot of water and stop it before it starts to boil. Ideally, it will be 170 degrees or so. Determining how long your stove will heat your water may be helpful to know ahead of time.

After an hour has gone by, your steeped grains have given their all. By steeping in the hot water, starches have been converted to sugars and flavors have been released that we are going to use to make a tasty brew.

The color change in this case was quite dramatic.

The temperature in our pre-heated cooler has fallen by less than 3 degrees. Since we have spent our time drinking beer and not watching a pot of water, we are rested and ready to start adding our ingredients together.

Grab the end of the grain filled bag, carefully dip it in and out of your hot pot of water. Rinse it like a giant tea bag until it runs clear. .

These grains have given their all, they can be composted, fed to animals or birds or simply discarded

The bag or bags of malt extract you had warming in the pot are completely liquid by now, be sure the heat to your pot is off and slice a generous corner off of the bag of extract and let it flow into the pot, let it run out and as it gets to the end, gently twist and squeeze it as needed to get all of the malty goodness into your pot.

Success.

Pour the mash water from the cooler into the pot and using your longest spoon, stir for several minutes to completely incorporate the honey like extract. Failure to do so will almost always lead to scorched spots in the pot and accompanying scorched flavors. Once you are sure you have completely incorporated all the liquids, put the lid on the pot and fire up the heat to nuclear. Stir occasionally in a clockwise direction, unless you are one of my readers from Down Under, to avoid hot spots and to speed up boiling.

As the liquor gets close to boiling; it will create a fine layer of bubbles, from this point on, watch the pot like a hawk. Failure to reduce the heat immediately after the start of boiling will result in the horror that is a boil over. Due to the huge amount of sugars we have in our pot, the resulting syrupy mess is enough to ruin a stove. Be prepared, come with weapons.

In the fight against boil over, the lowly spray bottle is your friend

Fill it with water and have it in hand while watching the pot. Reduce heat and spray at the first sign of a boil over and it will knock it down as easy as a Don King fighter.

Hopping in.

As we discussed earlier, hops are the spice of beer. The boiling liquid you have just created (called wort) is very sweet. Go ahead and ladle out a coffee cup full and taste it. Simply adding yeast will, at this point, create beer as most of the world knew it until the practice of adding hops to counter balance the sweetness was widespread. I believe however, you would be very disappointed in such a brew so we will add hops to make the beer we all know and love.

Your kit probably came with 2 separate kinds of hops. They are called boiling hops and aroma hops. The boiling hops are meant to counteract the cloying sweetness of the wort while the aroma hops give beer the familiar “beer smell” we most often associate with beer.

Turn down the heat and toss in your boiling hops. Once you are sure you are not going to boil over, crank the heat back up to maintain a roiling boil.

Helpful hints

One problem new brewers have is remembering when to do certain steps. A big help in aiding a quality and stress free brew session is making a timeline. A typical recipe will call for the addition of hops, kettle sugars, clarifiers, adjuncts or other items. Do yourself a favor and starting from the beginning of the boil, write down the timeline for when you need to add the various pieces of your recipe.

In this example, the timeline for my 80 minute boil went like this.

10:30-Boil started
10:40-Boiling hops and kettle sugars added
11:40-Clarifiers and aroma hops added
11:50-End boil

Most recipes have their own hopping schedule. Yours will undoubtedly be different than mine. Some have several types of hops which need to be added at different steps. Such as right after the boil, 15 minutes before end of boil, at the end of boil and even adding additional hops in the fermented beer. Writing them all down ahead of time greatly reduces the chances of forgetting a step. I firmly believe this simple step has saved me a great deal of trouble over the years.

Crossing the Sanitary Line

Cleanliness is next to Drunkenness.

Up till now, you have been working with boiling liquids so sanitation has not been a big concern. Heck, I have had leaves, bugs and other things fall into my boiling wort with no ill effects whatsoever. From this point on however, everything that touches your brew needs to be sanitized. You have several options including Bleach, Acid, Oxygen or Iodine based. I prefer Iodine so that’s what we shall use here.

It can be purchased in several sizes and is relatively inexpensive. Us it liberally and if there is any question of contamination.

Follow the label directions for use.

I like to make a tub of sanitizer and keep all of my working tools in it when brewing.

Cooling down your brew

Now that we have boiled our beer and added our hops, we need to cool it down as quickly as possible. If you have more money than time, you can buy a immersion chiller. Basically a coil of copper tubing that cold water runs through that will chill a 5 gallon pot of boiling liquid down to a comfortable 75 degrees in as little as 20 minutes.

If however, you don’t have access to a chiller, you can always do it the old fashioned way and use ice and water.

Using an able assistant and being very VERY VERY careful, you can move the pot into a bathtub, sink or other large vessel that will contain your pot and circulate cold water and ice to cool down your wort. Be sure to have some water already in the vessel before placing the pot inside. It make take hours to get it down to 75 degrees so don’t rush it. Keep the lid on the pot at all times to prevent contamination. Using a sanitized spoon, you can help the process along by giving it a non-vigorous stir occasionally. Overly agitating the cooling wort should be avoided at all costs. Once the temperature has dropped to 76 degrees you can move on to the next step.

Place the cooled pot on a countertop and give it a vigorous stir (with a sterilized spoon) in the clockwise direction, to make a whirlpool effect. It will then need to rest for 20 minutes, use the time to prepare for the next steps.

Proof your Yeast (if using dry yeast)
Sanitize your fermenter
Prepare your airlock
Clear a space for your fermenter.

Pitching the yeast

Our kit came with "Nottingham" yeast. Presumably an ale yeast which the creator of the kit thought appropriate to the style and recipe and we shall not second guess him.

I poured a cup of the cooled wort to a sanitized container and added the packet of yeast. Like making bread, we are going to proof our yeast, allowing it to bloom before adding it to the whole batch.

The one on the left was just poured while the one on the right had been sitting for 15 minutes.

You are now ready to transfer the cooled wort into your fermenter. You will be using either a carboy or fermenting pail. I have a preference for glass, and own several 6 ½ gallon carboys used only for fermenting. However, pails work very well, are easier to carry and are nearly unbreakable. The built in valve is a Godsend. Since I have only glass, we will use them in this example.

Getting the cooled wort into your fermenter is an easy choice if you have a pail. Toss in the yeast into your sanitized Fermenter and using a sanitized measuring cup, the larger the better, dribble the cooled wort into it making as many bubbles and foam as you can while still maintaining a reasonable flow. This is the only step in the process when agitating the beer is a good thing.

Avoid transferring the nasty goop in the bottom of the pot into your pail. Put the lid on and you are ready for the next step.

Those using glass will need to siphon or funnel the cooled wort from the pot into the carboy, again, try to use the stream to produce as many bubbles and foam as you can. If using a siphon, pour in the yeast, start the stream and sit back and watch. It will take at least 10 minutes.

And you thought I forgot.

When we were discussing the size of pot you need to make your batch, I mentioned that if you were unable to do a 5 gallon boil, you should do as big a boil as you possibly could and I would tell you what to do later. This is that time.

Add spring water, available at any grocery store, until your fermenter is at 5 gallons or 80% of your total fermenter volume if it is under 6 ½ gallons. Most brew pails are a full 6 ½ gallons so you should have plenty of headroom if you choose to go that route. You can go slightly over 5 gallons of you are feeling adventurous and greedy.

Plugging the hole.

You have several options for sealing up your beer from the elements while still allowing Co2 to escape. And trust me; a LOT of Co2 is going to be produced.

Either of these airlocks will work well for your beer. Pouring in a small amount of cheap Vodka or Sanitizer will create a one-way valve allowing gas out and not allowing bacteria and other nasties in.

Personally, I just use rubber bungs, a piece of hose and a section of pipe and call it good. The bottle has sanitizer or cheap vodka in it. Be sure your bungs have a big enough hole to accommodate your hose. Use the biggest hose you can get away with.

Once your airlock is in place, place your fermenter in a cool dark place (between 68 and 72 degrees with the yeast in our kit, yours may differ). When in doubt, I find an unused tub in a spare bathroom to be ideal in case of “accidents” as well as an ideal, stable temperature. Protect your brew from light with towels or a blanket and go get some serious couch time after your hour of backbreaking labor. I strongly suggest drinking several beers in sacrifice to the Yeast Gods.

Patience

You have done all you can to produce a great beer. It is all in Mother Natures hands now. There is nothing to be done except keeping an eye on it occasionally to ensure it does not blow out your airlock and produce a nasty mess. You should get airlock activity within 24 hours and have vigorous activity for a week or so. A layer of crusty looking goop will cover the surface of your fermenter.

Don’t worry and have a beer, the yeast is doing its job.

There is nothing to be done,

Don’t screw with it, don’t mess with it, don’t open it. When airlock activity slows to one bubble per minute or so, it is decision time.

Secondary or not?

Most brew books will tell you that at this point, it is time to transfer your beer to another carboy or bucket to finish clearing the beer. Since you are just starting out, I believe it is a step we can do away with and still produce a quality brew.

As you gain experience and equipment, seriously consider adding another carboy or bucket to your inventory but for now, we will just let the beer rest for another week or more. There is no cut and dried time you need to leave your brew, it is ready when it is ready.

So is it Ready?

After 2 weeks, take a look at the brew. Virtually all airlock activity should have ended. Shine a flashlight through the side of your fermenter and peek into the hole your airlock is in or peer through your carboy and take a look. Has the “head” of yeast fallen away? Is the beer clear looking? Really clear looking? If it is still a little cloudy or you still see a solid layer of gunk floating on top, put the airlock back in and cover it back up. Depending on temperature, recipe, yeast and numerous other conditions, it may take up to 3 or 4 weeks for your beer to completely clear. Take your time.

If it is clean and clear, its time to bottle.

Put a cap on it.

By now, you should have on hand at least 2 ½ cases of clean 12 oz. bottles or the equivalent. I have never had good results using twist off bottles. As fate would have it, most good beer comes in non-twist off tops so it is a good excuse to spoil yourself. Rinse your bottles in hot water as you empty them until they are clean. Try to get brown bottles whenever possible. Be aware that if you have a full 5 gallons in the fermenter, it may go as many as 3 cases.

As an alternative, many brewers like to use flip top bottles. The need for a capper is eliminated and the cool factor is way up there.

The “pop” sound the bottle makes when it opens is nice too.

Start by gathering your equipment and supplies and get some sanitizer ready. You are going to need a racking cane if you using a carboy but will need only a piece of hose if you use a bucket.

But first, always remember;

Cleanliness is next to Drunkenness

Sanitize everything that will come in physical contact with the beer.

Tools of the trade

To bottle, all you need are clean empty bottles, caps and a capper. Cappers can be found at any brew store or online for about 15 bucks along with the caps you will need. Always buy more caps than you need.

Throw the caps into some sanitizer and start filling bottles with it as well. Contact time is 2 minutes minimum for Iodine based methods so be prepared. Always inspect your bottles before filling them with sanitizer. Put aside any that are not squeaky clean. If you are using a bucket, hook up your sanitized hose to the valve in the bottom, pour the sanitizer out of the bottle, insert the hose and turn the handle. Fill each bottle until it is 1 ½ inches from the top.

Sweeting the deal.

There was one last ingredient in our kit we have yet to use. The priming sugar. Rather than mess with mixing the sugar, adding it to the bottles or using an additional pot or bucket for bottling, I suggest you use Carbonation Drops.

Carbonation Drops are available from your supplier. They are inexpensive, easy to measure and darn near fool proof. Spend the 4 bucks, it is less trouble than sugar and actually brings a little additional flavor to the party. Follow the manufacturers instructions for use. In our case it was 4 drops per bottle

Cap your bottles and store in the same cool dark place you used to ferment your beer. Practice on a few empties until you get the hang of it.

Did I mention patience?

Don’t even bother tying a beer before 2 weeks have passed. It just isn’t worth it. Even better, wait for 3, you will be rewarded with a much better brew. Throw a few into the fridge and prepare to taste your first brew.

Pouring your brew.

Rather than go on with a long winded explanation on how to pour a brew, I have prepared this handy graphic for you that explains the process.

I often print them and attach them to the bottle when I give beer away to friends.

Letting your beer age to its potential is going to be difficult, but if you are patient, you will be flat out amazed how good your beer turns out. Unlike Wine, Beer is best served fresh. Beer will peak in flavor and quality between the ages of 6 weeks to 4 months. I sincerely doubt however, that you will ever have any of your first brew still around at 4 months, it will be long gone. Take a piece of advise from an long time brewer, start another batch as soon as your fermenter is empty and you will be rewarded with a seemingly endless stream of top quality craft brewed excellence.

I hope that you will be inspired to perfect your technique and refine your methods to produce better and better beers. This guide is meant as an introduction only and I would again refer you to Palmers excellent on line guide at http://www.howtobrew.com/intro.html for an in-depth guide and reference. I do hope however that I have shown you that far from being overly complicated and expensive, you can, with a minimal investment, produce top quality beer at a fraction of the price of the cheapest swill available from your local mega-mart. Your circle of friends will suddenly expand and your waistline may grow, but through it all, you will have a secret smile, knowing your time and effort made it all possible.

I would like to thank my editors; Tom the Engineer, Decal, Concentric Circles, Doodad, Chris the number cruncher, IronKros and the many others who took the time to send suggestions and feedback.

As always.

Cheers,

knewshound

Celebrating my freedom

2007-09-21T08:49:00.000-07:00

It has been a full year since I canceled my subscription to the Sacramento Bee. I was a newspaper subscriber for over 30 years and it pained me to do it but I had simply had enough.

Below is my exchange with the Bees' Public Editor that was the straw that broke the camels back;

I haven't checked the letters today, but I will. As with most subjects in the paper, taking a one-day snapshot is not a true indicator of how that subject is covered over time. I know you have your strong opinion about that, as is certainly your right. I think you probably know this, but you can lodge your complaint via a letter to the editor. If you're interested, I suggest going to www.sacbee.com/sendletter.

Armando Acuna
Public Editor

-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick G [mailto:knewshound]
Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 9:18 AM
To: Public Editor
Subject: Batting 1000 today

I just wanted to congratulate your paper on a perfect 100% effort in todays letters to the editor.

Every single one was anti-Bush, anti-Republican or a repeat of the Democrats talking points.

With a solid effort like that, I'm sure that you will continue to have the outstanding financial success that I have come to associate with your paper.

After all, why would I as a subscriber, be interested in things like truth when I can get a series of Democrat talking points, distortions and outright fabrications?

Keep up the excellent work. With a bit more effort, I'm sure you will mirror the financial prospects of your idols at the NYT.

Oops !

Looks like you already have !

I wonder if bias in reporting might have something to do with it?

Naaaaa

Couldn't be.

Cheers,

knewshound

I need to get out more....

2007-05-30T19:42:00.000-07:00

Why I haven’t been Blogging much lately

2007-05-17T21:35:00.000-07:00

I have been asked why I have been so quiet lately.

Here are the reasons why;

Get new windows purchased and installed - DONE
Insulate walls, run new ground wire for electrical - DONE

Choose and purchase 7 tons of rock for landscaping - DONE
Install plants and other landscaping - DONE
Get mow strips installed - DONE
Shovel and move 7 tons of rock - DONE

Choose and purchase new front door (solid Mahogany!) - DONE
Mask, sand and stain new door - In Progress
Apply 3 coats of finish - Soon
Remove old door and frame, install new door - Soon

Sand and stain new side door - DONE
Apply 3 coats of finish - Soon
Remove old door and frame, install new door - Soon

Touch up paint around new windows - Sounds like a job for a kid of mine !

Demolish wall, move studs, install header for new slider - Soon
Install new slider - Soon

Remove Intake and Top End - Soon
Remove Heads - Soon
Refurbish heads - Machine shop !
Reinstall everything - Soonish

And lastly, what I want to do;
Locate new disc brake differential -DONE
Install new differential and proportioning valve - One of these days in all my free time

Some of my favorite movie lines

2007-04-19T22:14:00.000-07:00

Can you guess all the movies?

Highlight the area under each qoute to reveal the movie it came from.

Survival kit contents check. In them you'll find: one .45 caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing: antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair a nylon stockings. Shoot, a fellah could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff. ~Major T J Kong

Dr Strangelove (highlight here)

Candygram for Mongo.

Blazing Saddles

Ten Bears: These things you say we will have, we already have.
Josey Wales: That's true. I ain't promising you nothing extra. I'm just giving you life and you're giving me life. And I'm saying that men can live together without butchering one another.
Ten Bears: It's sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues. There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see, and so there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men. The words of Ten Bears carries the same iron of life and death. It is good that warriors such as we meet in the struggle of life... and death. It shall be life.

The Outlaw Josey Wales

“I’ll have what she’s having!”

When Harry Met Sally

“Of all the gin joints in all the cities of the world... She walks into mine”

Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) “Casablanca”

“Never get off the boat!” Chef (Frederick Forrest):

“Apocalypse Now!”

Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?

SULLAH: Ah, asps. Very dangerous. (a beat) You go first.

Indiana Jones

"You want confirmation? There's your confirmation!!"

Tora! Tora! Tora!

"What we've got here, is failure to communicate"

Cool Hand Luke

“In a garden, growth has its season...as long as the roots are not severed, all is well, and all will be well in the garden.”

Peter Sellers as Chance the Gardener in “Being There” 1979

"Wow! What knockers!"

Young Frankenstein

They pull a knife, you pull a gun. They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way.

The Untouchables

"You just put your lips together and blow"

Lauren Bacall to Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not (1944)

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

Blade Runner

It took me three hours to figure out that FU meant Felix Unger.

The Odd Couple

“Life is pain, Highness, and anybody who says otherwise is selling something.”

The Princess Bride

"You aren't too bright. I like that in a man."

Kathleen Turner, Body Heat.

“Every man dies...Not every man really lives”.

Braveheart

"Face it, girls. I'm older and I have more insurance!"

Fried Green Tomatoes

“I’m having a friend over for dinner”

“Silence of the Lambs”

"Surely you cant be serious? I am serious and don’t call me Shirley."

Airplane

Magic Mirror: Although she lives with seven other men, she's not easy.

Shrek

Negotiate? [BANG] Anyone else want to negotiate?

Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) in “The Fifth Element”

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!

“Conan the Barbarian”

Dr. Evil: You know, I have one simple request, and that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads! Now, evidently, my cycloptic colleague informs me that that can't be done. Can you remind me what I pay you people for? Honestly, throw me a bone here! ~DR Evil

Austin Powers

“I have to get this man to a hospital right away.”

“What is it?”

“A big building with lots of windows and sick people. But that’s not important right now.”

AIRPLANE

I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies. ...

Prissy in Gone With The Wind.

Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.

The Wizard of Oz.

“We’re gonna need some more FBI guys”

Diehard

How can you shot women and children?

You don't lead them as much.

Full Metal Jacket

"Hey, look mister, we serve hard drinks in here for men who want to get drunk fast. And we don't need any characters around to give the joint atmosphere."

It's a Wonderful Life

“No matter where you go — there you are.”

Buckaroo Banzai!

“This has GOT to be a nine-point-oh on my weird-shit-o-meter.”

Men In Black

“English, Motherf*ck*r! Do You Speak It!?”

Sam Jackson -Pulp Fiction.

“Express elevator to Hell, goin’ down!”

Aliens

A day may come when the courage of men fails,when we forsake our friends
and break all bonds of fellowship -but it is not this day!

An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down

but it is not this day!

This day we fight!!

By all that you hold dear on this good Earth,

I bid you stand, Men of the West!!!

The Lord of the Rings

“My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!

The Princess Bride

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

Robert Duvall, as Col. Kilgore, “Apocalypse Now”

"This is my BOOMSTICK!!!"

Ashe (Bruce Campbell), Army of Darkness

“No poor dumb ba$tard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the OTHER poor dumb ba$tard die for HIS country”.

George C. Scott as Gen. George Patton in “Patton”

Adm. Painter: What's his plan?
Jack Ryan: His plan?
Adm. Painter: Russians don't take a dump without a plan son.

Hunt for Red October

”You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means”.

The Princess Bride

Pay no attention to that Man behind the Curtain.

The Wizard of Oz

"Say hello to my little friend!"

Al Pacino, as Tony Montana, in Scarface

"It’s just a flesh wound"

The Black Knight, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

The Dude: Hey, careful, man, there’s a beverage here!

The Big Lebowski:

“Geoff Montgomery: It’s worse than horrible because a zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.

Larry Lawrence: You mean like Democrats?”

Ghost Breakers 1940

Hawkins: I’ve got it! I’ve got it! The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true! Right?
Griselda: Right. But there’s been a change: they broke the chalice from the palace!
Hawkins: They *broke* the chalice from the palace?
Griselda: And replaced it with a flagon.
Hawkins: A flagon...?
Griselda: With the figure of a dragon.
Hawkins: Flagon with a dragon.
Griselda: Right.
Hawkins: But did you put the pellet with the poison in the vessel with the pestle?
Griselda: No! The pellet with the poison’s in the flagon with the dragon! The vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true!
Hawkins: The pellet with the poison’s in the flagon with the dragon; the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true.
Griselda: Just remember that.

The Court Jester (1955)

Alex~ No time for the old in-out, love. I've just come to read the meter.

Clockwork Orange

"I ain't got time to bleed".

Predator (Jessie Ventura)

Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges.

Treasure of the Sierra Madres

"A real woman can stop you from drinking",

"She'd have to be a really BIG woman".

Arthur

"Hah, that's not a knife .... THAT'S a knife!"

Crocodile Dundee

Judge Smails: You know, you should play with Dr. Beeper and myself. I mean, he’s been club champion for three years running and I’m no slouch myself.
Ty Webb: Don’t sell yourself short Judge, you’re a tremendous slouch.

Caddyshack

"I am here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I am all out of bubblegum!"

Roddy Piper in "They Live"

"Your ass looks like 200 pounds of chewed bubble gum"

Gunny Hartman (R. Lee Ermy) Full Metal Jacket

Bring out your dead.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

"We're gonna need a bigger boat"

Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) Jaws

I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky?

Dirty Harry

I don't deduce. I observe.

Cary Grant, North by Northwest

“Talk To The Hand”

Terminator 3

Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”

Animal House

“You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use then as the backbone of a life trying to defend something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said “thank you,” and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest that you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a d*mn what you think you are entitled to.”

A Few Good Men

“There are two types of people in the world - those with a gun, and those who dig. Now dig!”

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Carl Spackler: So I jump ship in Hong Kong and make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over in the Himalayas. A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I’m a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald... striking. So, I’m on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one - big hitter, the Lama - long, into a ten-thousand foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga... gunga, gunga-galunga. So we finish the eighteenth and he’s gonna stiff me. And I say, “Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.” And he says, “Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.” So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

Caddyshack

You can't swim?! Hell, the fall will probably kill you!"

Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, 1969

Capt. Renaud: Round up the usual suspects.

Casablanca

“Fill your hands you son of a bitch”

John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit

“Yippee kai ay, mother f***er

Die Hard

Queer Eye for a Dictator Guy

2007-01-18T18:00:00.000-08:00

From the knewshound

Take
five swinging city boys

Add
one ex dictator getting ready for his big date

And
you get -

First,
Kyan has a heart to
heart with Saddam

Saddam, buddy, I know you have
been busy lately,
denouncing the infidels and so on,
buy honey, you
have let yourself GO.

Lets take a look at your
grooming and dental habits and see what we have to work with here

Well
the good news is; you don’t have a big bald spot to worry
about. When we were in Russia, Putin was trying to tell me he wanted a
comb over. Vlad, a comb over, can you imagine?
Anyway, have you ever
thought about a black rinse to take the edge off that gray?

Ow sweetie, you need to floss ! You always
need to floss !

And
I have to ask, what’s the deal with the hair?

Well you
see, I was on the run for a long time escaping the Infidel Americans.

I know just
what you mean, I had a Ex like that once. Anyway, it needs a
total makeover. I haven’t seen a head of hair like that since
I was at Al Sharptons party
and Don King showed up.

But all of that is going to change as we make over Saddam Hussein !

Well we
are here to change your life ! Lets get you in the chair and start your new you !

Sad, can I call you Sad? Anyway, Sad, I have to say, that took off 20 years just by cleaning you up.

I must confess I do feel refreshed. I have
to say however, I much prefer the beard, it adds a certain dashing
quality and my image consultant
says it gives me depth.

On or off, its all the same to me but Honey, you are smokin.....

Oh,
it looks like your Limo has arrived !
Time for Carson
to get you dressed for your big event.

Hussy, can I call you Hussy? We
need a new outfit to really make you shine on your big day.
I mean, just take a look at what you are
wearing now.

Well I was not given a choice what to wear,
they gave me these clothes, and these
ridiculous shoes.
And stop calling me Hussy.

Well lets get you out of that hideous
outfit and into something more suitable for a big event !
Now I want you to strip out of those dreary
duds and let’s dress you up.

I do not usually undress in front of
infidels but it seems I have little choice.

I am oddly comfortable without clothes in front of you too.

Oh well, these are changing times.

I must say, these are clothes more suitable
for a man of my stature.

Well, I was skeptical at first but I must
now say;
I look gooooood
No honey, you look HOT !

Oops, your
limo is back, time for Thom to work his magic on that dreary abode you
call home ! Taa Taa !
Mr. Hussein, I have been consulted on some pretty
dismal places in my time, but
yours has just GOT to be the worst I have EVER seen. Just look at it; horrible use of light, the
decorating is minimal at best, your choice of colors shows no imagination what so ever and the
furniture is soooo 17th century dungeon. We need an updated look to go
along with the new you !

I have given it a lot of thought, taking
into consideration your circumstances and I think we have a winner !

Taa Daa !
I know you will grow to like it
as much as I do !
I gave you a new can for drinking out of and you will notice 2 rolls of
TP in there. You wont have to spare that left hand anymore if
you know what I mean ! And, did I mention that the green
shows off your eyes ?

Wait a minute you kaffir, I do not wish to
live in such a place, what kind of people are you anyway ?

Don’t worry Saddy, I assure you the situation is only
temporary !
Ooooh Ooooh Jai is here ! Jai is going to give some tips to our friend here.

Hi. I'm Jai.

Well helloooooo sunshine !
Where have these other running
dogs been keeping you? Take seat here next to me and lets get better
acquainted.
Saddamn, I hope I can call you Saddamn, you
are at a critical time in your life. You are a father figure to many in your nation. Some
conciliatory words might help to calm some of the problems in your country and enhance your image as a leader for
posterity and possibly secure a greater place for your self in history.

Yes, Yes, yes, all that is for later.
First, let us discuss me and
you. I have been imprisoned for some time now and, well, I am lonely. You are very pleasing to look at and I enjoy
talking to you. I have known boys such as you in the past and I have to confess I have sometimes enjoyed spending time
with them.
May I show you some pictures?
I think you might like them.

This is me getting ready for my workout.
I know I am a little older than you but I am in good shape.

And I know you cant tell it from the
pictures but I swear I'm about this ....

Mr. Hussain. That is enough of THAT! This is television. You cant say
that on the air !

Oh look, Ted is here, hi Ted !

Hi ! I'm Ted. Lets talk about Food !

I don’t want to talk about food !
I want the young and strangely attractive one back.
Bring him to me now !

Sorry, Jai is gone. I think you scared him
off.
Anyway, Daddy, can I call you Daddy? Shall we discuss your last, oops,
I mean big meal?

I don’t want to talk about food.

Bring him to me, I demand the dark smooth one back !
And stop calling me Daddy you infidel swine.

Any big occasion should start with a good
appetizer.
I find Smoked Salmon and cream cheese on bagels to be an excellent
choice.
And as my dear Mother used to say before we went to Temple,
fresh is best.

Sigh, fine. Let us talk about food. All
they have served to me is infidel slop.

Wait a minute, did you say Temple.

Since
this is going to be a very active affair,
I'm going with something light.

So let’s enjoy some delicious Bacon
Lettuce and Tomato sandwiches. I will not be joining you but
my friend
say these are delish !

But,
but, but ...

Oh
look, your escorts are here. Oh well,
time just seemed to fly by. Toodles !

But, but, but, but....

Oh
look guys, its time ! We finally get to
see the end result, just call it the fruits of our labor !

Oh
I just love the way his suit compliments the
electrical tape wrapped around the end of the rope.

Oh,
and look, the assistants took the time to
wear complimentary colors. Something green or red would have
clashed
badly don’t you think ?

Here
we go baby !

I
don’t care what they say, THATS a money shot. I think the way the photographer used the light was just fabulous !

That’s all for today, we just hope that Saddam is happy in
his new home,
but we hear its a little warm there !

Be sure to tune in to the next Queer Eye for the Straight Guy where we
make
over John Kerry ! All on the next Queer Eye for the
Straight Guy.

To all my readers.

2007-01-04T18:18:00.000-08:00

On Christmas Day at about 9 am Pacific Time, an Internet user somewhere in Great Britain clicked on a link and became my 15,000^th visitor.

I am well and truly humbled.

I’m not sure what I set out to do when I started this blog; I certainly never expected it to turn out to become what it is. On the plus side, I was able to expose my beer brewing hobby to a much wider audience, been published on numerous news and opinion websites and I’m proud to be listed as a contributor to Chronwatch. Things came to a head when my piece on the Foley Scandal was published at the American Thinker and its subsequently being read on the air by Rush Limbaugh and my latest send up of the Flying Imams has been passed around the globe, literally.

The thing is, I never really meant for any of this to happen. I was encouraged early on by Charlite and thank her first and foremost; she encouraged me to go legit. I could not let the opportunity pass without thanking all the FReepers who have supported me and I appreciated the links from the Conservative Underground, Marklevinfan.com and all the other sites that have linked to my posts.

Anyway, I just wanted to take the time at this opportune moment to say thank you one and all.

2007 is going to be very interesting year.

Cheers,

Patrick

AKA knewshound

Merry Christmas from the knewshound

2006-12-24T22:39:00.000-08:00

The Iraq Study Group announces "Peace in our time".

2006-12-19T09:56:00.000-08:00

The sad thing is, Chamberlain was actually a thoughtful man who to his credit, came to recognize and deplore his actions later in WW2.

On the other hand, James Baker never will.

When Animals Attack !

2006-12-18T18:57:00.000-08:00

The question remains, what were the results of the Rabies Test?

Ex-Saint Suing Titans After Being Hit By Mascot

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Ex-New Orleans Saints quarterback Adrian McPherson is suing the Tennessee Titans because the team mascot hit him with a golf cart before the second half of an August exhibition.

McPherson is seeking $15 million in punitive damages.

He also seeks $5 million in compensatory damages for what he called the Titans' negligence. A team spokesman said Monday the Titans are aware of the lawsuit but had no further comment.

The quarterback was on the field Aug. 12 warming up when T-Rac, the Titans' mascot played by director of mascot operations Pete Nelson, hit him with a golf cart while throwing items into the stands.

McPherson missed the rest of the game with a deep bruise in his right knee. The Saints cut him Sept. 2.

The NFL did not sanction the Titans for the incident but reminded all teams that mascots must stay outside of a 6-foot boundary around their fields.

It's a Charlie Brown Christmas Jihad !

2006-12-11T21:32:00.000-08:00

Dennis Leary is one of the few in Hollywood who seem to get it.

How this made it past the Execs in Headquarters I will never know.

Allahboard US Airways

2006-11-30T23:10:00.000-08:00

Good evening, I'm Lou Dobbs and this is Moneyline

In a recent incident involving Muslim Imams being expelled for what has been called "Disruptive behavior", CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations has called for a boycott by Muslims of US Airways.

We are joined tonight by the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer for US Airways, Mr. Doug Parker. Thank you for joining us tonight on Moneyline Mr. Parker

Well thanks for having me on to speak about this very important subject Lou; it’s my pleasure to be here.

Here also to present the other side is Council on American Islamic Relations spokesman Mr. Nihad Awad.

Welcome to Moneyline Mr. Awad.

Thank you Lou, Peace be unto you.

Let’s go first to you Mr. Parker, what is US Airways position on the events of that flight?

Well Lou, as you know, at US Airways number our number one priority is keeping our customers safe. If anything, the flight crew was just taking every precaution for all the passengers.

What do you say Mr. Awad. And by the way, I have to say, I have never met anyone whose name fit them so very well.

Thank you Lou, and again, peace be upon you. The position of CAIR and all Muslims is that if the other passengers cannot grasp that shouting Allah’s name, peace be unto him, as they are boarding the aircraft, moving suspiciously about the cabin, asking for seatbelt extensions they do not need and praising Osama bin Laden while criticizing the criminal United States Government shortly before take off is just a normal and natural part of Islamic culture. If the bigoted and racist passengers cannot grasp that all these activities were no threat, it is their problem.

Are you out of your friggen mind?

Not at all Lou. It should be obvious to anyone by now that it is the racist American public that is the root of all of these problems. If the American public would just accept ...

Now wait just a minute Mr. Awad.

If you will let me finish Lou, If the American public would just accept the superiority of Islamic culture all of these problems can be put behind us.

Riiiiight

CAIR is calling for a boycott by all Muslims worldwide against US Airways until they have apologized to the insult toward Islam and these Imams. The humiliation suffered by these holy men is almost beyond calculation. Fortunately, we have excellent accountants, and they, by the most amazing stroke of luck, have managed to calculate that their humiliation can be diminished to an acceptable level by a payment by US Airways in the amount of Seventeen Million, Five Hundred Fifty Two Thousand, Two Hundred and Eighty Seven Dollars and Sixty Two Cents.

And 62 cents?

Yes Lou, and 62 cents.

Riiiiight....

Thank you for that Mr. Awad, and again, congratulations on a most excellent name.

You're quite welcome Lou.

Back to you Mr. Parker.

You just heard what Mr. Awad had to say, they are calling for a world-wide boycott by all Muslims against US Airways until their financial demands have been met. What is US Airways position on their position?

Well Lou, as I said earlier, US Airways believes it acted in a manner that ensured the safety of all its passengers. Disruptive behavior will never be allowed on any flight by anyone. We have been inundated with letters of support from members of the flying public praising our actions. We stand by our decision.

How do you respond to the demands by CAIR for restitution to the Imams that were ejected from the flight?

Lou, here's the thing. We are a private company. We have the right to refuse service to anyone, and pretty much for any reason we like. We believe that if you make your fellow passengers nervous by your obnoxious behavior, you shouldn't be surprised when we kick your ass off the plane.

Seems pretty straight forward to me Mr. Parker. What about their call for a world-wide boycott of US Airways?

Well Lou, here's the deal. We have done studies showing that Muslims make up only 3% of our paying passengers. As a result of actions by members of that group, the allies of CAIR have cost the Airline approximately seventy three million dollars in increased costs for security and other expenses since Sept. 11. Our marketing department has given us some interesting proposals since this latest incident. I am pleased to announce that rather than pay off these guys, we are proud to declare ourselves to be the worlds first all non-Moslem airline. I know there will be the claim that El Al got there first but we are the first to have it as a company policy.

Let me get this straight, your airline is agreeing to the boycott?

Oh it is way more than agreement Lou, we are actively discouraging Moslems to fly with us period. We have done a cost benefit analysis and determined that it just isn't worth the bother.

Interesting concept....

My thanks to both of you for being on Moneyline tonight. Thank you again Mr. Parker for a fascinating discussion about a very innovative business decision and again Mr. Awad, great name you have there.

(Together) Thanks Lou.

In our next story, blogger knewshound discusses his legal problem concerning his recent column. We get reaction from the author himself from an undisclosed location

I'm Lou Dobbs and this is Moneyline.

Authors note; Nihad Awad is in fact a spokesman for CAIR, Doug Parker is in fact the Chairman, CEO and President of US Airways, Lou Dobbs works for CNN, so we aren't sure about him - knewshound

Allahboard

2006-11-22T15:44:00.000-08:00

I found it ironic that US Airways has been declared a target of a boycot by CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) in protest of the recent incident involving the "Imans" removal from a flight.

In an impressive display of self preservation, the American Public has reacted to the announcement and spoke with their pocketbooks.

If the Muslims announce a complete boycott on all air travel, we can soon see the abolishment of the Transportation Safety Administration and a huge reduction in Homeland Security.

CAIR and their supporters - Doing their part to help the Economy©.

After 8 years, the Clinton Legacy is revealed.

2006-11-13T17:48:00.000-08:00

It was "For the Children".

The Rape of Europe

2006-11-02T15:56:00.000-08:00

The Rape of Europe

From the desk of Paul Belien on Wed, 2006-10-25 20:57

The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (12 October) that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now. Whilst sitting on a terrace in Berlin, Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said melancholically: “We are watching the world of yesterday.”

Europe is turning Muslim. As Broder is sixty years old he is not going to emigrate himself. “I am too old,” he said. However, he urged young people to get out and “move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable.”

Many Germans and Dutch, apparently, did not wait for Broder’s advice. The number of emigrants leaving the Netherlands and Germany has already surpassed the number of immigrants moving in. One does not have to be prophetic to predict, like Henryk Broder, that Europe is becoming Islamic. Just consider the demographics. The number of Muslims in contemporary Europe is estimated to be 50 million. It is expected to double in twenty years. By 2025, one third of all European children will be born to Muslim families. Today Mohammed is already the most popular name for new-born boys in Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and other major European cities.

Broder is convinced that the Europeans are not willing to oppose islamization. “The dominant ethos,” he told De Volkskrant, “is perfectly voiced by the stupid blonde woman author with whom I recently debated. She said that it is sometimes better to let yourself be raped than to risk serious injuries while resisting. She said it is sometimes better to avoid fighting than run the risk of death.”

In a recent op-ed piece in the Brussels newspaper De Standaard (23 October) the Dutch (gay and self-declared “humanist”) author Oscar Van den Boogaard refers to Broder’s interview. Van den Boogaard says that to him coping with the islamization of Europe is like “a process of mourning.” He is overwhelmed by a “feeling of sadness.” “I am not a warrior,” he says, “but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

As Tom Bethell wrote in this month’s American Spectator: “Just at the most basic level of demography the secular-humanist option is not working.” But there is more to it than the fact that non-religious people tend not to have as many children as religious people, because many of them prefer to “enjoy” freedom rather than renounce it for the sake of children. Secularists, it seems to me, are also less keen on fighting. Since they do not believe in an afterlife, this life is the only thing they have to lose. Hence they will rather accept submission than fight. Like the German feminist Broder referred to, they prefer to be raped than to resist.

“If faith collapses, civilization goes with it,” says Bethell. That is the real cause of the closing of civilization in Europe. Islamization is simply the consequence. The very word Islam means “submission” and the secularists have submitted already. Many Europeans have already become Muslims, though they do not realize it or do not want to admit it.

Some of the people I meet in the U.S. are particularly worried about the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. They are correct when they fear that anti-Semitism is also on the rise among non-immigrant Europeans. The latter hate people with a fighting spirit. Contemporary anti-Semitism in Europe (at least when coming from native Europeans) is related to anti-Americanism. People who are not prepared to resist and are eager to submit, hate others who do not want to submit and are prepared to fight. They hate them because they are afraid that the latter will endanger their lives as well. In their view everyone must submit.

This is why they have come to hate Israel and America so much, and the small band of European “islamophobes” who dare to talk about what they see happening around them. West Europeans have to choose between submission (islam) or death. I fear, like Broder, that they have chosen submission – just like in former days when they preferred to be red rather than dead.

A trip through Fantasy Land

2006-10-18T20:45:00.000-07:00

Like many of you, I read the reports of what life is like in North Korea and have wondered what it must be like to live in a bubble of Propaganda, your every action scrutinized, your every word probed for meaning.

How a society educates its children is a good indicator of its goals.

I could only gaze in wonder seeing this translation, courtesy of a Japanese resident, of the lengths to which the increasingly creepy Kim Jong-il goes to prop up his regime.

The following is a translation of a First Grade textbook from the People Paradise.

The textbook for first grade Korean in N. Korean elementary school, published by N. Korean Educational Books Publishing in 2005(Juche 94)

Kids studying so-called "Slogan Tree." Translators note: N. Koreans are taught that Kim Il-sung carved trees all over the country in order to encourage people to rise up against Japanese oppression. It is a sheer fabrication cooked up for their propaganda.) The text says, "Elder sister tells us one at a time. She tells us, while pointing at a Slogan Tree." The slogan on the tree says, "Long Live Commander Kim Il-sung"

On the left:

On the right:

Playing Soldiers

Kids are playing exciting game of soldiers.

Young-nam, the leader, looked around the hill, and gave us an order,

"Charge ahead!"

Kids ran out and crushed "Yankee imperialists."

Young-nam gave "medals" to brave kids.

Ration Day

Today is the ration day.

Father said to mother, smiling, "This year we get more ration than last year"

"This is all thanks to Marshall Kim Jong-il."

"Right, let us work harder on the field."

"I agree."

Father and mother looked at each other and smiled.

The picture is titled "Child."

On the left:

On the right:

Honorable Marshall continued,

"If Cicada sings, my father cannot sleep well. So I tried to stop its singing."

(Oh, that was why!)

Hearing Marshall Kim Jong-il care about the Grand Marshall(my note: Kim Il-sung,) his guards were deeply touched.

Kimjongil ia

Large flower, what flower?

Kimjongilia, the pretty flower

Blossomming one by one

Leaf by leaf

Where they bloomed

At my house

Across the ocean over the mountains

bloomed all over the world

Kimjongilia the red flower

bloomed by spring breeze?

no, no, the world in a single heart bloomed it

Marshall Kim Jong-il, shining like the sun,

the world bloomed them to honor him for thousands of years.

On the left:

On the right:

The tiny tank is going,

our tank is going

Crushing Americans,

the tiny tank is going.

Bo-chun-bo Raid

The honorable greate leader,

Grand Marshall Kim Il-sung fired a singal shot.

"bang, bang, ...."

Partisans wiped clean

all Japanese.

"Long live General Kim Il-sung!"

People shouted as loud as they can.

Please be with us forever

Grand Marshall, who gave us great faith,

please be with us forever.

Kid Scout Young-chol

Into the narrow trail of the valley,

came Japanese imperialists.

Kid scout Young-chol waved his red scarf to the partisans

"bang, bang, ...."

The partisans killed all Japanese.

"Long live General Kim Il-sung!",

shouted Young-chol and partisans.

I am going to be in People's Army

I will be,

I will be in People's Army

To defend our country,

I will be in People's Army

I will be,

I will be in hero's army

Of the great general,

I will be in hero's army

Yang Jung-a

/end translation

I swear, Kim Jong-il becomes even more like a James Bond Villian every day.

knewshound

And stop calling me Shirley

2006-10-10T14:42:00.000-07:00

I would rather be rich than famous.

2006-10-06T14:05:00.000-07:00

As any of my regular readers know, I am often published by mainstream Internet knews and opinion sites along with an occasional print article when I bother to submit them, which admittedly isn't often. One of the best on the Web is The American Thinker and it was to them and Chron Watch that I submitted my latest piece. Both sites posted them on their front pages as a lead article and I was quite pleased. I have been told by the publishers that my article was very popular, which any writer likes to hear.

I assumed I would get a few angry emails, as is typical with most things I have written and that I would hear little else from it. I was awaiting a conference call at work and was sorting out a report and decided I was bored so tuned in the Rush Limbaugh program to fill the silence.

I had only had the radio on for a few mintes when I heard the following;

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com

Lesson of Allen's Double-Digit Lead: Fight Back! October 5, 2006
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_100506/content/rush_is_right.member.html

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: George Allen now has a double-digit lead according to Zogby. Message: Fight back! We have no control over how the Democrats play their hand, whether they overplay it or not, but we do have to be smart and play our hands well. Attacking the media bias is a great tactic, not to mention it is truthful to attack the gay bias and the Democratic Party interests in all this. There's a great piece at the American Thinker today. It's one of our all-time favorite blogs. This is by Patrick Godfrey, (AKA Yours Truly) and I'll just give you some excerpts here. It's entitled: "The Worst October Surprise, EVER -- "It had all the earmarks of a classic Democratic Party plan to depress Republican turnout.

"Take a barely disguised homosexual Republican Congressman, add salacious electronic messages that included masturbation, sex and other lurid flourishes, push the story to their eager and willing accomplices in the media right before an election, and as quick as you can say LBJ an instant scandal is created. The only problem, it seems, is that in today’s world of media, with data available to the whole world that was heretofore available only to a select few, the plan didn’t work out quite the way they had expected. Enterprising bloggers have done the elemental detective work and discovered that the entire incident is nearly exactly the opposite of what was first reported.

"Rather than a case of a pedophile Congressman stalking young men in the corridors of power, it instead turns out to be a case of a closeted homosexual nurturing a relationship with a young man, and making sexual advances once he became an adult. A relationship by the way that the young man, if he felt threatened or chose not to continue, could have ended at any time. An older homosexual man seeking a relationship with a young man? Who would have thought such a thing would ever happen? Rather than the Pedophile Politician script we were first being fed..." and we are still being fed, by the way, because nobody is interested that this victim is 18 when this is happening. Nobody in the Drive-By Media cares about that. Nobody is willing to mention that.

So the pedophile politician script still is what we are being fed. "[W]e now know that the real story is far less than we have been lead to believe. As it turns out, although the young man in question was indeed a Page, was indeed befriended by Congressman Foley and did have sexual discussions with him. But it seems everything was perfectly legal, if nevertheless repellant to many, including a good chunk of the GOP base whose turnout is vital in the forthcoming election.... While angry values voters fulminate over Hastert’s failure to do something before the IMs came to light, all I can remember is the Democrats’ mantra. 'That the troglodyte Republicans were obsessed by sex between consenting adults. That homosexuals in close working relationships with young people, especially young men, is a good and healthy thing. That some forms of sex, aren’t sex.'"
That is the Democrat mantra. Gays in close working relationship with young people, teachers and so forth, young men? That's good. It's a healthy thing. We can't hide people from their realities. "That what two consenting adults do or say behind closed doors is their business." Do you realize we are preoccupied by the very people who told us, "It's sex. It's nothing but sex! It's nobody's business. It's a private affair, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. These people can do what they want. It didn't affect their leadership," they're now trying to invoke the same thing they defended back in the nineties with Clinton! Also included that "'intercepting and reading electronic communications between anyone in the US, especially those between two citizens, is never to be tolerated,'" except when somebody gets hold of some instant messages between a gay congressman who's a Republican!

Well, we can do all the subterfuge we want to get those, because that's good for the country. "So in the end, what do we end up with? 'A pedophile that wasn’t. A child that was actually an adult. The disclosure of personal electronic communications of a highly personal nature between two consenting adults revealed. A sex scandal between a couple who never had sex." I kind of miss it. Can I be honest with you? This country is going to hell in a handbasket. Where are the old days when you really had a sex scandal and people actually had sex? Fanny Fox in the fountain there in Washington with Wilbur Mills! Give me the good old days of Gary Hart and Donna Rice.

They actually had sex, chartered a boat to go out there to Bimini Island, actually had sex. The "Monkey Business" was the name of the boat. Yes, give me the good old days when there were actual sexual affairs between men and women, Rita Jenrette, remember that? Those were the good old days. If we're going to have sex scandals in Washington, can we go back to including sex in them? We have a sex scandal here with no sex! At least not by the Democrats. You think the Democrats define masturbation as sex if BJ's aren't? Let's see. Anyway... "We also end up with Democrat congressman can have sex with 17-year-olds and get reelected," Gerry Studds, "but Republicans that talk about sex in instant messages are forced to resign."

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

(American Thinker: Worst October Surprise, EVER - Patrick Godfrey)
(NewsMax: Zogby: Sen. Allen Has Double Digit Lead)
(American Spectator: Foley scandal, Democrats risk major exposure themselves)
(The Hill: Watchdogs in Soros's pocket: GOP)

All in all, I would rather have become famous for winning the Lottery, but I will take what I can get.

My real question is; Since the piece Rush read only took 5 minutes to read the piece, does that mean I still have 10 minutes of fame left?

I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

knewshound

Or is it a W?

2006-10-05T17:31:00.001-07:00

Phil Angelides and John Kerry demonstrate the Democrat Partys plan for Iraq.

Or is it a subliminal vote of confidence for George W. Bush?

I report - you decide.

Cheers,

knewshound

Worst October Suprise EVER

2006-10-04T19:36:00.000-07:00

Worst October Suprise EVER.

By Patrick Godfrey

knewshound@yahoo.com

(As read on the Rush Limbaugh Show)

It had all the earmarks of a classic Democrat Party plan to depress Republican turnout. Take a barely disguised homosexual Republican Congressman, add salacious electronic messages that included masturbation, sex and other lurid details, push it to their eager and willing accomplices in the Main Stream Media (MSM) right before an election and as quick as you can say LBJ an instant scandal is created.

The only problem it seems, is that in today’s world of media, with data available to the whole world that was heretofore available only to a select few, the plan didn’t work out quite the way they had expected. An enterprising blogger has done some elemental detective work and discovered that the entire incident is nearly exactly the opposite of what was first reported.

Rather than a case of a pedophile Congressman stalking young men in the corridors of power, it instead turns out to be a case of a closeted homosexual nurturing a relationship with a young man, and making sexual advances once he became an adult. A relationship by the way that the young man, if he felt threatened or chose not to continue, could have ended at any time.

An older homosexual man seeking a relationship with a young man? Who would have thought?

Rather than the Pedophile Politician script we were first being fed, we now know that the real story is far less than we have been lead to believe.

As it turns out, although the young man in question was indeed a Page, was indeed befriended by Congressman Foley and did have sexual discussions with him; it seems everything was perfectly legal. As a signatory of a Bill outlawing Internet sex between adults and minors, Foley was perfectly aware of the legal boundaries and seems to have taken great care to not cross that fine line until the young man became a legal adult.

All I can remember is the Democrats mantra. That the troglodyte Republicans were obsessed by sex between consenting adults. That homosexuals in close working relationships with young people, especially young men, is a good and healthy thing. That some forms of sex, aren’t sex. That what two consenting adults do or say behind closed doors is their business. That intercepting and reading electronic communications between anyone in the US, especially those between two citizens, is never to be tolerated.

And most of all; never be judgmental.

So in the end, what do we end up with?

A pedophile that wasn’t.

A child that was actually an adult.

The disclosure of personal electronic communications of a highly personal nature between two consenting adults revealed.

A sex scandal between a couple who never had sex.

That Democrat Congressmen can have sex with 17 year olds and get re-elected, but Republicans that talk about sex are forced to resign.

ABC news is made to look like a fool, hyping a story beyond the facts at hand.

That the facts at hand were, yet again, revealed by an anonymous Blogger Rather (pardon the pun) than the “professional fact checkers” that the MSM routinely crows about is the death knell to the Democrats traditional scripts. Along with the infamous Texas Air National Guard documents of 2004, this latest attempt by the Democrats is not going according to plan, and I suspect it will have the same result at the Polls in November. It is, without a doubt, the worst October Surprise, EVER.

On assignment

2006-09-02T08:33:00.000-07:00

I am on assignment in Southern California doing research for an upcoming story.

I will return soon.

Pot Meets Kettle

2006-08-30T08:22:00.000-07:00

I suppose by now, the bankrupt ideals of the Left should not suprise me.

However; having the associated members of the Black, Latino and Asain Caucus complain about a race based issue is just too ironic to pass without comment.

Perhaps if these members had a little less regard for race in their own identity, the whole situation would be moot.

Story follows.

WHAT, NO WHITE CAUCUS?

August 30, 2006 -- Everybody knows that the New York City Council lacks energy, imagination and - for the most part - integrity and intelligence.

It's running a serious irony deficit, too.

Yesterday, members of the council's Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus (BLAC) met with the press to complain about - of all things - classifying individuals by race and/or ethnic origins.

The issue is an upcoming TV-reality series that will divide up contestants based on ethnicity.

Yeah, that's a pretty obnoxious notion. But if the council members feel that it's repugnant for TV producers to classify people by race - and, again, we agree that it is - then why have they formed a race-driven cliques like BLAC?

The council is hardly unique in this respect. But that doesn't make it right.

Just ironic.

Approaching the Iranian border, 2010

2006-08-28T20:02:00.000-07:00

Catch more of Chris Muir at Day by Day

Never so glad to be wrong in my life

2006-08-23T17:48:00.000-07:00

Well, it is August 23 and I'm still here.

Thankfully.

I still am very concerned about Iran and its allies, they must not be taken lightly.

That the Iranians went out of their way for months declaring that Aug 22 was a deadline of sorts and that they would be making a major pronouncement on that day, and having the occasion pass with only a minor reiteration of their usual position indicates to me that something might have gone wrong for them.

We ignore Iran at our peril.

And this IS the Middle East, where anything can happen.

It is after all, not a question of IF, but WHEN.

The Gathering Storm

2006-08-18T15:04:00.000-07:00

Looks like my suspicions about Aug 22 are becoming reality quickly.

Tehran, 18 August (AKI) - Iranian state television has announced that Iran will begin new missile tests on Saturday in five different border regions including along the frontier with Afghanistan. The tests - which will last five days - appear to be a show of strength staged to impress ethnic minorities living in Iran's Kurdistan, Baluchistan and Khorasan provinces

And...

Iran's state television today said the military would launch a series of large-scale exercises on August 19.State television quoted army deputy commander General Mohammad Reza Ashtiani as saying that the upcoming maneuvers "aim at introducing Iran's new defensive doctrine."Ashtiani reportedly said the exercises would involve both ground and air forces and would go on "for an unspecified period of time."

And....

"We have to be prepared against any threat and we should be a role model for other countries," local newspapers quoted Gen. Ashtiani, as saying. "Our army is ready to defuse all plots against Islamic Republic of Iran."The military exercise, involving 12 infantry regiments, is called "The Blow of Zolfaghar," in reference to a sword that belonged to Imam Ali, one of the most revered figures of Islam for Shi'ite Muslims. A majority of Iran's 70 million people are Shi'ite. On Wednesday, the Interior Ministry said that Iran also plans to boost security patrols on its borders

The "exercises" will, by the most amazing coincidence, be right next to their enemies.

Meanwhile, the Mullahs are hard at work removing any link to the ouside world by destroying satellite dishes.

And at the same time, North Korea seems to be getting ready for a nuclear test.

All signs point to a History making event on the 22nd.

I fervently hope I am wrong.

It increasingly looks as thought I will not be.

Be safe.

knewshound

It's breeding obvious, mate

2006-08-17T17:52:00.000-07:00

I sometimes post Mark Steyn columns that never see the light of day in the US. In this piece from The Australian, he is at his absolute best. Those of you who subscribe to my Mark Steyn Mailing List already read it but for those who have not, please take the time to enjoy one the the finest wordsmiths in the business.

Its' breeding obvious, mate.

Australia and the US can avoid the bleak future awaiting dying old Europe

August 18, 2006 By Mark Steyn

I’M honored to be asked to give the C D Kemp lecture before members of the Institute he founded and which lives on after him. I’ve been in Australia for a couple of weeks on what I like to think of as my “Head for the hills! It’s the end of the world!” tour. But don’t worry, it’s like Barbra Streisand’s farewell tour, I’ll be back to do another end-of-the-world tour in a year or two.

Whether or not the western world is ending, it’s certainly changed. It’s a very strange feeling from the perspective of four decades on to return to a famous book C D Kemp wrote in 1964, Big Businessmen, a portrait of a now all but extinct generation of Australian industrialists. They were men whose sense of themselves in relation to the society they lived in was immensely secure. They had an instinctive belief in the culture that raised them and enriched them. To have pointed out such a fact at the time would have seemed superfluous: it was still shared by many forces in society – bank managers, kindergarten teachers, even Anglican clerics.

None of these pillars of what we used to regard as conventional society is quite as sturdy as it was, and most of them have collapsed. Many mainstream Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left political cliches. In this world, if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican vicar in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally-friendly car with an “Arms Are For Hugging” sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.

Yet, if the purpose of the modern church is to be a cutting-edge political pacesetter, it’s Islam that’s doing the better job. It’s easy to look at gold-toothed Punjabi yobs in northern England or Algerian pseudo-rappers in French suburbs and think, oh well, their Muslim identity is clearly pretty residual. But that’s to apply westernized notions of piety. Today the mosque is a meetinghouse, and throughout the west what it meets to discuss is, even when not explicitly jihadist, always political. The mosque or madrassah is not the place to go for spiritual contemplation so much as political motivation. The Muslim identity of those French rioters or English jailbirds may seem spiritually vestigial but it’s politically potent. So, even as a political project, the mainstream Protestant churches are a bust. Pre-modern Islam beats post-modern Christianity.

As for many teachers, they regard the accumulated inheritance of western civilization as an unending parade of racism, sexism, imperialism and other malign -isms, leavened only by routine genocides. Even if this were true – which it’s not – it’s not a good sustaining narrative for any nation unless it’s planning on going out of business.

And, speaking of business, even the heirs of those Big Businessmen C D Kemp wrote about feel obliged to join the ranks of the civilizational self-loathers. I notice that in its commercials the oil company BP – that’s to say, British Petroleum – now says that BP stands for “Beyond Petroleum”: the ads are all about how it’s developing environmentally-friendly ways to conserve energy; in other words, it’s ashamed of the business it’s in.

The question posed here tonight is very direct: “Does Western Civilization Have A Future?” One answer’s easy: if western civilization doesn’t have a past, it certainly won’t have a future. No society can survive when it consciously unmoors itself from its own inheritance. But let me answer it in a less philosophical way:

Much of western civilization does not have any future. That’s to say, we’re not just speaking philosophically, but literally. In a very short time, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and other countries we regard as part of the western tradition will cease to exist in any meaningful sense. They don’t have a future because they’ve given up breeding. Spain’s population is halving with every generation: Two grown-ups have a total of one baby. So there are half as many children as parents. And a quarter as many grandchildren as grandparents. And an eighth as many great-grandchildren as great-grandparents. And, after that there’s no point extrapolating, because you’re over the falls and it’s too late to start paddling back. I received a flurry of letters from furious Spaniards when the government decided to replace the words “father” and “mother” on its birth certificates with the less orientationally offensive terms “Progenitor A” and “Progenitor B”. This was part of the bureaucratic spring-cleaning of traditional language that always accompanies the arrival in law of “gay marriage”. But, with historically low numbers of progeny, the designations of the respective progenitors seem of marginal concern. They’d be better off trying to encourage the average young Spaniard to wander into a Barcelona singles bar and see if anyone wants to come back to his pad to play Progenitor A and Progenitor B. (“Well, okay, but only if I can be Progenitor A…”)

Seventeen European nations are now at what demographers call “lowest-low” fertility – 1.3 births per woman, the point at which you’re so far down the death spiral you can’t pull out. In theory, those countries will find their population halving every 35 years or so. In practice, it will be quicker than that, as the savvier youngsters figure there’s no point sticking around a country that’s turned into an undertaker’s waiting room. So large parts of the western world are literally dying – and, in Europe, the successor population to those aging French and Dutch and Belgians is already in place. Perhaps the differences will be minimal. In France, the Catholic churches will become mosques; in England, the village pubs will cease serving alcohol; in the Netherlands, the gay nightclubs will close up shop and relocate to San Francisco. But otherwise life will go on much as before. The new Europeans will be observant Muslims instead of post-Christian secularists but they will still be recognizably European: It will be like Cats after a cast change: same long-running show, new actors, but the plot, the music, the sets are all the same. The animating principles of advanced societies are so strong that they will thrive whoever’s at the switch.

But what if they don’t? In the 2005 rankings of Freedom House’s survey of personal liberty and democracy around the world, five of the eight countries with the lowest “freedom” score were Muslim. Of the 46 Muslim majority nations in the world, only three were free. Of the 16 nations in which Muslims form between 20 and 50 per cent of the population, only another three were ranked as free: Benin, Serbia and Montenegro, and Suriname. It will be interesting to follow France’s fortunes as a fourth member of that group.

If you think a nation is no more than a “great hotel” (as the Canadian novelist Yann Martel described his own country, approvingly), you can always slash rates and fill the empty rooms – for as long as there are any would-be lodgers left out there to move in. But there aren’t going to be many would-be immigrants out there in the years ahead – not for aging western societies in which an ever smaller pool of young people pay ever higher taxes to support ever swelling geriatric native populations. And, if you believe a nation is the collective, accumulated wisdom of a shared past, then a dependence on immigration alone for population replenishment will leave you lost and diminished. That’s why Peter Costello’s stirring call – a boy for you, a girl for me, and one for Australia – is, ultimately, a national security issue – and a more basic one than how much you spend on defence.

Americans take for granted all the “it’s about the future of all our children” hooey that would ring so hollow in a European election. In the 2005 German campaign, voters were offered what would be regarded in the US as a statistically improbable choice: a childless man (Herr Schroeder) vs a childless woman (Frau Merkel). Statist Europe signed on to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s alleged African proverb – “It takes a village to raise a child” – only to discover they got it backwards: on the Continent, the lack of children will raze the village. And most of the villagers still refuse to recognize the contradictions: You can’t breed at the lethargic rate of most Europeans and then bitch and whine about letting the Turks into the European Union. Demographically, they’re the kids you couldn’t be bothered having.

One would assume a demographic disaster is the sort of thing that sneaks up on you because you’re having a grand old time: You stayed in university till you were 38, you took early retirement at 45, you had two months a year on the Cote d’Azur, you drank wine, you ate foie gras and truffles, you marched in the street for a 28-hour work week… It was all such great fun there was no time to have children. You thought the couple in the next street would, or the next town, or in all those bucolic villages you pass through on the way to your weekend home.

But the strange thing is that Europeans aren’t happy. The Germans are so slumped in despond that in 2005 the government began running a Teutonic feelgood marketing campaign in which old people are posed against pastoral vistas, fetching young gays mooch around the Holocaust memorial, Katarina Witt stands in front of some photogenic moppets, etc., and then they all point their fingers at the camera and shout “Du bist Deutschland!” – “You are Germany!” – which is meant somehow to pep up glum Hun couch potatoes. Can’t see it working myself. The European Union got rid of all the supposed obstacles to happiness – war, politics, the burden of work, insufficient leisure time, tiresome dependents – and yet their people are strikingly unhappy. Consider this poll taken in 2002 for the first anniversary of 9/11: 61 per cent of Americans said they were optimistic about the future, as opposed to 43 per cent of Canadians, 42 per cent of Britons, 29 per cent of the French, 23 per cent of Russians and 15 per cent of Germans. I wouldn’t reckon those numbers will get any cheerier over the years.

What’s the most laughable article published in a major American newspaper in the last decade? A good contender is a New York Times column by the august Princeton economist Paul Krugman. The headline was “French Family Values”, and the thesis is that, while parochial American conservatives drone on about “family values”, the Europeans live it, enacting policies that are more “family friendly”. On the Continent, claims Professor Krugman, “government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff – to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family.”

How can an economist make that claim without noticing that the upshot of all these “family friendly” policies is that nobody has any families? Isn’t the first test of a pro-family regime its impact on families?

As for all that extra time, what happened? Europeans work fewer hours than Americans, they don’t have to pay for their own health care, they don’t go to church and they don’t contribute to other civic groups, they don’t marry and they don’t have kids to take to school and basketball and the county fair.

So what do they do with all the time?

Forget for the moment Europe’s lack of world-beating companies: They regard capitalism red in tooth and claw as an Anglo-American fetish, and they mostly despise it. And in fairness some of their quasi-state corporations are very pleasant: I’d much rather fly Air France than United or Continental. But what about the things Europeans supposedly value? With so much free time, where is the great European art? Assuredly Gershwin and Bernstein aren’t Bach and Mozart, but what have the Continentals got? Their pop culture is more American than it’s ever been. Fifty years ago, before European welfarism had them in its vise-like death grip, the French had better pop songs and the Italians made better movies. Where are Europe’s men of science? At American universities. Meanwhile, Continental governments pour fortunes into prestigious white elephants of Euro-identity, like the Airbus 380, the QE2 of the skies, capable of carrying 500, 800, a thousand passengers at a time, if only somebody somewhere would order the damn thing, which they might consider doing once all the airports have built new runways to handle it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s a swell idea. It’ll come in very useful for large-scale evacuation operations circa 2015.

“When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do,” writes Charles Murray in In Our Hands, “ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.” The Continent has embraced a spiritual death long before the demographic one. In those 17 Europeans countries which have fallen into “lowest-low fertility”, where are the children? In a way, you’re looking at them: the guy sipping espresso at a sidewalk café listening to his iPod. Free citizens of advanced western democracies are increasingly the world’s wrinkliest teenagers: the state makes the grown-up decisions and we spend our pocket money on our record collection. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912 – before teenagers or record collections had been invented. He understood that the long-term cost of a softened state is the infantilization of the population. The populations of wealthy democratic societies expect to be able to choose from dozens of breakfast cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies at the video store, and millions of porn sites on the Internet, yet think it perfectly to demand that the state take care of their elderly parents and their young children while they’re working – to, in effect, surrender what most previous societies would have regarded as all the responsibilities of adulthood. It’s a curious inversion of citizenship to demand control over peripheral leisure activities but to contract out the big life-changing stuff to the government. And it’s hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latterday Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in.

Australia has more economic freedom than the EU and fewer distorting demographic problems, so, along with America, it’s one of the two countries with a sporting chance of avoiding the perfect storm about to engulf the rest of the west. But at some point it too will have to confront these issues – not just the falling birth rate and aging population, but the underlying civilizational ennui of which the big lack of babies is merely the most obvious symptom. I feel bad running around like a headless chicken shrieking about this stuff. But let’s face it, scaremongering is the default mode of the age. We worry incessantly, because worrying is the way the responsible citizen of an advanced society demonstrates his virtue: He feels good about feeling bad. So he worries mostly about what offers the best opportunities for self-loathing – climate change, or the need to increase mostly harmful foreign aid to African dictatorships. This is a kind of decadence. September 11th 2001 was not “the day everything changed”, but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On September 10th, how many journalists had the Council of American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britain in their rolodexes? If you’d said that whether something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st century’s principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.

But it’s important to remember: radical Islam is only the top-eighth of that iceberg – it’s an opportunist enemy taking advantage of a demographically declining and spiritually decayed west. The real issue is the seven-eighths below the surface – the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and call into question the future of much of the rest of the world. The key factors are: i) Demographic decline; ii) The unsustainability of the social democratic state; iii) Civilizational exhaustion.

None of these is Islam’s fault. They’re self-inflicted. If you doubt that, forget about fast Islamifying Europe and look at the most geriatric jurisdiction on the planet. In Japan, the rising sun has already passed into the next phase of its long sunset: net population loss. 2005 was the first year since records began in which the country had more deaths than births. Japan offers the chance to observe the demographic death spiral in its purest form. It’s a country with no immigration, no significant minorities and no desire for any: just the Japanese, aging and dwindling.

At first it doesn’t sound too bad: compared with the United States, most advanced societies are very crowded. If you’re in a cramped apartment in a noisy congested city, losing a couple hundred thousand seems a fine trade-off. The difficulty, in a modern social democratic state, is managing which people to lose: already, according to The Japan Times, depopulation is “presenting the government with pressing challenges on the social and economic front, including ensuring provision of social security services and securing the labor force.” For one thing, the shortage of children has led to a shortage of obstetricians. Why would any talented ambitious med. school student want to go into a field in such precipitous decline? Birthing is a dying business.

At the beginning of the century, the country’s toymakers noticed they had a problem: toys are for children and Japan doesn’t have many. What to do? In 2005, Tomy began marketing a new doll called Yumel – a baby boy with a range of 1,200 phrases designed to serve as companions for the elderly. He says not just the usual things – “I wuv you” – but also asks the questions your grandchildren would ask if you had any: “Why do elephants have long noses?” Yumel joins his friend, the Snuggling Ifbot, a toy designed to have the conversation of a five-year old child which its makers, with the usual Japanese efficiency, have determined is just enough chit-chat to prevent the old folks going senile. It seems an appropriate final comment on the social democratic state: in a childish infantilized self-absorbed society where adults have been stripped of core responsibilities, you need never stop playing with toys. We are the children we never had.

And why leave it at that? Is it likely an ever smaller number of young people will want to spend their active years looking after an ever greater number of old people? Or will it be simpler to put all that cutting-edge Japanese technology to good use and take a flier on Mister Roboto and the post-human future? After all, what’s easier for the governing class? Weaning a pampered population off the good life and re-teaching them the lost biological impulse or giving the Sony Corporation a license to become the Cloney Corporation? If you need to justify it to yourself, you’d grab the graphs and say, well, demographic decline is universal. It’s like industrialization a couple of centuries back; everyone will get to it eventually, but the first to do so will have huge advantages: the relevant comparison is not with England’s early 19th century population surge but with England’s industrial revolution. In the industrial age, manpower was critical. In the new technological age, manpower will be optional – and indeed, if most of the available manpower’s alienated young Muslim men, it may well be a disadvantage. As the most advanced society with the most advanced demographic crisis, Japan seems likely to be the first jurisdiction to embrace robots and cloning and embark on the slippery slope to transhumanism.

The advantage Australians and Americans have is that most of the rest of the west is ahead of us: their canoes are already on the brink of the falls. But Australians who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we’ve led since 1945 in the western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world in which ever more parts of the map fall prey to the reprimitivization that’s afflicted Liberia, Somalia and Bosnia.

If it’s difficult to focus on long-term trends because human life is itself short-term, think short-term: Huge changes are happening now. For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs and ever less civilizational confidence, the question is a simple one: Can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then western civilization will go the way of all others that failed to meet a simple test: as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1870, “Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.”

Flooding the Zone; The coming war against Israel

2006-08-14T18:25:00.000-07:00

Flooding the Zone; The coming war against Israel

By Patrick Godfrey

knewshound@yahoo.com

In American Football, a time honored play is Flooding the Zone, where an aggressive opponent will put a large number of their offensive players in an area of the field overwhelming the Defense and allowing an opportune score. I believe the same strategy is soon to be unleashed on Israel from Iran.

Iran has been a favorite client of China, North Korea and Russia who have eagerly sold them the most advanced weaponry in return for some cold hard Petro-Dollars Along with those hard cases, some European firms now find themselves on the receiving end of their own technology as Iran arms itself to threaten Europe.

Iran has been acquiring missiles for years and among their inventories are the Shihab-2,3 & 4 with ranges from 1000 to 2000KM and has also acquired BM-25s from North Korea with a range of over 2500KM putting Europe and all of the Middle East in their sights. With their upcoming “Major Announcement” on Aug 22, I fear that a full scale attack on Israel is in the works.

I believe this attack will come in the form of waves of missiles from Iran, possibly first probing the Israeli air defenses but I suspect that type of attack is simply not the style of Iranian President Ahmadinejad. He has mad no bones about his intention to wipe out Israel, he has made it very clear that he intend to do this. The West has fritted away any chance of stopping him and he knows it.

I believe Iran will launch everything it has at Israel in one full scale assault. Iran will likely save their nuclear weapons for the final volley when Israeli anti missile defenses will have been spent. Ahmadinejad will try to obliterate Israel in one violent attack, fulfilling his prophecy that Jerusalem will be engulfed in a “sky filled with fire” as foretold in the return of the 12^th Madi, a apocalyptic vision of the world that Ahmadinejad believes in fully.

Only in the chaos and disaster that such an act would bring will the 12^th or “hidden” Madi return. Ahmadinejad has been planning this event for years and it will fulfill his deep seated desire to re-shape the world for Islam. For 60 years, the West and East were deterred from a full scale nuclear exchange by the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). When a religious fanatic with a desire for an apocalyptic confrontation with Israel and the West is given these same weapons, the outcome is nearly ordained.

Will Israel and the West confront Iran before the missiles fly?

Our very lives may depend on it.

And in this corner, the MSM

2006-08-02T20:38:00.000-07:00

Nothing much else needs to be said.

The Last Normal Day; 21 Aug 2006

2006-07-24T18:47:00.000-07:00

The Last Normal Day; 21 Aug 2006

By Patrick Godfrey

knewshound@yahoo.com

When we look back on it, we will be amazed we could be so stupid.

After all, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had given us ample warning what his intentions were. Since the day he took “office” he has been the hardest of hard liners, declaring his intention to promote his particular brand of Islamic fascism, with none of the evasive answers we had come to expect from others of his kind in the Middle East. Rather than dance around the issue of Israel, he openly declared that “Israel should be destroyed”. Neville Chamberlain would roll over in his grave; at least he got a Treaty out of the deal. The West got nothing but contempt.

Some saw it and raised the alarm. Had Bush been supported by the Democrats in a time of war, as was the tradition for the prior 200 years, he might have been able to convince our traditional Allies to actually DO something. But it was not to be. Realizing that no matter what, the talking points of the Democrats made it impossible for the US to take the lead on Iran. After listening to years of Leftist sputtering about “Cowboy Diplomacy” and the implied superiority of the Euro elites and their suave negotiating skills, Bush gladly handed the Iranian nuclear issue to them and wished them luck.

After 2 years of bargaining and negotiations, the Euros accomplished exactly….Nothing.

As most of the West long suspected, Ahmadinejad was merely biding his time, demanding and getting production of Plutonium to a point those in the West thought impossible, which they would have been if normal safety processes are ignored and needed shielding is not installed. After all, why worry about such pitiful details when the exposed worker will be dying for the return of the glory of Islam?

One might have suspected that with the apparent disgust that the Left looked upon the religious views of Bush, they would have recoiled in horror when Ahmadinejad expressed his belief in the return of the 12^th Madi. This was beyond some apocalyptic fire and brimstone Preacher, this guy actually believed what he was saying. But beyond mention in a couple of news stories, it was not widely reported on.

When the Iranian President wrote to Bush in May of 2006, few realized he was offering the West a truce. If Bush were to convert to Islam, all past grievances would be forgiven. Although it was given scant notice in the news of the day, it was in retrospect a portent of things to come.

Which brings us to Aug 22, 2006.

Many theories were proposed as to what the Iranians would do on the 22^nd as pundits of all stripes weighed on with their own pet ideas, and as it turns out a few of them were correct. The world has changed. A rethinking of our relationships and approaches are in order.

Now that the events of the day are behind us, what shall we do now?

The Left has always claimed the moral high ground and demonized every attempt by those who would stand up to Militant Islam. With the events of Aug 22 in mind, I demand an answer from the Left.

The choice is clear; in a fight to the death with fanatical, apocalyptic belief system, which side will they be on?

The question demands an answer.

NOW

Stuffing the Internet Tubes

2006-07-06T14:58:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder why we get such poor legislation concerning Technology?

Alaska Senator Ted Stevens is the poster child for Technological Stupidity. Read on as he explains the Internet to you and how one of his "Internets" was delayed for a day because of "clogged Tubes".

What a friggen Maroon.

From the Source;

There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let's talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren't using it for commercial purposes.

We aren't earning anything by going on that internet. Now I'm not saying you have to or you want to discriminate against those people

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says "No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet". No, I'm not finished. I want people to understand my position, I'm not going to take a lot of time.

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people.

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it's not using what consumers use every day.

It's not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a violation of net neutrality that hits you and me.

IowaHawk has a hilarious send up of this blowhard that you shouldn't miss

Revenge is better served cold

2006-05-31T15:20:00.000-07:00

Ever been ripped off on eBay?

This guy was too.

Unlike most of us, he got even.

Mash here for a very funny, and somewhat scary story of one guys attempt to get even with an eBay ripoff artist.

A tip of the knewshounds hat to the author of this very cleaver solution to his problem.

Cheers,

knewshound

In Pakistan, the beating continues

2006-05-16T21:11:00.000-07:00

The situation in Pakistan gets worse by the day. Egypt, Morocco , Saudi Arabia are not far behind. Here; a typical abuser is seen looking for his next victim.

There is only one answer, the United Nations should Immediately establish a commission to investigate this shocking development and a long term program to address the root causes must be implemented ASAP.

A crisis like this calls for an experienced hand. I can think of no better candidate than Paul Rubenfeld.

I'm sure, that with a thorough examination of the issue, this entire episode will come to a head. The solution should comprehensive, allowing for the cultural differences found in a developing country such as Pakistan.

With a concentrated effort, a solution can be found that is both satisfying and long lasting. The temptation to end the effort prematurely will be great, but with a concerted effort, the situation can be brought to a satisfying climax.

I eagerly await the results of this important and much needed investigation.

Cheers,

knewshound

Full text follows;

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Pakistan most sex-starved

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: Google, the worldÂs most popular Internet search engine, has found in a survey that mostly Muslim states seek access to sex-related websites and Pakistan tops the list. Google found that of the top 10 countries - searching for sex-related sites - six were Muslim, with Pakistan on the top. The other Muslim countries are Egypt at number 2, Iran at 4, Morocco at 5, Saudi Arabia at 7 and Turkey at 8. Non-Muslim states are Vietnam at 3, India at 6, Philippines at 9 and Poland at 10.

The quagmire deepens

2006-05-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

It gets worse every day.

Soldiers dying in a distant country, their leadership floundering, no long term plans, poor supplies and a hostile local population.

Oh wait, you thought I was talking about the US and Iraq?

You must be a reader of the Main Stream Media.

With the information below being freely available, why has it yet to make it to your local paper or the evening knews?

Read on, the answer will become obvious, it does not show the US losing, consequently, it will never see the light of day in the MSM.

The knewshound, doing the job the MSM SHOULD be doing.

Cheers,

knewshound

Captured Internal Al-Qaeda Documents Found April 16

1. It has been proven that the Shiites have a power and influence in Baghdad that cannot be taken lightly, particularly when the power of the Ministries of Interior and Defense is given to them, compared with the power of the mujahidin in Baghdad. During a military confrontation, they will be in a better position because they represent the power of the state along with the power of the popular militias. Most of the mujahidin power lies in surprise attacks (hit and run) or setting up explosive charges and booby traps. This is a different matter than a battle with organized forces that possess machinery and suitable communications networks. Thus, what is fixed in the minds of the Shiite and Sunni population is that the Shiites are stronger in Baghdad and closer to controlling it while the mujahidin (who represent the backbone of the Sunni people) are not considered more than a daily annoyance to the Shiite government. The only power the mujahidin have is what they have already demonstrated in hunting down drifted patrols and taking sniper shots at those patrol members who stray far from their patrols, or planting booby traps among the citizens and hiding among them in the hope that the explosions will injure an American or members of the government. In other words, these activities could be understood as hitting the scared and the hiding ones, which is an image that requires a concerted effort to change, as well as Allah's wisdom.

2. The strength of the brothers in Baghdad is built mainly on booby trapped cars, and most of the mujahidin groups in Baghdad are generally groups of assassin without any organized military capabilities.

3.There is a clear absence of organization among the groups of the brothers in Baghdad, whether at the leadership level in Baghdad, the brigade leaders, or their groups therein. Coordination among them is very difficult, which appears clearly when the group undertake a join operations.

4. The policy followed by the brothers in Baghdad is a media oriented policy without a clear comprehensive plan to capture an area or an enemy center. Other word, the significance of the strategy of their work is to show in the media that the American and the government do not control the situation and there is resistance against them. This policy dragged us to the type of operations that are attracted to the media, and we go to the streets from time to time for more possible noisy operations which follow the same direction. This direction has large positive effects; however, being preoccupied with it alone delays more important operations such as taking control of some areas, preserving it and assuming power in Baghdad (for example, taking control of a university, a hospital, or a Sunni religious site).

Page 2 of 4

At the same time, the Americans and the Government were able to absorb our painful blows, sustain them, compensate their losses with new replacements, and follow strategic plans which allowed them in the past few years to take control of Baghdad as well as other areas one after the other. That is why every year is worse than the previous year as far as the Mujahidin's control and influence over Baghdad.

5. The role that the Islamic party and the Islamic Scholars Committee play in numbing the Sunni people through the media is a dangerous role. It has been proven from the course of the events that the American investment in the Party and the Committee were not in vain. In spite of the gravity of the events, they were able to calm down the Sunni people, justify the enemy deeds, and give the enemy the opportunity to do more work without any recourse and supervision. This situation stemmed from two matters:

First, their media power is presented by their special radio and TV stations as the sole Sunni information source, coupled with our weak media which is confined mainly to the Internet, without a flyer or newspaper to present these events.

Second, in the course of their control of the majority of the speakers at mosques who convert right into wrong and wrong into right, and present Islam in a sinful manner and sins in a Muslim manner. At the same time we did not have any positive impact or benefits from our operations.

6. The mujahidin do not have any stored weapons and ammunition in their possession in Baghdad, particularly rockets, such as C5K Katyosha or bomber or mortars which we realized their importance and shortage in Baghdad. That was due to lack of check and balance, and proper follow-ups.

7. The National Guard status is frequently raised and whether they belong to the Sunnis or Shiites. Too much talk is around whether we belong to them or not, or should we strike and kill their men or not?

It is believed that this matter serves the Americans very well. I believe that the Committee and the Party are pushing this issue because they want to have an influence, similar to the Mujahidin's. When and if a Sunni units from the National Guard are formed, and begin to compete with the mujahidin and squeeze them, we will have a problem; we either let them go beyond the limits or fight them and risk inciting the Sunnis against us through the Party's and the Committee's channels.

Page 3 of 4

I believe that we should not allow this situation to exist at all, and we should bury it before it surfaces and reject any suggestion to that effect.

8. (Salah), the military commander of Baghdad (he used to be the commander of the Rassafah County and still is) is a courageous young man with a good determination but he has little and simple experience in the military field and does not have a clear vision about the current stage and how to deal with it Most of his work at al-Rassafah County is to take cars to the Jubur Arab Tribes, convert them into booby traps and take them back inside Baghdad for explosion. And the more booby trap cars he makes, the more success he has. This alone is not a work plan and we do not benefit from it in the medium range let alone the long range.

9. (Salah): The current commander of Northern al-Karkh (Abu-Huda) is very concerned because of his deteriorating security situation caused by being pursued by the Americans, since they have his picture and voice print. Therefore, his movement is very restricted and he is unable to do anything here. We should remove him from Baghdad to a location where he can work easier; otherwise he is closer to become totally ineffective. I know nothing about his past military experience or organizational skills.

10. (Salah): Northern al-Karkh groups are estimated at 40 mujahid, so is the Southern Karkh. They could double that number if necessary. Al-Rassafah groups in general is estimated at 30 mujahidin as I was informed by the commander of al-Rassafah. These are very small numbers compared to the tens of thousands of the enemy troops. How can we increase these numbers?

Page 4 of 4

End of Document/Translation

Charting approval

2006-04-21T08:48:00.000-07:00

Could it be that Bush's approval ratings coincide with the price of Gas?

Regardless, I had to post this amazing graphic.

One way or the other, the comparison is stuning.

Scott McClellan Out - Mr. Stick Figure In

2006-04-19T11:23:00.000-07:00

Hat tip to WuzzaDem

Scott McClellan Out - Mr. Stick Figure In

As you all know, Scott McClellan submitted his resignation today. I
want to thank Scott for his hard work and dedication, and wish him the
best of luck.

It's my pleasure to appoint as Press Secretary Mr. Stick Figure. He's
well informed, he speaks his mind, and I'm sure you'll all enjoy
working with him. Stick?

Thanks, boss. You heard the man - Mumbly McMushmouth is out, Stick
Figure is in, so let's get this show on the road. Let's hear from...

You...Four-eyes.

Me?

Not you, the other four-eyes.

Me?

What did I just say? Yes, you!

Oh, OK, I was just going to, um, I mean, I wanted to say, I mean to ask
that, um...

Holy crap - spit it out, already!

Oh, sorry. Um, as you know...

OK, let's just stipulate that any question beginning with the phrase "As
you know" is a waste of my freaking time, because if I
already know, I don't need you to remind me. Sound like a plan?

I guess so. So, um, then I guess what I should
say is, um...

All right, time's up, Zippy. We've only got three years left in this
administration, and we can't spend all three waiting for you to form a
complete sentence. Let's go to Mr. Pink-Shirt over here on the right.

Stick Figure, do you think Scott McClellan should have admitted he was
wrong when he said that...

Again with this?? What are you, obsessed with the guy?

I think it's a reasonable question, after all, he was the press
secretary for this administration, and he stated emphatically that...

The key word being was,
OK? By now, he's probably working at the local Starbucks, so how about
you head over there, grab a latte, and the two of you can continue your
little domestic squabble over some banana nut loaf, huh?

You're avoiding the question, and the American people aren't going to
stand for...

Whoa! Hold up a second there, sparky. In case you haven't noticed,
there's a new sheriff in town, and he's not taking any crap from the
peanut gallery.

But I asked a question, and I think you have a responsibility to...

Responsibility? Let's just review here - me, presidential appointee;
you, Brian Williams office-boy. Now, despite the obvious difference in
our social stature, I'm still willing to let you come in here and hang
out with these other losers, so mind your p's and q's.

That's not...

Next! Let's hear from Lurch, down here in front.

Me?

The next person who asks that is out on his ass - yes, you!

This is nuts, you can't talk to...

Hey, Porny McSleazemouth, they warned me about you, and I'll tell you
right now, I'm not going to stand for any talk about sloppy seconds, or
nuts, or any other body parts, got it?

But, but...

Again with the body parts! OK, I warned you, now you're sitting this
one out.

Oldie McFartson, what've you got for me?

I've reviewed six different polls on issues ranging from the public's
opinion on...

Can you believe this guy? He's actually reading from a script.

...demographic studies, many of which concur that...

Does he think he's running for office or something?

Now, taking into consideration the economic disparity between many...

I'm just going to let him talk. ChromDome, you're up!

Mr. Stick Figure, as you know...

Wrong answer! Take that guy's press pass away, he's a loser.

Hairpiece! What's on your mind?

I don't wear a hairpiece!

Riiiiight, right. What's your question?

Stick Figure, after what I've seen today, I can't vouch for you.

Well, I don't remember asking you to vouch for
me...

Seriously, I can't carry your water.

Carry my water? What does that mean?

This is outrageous. I'm a reporter for ABC, you know.

That's one of the reasons I wouldn't ask you to
vouch for me.

I've hosted Nightline!

That's it, get it all out. Confession is good for the soul. Oh, I
forgot - you're a reporter for ABC. Well, confession's probably good
for you, anyway.

I don't have to take this crap from you!

BOR-ing! You, in the back - take your best shot.

Wouldn't you agree that the president...

Wouldn't you agree that the president.

Excuse me, wouldn't you...

Excuse me, wouldn't you.

What are you doing?

Are you playing some kind of game?

No, I'm demonstrating the fine art of verbatim quoting. You bozos
should try it some time.

All right, show's over, kids. Move along, nothing to see here.

I can't believe I made so many new friends in one day. I think I'm
going to like this gig.

Coming soon to a City near you.

2006-04-17T20:05:00.000-07:00

Chain of suicide clinics planned

A SWISS lawyer who runs a “suicide clinic” that has helped 42 Britons to kill themselves, intends to offer his services to people who are not terminally ill.

Ludwig Minelli, founder of the Dignitas clinic in Zurich, says he wants to open a chain of high street-style centres to end the lives of people with illnesses or mental conditions such as chronic depression.

snip

Since it was set up in 1998, Dignitas has assisted in the suicides of more than 450 people, 42 of them from the UK. The most recent was Dr Anne Turner from Bath, who took her life in Zurich in January.

Dignitas is able to operate because the Swiss legal system permits the act of assisting people to kill themselves. The law in England and Wales makes the same act punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

Most of Dignitas’s members have been terminally ill, but there have also been isolated cases of people with non-fatal conditions being helped to die.

Mash here to read the rest.

In a related story; Ludwig Minelli, founder of the Dignitas clinic in Zurich also announced the opening of his latest endevor, a state of the art manufacturing plant that produces an "all natural" snack food that not only tastes good, but it is good for the environment as well.

In this photo, a Quality Control Inspector keeps an eye on the finished product.

Mr. Minelli says that he expects great sucess due to the unusual flavor and low raw material costs. He has yet to name this up and coming product and is thinking of sponsoring a contest for it with a 5000 Kroner prize. The only restriction is that it must have Soy, used as a binder in the crackers, and Green for the obvious reasons. You can send your entry to his Companies Website here.
Close up of the product

Doing the Job the MSM should be doing...

2006-04-17T14:05:00.000-07:00

It is not often I plug another Blog, but this one should be on your "must read" list.

You might have heard that Millions of Documents held by Iraq prior to the War have been released to the public.

JVERITAS has taken on this awesome task and has been releasing some bombshells.

Still think Saddam had no WMD? Still think he didn't support Al Quieda? Still think he had no relationship to terrorism?

You need to read more.

The question I have is, why is it up to an individual to do this? What about the much trumpeted MSM and their "Investigative journalists"?

Could it be that they don't WANT to know the truth?

If the information contained in these documents becomes more widespread, it will completely undermine their entire script concerning the war.

You know the script; Quagmire, defeat, civil war, lies and more lies.

Thanks to JVERITAS and others, the truth is starting to trickle out.

And it isn't quite what the MSM has been telling you.

I urge you to read for yourself.

Then decide.

Who is Really lying to you?

I'm making Reservations at The Restaurant at the End of the Universe now.

2006-04-11T22:19:00.000-07:00

I do hope there is a fellow Douglas Adams fan out there who appreciates this piece of news as much as I do.

I knew he was on to something, Dolphins be damned.

Cheers,

knewshound

Prime Numbers Get Hitched

In their search for patterns, mathematicians have uncovered unlikely connections between prime numbers and quantum physics. Will the subatomic world help reveal the elusive nature of the primes?

In 1972, the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote an article called "Missed Opportunities." In it, he describes how relativity could have been discovered many years before Einstein announced his findings if mathematicians in places like Göttingen had spoken to physicists who were poring over Maxwell's equations describing electromagnetism. The ingredients were there in 1865 to make the breakthrough—only announced by Einstein some 40 years later.

It is striking that Dyson should have written about scientific ships passing in the night. Shortly after he published the piece, he was responsible for an abrupt collision between physics and mathematics that produced one of the most remarkable scientific ideas of the last half century: that quantum physics and prime numbers are inextricably linked.

This unexpected connection with physics has given us a glimpse of the mathematics that might, ultimately, reveal the secret of these enigmatic numbers. At first the link seemed rather tenuous. But the important role played by the number 42 has recently persuaded even the deepest skeptics that the subatomic world might hold the key to one of the greatest unsolved problems in mathematics.

Prime numbers, such as 17 and 23, are those that can only be divided by themselves and one. They are the most important objects in mathematics because, as the ancient Greeks discovered, they are the building blocks of all numbers—any of which can be broken down into a product of primes. (For example, 105 = 3 x 5 x 7.) They are the hydrogen and oxygen of the world of mathematics, the atoms of arithmetic. They also represent one of the greatest challenges in mathematics.

As a mathematician, I've dedicated my life to trying to find patterns, structure and logic in the apparent chaos that surrounds me. Yet this science of patterns seems to be built from a set of numbers which have no logic to them at all. The primes look more like a set of lottery ticket numbers than a sequence generated by some simple formula or law.

For 2,000 years the problem of the pattern of the primes—or the lack thereof—has been like a magnet, drawing in perplexed mathematicians. Among them was Bernhard Riemann who, in 1859, the same year Darwin published his theory of evolution, put forward an equally-revolutionary thesis for the origin of the primes. Riemann was the mathematician in Göttingen responsible for creating the geometry that would become the foundation for Einstein's great breakthrough. But it wasn't only relativity that his theory would unlock.

Riemann discovered a geometric landscape, the contours of which held the secret to the way primes are distributed through the universe of numbers. He realized that he could use something called the zeta function to build a landscape where the peaks and troughs in a three-dimensional graph correspond to the outputs of the function. The zeta function provided a bridge between the primes and the world of geometry. As Riemann explored the significance of this new landscape, he realized that the places where the zeta function outputs zero (which correspond to the troughs, or places where the landscape dips to sea-level) hold crucial information about the nature of the primes. Mathematicians call these significant places the zeros.

Riemann's discovery was as revolutionary as Einstein's realization that E=mc2. Instead of matter turning into energy, Riemann's equation transformed the primes into points at sea-level in the zeta landscape. But then Riemann noticed that it did something even more incredible. As he marked the locations of the first 10 zeros, a rather amazing pattern began to emerge. The zeros weren't scattered all over; they seemed to be running in a straight line through the landscape. Riemann couldn't believe this was just a coincidence. He proposed that all the zeros, infinitely many of them, would be sitting on this critical line—a conjecture that has become known as the Riemann Hypothesis.

But what did this amazing pattern mean for the primes? If Riemann's discovery was right, it would imply that nature had distributed the primes as fairly as possible. It would mean that the primes behave rather like the random molecules of gas in a room: Although you might not know quite where each molecule is, you can be sure that there won't be a vacuum at one corner and a concentration of molecules at the other.

For mathematicians, Riemann's prediction about the distribution of primes has been very powerful. If true, it would imply the viability of thousands of other theorems, including several of my own, which have had to assume the validity of Riemann's Hypothesis to make further progress. But despite nearly 150 years of effort, no one has been able to confirm that all the zeros really do line up as he predicted.

It was a chance meeting between physicist Freeman Dyson and number theorist Hugh Montgomery in 1972, over tea at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, that revealed a stunning new connection in the story of the primes—one that might finally provide a clue about how to navigate Riemann's landscape. They discovered that if you compare a strip of zeros from Riemann's critical line to the experimentally recorded energy levels in the nucleus of a large atom like erbium, the 68th atom in the periodic table of elements, the two are uncannily similar.

It seemed the patterns Montgomery was predicting for the way zeros were distributed on Riemann's critical line were the same as those predicted by quantum physicists for energy levels in the nucleus of heavy atoms. The implications of a connection were immense: If one could understand the mathematics describing the structure of the atomic nucleus in quantum physics, maybe the same math could solve the Riemann Hypothesis.

Mathematicians were skeptical. Though mathematics has often served physicists—Einstein, for instance—they wondered whether physics could really answer hard-core problems in number theory. So in 1996, Peter Sarnak at Princeton threw down the gauntlet and challenged physicists to tell the mathematicians something they didn't know about primes. Recently, Jon Keating and Nina Snaith, of Bristol, duely obliged.

There is an important sequence of numbers called "the moments of the Riemann zeta function." Although we know abstractly how to define it, mathematicians have had great difficulty explicitly calculating the numbers in the sequence. We have known since the 1920s that the first two numbers are 1 and 2, but it wasn't until a few years ago that mathematicians conjectured that the third number in the sequence may be 42—a figure greatly significant to those well-versed in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

It would also prove to be significant in confirming the connection between primes and quantum physics. Using the connection, Keating and Snaith not only explained why the answer to life, the universe and the third moment of the Riemann zeta function should be 42, but also provided a formula to predict all the numbers in the sequence. Prior to this breakthrough, the evidence for a connection between quantum physics and the primes was based solely on interesting statistical comparisons. But mathematicians are very suspicious of statistics. We like things to be exact. Keating and Snaith had used physics to make a very precise prediction that left no room for the power of statistics to see patterns where there are none.

Mathematicians are now convinced. That chance meeting in the common room in Princeton resulted in one of the most exciting recent advances in the theory of prime numbers. Many of the great problems in mathematics, like Fermat's Last Theorem, have only been cracked once connections were made to other parts of the mathematical world. For 150 years many have been too frightened to tackle the Riemann Hypothesis. The prospect that we might finally have the tools to understand the primes has persuaded many more mathematicians and physicists to take up the challenge. The feeling is in the air that we might be one step closer to a solution. Dyson might be right that the opportunity was missed to discover relativity 40 years earlier, but who knows how long we might still have had to wait for the discovery of connections between primes and quantum physics had mathematicians not enjoyed a good chat over tea.

Marcus du Sautoy is professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, and is the author of The Music of the Primes (HarperCollins).

Knews of the Day 4/1/06

2006-04-01T11:35:00.000-08:00

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/01/gwot_cha/

Bush preps historic Third Term - memo

By Thomas C Greene in Washington

Published Saturday 1st April 2006 10:33 GMT

Exclusive The US Department of Justice (DoJ) and the office of the White House Counsel are preparing a draft document laying out the President's wartime authority to remain in office past 2008, The Register has learned.

The scheme is described as an emergency "continuity presidency," made necessary by the extraordinary circumstances and unique challenges of protecting the United States from the threat of international terrorism.

"The world changed on 9/11," a confidential DoJ memo obtained by The Register explains, "and no Administration is US history is better suited to adapt productively to those changes than this one.

"The Attorney General supports the basic framework in the White House Counsel's draft proposal for a future Executive Order establishing a Continuity Presidency, with two provisos: 1. There must be at least the appearance of a time limit, which the AG believes might be satisfied by tying the duration of the Continuity Presidency to the duration of the GWOT [global war on terrorism]; and 2. The House and Senate Majority Leaders and the Chairpersons of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees must issue a written certification that they have approved the plan.

"AG does not believe that the plan will succeed unless those conditions can be met. Suggest you liase with [the White House office of] Legislative Affairs and get their sense of the liklihood that the key Members will work with us."

The memo is signed Christine McIntyre, Special Assistant to the United States Attorney General, and is addressed to Philip Van Zandt, Special Assistant to White House Counsel Harriet Miers.

Mash here to read more.

Happy April 1st.