Category: News

A BBC piece entitled “Tribe shoots arrows at aid flight” features a number of illustrations about how pronoun abuse hurts everyone:

Officials believe they survived the devastation by using age-old early warning systems.

No, I think that the officials survived the devestation by being elsewhere when the devestation occured.

Scientists are examining the possibility to see whether it can be used to predict earth tremors in future.

The last sentence represents the worst sentence I have seen in a long, long time. “The possibility” doesn’t really have an antecedent in the preceding paragraphs; I think the author meant that scientists were going to examine the actual actions of the tribes to determine if, possibly, they have a line on predicting tsunamis that won’t cost money.

But the idea of using a possibility kinda scrums me. It sounds kinda Star Trek, ainna? But Captain, we can use the Solar Possibility to metaphase the Enterprise back in time four days….

On a side note to the natives who tried to shoot the planes with bows and arrows: although you, too, have watched the computer players’ spearmen hold off your tanks in Civilization III, it’s not that easy in real life.

This certainly didn’t happen in Florida after the hurricanes:

The main airport at Indonesia’s Sumatra island has reopened after an accident that dealt a severe blow to efforts to deliver aid to the region worst affected by the tsunami disaster.

The crucial airstrip in Banda Aceh — the province’s only runway — was closed for much of Tuesday after an aircraft carrying relief supplies hit a water buffalo on the runway.

The Humane Society of the United States called the other day to drum up some extra cash in light of the tsunami in southeast Asia as part of the Relief Efforts for Animals Difficult after Catastrophic Tsunami campaign.

Compounding the human tragedy unfolding in South Asia after a massive tsunami swept across the Indian Ocean, animal victims are now beginning to emerge as well. While the impact of this natural disaster on animal populations is currently very difficult to assess, Humane Society International (HSI) and its partners in the region are working to support disaster relief efforts in the affected countries.

Undoubtedly, countless animals died and were washed out to sea by the initial tidal waves, while the bodies of thousands of others litter the beaches and fields of devastated areas, complicating the disaster relief process. The necessity of disposing of both human and animal remains to contain the spread of diseases like cholera and typhoid is still critical.

And while the relief efforts of animal welfare workers in Asia understandably remain focused on human victims of the disaster, many are preparing to spend the coming days and weeks fighting disease and helping as many victims as possible—both human and animal.

It’s not a joke. To some people whose livelihoods depend upon raising funds for animal welfare, I guess this represents a reasonable opportunity to show animal compassion.

In light of the unimaginable human suffering, though, I find it crass.

94-year-old lottery winner doesn’t want to wait for her cash:

A Massachusetts woman says she wants her lottery winnings now — because she’s 94 and isn’t likely to live another 20 years.

Louise Outing won $5.6 million in September.

But it’s the policy of the Massachusetts lottery to pay out jackpots from its Megabucks game over 20 years. In this case, that would be about $200,000 a year.

Outing’s lawyer is asking a judge to force the lottery to pay her now in a lump sum, minus taxes.

Personal call for attorneys:

Dear sirs, the policy of the Missouri lottery is that it won’t pay out a lottery jackpot until you win it. However, given the astronomical odds, it will take me thousands of years playing the same number every week to win a jackpot. As I shall probably not live to see that day, please litigate on my behalf to force the Missouri lottery to force an immediate payout minus taxes. Thank you.

San Francisco lawyer and trainer of international prosecutors and other internationalist muckety-mucks Robert S. Rivkin asks:

So — where is the imagination in our national leadership?

Unfortunately, Rivkin’s “imagination” only extends to more taxation on Americans for two years (come on, permanently–taxes don’t go away that easily, or we’d be done wiring rural areas for phone by now) to rebuild southeast Asia:

For example, the president could propose a flat $50 surtax applicable to every American tax return with an adjusted gross income of between $25,000 and $40,000; a flat $75 surtax on every tax return with an adjusted gross income between $40,000 and $80,000; $100 for incomes over $80,000, and so on. This small assessment for two years would produce many billions of dollars, which could be placed into a fund which would support infrastructure repair and development over a period of at least 10 years in the stricken countries.

Hey, you want imagination? How about this proposal: Now, some tribes in devestated areas are probably not that far–maybe a generation or two–from head hunting and cannibalism. How about we send a couple of San Fransisco attorneys to tide them over? We’ve got a surplus here in America, and it’s awful stingy of us to let them simply grow old and die when they could sustain a family for a month.

(Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for starting my morning off right–with indignation and head shaking.)

US Orders Probe of Air Travel Troubles:

U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said on Monday he was launching a probe of air travel disruptions over the Christmas holiday weekend at US Airways Group Inc. and Delta Air Line Inc.’s regional carrier Comair.

Doesn’t normmineta sound like a bacterial gastrointestinal disorder?

Start with a large fortune, of course.

The New York Post details a number of charities in New York who lost money on fund raising campaigns last year.

Tips to charities who want to raise money from the Noggle household:

• Send us a couple of mailings a year so we have the envelopes, but cut out the bi-monthly, glossy campaigns. Our five dollars barely covers the costs of your printing and postage.
• Don’t bother selling our name to other charities and charity-facilitating for-profit corporations because we don’t respond to charities we don’t know, no matter how importantly the National Sisters of Animal Defense and Welfare fund takes itself, or how pretty we find its unsolicited and beautiful-but-no-salable-for-a-quarter-at-our-garage-sale calendar.
• For the most part, if you’ve got National, American, United States, International, Global, or Galactic in your organization name, save your bulk rate postage. We give precedence to local charities that don’t need to support national administrative costs so executives can attend meetings, lunches, and conferences on our five dollars. We give to the local Habitat for Humanity, not the conglomerated federated American effort, which needs to pay its salaries and costs before trickling down donations to local organizations. Sounds remarkably consistent with my position on the Federal Government spending, ainna?

Thank you, that is all.

According to the Riverfront Times, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter was fired for blogging:

Following publication of an Unreal item in last week’s Riverfront Times, newsroom management at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch seized the computer hard drive of staff writer Daniel P. Finney and suspended him from reporting duties.

The Unreal piece, “Local Blog o’ the Week,” highlighted an online diary written under the pseudonym Roland H. Thompson. Though Finney did not identify himself by name in the blog, titled “Rage, Anguish and Other Bad Craziness in St. Louis,” he chronicled minute details of his life, including lengthy passages about his job as a Post-Dispatch features writer.

Of course, what’s a story about a blogger losing a job without an obligatory genuflection to the apparent patron saint and prostitute plucky promiscuous-and-enterpreneurial Washington insider, Jessica Cutler:

Firing employees for their private blogs is nothing new. U.S. Senate mail clerk Jessica Cutler made national headlines earlier this year when she lost her job after detailing her sexual escapades with Senate staffers.

Although the content might have been pithy, I doubt Finney’s blog detailed receiving anal sex for six hundred dollars per.

Man, if this blog ever leads to my dismissal or loss of business, I shall keep it quiet just so no one mentions my name and Jessica Cutler’s in the same article.

In this report about the murder in northwest Missouri, the poor writer would to have already solved the mystery:

Nodaway County Sheriff Ben Espey (pictured, center) said authorities are awaiting DNA testing to confirm the girl is the child of Stinnett, 23, who was found slain in her northwest Missouri home Thursday afternoon by her own mother.

The former Delta Airline stewardess who doesn’t understand the nature of at-will employment laments her firing and chooses some questionable peers:

That was when I began to hear stories about people like Heather B. Armstrong, of dooce.com, who was fired because of her blog in 2002. Then there was “the Washingtonienne,” who was fired earlier this year because of comments she entered in her blog.

One should not compare oneself to Jessica Cutler, as one always suffers by the mention.

In Ohio,Ralph Nader has filed suit to end corporate subsidies:

St. Louis built a $260 million stadium to attract a football team. MasterCard got $41 million of tax incentives to build its technology center here. Ford got $17 million to keep its Hazelwood plant open.

Public officials justified each of those economic development deals as a legitimate investment that created and preserved jobs. But each also could be labeled corporate welfare.

Would we be better off if such subsidies were banned? It’s an enticing thought to many taxpayers, and a chilling thought to politicians and corporate officials. But the debate has been largely theoretical until recently. Now, a court case in Ohio may make some tax incentives illegal.

He’s a better gadfly than commander in chief, that’s for sure.

The government has no business spending tax monies to either perpetrate itself or to aid corporations so that they might indirectly benefit citizens.

Our European friends again broaden themselves beyond their normal anti-Semitism to demonstrate their ‘superiority’ over blacks:

The IMG/Primus Worldstars tour of Europe was organized as a gesture of goodwill, but not all fans at their 5-4 win against the Russian Stars on Sunday felt the same.

A fan twice threw a banana on the ice when Worldstars forward Anson Carter was playing, once during the first period and again during the third. Carter, who is black, told ESPN The Magazine’s EJ Hradek that he noticed the racist act but did not alert game officials.

A bit of perspective that people are thugs and punks everywhere, not just here in the United States where over 150 years ago, certain sections of the country practiced a barbarism.

Scientists clash over origin of ‘the Great Dying’:
Volcanic, celestial theories on extinction 250 million years ago take stage in S.F.:

A cataclysm 250 million years ago wiped out nearly all life in the Earth’s oceans, and nearly three-quarters of the plants and animals on land vanished too. It was the greatest catastrophe the Earth has ever experienced – – but scientists who study such events are in sharp disagreement over what caused it.

Indeed, scientists in San Francisco are divided: Is it the Bush administration’s environmental policies that rent the space-time continuum to cause a cataclysm in distant the past, or is it a Bush administration policy that has yet to pass? Can good scientists stop the evil Edward H. Haliburton III, who many people don’t realize still plots maniacally in a lair in the Mojave Desert?

Hopefully, a burst of triumphant fanfare will arise from this Science League retreat to save the future and the past!.

You know, much has been made about the discovery that Viktor Yushchenko, Ukrainian politician and soon-to-be president elect, has been disfigured by a large amount of dioxin introduced to his body. Most people suspect the Russians or political rivals, but I’ve used Occam’s Cosmetological Scalpel to come to a different conclusion.

You know, perhaps he’s studied American politics and has learned that certain American politicians have injected deadly poisons used as devices in 1970s and 1980s suspense novels and movies, such as botulism toxin, directly into their bodies in vain and, well, vain efforts to make themselves more appealing to the public.

Unfortunately, because the Ukraine is not Massachusetts or Beverly Hills, Yushchenko got the dioxin and not the botulism.

It’s just a crackpot theory, so it might be wrong. But that’s what they want you to think.

It looks like government officials in Madison, Wisconsin, want to return to the glory days of the 1980s, where local governments gave cable companies monopolies in exchange for wiring their communities. Instead of cable, though, Madison wants a single company to provide wireless Internet access to its citizens:

Wireless Internet could be available in downtown Madison and at the Dane County Regional Airport by this spring, said mayoral spokesman George Twigg.

The state Department of Administration is putting out a request for proposals today seeking vendors interested in building the network, said Twigg and Scott McDonell of the state Department of Administration.

…

Twigg said the city is trying to strike a balance between imposing user fees and building the cost of using the network onto the property tax.

“It’s a tradeoff,” he said.

Let me project what’s going to happen:

1. Some sucking connected wireless provider will bid low.
2. As part of the contract, sucking wireless provider will want exclusive rights to downtown Madison and the airport.
3. The wireless company will run over budget and will come weeping to the government to build finish the network it’s contractually obligated to deliver.
4. Government will spend taxpayer money to finish the network.
5. Sucking wireless company will use a clause in its contract to increase user fees by up to 20% annually.
6. Other local governments will think it’s a good idea and will follow Madison’s lead.
7. It will become a felony to place a router in your downtown place of business to pay only one user fee for wireless access and connect multiple computers.

You think I am mad? Look at your cable bill and wonder why you’re beholden to a single company for service.

(Link seen on Boots and Sabers.)