Category: News

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.)

Thanks, Jon Dolan, Missouri State Senator from Lake St. Louis and an alleged “Republican,” for cooking up this stupid waste of tax money: “Visitors will know Miss USA is ours“:

Stan Musial hasn’t had one. Neither has Chuck Berry. In fact, no St. Louisan has been honored with his or her name posted on a state highway sign leading into Missouri. But that’s about to change.

Starting next year, motorists driving west over the Poplar, Jefferson Barracks and Interstate 270 bridges into Missouri will be greeted with this: “Welcome to Missouri. Home of Shandi Finnessey Miss USA 2004.”

Not to put too fine a point of it, but by that time, it will be that Miss USA was ours, once, sometime around the turn of the century, like the World’s Fair.

Jumping jesuits, but that’s a lot of money to laud a transitory and ultimately unimportant honor. For the love of peat, why?

“She’s a hottie, and she’s a smarty,” said state Sen. Jon Dolan, R-Lake Saint Louis, whose idea it was to put up the signs.

Dude, next time you try to impress a woman, how about you expend a little of your own money to send flowers?

Apparently, according to several unnamed sources, obese Americans are breaking cruise ships with their weight.

Not obese passengers, but obese Americans.

I’ve not seen that many unnamed sources since I read a the recap of a leaked story in the New York Times.

Undoubtedly, America is to blame for earwax, belly button lint, and static cling as well.

Apparently someone in New Hampshire has determined that online sex offender registries are one-stop shopping for his vigilantism: Man defends attacks on sex offenders:

Lawrence Trant sees himself as a righteous crusader who put muscle behind his boiling outrage against pedophiles.

The state of New Hampshire sees Trant differently. He is serving a 10- to 30-year sentence in New Hampshire State Prison after pleading guilty to attempting to murder two convicted sex offenders whose names and addresses he found on an Internet registry posted by the state.

Check out the subtitle of the article: Crusader gets jail term.

This attempted murderer, according to the Boston Globe, is a crusader. A veritable insurgent against the prevailing orthodoxy that these people retain a number of citizens’ rights to not getting shot arbitrarily by people with nothing better to do. A rebel against the system that thinks that incarceration, forced hospitalization beyond their sentences, and notoriety, and that capital punishment is too much for the crime.

I remember an outcry when a pro-dead-abortion provider Web site listed doctors who terminated pregnancy along with good stalking information for them. I imagine we’ll see less uproar over a government-funded registry that provides the same convenience for other Defenders of the Defenseless Children.

That’s what I make of this capitalization from this story about a drug bust in Wisconsin:

Along with the arrests, police seized powder cocaine, crack cocaine, marijuana, heroin and Ecstasy, seven handguns and ammunition, seven vehicles and $25,000 in cash. Police refused to give details.

However, if that’s the case, shouldn’t it be:

Along with the arrests, police seized powder cocaine, crack cocaine, marijuana, heroin and Ecstasy® 3-4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine, seven handguns and ammunition, seven vehicles and $25,000 in cash. Police refused to give details.

Ecstasy has been in the mainstream 20 years now. How long until we drop the capital E. (I mean that in the grammatical way, not as a slang for actually, you know, doing ecstasy.) No one calls white lady Heroin any more.

Those Bosnian peacekeepers will be home before Christmas.

This article about the serial killer in Kansas known as Blind, Torture, Kill, gives numerous details about the killer that he’s revealed about himself in new missives:

According to police, BTK claims to have been born in 1939, making the killer either 64 or 65 years old. The statement did not say where he was born or where he lived, but that his family moved frequently and always lived near railroad tracks.

BTK’s communications indicate a lifelong fascination with trains, police said.

…

Among other details provided by police:

BTK’s father was killed in World War II, and he was raised by his mother, with his grandparents caring for him while she was at work. When he was about 11, his mother began dating a railroad detective.

His grandfather played the fiddle and died of lung disease.

BTK’s communications include accounts of a cousin named Susan who moved to Missouri, and of a woman he knew named Petra who had a younger sister named Tina.

Unstated, but obvious to anyone who reads too much detective fiction and dabbles sometimes in the composition of same, is this unspoken but apparent klew:

Since he’s only now opening up to the police after apparently going without killing anyone for 18 years and he’s in his middle sixties and he’s got a history of lung disease in the family.

His final mockery comes as he reveals himself on his deathbed when we cannot punish him.

Blackfive speaks about ribbon magnets for your car and suggests you put that money somewhere where it will actually help troops. I concur.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch expresses its continuing sympathy for illegal aliens with this story: Latvian family faces deportation threat:

Ofelia Boudaguian says she hoped for fair treatment when she and her family came to the United States in 1995, after years of suffering discrimination and violence in Latvia.

After nearly a decade in the St. Louis area, though, Boudaguian says she feels let down by the American legal system, which has denied the family political asylum and now threatens them with deportation at any moment.

“We live now day by day. It’s so scary,” she said. A knock on the door might mean that she and her husband, Vitalik Boudaguian, and their two children must gather their belongings, submit to arrest and go to a detention facility to await deportation.

Their one-year tourist visas expired May 18, 1996.

Because starting deportation precedings after these people overstayed their visa by nine years and exhausted all recourse through the system is just unfair!

The system is only fair when it does what I want it to do, regardless of the existing rules. Natch.

The headline, Report: Birth Rates for Older Women Rising, really just makes sense, especially when you consider the gist of the story:

U.S. women in their 30s and early 40s had higher birth rates in 2003, while births among teenagers fell for the 12th straight year, federal health officials said on Tuesday.

Well, of course they’re having higher birthrates. Come on, hasn’t anyone else noticed that women in their 30s and 40s have become smoking hotter in the last ten or fifteen years? I mean, when I was a young man, they looked okay, but now, dayumm. They look mighty appetizing for procreative activities and all drills thereof.

The fact that I am in my 30s or 40s is merely coincidental.

Important quote from this article about the author of Fast Food Nation‘s week performance at University of Wisconsin:

“I was looking for more of a venue for action,” said Kirsten Jordan, a UW-Madison student majoring in geography.

A major in geography? Ha-ha! That will prepare you for anything for any number of years until the Bush administration rewrites world maps and alters world climate. Also, clear-cuts and strip mines to alter topography. So in the next four years, about the time this kid is graduating, all that book-learning will be useless.

Hope she’s smart, like me, and picked up a useful second major like philosophy.

(Link seen on Ann Althouse. Well, not on Ann Althouse, but on her blog.)

In a move that reminds me of extranationals talking about the American election this month, apparently ministers from other Arabic states are squawking about the Iraqi elections due this January:

Violence and boycotts could yet stop promised Iraqi elections going ahead on time, Arab ministers said, despite Baghdad’s confident assertion the landmark vote would be held on January 30.

Iraq had somewhat upstaged a major international conference in Egypt on its future by announcing the date for the first post-Saddam Hussein elections a day before the meeting opened.

But not everyone was impressed by its confidence.

So let’s run down the list. Doubters include:

• Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit
• Jordanian Foreign Minister Hani Mulki
• an Arab delegate to the conference, speaking on condition of anonymity
• Jordanian government spokeswoman Asma Khodr

Hey, here’s a hearty cup of butt the hell out for those representatives of undemocratic societies who have sound bites about sacred democracy. You know what happens if the Sunnis boycott? They don’t vote. Choosing not to participate does not render the decision of the participants invalid. It just means you have to wait until the next election to choose again whether or not to participate.

In Wisconsin, a nutbar in the woods, instead of hunting deer, shot five other hunters in whose tree stand he was trespassing. Story.

Uh oh, and wouldn’t you know it, he had an assault rifle:

Five deer hunters were shot to death and three were wounded Sunday by a man who was hunting from someone else’s tree stand in northern Wisconsin, authorities said.

Chai Soua Vang, 36, of St. Paul, Minn., was arrested by a Department of Natural Resources warden just before dark.

The bizarre attack happened on private land in this Sawyer County town about noon on the second day of the gun deer season, a time when hundreds of thousands of deer hunters are in the woods throughout Wisconsin.

Sawyer County Chief Deputy Tim Zeigle said Chai Soua Vang, 36, of St. Paul, Minn., was arrested by a Department of Natural Resources warden just before dark about 4 p.m. on a road about one mile from the scene, just across the Sawyer County border in Rusk County.

Vang was armed with an SKS semiautomatic assault rifle, a weapon that’s similar to a 30.06 but seldom used by deer hunters, Zeigle said.

Let the call for a renewed ban begin! Oh, wait, somewhere out there it already has.

Personally, I think there’s more to the story–like the relationship between the shooter and the dead and wounded–that will not be included in follow-up stories after the nationwide gun banning crowd crows about the dangers of guns.