Kim du Toit Fails Test to Ascend to 9th Dan

In a post, we see how Kim du Toit fails his test to attain the 9th Dan of Paranoia:

…we Baby Boomers know all the tricks, and I am even more paranoid than Blackfive.

Listen, students, when your shidoshi of paranoia speaks: You never know all the tricks. You are ready ascend when you realize you must know most of the tricks, and you know that anything you do not recognize as a known trick might, in fact, be a trick.

Doubt even this post, my students.

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So-Called Watch

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in a story entitled Slay, Blunt butt heads over early voting plan:

However, Blunt, the favored Republican candidate for governor, said the law merely set the framework for early voting but did not give statutory authority for it. It also did not provide funding for early balloting, a possible violation of the so-called Hancock Amendment, which requires the state to pay for anything that it is requiring local jurisdictions to do. Early voting would cost about $2.4 million, according to estimates from local officials that Blunt compiled in 2002.

I think this writer is trying to use so-called as a synonym for “law commonly known as”, which is rather funny, since the writer probably doesn’t know it by any other name.

This link was sent to me by reader John F. Donigan, who seems to lament the fact that officials from the city of St. Louis want election day to last two weeks, and might have a law to stand on. Donigan writes:

KMOX ran a story in which the picketers stated that Blunt wasn’t allowing early voting because he was a Republican. Blunt answered with something on the order of “You could come to me as the most Republican-voting city in the state, (not that I can think of one at the moment) and I’d still have to say you can’t do it.” The picketers responded with It’s our right ’cause we want it!

*sigh*

I cannot take an experiential historical perspective to know if these sorts of shenanigans have always been a part of the electoral process; I suspect though that politics now trumps government in ways that it has not before, and in ways that will ultimately lead to the implosion of the Great Experiment.

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One of These Does Not Belong With the Other

A story I saw on Drudge: Researchers Exposed to Anthrax:

At least five workers developing an anthrax vaccine at a children’s hospital research lab in Oakland were accidentally exposed to the deadly bacterium because of a shipping mistake, officials reported Thursday.

Officials with the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute said none of the researchers has shown symptoms of infection since the first exposure about two weeks ago, but each is being treated with precautionary antibiotics.

The researchers believed they were working with syringes full of a dead version of anthrax, hospital spokeswoman Bev Mikalonis said. Instead, they were shipped live anthrax by a lab of the Southern Research Institute in the Frederick, Md., Mikalonis said.

Parents, does the children’s hospital where you take your children have a research lab where researchers work with deadly toxins better known as weapons of mass destruction? You would assume not, but I guess you can’t be sure unless you ask.

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Sounds Like An Old Joke

So an old joke tells us about the child who kills his parents and begs the court for mercy because he’s an orphan, but one woman in Virginia is apparently using it as a defense strategy:

The only woman on Virginia’s death row doesn’t deny that she deserves punishment for having her husband and stepson killed so she could collect insurance money.

But paying the ultimate penalty, says Teresa Lewis, is too much — especially considering the men who actually did the deed will live out their lives behind bars.

“I don’t think it’s fair for the triggermen to get life, and I got the death penalty,” she said, speaking by phone through a glass partition at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women.

Lewis pleaded guilty last year to arranging the slayings of her husband and stepson to collect a $250,000 insurance policy.

The punchline: the caption beneath her photo:

Lewis: “I just feel like I have something to live for. I’ve got a daughter here.”

Apparently, she’s not finished.

No laughs, of course, for the absolute pathology involved in saying she shouldn’t die because she has something to live for, apparently unlike her husband and stepson.

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If the Shoe Is on the Other Foot, Wear It

Zudos to Joe Williams of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who demonstrates through his review of The Chronicles of Riddick that he truly has dizzying intellect:

In the grand hall of a mothership that resembles a mid-century Chrysler on steroids, the Lord Marshal mentions that the Necromonger army is composed of forced converts from other religions. So maybe “The Chronicles of Riddick” is supposed to be a parable about American imperialism, sweeping other cultures into its maw.

Let’s see, we have a culture that either converts, enslaves, or kills other cultures that do not adhere to its tenets, and that culture represents American imperialism? One man stands against them, but Williams doesn’t enlighten us to whether that one man who fights reluctantly against the hordes illustrates the struggle of stringy-haired Berkleyans, French diplomat sophisticates, or the Arab street. Wholly schnucking deconstructionism, fatman!

His college professors must be awfully damn proud of him.

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It’s Already Too Late

Belatedly, Michael Williams learns a devastating drawback to blogging:

One of the difficult things about hanging out with people who (occasionally) read your blog is that they’re already familiar with all of your A-list material (and, let’s face it, I use most of my B- through M-list material here, too).

Reminds me of this one time I stood beside a former rugger who was busy popping the heads off of crawdads….

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Shotgun!

I’m calling it officially! In November, my vote will cancel out Bruce Springsteen’s in the presidential election! I called it! You’ll have to find your own celebrity to thwart.

Oh, I know how it works. I can’t cancel it out because he’ll vote in New Jersey and I’ll vote in Missouri, and we’ll vote for different electoral college members. But still, symbolically, he’s all mine.

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Youthful Ingenuity

Suicidal Youths Turn to Hanging Instead of Guns!

A new report finds that suicidal young people are less likely to use firearms to take their own lives, but the survey finds little comfort in the trend because they are turning to more readily available methods.

In the last decade, suffocation — notably hanging — has overtaken firearms as the most common way for adolescents to kill themselves, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

Time to start banning the clothesline for the Children!

(Link seen on Drudge.)

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Warm Spittle for the Freshly-Turned Earth

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Sylvester Brown, Jr., says:

It’s wrong to speak ill of the dead.

He then goes on to bury Reagan, not to praise him, and speaks ill of his policies and contributions to the world and the United States. Somehow, he villifies McDonalds inappropriately and I guess blames Reagan for modern America’s victim culture, well, no, he blames Reagan for leaving sharp objects and soft, tasty Big Macs lying around for sheepish citizens to consume in bulk. Or something.

This guy has a full time position as a newspaper columnist.

I’d blame Reagan for that, but unlike Sylvester Brown, Jr., I listen to my elders (excepting newspaper columnists) , and I wouldn’t mean it.

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Intel CEO Cries, “More Socialism, Please!”

At least, that’s what I hear when a CEO of a profitable company wants the Federal Government to fund his R & D.

So let me get this straight….space travel, which only will be profitable in the long term, should be open to private capital and research, but chip and computer design, which yield profits now, should be funded by Mississippi citizens who live in tar papered hovels, or Montana citizens in kerosene-heated mobile homes?

Suck it up, pinko. Your duty to increase your shareholders’ wealth and your own bonuses does not come at the expense of the U.S. Taxpayer.

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Instapundit Favors Increasing Social Security Benefits!

He’s written a column for Tech Central Station about why governments don’t fund research dedicated to increasing longevity. You have to read between the lines, but Professor Reynolds is actually advocating an increase in Social Security benefits! Because heaven knows that the age of funding has not kept moving upward at the same pace as longevity, even the natural way. So if you add two or three decades (or centuries) at the end of life, Social Security will be dished out at a maximum of something like seventy-five, meaning the codgers willdraw it for half a millenia. Is that what he really wants?

On a serious side, though, if the government funds the research, it will have to provide the resulting cure to everyone in the population. Our electorate would, unfortunately, expect nothing less than immortality funded by tax money.

Couple that with disparate availability of the drug (and I do assume it will be a drug) between developed nations and underdeveloped nations with a large birthrate and less love of life than we have, and suddenly you have the makings of World War V or World War VI or World Wars V-IX. Werd.

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