Author: Brian J. Noggle

AP illustrates the fun one can have with juxtaposition, especially when it’s a non sequitur:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a surprise visit to volatile Lebanon on Friday to encourage a new democratic government outside Syrian control and better relations between the two Mideast countries.

Hours after Rice left the city, witnesses said an explosion rocked a busy street of restaurants and bars in a Christian neighborhood of Beirut.

“We would like to see the day when there are good neighborly relations between Syria and Lebanon based on mutual respect and equality,” Rice said at a joint news conference with Lebanese Prime Minister-designate Foud Saniora earlier in the day.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the city where this asinine story was written, someone was undoubtedly murdered. Please, gentle reader, infer what you will that I included the two things in the same sentence.

Here’s an AP account of this morning’s shooting in the London underground:

Plainclothes police chased a man in a thick coat through a subway station, wrestled him to the floor of a train car and shot him to death in front of stunned commuters Friday, witnesses said. Police said the shooting was “directly linked” to the investigations of the bomb attacks on London’s transit system.

Execution style. That differs from other accounts, such as this one:

At Stockwell Station, armed officers opened fire on the suspect after he hurdled a ticket barrier and raced along a platform.

Police screamed at passengers to evacuate and are thought to have shot the suspect as he stumbled on to a train.

Alarmed onlookers said they saw up to 10 plain-clothed officers chasing an Asian-looking man before opening fire.

Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair said the shooting was “directly linked” to ongoing anti-terrorist invetigations in the capital.

He said the man had failed to comply with instructions from police before he was shot dead.

That sounds a little less Western police are gangstas shooting Muslims for sport, doesn’t it?

Pluck Big Bird from chimney, Greendale orders:

The Village Board has ordered a blue Big Bird sculpture down from its nest atop a chimney of a historical home, where neighbors want it removed.

Trustees voted unanimously this week to deny the special use permit application of artist Al Emmons, who with his family created the chimney ornamentation through their company, Creative Construction of Wisconsin Inc., for the home at 5595-97 Bluebird Court.

The opponents have interesting ideas of their rights:

“It’s changed our way of life. It has infringed on our privacy. It has caused a lot of heartache on the street,” said Ardith Weitkunat, a Bluebird Court resident. “This is totally inappropriate for the top of a house.”

Legislation of taste and the right to not see things one wants to otherwise it infringes on privacy. It’s right in the Constitution, somewhere; if we bothered to read it, we could tell you where.

Situations like this underline how few rights you have ceded as a property owner, citizen. If the neighbors don’t like what you want to do with your property, you cannot do it:

“That’s what upset me the most. He wasn’t given permission to do this,” he [another neighbor] said.

Of course, municipalities want to preserve property values or preserve heritage. You don’t want to have a junk yard next to your house!!! Well, most residential property, especially in municipalities that are zoning-happy, rapidly price themselves out of the junk yard market. Businesses in residential areas will serve residents. You’re not going to tear down a subdivision of $40,000 homes to put in an animal rendering plant.

But once again, when you begin ceding your rights about what you can and can’t do with your property, you won’t stop. You cannot decorate as you want, then you cannot smoke in your home or shop, and then you won’t be allowed to drink soda or eat fast food there (in case The Children would get fat because you do).

There’s no line that divides one prohibition from the next, no principle which would preclude the other, regardless of how one rationalizes.

Hence, we should Save Blue Bird!

(Submitted to Outside the Beltway’s Traffic Jam.)

Michelle Malkin claims some exclusive insight, exclusively for the registration-only New York Post about New York’s random backpack searches in the subway system.

I squawk here about my concerns, gentle reader, because the searches will become ineffective as suicide bombers subject to search blow themselves up at the turnstiles instead of on trains.

Nah, the chicken little hawks (“I’m a chicken little hawk. Are you a chicken little?”) think, that won’t happen. Checkpoints are never targets in the Middle East, ainna?

Over at Draft Matt Blunt 2008, I take to task a Columbia Tribune columnist who defends state employees–in this case, Medicaid caseworkers–who tell recipients of state aid to call their legislators to demand more aid.

This is the face of the future with strict finance reform. “Merit”-based state employees with vested interest in expanding their budgets and power can speak to potential voters who have a specific interest in one set of public policies. And you, citizen, cannot.

DC officials have a rather silly idea about how to deal with potential suicide bombers in the Metro stations: random backpack searches:

Subway riders may face random police checks of their bags under a security measure being considered in the nation’s capital, the latest city to look for ways to deter terrorism on rail systems.

No decision has been made on the idea for the city’s 106-mile Metrorail system, and the logistics would be difficult. But “it would be another tool in our security toolbox,” says Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein.

All right, class, let’s hit the highlights of how this would not work:

• If the random searches occur in crowded stations or, heaven forfend, crowded trains, what’s the difference of detonating the backpack on schedule or when the Metro cop says, “Hey, you!”? Not much to a suicide bomber.
• Fine, you say, search all backpacks before people get into the system. Capital idea! As in waste of capital except for the new TSA hires for screening backpacks who will draw new salaries and government benefits.

  But when you look at an airport, a subway, or other mass transit system, you have two locations where passengers are grouped and vulnerable: In the little metal tubes, and in the queues. Adding a new queue checkpoint where everyone regardless of train, plane, or bus has to crowd together will give terrorists and malcontents a fatter opportunity to wreak their havoc and up their body counts with a bomb.

• Searching backpacks won’t stop bombers wearing bomb belts. Or bomb shoes. Or whatever other nefarious creativities will arise to subvert the check and balance mechanisms put in place to deal with a very specific threat.

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is on the cusp of creating yet another perpetual inconvenience for temporary appearance of security.

At worst, these measures will be ineffective or even more dangerous than the current situation, and at best will only send the bad guys to blow something else up.

But at least the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority will have done something!!!

UPDATE: As a story seen on Outside the Beltway indicates, New York will begin random searches. I hate to be the first cop to try to search a suicide bomber.

Cinnamon Stillwell takes a look at the “protest” environment in San Francisco, where criminal miscreants have the right to vandalize and commit mayhem and police are sued for everything but getting their skulls fractured by rioters (but attorneys are still looking into that).

St. Louis Post-Dispatch insightful report: Low-pay jobs outgrow high-pay positions!

The St. Louis area added thousands more “bad” jobs than it did higher-paying “good” ones from 1980 to 2000, according to a report released by the Federal Reserve this week.

Unfortunately, “leaders” will use this as an excuse to funnel taxpayer money to their friends who own businesses.

eBay tightens rules for sellers:

eBay said Monday that sellers could no longer accept PayPal payments from buyers without accepting credit card transactions, thereby avoiding PayPal fees. eBay acquired PayPal in 2002.

Sellers’ practice of restricting PayPal payment methods “was creating a bad buyer experience,” said PayPal spokeswoman Amanda Pires. “It would be like walking into the grocery store and filling up your cart, getting to the check stand with your credit card and being told sorry, even after you saw the credit card logo outside the store.”

Under PayPal rules, sellers can accept payment through bank transfers or PayPal balances for free. But sellers in the United States who accept credit card payments are charged between 1.9 percent and 2.9 percent of the value of the transaction, based on volume.

Pires sought to quell concerns that eBay was tightening the restrictions merely to boost PayPal’s fee collections.

“We got a lot of community feedback, which is why we’re changing this,” Pires said. “And it was a very small percentage of sellers who were doing this.”

Sure. Like they’re responding to community feedback to lower seller’s fees. I used to spend a lot of time selling inexpensive books on eBay, mostly books I picked up for a buck or so at garage sales and sold for five to ten dollars. Eventually, I calculated that eBay was making more money from my effort than I was.

Community that, eBay.

In perhaps a great case of Laphamization, the New York Times is lamenting judicial activism before the judge is even confirmed:

One of the most important areas for the Senate to explore is Judge Roberts’s views on federalism – the issue of how much power the federal government should have. The far right is on a drive to resurrect ancient, and discredited, states’ rights theories. If extremists take control of the Supreme Court, we will end up with an America in which the federal government is powerless to protect against air pollution, unsafe working conditions and child labor. There are reasons to be concerned about Judge Roberts on this score. He dissented in an Endangered Species Act case in a way that suggested he might hold an array of environmental laws, and other important federal protections, to be unconstitutional.

Isn’t it a shame how much power the judiciary has?

Only when it’s wielded by judges of whom the New York Tomes disapproves, apparently.

(Link seen on Michelle Malkin.)

Survey: 25,000 civilians killed in Iraq war:

Nearly 25,000 civilians have been killed since the start of the Iraq war, according to a group that tracks the civilian death toll from the conflict.

The Iraq Body Count — a London-based group comprising academics and human rights and anti-war activists — said on Tuesday that 24,865 civilians had died between March 20, 2003 and March 19, 2005. [Emphasis mine]

Swell. How did this survey come about? Did the anti-war activists ask people if they had been killed in the Iraq war? Close.

“Our data has been extracted from a comprehensive analysis of over 10,000 press and media reports published since March 2003. Our accounting is not complete: only an in-depth, on-the-ground census could come close to achieving that,” the group said.

“But if journalism is the first draft of history, then this dossier may claim to be an early historical analysis of the military intervention’s known human costs.”

At least CNN did add a bit of a rejoinder, some paragraphs down, from people closer to the conflict than press and media reports:

The Iraqi government disputed some of the finding of the report.

“We welcome the attention given by this report to Iraqi victims of violence but we consider that it is mistaken in claiming that the plague of terrorism has killed fewer Iraqis than the multinational forces,” said the prime minister’s office, citing recent terror strikes, including the Musayyib bombing that killed nearly 100 people on Saturday.

“The international forces try to avoid civilian casualties, whereas the terrorists target civilians and try to kill as many of them as they can.”

So it’s really unclear to me why this piece puts the claims of academics activists above Iraqi government officials and U.S. government officials. No, wait, come to think of it, it’s clear.…

A new study questions whether conversion of corn into ethanol actually expends more energy than it stores. When confronted with contrary data, modern scienceocrats do the obvious: they attack the study on merits other than scientific:

Researchers at the National Corn-To-Ethanol Research Center at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville said there are several federal studies that cite the opposite and said the recent study is harming their ability to reduce the United States’ dependence on foreign oil.

“It discourages me,” said Martha Schlicher, director of the research center. “People tend to remember negative news instead of becoming educated in what may not be as interesting. I worry that in a time so critical for energy security and the environment that this detracts from getting accurate information to consumers.”

Forget about the data. How do you feel? The director of the research center nust feel discouraged, because if scientists cannot disprove this data, then something more important than truth lies at stake:

At a time when businesses, state officials and farmers are investing millions of dollars in ethanol research, researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and the University of California at Berkeley found it takes 29 percent more energy to turn corn into ethanol than the amount stored in the resulting fuel. [Emphasis mine]

If ethanol proves to as effective as mixing snake oil with banana oil, who’s going to want to pay to maintain research facilities to studying the proper ratios, and more importantly, to keep directors salaried?

Allow me to quickly consolidate the new, revised, and more better

Twenty-First Century Scientific Method

1. Observe some aspect of the universe.
2. Determine that the aspect of the universe impacts some large corporation, public policy initiative, or both.
3. Write grant proposals and get funding for research into the aspect of the universe.
4. Organize and attend conferences to confabulate with others who are thinking about the aspect of the universe, or perhaps just related fields, or perhaps unrelated fields–after all, the universe is holistically interrelated.
5. When funding is about to run out, invent a tentative description, called a hypothesis. You can make it all up if you want; it only needs to be believeable enough to warrant more funding.
6. Use the hypothesis to make predictions and as progress report or new grant proposal fodder.
7. Receive more funding.
8. Test those predictions by experiments or further observations and conclude you need more funding to conduct further research.
9. Repeat steps 6 through 8 until retirement age.