XIAM007

Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Tuesday 8 March 2011

86 year old WWII US Army Sniper - three shot- five inch group at 1000 yards -

86 year old WWII US Army Sniper - three shot- five inch group at 1000 yards -



Find a few minutes in your life to watch this upload. You'll be glad you did. Meet Ted Gundy,US Army Sniper-retired. But be forewarned, if after watching this video you feel a little less then a man and not worthy...don't feel so bad. This 86 year old WWII US Army Sniper makes all of us feel that way.

Just how good is he? How about a three shot- five inch group at 1000 yards?
Done and Done.
Ted Gundy:American,Soldier,Sniper and Hero after all these years

Ontario to consider longer bar hours for Royal Wedding -

Ontario to consider longer bar hours for Royal Wedding - 

Ontario's Attorney General said he would consider requests to expand drinking hours for the royal wedding.
But Chris Bentley said he has yet to be formally asked about extending drinking hours on April 29, the day Prince William and Kate Middleton tie the knot.
"I haven't seen any request in this regard. I know we are all looking forward to the royal wedding, there is a sense of excitement brewing," Bentley said when asked by CTV Toronto's Paul Bliss on Tuesday.
Bentley said the decision is ultimately up to the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario and would be made after considering the viewpoints of those in favour and opposed to extending hours.
Ontario extended its drinking hours for the FIFA World Cup last summer, allowing for pubs and restaurants to serve alcohol an hour earlier during the month-long event.
Bentley said no municipality has asked yet, but he is not opposed to the idea on first blush.
"I'm really looking forward to the Royal Wedding, I really am. And I know my mother is," Bentley added.
Last month, Ontario announced that it would ease several liquor laws surrounding special events, allowing those attending festivals to walk around while carrying alcohol and wedding receptions to serve liquor an hour longer.

6 Things You Should NEVER Buy Used -

6 Things You Should NEVER Buy Used -

1-13-2009mattress.jpg

The weak economy has many cash-strapped consumers opting to purchase items secondhand, but buyers beware: Not all items are fit to be purchased used.
“When the economy first bottomed out, a lot of people shopped resale for the first time,” says Adele Meyer, executive director of National Association of Resale Professionals.  “And once they get that first bargain, they’re hooked, there’s a real thrill to finding something that you get such a good buy on.”  
Members of the NARTS, which include resale boutiques and secondhand stores nationwide, reported a 12.7% growth in net sales in 2010.
From shopping at the Goodwill to picking up a discarded item on a street corner, finding gently-used items can save a lot of money. However, some items are better purchased new no matter what the cost savings.
We asked experts for the top six items you should never buy used, because they might end up costing you more in the long run.
Mattresses
Buying used bedding and mattresses can be risky for health reasons. 
 “[You] have to be very careful that people haven’t discarded an item because of bedbugs—either knowingly or unknowingly,” says Missy Henriksen, vice president of Public Affairs at the National Pest Management Association (NPMA).
Bedbug extermination can cost between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars, according to Henriksen, and they aren’t the only critters you need to worry about. Dust mites, which can cause allergies or asthma attacks, can also be found in used mattresses, as can fleas. Fleas can lay dormant for up to a year without needing to feed, so they can be hiding in a mattress or boxspring with no activity for 12 months. 
 “It’s just too risky to take in a mattress that has been in anyone else’s home,” says Henriksen. “Even if there are no live bugs in the mattress, there can be dead ones, and dead bed bugs do emit an odor.”
Boats 
Because boats typically don’t get serviced as often as cars, they are much more likely to have maintenance problems, according to John Thedford,  CEO of LaFamilia Pawn and Jewelry in Miami.
And when it comes to maintenance, the hull of a boat is much more difficult to repair than a flat tire.
“Our practice is to test the item before we write a pawn loan,” says Thedford. “And it would be difficult, if not impossible, to test something such as a watercraft.”
Buying used is all about knowing what you’re getting, Thedford said, and when a test drive can’t be performed and a diagnostic test would be prohibitively expensive, you’re better off buying new.
“People have to take care of their cars because they drive them every day, but you can’t say the same for a boat,” he says.
Engagement Rings and Fine Jewelry 
“It’s a bad idea to buy a used engagement ring directly from another individual,” according to Marcy Roth, owner of fine jewelry boutique AccessoryArtists.com. “Unless they have the paperwork that documents stone quality you are taking a gamble.”
Of course there are many professional jewelry resellers that specialize in the certification of estate pieces, but if you buy straight from another individual via eBay or consignment shops, you have no way of verifying quality, Roth says.
“How do you know that the stone is really a yellow sapphire? It could be a citrine or yellow quartz,” says Roth. “Gold is the same thing. They can say it’s 18 karats, but it could be 14 karats or even some type of plating.”
Roth advises that as a general rule, fine jewelry should only be purchased from a trusted source or a designer; pictures on a computer screen can be very deceiving.
Baby Car seats and Cribs 
If there’s any chance that you’ll put your children at risk by buying a used item, it’s not worth it.
“Fairly recently, there have been recalls on cribs that have an adjustable side because they were disengaging and catching babies’ heads and hands,” says Marcia Turner, author of theblog Thrift Shopping Tips, (LINK OUT TO: thriftshoppingtips.wordpress.com)
Baby car seats are another potential safety hazard if you happen to purchase one used that is damaged, Turner adds. To the naked eye, it would be virtually impossible to determine if the underlying plastic is broken or chipped, or has been weakened through misuse, says Turner. If a car seat happened to be in an accident, the integrity of the seat could be compromised and your baby might not be as well protected as you think.
“Some car seats have built in fabric-covered seats and backs that cannot be removed and cleaned. Sure, you can scrub the plastic and hose the fabric down with disinfectant, but unless you can wash it in hot water, be aware that the seat may harbor germs that will come into contact with your baby’s skin. “
Video Cameras and Digital Cameras 
You would think a used camera or camcorder could be a great idea for a kid or a senior like your parents or grandparents, but think about where they’ve been,” cautions Christine Frietchen, the editor-in-chief of  ConsumerSearch.com, a product review Web site. “They could have fallen in a stream, or have a grain of sand from the beach in there that you might not notice.”
Many new digital cameras can cost $40 or less, according to Frietchen, and they often come with a year-long warranty that you’re not going to get if you purchase them used. Also, it’s possible that used imaging equipment will have battery issues, as many of them come with rechargeable batteries.
“If you buy a used camera for $30 and then you have to go out and buy a rechargeable battery pack for $40, then you could have just bought a new camera with a warranty,” says Frietchen.
It is possible to purchase refurbished cameras and video cameras from a manufacturer, and that’s a good option as long as they come with a warranty, Frietchen warns.
Vacuum Cleaners
“Think about why most people get rid of an old vacuum,” says Frietchen. “It probably doesn’t work that well, and you don’t want to spend the time taking it apart and cleaning all the hair out of the wheels.”
While some people may think that putting a new bag in a vacuum means it’s good to go, even that can be an issue: it can be hard find new bags for a discontinued vacuum model.
But bags can be the least of your problems when you consider wiring issues that can come with a faulty cord.
“Think about cords. Anyone with pets at home knows that dogs and cats like to chew on these things, and they short out,” says Frietchen. 

25 Bizarre Examples That The U.S. Is Absolutely Brimming With Idiots, Incompetents And Incredibly Corrupt Politicians -

25 Bizarre Examples That The U.S. Is Absolutely Brimming With Idiots, Incompetents And Incredibly Corrupt Politicians -


If our founding fathers could see us today, what would they think?  Unfortunately, they would probably come to the exact same conclusion that so many of us have come to – the U.S. government is absolutely brimming with idiots, incompetents and incredibly corrupt politicians.  Today it is very rare to come across a politician that still has any integrity left.  Washington D.C. has become such a cesspool that it seems to corrupt even most of the politicians that originally go there with good intentions.  We have created the most complicated government in the history of the world and we have hundreds of thousands of pages of laws, and yet nothing seems to work right.  Our economy is dying, our relationships with the rest of the world are a mess and we have accumulated the largest debt in the history of mankind.  Meanwhile, our politicians openly hand out our money to their friends and to those that have donated money to their campaigns and they waste our money on some of the stupidest things imaginable.  Have we now gotten to the point where our system of government has become so corrupted that it is almost impossible to repair it?
There days is seems as though almost everything our government tries to do is cursed.  Nothing ever seems to turn out the way that it is supposed to.  The more our politicians promise to get spending under control, the more money they seem to waste.  It is almost as if there is a “drought of common sense” in Washington D.C. right now.  Not only can’t our politicians fix our problems – everything that they do only seems to make our problems even worse.
So would it really be so bad if there was a government shutdown for a while?  At least then our politicians would not be able to do any more damage.
New stories of political corruption seem to come out almost daily now.  So many members of Congress are entangled in controversy that it is hard to keep up with it all.  And yet they seem to have no problems with passing endless amounts of onerous new laws that make life even more difficult for all the rest of us.
We have become a society with millions of laws but that is becoming more lawless by the day.  Federal money is flying around everywhere and yet our politicians can’t seem to find anywhere to cut spending.  Incompetence rules in Washington D.C. and yet the American voters seem to keep wanting to reward it.
What in the world is going on out there?


The following are 25 examples that show that the U.S. government is absolutely brimming with idiots, incompetents and incredibly corrupt politicians….
#1 As 2010 came to an end, 96 departing members of the U.S. House of Representatives (most of them Democrats) awarded millions of dollars in extra pay to their staffers and aides as they closed down their offices.  Keep in mind that this was U.S. taxpayer money that was being spent.  The Wall Street Journal described what happened this way….
The 96 lawmakers paid their employees $6.7 million, or 31%, more in the fourth quarter of 2010 than they did, on average, in the first three quarters of the year.
#2 If the new health care law is so great, then why is the Obama administration allowing so many organization to opt out of it?  According to the Department of Health and Human Services, more than 1,000 organizations have received Obamacare waivers so far.
#3 Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida used $15,551 in federal stimulus money to pay two researchers to study how alcohol affects a mouse’s motor functions.
#4 A perfect example that shows just how clueless our leaders are about the deindustrialization of America occurred recently when U.S. Senator John McCain claimed that iPods and iPhones are made in the United States.
#5 Barack Obama recently challenged a group of business and labor leaders to come up with some great ideas for creating more jobs inside the United Stateson the exact same day that he was pushing hard for Congress to approve the new free trade agreement with South Korea which will send even more of our factories and jobs overseas.
#6 Syracuse professor of psychology Michael Carey received $219,000 in federal stimulus money for a study that examines the sex patterns of college women.
#7 The National Institutes of Health spent approximately $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.
#8 Our federal tax code has become so riddled with loopholes that many of the largest corporations in the U.S. have figured out how to pay their top executives millions upon millions of dollars in bonuses and still not pay a single dime in income taxes to the U.S. government.
#9 Back in 1913, the federal tax code was a whopping 400 pages long.  If you lived back then, would you have had enough time to read the whole thing?  Perhaps.  Well, today the federal tax code is approximately 70,000 pages long.  Do you think that anyone has ever actually read that thing from beginning to end?
#10 This year, it is estimated that U.S. taxpayers will spend somewhere around7.6 billion hourspreparing their taxes.
#11 1.15 million dollars in federal stimulus funds were allocated for the installation of a new guard rail around the non-existent Optima Lake in Oklahoma.
#12 For the month of February alone, the U.S. government ran a deficit of 223 billion dollars, which was a new all-time record for a single month.
#13 Researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo received $389,000 in federal stimulus funds to study 100 residents of Buffalo, New Yorkand record how much malt liquor they drink and how much pot they smoke each day.
#14 A total of $3 million has been granted to researchers at the University of California at Irvine so that they can “research” video games such as World of Warcraft.
#15 One dinner cruise company in Chicago, Illinois received nearly $1 million in stimulus funds to combat terrorism.
#16 During Barack Obama’s first two years in office, the U.S. government added more to the U.S. national debt than the first 100 U.S. Congresses combined.
#17 Landon Cox, a Duke University assistant professor of computer science, was awarded $498,000 in federal stimulus money to study Facebook.
#18 The entire U.S. government might shut down because Barack Obama and the Republicans are squabbling over 61 billion dollars in spending cuts that would barely even make a dent in the gigantic budget deficit that we are facing this year.
#19 Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has a track record of incompetence that is so monumental that it is really difficult to even find words to accurately describe it.  Unfortunately, Barack Obama is so incompetent that he actually renominated the guy and our Senators are so incompetent that they actually confirmed him again.
#20 Barack Obama and the Federal Reserve keep trying to convince us all that we are in an economic recovery and yet the number of Americans on food stamps has surpassed the 44 million mark for the first time ever.
#21 The Conservation Commission of Monkton, Vermont recently received$150,000 from the federal government to construct a “critter crossing”.  Thanks to U.S. government money, the lives of “thousands” of migrating salamanders are now being saved.
#22 Approximately $1 million of U.S. taxpayer money has been used to create poetry for the Little Rock, New Orleans, Milwaukee and Chicago zoos.  The goal of the “poetry” is to help raise awareness on environmental issues.
#23 The “entitlement mindset” that permeates not only the U.S. government but also much of the voting public was clearly displayed recently when a union protester in Wisconsin asked a Tea Party activist the following question: “Why do you have a right to your money?“  Of course with politicians such as Howard Dean publicly declaring that it is the “job of the government” to redistribute wealth this is the kind of nonsense that you are going to get.
#24 The budget that the Obama administration has submitted for fiscal 2012 assumes that the U.S. government will bring in about 2.1 trillion dollars in income this year (mostly by taxing all of us), and by 2021 Obama’s budget assumes that the U.S. government will be able to increase that figure to 4.9 trillion dollars.  Can anyone figure out how in the world the U.S. government is going to get over twice as much tax money out of all of us ten years from now?
#25 Barack Obama, the man with “the most important job in the world”, sure does seem to have a lot of free time on his hands.  He recently played his 60th round of golf since becoming president.  Obama has also become the first U.S. president to ever produce his own beer.  Obama certainly does seem to be enjoying the high life right now.  During his first two years in office, Obama enjoyed a total of 10 separate vacations that stretched over a total of 90 vacation days.  Wouldn’t it be great if we all were given that much vacation time?