Category: News

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.

Local terror fighters think big: A homeland security grant wish list including an armored carrier reflects a worst-case scenario.:

Denver-area coordinators charged with fighting terrorism want to buy a military armored vehicle – a Vietnam-era troop carrier to move police through gunfire and heavy contamination at the scene of a mass- casualty chemical, biological or nuclear attack.

They’re also good for pit bull search-and-destroy missions.

For those of you whom have doubted LASIK surgery, wherein someone peels your eye open like a grape and sucks out some portion of the inside for your betterment, we offer this heartening story of a plucky survivor: He wins $7.25M in botched eye surgery suit:

A former Wall Street broker won a $7.25 million civil suit after a botched laser eye surgery that he says left his vision permanently damaged.

The award, handed down by a jury in Manhattan Supreme Court, is believed to be the biggest so far in cases involving LASIK surgery.

Mark Schiffer, a 32-year-old Yale graduate, said the shoddy care he got from Dr. Mark Speaker and the TLC Laser Eye Center in October 2000 forced him to ditch his Wall Street career and take a job with his dad’s security firm, according to his lawyer, Todd Krouner.

Botched? It ruined his life to the point that:

Mark Schiffer, WG’01, has been named chief financial officer of Safe Banking Systems. Prior to joining SBS, Schiffer worked for Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman Sachs.

Yeah, thanks, brother, for raising the cost of eye surgery and all surgery for the rest of us.

(Link seen on Overlawyered.)

This graph tells a story: The United States is the stingiest of all countries relative to military budgets.

For example, the United States spends the equivalent of 3% of its defense budget on foreign aid. Contrast this with the Danes, who spend the equivalent of 52% of its defense budget on foreign aid. That is, for every defense dollar Denmark spends, it apparently also spends about a half dollar on foreign aid.

That’s a nice story, Bodie. But what this chart doesn’t illustrate is the relative size of these budgets. Ergo, it’s possible (but I am to lazy to research to prove) that Denmark’s defense budget is so low that 3% of America’s defense budget dwarfs the 53% commitment of Denmark’s.

So one way to bring this into parity would be to raise the foreign corruption contributions and NGO viggorish to 53% of the current US defense budget. The other is to drop the United States’ to match Denmark’s.

One assumes either would please someone who points to these charts as evidence of the United States’ stinginess. Personally, I’ll be satisfied with the absolute, real number amount our wise and benevolent (or at least smiling) leaders in Washington, D.C., expend or perhaps a little dissatisfied that it’s so much.

In Nebraska, one government entity wants to take over other separate government entities by force:

Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman said Thursday that he is against an Omaha Public Schools plan to take over schools in the metro area.

OPS wants to annex 21 Millard schools and four in Ralston, which are within Omaha city limits. Eventually, Elkhorn Public Schools also would be part of OPS under the plan. The OPS School Board calls it a plan of one city, one district and said the move would level the playing field.

Four school districts have banded together to fight the plan, and Douglas County officials have told OPS that they have no authority to redraw borders or reassign taxes.

More evidence, along with intragovernment lawsuits over funding and eminent domain for “public use” that is merely an increased tax base, that government of the people, by the people, for the people has indeed perished, with government of the government, by the government, for the government holding the pillow over the republic’s head until it stopped kicking.

From an op-ed from one of Missouri’s state legislators regarding Medicaid budget cuts:

You get statements like this:

In April, Hilton issued a terse statement saying it was “no big secret that Nicole and I are no longer friends. Nicole knows what she did, and that’s all I’m ever going to say about it.”

How profound.

At Tech Central Station, Arnold Kling sums up the expensive and ineffective security measures the government is putting into place in response to terrorism.

They might sound familiar, gentle reader, because you might have read similar sentiments right here.

3 Teens Accused Of Kidnapping 10-Year-Old Boy: Boys Were Playing Video Games:

The case started when the boy was at his grandmother’s home and went next door to play video games with the teens.

Police said the teens stopped playing the games and started a real-life drama with real weapons.

The newspaper offers the hint of causation; had the young man gone next door to play Parcheesi, would we have heard about it?