Category: News

The Professor links to an article about the drive of Iraqis to learn English. It’s a neat piece, but here’s the most telling quote:

”We have not seen anything from the United States of what they promised,” he said. ”I want to help them help me.”

This particular Iraqi wants the United States to provide him with fresh water, electricity, phone service, and who knows what else. He wants the United States government to help him personally.

Sounds like these people are well on their way to the American form of government already. For whom can he vote to receive the best goodies?

In Illinois, anyway, where the Supreme Court has recently abjudicated its members and other statewide judges into a raise when the governor said the state couldn’t afford the cost of living adjustments this year.

Forget the constitutional crisis that occurs when the state comptroller doesn’t dish out the money. Let’s think about the wisdom of allowing a bunch of judges to sue non-judges. Where the hell do you find an impartial trial for that?

Oh, and lest we overlook it, these sagacious twits have decreed themselves a raise to $162,530 a year because they were barely scraping by at $158,103 a year.

News flash:

“The nation needs to break the chains of our addiction to prison….”

Maybe we just need to make going to prison into a felony to deter people from doing it.

(Link seen on Drudge.)

In the June 2003 issue of Esquire, Ilene Rosenzweig writes “10 Things You Don’t Know About Women” which offers the following sage advice:

10. Women judge men by the way they drive. If you aren’t at least ten miles per hour over the speed limit, we think you’re a wimp with no ambition. Heavy foot on the brake? Too neurotic and can’t dance. We also analyze your sexual potential at mealtime. Drive fast. Eat slow.

I’ve been looking for a new philosophy, so I decided this one was it: Drive fast. Eat slow. Especially when trying to impress a babe.

I conducted some surreptitious research on this new axiom while trying to impress a beautiful woman last weekend and can offer the following corollaries:

• Do not use the red four-cylinder “sports” car owned by the babe when proving you’re not a wimp and that you have ambition.
• When assertively and decisively changing lanes, remember to leave a distance approximately equivalent to the 6:15 Freight Express, that is, about four train cars and a locomotive, between you and the vehicle in front of you. Particularly if you’re driving the red “sports” car.
• Don’t utter, at about 85 dB, invectives to the other drivers.

You can call these the Brian J. Corollaries, if you wish, and you may use them at will in geometric proofs as necessary. Follow the corollaries as the axiom, and you will lead a more fulfilling life.

Oh, and one more hint, but this one doesn’t earn corollary status: order the couscous. You cannot eat couscous quickly without using a spoon.

My beautiful wife links to a story about an Oracle manager, an Indian, who used his undue managerial influence to receive monicas from a developer, also an Indian. So of course she sued Oracle.

My beautiful wife says:

And the kicker.

The lawsuit said that Oracle knew or should have known of the different cultural and legal context in which Anand was used to working in India, where managers can often exert unfettered power over their female subordinates.

Um, no. What could Oracle have done, anyway? If it, as an entity, was unaware of said manager’s particular behavior, what could it have done?

You poor, uncynical creature. This is a perfect case of DIYD/DIYD (an acronym pronounced “died-died”). Because the Oracle did not treat the non-Caucasian differently than it would treat an American, it’s getting sued. Of course, had it treated him differently, he would have sued them.

Lawsuits all around! It’s a paradise!

The St Louis Single Point-of-View is reporting that the whole Bambi-hunting thing, where people could pay $10,000 to hunt naked women in the Nevada desert and then, um, mount the trophies for a Nevada dessert, is admittedly a publicity stunt designed to promote videos depicting men hunting and, um, stuffing their ‘kills’ without a certified taxedermist present. Publicists would call that guerilla marketing, but those sorts of spoofs and hijinks are no laughing matter in LVNV.

But now he’s going to get the “Las Vegas is a Family Place” marketing brochure thrown at him. He’s being charged with a trumped-up misdemeanor charge because apparently misleading the news media is not yet a felony.

The story says:

The mayor said, “I’ll do everything I can to see this man is punished for trying to embarrass Las Vegas.”

So the mayor admits that he will wield all power that he has as a government official to punish this man for the bad behavior (not a crime, mind you, just bad behavior) of embarrassing (that is, causing a human emotional response of shame-lite) in a freaking social construct (the fiefdom of said government official).

What is everything in the mayor’s power? Fortunately, it’s not much:

“This man” is promoter is Michael Burdick. He could get six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for operating without a proper business license.

Fortunately, the avatar of Las Vegas has conjured a law with which to prosecute This Man so that he, the Embodiment of the Glorious City On Earth can find vengeance for the vast wrongs done upon The Almighty Yet Easily Embarrassed City of Sin. With this mighty cudgel, the petty tyrant shall once again affirm his power and his will.

Steve Chapman, of the Chicago Tribune, asserts (registration required) that intervention in Liberia would be a pointless waste of American time, money, and lives.

He’s right.

Sorry. I meant to say, “Indeed.”

Best of the Web links to a story about a boy and his dog. This particular boy is the governor of Connecticut, and his dog leaped from his car and was on the lamb, or on the man, for several hours before the law caught up with it.

The officers chased Coalby for about 3 miles, before a Wolcott man was able to grab the dog after officers shouted at him.

How’s the man doing?

Police said the man, Ed Humel, was taken to a local hospital after his arm ended up in the dog’s mouth. Police would not characterize the incident as a bite.

Not until the medical examiner reports, anyway. It could yet prove to be attempted zerbery.

It’s the 35th anniversary of Chappaquiddick. Remember to send your wishes to Senator Kennedy.

The headline says “Body in lake was chained to weight“.

The lead paragraph says:

Dawn Brossard’s hands were bound together and her body was held at the bottom of Geneva Lake by a weight and a chain, two officials said Wednesday.

The sheriff’s department, however, is not jumping to conclusions:

The Walworth County Sheriff’s Department has not declared Brossard’s death a homicide, saying it is awaiting a ruling from medical examiners on the cause of her death.

It could yet prove to be natural causes.

Apparently, a black bear has gone on a rampage in Colorado and has attacked several campers.

Although the knee-jerk response would be to import some giant kangaroos, which naturally prey upon black bears, this is not a good idea.

Translation is as much “art” as science, and the obra regurgitated into the second language is subject to the translator’s idiom and biases. I once saw a 1974 translation of a Pablo Neruda sonnet that turned no se hace nada con muerte as “I ain’t got no truck with death,” I kid you not. Who translated that, Shaft?

So it’s with great skepticism and cynicism that I note the CNN story telling about a congressional flack translating the Constitution to dumb it down for students. Especially a congressional staffer who says of the Constitution (about its length) “it’s an itty-bitty thing.”

For example, look at the foreshadowing of the fun to be had when “translators” tell us what the Second Amendment means in common language. This guy’s translation includes “citizens have the right to own firearms.” The contentions have begun already.

I fear one of these translations will supplant the existing document. Hey, how about instead of translating the Constitution for children and the functionally illiterate populace, how about we expect people learn enough to read it in its original form?

Pardon Mr. du Toit for exploding with rage when a Missouri couple who recently won half of a $261 million dollar Powerball jackpot said they were going to spend the money getting a tractor with brakes and buying a new refrigerator. Whereas Mr. du Toit raged, I understand.

Whereas I understand the urge to splurge, I understand it’s the shortest distance between old money and shining shoes (see also Janite Lee, et al) is philanthropy, big houses, and essentially eating the seed corn. Hey, I read The Millionaire Next Door. I know the secret to attaining wealth, and keeping it, is not spending it all.

Want to know what I would do with $73 million dollars in my fellow citizens’ gambling losses?

1. I would pay taxes of some tens of millions of dollars.
2. I would pay off all my debts and my mortgage and my poor mother’s mortgage.
3. I would invest the remainder in a variety of schemes, such as equities, and other investments, hopefully yielding 7-10% a year in returns.

That’s it. No Porsche right away, no huge house, no yacht to travel around the world. Know why? Because at 7-10%, $30,000,000 principal yields $2,100,000-$3,000,000 each year in mad money. So once we got to the interest, then we’d have some fun!

Part of the beauty of that windfall would be the freedom from worry, and although the tempation to spend more than the interest would beckon, I’d want the peace of mind knowing that I have the steady income AND a pile of money in the bank. I understand the goal is to run out of money as close to the end of my retirement as possible, but this pile of money would ensure that my wife and I would receive the best health care in our near-retirement-end years, up to and maybe including transplanting our brains into cloned and flash-grown facsimiles of our 25 year old bodies for another several decades of not dipping into the principal.

That’s the hypothesis, and I hope to get the opportunity to test it.

A column in the San Francisco Chronicle seems to indicate that California’s state government abuse of business as merely sources for revenue and for social progress and not, you know, capitalism, is driving businesses to move elsewhere.

<fanfare>Epiphany!</fanfare>

Why do I suspect, though, that the publication of this column merely represents the equivalent of a revelation at a cocktail party that is followed by a brief moment of silence before the regular drone of conversation (regulation and taxation) begins again?