Category: News

N. Korea Accuses U.S. of Plotting Attack:

In a second day of bluster after its disarmament accord, North Korea accused the United States on Wednesday of planning a nuclear attack and warned it could retaliate.

Let’s make it clear, rest of the world: We have plans to nuke everyone, from North Korea to China to France to Great Britain to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Are we clear on that? Because we understand the nature of man and their collective nature, we are ready to destroy anyone who could attack us, no matter how probable our nuclear plans are to be used.

Because planning is easy, and being unprepared is bad.

So don’t think you’re special, North Korea, even though you’re highest on our list of probable recipients of an unwelcome transfer of nuclear technology. We have plans for every contingency, I hope.

In an era where citizen everywhere are complaining, post-Kelo, about eminent domain, it’s heartening to see a few noble governments remain unafraid to seize private land to redistribute it as they see fit. Kudos, Manchester, Missouri, Mayor Larry Miles:

However, Manchester Mayor Larry Miles said, “We’re not going to have anyone holding up the project because he doesn’t want to sell.” He noted, “We have 35 residents who have agreed to sell and we would like to move forward.”Butler, he said, is standing in the way of progress and change.

The mayor said Pace Properties might have to use eminent domain to obtain all properties it needs that front on Manchester Road, except for the Eagle Bank site.

Pace Properties seeks to build a $131.5 million shopping center on the northeast corner of Manchester and Highway 141. It is asking for $29.5 million in tax-increment financing from Manchester and about $17 million from a transportation development district. The center would have 476,719 square feet of commercial space.

It takes a really strong leader to cede the powers of government, and lots of tax money, to private land developers when citizens are standing up for their private property rights.

The beauty products from the skin of executed Chinese prisoners:

A Chinese cosmetics company is using skin harvested from the corpses of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe, an investigation by the Guardian has discovered.

Agents for the firm have told would-be customers it is developing collagen for lip and wrinkle treatments from skin taken from prisoners after they have been shot. The agents say some of the company’s products have been exported to the UK, and that the use of skin from condemned convicts is “traditional” and nothing to “make such a big fuss about”.

Come on, fill in your own tag lines. Soylent Morning Rose Blush….is people!

Herb “The Helmet” Kohl stands upon the shoulders of giants during the Roberts confirmation hearings when he echoes philosopher William Martin Joel during a harangue.

Semator Kohl:

Justice, after all, may be blind, but it should not be deaf.

Billy Joel, from the video for “Keeping the Faith” ca 1983-1984:

Your honor, they say justice is blind, but I sure hope it ain’t deaf.

(Quote first seen on Ann Althouse.)

Schools fear ‘tax giveaway’:

“This is so complicated that a lot of people will not get it,” said Patrick Lanane, assistant superintendent and chief financial officer for the Lindbergh School District in St. Louis County.

“Be careful, be quick or you will miss one of the most important tax giveaways that will happen in a person’s lifetime,” Lanane said. He and others believe that some outstate school districts are getting far more state aid than they deserve.

Thank you, Mr. Lanane, for looking out for the interests of taxpayers. No, wait, pardon my while cynicism realism settles in: You’re not afraid that these other school districts are getting too much; you’re afraid that your district isn’t getting as much as you think it deserves.

But never fear, our government officials are on the case:

School and business leaders in the St. Louis region feel so strongly that they have begun a campaign to raise $100,000 to pay for studies of the accuracy of assessments in 10 counties, said Glenn Koenen, of the West County Chamber of Commerce. The studies would be completed early next year.

Raising that money to educate students? You forget the purpose of government, citizen, which is to get more money for government, even if it’s from a higher government and its gains are at the expense of other governments in outstate Missouri.

(Link submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

Look out, Crestwood: a private consultant hired by the city has told the city that it has to renovate a privately-owned mall or lose tax revenue. Of course, he couched it in waivers and wherefores, but what do you think the local government heard?

While he proposes redevelopment, Melaniphy [the consultant] doesn’t advise Crestwood on whether the city should use public funds for the project. That’s something the city and Westfield will have to iron out, he said.

“If financial assistance can be used to keep a Macy’s or a big anchor store, the board should at least listen and see if we can accommodate that,” Robinson [Crestwood’s Mayor] said.

Translation: The government should use tax dollars to ensure that it continues receiving tax dollars. Serve the citizens? No, modern government serves itself first.

Perhaps the striking Northwest mechanics should contemplate crawling back to their wife and begging her forgiveness:

David Pounds, a 22-year mechanic, said he was thinking of changing careers, maybe selling cars. He’s had job interviews, but hasn’t had any offers.

“People are reluctant to hire a guy on strike,” he said.

He has also had trouble finding a job that pays as much. Union mechanics made $70,000 a year on average. “The last company I interviewed with, the compensation was a joke,” Pounds said.

The last company he interviewed with was probably not relying on government handouts to remain almost solvent, but that’s unrelated, no doubt.

Nuke Reactors on Campuses Keep Low Profile:

For University of Missouri tailgaters, the name of the new parking lot down the hill from Memorial Stadium is little more than a curiosity: Reactor Field, a nod to the nearby nuclear research reactor.

The nation’s largest university-based reactor keeps an intentionally low local profile, despite its cutting-edge research into promising cancer drugs.

Nothing says “incognito” like naming a facility used by thousands of unknowledgeable, transient sports fans after the “low profile” nuclear reactor which is plainly visible from Providence (name of road redacted for security reasons).

New Orleans Begins Confiscating Firearms as Water Recedes:

Waters were receding across this flood-beaten city today as police officers began confiscating weapons, including legally registered firearms, from civilians in preparation for a mass forced evacuation of the residents still living here.

Confiscate weapons before a forced migration of peoples. Sounds familiar….

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

Katrina could cost 400,000 jobs: CBO:

The damage from Hurricane Katrina could include up to 400,000 lost jobs and slower U.S. growth, a congressional report said on Wednesday, as President George W. Bush sought $51.8 billion in fresh aid for the disaster zone.

If the Congressional Budget Office is so sure of the number, perhaps that’s the number the Federal government plans to lay off.

Otherwise, they’re just pulling smoke out of their arse.

So what?

Is it any coincidence he’s not a member of our national security or foreign policy team? No, I think it’s the lack of credentials.

Nothing is as comforting as the certainty of leaders. For example, we can cull the following list from the story entitled Roundabouts are coming – and traffic flow may never be the same:

• city officials say
• officials believe
• traffic engineers say
• “They are definitely gaining in popularity,” said Larry Hagen of the Center for Urban Transportation Research at the University of South Florida.
• The proliferation of roundabouts could do more than ease traffic congestion, some hope.
• proponents say
• some roundabout advocates hope
• “I’d like to see us go like France,” Russell said. “They’ve got about 25,000 now.”

But perhaps I too-easily mock leadership. After all, there’s some definitive certainty in the article:

Columbus Circle, built in New York City in 1904, is considered the country’s first traffic circle, and was followed by hundreds more, mostly in the northeast, Russell said. Now, in some parts of the northeast, transportation officials are working to get rid of the circles and replace them with signalized intersections or updated roundabouts.

“We’re currently initiating a program where we’re attempting to eliminate as many as possible,” said Brendan Gill, a spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Transportation. “Essentially, they’re antiquated. They’re not built to handle the volume of traffic we’re currently handling.”

But it’s hard to blur and soften the edges of those sentiments, wot?

Hillary Clinton: “This time, you won’t get away with only having been in office for eight months, Mr. President.”

With many blaming the growing scope of Katrina’s devastation on the Bush administration, Sen. Hillary Clinton called yesterday for a 9/11-style probe into how the federal government responded to the crisis.

“It has become increasingly evident that our nation was not prepared,” Clinton (D-N.Y.) said in a letter to Bush asking him to set up a “Katrina Commission.”

“The slow pace of relief efforts in the face of a mounting death toll … seems to confirm that our ability to respond to cataclysmic disasters has not been adequately addressed,” she said.

On the other hand, if she does become president, imagine the fun her opponents will have when conducting “non-partisan” commission-based and tax-wasting inquiries like the one she proposes here.

Brother Paranoia Shidoshi Ray Nagin saith:

“Today was a turning point, I think,” he said. “My philosophy is never get too high, never get too low. … I always try to keep my emotions in check and yesterday I kind of went off a little bit. I was worried about that, but it maybe worked out. I don’t know. If the CIA slips me something and next week you don’t see me, you’ll all know what happened.”

A marvel of paranoid thought which I admire.

Speaking of which, I haven’t posted much about Katrina, neither denigrating foolish government idiocy on one hand or grasping, needling mewling from dependent citizenry on the other hand. And if the CIA slips me something and next week you don’t see me you will all know what happened.

I will have gotten too busy doing my freaking job to find a blog entry form or a television camera.

(Although I’d seen this story all day, it was Baldilocks’s entry that I saw last before I couldn’t take it any more and had to post.)

Friends and family plan on the cellular phone? Hell, no.

If you and your spouse or you and your friends have contracts with different companies, you’ll also be on different networks. Ergo, you’ll have redundancy so that if one cellular network goes down, you’re not dependent upon it and can call for help if the second cellular network remains operational.

Relatives file wrongful death suits:

Relatives of five people killed July 28 in a fiery wreck on Interstate 44 in Eureka, near the Six Flags St. Louis amusement park, have filed wrongful death suits in St. Louis County Circuit Court.

The suits were among 1,400 filed in the county last week, before a new law capping damage awards in civil cases took effect.

The situation:

A dump truck loaded with rock and driven by Thomas Miskel, of Imperial, smashed into the back of Huckaba’s 2000 Dodge Caravan, shoving the minivan into four vehicles and across a frontage road before the wreckage erupted in flames.

How many suits? Five: one for each victim of the single accident.

The plaintiffs?

• The driver of the truck, natch.
• Bourbeuse River Hauling, the company that owns the truck.
• H & H Freight Services, which provided the contract driver for Bourbeuse.
• Millstone Bangert Inc., the company that hired the truck to deliver the rock to its construction site.
• Kenworth of St. Louis, the mechanics who worked on the truck and should have known it wouldn’t stop in time.
• Six Flags, for apparently building a theme park nearby which people would look at or attend.
• The state of Missouri for its poor design of the highway.
• The city of Eureka, for not stopping traffic backup at the highway exit where the accident occurred.

Why not sue Dodge, for not making fourth, fifth, and sixth brake lights? The parents of the driver, for bringing a child capable of such evil into the world? The painting contractor who puts the lines on the highways and the makers of the asphalt for not providing enough traction for stopping?

Perhaps those are defendants for another day.

Bush may tap strategic oil reserve as prices soar:

Hurricane Katrina disrupted Gulf Coast petroleum output and rattled energy markets on Monday, sending oil and natural gas prices soaring and setting the stage for a spike in the retail cost of gasoline.

The Bush administration said it would consider lending oil from the nation’s emergency stockpile to refiners that request it and the president of OPEC said he will propose a production increase of 500,000 barrels a day at the cartel’s meeting next month.

Given that the Middle East remains relatively unstable, that one of the largest exporters in this hemisphere has a mad-on for freedom, and that a rising rival power’s consumption of the existing supply is growing, I’d rather we save the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for just in case the s really hits the f beyond consumer inconvenience and price increases. Call it a foolish consistency, but I opposed the last president’s proposed release as well.

I mean, where does the government’s meddling in free markets end? With increased home seizures when the housing bubble “bursts,” so better to spur demand and keep the supply tight? Oh, no, you say? Why the heck not?