The local police arrested two young people for stealing packages off of people’s porches.

Luckily, it appears that most of the purloined presents will be returned prior to Christmas.

I’m glad to see that the two yutzes will have to face up to the people they stole from and return the loot.

Maybe if more of our young delinquents had to actually talk to the people they victimize and make amends for their crimes, we wouldn’t have as many problems with crime in our society. A little shame goes a long way.

New rules have been proposed that would make it too expensive to create hand-made toys for children.

I love to go to crafts fairs and get homemade toys for the kids, such as sock monkeys, wooden trains, and building blocks. My little ones have all loved playing with these simple, non-electronic, non-plastic toys.

Now, the people who make them can either pay an exorbitant amount of money to get them certified as safe or close up shop.

There needs to be some kind of exception for toys that are hand-crafted by local merchants.

Now, I’m going to go play with my blocks.

Looks like the authorities are looking further into Plaxico Burress’ life.

A recent search of his house found several guns and some ammunition. They also took the pants he wore on the night he shot himself.

Some of my gun buddies and I have discussed this kind of thing before. We’ve all seen the news features that talk about how a house was searched and a large cache of guns and ammunition were found and confiscated.

So what makes a large cache of guns and ammo?

I personally own upwards of 5 or 6 guns. For each of these guns, I own at least a few rounds of ammunition. For some of them, I own a lot of ammunition. When you shoot on a budget, and you find bulk surplus ammunition on sale, you buy it so you can go shooting during lean times.\

So it would be safe to say that I have a lot of ammunition stored in my house. Don’t worry, it’s stored in safe containers to keep it away from prying eyes and small hands.

But if my house was searched for any reason, would I be trotted out in front of news cameras as a gun nut? Would my small collection be put on a table along with the various boxes and cans of ammunition to show that I was a dangerous criminal?

Talk amongst yourselves. Topic – What consititutes a dangerous amount of guns and ammunition?

Interesting fact – None of them were created by the Franklin Mint.

A British tourist helping out at an archeological dig found a cache of ancient coins.

I can see the conversation now.

“OK, let’s see, shell casing, shell casing, bottle cap, bottle cap, shell casing.”

“Wait a minute, that’s not a bottle cap, it’s a coin!”

“Huh, what do you know, something that’s not trash thrown down here from the 2000 years worth of tourists and invasions.”

H/T to Blackfive.

Wreaths Across America has decorated the graves at Arlington, and it’s not only touching, but it’s beautiful.

Service organizations like this are always good to see. When Junior Bear was a Tiger Cub, we went to the Veteran’s Cemetary near our town in Arizona and helped to put flags up for Memorial Day.

When you do things like this, you see people from every walk of life spending a little bit of their time to do something noble.

and slowly adjusting.

My week long turn at 3rd shift went pretty smoothly. Work was pretty much sitting on my butt and watching monitors on my servers. We only had two or three small issues all week.

I got sleep when I could. Some days I slept from 9 AM until 4 PM, which was nice. On others, I grabbed as many cat naps as possible. By cat naps, I mean Timmy, Koshka, and I curled up on the couch and snoozed hard.

I fell off the caffeine wagon for the week, but have gone cold turkey again. Yesterday I had the sluggishness and headache again, but I’m better today.

Girlie Bear had a Christmas concert downtown on Wednesday, and 30 young children singing “Jingle Bells” in Latin is pretty neat, if I do say so myself.

Crews are working on fixing the broken underwater cable in the Meditteranean.

I wonder if someone has to be in the Med waiting for them sometime between 2 and 8 or they’ll have to reschedule?

Sometimes, not so much.

Apparently, someone didn’t want to just chip the ice off of his porch.

Using a bush burner might be easier in the short run, but it is hard on the structure.

That being said, when I was growing up in the great white north, I used to fantasize about using a flame thrower to melt the snow in our drive way and then squeegee it off before it froze again.

First, to the nice young woman who served me my hot cocoa this morning, yes, my son is very cute, and he does like smiling at you. So did his daddy. Nice presentation.

To the assbag who decided to play his music at glass rattling levels this morning at the stoplight, I hope you actually achieve your goal of attracting women with your stereo. And when you do, I hope they’re the kind of women who are impressed by the size of a man’s stereo.

To the poor soul who was driving the salt truck down I-64 this morning in preparation for another snow-pocolypse. Thanks for the effort, and I hope you don’t have to continue doing it for the rest of the weekend.

Danger Room is reporting that Wikileaks has posted a classified report on one of the jammer systems the military has developed to counter the threat of remotely controlled IED’s.

I’m not going to debate the merits of the system, or even discuss what’s in the report. What’s in that report isn’t any of my business. It certainly isn’t something that I want to help pass on.

Listen up kids:

Things like this are classified for one of very few reasons. They either talk about operational plans, sources and methods for intelligence, or the capabilities and shortcomings of technology.

I think we all understand why we don’t want to talk about operational plans. Anyone who paid attention to the early stages of the Iraq War remembers when Geraldo Rivera (occupation: tool) was kicked out of the AO for broadcasting plans for the unit he was attached to. Broadcasting plans for upcoming operations puts soldiers lives in jeopardy. Broadcasting plans for operations that have already happened lets anyone listening learn about how things are done, and can help them predict what’s going to happen in the future.

Intelligence methods and sources are just as easy to understand. If a target knows that someone or something is a source for our intelligence staffs, they can eliminate that source. In real words, that means that a living person will be killed, usually after some pretty horrific interrogation.

The last one, at least to technology types, seems to be hard to understand. When you talk about the pros and cons of a given piece of technology in the civilian world, it’s a good thing. If you try to conceal problems with your technology, especially if it’s something that has to do with security, you get branded with “security through obscurity”.

In the military realm, openly discussing problems and limitations of technology tells our enemies what our technology can and can’t do. It can help them develop countermeasures to our technology, or to develop tactics that take advantage of our limitations. Classifying these characteristics is an attempt to force opponents to learn these limitations the hard way, through having to face our technology in combat and pay for it in blood.

Some people I know think that the government classifies most things to cover up bad deeds or stupidity. I’m not going to argue that that doesn’t happen because it does, and it will happen again. And when the press publishes reports on these instances, I’m all for it. That’s one of the reasons we have a free press, to publicise instances when the government is either stupid, malicious, or both.

But publishing documents that put the lives of our soldiers in danger, however indirectly, is irresponsible and criminal. I’d like to have the yutz who leaked this staked out on the lawn of the Pentagon for a couple of weeks.