Category: News

In 2010, I said:

I have a great new idea for a non-profit organization, and I’m going to get in on the ground floor and get rich. My stunning idea:

An Urban Chicken Rescue Organization.

Throughout Missouri and probably the nation, people are deciding that they want to raise chickens in their suburban and urban backyards (see stories in St. Louis and Springfield). These people are doing it as part of an environmental nutbar fad and they’re doing it with a bit of Internet research and without any experience in farming or treating livestock qua livestock instead of livestock qua food-providing-pet.

Yesterday’s New York Times says:

Hindus regard the chicken as a vessel for evil spirits. The Chinese cook them to honor village deities. But here, chickens are a symbol of urban nirvana, their coops backyard shrines to a locavore movement that has city dwellers moving ever closer to their food. And the increasingly intimate relationships have led some bird owners to make plans for their chickens’ unproductive years. Hence a budding phenomenon: urban chicken retirement.

While many Portlanders still pluck aging birds for the broiler, others seek a blissful, pastoral end for them. Because most chickens lay the majority of eggs early in life, and can live about 10 years, the quest for a place where chickens can live out their sunset years has brought a boom to at least two farm animal sanctuaries and led Pete Porath, a self-described chicken slinger, to expand the portion of his business that finds new homes for unwanted birds.

You want to know how I augured this two years ago? No, you don’t.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link again as two years ago, Ms. K.

The price of gas is down four cents after remaining at $3.59 a gallon here in Springfield for weeks.

The Associated Press and some scribe at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch are thrilled with the happy days ahead:

The worst appears to be over. Gasoline prices are going down.

After a four-month surge pushed gasoline to nearly $4 per gallon in early April, drivers, politicians and economists worried that prices might soar past all-time highs, denting wallets, angering voters and dragging down an economy that is struggling to grow.

Instead, pump prices have dropped 6 cents over two weeks to a national average on Friday of $3.88. Experts say gasoline could fall another nickel or more next week.

Drivers might also get to say something they haven’t since October 2009 _ they’re paying less at the pump than they did a year ago.

“It’s nice, much more manageable,” said Mark Timko, who paid less than $4 per gallon Wednesday in the Chicago suburb of Burr Ridge, Ill., for the first time since March. “I wasn’t sure how high they were going to go this year.”

On the other hand, gas prices are still over $3.50 a gallon (locally), which is about double what they were four years ago. Someone who says that $3.99 a gallon is more manageable than $4.05 a gallon is either not very smart or wants to see his name in the paper.

The headline sez: Romney Visits Empty Factory to Mock Obama

The lede sez:

Mitt Romney, shadowing President Barack Obama on the campaign trail, went to the battleground state of Ohio to appear at a shuttered industrial warehouse to dramatize his complaints about the incumbent’s economic policies.

A warehouse is not a factory. Maybe those blue collar locations where things are made and stored/shipped all look the same to a professional journalist or editor. To be fair, the story calls it a warehouse. Only the headline says differently.

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

New treatment for prostate cancer gives ‘perfect results’ for nine in ten men: research.

As Brian Fantana reports, sixty percent of the time it works all the time.

(Link via Instapundit.)

So I was telling the five-year-old about freshwater carnivorous threats to man the other day, one of many such educational conversations we have on a daily basis, and I mentioned that the United States really only has the alligator, since the crocodile is African. We talked about the gar, which is not really a threat, and we talked about the muskie and the northern, which are carnivorous, but not a threat to man. Heck’s pecs, I even brought up the catfish and educated not only my children but also my beautiful wife on Noodling (that is, sticking your hand in a catfish hole and getting the catfish to bite you so you can pull it out of the water hanging from your extremity–my wife didn’t believe me and had to look it up).

Then, because my son is friends with a young man from Brazil, I brought up the piranha.

Speaking of piranha:

Thousands of flesh-eating piranhas have infested a Brazilian river beach popular with tourists, biting at least 15 unwary swimmers.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2062819/I-lost-tip-toe-Thousands-flesh-eating-piranhas-infest-popular-Brazilian-river-beach.html#ixzz1e1CD9A1n

…

Elson de Campos Pinto, 22, who was bitten on Sunday, said: ‘I took a dip in the river and when I stood up, I felt pain in my foot.

‘I saw that I had lost the tip of my toe. I took off running out of the river, afraid that I would be further attacked because of the blood. I’m not going back in for a long time.’

Firefighter Raul Castro de Oliveira told Globo TV’s G1 website: ‘People have got to be very careful. If they’re bitten, they’ve got to get out of the water rapidly and not allow the blood to spread.’

Authorities said the beach would remain open because it is an important draw in Brazil’s Pantanal region, known for its ecotourism.

I have explained to my child that I would not go swimming in the Amazon. I’ll add the Paraguay to my list.

You’re saying, “Hey, Brian, you forgot to tell the child about the Candiru. I didn’t forget; I didn’t bring it up on purpose. Because the father in this situation can talk scientifically, calmly, and dispassionately about the aforementioned piranha, crocodiles, alligators, and so on. But the candiru makes Daddy whimper.

UPDATE Ms. Harris corrects me and tells me that American crocodiles do exist. Be that as it may, if I change my answer know to my child, he will never believe me about anything ever again.

The obvious solution to this dilemma: Poaching party!

To Create the Perfect Machine, Soldiers Build a Robot Out of Robots:

Over at Fort Benning, soldiers at the Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment aren’t waiting for military robot makers to come up with the right mix of robotic capabilities. Putting that military penchant for improvisation into practice, soldiers there are mashing up their military robots to give themselves the capabilities they want, piggybacking one robot on top of the other until they get the right mix of gear.

All right, maybe it’s not so much Voltron as Capsela. But you have to crawl before you walk.

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

In a facile letter to the editor, a Christian of some sort, amid the regular blurrings of doctrine, uncovers the emanations and penumbras of the Ten Commandments:

So, when the conservative politicians say they are going to do away with Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, then as a Christian I must speak out and say this is wrong to bring hardship and shorten the lives of people.

Christians, if you support the conservative movement because of abortion, then I wish to point out that Jesus says nothing about abortion or murder in his admonishment in Matthew, and there are nine other commandments, too. If you cause a person to lose their income and cause a person to lose their way to pay for a doctor you are murdering them.

I say regular blurrings because this fellow talks about the early Christian church, a voluntary organization of like-minded individuals (come to think of it, that describes Christian churches even today) coming together and sharing their goods voluntarily and compares, not contrasts, that with the government’s compulsory behavior, where like-minded or not, individuals must sacrifice their time, talents, efforts, and goods to others who have less for whatever reason (sometimes hard luck, sometimes bad choices) as legitimized by a Rousseauan “Social Contract” foisted on them without their implicit consent.

Oh, yeah, also he says violating 10% of the Ten Commandments is okay, apparently. And then goes onto say that laying someone off from a job is the equivalent of murder.

Strangely enough, in so many interpretations of Christianity, Jesus’s lessons were for all people to behave just as the interpreter does already.

Trog links to a story about the military investigating the possibility of caffeinating meat for soldiers:

An Army lab here is testing a beef jerky stick that . . . contains an equivalent of a cup of coffee’s worth of caffeine to give even the sleepiest soldier that up-and-at-’em boost,” Davenport reported.

Come on, the private sector is already there.

(I knew about Perky Jerky because I’d read this article in Forbes. The link is not important; what’s important, gentle reader, is that you respect me for reading Forbes in print.)

For years, I’ve been sending back unsolicited credit card offers in their own post-paid envelopes to raise the cost of acquisition marginally in hopes these identity theft templates would stop coming, and because I’m petty and juvenile. Now, I see it’s Occupy-Approved Protest:

Well, I guess I’ll start shredding them.

Ah, the naivete of the young. This fellow thinks that this juvenile stunt is somehow going to increase communication with the banks, as they react to what they’re getting in their mail rooms and that the time they spend dealing with roofing shingles in the mail is going to cut down the amount of time bankers spend lobbying and fundraising for Oh-bah-ma! Oh-bah-ma! and the amount of time they spend foreclosing on homes.

Look at your return addresses, children. They do not go to BANK OF AMERICA, WALL STREET, NEW YORK CITY. They go to CREDIT CARD PROCESSING CENTER, SOMEWHERE, NORTH DAKOTA. Where some outsourced mail center is far insulated from the SCREWING THE POOR division you think works in the Manhattan high rises. Lobbying? Also outsourced. So you’re just clogging up the postal system and bothering some low-wage clerk in the cornfields and aren’t bothering the crony capitalists in Manhattan and Washington at all.

But the Occupy movement is all about self-expression, not results. Which is where it differs from the Tea Party and why it won’t have any real impact in a democratic republic aside from the theatre.

(Video seen here.)

This Washington Post chart shows percentages of gun owning households by state, or at least among the 201,881 responses received nationwide. In 2001.

I wonder if anything that would have happened in the last 10 years would have caused those numbers to change.

I also wonder why the Washington Post, which updated this graphic in 2006, used 2001 instead of the 2002 North Carolina survey wherein nationwide gun ownership had jumped from 31.7% to 34.4%.

Noodling around the North Carolina Web site, I see that the North Carolina State Center for Health Statistics dropped firearms questions in 2003 and national survey coverage in 2004.

I wonder why Instapundit posted a link to this chart without comment today.

But I do remind everyone that Christmas is just a couple months away, and guns make excellent gifts. And if the Man tries to tell you that’s straw purchasing, tell them the recipient is a Mexican drug cartel enforcer. That’s not illegal, it’s just thoughtful.

Light speed denialists must be silenced!

Physicists on the team that measured particles traveling faster than light said Friday they were as surprised as their skeptics about the results, which appear to violate the laws of nature as we know them.

…

The team – a collaboration between France’s National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research and Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory – fired a neutrino beam 454 miles (730 kilometers) underground from Geneva to Italy.

They found it traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than light. That’s sixty billionth of a second, a time no human brain could register.

…

“Everybody knows that the speed limit is c, the speed of light. And if you find some matter particle such as the neutrino going faster than light, this is something which immediately shocks everybody, including us,” said Ereditato, a researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Strange how an experimental science, whose results can be tested and proven or disproven, can have the potential for startling, paradigm-shifting upsets, but untestable sciences like climate modeling and evolutionary biology, are somehow infallible through imperfect study with small sample sizes and human interpretation.

The Wall Street Journal must have learned something from reading Troglopundit. Note how on Thursday, it ran a story entitled "Banks Apply Lever to Cash Positions" about….

Well, I’m not versed enough in finance to really understand what it’s about. Cash positions and leverage and interest or something.

What does the venerable newspaper choose to illustrate the concepts in this article?

Danica Patrick.

I may not understand finance, but I understand Danica Patrick. Well, maybe that’s presumptuous. I understand Trog has a thing for Danica Patrick.

We’ve all seen this video:

A lot of people are glomping on how unprepared the MSNBC hostess is to walk into that bit of a gaffe. Yeah, she’s unprepared and looks dumb.

However, more telling to her mindset is that she asks the question to dismiss the opinion of the member of Congress’s opinion; however, when the Congressman answers in such a fashion that his does have the credential to have a valid opinion, she dismisses that, too.

So asking for a credential is only important in so far that it can exclude others. If the other has the proper credential, that, too, is unimportant; the other must be excluded some other way.

(Video seen most recently on Boots and Sabers, but I think I saw it first on Ace of Spades HQ.)

The only reason we ever hear about Coral Gables, Florida, is when they decide (again) to enforce their pick-up truck ban.

2011:

Starting this month, the city of Coral Gables will issue warning notices to owners of pickup trucks who do not park their trucks inside their garages at night.

Since the 1960s, the city has banned people from parking their pickup trucks in their driveways or on city streets from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.

Flashback to 2003 and one of my first blog posts:

In Coral Gables, Florida, you cannot park your pick-up truck on the street or in your driveway between 7 pm and 7 am lest you be mistaken for someone who actually has to work for a living. The city enacted the law in the 1970s to preserve its sense of uniquely fake Mediterranean decorum, to keep property values and tax assessments suitably elevated, or simply to thrash property rights whereever it can, and most of Coral Gables was fine with it until recently.

The pick-up owners have rebelled. Now that pick-ups have evolved from utilitarian cargo haulers to 250 XXL Buses-With-Lidless-Trunks-For-Beds, the pick-up owners think their trucks are no different than SUVs, so the SUVs should be banned from driveways and streets at night. And the powers that fill the city’s coffers with ticket revenue agreed. Dadgum, SUVs are trucks!

History repeats itself, but on a shorter time cycle than Nietzsche imagined.

(Link seen on Dustbury.)

The New York Times uncorked this fact, which I’ve seen repeated elsewhere:

No American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent.

Well, okay. But how many presidents have we since?

13. One of whom has yet to run for re-election.

So the 12 who have include:

• Harry Truman
• Dwight Eisenhower
• John F. Kennedy
• Lyndon Johnson
• Richard M. Nixon
• Gerald Ford
• Jimmy Carter
• Ronald Reagan
• George H.W. Bush
• Bill Clinton
• George W. Bush

Of those, one died in office, so he could not run for re-election (John F. Kennedy for those of you who went to public school and are not a baby boomer).

Here are the election results and the unemployment rate in November of the re-election year:

	Year as Incumbent	Unemployment
Harry Truman	1948	3.8
Dwight Eisenhower	1956	4.3
Lyndon Johnson	1964	4.8
	1968	3.4	Withdrew
Richard M. Nixon	1972	5.3
Gerald Ford	1976	7.8
Jimmy Carter	1980	7.5
Ronald Reagan	1984	7.2
George H.W. Bush	1992	7.4
Bill Clinton	1996	5.4
George W. Bush	2004	5.4

I’ve added LBJ in 1968 since he was sort of eligible to run again but he withdrew before the primaries, so maybe he would count as not winning a second full term in office (although he did win a second term, his first full term, in 1964).

So, who did not win reelection? Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush. That’s three, and it is assured that the unemployment was over 7.2% on election day for those fellows, although in Bush’s case it was coming down. Of course, this statistic does not account for the 1992 candidacy of Ross Perot, who ran on a ticket of more fiscal conservatism than “Read My Lips” Bush.

Why the cutoff at “topped 7.2 percent”? Because in 1984, Ronald Reagan won reelection with that very figure.

By focusing strictly on the unemployment, the New York Times and its repeaters do disservice to other factors, including the mood in the country.

So this factoid is more of a “Huh.” kind of thing rather than something we should accept as a scientific truth.

After kicking in the door in the middle of the night and shooting a veteran 60 times, the police justify execution of a search warrant, the spokesman for the police explains the guy had a picture of a drug figure of some sort:

Mike Storie, a lawyer for the SWAT team, said at a press conference Thursday that weapons and body armor were found in the home as well as a photo of Jesus Malverde, who Storie called a “patron saint drug runner,” according to KGUN.

Lord, love a duck. I have a stack of Wall Street Journals two feet deep (I’m a little behind). I’ve got photos of drug runners, inside traders, international terrorists, and contemporary athletes. What kind of nefarious man am I?

It’s sad that a law enforcement official had to trot that out. Seriously, a “patron saint”? Are we supposed to imagine a shrine with an altar and some candles burning here?

Jeez.

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

Dry run?

Minor delays on BART trains in Oakland Friday morning were apparently caused by an unruly passenger talking loudly about weapons of mass destruction, a passenger said on the microblogging website Twitter.

The police activity started at about 9:15 a.m. and was causing delays of about 10 minutes for trains headed into San Francisco, a BART dispatcher said.

Around the same time, someone named Michelle King posted on Twitter, “on the train to sf; Of the many crazy people, there’s one right now clapping loudly and talking about WOMD,” a reference to weapons of mass destruction.

Devious scenario:

Step 1: Get them to shut down the trains.
Step 2: Passengers back up in the train stations, leading to a very crowded venue.
Step 3: Poofit.

I hope the government has some fiction writers gaming this stuff out instead of keeping them all occupied in the White House information office.

(Link seen Edstapundit.)