From those wonderful folks who brought you street violence in Baghdad

Your friends at Blackwater came up with a clever scheme that allowed employees to train with AK-47s and other fully automatic weapons in its headquarters in sleepy Moyock, North Carolina: they bought 34 machine guns and "donated" them to the Camden County Sheriff's Department, which has all of nineteen deputies, none of whom has been trained with the Kalashnikovs or any other automatic weapon. According to the local paper, AK-47s are considered a poor choice for police work, even for SWAT teams, because they're "too powerful."You will probably not be surprised to learn that most of the weapons were stored not at the sheriff's office, but at Blckwater's headquarters. Note that Blackwater has more firepower in its headquarters than all of the state and municipal police departments in the State of North Carolina. I, for one, am not sure this is wise.

The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (as P.J. O'Roarke says, "all my hobbies under one roof"), unpersuaded by the figleaf tale, seized all of the weapons.

Locally, the Blackwater story shared today's front page with District of Columbia v. Heller, a landmark case handed down yesterday in which the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment right to bear arms is an individual right not tied to the need for a state militia. Ironically, since the AK-47 is entirely appropriate for a militia and is in fact the weapon of choice of militias world-wide, logically, it fits within the original intent of the drafters of the Second Amendment.

Justice Anton Scalia, asked for comment, drew a gun and shot the reporter.

Yet another reason for Mac users to act smug

From the "Satan complains about the temperature in Hell" department, click here for a link to a scathing e-mail sent by Bill Gates to senior Microsoft executives complaining bitterly about how hard it is to use Windows. (Scroll down through the string to see Bill's part.) In the end he gives up on trying to download software from his own web site. Your standard Windows experience--repetitive re-entry of personal information, machine code error messages, repeated re-boots, obscure patches loaded for no reason--it's all there. The only thing that would have enhance the e-schadenfreude would have been a last desperate attempt to fix the problem by calling Microsoft customer support only to have the call answered by an Urdu speaker with limited English skills who referred to him as "Bill" in every sentence.