Category: News

MSNBC is running a story entitled “What $87 Billion Buys: Instead of a war in Iraq, here’s what America could be getting for its money”. In this remarkable (as I am remarking on’t, werd) piece (of something), the author puts together a list of bullet points that describe things the government could do with $87 billion dollars instead of spending it rebuilding Iraq. In between lists, he inserts some snarky quotes by grabby people who haven’t quite gotten their hands full of your money on their pet projects yet.

Basically, Jonathan Darman, author of this Web Exclusive! says the United States Government could, and should, take that $87 billion dollars and:

• Hire millions more bureaucrats which would then need $87 billion dollars plus cost of living adjustments every
  year from this day forward, or

• Pour millions into the budgets of petty bureaucracies, who know they have to spend the money if they want to get
  it next year, which again means $87 billion dollars a year plus 8- or 10-percent annual increases forever.

The author of the piece obviously attended the remedial mathematical classes required to get a Poli-Sci degree along with our distinguished Congresspeople who have the motto if we have a dollar, we should rent something that costs a dollar a month forever.

(Link seen on Little Green Footballs.)

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is so excited that it’s left a puddle on the floor as it reports that:

“No Firearms” signs at many workplaces and businesses open to the public may be the first outward indication that Missouri has joined the states that allow residents to carry concealed weapons.

Gramercy, that will comfort the goblins. Businesses to rob and assurances of safety to ensure that if you’re a nutbar with a grudge, you can splatter as many co-workers as you want before the police arrive. You know, the guys with guns to stop you.

Time quotes “Mad” Albright:

Frankly, if there was a President Gore, we wouldn’t be in this particular mess.

What mess would we be in? Anyone think it would be less?

(Link seen on Drudge.)

Drudge linked to this story about a home owner in Florida whose house is being stripped from him because he violated the local home owners’ collective by putting up a flag pole. Now that the court wrangling is done, it’s time for some house rustling to pay for the bills.

Whereas everyone else seems to be focused on the “damn commies took away his flag!” aspect, it might be worthwhile to note the deeper erosion of human rights, that is, a property rights. To quote the self-satisfied snake from the home owner’s collective:

West Palm Beach attorney Steven Selz, who represents the homeowners association, said the ruling makes sense.

“There has to be a way to give the association a right to enforce its claims on the property,” he said.

Remember, the homeowners’ collective only has its freedom to infringe upon a man’s land only until the municipality decides your puny property taxes are no match for big box sales taxes, werd, and then you, too, get to ride the slippery slope from the recognition of individual property rights into statist security.

After the last Israeli strike (let’s not call killing a schnucking cancerous criminal killer an assassination for the umpteenth time–learn your etiomology, broadcasters, so perhaps you can stop making yourself look as ignorant as you think we rabble are that you want to educate), Hamas needed something to come out of its mouth when it foamed, so it had to come up with something. So they said:

“Targeting homes is violating all red lines,” the Hamas military wing, Izzedine al Qassam, said in a leaflet distributed in Gaza City. “So the Zionist enemy from today shoulders the responsibility for the targeting of houses and Zionist towers everywhere in occupied Palestine.”

Unfortunately, Hamas has reached the Boogeyman Ceiling. Since Hamas has proven that its capable of killing as many innocent people, especially women and children, as possible and that it likes to do so, it doesn’t have any threats to scare people. After three years of regular-looking unhelpful hardware men spraying ballbearings, fasteners, their fetid entrails, and innocent blood, its probably hard to imagine anything worse than the constant threat of sudden painful death. How does Hamas turn it up a notch? It cannot, it’s the worst possible boogeyman, and the Israelis have nothing to fear but the worst, which is what they’ve had for many years now.

Den Beste shares the sentiments, and says it better. If you’re not reading his every post, you ought to.

The Missouri Legislature this afternoon voted to override Governor B. Holden‘s veto of its bill to allow Missourians who aren’t fatcats or their defenders to carry firearms for self-defense. Here’s the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story.

Or, as Carol Daniel of KMOX Radio “informed” us during the “news” at four o’clock, the legislature got the bare minimum of the two thirds majority.

That’s right, citizens, a scant two thirds of your elected officials have voted to recognize your right to bear arms and to bag your daily goblin limit. These few mouthbreathing outcasts have used due process of law to ram their agenda through the legislature.

But never fear, your self-appointed broadcasters are looking out for you. Just remember to call them next time someone busts through your patio door at three on a Thursday morning. Our phone lines are open!

The British gave up their weapons. Now, they’re going to give up their sovereignty. No vote, just fiat from the prime minister.

The European rulers who ride in their limos, with their entourages, no longer even put on the show of working through the will of their people. Welcome to the 21st century aristocracy, prole, now surrender some of your wages to keep the French elderly cushioned from the horror of their expanding retirement.

(Link seen on Fark. Thanks, Drew, you’ve ruined my day.)

Here in Casinoport, Missouri, one 15 year old said to a bunch of friends, hey, I just cracked myself over the head with a skateboard and it didn’t hurt, I am invincible (or words to that effect). So he asked his friends to help him prove the point, and unfortunately, one of his buddies found an error in the hypothesis by cracking Mr. Invincible’s skull and putting him in the hospital with a severe brain injury.

Authorities, of course, have charged boy #2.

He’s going to reform school for four years, where they’ll eat up a suburban skateboard kid. That’ll fix him. For just being a stupid kid. Crimeney, some of the things my brother, Him Jim, Dim Jim, and I did when we were young would undoubtedly be capital crimes now or threats to Homeland Security, which nowadays includes more than blowing stuff up. I’d discuss some anecdotes, but I am still in my mother’s will. Too much revelation, and the pets’ or vets’ organizations get my cut.

Also, our nation will be safer when being a teenage boy is a felony, so I urge our lawmakers to outlaw it immediately.

In The Skeptic Volume 10, Number 1, Michael Shermer writes in a review of The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of Self:

Alfred North Whitehead once famously quipped that all Western philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. Although Aristotelians would beg to differ, a similar observation may be made that modern theories of the mind are footnotes to Darwin.

As someone who considers himself vaguely Aristotelian (next person to ask me how I am gets that as a response: “Vaguely Aristotelian. You?”), I have to say I have never considered begging or differing with observations that may be made about Darwin.

Heck, no one’s even asked.

On the other hand, I’ll lick any self-important Idealist who wants to tell me that I should be ruled by a class of my betters or that I, as a better, should rule everyone else. If you call a size eleven cheap sneaker applied judiciously to the glutes and occasionally the tensor fasciae latae a footnote, then I guess I’ll have to agree with the poorly-written statement in the quote.

This madness must end! First, they sued Al Franken for using the phrase “Fair and Balanced.” Now Drudge has linked to a story headlined:

Fox attacks girl in her bedroom

Rupert Murdoch must be neutered! Too late? Well, what about hobbled? I read James Fallows’ long, and I thought at the time laughable, clawing at the ankles of an entrepreneur.

It wasn’t until Murdoch’s minions started showing up unnanounced and pulling the pigtails of British schoolgirls that I read the writing on the television!

According to this story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Department of Homeland Security (DOHS!) wants to remove the diamond-shaped placards that display on the sides of trucks that carry hazardous, corrosive, or flammable chemicals. You’ve seen them. They have the esoteric sub-diamonds with numbers that tell you how bad the contents of the truck are when the semi dumps its load on the interstate because the proud mother of a 2001 Girls 7-9 State Champion soccer player swerved into the opposite lane while arguing with her husband on the cell phone whether little Tyler bends it like Beckam or breaks it like Geremi.

You see, those little diamonds tell emergency responders what thickness of rubber to put between themselves and the various oozes and gases when they try to pull Bud, the truck driver, Melissa, the mother, and little Tyler from the green-flaming wreckage. Without those diamonds, the emergency responders either have to resort to taste tests or they have to suit up like they’re invading an Iraqi Chocolate Milk Factory that’s surrounded by barbed wire. These accidents occur with some frequency, you see, because Melissa never learns to just hang up the phone and drive.

But DOHS! thinks that removing these diamonds is a matter of national security. Because, you see, terrorists could see that information! And they could do things with those trucks!

Because these terrorists are spur-of-the-moment guys who see a truck driving through Nevada and say, hey, let’s spill some chlorine!

Without the little diamonds on the side of the truck, the bad men who have been casing the chemical plant for six freaking months will mistake that the tanker truck coming out of the front gates carries nothing but crisp, refreshing (as Mike Shannon alleges) Bud Light, or that the glimmering behemoth bearing the Shell logo carries milk.

Soon, DOHS! will extend the ban to include removing Mr Yuck! from everything under your sink so the Doctor-of-Chemistry-bearing terrorists won’t figure out that mixing a lot of bleach and a lot of ammonia is bad, and then DOHS! will want to strip warnings from cigarette packs because those warnings indicate that lit tobacco emits a colorless, odorless gas capable of killing people in enclosed spaces.

Hey, I cannot blame DOHS! for their efforts; I mean, much of my job is looking busy too, and not every bureacrat can just make up columns of numbers in a spreadsheet to stare at and say, “Mmm-hmmm,” whenever the boss walks by the cubicle door. So keep up the good work, fellows, and keep hiding the pointy things for national security.

You know, the funniest thing in this story about what the Toronto authorities have had to deal with when drivers attempt to “explain” their infractions is that:

The Ontario Provincial Police goes by the abbreviation OPP!

You down with OPP? Yeah, you know me!

Ha hahahahhahasnerk!

Not funny? You’re too old! Or too young, you damn kids!

(Link seen on Fark, of course. Who else besides me and Drew are posting on a holiday?)

CNN’s got a story talking about how The Onion is continuing to thrive. No, check that, it’s TheOnion.com that’s the real story, even though:

Today newspaper ads from its five regional editions still account for 50 percent of the company’s revenue, compared with about 30 percent from Web advertising. (The rest comes from book proceeds, a few thousand subscribers to the paper, and other businesses.)

Huh! So it’s TheOnion.com that’s turning a profit, wot? Somebody with the national press, banging out this story instead of Shakespeare in a room full of colleagues, probably hasn’t seen the ubitquous paper in its stands in Wisconsin, where it’s full of local ads for bands and music venues. Instead, it’s the big time now that it’s on the Internet and important people like him or her can see it.

Sure, I am a little cheesed off, but those sellouts moved out of Wisconsin. Dang them all to New York!

(Link seen on The Volokh Conspiracy.)

Nick Gillespie has identified other bad behaviors students learn from Hollywood. It’s not just smoking, swearing, and fornicating.

The only solution is the simplest one: put out the damn kids’ eyes. For the children!

In an article on TechCentralStation, Ralph Kinney Bennett offers, among other things, architectural advice to thwart truck bombs.

On September 11, 2001, I worked in an office building shared by a United States government office, so I considered the changes in architecture, including setbacks and remote loading docks, that would offer greater safety for workers. However, I also expected a fundamental shift in everyday life following that day, and it’s not happened yet, fortunately.

As long as we remain relatively safe and the danger remains fairly low, underlying infrastructure won’t change, including architecture and law enforcement. Those poor dozens, or hundreds, of people who perish in the isolated attacks are expendable to keep prices low.

Of course, for all the paranoiac I portray, I still live in a suburb of a major city. Were I a committed paranoid, wherein my paranoia where schizophrenic instead of mere neurotic in nature, I would live in Wyoming or Montana with a bunch of guns and dogs instead of a mad-money IT job and a hot wife. Werd.

After several years of hounding, Stephen Hatfill, the most interesting person the FBI has discovered since Richard Jewell, is suing the government for hounding him and effectively hindering his life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without due process.

Good luck.

(Link seen on Drudge.)