Category: News

In a story about my congressional representative (Congressman Billy Long talks with KY3 regarding Capitol Insurrection and possible Senate run that really does not offer any detail but a couple quotes from the Congressman and a couple of times mentions that the Republicans blocked creating of a commission to “investigate” the “insurrection.”

It does, however, offer this bit of civics:

The vote was 54 in favor of the bill and 35 against. That is just six short of what it needed to be at 60 in order for it to pass.

That’s not actually for it to pass, but it’s all the same I suppose for a twenty-four-year-old journalist.

Full disclosure: Although I have voted for Mr. Long, I have not had my picture taken with him since Friday, when I attended the reopening of the Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield visitor center where he spoke.

So that’s why posting has been light late last week: I’ve been, you know, doing stuff.

Gun-waving charges against Missouri U.S. Senate candidate’s wife amended.

Not Holding guns in sight on their property when a mob breaks down a gate to enter their closed neighborhood. No, gun-waving, like the mad man and woman they are!

A special prosecutor said Tuesday he has amended the charges against a St. Louis woman who waved a gun at racial injustice protesters last summer, and he’ll decide soon if he’ll amend charges against her husband.

Mark and Patricia McCloskey were indicted by a grand jury in October on felony charges of unlawful use of a weapon and evidence tampering. Special Prosecutor Richard Callahan said in a statement that he filed a new indictment on Monday that would give jurors the alternative of convicting Patricia McCloskey of misdemeanor harassment instead of the weapons charge. Under that alternative, the evidence tampering count would be dropped.

Why the wife and not the husband?

Because the husband is running in the Republican Senate primary, duh!

(Part I of what is no doubt destined to be a long series unless the guy stops running for political office as part of a plea deal.)

Professionals advocating. Child marriage is currently legal in 46 states:

A new study shed light on a centuries-old issue still happening across the United States, child marriage.

The organization Unchained At Last found nearly 300,000 children under the age of 18 were legally married between 2000 and 2018.

“When I talk about this issue, invariably somebody says, ‘Child marriage is that a thing?’ Well it is and it’s a problem,” said Pennsylvania state representative Perry Warren.

The new study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, noted that the age or spousal difference is significant enough it would have been considered a sex crime for 60,000 of the cases.

Now, that’s rich, given the salacious and tawdry things coming out in the Gates divorce, including Bill Gates’ connections to Jeffrey Epstein and so on. Yeah, I know, it’s a logical fallacy to point out the fallibility of an argument’s source as proving the argument incorrect, but c’mon, man. Logic does not win arguments any more. So we can forget all about arguing about the expansion of childhood to the arbitrary 18 or 21 or about how some sixteen year olds are more mature than others, and why marriage is such a bad thing for seventeen year olds.

No, let’s take the dramatic map from the article:

Now, professionals, please color in on this map the states where children on their own recognizance with the assistance of other professionals who are not their parents should be prohibited from reassigning their gender:

Wait, what? Children should not be allowed to marry until eighteen even with their parents’ advice and consent but should be allowed to irreparably alter their bodies based on their childish utterances or phases? Why is that?

Sorry, I forgot: being a professional agitator in one arena means deferring any continuity or consistency in thought. After all, you’re focused like a laser on the issue whose advocacy foundation pays your bills and will leave the other issues to the expert professionals in their advocacy foundations for that issue.

You see “many” in a headline like this, and you know who the particular “many” are: Week of violent crimes in Springfield leaves many seeking a larger conversation

The professionals.

Because if you put Professionals with Moms Demand Action or Man Planning Political Career in the headline, it’s definitely less compelling.

Strangely enough, the conversations are about what advocacy groups and the government should do, which is the predictable litany of social programs and gun proscriptions that have not had the intended results over the course of the last sixty years.

It does not say about reaching out to anyone about how our culture or cultures have come to a place where shooting, stabbing, stealing, and a whole variety of immoral acts are no longer condemned or punished. The root causes are always found to be economic, structural, or something other than individuals acting on their own agency against a shared moral code. The very thought of morals oppresses people by telling them not to act a certain way.

No, clearly, what we need are more laws for the lawless to ignore and slush funds for professional advocates and their organizations.

Someone at KY3, probably someone young, picked some low-hanging fruit with this article/news story and wrote the same story that has been written for the last sixty years, leading us in a descending widening gyre.

On the other hand, I guess it’s good that coronavirus EXTINCTION-LEVEL EVENT has passed and we’re back to gun violence. On the other tentacle, it’s always something.

UPDATE: See also An interesting discussion on criminal “gun violence” which is a little more nuanced than you get out of twenty-four-year-olds writing the news.

Pretty uniform coverage of this announcement across the media.

You know, in some quarters, namely Republican primary voters, standing your ground against vandals is a feature, not the sign of insanity.

So far, he’s at the top of my list for the primary. Sadly.

Apparently not. Former MIB leader eyes digital expansion of monthly newspaper

via GIPHY

Evangel University seeks new mascot name, nominations due Monday.

The mascot name is/was the Crusaders. Which, in its original form does mean a Christian warrior headed to liberate the Holy lands from infidels. It’s non-religious meaning comes later, where everything is a crusade when it’s not the moral equivalent of war on something.

Contrast that with Warriors, which Marquette dropped in 1994. I wrote about it for the school newspaper in, what, 1992?

Here at Nogglestead, we have had some recent run-ins with government-mandated ill efficiency and poor economy in the service of the all-important but apparently impotent Mother Gaia. I mean, aside from the light bulb lament that I post regularly here.

One, one of the boys recently broke the wand portion of a shower head. Remember when these came into all the rage in the latter decades of the 20th century? Now they’re pretty much de rigueur; all the shower heads come with the wand attachment. So I bought a new kit and installed it. Although I had heard of the new low-flow showerheads, I had not experienced them. When I did, I did not care for it; saving water by making it take longer to rinse yourself is definitely government economist thinking. After a week or so, I swapped the old shower head back in and just used the new wand, which has the strictures in place, but the main head still gets it done. Yeah, I know, the way you’re supposed to use the new low-flow showerheads is to use the showerhead and the wand at the same time all the time–it’s not lost on me that the wand mount is now atop the showerhead so you can use them almost like one showerhead which is still weaker than the old showerhead.

The second was another bit of plumbing work. My mother-in-law requested an upgrade to our hall bathroom–a taller commode that would make it easier for her to use. We hadn’t been in a rush with this–it has been a year of nobody going nowhere, after all–but the hall toilet recently came loose, so we figured we’d just have a plumber swap out the toilets instead of reseating the existing one and replacing the wax rings. So we have a new senior toilet which uses very little water and often does not fill the bowl with water. I have not placed a bucket in the hall bathtub to gather water from the bath toilet to assist, but if I have to plunge it a bunch, I will end up doing this.

On the other hand, I guess I should count my blessings that these rites in the service of the nature goddess do not require expensive heavy metals mined in countries without strict environment controls that make it easy for thieves to cause thousands of dollars of damage to American automobiles for a couple dollars of drug money (Metal prices make catalytic converter theft a problem of ‘epic proportions’ in Springfield).

After investigating 95 total instances of catalytic converter theft in Springfield between 2016 and 2019, there were 408 reports of catalytic converter thefts in the city in 2020.

And through the first four months of this year, there had already been 337 reports of thieves shimmying under vehicles to cut out and steal the catalytic converter.

The huge rise in catalytic converter thefts is not unique to Springfield. The New York Times reported earlier this year the nationwide problem has been spurred by a big increase in the price of precious metals that are found in catalytic converters, like palladium and rhodium.

The Times reported that the price of rhodium went from $640 an ounce five years ago to $21,900 an ounce earlier this year (roughly 12 times the price of gold).

On the plus side, the environmentalists got a cheap thrill forty-some years ago in leading us to this place. On the minus side, it’s never enough and it has little impact as the rest of the world industrializes with greater populations without the scruples we’ve drilled into generations of Americans through judicious spacing between passing the mandates and things just aren’t as good as they were in the old days.

So I’m reading a New York Post review of Woman in the Window which looks like Rear Window but with a woman, and I guess it’s a front window, and I come across this:

Days later, she witnesses Jane being murdered across the street by her husband and frantically calls the cops. The man, Alistair (Gary Oldman) rushes over, but — presto change-o — he’s accompanied by an entirely different Jane (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and insists Anna is confused or making it up. The cops think she’s a loon, too.

And then I’m reading about The highs — and astonishing lows — of Angelina Jolie’s film career, I get to the bit on The Changeling:

This Clint Eastwood-directed period picture was Jolie’s last decent movie (I refuse to count “Kung Fu Panda”). She got an Oscar nod for it, and it’s no wonder — she pulled out all the stops. Playing a mother who believes her son has been switched out with a different boy — and who the police think is a loon — she’s sent to a sanatorium and given dramatic electroshock therapy. If wrongful electrocution doesn’t get you an Academy Award nomination, what will?

And I thought, wait a minute, did I already read that just a minute ago? Is it a glitch in the Matrix? Or is the Internet trying to convince me that the cops think she is a loon–who is this she?

Gentle reader, I was pleased when I returned to the first article to discover that Johnny Oleksinski just so happened to recycle the cops think she’s a loon bit in stories with similar plot/twists.

Because I was half believing that it was evidence that I was a loon.

Springfield faces apartment shortage due to a rise in jobs:

It looks like houses aren’t the only hot item in the market. Springfield is experiencing an apartment shortage and a local property manager says it’s because of jobs.

“I think Springfield’s blessed right now with a lot of people moving to town because there are jobs available and as a result of that, apartments are the first place to stop to find a place to live,” said Lonnie Funk.

But:

“I think a lot of people get forced into paying more for an apartment than what they can really afford to pay,” said Funk.

“It’s $900 or $1200 a month, so a single person can’t swing it,” said Bailey. “Rent’s never going to go down. I was amazed at what the rent went up here. I’m to the point where I’m about ready to go back to Florida.”

Not depicted: The Federal Government, particularly the CDC, forbidding landlords from evicting tenants who are not paying rent, which unexpectedly! should be expected to cause rents for new leases to rise and the supply to shrink.

But it looks like England vs. France might just pay out:

BORIS Johnson has deployed the Royal Navy to protect Jersey from the threat of a French blockade.

The dramatic move came after French fishermen – backed by Macron’s ministers – vowed to shut off the island unless they could fish more British waters, a threat branded an “act of war”.

The furious spat erupted after the island – which is under Britain’s protection – slapped French trawlers with post-Brexit fishing licences requirements.

About 100 French fishing vessels are due to sail to Jersey’s port on Thursday as part of a protest against the new rules, the head of fisheries for the Normandy region, Dimitri Rogoff has said.

In the face of increasingly bellicose French threats, two patrol vessels will sent to monitor the situation and protect the islands 100,000 citizens who depend wholly on imports for food, medicine and even electricity.

I did not see that coming!

Okay, now, let’s look through the signs and portents and penumbras and emanations to determine who is the Russian and or Chinese proxy in this fight. Cui bono?

Which does not mean “Alexa, play Sonny and Cher,” by the way.

St. Louis County votes to halt evictions:

Some households in St. Louis County are waking up with a sigh of relief after St. Louis County leaders voted to halt evictions through June.

In a 4-2-1 vote Tuesday night, the county council voted to approve a measure to temporarily suspend evictions until June 30.

Why will it end in June? Spoiler alert: It won’t.

So what is a landlord to do? Raise the rent, or let the properties fall to ruin because they can’t put out people who don’t pay the rent?

Maybe both!

NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity completes third successful flight:

NASA completed the third successful flight of its Mars helicopter Ingenuity on Sunday.

The NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., announced the successful flight in a tweet Sunday morning, declaring that the helicopter “continues to set records” flying faster and farther.

C’mon, man, Martian records that we know of are currently pretty easy to break, ainna?

But let’s look to the future: That little thing should have a couple Hellfire missiles on it.

Because later rovers will have that capability (China invokes mythic god of war and fire for its Mars rover name).

(Former link from Instapundit; the latter because I hit the New York Post Web site a couple times a day. Kind of like when I got my first desk job connected to the Web in 1998.)

The current administration is working hard to get teams signed up for World War III: Biden recognizes atrocities against Armenians as genocide

Well, I guess that pushes a NATO member towards the Chinese/Russian side.

Currently, we’ve got the teams as follows:

Allies:	Other Side:
United States	Russia China Turkey

Although we really have to come up with actual allies to call our side “the Allies”. We could add Taiwan, briefly. And we’d need to come up with a name for the other side since Axis is played out and Axis of Evil, too.

Ah, well, the winners will write the history of any future global conflict. Let’s leave it to them.

According to Writer’s Digest, they have limitations on poetry imports:

Due to U.S. Government restrictions we are unable to accept entries from Syria, Iran, North Korea, or Crimea.

One of those is not a country. It’s a part of Russia. Or will be soon because Trump was a Putin puppet who somehow prevented it.

Ted Nugent, who once dismissed COVID-19, gets virus:

In the video shot at his Michigan ranch, the “Cat Scratch Fever” singer repeatedly uses racist slurs to refer to COVID-19 and reiterates his previous stance that he wouldn’t be getting the vaccine because he claims wrongly that “nobody knows what’s in it.”

Nugent, a supporter of ex-President Donald Trump, previously called the pandemic a scam and has railed against public health restrictions. He has repeated a narrative pushed by conservative media and disputed by health experts that suggests the official death count from the coronavirus is inflated.

So much rightthinking in that “news,” I feel mindcleaner for having read it.

UPDATE: Immediately after posting this, I happened over to Facebook and saw one of my now-Internet acquaintances commenting on another medium’s covering of the story with his own, “Haw, haw!” I used to think so much better of people. On the other hand, I vote for Trump twice, so he would think me irredeemable were he to think of me at all.