Every so often someone says it so well..

...that it's best to just let them speak without any further introduction. And with that...

You knew I'd Harp On The NY Times...

So the day after I write a post about gun laws and point out that a CDC study couldn't find any connection between restrictive gun laws and a positive effect on violence, a psychotic alien executes 30+ students. The Korean killer used a backpack, chains, his finger, a pair of shoes and a variety of other items as part of his evil deeds.

Oh, yeah, there were two guns involved as well, but since the media will ignore everything BUT the guns, I will focus on the other inanimate objects involved. The killer shoes, we can't forget about those killer shoes that brought the Korean executioner from one room to the next.

Did I mention that he was Korean and not a citizen?

As you can see, there are plenty of things we could focus on, but for some reason the media want to focus on the guns.

And, of course, notwithstanding the fact that what the Korean did was ILLEGAL already, and the school was a gun free zone, the media and their ignorant cunt puppets in Congress want us to believe that just one more law will turn the tide.

Pardon me if I say bullshit.

As I said to Affe today, the guns were nothing more than the period at the end of a very disturbing sentence that was the killer's recent actions. It's clear now that the killer was psychotic-he had written a number of telling essays in school that made clear he was about to snap, he was known as a troubled person, he had been engaging in anti-social and dangerous activities and the school knew about it. They even sent him to counseling, but they didn't do anything else. To focus on the fact that he snapped and had a pair of shoes, er, I mean guns, when he snapped is to focus on the wrong thing.

But back to the NY Times.

It's actually quite disgusting to see the NY Times' editorial today, where they waste no time to pervert a tragedy into a call to take away our constitutional rights.

That got me to thinking...what were the NY Times' editors saying on September 12, 2001? Were they saying "we must do everything possible to prevent another attack on our people, we must deprive citizens of constitutional rights!"?

Let's check...here's an excerpt from the NY Times' September 12, 2001 editorial:

Americans must rethink how to safeguard the country without bartering away the rights and privileges of the free society that we are defending. The temptation will be great in the days ahead to write draconian new laws that give law enforcement agencies -- or even military forces -- a right to undermine the civil liberties that shape the character of the United States. President Bush and Congress must carefully balance the need for heightened security with the need to protect the constitutional rights of Americans. That includes Americans of Islamic descent, who could now easily became the target for another period of American xenophobia and ethnic discrimination.

Wow...how about that, readers? A call for no draconian laws that undermine our civil liberties...the need to protect constitutional rights...the need to not give away the rights of a free society...the need to not demonize one group of people...

But wait, how does that compare to what they called for today? Let's take a look at today's editorial:

Yesterday’s mass shooting at Virginia Tech — the worst in American history — is another horrifying reminder that some of the gravest dangers Americans face come from killers at home armed with guns that are frighteningly easy to obtain.

Not much is known about the gunman, who is reported to have killed himself, or about his motives or how he got his weapons, so it is premature to draw too many lessons from this tragedy. But it seems a safe bet that in one way or another, this will turn out to be another instance in which an unstable or criminally minded individual had no trouble arming himself and harming defenseless people.

[blah blah blah]

[blah blah blah]

[blah blah blah]

Our hearts and the hearts of all Americans go out to the victims and their families. Sympathy was not enough at the time of Columbine, and eight years later it is not enough. What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.

Shocking, isn't it, that the same paper that was calling for calm heads and demanding that our rights not be sacrificed when 3000 were murdered can, with a straight editorial face, pull a 180 and demand that a constitutional protection be tossed aside when 30 die?

What happened to "Americans must rethink how to safeguard the country without bartering away the rights and privileges of the free society"? How about "President Bush and Congress must carefully balance the need for heightened security with the need to protect the constitutional rights of Americans"? Hey, Times' editors, remember this one? "The temptation will be great in the days ahead to write draconian new laws that give law enforcement agencies -- or even military forces -- a right to undermine the civil liberties that shape the character of the United States."

Why were those sentiments applicable on 9/12/01 but not on 4/17/07?

In Honor Of Buy A Gun Day...

In honor of national buy a gun day, Mr. and Mrs. Zhid are buying a lot of guns. Not directly, unfortunately, but through our payment of taxes along with a note we'll be sending to the IRS.

Mr. & Mrs. Zhid had a very good year, financially, in 2006 and will, as a result, be writing a hefty $38,000 check to the federal government (on top of the $100,000 that was already withheld from our paychecks). Because there are some people who withhold their tax payments to the federal government to protest the war on terror, we are sending a note along with our $38,000 check asking that all of our tax money be spent on acquiring firearms for the military. I'm not sure how much the government pays for a rifle, but I assume that they pay about the same as the private person does for something like an M24 sniper system. I'm guessing they can buy at least three sniper systems with our check.

Of course, this note will be ignored, but since it's the only way I can justify buying yet another gun today (given the draining of our cash reserves to write the check to the IRS) it's the best we can do.

On the topic of guns, though, I ran across this story in today's NY Times. It's typical Times propaganda, focusing on guns as the cause of violence and embedding the "ban all guns" message through the selective use of quotes. It's as if the people who pull the trigger don't exist...

April 15, 2007
Philadelphia Struggles to Quell an Epidemic of Gun Violence
By JON HURDLE
PHILADELPHIA, April 14 — In a hospital emergency room, a young man winces as doctors try to determine how badly he has been injured.

His name is Karim Williams, he is 27, and he is this city’s latest shooting victim. He says he was hit around 12:30 a.m. by a shot fired while he was walking from his girlfriend’s car into a bar.

Mr. Williams was fortunate. The bullet went through his leg without hitting bone or major blood vessels, and after a shot of morphine and a few hours’ observation, he will be discharged from the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania back into the West Philadelphia night.

In some ways, Mr. Williams is a typical patient at the trauma unit: young, mildly intoxicated and apparently with no idea why he was shot. What makes his case less common, doctors here say, is that he is neither seriously injured nor dead, since Philadelphia is in the midst of an epidemic of gun violence that has left the police struggling to preserve public safety and government officials renewing efforts to tighten the state’s gun control laws.

Last year, there were 406 homicides in Philadelphia, most of them by gunshot, the highest number in nine years, according to the Police Department. From 2004 to 2006, the number of homicides in the city rose 22 percent, more than twice as much as the aggregate increase recorded by 56 cities surveyed by the Police Executive Research Forum, a national law enforcement group.

This year, the pace of the killings has worsened; as of Friday the death toll stood at 110, or 16 percent higher than at the same time last year. By comparison, in New York City, with six times the population, there were 102 homicides from Jan. 1 to April 8, a drop of almost 24.4 percent from the same period a year ago. The rise in violence is evident at the University of Pennsylvania hospital, whose trauma unit treated 479 gunshot victims last year, a 15 percent increase over 2005. Some 18 percent of the attacks were fatal, and 16 percent of the victims will suffer permanent disabilities, like paralysis from head or spinal injuries, amputations, or long-term damage to internal organs.

Gun violence is becoming so common in some parts of the city that many people are no longer shocked by it, said Dr. Bill Schwab, chief of trauma and surgical critical care at the hospital.

“Are people becoming numb to violence? The answer is yes,” Dr. Schwab said. “It’s very common for them to be sitting on their porch and to hear gunshots in the night.”

What sets Philadelphia apart from other cities, say the police, politicians and academic experts, is the combination of high poverty — with 25 percent of the population living below the poverty line, the city has the highest rate among the 10 biggest cities, according to census data — a youth culture that increasingly settles minor disputes through violence and the easy availability of guns.

Pennsylvania’s cities are forbidden by state law from making their own gun laws, and so must conform to the political will of a largely rural state that, according to the National Rifle Association, has around a quarter of a million gun owners.

With about 85 percent of Philadelphia’s homicides involving guns, gun control advocates are urging state lawmakers to limit handgun purchases to one per person per month. The goal is to choke off supply to so-called straw purchasers, who buy multiple guns on behalf of those who cannot legally acquire the guns themselves because they have criminal records.

Supporters — including Gov. Edward G. Rendell and Philadelphia’s police chief, Sylvester Johnson — say it would not curtail the right of gun owners to bear arms but would significantly reduce the number of illegal guns on the street.

But many state lawmakers oppose the plan, which was introduced in February as part of a package of gun control measures, as an attempt to curb the Second Amendment right to bear arms. “It’s a constitutional infringement,” said State Representative Bryan Cutler, a Republican from Lancaster County, at a recent seminar at Temple University Hospital here on the effects of gun violence.

A similar measure was defeated in the Legislature last October, the day after a Lancaster County gunman carrying a mostly legal arsenal shot 10 Amish schoolgirls in their classroom, killing five of them.

For Karim Williams, the explanation for Philadelphia’s carnage is a lack of jobs.

“You’ve got to have jobs for the people that need them,” he said from his gurney. “You have to keep people occupied. Without jobs, all you can do is resort to violence.”

Mr. Williams said he recently became a licensed electrician and was looking for work after a past in which he served jail time for crimes including car theft and drug dealing.

While Mr. Williams hopes to escape the violence of his West Philadelphia neighborhood, it is too late for Richard Johnson. He was killed in a South Philadelphia convenience store in July 2005 when he was 17.

His mother, Catherine Young, said Richard — who had won a full academic scholarship to a local university — and his cousin were shot by a 16-year-old boy who claimed they were blocking the doorway in the store, and came back a short time later with a gun.

“It’s so easy for them to have a gun,” Ms. Young said. “Nobody should own a gun except the police.”

Take that last line, in bold, as the Times' editorial position.

So this got me to thinking. If gun violence is raging out of control and is justification for collective punishment and prior restraint (through the stripping of all gun ownership rights from all citizens), there should be data that show how effective the existing laws that restrict gun rights have been.

That is, the Times is arguing that the guns are the cause of gun violence and the solution is to enact more laws that restrict gun ownership. There is, in the Times' view, no other issue that could be the cause of the increase in violence in America over the past few decades.

So we should expect that once we've passed more restrictive gun laws, the criminals who are using guns will (1) abide by the law, even though they are criminals and (2) not resort to any other weapon, such as a knife, a bat, a vehicle, a sword, a chainsaw, etc.

At first, I wanted to find data for gun related violence from, say, the 1940s until today, and then chart the annual data with an overlay for each gun law that was enacted, to determine a few things. The first thing would be whether the imposition of restrictive gun laws coincides with a drop in gun related violence. The second is to show the trend over the last half century or so to see whether, perhaps, there is something else that is driving violent acts (for example, I'd like to see whether there was a spike in violence around the time of the Civil Rights Act, the Roe v. Wade decision, forced integration of schools, the introduction and general acceptance of violent movies, rap music and video games, etc.)

Alas, I couldn't easily find the data and decided that I'd take a shortcut. I went to the Centers for Disease Control website to see whether anyone else has done this type of study. While no one seems to have done the chart that I've described, there was a very interesting study on the site.

Here's a link to the study: CDC Study on Effectiveness of Gun Laws
The study is from 2003, but the results are very telling, even a few years later. The CDC concluded the following, which is something that the Times and other anti-gun zealots conveniently ignore:

During 2000--2002, the Task Force on Community Preventive Services (the Task Force), an independent nonfederal task force, conducted a systematic review of scientific evidence regarding the effectiveness of firearms laws in preventing violence, including violent crimes, suicide, and unintentional injury. The following laws were evaluated: bans on specified firearms or ammunition, restrictions on firearm acquisition, waiting periods for firearm acquisition, firearm registration and licensing of firearm owners, "shall issue" concealed weapon carry laws, child access prevention laws, zero tolerance laws for firearms in schools, and combinations of firearms laws. The Task Force found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent outcomes.

HUH? HOW CAN THIS BE? Bans on firearms don't have a demonstrable effect on lowering violence? Waiting periods for firearms purchases don't have a demonstrable effect on lowering violence? Registration of firearms doesn't have a demonstrable effect on lowering violence? Why, the Times and crew say that the only way to stem the tide of violence is to ban guns! Where is the disconnect???

But wait, there's more...do you know what type of violent act is the most frequent one involving a firearm? It's not homicide, my friends...it's SUICIDE. 58% of violent acts involving a firearm are suicides.

While there can be no doubt that a suicide by gun is violent, to add the number of suicides into violence statistics is no different from adding incidences of masturbation to rape statistics.

But guess what? Even the suicide statistics show that restrictive gun laws don't have the effect of lowering the rate of suicide. From the report: "One study indicated a statistically significant reduction in the rate of suicide by firearms among persons aged >55 years; however, the reduction in suicide by all methods was not statistically significant."
In other words, yes, if you make it harder for people to get guns, fewer guns are used to commit suicide, but people just find other ways to kill themselves, leaving the overall rate of suicide unchanged.

This is the same with other types of violence (and I still have a hard time understanding why suicide is included in violence statistics). If you ban guns, the thugs will just find another way to kill and maim.

Thus, I am left with a question for the Times-if the CDC study shows that restrictive gun laws have not lowered violent acts in the country, what exactly is the purpose of ignoring all the other causes of violence to focus on the one thing that has been shown to NOT affect rates of violence?

In particular, how about violence in tv shows and movies? How about violent video games? How about other factors that could be explored, such as not holding certain segments of society (ones that have been here for hundreds of years and still can't seem to do anything other than complain, ask for handouts and take offense at every perceived slight) responsible for their acts and their failures?

I bet free speech results in far more violence than the availability of guns, but would the Times ever call for bans on forms of speech?

The Times is burying its editorial head in the sand and ignoring the clear evidence showing that more gun laws do not reduce violence. Why, it's almost as if they care more about pushing their own irrational fear of guns than they care about helping the people who are the victims of violence...

The lie of slavery in America*

The negro attack on Don Imus, and the related claims of discrimination that is alleged to exist in America, have inspired me to write about the roots of this alleged discrimination.

I'm going to cut to the chase-there was never a slave trade that brought negroes from Africa to America. There is no evidence that such a slave trade existed, there is no evidence that slavery was ever allowed or that it ever existed in America.

The negroes today who claim to be ancestors of slaves are actually ancestors of negro immigrants to America who arrived here 300 years ago in the same way negroes arrive today (well, not quite-there weren't airplanes 300 years ago, so the negroes came on boats).

Anyone who claims that there was slavery involving negroes in America has been brainwashed. Anyone who claims that there is evidence of such slavery has either made up the evidence or is a tool for someone who made up the evidence.

The myth of slavery in America is nothing more than a convenient lie used to divert attention away from the centuries of failure among the negroes in America.

I defy anyone to provide me with absolute proof of a slave trade in America or the presence of african slaves in America at any time.

Send any proof to vengefulzhid@yahoo.com.

I will post all responses and publicly prove false any evidence that is offered.

*UPDATE...
Affe pointed out that he had no idea where I was going with this. My point was to employ the tactics of the left, denying something that is obvious (e.g., 9/11), claiming it either didn't happen or was a conspiracy, and then using that very thing to blame the actual victims. I guess I wasn't very successful with this attempt.

Nigger, heal thyself

On the day that the Don Imus "nappy headed 'ho" non-story broke I had my own experience with racist hate speech.

I was on the way home from work and the BART train was packed. Taking up the two rows of seats in the car I entered were five or so negro youth. For the next 20 minutes, we riders were serenaded with the very loud conversations taking place among the negroes.

I'm not sure that I can repeat everything that they said, but they were talking at a near-yell and every other word was "nigger". They used the word "nigger" as a form of punctuation, as a noun, as a verb, as an adjective and even as a verbal placeholder.

It was a steady stream of "nigger nigger nigger" and no one could avoid hearing it, even with the assistance of an mp3 player's earbuds stuck deep into the ear.

At one point, a negro woman boarded the car and the negro youths began screaming "Ah, nigger, check out that ho, nigger, I'd tear up that pussy, nigger!" And they repeated that for a good 2-3 minutes. Not even a variation of that sentence, the exact sentence.

So I ask you, gentlereaders, why should someone like Don Imus be taken to task for saying something far tamer than what is said by the typical negro on public transit?

If I didn't like being called a Zhid, I certainly wouldn't have started a blog titled "Vengeful Zhid."

Nancy Pelosi has unseated Diane Feinstein for the Ignorant Cunt title.

The Zhid News Agency has gone to a medium to interview Neville Chamberlain. When told about Nancy Pelosi's recent trip to Syria, Mr. Chamberlain smiled a shit eating grin and said

"Thank goodness, I'm now off the hook. What an ignorant cunt."

Passing over some news

Apologies for the light posting of late, in addition to spending too much time at work, this Zhid has been preparing for Pesach over the last few days. Yesterday I harvested a nice piece of horseradish from the yard...



...and today I will grind it for a savory delight over the next week. Also, Affe invited me to the range yesterday where I got to shoot his new Fulton Armory M14 rifle. It's a nice piece, very different from the Zhid's Springfield Armory DMR M1A clone. Affe's rifle is a classic battle rifle-wood stock, no scope, true to the original.

It's also quite a shooter. When Affe let me shoot a clip from his rifle I decided I'd like to see what would happen if I did as close to rapid fire as possible (taking enough time between shots to reacquire the target and then firing again). I was very impressed to see the results. I had 15 rounds in the clip (Winchester 7.62 white box) and, as Affe said, I had a shit eating grin when I was done blasting away. The impressive part was the grouping of the rounds. The rifle was set up a bit high, but at 100 yards I had put 15 rapid fire rounds into a group about the size of my hand, with 10 of the 15 rounds into a space the size of my palm. Damn nice rifle, Affe.


And just for Affe, here's a picture from my early morning mountain bike ride up Mt. Diablo today. I include this picture of spring wildflowers to remind Affe of my superior photographic skills.


Anyway, back to the point of this post. I was reading the Jerusalem Post this morning and came across this story "'Iran, Syria, and Hizbullah preparing for summer war'", which was quite interesting. What struck me, though was this line:

[IDF OC Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Amos] Yadlin pointed out that both Mashal and PA Prime Minster Ismail Haniyeh have taken a very strident stance since the summit, saying that if the isolation of Hamas did not end, there would be a "third intifada."

To begin with, it's almost funny that Hamas, an extremist terror group that was voted into power by the Palestinian Arabs, is whining that it doesn't get enough participation in the political process. Perhaps it's that little problem with Hamas not renouncing terror and actively participating in terror attacks against Israel. Oh yeah, and maybe it's that even smaller problem about Hamas refusing to accept Israel as a state.

In any event, it's just plain silly for Hamas to complain that it is being isolated yet to refuse to become a normalized political entity. It did get me to thinking, though, about how the world works (at least for the left and the media).

Since 9/11, there has been an intense focus on portraying Islam as a peaceful religion, one with a long history of good deeds and artistic accomplishments (just read the NY Times and notice how much coverage they give to Islamic art these days). You can't pick up a paper without reading a touching story about how Muslims are good, honest folk.

And now you have Hamas threatening a "third intifada" if the world doesn't embrace it.

So I wonder...if a group of Jews began to treat the Islamic world as the Islamic world treats the West (and, in particular, Israel and Jews), would there be less of a focus on asking Israel to make compromises? That is, right now it always comes back to the point that the media and left demand that Israel ignore the terror attacks perpetrated against Israel and Jews and to work with the enemy. What if, say, the Zhid and a group of fellow Zhids went around the world, blowing up mosques, lopping off the heads of Muslims, blowing up buildings in Islamic countries, firing rockets into civilian areas of Islamic states, etc.?

Would we receive the same slap on the hand that the Islamic terrorists get but then be treated as righteously aggrieved people who needed to be catered to and compromised with? Instead of Israel being told to give up land for peace, would Jordan and Lebanon be told to do the same?