Of course it took almost twenty years to build the Death Star. It’s a government project, for crying out loud.
Star Wars Episode III.V: Civil Service of the Sith
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Damn Bayonet Lugs
Photo and caption from Saturday, May 21, St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
Click for full size
Note the boy has an assault rifle, an obvious assault weapon. Militants carry assault weapons. Law-abiding citizens wouldn’t carry assault weapons. The government should ban them.
I mean, damn, the kid’s got a wholly automatic rifle, and the Associated Press or the Post-Dispatch unknowingly or knowingly bestowed the term assault weapon on it. Nothing like calling slavery freedom and war peace to keep the discourse straight.
So do can the caption writer not differentiate, or does he/she merely want you to be unable to, gentle reader?
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Sierra Club Promotes Higher Electricity Rates
Well, pardon me, but that is the subtext of this story:
An environmental group has filed a lawsuit to block construction of a coal-fired power plant in Southern Illinois, alleging that the project lacks a valid air permit.
In the lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Benton, the Sierra Club seeks a court order requiring Houston-based EnviroPower to obtain a new air permit and install modern pollution controls before starting construction.
Might as well make it the headline.
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Here’s the Outrage
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has discovered, again, that fund raising companies that work with dubious collective organizations use the donations to pay for their expenses and pass the proceeds onto the organization for whom it’s collecting donor money. The story: Police charity renews lopsided deal with firm. The lead:
A foundation run by Missouri police chiefs has renewed its contract with a Texas-based fundraiser despite criticism that the fundraiser takes too big a share of charitable contributions earmarked for the foundation.
“It’s the best we can get. It’s the best anybody can get right now,” said Sheldon Lineback, executive director of the Missouri Police Chiefs Charitable Foundation. The foundation is based in Jefferson City but works with police departments throughout Missouri.
In an interview this year, Lineback said the foundation operated a Web-based police training program, conducted statewide training conferences and offered technical assistance to police departments. Lineback also said the foundation was a clearinghouse for homeland security equipment for police departments throughout the state.
Lineback said the contract extension with United Appeal Inc. was similar to the foundation’s past contracts with the telemarketing company. He said it called for the foundation to get about 20 percent of money raised for the charity by United Appeal while the company gets about 80 percent. Most of the money is raised by telephone solicitations.
Actually, 20% is pretty good; when I was working as a telemarketing fundraiser for the Missouri Deputy Sheriffs Association, its cut was 17%.
It sounds outrageous, but it’s really not. These fundraising companies are businesses, and they rely on the income from donations–pre-distribution–to pay all of their expenses, including rent, salaries, expensive autodial equipment, terminals for the employees, and so on. All business expenses must come from the money raised; these companies don’t have chickens in the back yard whose eggs they can sell to pay the bills.
So after all expenses are paid, the profit, if you will, goes directly to a charitable foundation of dubious merit. The Post Dispatch wouldn’t complain if a business that was doing something productive was churning all its profit into charity. Also, the Post-Dispatch favors a coerced setup wherein an entity takes money from all people, keeps a chunk of it, and then redistributes the remainder to dubious good causes–that’s government, and the Post-Dispatch wants more of it. But because this is a for-profit business, the Post-Dispatch is on its case.
No, let’s look where we should find the outrage:
Records filed with the Internal Revenue Service show that Lineback receives a salary of about $70,000 a year. Half of that comes from his work with the foundation and the other half from his work with a related group, the Missouri Police Chiefs Association.
Other members of the foundation’s board of directors include Bellefontaine Neighbors Police Chief Robert Pruett, O’Fallon Police Chief Steve Talbott, Eureka Police Chief Mike Wiegand, Cape Girardeau Police Chief Steven Strong and Columbia Police Chief Randy Boehm.
Despite the fact that the foundation’s board is made up of publicly paid officials, Lineback says the foundation meetings are not open to the public.
During the past three months, Lineback has said repeatedly that he is too busy to make public minutes of any board meetings, contracts between the foundation and United Appeal or other documents requested by the Post-Dispatch.
No, the fact that a number of law enforcement officials sit on the boards serves as the red herring. This charity is not unlike any other, paid officials or not. It doesn’t have any extra duty to dispense its records or minutes because it’s a cop charity.
However, note that it is a charity fighting transparency, and it’s a charity whose executive director makes his living by running a number of charities. So these charities take the 20% they get from telemarketing fundraisers, keep their share, and pass on the benefits to their members–not to all police, but only to members.
The telemarketing fundraiser is the tick on the leech as far as I’m concerned. I don’t support telemarketing fundraising efforts, and I don’t support charities that exist to perpetuate themselves and their fundraising efforts. But then again, I am a small-hearted, small-government kind of fellow who tries to maintain a consistency, no matter who might see that consistency and shout “Hobgoblin!” before running away.
(Added to Outside the Beltway’s Traffic Jam.)
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Book Report: Jump the Shark by Jon Hein (2002)
I know, I know. I’ve read a book based on the Darwin Awards, which is a Web phenomenon. I bought Philip Kaplan’s book, even though his site right there on the blogroll. I read a complete book of Urban Legends even though Snopes is on the blogroll, too. So it should not shock you, gentle reader, that I bought this book when I found it on the discount rack at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco this weekend. Face it, I like reading the Internet when someone else prints and binds it for me.
The book Jump the Shark distills the Web site. The author picks a number of classic and recognized television shows and identifies a single moment where the show turned its corner and began its inevitable slide into mediocrity and from thence to DVD releases (although, when the site was created in 1997, who could have known how big those re-releases would be?).
The book devotes about 90 pages to television shows, so it selects from the Web site’s extensive catalog. Then the book begins applying the concept to music bands…. and celebrities…. sports teams…. politics….
So I give kudos to the book for going beyond the Web site. The reflections on when bands lost their edges was fun (and prompted my beautiful wife of six years to snatch it from my hands to read on a flight).
However, perhaps the extension of the metaphor to political personages and to political concepts was ill-advised. Communism jumped the shark with the fall of the Berlin Wall? So the purges, the famines, and the deaths of millions didn’t register, but the made-for-television images and the pageantry of what might be called the final episode of Soviet Influence did. Hmm, that seems ill-advised. Suddenly, we’ve tripped from light humor into places where this reader wants to sniff a slight political bias from the author who lives in New York with his wife and two kids. I didn’t buy this book to sniff for political biases, nor to consider politics at all within the confines of this book.
So did this book, well, leap the mako? Not really. The short vignettes and page-or-so treatments made it an easy read, perfect for travel time or for those moments you can snatch during the day. It distills the Web site’s often nebulous comments into succinct snark, but one should read the throwaway-trivia and asides with some skepticism. I found one blatant error in the book and a couple of asides that don’t jog with my memory. But overall, the experience is positive, worth the five dollars I spent so that I could clutch its covers with white-knuckled eagerness instead of the arms of the airplane seat.
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The Streisand Manifesto
Not that you needed a reason to vote against Barbra Streisand for any legislative position in government, but let’s review some points in her manifesto “Guilty“:
- Make it a crime to be lonely or sad
(it oughta be illegal)Ms. Streisand obviously wants the government to legislate what moods an individual experiences. Lonely? Sad? Smile, friend, or you’re facing felony charges. Life in a Streisand state would resemble life in the role-playing game Paranoia.
- Make it a crime to be out in the cold
(it oughta be illegal)One wonders if Barbra wants to round up the homeless, but it’s not that simple. No, friends, this California resident wants to impose a winter-long curfew. Think about it, friends in Minnesota. Barbra imagines winter as spent in a warm and fuzzy set of evenings in front of the fireplace with warm chocolate. Ergo, they all must be. If you dare run to the store for milk and bread before a big snow storm, you could be shot on sight!
Friends, someone with more stomach for her lyrics should closely examine her work for these indicators in case Barbra determines that she needs to unseat that conservative warmonger Barbara Boxer from her position in the United States Senate in the next election. I only saw this portion of the grand unified Streisand theory of overlegislation in this book and don’t really own any of her work, nor would I sacrifice myself for this research. Undoubtedly, other kernels of Streisand’s legislative agenda lie within her work, and we must root it out!
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Book Report: I Can’t Fight This Feeling edited by David Cassidy (2002)
I bought this book at A Clean Well Lighted Place for books in San Francisco. It was on the discount table for $4.98, and I thought I would get enough mockery out of it to make it worth my fin. I was probably wrong.
The full title of the book is I Can’t Fight This Feeling: Timeless Poems for Lovers from the Pop Hits of the ’70s and ’80s. The book collects a bunch of lyrics from 1970s and 1980s pop fare, imposes arbitrary and dare I say “Random?” line breaks upon them, and calls them poetry. When coupled with music, some of these songs are enjoyable, potentially meaningful three minute vignettes into poetry that I laughed at in high school. Ah, high school, when I worked as editor of the school literary magazine, whose mockery would keep bad poets out of print; now that I am an adult, the only person’s poems that I can keep out of print are my own and I can only do that by submitting them to every poetry magazine from Poetry to Highlights for Children. What was I talking about?
Oh, yes, this book. The introduction is not from the editor, but from some obscure pilot, Fred Schnieder of the B-52s. He explains that these really are poems. The rest of the book refutes his assertion. Because, folks, let’s just face it: poems use images to evoke emotional response. Pop songs like Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” or “I Honestly Love You” or Orleans’ “Still the One” or Barry White’s “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe” or Bon Jovi’s “Bad Medicine” don’t rely on images so much as testimony from the poet-narrator. Actually, of all those I listed, “Bad Medicine” comes closest since its very conceit is a metaphor (your love is like bad medicine). Oddly enough, this would mean that Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” is one of the poetical highlights of the book.
The only song of the 35 that would stand alone as a poem–that is, it relies on imagery and has a good internal consistency in its dreamlike surrealism–is “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper. Perhaps “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” by Looking Glass would fall into the poem category, seeing as it’s a traditional ballad that tells a story and actually includes images (a braided chain made of finer silver from the north of Spain, etc., etc.). However, unlike other songs in the book I can hear within my head as performed by the original artist, “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” comes with a visual. A former co-worker, soon-to-be the head of the Technical Writing department, admitted that she had been a pom-pom girl in high school, and that after a couple of glasses of wine, she’d be likely to re-enact a routine based on the song. So, gentle reader, I must diss Looking Glass simply because the song can make me imagine a drunken Peggy smiling and kicking and waving imaginary or improvised poms. Although the imagery is the most vivid, I don’t think Looking Glass intended that particular image.
So, I would certainly not recommend this book for you, gentle reader, unless you can find it at a garage sale for a quarter and you can enjoy the absurdity of sharing these poems, read aloud with full Shatner-inflection, with your loved one (or ones, Utah readers). My beautiful wife has taste for poetry and distaste for cheese, so I don’t think I got a full verse of "poetry" out before she told me to stop under threat of bodily injury. I don’t the heart, or perhaps other masculine anatomical features, to tell her this was supposed to be her anniversary gift.
Bonus: The only laugh out loud line came from John Waite’s “Missing You”:
stop this heartbreak overload!
Come on, the line’s something best mumbled over when singing the song, which I adore; however, seeing it in print, with an exclamation point, sent me into near hysterics.
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Appropriate Sponsorship
Pop-Tarts presents: American Idols Live!
My hat’s off to the marketer with the wry sense of humor and, if his employers get wise, with the new weekly unemployment check.
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Book Report: A Man of Affairs by John D. MacDonald (1957)
As with a number of my other John D. MacDonald books, such as Judge Me Not and On The Run, I fully acknowledge the jonesing with (or jonsing, if I need to drop the silent e) that drives me to pay $2.00 each for John D. MacDonald paperbacks. I am glad, glad, you hear?
I bought this book at Downtown Books in Milwaukee (the place to go in Milwaukee for used books, werd) for $1.95. John D. MacDonald’s other works, including the Travis McGee series, get reprinted ad infinitum so their prices are cheap. All of his works are worthwhile, though, no matter the cost. Please visit my eBay listings after I make this assertion to drive up the prices….wait–I’m not selling my copies, you damn chiselers.
This particular book represents another of MacDonald’s forays into Big Business. When a junk bond/leveraged buyout king swoops into a family-run business after the patriarch dies, a self-appointed self-made man (the first person narrator) invites himself onto a Bahamas retreat where high finance and human nature collide. The narrator, Sam Glidden, wants to keep the heirs of the owner from selling the company to a corporate raider. But on the holiday in the sane where the sun and the sex are easy, can he hold to his ideals?
Crikes, this book was written almost fifty years ago. With the easy sex and the high finance, I found it easy to forget–and to follow along.
Were I less loyal to my patron saints (Parker, Frost, and Billy Joel, amen), I would find John D. MacDonald’s miracles hard to discount. Each of his books, whether ignored in individual paperbacks or apotheosized in Travis McGee omnibus editions, contains the same ambiguous characters, the same lush descriptions of big business or maritime “salvage,” and the same lush descriptions.
If you stumble across this paperback through a “friendly” loan, steal it. If you find it at a garage sale held by an underfed woman and her dozens of underfed children, buy it. If you can inadvertently purchase it from a reputable used boook store, buy it.
When I grow up, I want to be John D. MacDonald. Although, with LASIK surgery, perhaps I could avoid the heavy plastic glasses frames.
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You’re Not From Around Here, Are You?
From the Post-Dispatch story entitled UM ends suit with $10m scholarship fund:
The University of Missouri has agreed to set aside $10 million for a scholarship fund to settle a class action lawsuit that the school violated state law for 15 years by charging tuition to in-state, undergraduate students.
That’s the University of Missouri system, right? Check it out:
Between 1986 when the University’s Board of Curators broke a 1939 law by charging educational fees based on credit hours until 2001 when the legislature repealed the 72-year-old statute, Mizzou was breaking the law at its campuses in Columbia, Rolla, St. Louis and Kansas City, Herman alleged and Romines ruled in December 2002. Since then, higher courts upheld the ruling.
Somewhere in that run-on sentence, the author says Mizzou was breaking the law at the four University of Missouri campuses listed. The problem? Mizzou refers specifically to University of Missouri at Columbia. That’s a specific nickname that the author applies to all UM campuses.
Word: don’t use the hip local lingo if you’re unclear on it.
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No Dog Bites Man, But Post-Dispatch Covers It Anyway
I predicted yesterday:
So keep an eye on it, gentle reader: when the dog bites man, it will be news in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch if it’s a pit bull doing the biting, and it will be one more anecdote to drive bad legislation.
Well, translated as augury, that means watch for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to grab hold of the pit-bull-attacks story with its teeth and not let go. Kind of like, you know, a pit bull.
The Post-Dispatch does not disappoint. Here’s today’s entry: Dog attacks: The solution proves elusive
While the family and friends of the victims of two pit bull attacks in St. Charles County try to understand what caused the animals to snap, experts are divided about how to prevent maulings.
Even pit bull advocates admit the dogs have an image problem.
Get that? Even pit bull advocates admit there’s a problem. But they’re only copping to an image problem. Ironic, ainna, that the admission comes in an article that casts pit bulls in a bad light.
But not to worry, citizens. The government is making its plans for the pit bull purge:
Unlike Missouri, Illinois law makes it illegal to enact breed-specific ordinances that would allow the state’s cities to ban certain breeds. A bill currently in the Illinois House, however, would change the law.
Furthermore, we get column inches lauding the bans:
Merritt Clifton, of Clinton, Wash., editor of the newspaper Animal People, disagreed and cited laws banning pit bulls in Denver and one being enacted in Ontario.
He said that dog-related legislation had historically allowed the dog one free bite before it was deemed a dangerous animal.
“The problem with pit bulls and also with Rottweilers is that the first dangerous incident is very often the first fatality or life-threatening injury,” he said. “So that one free bite doesn’t work when you’ve got that level of capacity to injure, and the issue is no longer whether the dog bites often but whether the dog bites at all.”
He said that pit bulls made up about 5 percent of the dog population in the United States, but that more than 50 percent of the dogs involved in fatal attacks or maimings have been pit bulls.
Delise calculates that pit bulls are involved in 21 percent of fatal attacks, the highest of any breed.
Well, what’s a newspaper to do? We don’t have sharks in Missouri. But we do have menacing pit bulls. It’s a twofer for a paper: it can tell harrowing stories with human victims in the man-versus-nature style, and it can goad the government to further curtailing freedom on behalf of the Little Man and/or The Children.
To be continued, undoubtedly….
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Maybe They Had a Lot of Luggage
In a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story entitled Amtrak train hits tractor-trailer, we have an inadvertent argument in favor of ending Amtrak subsidies:
Six people on the westbound train, which had a total of 23 passengers and crew on its engine and three passenger cars, were taken to Barnes-Jewish Hospital with bumps and bruises, said Kim Bacon, a spokeswoman for EMS. [Emphasis added.]
23 passengers and crew scattered among 3 passenger cars in a train that’s just left the St. Louis station bound for Kirkwood, Washington, Jefferson City, and Kansas City. Maybe the majority of its passengers get on at Kirkwood. Or maybe our goverments are spending millions of dollars to move dozens of people each day. But in a scenic fashion with historical ties, so that’s a bargain!
(Attempted submission, again, for the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)
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Protested Innocence
Headline on CNN: Groups suing FBI over monitoring of activities:
Five civil rights, animal rights and environmental groups are joining together to sue the FBI to release records about monitoring of anti-war and other political activities by federal agents assigned to counterterrorism duties.
The FBI might monitor political groups under the trumped-up “counterterrorism” excuse. Wait a minute, which groups are suing?
The American Civil Liberties Union said the decision to file a lawsuit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington came after the FBI ignored Freedom of Information Act requests for the documents. The other organizations involved are the American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee, Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and United for Peace and Justice.
So we’ve got Arab groups, animal rights groups, and environmental groups. Groups that might be connected to rogue organizations that actually commit terrorist acts on American soil? Sounds like the groups the FBI should monitor in the name of counterterrorism.
We’re not talking about the Boy Scouts of America, the Society of Technical Communications, or the United Auto Workers. And if a group called Prepared Youth of America or Tech Writers for Justice started setting fires to motels or IT companies that have crappy documentation, I wouldn’t mind the FBI sniffing around them.
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There Ought Not To Be A Law
Apologies to Radley Balko for misappropriating his title.
In Milwaukee, a close reading (and by “close” I mean actually reading) of a city ordinance has uncovered that every tailgate party with alcohol at County Stadium or Miller Park has been illegal and subject to citation. Instead of simply not enforcing the law (and leaving it on the books for arbitrary enforcement), the city of Milwaukee will rewrite the law:
Ordinance 106-2.1, which was passed in 1980, is the one we’ve been blissfully ignoring out there. It says it shall be unlawful for anyone to drink the strong stuff in public parking lots or parking structures. The fine is $50 to $250, probably depending on how much abuse is heaped on the arresting officer.
Schrimpf remembers reading the ordinance several years back when there was talk of building Miller Park downtown.
It struck him that popping a cold one in a downtown parking structure or doing it in the sprawling lots around the ballpark were no different under the law. But he always thought there must be some exception for tailgating, which he himself has enjoyed.
But there was no exception under the city ordinances, nor is there any county ordinance that says go ahead and imbibe in the shadow of your vehicle.
“The answer is yes. It was illegal,” Schrimpf said.
So at Murphy’s request, the council recently voted to allow tailgate drinking for this season as a “special event” under the ordinance. And last week the Public Safety Committee recommended to the council to make it permanent.
Granted, they’re just making ball games a “special event” not subject to the prohibition, and aren’t completely throwing out the “no drinking in public” law, but it’s a good step in good governance.
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Steinberg Disses Aaron of Free Will Blog
Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times, today:
Sometimes this job is too easy. That whooshing noise you heard Tuesday was every pundit north of St. Louis lunging for a keyboard to heap ridicule on Gov. Blagojevich for his “testicular virility” quip.
But what about Aaron? He’s not north of St. Louis. Perhaps Steinberg doesn’t think Aaron is a pundit like he (Steinberg) is.
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Please Step Out of the Vehicle, or Zzzzt
Tasers: or else the cops would have to shoot you for not getting out of your car:
The two-mile pursuit ended on west 56th Street, but Martin refused to get out of the car. One deputy broke out a window and used a taser on him.
Cops wouldn’t shoot the driver in the case, nor would they clap him with the billy club. Because those leave marks that look bad in photographs. Tasers, though, are nice alternatives to deadly force.
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Judicial Pr0n
02-P-381 Appeals Court: JOHN DOE[1] vs. MARY MOE.[2]:
Early in the morning of September 24, 1994, they were engaged in consensual sexual intercourse. The plaintiff was lying on his back while the defendant was on top of him. The defendant’s body was secured in this position by the interlocking of her legs and the plaintiff’s legs. At some point, the defendant unilaterally….
I forgot from whence I found that particular link, but I have to wonder who will be the first to demand that court cases like this be redacted from the public record to protect the impressionable minds of children.
UPDATE: I was remiss in not pointing out that I saw this story on Overlawyered.
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Free Trivia Answer
Today’s free answer to an unasked trivia question is:
Roxette
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Compare and Contrast Assignment
Your topic, today, gentle reader: Causes for Alarm.
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails:
Reznor said he began to grow worried about finances when he was told during a meeting with Malm and a lawyer in 2002 that there was “cause for alarm.”
The following year, he said, he asked Malm to tell him how much money he had. He said he was sent a financial statement that revealed he had at most $3 million in total assets and as little as $400,000 in cash.
Crew on the International Space Station:
A balky Russian oxygen generator broke down on the International Space Station, but its two-man crew has a reserve air supply that would last about five months, NASA officials said Friday.
The station’s primary generator, which has been operating in an on-again, off-again fashion for months, stopped working last week and the station’s crew has not been able to fix it.
Mission managers say the unit has failed for good. Consequently, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev and U.S. astronaut John Phillips will be relying on reserves until replacement parts arrive at the station in late August.
Kylie Clem, a spokeswoman for NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the reserves would last well beyond the scheduled mid-June arrival at the station of a Russian space freighter with additional supplies.
As it stands, oxygen supplies in a Progress cargo carrier now at the outpost will last until May 22 or May 23.
The crew also is equipped with oxygen generators that work like drop-down emergency air supplies on commercial airliners. Supplies from those would last until early July. Beyond that, there is a 100-day oxygen supply in tanks attached to the station U.S. Quest airlock.
Total air supply now onboard: About 140 days.
One of these situations is dire, and the other is not. Can you spot the difference?
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Lileks Spreads Disinformation to Children
Lileks today:
“You have FOUR STAR WARS?” Gnat asked. “Wow.”
There are actually five – well, six. But I sold the first one.
“Why?”
“Because it was an embarrassing piece of tripe.”
“What’s tripe?”
“It’s a kind of fish.”
Everyone except Lileks, and now his daughter, knows that tripe is cattle guts.
I’m not too proud to LOUDLY CORRECT MISINFORMATION IN THE MAINSTREAMISH MEDIA! I am a BLOGGER! It’s what I do to feel better about myself!
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