Category: News

From an AP article entitled “WWF Warns on Man-Made Arctic Toxins” that apparently seeks to outlaw everything Gaia doesn’t like:

Only a tiny fraction of the estimated 30,000 to 70,000 chemicals made worldwide are banned, even though many more may be harmful, the report said.

In related trivia:

• Of the hundreds of thousands of plants grown in American homes, only a tiny fraction is pot, but many more would stink up your house if you dried them and lit them on fire.
• Of the millions of cars on American roads, only a tiny percentage will be in accidents, although any of them can be lethal if accelerated to their top speeds and run into unyielding objects.
• Of the gazillions of gallons of water in the world, only a small amount causes death by inhalation, but all of it is potentially lethal unless you’re Kevin Costner’s character in Waterworld.
• Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

Subtitle this piece Subsets for Effect.

Does Michelle Malkin oppose competition? It’s hard to discern her stance from the sentences in her post entitled The Impact of Immigration of Wages in Arkansas, wherein she frames a link to a Wall Street Journal article. Malkin comments:

The news side of the Wall Street Journal has conceded that immigration depresses wages among blue-collar workers.

That’s not a bug, that’s a feature. Competition among workers drives manufacturing costs down and should inspire the best of those employees to aspire to something better–instead of annual or union-driven raises to do the same thing over and over. The competition keeps costs down and makes for cheaper manufactured goods and for easier expansion for business owners. Regardless of from whence the workers come.

I cannot espouse an argument against immigration based on its economic impact to lowering prices. Sorry.

States Mull Taxing Drivers By Mile:

It’s [a hybrid car] great for Just but bad for the roads he’s driving on, because he also pays a lot less in gasoline taxes which fund highway projects and road repairs. As more and more hybrids hit the road, cash-strapped states are warning of rough roads ahead.

Officials in car-clogged California are so worried they may be considering a replacement for the gas tax altogether, replacing it with something called “tax by the mile.”

Seeing tax dollars dwindling, neighboring Oregon has already started road testing the idea.

Keep that in mind whenever your government wants to tax a behavior, such as using gas, smoking, drinking, or using a telephone. When that behavior changes, the spending remains, so the government will have to finally demonstrate some creativity–not in cutting spending, but in taxing something else for money to waste.

Lasers warn pilots of restricted airspace:

The U.S. military is planning a final demonstration Friday night of a ground-based laser system designed to warn pilots who have flown into restricted airspace over the nation’s capital.

During the demonstration of the Visual Warning System, a test aircraft will be illuminated with alternating red and green laser lights, said Michael Kucharek, spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

“It’s an attention-getter, but it’s not blinding,” Kucharek said. “It’s not a distraction. So pilots can still focus on flying the aircraft without endangering anyone or themselves.”

After warning pilots and law enforcement to watch out for terrorists using lasers to blind pilots and crash jets, the military is going to use lasers to literally light up plane cockpits like a Christmas tree when they enter restricted airspace.

Not a distraction? Whose lives are you betting?

Suggested motto for public schooling, 2005:

Bag ’em and tag ’em.

(First link seen on Cold Fury; second seen directly on KdT’s site because I read it every day to make sure his library remains smaller than mine.)

The cover story from the latest issue of Integrated Solutions frightened me, since it told me about how the state of Washington was earning money: Imaging Success Is No Accident: The Washington State Department of Transportation improves access to collision reports and earns $4 million in additional revenue with a document capture solution.

However, I skimmed to the end of the article and discovered how the state of Washington is "earning" that money:

Due to the increased efficiency of this document management system, WSDOT is no longer in danger of losing federal funding. The system also is helping the agency raise extra revenue. WSDOT estimates it is now collecting between $3 and $4 million annually for damage to state-owned property that it was previously unable to obtain. “It used to take a long time to get the paper reports for a specific accident,” says Stanley. “By the time we tracked down who was responsible, the insurance case was closed.”

They’re recovering damages from insurance companies for state property, probably non-vehicular, damaged in auto accidents. So losing less money is really earning money.

Unfortunately, although I don’t think whomever came up with that turn of phrase–whether a puffing state employee or the writer who was looking for a marketable spin for his piece–meant to engage in Newspeak, but when it’s inadvertent, it’s much more disheartening.

Bush threatens to veto Medicare changes:

President Bush on Friday threatened to veto any changes Congress tries to make to Medicare’s new prescription drug benefit, which takes effect in January 2006.

“I signed Medicare reform proudly and any attempt to limit the choices of our seniors and to take away their prescription drug coverage under Medicare will meet my veto,” Bush said at a swearing-in ceremony for Mike O. Leavitt, the new secretary of Health and Human Services.

Yeah, I voted for him. So now he threatens to veto any attempt to rein in the profligate spending-to-buy-votes. As his first veto in five years in office.

With great power comes great irresponsibility, perhaps, but at least he’s not as bad as the other guy would have been, and his foreign policy will allow us to live in a world safer than the alternatives so we can enjoy a future of financial collapse. But man, sometimes I have to work at convincing myself.

Eleven arrested after police find keg party in moving truck:

Police officers broke up a 21st birthday party and charged 11 people with underage drinking after pulling over a U-Haul moving truck with the revelers inside, officers said.

The most encouraging fact:

Officers allowed the partygoers to call for rides and no one was arrested.

But those who weren’t yet 21 were charged with underage drinking. If found guilty, each person could face a $255 fine or 30 days in jail.

Fortunately, though, none of the underage drinkers were elementary school kids with butter knives, because that would have been a different story.

Unfortunately, as I make juxtapose the behavior to prove the outrageousness of the zero-tolerance policy in schools yielding felony arrests, some might think the proper way to put balance into law enforcement would be to riding in the back of a rental truck a felony.

Missing Halliburton shipment of radioactive material found in Boston:

A Halliburton Co. shipment of radioactive material that landed in New York in October was lost en route to Texas, and was not found until Wednesday, when it turned up in Boston.

The material two sources of the element americium, used in oil well exploration was found intact at a freight facility after an intense search by federal authorities. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it was not alerted to the missing shipment until Tuesday.

Boston was under a heightened state of alert in January and didn’t uncover this unexplained radioactive shipment with its radioactivity detectors and whatever other means it employed to investigate the dirty bomb threat.

Sleep tight.

End to Amtrak funding unpopular:

Wisconsin’s top transportation official Monday blasted President Bush’s budget proposal to eliminate all federal funding for Amtrak.

“I think it stinks,” state Transportation Secretary Frank Busalacchi said.

Who joins this apparatchik in bemoaning the loss of federal funding for a railway used by a few but employing many?

Similar comments came from Amtrak management, the National Association of Railroad Passengers and the United Transportation Union, which represents Amtrak conductors.

Oh, yeah, the cool kids.

A more accurate headline more likely would have been End to Amtrak funding met with general apathy by majority, but that hardly tells Journal-Sentinel readers what to think, ainna?

Neil Steinberg says today:

I never knew the name of the actor who played Dean Wormer in “Animal House” — John Vernon — until he died this week, at age 72. While the obituaries didn’t mention it, he uttered one of the great lines in movie history — “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” At least to those of us who struggle with all three.

Obviously, he does not read blogs every day; that line was mentioned in almost all of the blog memorials I read last week.

Steinberg, like many of other commentators, does Vernon disservice by not remembering Vernon’s role in Terminal Exposure and Sledge Hammer!.

A good fellow who looked a little too much like John Lithgow for true immortality.

When my beautiful wife and I were in the grocery store, a disparate pair of magazine headlines intruded upon the sane world in which we live:

Click for full size

So Brad Wants Jen Back! and Jen Fights to Get Brad Back!? Yeeks, these are direct opposites by implication. Tabloids should be careful since their regular readers, who seem to care about the state of Bradnifer’s marriage, might suffer from brain implosions when trying to comprehend how Brad is fighting for Jen and Jen is fighting for Brad.

Fighting whom?

Yeah, I know, I bought the magazines and only encouraged them. Shaddup.

Professor Bainbridge muses on Donald Rumsfeld’s reluctance to go to Germany:

So Donald Rumsfeld is afraid to go to Germany because he might get arrested on war crimes charges. So much for the NATO alliance, eh?

Well, that’s only on the good end of the spectrum. There’s always a chance that German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and some of his other leather clad apparatachiks might firebomb his motorcade or beat him to death with a brick.

Because that’s the caliber of leaders to which some would have America aspire, or to whom America should kowtow.

So, gentle reader, what do you think will result from this crime?

As the store’s alarm rang, thieves made off with 32 rifles and handguns from a Fremont gun shop early Wednesday, less than two weeks after police announced they will soon ignore burglar alarms unless there was a confirmed crime.

Irvington Arms owner Martin MacDonald was livid over the break-in at his shop, where burglars used an aluminum baseball bat to break the front door and smashed display cases with a crowbar before making off with $20,000 in weapons.

MacDonald blamed the break-in on the Police Department’s policy — announced last month but not effective until Feb. 18 — that officers won’t respond to burglar alarms unless they are told there is evidence of a break-in or security breach.

“I think they basically invited crime into the neighborhood,” said MacDonald, 35. “It’s on every channel and in the newspaper. They might as well have said, in bold print, ‘Commit robbery in Fremont,’ because the PD won’t respond. This was unacceptable.”

Will the community of Fremont:

• Scale back its police non-intervention program, ensuring that perhaps someone should drive by places with their alarms ringing.
• Ban the sale of guns in Fremont, because if it ain’t in Fremont, it can’t be stolen in Fremont, and when only outlaws can put guns for sale that other outlaws can steal, those other outlaws will have to steal the guns for sale from someone else, preferably in a different jurisdiction.

If you’re here for anything but a weird Google search involving hot pix of one sort or another, you know which one I think Fremont will implement.

Global warming: scientists reveal timetable:

A detailed timetable of the destruction and distress that global warming is likely to cause the world was unveiled yesterday.

Excellent. I ask of you, gentle reader, if you’re brave enough to make it to the bottom of this article, please e-mail me the exact date of the end of the world because of global warming.

Story in the San Francisco Chronicle: Delighting in the dollar’s decline: Foreign visitors find bargains abound in S.F, other tourist areas:

While Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is worried about the weak dollar, it has been a boon for foreign visitors and San Francisco’s tourism industry.

The precipitous drop of the dollar against the euro and other major currencies has increased the buying power of foreign tourists. Hotels are seeing more overseas guests, and business at shops and restaurants has picked up.

I’m no economist, but having people want to buy your goods and services sounds good to me.

Britain: U.S. Must Help Avert Climate Catastrophe:

Britain, arguing that climate change is now unstoppable, urged the United States on Tuesday to sign up to life-saving cuts in greenhouse gas emissions as environmentalists warned of approaching Armageddon.

Well, if it’s unstoppable, what can we do? Hurry up and cut down in the Amazon because I want some fresh rainforest lumber for a new deck.

And please have an SUV tow it straight from the interior of Brazil.

Your land doesn’t belong to you, citizen, except at the government’s leisure. Story:

Every month for 20 years, Gentle “Jim” Day mailed his $1,222.22 mortgage payment on his business, Royal Auto Repair.

He finally paid if off last year. But now Day, the son of Arkansas sharecroppers, faces losing his land and business.

An agency backed by the city is preparing to take Day’s business by eminent domain to make way for something called a “Media Box.”

A development group gets to take a commercial business owned by a private citizen for a mostly TBA addition to the “arts district.”

I don’t know about you, but I always suspect that government officials love these underused and underserving “arts districts” as personal come-ons to easy living and easy loving artists and wealthy, divorced or surviving spouse patrons of those arts. Arts districts don’t tend to serve the entire community, contrary the Utopian wishes of their proponents. Arts districts serve the upper crusts of society who go to the theatre, the symphony, or the opera. Sorry, but save for school field trips, that doesn’t tend to include the majority of Americans.

So now the city of St. Louis will forcibly seize the land of a working man to make something for the benefit of the well-to-do. Typical.

On a final note, I must include that this is a triumph for the Democrats who run St. Louis. I thought the Republicans were supposed to look and act like Mr. Moneybags from Monopoly Chance cards. I guess it’s just whoever’s in power.

From John Cole:

“Vietnam? You mean the Democrat conceived, Democrat initiated, and Democrat run war that is widely regarded as the only war the modern United States has ever lost? That Vietnam?”