Category: News

Missouri Department of Transportation, November 10, 2004, after a Missouri Constitutional amendment throws hundreds of millions of dollars into the Missouri Department of Transportation budget:

Funding from passage of Amendment 3 will provide thousands of miles of smooth roads on Missouri’s most heavily traveled highways, officials with the Missouri Department of Transportation announced today.

MoDOT unveiled the Smooth Roads Initiative, a plan to provide 2,200 miles of smoother pavement, brighter road markings and other safety improvements in three years. The initiative is the first part of a three-part plan to use Amendment 3 funds to improve the state’s highway system. A map specifying the selected roads was included in the announcement.

“Missourians spoke loud and clear when they voted for Amendment 3,” said MoDOT Director Pete Rahn. “By an almost four-to-one margin, they said they’re not happy with current road conditions, and they want them fixed. Starting today, that’s just what we’re going to do.”

Fast forward (or travel one day at a time like the rest of us) to August, 2007, not even three years later, and learn that despite the best efforts of the government, that new money ain’t enough:

Missouri’s top transportation official is canvassing the state talking about a “perfect storm” forming over his department.

Road construction costs are spiking, debt payments are ballooning, and at the same time, fuel taxes are generating slightly less cash and the federal highway trust fund is speeding toward a multibillion-dollar deficit.

Wow, who could have seen that coming?

The more you feed the government, the bigger it gets; the bigger it gets, the more it needs to eat. Ah, who cares about economics and an understanding of a bureaucratic nature. THE BEAST IS HUNGRY!

Mark Steyn enumerates flaws in the justice system. I agree with everything he says.

But I don’t expect that there will be a groundswell to fix these issues since it’s not everyone’s grandmother getting railroaded like everyone’s grandmother is starving and destitute. At least, that’s how Congress characterizes them.

James Joyner looks at a Congressional Budget Office report requested by Congressman John Murtha, D-PA about the feasibility and impact of bringing back the draft, and Joyner wonders:

One wonders, then, what he hoped the CBO study would accomplish.

Well, here it is in Time magazine.

Reports indicate that the government is studying the feasibility of reinstituting the draft. Never mind that, once again, these initiatives/studies/legislative proposals come from Democrats who really only want the word “draft” in the news. The important thing is that the public, helped along by the message-managers in the media, will think this is a George W. Bush / Republican thing.

Behold the beauty of the rhetoric:

So then what about the third, most controversial option — is it time to reinstitute the draft? That option has a certain appeal as the Army fell short of its active-duty recruiting goal for June by about 15%. It is the second consecutive month the service’s enlistment effort has slipped as public discontent grows over the war in Iraq.

Bringing back mandatory service has been the refrain of many who want to put the brakes on the Iraq war; if every young man is suddenly a potential grunt on his way to Baghdad, the thinking goes, the war would end rather quickly. It’s also an argument made by those who are uneasy that the burden of this war is being unfairly shouldered by the 1.4-million-strong U.S. military and no one else.

The war unfairly shouldered by an all-volunteer military. An option put up by the journalist for a problem that he has inflated (military recruiting not meeting its goals).

I don’t think a draft is going to happen; however, what’s important to certain elements within our nation is that grandmothers, mothers, and the young fear it enough to elect the “protectors” of youth. Even those same “protectors” are the ones studying and trying to reinstitute the very bogeyman they slay.

Dollar Falls Against Major Currencies:

The dollar fell to new lows against the euro Wednesday, while the pound soared above $2.05 for the first time in more than a quarter of a century as housing and economic worries battered the U.S. currency.

Well, it’s good news for tourism and manufacturing, as US destinations and products are more affordable on the world stage.

Well, unless you’re as fickle as the media. In which case, it’s all bad, regardless. Dollar goes up, it’s bad; dollar goes down, it’s bad; dollar stays the same, it’s bad.

911 call failed to stop attack that killed man:

Sheriff’s deputies were warned about an increasingly angry confrontation between two groups that led to the death of a 26-year-old Fijian immigrant, but the officers could not find the site, a sheriff’s spokesman said Wednesday.

Wolfgang Chargin of Folsom called 911 on July 1 to report that trouble was brewing between a group of Russian-speaking people and a group of Fijian and East Indian immigrants in a picnic area at Lake Natoma near Folsom.

The call came in to the California Highway Patrol and was transferred to the Sacramento County Sheriff’s dispatcher about three hours before the fatal confrontation. Satender Singh was punched and hit his head when he fell. He died a few days later after being taken off life support.

We’re not talking about a thirty second just out of the nick of time thing here. Three hours after the call the violence occurred.

Now, think about those response times when you’re in an emergency. Who’s going to respond faster, an emergency call switched between different law enforcement agencies, or your twitchy finger?

In this article, an attorney for Trader Joe’s doesn’t want to be insulting as he defends the chain’s obvious trademark infringement on Papa Pallermo’s well-known (to people who listen to Milwaukee Admirals broadcasts or Internetcasts) brand:

As you are aware, Palermo is a prominent city in Sicily, Italy, having a style of pepperoni pizza distinctive to the region.

Erm, yes, of course I knew that. Where’s Wikipedia when I need it?

Of course, this settlement will only last until the EU gets its way and prominent European locations are treated as trademarks when it comes to foodstuffs, but hey, you win the ones you can.

After enough time has passed that the Virginia Tech shooting is fading from collective memory, Marquette University President Robert J. Wild, S.J., pens a column for Marquette magazine just in time to frighten the incoming freshmen (except the psycho ones packing heat, of course). In it, he details Marquette’s ineffective plan to handle a similar situation, broken down (literally) into phases.

When pandemonium erupts, Marquette will respond thusly:

Phase 1: Meetings:

At the highest level of response, a crisis team with representatives from offices throughout campus would immediately assemble and work with local law enforcement and emergency management agencies. At every level our crisis plan calls for utilizing all available means of communication, including e-mail, the university Web site, university voice mail, Access TV message boards, postings in buildings and other tools as needed.

Well, I guess he only enumerates the highest level of response, which is meetings and communication. But don’t worry. Marquette offers other nuggets of safety. I’ll tick off a few for you here:

• Friendly Public Safety staff:
  

  >We also have an outstanding Department of Public Safety. Not only do these men and women patrol around the clock our campus and surrounding neighborhood, they also through their daily interactions work to develop a relationship of trust with our students, faculty and staff.

• Electronic surveillance equipment:
  

  In addition, Public Safety commanders have at their disposal in a crisis situation first-rate technology that includes an electronic system to lockdown instantaneously most academic buildings. Furthermore, this summer we will unveil a new command center equipped with cameras that allow us to monitor the campus area for suspicious activities.

• Good old fashioned Kumbaya:
  

  However, the Jesuit tradition of cura personalis or “care for the individual” provides us with greater freedom to build a campus environment that nurtures students in a holistic manner, intellectually, physically, emotionally and spiritually.

Nothing about arming up or allowing legal weapons on campus.

So I guess the hide behind the fat guy is just implied, because once you start inserting the phrase “a suicidal man with a gun” into many of the sentences in his letter to the Marquette community, you realize how silly and, ultimately, ineffective the measures will prove if a Virginia Tech sort of incident erupts in Cudahy Hall.

But the survivors will have access to a crack team of grief counselors, no doubt. Try to live through any rampage if only for that.

Israeli security firm reports huge spike in PDF spam:

Israeli security firm Commtouch Software Ltd. is warning of a massive surge in Portable Document Format spam over the past 24 hours.

According to estimates by the company, about 10% to 15% of all spam over the past day or so has been in the form of PDF messages. “Given the fact that these messages are nearly four times bigger than standard spam messages, this increases overall global spam traffic by 30% to 40%,” said Rebecca Herson, senior director of marketing at the Israel-based company.

So far, the outbreak has involved 14 billion to 21 billion PDF unsolicited messages and shows no signs of slowing, Herson said. >

Lucky me, I must have been on the beta test list, since I’ve been getting this crap for over a week.

On the other hand, if I am on the spammers’ friendlies list, maybe there’s time for me to make a killing in Vision Airships before it goes from 1.9 cents a share to 2.8 cents a share.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel gets its outrage on when it finds that sometimes complex weighing mechanisms falter and don’t weigh precisely, and when these fail between inspections, they deliver faulty measurements to the benefit or detriment of consumers. But the Journal-Sentinel goes nuts on it since it can get a WATCHDOG REPORT out of a hot-button contemporary issue like gas:

When it comes to buying gas in Wisconsin, you don’t always get what you pay for.

A Journal Sentinel [sic] analysis of nearly 60,000 gas pump inspections shows that more than 2,000 pumps delivered a different amount of fuel than the meter registered in the past two years.

Yeah, well. That’s about a 3.3% failure rate. Thanks, Journal-Sentinel, for your analysis that probably meant you read a department of weights and measures report.

The Journal-Sentinel piece is long on its own flabbergasted outrage, but doesn’t really have anything but that. What’s the solution? Twice a year inspections by the official standards keepers? Mandating the gas stations and their evil overlords Big Oil invent failure-proof pumps? No answer needed–only interviews with outraged consumers.

A more compelling story would be an indictment of how differences in air pressure and temperature affect the actual gas in a gallon. However, understanding Boyle’s Law and explaining it to daily newspaper readers is beyond the ken of contemporary journalists; reading summary tables in government reports and conducting man-on-the-street interviews, however, remains in the sweet spot of the modern journalist skill set.

No word yet on whether Journal-Sentinel WATCHDOGS will figure out that most times when you buy meat at the grocery store, you’re paying for the tray and the cellophane wrap if the meat clerk forgets to or out of haste omits to use the pricing scale’s tare feature. But that’s not an attack on BIG OIL, and those grocery stores still advertise with the local daily.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is beside itself as land developers lose some in Centene’s giving up its attempt to build a new company headquarters by condemning properties in that slum of Clayton. In this case, the Post-Dispatch quotes those who worry about the impact the rule of law and right to private property will have on the region:

Jim Koman, president of Koman Properties, a Clayton-based development company, said developers are watching the situation closely “to figure out if Centene was still interested in Clayton or would pursue other markets.

“My personal hope and wish is that Centene stays within the metro area so at least the region will retain the jobs,” Koman said. “All businesses and developers look towards pro-development communities and municipalities, no matter where they are located.”

That implies that the region might lose jobs because the government wouldn’t let the company strongarm other property owners out of their rightful property at Centene’s behest.

On the other hand, the Post-Dispatch highlights a development setback for a property owner that acquired properties by buying them from their owners:

Only one developer would have qualified for the tax credit: Paul McKee, who has amassed large parcels of vacant property in north St. Louis.

Remember McKee? The Post-Dispatch apparently decided it couldn’t abide this Republican land accumulator in the city. Hey, I think Blunt did the right thing in vetoing tax credits for developers who probably have good enough cash flow and credit to start with (or they should be in another business).

But the St. Louis Post-Dispatch doesn’t have a consistent opinion on land development companies in their quest for government handouts; it seems as though it prefers those developers who forcibly seize lands through eminent domain “for the public good” over those developers who buy lands secretively for their own profit.

And that makes me see red, if you know what I’m saying.

Good news of a sort for this fellow; prosecutors are dropping half of the charges:

Prosecutors on Thursday dropped four of eight first-degree murder counts against a suburban Chicago man accused of killing his wife and three children, saying they were focusing their case.

So now the first degree murder counts line up with the actual number of victims. Some common sense prevails at the D.A.’s office.

Here’s a fellow who thinks suburban development is over and that the American public doesn’t know it yet:

I get lots of letters from people in various corners of the nation who are hysterically disturbed by the continuing spectacle of suburban development. But instead of joining in their hand-wringing, I reply by stating my serene conviction that we are at the end of the cycle — and by that I mean the grand meta-cycle of the suburban project as a whole. It’s over. Whatever you see out there now is pretty much what we’re going to be stuck with. The remaining things under construction are the last twitchings of a dying organism.

The remainder of his screed and, from what I can tell from a quick glance, his blog go on about the unwashed masses and their desire for space, and he attributes all that growth, all misguided (by someone other than a smart fellow like him or his correspondents) public policy, and foreign policy to OIIIIIIL.

American expansion, of which suburban expansion is the latest and most myopically pooh-poohed by those who look down upon single family homes, starts before even Manifest Destiny. People who came to America came here to escape crowding or busybodies telling them how to live their lives. Most of America still doesn’t like those things. Those who do are welcome to the decaying urban cores and the artificial mixed use developments in the suburbs.

Instead of recentralization into urban cores, I expect we’ll find alternate means of transportation to and from our strip malls with their excessive retail space (more retail space = more choice for consumers, but some people don’t think average people need choices; those elites think the average person needs diktats). With the Internet and technology serving to decentralize workplaces (and even provide decentralized shopping), I think the trend toward stretching out and thinning population density will continue.

But don’t tell those elites who want to live in crime-ridden, mismanaged urban centers that. They need their pipe dreams.