Category: News

Pack a large number of disparate people in an enclosed area, moving slowly, and what do you have? A tempting target:

Stepped-up screening procedures at Los Angeles International Airport that were designed to make flying safer have created another potential vulnerability: long lines that are a “tempting target for terrorists,” security experts said Friday.

The answer, obviously: Spend more money:

Rand Corp. researchers recommended in a 47-page report that airlines and federal officials spend $4 million a year to add skycaps, ticket agents and screeners to speed travelers through lines in terminal lobbies and on sidewalks and into the secure gate area — where they would be less vulnerable to attack.

Spend more money ($4 million a year to start), add more procedures, and then herd the people into a more “secure” enclosed space where they’ll still be a target.

Man, how can I get paid for bad ideas? I have a million of them! At $10 each, I would be rich!

Here’s his potshot from today’s column:

George W. Bush’s claim that our goal is to install democracy in Iraq is a recipe for quagmire. Iraq is a Frankenstein’s monster of sects cobbled together by the British, a non-nation that flies apart without a tyrant holding it together. America can’t be the new tyrant.

The United States is also a Frankenstein’s monster of sects, races, and lifestyles cobbled together which seems to hold together without a tyrant.

Which isn’t to say that certain leaders aren’t in favor of a tyranny of our betters in Washington.

Because Federal law enforcement is running out of things to do, our legislators are now going to make video voyeurism a Federal crime. Here’s a wonderful quote from Wisconsin representative James Senselessbrainer:

“With the development of smaller cameras and the instantaneous distribution capability of the Internet, the issue of video voyeurism is a huge privacy concern,” House Judiciary chairman F. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., said after the vote on the second bill.

Also newly illegal on the Federal level: selling “counterfeit labels” attached to copyrighted material including DVDs, CDs or computer programs.

Keep this in mind the next time you gather pitchforks and torches and stakes to march on John Ashcroft’s castle or raise your voice into the harmonized kennel whine bemoaning how George W. Bush is crushing civil liberties and implementing a police state, remember who’s really giving the executive branch the powers it uses.

In testimony why he suspected Scott Peterson in Laci Peterson’s death, detective Craig Grogan unloads his litany of probable cause:

Grogan, the lead investigator on the case, told jurors Monday that there was a lot about Scott Peterson that made him suspicious. Peterson was the last person to see his wife alive, the first person to find her gone, he had an odd alibi and it looked as though the former fertilizer salesman had been making concrete anchors in his warehouse.

There you have it. If you’re married to a murdered housespouse and you work outside the home, obviously you kill him or her because you’re the last to see him or her and the first to notice him or her gone.

Definitely another argument against marriage and cohabitation, or perhaps against interpersonal relationships at all. Never see anyone! It’s the only way to be safe.

(Public service note: don’t blog hungry; lack of blood sugar makes on note something silly and leap to spurious assertions. It’s the only excuse I can think of.)

UPDATE: Noun/pronoun agreement now corrected, dear.

Ann Althouse reviews John Kerry’s appearance on The Late Show last night, and she knocks it:

Kerry cranked out a dismal performance on David Letterman’s show last night. He alternated between rerunning lines from his stump speech and plodding through scripted jokes. Unlike Nixon on “Laugh-In” and other candidates who’ve used pop culture shows successfully, Kerry did not use self-deprecating jokes. He attacked Bush and Cheney and used “Halliburton” as a punchline.

Compare and contrast Kerry and Bush’s campaign speeches. Bush cracked jokes at his own expense, Kerry, not so much.

When you’re wound tightly into defending your gravitas and authenticity and nuanced intelligence, you have to fear that any crack you put in that image with your self-deprecating humor will cause a complete collapse of the public’s understanding of your qualification to lead the country, which is your own sense of worth.

After putting a 3 inch nail into his finger, a Scottish man went to his state-run hospital’s ER — and waited 22 hours before leaving with the nail still in his finger.

Keep that in mind: when every American has health care provided by the government, those who accept that level of help will get care on par with the level of service doled out by the tenured functionaries that serve in departments of social services throughout the country. Meanwhile, those who can afford it, and that will include everyone who makes the mandates, will go to private caretakers. Unless they ban private practice, mandaters exempted, of course.

Not so with someone to politicize the dead–especially her son:

Seth, 24, was in debt after he graduated from Rutgers University in 2002. He joined the army for money and skills that, he was told, would help land him a job with the CIA or FBI — his dream jobs. “Not for patriotism,” said his mother, Sue Niederer, who is now an anti-war activist.

Congratulations, mudder, you have just called your son a calculating mercenary who went into the military only for money and job experience.

Sheesh, I hope my mother doesn’t affront me when eulogizing me. But she’s a Marine, so (aside from that) she’s got some sense.

Headline: U.S. Weapons Inspector: Iraq Had No WMD.

Lead paragraph:

Fallen Iraqi President Saddam Hussein did not have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, but left signs that he had idle programs he someday hoped to revive, the top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq concludes in a draft report due out soon.

Considering that actual shells with chemical weapons have been found, that logically refutes the “no,” but I suspect logic remains outside the grasp of some AP reporters.

In Whitehorse, Canada, a Black Lab took a truck for a drive:

A pedestrian in a Whitehorse suburb was taken aback Tuesday night when a dog drove by in a red pickup truck.

Police say a person was out for a walk when the truck with a black Labrador at the wheel passed by.

When police arrived, the truck was in the middle of Thompson Road in Granger, blocking traffic. The dog was still behind the wheel.

All’s well that ends with no fatalities in Canada:

There were no injuries or damages, and no indication from police they plan to charge the owner.

Which is unlike East St. Louis, where the dog would be ticketed for driving without a license and without insurance and the owner charged with endangering an animal.

Progressive Insurance trades insurance discounts for little boxes that track on users’ driving habits.

Progressive chairman of the board Peter B. Lewis has given over fourteen million dollars to pro-Democratic 527 groups.

Vast Left Wing Conspiracy uniting politicians and corporations to strip privacy from common citizens? You read it here first!

Cock your tin foil helmet to a rakish angle and follow me.

Scientists and policy makers think global warming probably continues unabashed, according to the simulations they run, and as a result, the United States should hobble its industry and become a socialist state like enlightened European failures-in-making:

• Blair to urge US to take tougher action on global warming
  

  Tony Blair will today urge the United States to commit itself to a tougher action to combat global warming and promise that a list of green policies will be included in Labour’s general election manifesto.

  The Prime Minister is to raise the profile of green issues as part of a drive to woo back people disaffected by the Iraq war.

  Labour’s private polling shows that “progressive voters”, many of whom were alienated by Mr Blair’s stance on Iraq, regard the environment as a top priority.

  Speaking to a conference staged by the Prince of Wales’s Business and the Environment Programme, Mr Blair will stop short of a full-frontal attack on President George Bush but make clear Britain will expect America to accept its responsibilities on global warming when it takes over the presidency of the G8 group of leading industrialised nations in January.

  Mr Blair, who believes the Kyoto Treaty does not go far enough, will reiterate his call for the United States to sign it. He will identify climate change as one of the greatest challenges facing the planet, saying that one country acting alone cannot solve the problem.

  Thanks, Tony, for calling for American action while overseas. How about talking to dirty-but-growing industrial Asian companies, who pump out greenhouse gases, soot, and air pollution that blow easterly towards our countries? No? Can’t stop them because they don’t have “enlightened” populations willing to commit seppukku over their unjust strength?

  Why don’t you spend time on possible dreams. Like getting the United States to adopt the Euro.

• SAN FRANCISCO
  ‘Cool gray city’ projected to turn murderously hot
  Temperatures likely to rise by mid-century as a result of global warming, study warns

  San Francisco’s trademark cool summers are likely to heat up dramatically before the century is over, scientists said Monday, bringing frequent heat waves and a big jump in heat-related deaths.

  A new city-by-city analysis of California climate projections suggests that everybody’s favorite “cool gray city of love” may be in for a shock from the local impact of global climate change.

  Critics, however, said that such doomsday global-warming scenarios were highly speculative — designed mostly to sway public opinion and influence policy-makers considering proposals to cut heat-trapping vehicle emissions.

  The latest projections by the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C., suggest that in a worst-case scenario, San Francisco can expect 55 heat- wave days — three or more consecutive days of temperatures above 79 degrees — a year by the 2050s and up to 135 such days a year by the 2090s, compared with only 10 to 15 heat-wave days in the 1990s.

  Union of Concerned Scientists? Sounds like they might have an agenda outside of science, but it’s remarkable that anyone can claim the mantle of “scientist” by writing computer simulations of things that might be instead of studying things that are where conclusions need to be repeatable.

  But then again, I’ve never gotten a government grant, so what do I know about real science?

Meanwhile, after a notoriously cool summer:

Old Farmer’s Almanac predicts colder, snowier winter for much of country

Time to break out the long underwear. The Old Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a colder and snowier winter for a wide swath of the country.

The editor-in-chief says it’ll be colder than average from the Rocky Mountains eastward.

The exceptions will be Montana, Wyoming, northern New England and the Appalachians, but even these areas will be very cold toward the end of winter.

More snow than usual is expected from the Great Lakes, across New England and down to the Middle Atlantic states, and from northeastern New Mexico, across northern Texas and Oklahoma, across the Ohio Valley to the Middle Atlantic.

The almanac is the oldest continuously published periodical in North America, making its debut in 1792. It also boasts a weather accuracy rate of 80 percent.

Maybe it’s once again time to switch the unproven longterm meterologipolitical assertion back to global cooling brought on by industrialization.

Pardon me, fellows, but it’s the height of hubris to know that the actions of this single species of man can so easily and irrevocably alter global and even celestial mechanisms of which we have incomplete understanding. I pray we don’t all pay for the hubris of a few “enlightened” despots.

All’s quiet in International Space Stationopolis, when Look! The Cavity Creeps! the oxygen generators fail.

Not to worry, they have undoubtedly have a lifetime service and parts warranty.

The three Elektron units on board the space station are the last of their kind. The company that manufactured them has gone out of business, and the engineer who almost single-handedly made the final adjustments of flight units died several years ago. Reportedly he retained some “trade secret” about the final adjustments of the devices — and it died with him.

Uh oh. I blame the Limited Liability Company business organization.

Hey, cheap land in Florida this year. Sweet!

In the video capture of the MTV interview with John Kerry that’s available at The Daily Recycler, who else noticed the yellow thing flopping around on his arm?

No, kids, if you snap it off, you don’t get a sexual favor. That’s a Lance Armstrong rubber band for cancer, of which Heather has one.

One has to wonder if Johnk paid $1 for the version shared by the proletariat, or if his is a special, titanium mesh, gold-plated version.

Either way, he’s sending us secret code that he’s an active sports participant.

Sorry, honey, that I ruined it for you.

You want a conspiracy theory? Here’s a conspiracy theory:

Osama bin Laden gives himself up next month.

You see, by sacrificing, but not quite martyring himself, bin Laden allows US forces to capture him so that the conspiracy nuts in the United States will throw the election to Kerry.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch likes to milk its previous stories for all they’re worth, flogging horse skeletons to dust. For example, they recently discovered that elected fire protection boards tend to get paid lots of public money and that sometimes firefighters give the candidates whom they want to win money! Not satisfied with a multipart investigation, the Post-Dispatch carried on for weeks about the splash its story made with oversight groups and the state government; in each subsequent article, the Post-Dispatch mentioned, reluctantly and while kicking a toe shyly at the carpet that they originated the story.

But now, riffing off of the Bill McClellan column about how hard a time released felons have making it outside, the Post-Dispatch runs a story on the front page of its Sunday business page with the title Ex-convicts face a Catch-22 in job search.

Here’s the “hook” anecdote that starts the article:

Dava Rogers says she applied at all kinds of jobs for a year, from fast-food restaurants to cleaners, with no success.

On every application, once she checked “yes” to having a criminal record, that was usually the end of it, said Rogers, 42. She served six months at the City Workhouse in St. Louis after being convicted of embezzlement from a former employer. She was released in 2002, but she found work only a year ago as a counselor in transitional housing for the YWCA.

“On the first few applications, I wouldn’t check ‘yes,’ and then they would say if I explained it and didn’t lie, they could’ve hired me,” Rogers said. “When I was truthful, there was never a call back.”

Personally, I have to wonder if it’s not so much the checkbox in her case, but the If so, explain. portion of the question. I would have less trouble hiring a drug offender, a DUI person, a vandal, or any of the numerous other non-threatening felonies which continue to proliferate over someone who steals money from her employer.

I don’t hear the St. Louis Post-Dispatch championing pedophiles who want to return to their birthday party clown jobs, but I didn’t read the whole article. Undoubtedly, it’s in there somewhere.

When a juvenile detention center closed in Tarkio, Missouri, the residents, not the local government, joined their money and are looking to buy a business to move to the town.

Private, not government, action. Thank you, sir, may I have some more like this?