Category: News

Donald Sensing’s eyes have opened to some of the depravity and hardship suffered by the American poor. The real question is, “Is Barbara Ehrenreich listening?”

Probably not; she’s probably enjoying an indiscretion that will keep her from getting any job that requires a drug test.

However, I have a hot tip for her next book:

Half the families in the country earn less than the average household income!

Quick, redistribute the wealth until we’re all above average! Vote for Dean Howard!

In New York, compare and contrast:

• Giuliani time, with the Broken Windows theory of policing, wherein police crackdown on nuisance offenses to improve the quality of life.
• Bloomberg time, which apparently features the Flat Broken theory of policing, wherein police write tickets for as many offenses as they can to help the city can balance its finances as taxpayers flee for less strident regimes.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Louis area police have a new gizmo to use on motorists:

More St. Louis-area police officers are carrying extra gadgets this holiday season to help them catch drunks on the road.

Several police departments in Missouri and Illinois have acquired the new technology during the past year. It is geared for traffic enforcement and could be key in the campaign to halt drunken driving during the holidays.

In the past six months, St. Louis County police bought portable breath testers for each precinct station.

Now officers in the field can easily test a driver who might straddle the line between sober and illegally drunk, police said. Results from the tests are not admissible in court, but officers can use the test as probable cause to arrest a driver then test him or her on a more sophisticated machine at the jail.

That’s right, fellows. They’ve got a new divining rod that, if it twitches right, indicates you might be in violation of the law. Enough to arrest you and drag you downtorn or to Clayton. For violating a law that’s sliding slipperily but certainly to the point where wearing an alcohol-based cologne will make you legally intoxicated. Why do the police think this new gizmo is important?

“Some professional drunks can fool you,” said Maj. Timothy Fitch, commander of the St. Louis County police patrol division. “Even if they can pass the field sobriety tests, they can’t pass this.”

Got that? People who are “professional drunks” can pass field sobriety tests–by not behaving in such a manner as to indicate the alcohol has affected them! Could it be that they’re perhaps not driving badly either?

What, you think I am making this up and it will only be applied to people who drive forty miles an hour in reverse on the shoulder on the wrong side of the highway? Wrong.

Departments expect these gadgets will come in handy during roadside safety checks and extra patrols scheduled for the New Year’s holiday. [Emphasis mine.]

Roadside safety check? Buddy, that means the sobriety checkpoints the police set up on the roads wherein all vehicles get screened. So whatever false positives this thing provides, complete with paddy wagon ride and booking, that means you Mormons are eligible, too.

A pile of cash and another nick in our liberty, for what? Here’s the numbers, in a metropolitan area of up to three million people (depending upon the counties you include):

Officers gave DWI violations to 713 drivers through November last year. They arrested 922 in the same time period this year.

That’s almost three arrests per day. In a population of three million. Obviously the profession of drunkeness does not pay well, or most professional drunks are telecommuters. What’s the life savings?

Last year, Missouri lost 525 people in alcohol-related crashes.

Fewer than two per day, and I would wager that many of those deaths were self-inflicted.

Individually, drunk driving deaths are tragedies, particularly the non-drunk victims. However, I do dispute that all the effort and ever-tightening legislative and law-enforcement nooses drawn around the problem probably have entered the diminishing returns effort. And it’s more than the returns that diminish; it’s our very freedom, Chester.

Now have a Guinness, and walk home, for crying out loud. A little cool air will clear your head, and you could use the exercise.

So I am reading the Samizdata post on the Beagle 2 Martian lander, and I read about how Mars is going to be crawling with landers in the coming months with the arrival of Opportunity and Spirit in January. Beagle 2, for those of you who don’t know’t, is a European probe, and Spirit and Opportunity are American landers. So I look at the artist rendition and I think of a bunch of robots tooling around on the planet of Mars, and immediately I think:

Wouldn’t it be cool if, at the end of their lifecycles, the landers fought it out like Battlebots?

And then I think I am onto something. I mean, think of the possible commercial possibilities that could underwrite part of the cost of the voyage! A pay-per-view spectacular, wherein the robots duke it out in a hostile environment on another world? Dudes, I’d order my first pay-per-view event to see it! Maybe a couple of corporate logos slapped onto the landers, a special camera lander to transmit live video, and bam! You’ve got enough capital to lift the things at more than seven miles per second, werd.

Picture it. After NASA and the European Space Agency have had their time with the landers, accumulating and transmitting data back to home base, imagine the two rovers rearing up and exposing whirring blades, great spikes and drills, and articulate claws to rend the other into space junk. Because ultimately, that’s what they are, junk and refuse and detritus from our exploration. At least we could have some fun with it.

Picture the Beagle 2 and Spirit going at it on the red sands of Mars. Imagine a couple of landers doing battle on the ice of Europa, among the volcanoes of Io, or the hazy surface of Venus. I’d buy the DVDs, dammit.

So get to it, guys. Who needs the X-Prize when you can have the Solar Battlebot Championship Tour? Am I onto something, or just on something here?

Richard Cohen, of the Washington Post, continues to toss us juicy pitches. Speaking of Howard Dean’s recent musing about an interesting whack job conspiracy theory that Bush knew about the September 11 attacks before they occurred, Cohen posits:

There is no excusing what Dean said. But providing a context is a different matter entirely. As Dean himself said, the Bush administration has been very stingy about revealing just what it knew about terrorist activities before Sept. 11. Couple that with the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq — nor a link between Saddam and al Qaeda proved — and you have the requisite ingredients for a conspiracy theory: Something here doesn’t add up.

Let me paraphrase: The theory doesn’t make sense, but it only makes sense to have a senseless theory.

(The little angel of paranoia on my right shoulder asks “But why does Richard Cohen want us to think that?“)

In a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article about how the suburb of St. Peters and its duly appointed constabulary love their new cameras, we get this reassurance:

The only incident of abuse, according to St. Peters officials, occurred more than a year ago. An employee was caught using the cameras to improperly watch people at the Drury Inn on Mid Rivers Mall Drive, a police dispatcher said.

Police spokesman David Kuppler wouldn’t say exactly when the incident occurred, or whether the person was charged with a crime. [Emphasis mine, of course.]

Why’s that at the end of the story? That deserves a lead of its own.

Remember, fellow sheep, cameras won’t keep the wolves from eating you. It will only make sure that the shepherds can identify which wolf ate you. Also, it’s apparently good for seeing what Little Bo Peep’s doing in her motel room with Christopher Marlowe when they forget to pull the shades.

Ravenwood links to a bit of Neilz Nuze about a common eminent domain abuse, this time in Alabaster, Alabama.

Remember, citizen, that your municipality would gladly trade your home, without your consent, for a dozen empty spaces in a Wal-Mart parking lot. It only has not because no developer has offered. Yet.

Radley Balko must read my blog. The day after I link to the Gordon Gekko speech, he posts a column about how greed drives innovation.

Coincidence?

Fark links to a story about an incident at a party wherein one person spilled a beer upon another, which led to a person getting shot in a rather Orient Express manner–the original shooter passed the gun onto friends who proceeeded to put a slug into the offender.

Man, I am glad the Atari Party never gets out of hand like that. With all those offended people throwing a superball at each other to break down the defenses and destroy the corner icon of the other, someone could put an eye out!

Crap! Should I have included a “spoiler alert” above when I mentioned how Murder on the Orient Express turns out? Man, I suck!

My apologies to my newbie Agatha Christie fan demographic. (Wait, no such demographic exists? To whom will I appeal?)

And a special tip of the hat to the media, who’ve apparently discovered that the national health industry does not routinely order two doses of flu vaccines for every man, woman, child, cat, and dog in the country. So when the media whips the populace into a frenzy because of the dangers of influenza, and then hits them with the headlines

Flu Vaccines Running Out:

You People Gonna Die

it creates a run on the flu vaccines. A run by able-bodies and healthy adults who aren’t risk. Good work, fellows. So then elderly and exteremely unelderly (children) people don’t get a flu shot because Joe Athletic Yuppie got it instead and those at-risk members of the population start dying, the media can run the headlines

Flu Killing People:

Current Administration, Capitalism Accomplices

Oh, the humanity!

Not that I want to plant a seed in your heads, dear journalistic activists, but did you know that the local branch of the bank down the road from you doesn’t have enough money to give to all its depositors if they all came at once? That’s right. Why don’t you run a headline like

Banks Short of Cash:

They Don’t Have Your Money

It’s your duty to bring this to the attention of the public. They have a right to know about scarcity and allocation without understanding the reason why so they can decide to panic mindlessly as needed.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this oversight.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports on the Ricky Clemons scandal at University of Missouri, and relates this anecdote about Ed Stewart, an assistant athletic supporter or something:

“Ed come home, every time he come home, he be like, ‘Them crackers shaking. They going crazy. They don’t know what to do. They shaking. They can’t talk to Ricky. They’re like some crackheads running around there.'”

How sweet. He lets out some racial epithets, and the johnking St. Louis Post-Democrat publishes it.

Heaven forbid a white person say any six letter word that begins with n, ends with r, and has a double consonant in it. Were I to say I like Nutter Butters, certain segments of the population think I am deni-oppressing not only members of a different race, but the women therein.

Where’s the sensitivity for my easily-bruised feelings? Why are cracker, gaijin, bleach blood, and haole allowed and nigger isn’t?

Rhetorical question. It’s because we’re crackers and deserve the abuse. I matriculated with a degree in English. I learned these things in college.

Johnk you, Robert Roeper. You’ve ruined my day again by asserting in your Chicago Sun-Times column that:

Actress Joey Lauren Adams, the squeaky-voiced girlfriend in “Big Daddy” and the Amy of “Chasing Amy,” was arrested Friday in San Diego on suspicion of drunken driving after she allegedly kept running into a curb in a gas station. She’s 38, and how did Joey Lauren Adams get to be 38?

It’s a lie. It must be a lie. How can the women I lusted for in my age group be nearing forty?

So Senator John Kerry has launched the f-bomb:

“I voted for what I thought was best for the country. Did I expect Howard Dean to go off to the left and say, ‘I’m against everything’? Sure. Did I expect George Bush to f – – – it up as badly as he did? I don’t think anybody did,” Kerry told the youth-oriented magazine.

Oooh. He’s young, hip, and aggrieved, and has used this word undoubtedly only after his advisors told him it was okay. Some people might disagree with the leader of the free world using the f-word, but I got no problem with it; I’m from the North Side, wherein the f-word was a part of my vocabulary in the third grade and in frequent rotation therein (much to the disgust of Danny H, my sophisticated fourth grade friend).

No, what bothers me is that Kerry deploys it against a sitting president. I expect that’s how he would be as a president, too, a stretch just inside the limit of my vast and fertile imagination. He’d save his wrath for internal opponents, and people who disagreed with his policies. Not against external threats or the pompous politicos and despots who would like to lay low our very civilization.

So if a leader’s going to display controlled psychopathy with the f-word, I’d rather he use it in appropriate places. In the imperative tense, such as to the United Nations, to Little Kim, to Jack Chirac. Or as an alternate pronunciation for the unvoiced labiodental fricative in the names of Arafat or Kofi. These uses of the f-word I could support.

But for JFK the lesser, I would offer the word in its imperative reflexive, but he prompts me to a North Side Stream of Cussingness, which is a stream of common swear words, grouped and repeated, not in a particularly clever fashion, but with feeling.

Neil Steinberg, in his Friday column, examines how nations review their own histories and concludes that the United States owes no apology for dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

He begins:

There is a museum in Tokyo dedicated to Japan’s ample history of warfare. But if you visit the plainly named Military Museum, you will find no reference to the grotesque medical experiments the Japanese army conducted in World War II or the sex slaves it kidnapped. The Rape of Nanking, when rampaging Japanese troops raped and murdered hundreds of thousands of Chinese, is airbrushed into the “Nanking Incident” and the facts are said to be uncertain. Civilian deaths aren’t mentioned at all until the Americans begin firebombing Tokyo in 1944.

This is par for the course. In Japanese textbooks the relentless quest of military domination that so marked that nation’s conduct in the 20th century gently morphs into a brave struggle for independence against a hostile world.

Nor is the museum a relic of the equivocating past. It opened just last year. “The museum’s jingoism begins in the very first room,” wrote Howard French in the New York Times. “There, a saber adorned with gold braid, an ancient relic from the Imperial Palace guard, hangs, dramatically lit, above a block of text glorifying 2,600 years of independence, secured by valiant warriors against unnamed invaders.”

Click the link and consume the entire column.

Drudge links to a story that Cracks in Earth’s Defenses Let Space Storms In.

Time to start a pool: what industry will the environmentalists target for this one?

The obvious answer, all, is not allowed, since that represents kind of a metaopponent for environmentalists. No fair choosing civilization, either.

I was going to fisk Robert Cohen’s latest column, but it’s too time consuming to refute this bad Santa’s columns for no pay. However, I do want to snark about this bit:

The use of George W. Bush as a role model for a Democratic presidential aspirant is both novel and troubling. Bush, after all, is Mr. Secrecy. His White House — actually, it’s ours — is virtually hermetically sealed. We still do not know who Vice President Cheney consulted in drawing up the administration’s leave-no-energy-company-behind energy bill, and there is the little matter of our still not knowing why the administration went to war to rid Saddam Hussein of weapons he did not have. It is — shhh — a secret.

My snarkage:

• Leave-no-energy-company-behind energy bill? Come on, Dicky, this administration left their oil buddies at Enron behind, didn’t they? Oh, never mind. I cannot talk sense into you. I better just call you Dicky again to elevate this conversation to its proper depth.
• not knowing why the administration went to war to rid Saddam Hussein of weapons he did not have? Come on, that’s so cliché, and a lying cliché at that. Are you (a) really that simplistic in your analysis of foreign policy, or (b) dumbing it down because you think your readers are that simplistic about foreign policy? Which is worse?

  Actually, I’d like to point out that “administration” and “weapons” still have more than one syllable. Just in case you think the American public disagrees with you and yours because they just don’t understand! You can still make it dumberer for them.

I keep asking myself why I bother to try to read things with which I disagree since they make me so angry. Life’s too short. I should stick to pulp fiction.