Category: News

Overthrow of the Flyovers:

Next up on NPR was a discussion about how all the congressional districts have been gerrymandered so they are either Democrat or Republican. Thus neither party ever makes any real headway. These districts need to be redrawn so they are even. Yeah, like THAT’s ever gonna happen. But, I do have a way that the Democrats can outsmart the Repubs on this one. Ready? Here it is….

Move. Yup, that’s right. Determine how many folks you need to keep on the coasts & in Illinois to maintain a majority. Hold a lottery or something, and the winners get to invade the Heartland and swing the balance of power. Now some states would be easy to overthrow, due to their small population, Wyoming & Montana come to mind. Others, that voted more heavily for Bush, Utah & Oklahoma, would require a larger concentration of the coastal experts to move in, register, vote & move out.

After all, it’s worked for the Libertarians.

(Link seen on Dustbury.)

Police: Teacher, student had sex:

She met her 16-year-old student for sex in cars and at his summer job during a four-week affair that ended when a family pastor turned her in, police and prosecutors say.

Kristen A. Margrif, a 27-year-old English teacher at Kingston High School, faces 15 years in prison on eight counts of sexual contact with the eighth-grader, Tuscola County Prosecutor Mark Reene said.

…The victim was planning to continue attending school in Kingston. It was not clear whether he was entering eighth or ninth grade this fall, Reene said.

Couldn’t she have waited until he reached the age of consent sometime as a freshman in high school?

Although they’ve often annoyed me, I’ve never considered this method of turning off someone else’s car alarm when it goes off after reasonable hours:

A man annoyed by a noisy car alarm fired at least three bullets into a Toyota Camry, silencing the alarm and bringing out police who hauled him away in handcuffs, authorities said.

David Owen Rye, 48, was arrested and booked for investigation of reckless discharge of a firearm and felony vandalism, Sgt. John Adamczyk said. Rye allegedly told officers he grabbed his handgun and went out to put a stop to the car alarm.

However, this mechanism is not recommended, particularly as on of the Nogghicles has a flaky security system that sometimes starts yowling for odd reasons, including some odd sequence/combination of door openings and key placement. I don’t want to die with my car. Thank you.

Man, I don’t know what some of those things are, but how come they don’t get the column inches?

Chavez: U.S. will ‘bite the dust’ if it invades:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told thousands of visiting students that if U.S. forces were to invade the South American country, they would be soundly defeated.

That cinches it. We must invade Valenzuela just to prove that our country is more manly than Hugo Chavez.

I also want to laud CNN for putting this story in perspective:

The U.S. government has strongly denied Chavez’s claims that it is considering military action against Cuba’s closest ally in the Americas.

That’s right, it’s not absurd on it’s face. No, it has been strongly denied by the warmongering American government.

Baldilocks captures a thought I had as well. When the Russians are in trouble with another one of their submarine-anchor conversion projects, who do they call?

In light of the planned war games between Russia and China, it is interesting that President Putin asked the US and the UK to assist in the rescue effort rather than the Chinese.

Well, yeah.

Hopefully, they called us in time for us to help out this time.

Extinct means the same as living in Italy? (Source.)

Bears have been extinct in Switzerland for more than 100 years until one was spotted last week that is believed to have migrated into the country from neighbouring Italy.

Environmental damage seen from shuttle

No word on whether the eagle-eyed spotters can see:

• The peaceful intentions of the Iranian nuclear program.
• The leaker of Valerie Plame’s identity.
• The last member of an individual species or two getting extinctated.
• Karl Rove performing an eldritch, unholy ceremony in Innsmouth to increase his power.
• The dark shadow of American hegemony creeping across the middle east.
• Grand Theft Auto actually altering the brain waves of another youth, inciting him to violence.
• Another shark preparing to attack a tourist in Florida.
• The National Hockey League discussing when to fire Gary Bettman.
• Paula Abdul sitting on her sofa with two empty quart containers of Häagen-Dazs Cherry Vanilla ice cream and a picture of Corey Clark, weeping, and occasionally shrieking, “Why did you do this to me, CC?”
• Robert Novak, stomping around and saying, “Bullshit!”
• A shark in Louisiana preparing to attack pit bull exiled from Denver.
• A saddened-but-following-orders animal control officer in Denver gassing a family pet who couldn’t escape to Louisiana.
• Thousands of world health officials scheming for more budget to combat their predicted avian flu pandemic while some unforeseen mutation of something else entirely is preparing to strike.
• Thousands of people who don’t deserve credit cards filling out the forms proffered them by the credit card agencies who then complain about default rates and raise interest on people who actually pay their debts.

Because those astronauts’ eyes are especially sharp, you know.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

At Q and O, inadvertently suggests a slogan for the Democrats when he says:

I wouldn’t trust the Democratic Party with national security, for instance, any farther than I could comfortably spit a rat.

The Democrats: You can trust as with national security as you can uncomfortably spit a rat.

I missed this last autumn when it appeared in the Washington Post as an advertisement funded by one man, but here is:

You’re a Republican???

In today’s America, ask a growing number of high school and college students; their teachers and professors; the self-anointed media elite and/or hard working men and women of all ethnicities, the question, “What is a Republican?”, and you’ll be told “… a rich, greedy, egotistical individual, motivated only by money and the desire to accumulate more and more of it, at the expense of the environment … the working poor … .and all whom they exploit…”

I am a Republican … I am none of those things… and I don’t know any Republicans who are.

Read the litany of what Republicans are. It’s our equivalent of Gordon Sinclair.

(This story has been confirmed by Snopes.)

As a member of the quality community in good standing (or ill repute, if you’re a developer), I wouldn’t get too excited about this headline: Unprecedented Shuttle Repair a Success:

A spacewalking astronaut gently pulled two potentially dangerous strips of protruding filler from Discovery’s tile belly with his gloved hand Wednesday, successfully completing an unprecedented emergency repair.

Well, the procedure was completed. As to its success or failure, I reserve judgment until that bird’s on the ground in the minimum number pieces are required for the astronauts’ survival.

Are Earth ice ages created by stars?:

It might sound preposterous, like astrology, to suggest that galactic events help determine when North America is or isn’t buried under immense sheets of ice taller than skyscrapers.

But new research suggests that the coming and going of major ice ages might result partly from our solar system’s passage through immense, snakelike clouds of exploding stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Resembling the curved contrails of a whirling Fourth of July pinwheel, the Milky Way’s spiral arms are clouds of stars rich in supernovas, or exploding stars. Supernovas emit showers of charged particles called cosmic rays.

Theorists have proposed that when our solar system passes through a spiral arm, the cosmic rays fall to Earth and knock electrons off atoms in the atmosphere, making them electrically charged, or ionized. Since opposite electrical charges attract each other, the positively charged ionized particles attract the negatively charged portion of water vapor, thus forming large droplets in the form of low-lying clouds.

In turn, the clouds cool the climate and trigger an ice age — or so theorists suggest.

Burning fossil fuels might be our only hope! We should run our cars overnight. We should also exterminate and bury entire species to ensure our future generations have fossil fuel to burn.

Or we could admit that our understanding of the universe and its component parts have great glaring omissions, and realize that humanity acts in its best interest given its best knowledge at the time it acts….

Nah. BIG OIL! BIG PHARMA! (Anything but BIG LAWYERS! BIG IDIOTS-DEMANDING-PUBLIC-POLICY AND BIG GOVERNMENT!)

The Milwaukee Public Museum’s savior knows the solution to problems with the cultural institutions in southeastern Wisconsin: Not enough government:

As he prepares to take over the Milwaukee Public Museum, outgoing Waukesha County Executive Dan Finley called Monday for the creation of a regional cultural district that would oversee the museum, Boerner Botanical Gardens and other financially troubled attractions.

“Every one of them is struggling,” Finley said. “We’ve got to come up with a way to support them because we can’t afford to lose any one of them.”

Because what smaller bureaucracies cannot handle, larger ones can.

Finley did not specify how such a district would be financed, but said: “This is not about suggesting a new tax.”

Because adding administrative apparatus, office costs, and salaries–not to mention public relations, advertising, and perks–is going to, what, come out of the pooled resources of the nearly bankrupt individual entities?

Give me a break. It is all about new taxes spread throughout a wider area to fund perks for Finley and his ilk and to increase their visibility within the power circles of the community. When you see how he’s turned around the museum–with extra taxes and extra costs–think what he can do as governor. He probably is.

UPDATE: Owen of Boots and Sabers agrees with my sentiment.

In California, a child has hit another with a rock. As it is in California, common sense does not figure into what happens next:

Until the afternoon of April 29, 11-year-old Maribel Cuevas’ only connection with law enforcement was involvement in a mentoring program sponsored by the Police Activities League.

But that day a rock she says slipped from her hand struck Elijah Vang, 8, in the forehead. A 911 call led to Maribel being arrested by Fresno police officers, handcuffed and taken to Juvenile Hall, where she stayed for five days before a judge released her on the condition she wear an electronic ankle bracelet.

On Wednesday, Maribel is scheduled to go on trial in Juvenile Court on felony assault charges. Authorities say the rock-throwing incident was too serious to be treated lightly.

Fortunately, Californians don’t hang children for being children. Yet.