Category: News

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.)

Pud‘s linking to a story in which Abercrombie and Fitch are claiming ownership on the number 22 on clothing. More to the point, American Eagle Outfitters shouldn’t be allowed to use it, because Abercrombie and Fitch were the first to devise the addition of eleven and eleven. Perhaps both Abercrombie and his faithful henchman Fitch were polydactyl and each had six fingers on his left hand, so 22 is an important sum for ANF.

But if the next intellectual property grab is going to be numbers, alphabetical characters, or glyphs, I right now want to stake my claim on the exclamation point (!). Back off, you hosers, it’s mine!

The wonderful exclamation point, known to some as a bang (translated from the German “nicht”), is not just a character, it’s a way of life. !me, !now.

!funny to the non-geeks in the readership, but who cares? Any time they’re excited and say, “I love you!” in a love note, I’m suing. Werd.

(Apologies to Leslie Fish whose filk song “The Gods Aren’t Crazy (They’re Higher Than Kites)” produced the headline, and to my dear readers, who won’t find the song’s lyrics online and would be hard pressed to find the song on CD or cassette.)

Fark points to a story about the wonderful world of coincidences, and how the laws of probability indicate that every billion or so tries, a billion-to-one event will occur.

It’s only old Pan, and he’s crocked to the gills.

Meanwhile, at the decaying center of the patchwork of municipalities, the City of St. Louis (which is not itself a part of St. Louis County due to a bit of short-sighted governmental miserliness before suburban expansion made the county’s tax base a multiple of the city’s) and its Metropolitan Police (known less-than-affectionately by those who have been threatened for jail time for fencing as “Metro Tins”) are cracking down on people who come into urban neighborhoods and sell their product for bags full of money.

That’s right: they’re taking the ice cream man down hard.

Those of us who live in the St. Louis area can easily get inured to the absurdity that passes for politics in the area’s dozens of postage stamp municipalities, where high school drama kings and queens can ply their cliquish fantasies decades beyond graduation. The spectacles tend toward comedies, in the sense that life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel or own land about to be eminent domained for a new Wal-Mart.

Typically, it’s the powerless home owners against the slightly less powerless municipal Powers-That-Pose-To-Be in their own government. However, the regularly-scheduled development brouhaha takes a novel twist when it’s the citizens of neighboring communities who try to dictate development in a neighboring community.

To sum it up in a nutshell for those of you who don’t want to click the link, a tony suburb called Town and Country (whose very name conjures up visions of failed Warren Beatty movies and Lincoln-Mercury minivans) wants to throw in one of those strip malls guaranteed to bring in $2.4 million in sales taxes every year until the next development siphons half or three quarters of the sales next year. However, residents in neighboring communities whose lots abut the development site have annointed themselves to determine what’s best for not their communities, but Town and Country. That land would be better used as a park to raise their property values than anything the duly elected government of Town and Country could approve.

That sets off my special Rant-Sense. You see, it’s bad enough when municipal governments and the fascist power of the majority gets to infringe on the property rights of owners, whether homeowners who don’t want to sell or developers who want to build, but for unelected and un-asked-for people from different communities to start their a-clamoring and a-litigating…. Well, it’s so very wrong and against many principles upon which this country was founded. Self rule. Property rights.

I wonder if these same “activists” think that the United States government should submit to the will of its neighbors before making decisions in Minnesota or Arizona. I’m not sure which would trouble me more: hypocrisy, in which they would say, “Of course not!” or eager belief that a single world government is a good idea, and that Luxembourgers could best determine where to put a Target.

Drudge links to this story in the Washington Post about the two soldiers who some Iraqis had claimed to have captured. The Pentagon, in this story, points out that the soldiers aren’t missing at all.

But the story points out:

LBC broadcast close-ups of the cards: one carrying the name of Capt. Katherine V. Rose of the 142nd Corps Support Battalion from Fort Polk, La., and a Pennsylvania driver’s license with the name Andrew C. Peters, 37. A call to the address on the driver’s license was answered by a person who hung up.

Why in the wide, wide world of sports did the reporter include that sentence? What sort of pavement-pounding (or Internet-searching-and telephoning) petulance prompts someone to point out that he or she got the abrupt brush off when he or she called the family of a serviceman reported as capture by probably psycho enemies? He or she’s probably lucky he or she only phoned; a slamming door might have bruised.

By putting the sentence in the story, the reporter wants our sympathy. He or she was trying to do his or her job, when this person out of Pennsylvania showed a lack of cosmopolitan sensibility and good breeding by refusing to emote publicly for Associated Press. Something our intrepid reporter thinks he or she has, and assumes we share.

Not likely.

Mark Steyn examines how a person’s views on homosexuality are often used to impugn the person’s rational capacity to do some job.

(Link seen via Tim Blair.)

The Chicago Tribune’s John Kass has uncovered the story of a raging pack of Chihuahuas, over 150 strong, on the rampage in California.

Who’s laughing about this horrible force of nature? Probably everyone not in California.

The venerable Chicago Tribune has a story about the dangers of Aspartme.

Of course, aside from the headlines and assertions, the story does indicate:

But does it really cause headaches or, worse, seizures, lupus and multiple sclerosis?

Most experts and studies say no.

Anyone who’s been to Snopes knows that “Warnings about drinking too much diet soda have circulated on the Internet for years” but that the warnings are bogus.

So it’s good to see the Chicago Tribune wasting column inches dignifying these assertions by exploring them (next week’s e-mail undoubtedly will say As scene in the Chcago Tribune!!!).

I am looking forward to upcoming hard-hitting Tribune investigative exposés (what you don’t know might hurt you):

• The health benefits of blooding.
• World is round, Earth not center of universe.
• Disco rocks the house.
• No aether in space.
• They don’t actually live, it was just a movie, learn and obey, citizen.

In today’s Washington Post, Anne Applebaum compares the impolite, overly-subsidized airline industry to the bureaucracies in a totalitarian regime.

She’s right.

In this story about warships that the Germans sunk in World War II to impede the advancing Russians, we find this gem of geographic history:

Fisherman Curovic said some of them were pulled out of the river when Romania and Serbia started building the nearby Djerdap dam 30 years ago.

Granted, I’m not old enough to remember it first hand, but wasn’t there another country abutting Romania at about that spot thirty years ago. This little country called Yugoslavia?

(Link seen on Fark.)

A lottery winner who left more than half a million dollars in his car while he went into a strip club was surprised to find his car broken into. The thief made off with a briefcase containing $245,000 in cash and three $100,000 cashier’s checks.

Fortunately for the intrepid “hero” of this story, or at least its “victim,” that sort of money looks like mob or drug money to a common thief; whoever stole it ditched it pretty quick.

John Kass of the Chicago Tribune has uncovered (registration required) a shocking case of child labor in Chicago.

Fortunately, the Illinois Department of Labor has stepped in and used its Powers of Discretionary Persecution Prosecution to punish the grandmother who paid her grandchildren in token money or candy to wash the window of her resale shop.

Coming next: an all-out assault on parents who expect their offspring to do chores for their allowances. Undoubtedly, the parents, like the state, should just dish out money for nothing.

One more thing to worry about when you get bitten by an alligator: They can transmit the West Nile virus.

Keep that in mind the next time one has you in the “death roll.”

(Link seen on Drudge.)