Author: Brian J. Noggle

Here are some things to which I have meant to bring to your attention, but haven’t:

• Man tries to buy $7,000,000 in lottery tickets.
  This guy tries to buy seven million lottery tickets, which would give him a one in two chance of winning the $38,000,000 jackpot. Lottery officials decline. Not because it’s against the rules, but because it’s against the “spirit” of the lottery. That’s right, they arbitrarily change the rules on the fly to suit their own agenda. Keep that in mind if you ever win; take the cash. Just because the lottery promises to pay out that money over twenty or thirty years, does not mean they will. The minute the state legislature needs it to give poor children LeBron sneakers, your winnings are seized. (Link seen on Fark.)

• There’s too much extraneous crap overlaid on television.
  Gail Pennington of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch agrees. Hey, Fox Sports Net, covering a quarter of the screen with an advertisement for Master and Commander while the Blues are breaking up ice does not endear me to you. I am not going to watch your “extreme” sports show or your fantasy football program. I want to watch the damn hockey game.

• Regulation by punchline.
  Radley Balko joins the party late in recognizing that reductio ad absurdum helps those who sue or legistlate brainstorm for fresh outrages. Recognizing a slippery slope doesn’t mean you’re not sliding down it.

• FBI can’t use your OnStar against you….yet.
  A court has ruled that the FBI cannot just take your vehicular remote assistance product off the hook and listen to what you’re saying in your car. Yet.

  Of course, you all know I would never buy a product where a radio signal can open your car doors or that the FBI could track your stolen vehicle. I don’t even have a cell phone where a signal could take it off hook, either. You think I am mad? Listen to how carefully I planned it out! (Link seen on Tech Dirt.)

• Rigorous debate in comments is good.
  I don’t have comments because I don’t like trolls. So check this link out. It’s a story about how Australian Prime Minister shared an elevator with some footy fans. But the trolls are all on John Howard for his politics, and the owner of the blog responds appropriately.

There, now the bloggable notes are out of my inbox. I can now start answering some six month old e-mail.

There it is.

Hey, Salam? Fuck you. I know you’re the famous giggly blogger who gave us all a riveting view of the inner circle before the war, and thus know more about the situation than I do. Granted. But there’s a picture on the front page of my local paper today: third Minnesotan killed in Iraq. He died doing what you never had the stones to do: pick up a rifle and face the Ba’athists. You owe him.

Man, do I understand the urge. Sometimes there’s nothing more you can say to some of the incoherence than to answer in strict terms that you assume your opponents can understand, and to let them know that there words are not only wrong, but also risable and subject to consequences.

Perhaps I am being too harsh, but I get a little riled when a Hollywooder loves the Midwest, like when director of The Day After Nicholas Meyer says:

“I have an enormous soft spot for the Midwest and the hospitality, the generosity and the openness of a lot of the people who live there,” says Meyer, a graduate of the University of Iowa.

Smeg off. There, you feel more at home, pinhead?

Maybe I am just a tad sensitive whenever a coastal type talks about Midwesterners. Typically, though, they like to ruffle their fingers through our hair and tell us we’re good kids.

I am surprised that that one Bears fan hasn’t written about this Fox news story:

The U.S. Army declared medic Spec. Simone Holcomb AWOL for refusing to return to her duties in Iraq because of a family emergency, threatening her with a dishonorable discharge or even a court martial.

Holcomb, whose husband is also in the military as a tank commander, had to rush home to care for their seven children. Her mother-in-law had been taking care of the family, but had to leave Colorado suddenly when her father-in-law fell ill with cancer.

But the Army wasn’t too sympathetic, slapping Holcomb with the AWOL label and later deactivating her and reassigning her to the Colorado National Guard (search). She is considering taking legal action to be reinstated as a full-time soldier.

Let’s see, she went absent without leave, and she’s upset for being disciplined for going AWOL? And now she’s going to sue to get back into the army? Goodness gracious, that’s improper.

I understand she had extenuating circumstances, but she broke the rules.

And if she does try some nutbar legal maneuver, heaven forfend if some civilian court gets its dominion over the military. Forget liquor and guns. I will have to change my investment strategy to burkas and guns to prepare for the eventual destruction of our way of life.

John Kass of the Chicago Tribune reminds us that regular zoos are not petting zoos (registration required).

When the man wants to charge you with something! Yes, it’s more money laundering madness, this time with Rush Limbaugh in the sights of prosecutors.

You see, financial institutions have to report if you make transactions of $10,000 or more because you’re automatically suspected of dealing drugs if you have that kind of money. So Rush took out money in $9,900 amounts–and now he might be on the hook for money laundering.

Avoiding the law is breaking the law! You only oppose the inconsistency if you have something to hide, Citizen. Your papers, please?

Poor form, Richard Roeper. Rush Limbaugh makes the most personal broadcast of his life, and you feel the need to belittle it.

So Suffolk County, New York, finally got their woman. According to this New York Post story, the alleged madam ran a chain of massage parlors, and now they’re throwing the encyclepedias at her. In addition to two counts of promoting prostitution, she got:

Clifford said Kim, who had herself been busted twice for prostitution, was charged with money laundering because she would invest her ill-gotten gains back into her massage parlors.

What, nothing else? Didn’t she stub out a cigarette on the sidewalk and get some hazardous waste or attempted arson charge?

Quick, someone call a legislator who needs to get tough on crime! We need someone brave enough to realize that if spending illicit proceeds on illegal activity is good to tack onto other charges, our prosecutors need more pancakes to stack on top, such as the following”

• Getting money through illegal activity.
• Spending money made through illegal activity.
• Laying waste your powers with illegal activity.
• Having stuff bought with money made illegally.
• Using stuff bought with money made illegally.
• Eating food bought with money made illegally.
• Having money that was once earned illegally.

Because remember, the prosecution engineers DAs will only use these creative railroading charging techniques to hound the bad people.

If this story was true about the United States putting its troops under international command in Iraq (which I really want to doubt entirely), I hope it became untrue when the EU apparatchiks started flapping their gums:

The United States accepts that to avoid humiliating failure in Iraq it needs to bring its forces quickly under international control and speed the handover of power, Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, has said.

Class, compare and contrast the following essays/columns:

• Kim du Toit’s The Pussification Of The Western Male, which details how the modern American male is shackled and coddled by the State and society into a “civilized” passive consumer.
• Val MacQueen’s Tech Central Station column A New Stockholm Syndrome, which explores how Swedish society has become so passive that citizens stand idly by while a leading political figure is stabbed to death in a mall.

As long as the number of points of contrast outnumber the comparisons, we’re okay. But I suspect the gap is shrinking.

Andrew Sullivan links to a gushing review of a John Kerry ad that attempts to turn George W. Bush’s carrier landing into a slam against the president. Here’s how the blank Slaters describe the ad and infer its meaning:

The second shot is Bush, in the infamous shot after he landed on the deck of the carrier, dressed in an olive-drab flight suit (military garb and straps were in last season) with a helmet tucked under his arm. The ad suggests that this was a phony costume to go with the false label on the big ship. Bush had no right to wear military garb, because he never served in the real military, only in the Texas Air National Guard, which kept him far from Vietnam. This juxtaposition is a page out of the Bush family’s own political playbook: It’s Michael Dukakis playing soldier in a tank.

The National Guard is not the real military?

A damn fine sentiment to express when National Guardsmen are dying the same as “real” military men in Iraq.

I blame the yahoos at Slate (Jacob Weisberg wrote the particular assertion) first, but damn Senator Kerry, too, and anyone, active military or not, for casting aspertions on anyone who served.