From the Austin American Statesman:

In early May, the Dicksons bought a house that had been headed for foreclosure. All the paperwork was completed.

But the foreclosure process apparently wasn't halted, and the couple came home from work May 14 to find all their possessions gone.

Field Asset, which provides property management services nationwide, had been hired to drill out the locks and empty the house, according to police reports. Field told police that the family's belongings were given to area thrift stores, but the Dicksons have had no luck finding them.

I'm glad I work from home. If someone had shown up at my house and started drilling the locks, shotgun fire would have been the result. It's interesting how the law works. If you are home when this happens, wake up after they come through the door, you are legally allowed to kill them. After they leave, all bets are off. It's all about the threat.

Let's take a look at Section 9.609 of the Texas Uniform Commercial Code:

§ 9.609. SECURED PARTY'S RIGHT TO TAKE POSSESSION AFTER DEFAULT. (a) After default, a secured party:

(1) may take possession of the collateral; and

(2) without removal, may render equipment unusable and
dispose of collateral on the debtor's premises under Section 9.610.

(b) A secured party may proceed under Subsection (a):

(1) pursuant to judicial process; or

(2) without judicial process, if it proceeds without
breach of the peace.

This means if you show up to take my property, I produce a firearm and tell you to leave, legally you have to leave. Period. If you don't, the bank is liable under tort law for any damages that result, including the death of the attempted reposessor. I have read WAY too many stories about criminals pretending to be repo men, cops, federal agents, immigration officers, etc. to believe any person who shows up at my door waving a piece of paper. Anyone can search google for a list of foreclosures in Austin. How many do you have to stop by before someone just lets you take everything you own without even a challenge?

To make things even more ironic, the couple is Nigerian. Nigeria has a bad rap in the US for the rash of constant internet scams that originate from Nigeria. Here is what appears to be a fairly well-off couple, with two kids, trying to move into a nice neighborhood, who have been completely screwed over by a bank.

As Denver dignitaries gathered today for Mayor John Hickenlooper's State of the City address, City Council President Michael Hancock introduced singer Rene Marie to perform the national anthem. But that's not what she did.

Instead, Marie performed the song "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," which also is known as the "black national anthem."

Let's see someone try that kind of shit here in Texas. I would have booed loudly. If my booing was met with resistance, I would have booed louder, or tossed a drink on stage. They should fine her for disturbing the peace, inciting a riot, or hate speech. We know how much the libs loooove hate speech.

She later admitted that she lied to the event organizers when she told them she would sing the Star Spangled Banner. They mayor said that she was "apologetic," but I'm sure it was along the lines of "I'm sorry if anyone was offended" and not an apology for lying to the event organizers and smearing the Star Spangled Banner.

Even at Wattstax in 1974, they had the common decency to sing the Star Spangled Banner, followed by Lift Every Voice And Sing. Everyone sat down in protest of course during the National Anthem, but they did sing it, which I think was a reasonable protest.

h/t: Michelle Malkin

I found a YouTube of someone singing the song in it's original Wattstax glory. Check it out after the jump. I'm working on a youtube of the performance in Denver. Stay tuned.

Part I:

Part II:

• We still haven't witnessed the bloodbath of the DNC Convention. How much will that hurt?
• National polls show them evenly split. Landslide? Not hardly.
• B. Hussein Obama is black. The democratic party is the same party that voted to keep slavery, count the black race as 3/5 of a person, and has active KKK members sitting in congress today. That anti-black sentiment is still felt by living Democrats today, and will not disappear before November. There are democrats who will simply not vote for a black man.
• Obamessiah has never won a contested election. Don't take my word for it, look it up.
• We haven't seen VP selections yet. Rumors are flying around that John McCain may pick Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his VP. Remember all those Clinton voters clamoring for a woman in the Presidency? (Having a newborn would be a happy bonus)
• Socialized healthcare doesn't work. It doesn't work in Canada, France, UK, Germany ... it doesn't work anywhere it has been tried, and Americans know it.
• Raising taxes and increasing spending is not the way out of a recession, if we are truly in one. Americans know this too, and aren't buying it.
• Obambi has renounced his Christian faith. How will he fight the rumors that he is a sleeper Muslim now that he is no longer a Christian? (I can hear the apologizers now ... "He's still Christian ... just not part of that awful church" I don't buy it.)
• Appeasement has never worked when dealing with dictators and their puppets. Has Obammessiah actually said which part of Iran's political structure he wants to "negotiate" with? Does he want to talk to Khamenei or Imadinnerjacket?
• Obamba is un-patriotic, and so is his wife. Will America elect someone so un-American over a decorated POW war hero? I believe not. (Some call the pledge gaffe a one-time misstep. I believe he was showing his true feelings)
• Obamessiah has no true working plan to keep America safe. No amount of appeasement, happy speeches, or feel-good legislation is going to change the perception of America in the world. Refusing to deploy troops or use our defensive weapons only puts us in a position of weakness that encourages direct attacks by our enemies. How exactly are we "giving Iraqi's their country back" by abandoning them before the job is done?

Once the GOP gets its arms around picking Obama apart, the race will widen up. People seem to forget that John McCain has more cross-over appeal that the most liberal senator could ever dream of. The true conservatives in America may not like John McCain 100%, but he's far better than Obamessiah and only mildly liberal. The only candidate in danger of winning by a landslide is John McCain.

Angry spoiler after the break. If you don't want to know the plot and shit-filled ending of the movie, avert thine eyes.

First off, they put Indiana Jones in the middle of a Nuclear Test site in Nevada 60 seconds before detonation. Indy is toast right? Not so fast. Indy thinks fast and locks himself in a lead-lined refrigerator half-a-second before the blast, goes hurtling through the air, and emerges unscathed. Unfuckingbelievable.

Blah blah blah, we meet Shia Lebouf ... he's a punky 50's greaser with a vintage Harley Davidson motorcycle (it's the 50's, so I guess we are to believe it's just a cheap bike). He tells Indy a fantastic story about his mom being kidnapped in a grand plot to find a crystal skull that has to be returned to the infamous lost city of gold! Oh yippee!! Hop to the tired old map with the red-lines for an Indy trip around the world.

Oh ... and have I mentioned that he's being chased by Russians? Some rusky bitch is Indy's arch nemesis in this flick along with an old friend that has turned on Indy. But back to the shitty plot ...

Indy and Mutt (that's what he's called ... I couldn't make this shit up if I tried) find the skull, and it's immediately grabbed by the rusky bitch and the trio goes to camp where we find ... oh let me guess ... Mutt's mom and Indy's old friend who has gone batshit crazy. Oh ... and can we guess who Mutt's mom is? Do I even need to type it ... Yeah ... Her ... From the first Indy movie ... Big surprise there .... Oh ... and by-the-way ... if you haven't figured it out by now ... another big surprise ... Mutt is Indy junior. Didn't see that coming a mile away.

Indy and crew make a daring escape with gun fights, a sword-fight on top of racing cars, and Mutt swinging from the trees like fucking Tarzan, monkeys and all. I shit you not ... more fucking monkeys ... didn't see that coming either ... All of this followed by not one, not two, but three waterfall drops in an amphibious WWII "duck boat" where everyone swims out alive and unscathed. Bravo assholes.

Long story short ... friend betrays him ... then befriends him ... betrays him some more ... and Indy makes it to the ancient city! YES!!! GOLD!! GOLD!!! .... oh ... wait ... that's not gold. IT'S A FUCKING MUSEUM! "They were archaeologists" ... great ... a whole fucking series to find the city of gold and it's a museum. Oh ... but wait ... it gets better.

Not only is it a museum, but the skull they have been lugging around is the skull of an alien with a crystal skeleton that was recovered from a crash site in Roswell, NM. I'm not making it up ... and inside the museum are 12 other alien skeletons that come back to life and open a portal to another dimension when the missing skull is rejoined with it's body. The bad guys are sucked into the other dimension and Indy and crew escape just in time to see the entire temple crumble into pieces. No sooner do the pieces start whirling around in a circular whoosh of air than a giant flying saucer appears, and the aliens fly away.

I'm not making this up folks. Indian Jones finds the ancient city of gold and it's an archaeological museum on top of a flying saucer from another dimension.

I mean ... seriously ... WHAT THE FUCK? I'm just dumbfounded. What in the name of Zeus's holy ass were those fuck-twits thinking when they wrote this hunk of shit? And it's very clever ... they throw just enough bits of reality into the shit quagmire that I have no doubt there are people gullible enough to actually believe this steaming pile of cat vomit as plausible.

George Lucas and Steven Speilberg should have quit while they were ahead. There were a few people disappointed with the last Indy movie, but this is just too much. Hollywood has completely lost it's fucking mind and I don't see it getting any better.

There was a good trailer for HellBoy II before the movie. Hell is something Hollywood does understand, so it looks pretty good.

Full account of the brutality after the jump.

* Turn on all of my lights, all day.
* TV on full-blast all day
* All computers and monitors on
* Small trash-fire in the backyard
* Air-conditioning set to 65 with the windows open
* Driving 100+ mph on the toll-way with the AC on, windows open, in 5th gear in my RSX-S
* Dumping the neighbor's recycle bins into my trash bonfire (bins included)
* Shattering my CFL lightbulbs in the backyard spilling the mercury
* Replacing the broken CFL bulbs with evil incandescent bulbs

I'll try and think of some more ways to celebrate Earth Day later tonight and post my results tomorrow.

Just discovered the nerdcore group Sudden Death today.

Also in nerdcore news, if you haven't heard, Doc Popular of Drown Radio released his debut solo album Me Geek Pretty One Day last week. I bought it, and it's pretty good. Check it out.

Experian has announced the launch of Emerging Credit Score, a new credit scoring tool developed with eBureau designed to assist lenders in evaluating the creditworthiness of unbanked and underbanked consumers.

For those not in-the-know, "unbanked" and "underbanked" are PC terms for illegal aliens and other Americans who operate in that gray underworld where either your job, criminal enterprise, or immigration status put you at odds with law enforcement. The banks have been wrestling with finding ways to separate these people from their money in much the same manner that they do to those of us who obey the law and pay our taxes. The first step was coming up with the term of "unbanked" and "underbanked" in an effort to sanitize this group of people and separate them from their dubious legality.

One of the consequences of allowing illegal immigration to go unchecked is that there are untold thousands/millions of people who all use Social Security Numbers from a much smaller pool of available numbers. I have read reports that some single Social Security Numbers are being used simultaneously by thousands of people. The problem for the banks in this scenario is, how do we calculate a credit score? If thousands of people are all using the same identity, how do we tell them apart? Experian's answer is to create a whole new model for scoring the criminal underworld.

Maybe this will turn into a new way to build yourself a new credit score. If you have a poor credit rating, or just don't care anymore, you can sell your identity into the human smuggling networks and after you have built up a large enough cadre of people using your identity, you effectively become someone new. And Experian will give you a new credit score in their new "Emerging Credit Score" system. They should have called it Phoenix ... it would be far more fitting.

If you don't know, many Guitar Hero 3 users complained when it was discovered that GH3 on the Wii was recorded in Mono, rather than Stereo. Activision stepped up and offered to upgrade the game, and replace the discs for free.

Not only is Activision fixing the Mono problem, but they are adding downloadable content. Did I mention they are doing this for free? The only caveat is that you have to send in your disc before Activision will send you a replacement. This is made clear on the website, and was made clear to me when I called to register.

As far as I am concerned, Activision has not only done the right thing by offering to replace the game, but they have gone above the call of duty by adding downloadable content to the game. The whiners at Consumerist have no right to complain, and should be glad that Activision is the kind of company that will not only do the right thing, they will go a step further. If it's so traumatic to give up playing the game while waiting for the new disc, go buy another one, or keep what you have. I mailed mine today, and don't mind waiting for a freebie.

You would think that I would be happy about it ... I've never seen MC Frontalot live before, and he's coming to Austin. I just can't bring myself to pay $400.00 just to see one movie, and attend one concert. Not to mention that I'll have to wait in enormously huge queues, pay for at least one more pass for my wife, and have to deal with all the self-indulgent shit that has become SxSW.

SxSW has turned into a circle-jerk of hollywood elitists and wannabees, all vying for attention of the self-indulgent teeming masses yearning for the latest in "entertainment." I've been downtown during SxSW, and it's mad crazy. I have friends that pay the fee, every year, and then bitch endlessly about how much worse it gets.

Sorry Front, but I'll have to pass. Perhaps when NR comes out on DVD I can get it on BitTorrent. I liked Nerdcore better when it was underground, and nobody thought it was cool.

Air America, the home for defiantly liberal talk radio, has quit Austin's air waves, though it can still be heard online or on XM Satellite Radio. Its previous broadcasting home in Austin, KOKE 1600 AM, has started following a Spanish-language format.

What should be a tougher loss to take is the knowledge that Austin is a very Liberal city with a giant market of young, educated liberal college students.

If you can't make it here with Liberal radio, then you probably can't make it anywhere (which the national market is bearing out, too).

Na na na na! Na na na na! Hey Hey Hey! Good Bye!

Nathaniel Brooks of Houston is a hero. He held two would-be burglars at bay with a 12-gauge shotgun until Houston PD arrived and took the pair off to jail. KHOU in Houston (BugMeNot is your friend) is reporting that the police also recovered evidence from several other burglaries that morning.

The video is up at LiveLeak. My favorite part is the reaction from his wife:

How do they prove their point? By stating that Manhattan comprises approximately 15,000 acres, and stating that every Wal-Mart store combined comprises 18,810 acres. Gasp! Now compare that to the USPS ... I can't find the acreage of each USPS location, but let's assume it's an extremely modest 2 acres. Multiply that by 27,000 and you get 54,000 total acres, or almost 3 times as much space as Wal-Mart. Look everybody ... I can count too!

Here's a news flash ... Manhattan is not that big. Take this fun fact from http://www.dfwairport.com/visitor/facts.htm:

At the time DFW was built, it was the largest and costliest airport in the world: $700 million spent and 17,500 acres – bigger than the island of Manhattan

And of course, if you attempt to point this out in the comments section of the page, the admins never let it appear ...

If you want to compare it to something that sounds bigger than it really is, try the Louisiana SuperDome ... it's only uses 13 acres. Saying that it would take almost 1,500 SuperDomes to equal the square footage of all the Wal-Marts sound much bigger.

BOSTON - An MIT student wearing what turned out to be a fake bomb was arrested at gunpoint Friday at Logan International Airport and later claimed it was artwork, officials said.

Star Simpson, 19, had a computer circuit board and wiring in plain view over a black hooded sweat shirt she was wearing, said State Police Maj. Scott Pare, the commanding officer at the airport.

A Massachusetts Port Authority staffer manning an information booth in the terminal became suspicious when Simpson — wearing the device — approached to ask about an incoming flight, Pare said. Simpson then walked outside, and the information booth attendant notified a nearby trooper.

The trooper, joined by others with submachine guns, confronted her at a traffic island in front of the terminal.

"She was immediately told to stop, to raise her hands and not to make any movement, so we could observe all her movements to see if she was trying to trip any type of device," Pare said. "Had she not followed the protocol, we might have used deadly force."

Those troopers should have shot her, made sure she was dead, and immediately locked down the airport. The media should spend the next two weeks discussing it over and over again. Get the message out ... If you show up in a US airport with a bomb strapped to your back, you will be shot on-site. Period.

Honor The Threat.

UPDATE: WizBang! Blog has weighed in on the issue, with a link to MoonBattery, and has even highlighted the same arguments that made it into the comments here. Cassy looks at this as just another "Attention Whore" looking for attention, but does pose the question of "what if" Star had been a true Jihadist:

It isn't fear mongering for police to take something like this seriously. She may well have simply been a stupid kid, but what is the alternative? What if she hadn't just been some stupid kid and really did have a bomb, but police just looked at her and thought, "Oh, that's just some kid being stupid?"