Month: March 2006

Get in on the ground floor with your very own non-profit idea in a new agitation industry! You, too, can have jets, spacious hotel accommodations, audiences with kings, reporters, and senators, as well as a good salary paid by your donors while you can simply “educate,” raise funds, and not produce anything but enough money to cover your expenses and fundraising efforts.

To get into this lucrative industry, be the first on your block to be a:

I got the idea from this post wherein Michael Williams talks about mining asteroids in space for big dollars. I mean, let’s face it, the idea has dangerous sides that can really make excellent bullet points in fundraising letters, such as:

• Could destroy the cobalt industry in Zambia, driving that country into poverty.
• Profit-oriented corporations will use asteroids as weapons to pulverize the competition (Did you notice that the bad guys in Niven and Pournelle’s Footfall were elephants? Do the math!)
• Disruption of celestial bodies will ruin star charts and astrologies for everyone!

Hurry and establish your charity now while there’s no glut in the market! You’ll be able to use Since 2006 in your promotional material henceforth. And by the time the other usual suspects arise to protest, you’ll have the cachet–and the wealthy database of previous contributors!

It would be much funnier if I didn’t fear it’s satire today, semipowerful actual lobbying group tomorrow, and taking credit for the UN ban on space commerce two weeks from now.

Overland Students Walk Out In Support Of Teacher.

You know it’s about that geography teacher who helped his students find Germany or the United States on a world map by comparing Bush to Hitler (both liked dogs! They are just the same!).

I don’t care about the story about its grassrootsification of students walking out of class–hell’s belles, today’s students know they won’t get punished for “political expression,” so they go on these little short-term field trips when the cafeteria is out of chocolate milk. No, I like a story that includes multiple implications for what’s wrong with our public education system (the teachers, the students, the administration, to name a few) that offers insight like this:

“I think he inspires so many students and he’s a great teacher,” one student said during the rally. “I mean he makes people do there work and he makes people care about things.”

If you don’t know what’s so pleasantly wrong with that, I’m not going to explain it to you. Ask your fellow alumni from Overland High School.

Sort of. I mean, action:

The Senate gave final approval Thursday to broad anti-methamphetamine provisions that will impose tight curbs on the sale of popular cold remedies used to make the highly addictive drug.

The long-stalled crackdown on cold medicine sales – initially opposed by retail and drug lobbyists – passed after months of intense negotiations with those industries over the scope of the new restrictions.

The measure, part of legislation reauthorizing the Patriot Act, has already passed in the House. The president is expected to sign it.

Reaction:

Missouri drug investigators say there are fewer makeshift labs churning out methamphetamine, but they also warn the state’s menacing meth problem might be taking a new direction – changing from small-time illegal operations to a fertile market for imported drugs.

Police say imported meth is starting to sneak into Missouri as area drug labs shut down. Just last month, seven Mexican citizens pleaded guilty in federal court to charges of conspiring to distributes large quantities of meth in southwestern Missouri. Police in the St. Louis area say they expect to see similar cases in the area as organized crime, particularly Mexican drug-trafficking groups, take over the local meth trade.

As a result of the Talent-Feinstein meddlings and the happy Federal determination that some states could not use common sense in their retailing of certain cold remedies and that all must abide by an asinine standard since Talent and Feinstein know better than individual legislatures, crank heads will still get their meth, but my wife will not be able to stock up on Claritin when it’s on sale.

Thank you, Senator Talent. Hopefully, this year we can send you on the next step of your career: lobbyist.

Telescopes ‘worthless’ by 2050:

Ground-based astronomy could be impossible in 40 years because of pollution from aircraft exhaust trails and climate change, an expert says.

Hurricane season could match ’05: UN:

All blowed up:

Some women have their book clubs, and others belong to professional groups. Some connect in therapy and others through sororities. But here is a relatively new connection: a group of 11 sharp, educated and independent women brought together on the Internet by one man’s sperm.

Not one of them has met the donor — his identity is kept secret by Fairfax Cryobank in Virginia. Known only as donor 401, he has fathered all of their children — 11 so far, and Leann Mischel, 41, a Pennsylvania college professor, has a second child by way of his sperm on the way.

“It’s an emotional connection. We have a common base,” explained Carla Schouten of San Jose, who adds that the women have less interest in knowing the donor than they do one another. “Most of us are single. We all desired children, and we were all attracted to the same donor.”

Perhaps these women hope for a future that looks a lot like Utah, but where men are only kept in barns to be milked when needed. However, more traditional people will outbreed these cretins and hopefully their fatherless children will grow up well-adjusted enough to be Republicans or Libertarians.

Were I this 401 guy, though, the thing I’d dread most is the possibility of getting on the hook for child support. It hasn’t happened, gentle reader, but that just means it hasn’t happened yet. One creatively-reasoned (i.e., made up) legal argument and one progressive judge is the narrow distance between the increasingly tenuous reality and settled law.