Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Some dude in the LA Times thinks Google should buy a newspaper:

It’s only a matter of time before a Yahoo or a Google decides to buy an old media company in order to differentiate itself by offering high-quality, proprietary news. Or a company like Amazon could buy a prestigious newspaper publisher and reinvent itself as a portal, leapfrogging over those that treat news updates as a commodity.

Mickey Kaus disagrees and lists two good reasons why not, concluding:

I’ll invest kf’s retained earnings elsewhere, thank you!

Professor Bainbridge calls it a provocative business plan.

I have one word for them:

AOLTimeWarner

The “authorities” say it was an accident:

According to the City of Los Angeles’ Department of Animal Services, which conducted an investigation, the horse was running when it stepped on its own lead rope and broke its neck. Animal Services is ruling the death an accident.

Don’t believe the whitewash. Ask yourself:

What had the horse seen that would drive it to suicide?

Looks like “Republican” Senator Bond wants to spend lots of money, and those lots aren’t enough:

The Senate has opened debate on a highway bill that would send billions of dollars to Missouri and Illinois for key road and bridge projects over the next six years.

“This bill is long overdue,” Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond, R-Mo., a lead sponsor the legislation, said as lawmakers began debate on Tuesday. “Our roads are deteriorating, (highway) safety is deteriorating.”

But even as he championed the legislation, Bond and other lawmakers said the $284 billion price tag was not enough to meet the nation’s needs. And they vowed to include more money in the bill, even though the White House has signaled that $284 billion is the maximum the president would accept.

Jeez, spending lots of Federal money is good because it’s spent in Missouri! How short sighted does Bond think we are?

Probably only as shortsighted as we actually are.

Over at Q and O, McQ invokes Orwell describing Zimbabwe’s plan to slaughter animals in national parks to feed the peasants. McQ says:

Rather Orwellian wouldn’t you say? Killing animals in “conservation areas?”

He overlooks the direct Orwellianism in this quote from a Zimbabwe official included in the post:

“Killing of animals for any reasons other than conservation can be very disastrous,” said one National Parks official.

You can kill some animals to save others because All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Teachers’ Union Suit Sparks ‘No Bureaucrat Left Behind’:

Dubbed ‘No Bureaucrat Left Behind’ the new plan would address teachers’ union complaints about unfunded federal mandates by removing the mandates, the funding and the federal role in public education.

“When I read the NEA lawsuit,” said Mr. Bush, “I realized that as long as we funnel education money through Washington D.C., we provide teachers’ unions with an excuse for their poor performance. Blame Bush. Blame Congress. Blame the Department of Education. But if all the money is raised and spent at the local level, then taxpayers can hold the unions accountable.”

If only. I suspect Bush would only offer to spend the same money on public or private schools, which wouldn’t be the same thing.

At least California’s Attorney General is not hiding his totalitarian instincts:

“The weighing of public benefits versus private rights tilts heavily in favor of the public benefits,” he said.

He’s speaking about a bill to force ammunition makers to put unique identifiers or serial numbers on each and every bullet sold in the state of California. Let me just bullet point (hem) the problems:

• He likens it to bills that established DNA laboratories:
  

  Lockyer likened the proposal to previous legislation that advanced law enforcement investigation efforts, such as funding for DNA labs.

  Except that funding DNA laboratories probably didn’t issue unfunded mandates to private companies and, ultimately, consumers. But don’t worry, there’s government pork, too, since the state would need a new technological money pit into which it can throw good money after bad.

• The bill will help solve crimes, but will not prevent crimes:
  

  “We’re going to solve (more) crimes if this bill becomes law,” Attorney General Bill Lockyer testified.

  You see, citizen, this will not prevent crime, but it will increase the case clearance rate after crimes are committed. If someone wants to shoot you dead and doesn’t care or doesn’t reason it out, those bullets with little numbers on them will kill you just as dead.

• Limited practical benefit:
  

  The proposal would provide investigators with a huge leap forward in their efforts to trace ammunition at a crime scene to the person who fired it. Though ballistics testing enables police to connect a bullet to the gun that fired it, its use in investigations is limited because investigators need to recover both the gun and the bullet to confirm a match.

  While bullets used in a crime may have been lost or stolen from their original purchaser, knowing who that person is will provide a starting point for investigators that they previously have not had, supporters say. Randy Rossi, the director of the firearms division at the state Department of Justice, likened it to “a license plate falling off a car when driven from a crime scene.”

  So it’s a starting off point for homicide investigations and nothing more, since the bullets might have been lost, stolen, or altered to remove identifiers. How many investigations are we talking about?

  Noting that California homicides increased to 2,400 last year from 2,000 the year before — with 45 percent unsolved — law enforcement officials urged senators on the committee to vote for the bill. Nearly three-quarters of the state’s homicides in 2003 were committed with a firearm.

  In 2003, Californians committed 2000 homicides, of which 1500 were purportedly with firearms, of which 45% are unsolved, which would make one believe that this new imposition might offer leads in 675 cases a year or fewer.

  Once the kinks are worked, at taxpayer’s expense, out of the system.

  I suspect the eventual success would match that of Maryland’s ballistic fingerprinting program.

Never mind, though; ultimately, the goal is to drive all bullets and guns out of the hands of non-professionals and to ensure that those guns in the hands of professional law enforcement are safely in a security camera viewing room while the guns in the hands of the professional lawbreakers are pointed at the law-abiding.

California lawmakers are doing something!!!1!, which should get them in the paper and, occasionally, on the blogs.

Laws of economics are more malleable than those of physics as far as Waukesha County, Wisconsin, are concerned, and municipal government bodies can repeal them at will:

Hoping to control health care costs by slowing industry expansion, the Waukesha County Board today rejected a hard-fought plan for a new hospital in the county’s fast-growing western region.

That’s right; to keep prices down, Waukesha County wants to keep supply down.

Too bad it wasn’t a sports facility of some sort instead of a health care provider, undoubtedly the government of Waukesha County would not only have approved the building, but would have made the citizens pay for it.

Concern over rise of ‘happy slapping’ craze:

In one video clip, labelled Bitch Slap, a youth approaches a woman at a bus stop and punches her in the face. In another, Knockout Punch, a group of boys wearing uniforms are shown leading another boy across an unidentified school playground before flooring him with a single blow to the head.

In a third, Bank Job, a teenager is seen assaulting a hole-in-the-wall customer while another youth grabs the money he has just withdrawn from the cash machine.

Welcome to the disturbing world of the “happy slappers” – a youth craze in which groups of teenagers armed with camera phones slap or mug unsuspecting children or passersby while capturing the attacks on 3g technology.

According to police and anti-bullying organisations, the fad, which began as a craze on the UK garage music scene before catching on in school playgrounds across the capital last autumn, is now a nationwide phenomenon.

Oddly enough, this fad probably won’t catch on here in America. Particularly the right to carry states.

Roeper on tattoos:

You can’t call the tattoo craze a craze anymore, as it’s been going on for more than a decade and it crosses all demographics.

Still, one day it will ebb. Today’s 10-year-old will become tomorrow’s 20-year-old, who doesn’t want to have anything to do with what mom and dad think is cool. I can see a college kid in 2015 saying, “My mother has my name tattooed on her neck. I mean, is she old-fashioned or what?”

I have no tattoos and never got a piercing. I saw Larger than Life which features a retired circus painted lady. Elderly, and covered with tattoos. That was the future tattooed people have embraced, and they don’t know it.

Sink or swim: Neighborhood pools struggle to compete with public facilities:

Chesterfield, Manchester, Ballwin, Des Peres and other West County communities have built elaborate aquatic centers in recent years.

Those facilities are among the factors swamping some neighborhood and subdivision swimming pools, once the staple of the suburbs but now finding it tough to compete with the publicly funded pools.

You know, certain people condemn Wal-Mart for this sort of behavior. Local governments want to prove that their micromunicipality is as good as the next, so they waste tax money on these wet amusement parks and “invest” in a future of rising costs of maintenance for these facilities. Meanwhile, they raise our taxes to fund pension plans for police and government employees and to take care of other ongoing expenses for which the local government is short of funds.

All this to duplicate services offered by these private groups, local gyms, and the YMCAs.

When did the equation building waterparks = governance enter our civics textbooks? Probably when the governments found that they could just write it in.