Well, some of you know me already for GCP.
But first, I owe rickl an apology. The email ball was in my court, and I still have it in my drafts folder. No excuses, but an apology just the same.
Now, how did I get here? All blame for that mistake goes to pandora. Yell at her.
[Now those of youse who already know me can skip the rest.]
But going back in time, I first started reading a blog called ProDeathPenalty, I was always interested in who would be juiced next (although now it's injected and takes some of the fun out of it). That site had a 'Scheduled Executions' section which was my weekly read in the late '90's, even more frequent if there were some executions going on; the NYTimes always had that negative slant, and executions were never a negative with me, even from when I was a little boy. Went against Catholic teachings and the nuns were none too happy, but 'some people jus' need killin'.' Maybe it was the Westerns I watched as a kid with that frontier justice, I don't know. But I guess that made me a conservative before I even knew what a conservative was. Sometime around 2004, wonder of wonders, I discovered the blog had a comment section set up like this one. I joined. There were members from all over the world as the death penalty is like honey to bears. And let me tell you, you think lefties are bad on political blogs? They were much worse on that one. 'Oh, killing a prisoner is state murder', crap like that. And the scumpals (those who communicate with prisoners, and even marry them -- gack!) were the worst of the worst. With some of these anti clowns, even life without parole was cruel and unusual punishment. Of course, there were also those Brits, Aussies and Canucks who longed for the DP to come back in their countries, a forlorn hope at best.
A little before that, around middle 2002, I don't know how but I stumbled upon Little Green Footballs. It was a pro-kill the terrorists website, with a lot of like-minded people. There were the trolls, but it was an anti-jihad clearing house, and I learned a lot from the many posters. It took me a half a year to get the courage to post. I stuck around there until just after the 2008 election, by which time the blog owner was going off the rails. he made a name for himself with the 'throbbing San rather memo', and did some decent posting of the fauxtography scandal in the Israeli-Hesb'Allah War in Lebanon in 2006. It was there that I 'met' many of the members of GCP, though I didn't have much interaction with them. LGF was a site with an incredible amount of members back then, and it was pretty much open 24 hours what with anti-jihadi people posting from all over the world (although South America was underrepresented, which was a surprise, as were the totalitarian regimes, which was not a surprise). While there, I found other great blogs in the blogroll. I went for a time to a place called TongueTied, run by an Aussie, I believe, and it was a humorous look at PC insanity. Also from LGF, I found my way to Spencer's DhimmiWatch and JihadWatch, now rolled into only JihadWatch. Again, post 9/11, I was desperate to learn what I could about my enemies, what made them tick, how to hurt them. These used to be goto blogs, but that has trailed off in the Age of Obama. Another place I found was AceofSpades, a place I still frequent, along with Wizbang, though i never frequented it much. I managed to get an account at Hot, now TepidAir, and boy was that a pain. I still occasionally post there, but find that place to be only RINO, at best, 24/7. I'm also at GatewayPundit quite often, and visit neo-neocon frequently. There is a poster at neo's place, artfldgr (or something like that), who is apparently a refugee from Soviet Russia and whose posts, while oftentimes excruciatingly long, are quite informative. Again, I go where I can learn.
Then there's GCP, which is pretty much my home base. From there, when there were problems, I heard about Nano's Place. Went there and registered, but only posted once, maybe twice. For some reason, the atmosphere, or whatever, just did not mesh with me. Now that I've read the 'tone' posts here, I now know why 'tone' is exactly correct. Reminded me of the fake collegiality in Congress, which pisses me off to no end.
Those of you who know me, know I have a love of food, cooking it and eating it. I've never had any formal training, except for hanging out in the kitchen with some pretty good female cooks in the family: My Mom, her Mom and one of her sisters, my dad's mom and one of his sisters. By brother's MiL made the best damned sauteed oysters. What is funny is that, while they were all good cooks, they were basic cooks with some very tried and very true recipes. Me? I'm the creative type. I'll try anything, and will adjust recipes on the spot to delete things I don't like (raw tomatoes), substitute (red peppers for green), or add (like mushrooms, citrus zest/juice and the like). So I'd say I'm the best creative cook in the family, and I will share some of my concoctions here. Before I do that, though, I do have to add a few comments to the existing food threads, especially the missing ingredients in the baked stuffed potato recipe. I have some simple recipes, with as few as four ingredients, and more complex ones, a beans and franks recipe that had over 30 ingredients. I'm also big on making my own stocks, chicken, pork and beef. That started thanks to a dinner I made for a good friend, shrimp and green olives in a red sauce (which started with anchovies) over linguine. I bought shrimp with the head on, cut off the heads and peeled the shrimp, and put all that 'garbage' into a large saucepot and simmered for about 4 hours. (Note: If this is being done indoors, open the windows and crank on a fan or two; if you can make shrimp stock outdoors on a grill, all the better.) That amber colored shrimp stock was added to the pasta water and to the frying pan where all the ingredients went together. It really turned me on to homemade stocks, and they freeze well. Plus, you know exactly how much sodium is in them -- none!
But back to politics. As I said, my support of and belief in the death penalty gave me a conservative foundation, though I'd've be hard-pressed to admit to that. Until 9/11. I was on 5th Avenue and 18th St. when that happened. That was a life-defining and life-changing moment. No more liberal veneer. I knew at the time that it was muslims, though I did not know from where. I had read a site back in the late '90's called UNRWA, or something like that, which detailed the abuses the Taliban in Afghanistan inflicted on their women, including videos of executions in soccer stadiums; that was a real eye opener. After Somalia in '93, and the African Embassy bombings in '98, I was pretty much not enthralled with muslims. I also remembered the muslim who shot up cars just outside CIA headquarters in Langley, and remember his execution, as well as the hero's welcome his body received in his native Pakistan. I had a good friend who was in WTC 4 when the '93 bombing occurred. I have been fortunate enough to have been on the catwalk on top of WTC 2 (the South Tower). That's something I'll never forget. So 9/11 was personal for me, as well as every atrocity that has occurred since. I am thoroughly disgusted with our Constitutional Law Perfessor, Jugears McF*ckstick. I've always hated commies (a holdover from the nuns in my 12 years of Catholic education). My father's family is from Hungary (actually the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, my grandma coming here in 1911). I have a connection to Hungary in that I was born in the year 1956, the year of the Hungarian Revolution. I was lucky enough as an Eagle scout to attend the World Jamboree in Japan at the age of 15, in 1971. That was some World Jamboree; we were hit by a typhoon and, once the eye passed, had to be evacuated. Nothing like sleeping in a pup tent in a typhoon. The recent tsunami broke my heart. But I mentioned this before, that with the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, you could tell the difference between a first world country and a third world one (like Indonesia and Haiti). That the Japanese have handled their tragedy with such class and pull-togetherness is a testimony to how far they've advanced since the end of WWII.
Anyway, that's enough for now. Like many here, I don't suffer proglibtard fools gladly, and I'm tired of trying to convince them with reason. They're commies, and the only good commie is a dead one. Oh, and I'm sick of the reacharounds the RINOs give to the Dems in Congress, as well as to Obama. We need every Republican to have the fighting spirit of Rep. West (R-FL).