So, if they take our guns away, can we use swords instead?

They appear to work:

Hours earlier, someone had broken into John Pontolillo's house and taken two
laptops and a video-game console. Now it was past midnight, and he heard noises
coming from the garage out back.

The Johns Hopkins University undergraduate didn't run. He didn't call the police. He
grabbed his samurai sword.

With the 3- to 5-foot-long, razor-sharp weapon in hand, police say, Pontolillo crept toward the noise. He noticed a side door in the garage had been pried open. When a man inside lunged at him, police say, the confrontation was fatal.

Smoke 'em.

As most of the on-air cable television personalities focus on the national politics of the Republicans' nomination of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for vice president, stories and footage of clashes between the St. Paul police and protesters at the Republican National Convention are turning up on the internet.

The Uptake, an online citizen-journalism training outfit in Minneapolis, has been at the forefront of documenting much of the unfriendly interaction between the police and the protesters.

I wouldn't really call this a clash. But look at the crusties: First you got the tubby guy on the bike yelling sieg heil, and then the idiots advance on the police. What the hell did they think was going to happen?

Lenin would have been laughing at these amateurs. This is why I have such contempt for them. They're just playing around. They're not serious, they have no idea that they look both foolish and stupid. More bored, white-bread middle class kids. They have no idea how good they've got it.

President Batman?

As Grim likes to use movies to instruct and inform on morality, this item caught my eye.

Andrew Klavan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, has a curious interpretation of the new Batman movie "The Dark Knight".

There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

I have not seen the movie, so I can't really comment on Klavan's idea, but any who have, feel free to discuss.

One thing I do note about Batman, as opposed to the other superheroes movies are being made about recently--Superman, Spiderman, the Hulk, the X-men, even Hellboy--is that Batman is still, underneath the costume, just a guy. He has no actual super powers, just some neat toys that help him get things done. I wonder if that makes stories about him more accessible than the others on some level.

Clever lads.

If this isn't proof that the UK is overrun with surveillance cameras, I don't know what is.

One of the most difficult things for a DIY label to do is to create an engaging music video on a shoestring budget. The Get Out Clause has found a novel way around this problem using a combination of Manchester’s state of the art CCTV system and a little knowledge of the Freedom of Information & Data Protection Act. The Get Out Clause set up at various locations around Manchester city centre where they knew there would be CCTV coverage and performed their new single Paper. The footage was then requested under the Freedom of Information & Data Protection Acts and a video was cut together in their home studio.

What's also telling is that all those cameras don't seem to be doing anything to reduce the crime rate, either. At least somebody has found a use for the things.

(via Art of the Prank)

More on Iraqi Police training:

Mike Totten and Patrick Lasswell have been driving all over Norther Iraq (otherwise known as Kurdistan) and file these two reports of the same incident with video from Kirkuk (which isn't really Kurdistan but probably will be someday):

Mike Totten
Patrick Lasswell

I sometimes wish cops could do this and not get fired for it in the US.

Sometimes a fool needs to be smacked upside the head.

Sometimes.

Totten and Lasswell are consistently posting interesting reports. They bear watching.

(hat tip to Instapundit)