Category: News

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.)

It made a lot of goofy left wing nutjobs insanely rich. Of course, if they hadn’t had stock options, they would have been insanely middle class, being left wing nut jobs and all.

You know, if my start-up company experience had left me with fifteen million dollars, do you think I would be talking to a grief counselor about it? Heck, no, I’d be refusing to let Bob Cratchit throw an extra log on the fire. You know why? Because I am a capitalist. I like making money with money.

Imagine, cutting your own children out of your legacy to better a foundation or a charity! Egads!

I can only hope we get to see some of these unhinged (I mean “enlightened and philanthropic”) stock option millionaires pulled naked from their pickup trucks someday.

A schizophrenic article in today’s Chicago Sun-Times describes the steps New York has taken to drastically cut its crime rate and how Chicago, which is now less safe than New York, can apply the same methods, just not so harsh.

We start with a success anecdote from New York:

BROOKLYN, N.Y.–Ric Curtis used to watch from his window as dogs fought to the death in an empty lot across from his apartment.

Now the cheering gamblers and snarling pit bulls are gone and the lot has become a tiny, gated park with trees and shrubs.

The shootings, robberies and drug dealing that plagued the corner are mostly gone, too.

“When we first moved here in 1991, we put the baby to sleep on a mattress on the floor,” Curtis said. “We worried about a bullet coming through the window. Now we have two daughters and they sleep in bunk beds.”

In this gritty Brooklyn neighborhood called Brownsville, crime rates have fallen at a stunning rate in the last 10 years. In 1993, 74 people were murdered here. Last year, only 16 people were killed.

Hooray! Kids in bunk beds. But wait! Not everyone is happy:

To New Yorkers like Curtis in the city’s toughest neighborhoods, the streets seemed to get safer overnight. To others, like developer Bill Webber of the tony Upper West Side, the change was more gradual, and in some ways not as welcome.

“Of course, it’s because of Giuliani,” Webber said. “Sure, with my long view over 30 years here, I think the neighborhoods have become more secure…. In Times Square, the seamier elements have been driven away, like the peep shows. But some of us in New York do not think this is progress. I miss some of the grunge. If you take some of the friction out of urban life, it becomes less interesting.”

That’s right, people who sell property in expensive neighborhoods miss the texture of the gritty life-and-death struggles in the city. Struggles that occur in other neighborhoods, which inflate the value of his holdings in safe neighborhoods. That’s the other side.

No, wait, there’s another side:

He [a criminologist] came across “Hamp,” a 62-year-old addict. Hamp told Curtis that NYPD’s zero-tolerance policy has hit the neighborhood hard.

“They’ll bust you for the least little thing,” he said, standing in a trash-strewn parking lot. “They used to come out and say, ‘Good morning, how you doing, Hamp?’ Now they look at you like a piece of s—.”

Addicts like Hamp scrape together enough money to buy their heroin through a variety of hustles. They work as prostitutes, sell small amounts of drugs, and even sell the needles they get free from needle exchange programs.

“It’s been driven underground,” Hamp said. “The police will no longer tolerate addicts shooting up outside in parking lots and on park benches…. Right after Giuliani initiated it, they started going after open cans of beer and loitering.”

Over the past decade, Curtis said, New Yorkers have become less tolerant of criminals and more likely to call the cops.

That’s right, zero tolerance hurts criminals. It’s a pretty discriminatory practice, wot?

Don’t worry, Chicago criminals, because the Chicago city government is only wasting tax payer dollars to study New York policing methods. It won’t actually implement them:

But Cline and Crowl came to believe the New York strategy was not a perfect fit for Chicago. It would have to be customized to target street gangs–a much bigger source of crime in Chicago than in New York–and to maintain a reservoir of goodwill between Chicago police and the public.

Remember, it’s all about the feelings. Furthermore, the academics from respected Loyola University intone:

Arthur Lurigio, head of the criminology department at Loyola University in Chicago, said Chicago would be wise not to simply copy New York’s strategy.

“Chicago would have to be very selective in choosing elements of the New York model,” he said. “It does not make sense to import models of policing. Order and maintenance policing–the kind they do in New York–is effective if it is not too heavy-handed and construed as harassment.”

Lurigio said he would like to research whether complaints against New York cops have skyrocketed during the crackdown on crime.

“That’s part of the ‘New York miracle’ that does not become public,” he said. “I have a feeling there is an interesting story there.”

Whew! For a minute there, it looked as though Chicago was going to become safer, but fortunately, the Chicago city police are apparently more interested in public relations and possibly listening to nattering academics who make a living out of finding “an interesting story there” whether “there” is a Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the interesting story is “homoeroticism among heterosexual minority women” or there is “This city where children are killed in murderous crossfire” and the interesting story is “the pigs are mean.”

Slate magazine urinates on a grave. Again. Most disappointing, it’s Christopher Hitchens relieving himself of some pent-up hostility this time.

Bob Hope might not have been laugh-out-loud, paradigm shifting, sticking-it-to-The-Man funny, but he was warm and amusing, eliciting a chuckle or two.

Remember, this is the second time I have taken them to task for disrespecting the dead. The first was Strom Thurmond. Guys, it’s one thing to disagree with someone when they’re alive, but leave your spite and your dismissive wit at the door of the funeral parlor, okay? Bob Hope was not Uday or Qusay.

(Link seen at Andrew Sullivan’s.)

Today, on FelonyWatch, we visit lovely Bloombertopia, where Augusta Kugelmas, pigeon lover, threw birdseed at an overzealous and power-mad park volunteer who wanted to stop Augusta from feeding the birds. Augusta has been charged with third degree assault.

FindLaw.Com indicates that this is not yet a felony in New York:

S 120.00 Assault in the third degree.

A person is guilty of assault in the third degree when:

1. With intent to cause physical injury to another person, he causes such injury to such person or to a third person; or
2. He recklessly causes physical injury to another person; or
3. With criminal negligence, he causes physical injury to another
   person by means of a deadly weapon or a dangerous instrument.

Assault in the third degree is a class A misdemeanor.

Hopefully, an enlightened politico on his or her way up will soon recognize the danger thrown birdseed poses and will bump this up to a felony.

I’m Brian J. Noggle with FelonyWatch.

Charter Communications announced on its investor conference call that it’s going to raise the rates for its Charter Pipeline cable modem offering because it can.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch story says:

Charter Communications Inc. is considering raising the price for its high-speed Internet service and eliminating its slowest-speed service to “extract more revenue” from its markets, Chief Executive Carl E. Vogel told analysts Thursday.

“High-speed data has been a wonderful business for us,” Vogel said.

It’s the most profitable product as well as the one requiring the least capital expense for Charter to deploy.

That’s right, little lambs, Charter needs a new pair of woolen socks, so give it up. It’s not passing on increases in its costs. It’s just extracting revenue from you.

Meanwhile, the Noggle household happily continues to pass on any Charter offerings.

Today’s Washington Post has a story about the New Zealish guy who’s doing a complete ASCII art remake of Star Wars. Unfortunately, the author makes the astonishing claim:

Anyone who’s ever come near a computer knows how to create little text “emoticons,” such as a sideways smiley face :-) or a winking face ;-), but Jansen has taken this idea to extravagant, or possibly insane, extremes. He’s tapped out whole “Star Wars” tableaux — hyper-driven spaceships, storming Storm Troopers, the famous bar scene — with nothing but dots, dashes, parentheses, asterisks and what-have-you.

Simon Jansen, the artist, is not taking emoticons to a whole new level. ASCII art is not an extension of AOL-inspired colonic stupidity. By making that claim, the author is denying we old-time geeks of our culture and heritage and represents a great deal of insensitivity duly worth of italics and sometimes bold!

After all, ASCII art has been around for much longer than AOL. Am I the only one who remembers Color 64 BBSes, with their medium res ASCII animations, and St. Louis’s own Dave Hartmann?

Techdirt links to a story wherein Snopes.com gets props for debunking the ‘Bambi Hunt’ story. Bravo, Snopes!

I have been a fan of Snopes for almost five years (since I worked at my first “sit down in front of a computer” job). I use them as a resource to debunk e-mail forwards that I get and just to keep abreast of the latest foolishness on the Internet.

Bravo, David and Barbara Mikkelson! You’re better than the World Book, werd.

Look for the Snopes.com IPO coming soon to a new-and-improved Internet bubble near you!