Category: News

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.)

The President is to speak. Well, he was to speak at 9:30 CDT, but I’m waiting.

The word is he’s going to announce the death of Osama Bin Laden. Say what you will.

President John McCain would have eaten Bin Laden’s heart on the live feed. I can’t wait to see what Obama says.

10:04: How triumphant will it be if Osama Bin Laden died of old age?

10:07: If Osama Bin Laden died of old age, wouldn’t you, as a Taliban, throw a couple grenades on him and drag the smoking wreckage to the Americans to claim the reward?

10:08: Yeah, I’m facile and cynical, but personally, I like my thoughts better than Geraldo on Fox going, “Uh, uh, uh, the son of a bitch (I am tough! I curse on Cable TV!) is dead!” and the guys on CNN going, “This, after 8 years of failure and 2 years of earnestly leading from behind resulting in resolution (not triumph or victory, we’re above that!”

10:12: I planned to spend the last hour reading. Now, I’m listening to a Washington Post photographer talking on C-SPAN about taking pictures. The President’s delay is elevating me.

10:14: Remember when President Bush interrupted our nights to say he had Saddam Hussein? Frankly, I caught it on the morning news after a Christmas party, and President Bush spoke on Sunday morning about it. We didn’t get the “Here’s a big announcement on Sunday night. Hold the wire!” thing.

Makes me wonder what news Monday will bring about other things.

10:18: Fortunately, the adrenaline has worn off in the 49 minutes since the President was supposed to speak, and the speculation has gone from (personally) uh-oh to the Osama Bin Laden, yesterday’s villain, has been captured. Now, I hope I can stay awake until the President speaks. Once he starts, though, all bets are off.

10:22: I sent the link to this liveblog to Instapundit. Considering that I am timing out writing to the database when I try to update this post for my own echochamber, I daresay it will all fall down if I get an Instalanche.

Sorry, Trog, but Danica’s sponsor does me wrong sometimes.

10:27: Just checked in on Fox News. Geraldo is still asking the only sober Fox person qualified for live broadcast to ask him what he thinks the president should say.

Me, I think he will say, “Let me be clear: On one hand, there are some people who say that my predecessor failed. Some people say it was impossible. I have done it.”

10:29: Did the President mean 10:30 CST because so many swing states are in the Midwest?

10:31: Maybe we should have put Petraeus in charge of the CIA years ago. The man, and his reputation, get things done.

10:33: In the past, when I live-blogged, I had a second computer (a Macintosh) running live feeds so I could post and keep up. In the second decade of the 21st century, I’m playing Civilization IV in another window and am going to paste it to the Dutch in just a second here. I’ll be kinda upset when the president drops in to take credit for the efforts of 10 years of American military men.

10:34: Maybe it’s just that the President doesn’t have to go to work in the morning.

10:35: When I was a boy, this was time to watch Dr. Who.

10:36: Osama Bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaida? Kinda like claiming that the Tea Party is astro-turf, hey?

10:36: The White House feed is offset, so he’s not looking at the camera. Like Michelle Bachmamn’s response to a previous speech. Wonder if it will make SNL.

10:38: Well, he thanks the military. Good.

10:39: HE DID IT! He made Leon Panetta do it. But he did it.

10:40: President Obama is more butch than President Clinton, who pulled back at the last minute. Rock on! Maybe he should launch airstrikes against the leader of a foreign country under the auspices of the … and wait a minute….

10:41: It’s a good speech. I hope it doesn’t essentially throw Pakistan under the bus.

10:43: I wish this guy was president.

10:44: Except for the laundry list of things that we can put our minds to, as long as they’re as easy as killing one man.

Recap: Well, that was a very good speech. If George W. Bush had said it, I would have believed he meant all of it.

However, if “unity” means “we celebrate together the military accomplishments of this nation but submit to the programs of Washington that I dictate,” I’m still going to pass. There was a day when the Federal government did sort of hew to that protect us from foreign enemies abroad but let us drill for oil on our land and hope to strike it rich and let us take whatever means we think is necessary to provide for our own health, but those days have passed in the last two years.

Crikey, couldn’t he have called a press conference for tomorrow?

I’m afraid for a Monday morning document dump now.

A couple dry springs and a couple wet springs like this one will produce an average rainfall that no year actually meets, which will be further proof that Washington, New York, or the Hague needs to control more of your life to support a statistical abstraction.

Exchange incandescent bulbs for CFL bulbs April 16:

The Partnership for Sustainability is partnering with Harry Cooper Supply to offer a one-to-one compact fluorescent light bulb exchange on Saturday, April 16.

Families can bring up to five incandescent bulbs to trade for up to five CFL bulbs. Fifteen-watt CFLs are equivalent to 60-watt light bulbs, but use 75 percent less energy and last five times longer.

Except, of course, I’ll run it the other way.

I just replaced a dead 100-watt incandescent bulb in the floor lamp that provides illumination for my reading station with a 60-watt bulb in to prepare for the new Pelosi Dim Age, and I don’t mind telling you, it sucks. Since it’s a floor lamp, it’s what the greens might think of as a Confined Mercury Release Program, where the poor, innocent Hg raped from the bosom of Mother Gaia (don’t ask about the inconsistent metaphor. Consistency, the greens maintain, is a hobgoblin of little minds) is returned to the earth from which it sprung when someone or somecat knocks over the floor lamp containing a fluorescent bulb. So I’ll have to keep it stocked with incandescents as long as I can of diminishing yield until I am forced to read by candelight.

Man, I need incandescence. Even if I have to barter for it in the post-Obamalyptic world of 2014.

Apparently, some New York public employees have misplaced some public property:

Officials have closed the Reptile House at New York’s Bronx Zoo after a poisonous Egyptian cobra disappeared from an enclosure that’s separate from the animal exhibits.

If they don’t find the cobra in the pocket of a dead man lying just outside the gates, you know what they need to do as well as I do: Open the honey badger cages. And get somewhere safe.

(Warning: salty language in the video below.)

You know what? If DARPA is not developing cybernetic assault honey badgers and is wasting its time on driverless tanks, it is doing the nation and national security a great disservice.

(Link seen on Ace’s sidebar.)