To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
A lifeguard in Santa Barbara, Calif., is recovering Wednesday after being attacked by a sea lion in the waters off El Capitan State Beach.
I suspect a conspiracy with collusion amongst the sharks, alligators, pit bulls, and now the sea lions.
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AP reports on the London bomb attacks:
British police told the Israeli Embassy in London minutes before Thursday’s explosions that they had received warnings of possible terror attacks in the city, a senior Israeli official said.
Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had planned to attend an economic conference in a hotel over the subway stop where one of the blasts occurred, and the warning prompted him to stay in his hotel room instead, government officials said.
Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said he wasn’t aware of any Israeli casualties.
Israeli warnings spared Jew lives. Where have we heard that before?
UPDATES:
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Apparently, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel wants to paint that picture. Poor get poorer in lottery land: Higher-poverty areas win less:
Nearly one-third of all state lottery tickets sold in southeastern Wisconsin last year were sold in poor neighborhoods, and players in these areas hoping to strike it rich have not seen as many big payoffs as the rest of the region, a Journal Sentinel analysis shows.
Longtime lottery player Tim Butler, who lives on Milwaukee’s west side, didn’t need to see the numbers to know that he and his neighbors are not exactly reaping big rewards from their investment in lottery tickets.
“I have never won any decent amount of money with tickets I bought in the inner city,” said Butler, a Milwaukee County bus driver, shortly after returning home with another $20 worth of Pick 3 and Pick 4 tickets.
He said in the seven years he has been buying lottery tickets – usually several every day – his biggest prize has been $500 won in the Super Cash game with a ticket, he makes a point of noting, that he purchased on the city’s south side.
By far the worst abuse of statistics to support a cracked hypothesis that I have seen in my lifetime.
Shame on the Journal-Sentinel. Analysis?
(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)
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Scientists flip over new dolphin:
A NEW, dinkum, species of dolphin has been found living in the crystal waters of the Great Barrier Reef.
The Australian snubfin dolphin, or orcaella heinsohni, was originally believed to be the Irrawaddy dolphin, found in coastal waters and rivers in Asia and northern Australia.
But James Cook University Townsville marine researcher Isabel Beasley said yesterday investigations carried out in collaboration with Dr Peter Arnold from the Museum of Tropical Queensland revealed enough differences to identify the mammal as a new species.
When species die out, the environmentalists blame humans. So do we get credit for new species?
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Could a computer coding job paying just $15 per hour signal something’s wrong with the tech world?
A generation of IT workers have come into the marketplace assuming that they’re due exorbitant salaries. So if the salaries fall, their world ends, and so must ours, they project:
Even so, the ad’s wage does make one wonder if guest worker visas and the rise of offshoring are undermining U.S. tech careers–and by extension threatening the country’s tech leadership.
Ho hum. You know what killed US automotive manufacturing leadership? Giant corporations and unionized employees who made the enterprise cost ineffective. If United States born developers price themselves out of the market, whose fault is that?
Oh, yeah: the government or the Other.
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Wilmington Man Attacked by Alligator in Lake!
Granted, the alligators remain behind the pit bulls and the sharks in the standings, but the summer’s not yet half over.
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2 dead in apparent murder-suicide:
It seemed like a regular night at Mr. Frog’s Bar on Brewster Avenue before a gunman entered about 6 p.m. Saturday, police said.
His first shot hit a man in the head. Then the woman he was dancing with and the gunman were fatally shot. Police, who have not released the victims’ names, are investigating the incident as a murder-suicide and have no suspects.
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Isn’t that what I should make of this?
Nowadays, intrusive government is a liberal worry. Between the Patriot Act and the Supreme Court deciding that any claque of local official can, at their whim, seize your house and give it to his brother-in-law to develop into a Starbucks, Democrats have inherited the difficult task of keeping our leaders from seizing control of an ever-increasing slice of our lives.
I think I am having vapors. Someone wave a beer under my nose to revive me.
The man once called me a genuis. Just so you know what his standards really are.
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The transportation columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (transportation columnist?) compares light rail to buses:
So for $550 million, here’s how many more buses Metro could have put on the road every day of the year for 16 hours a day: 241 new bus routes for five years; 120 bus routes for 10 years; 80 bus routes for 15 years; or 60 for 20 years.
So why does the government prefer light rail schemes to buses?
But Metro says about half of the passengers who ride MetroLink make between $50,000 and $75,000 a year. Only 17 percent of bus riders make that much. In fact, more than half of them make less than $15,000.
Quite so.
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Here’s what some are saying and how that’s headline material for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
One wonders what observers these are. International appointment observers? Professional observers? I know it doesn’t include me, because the Post-Dispatch never asked. But then, citizens are not engaged observers and independent thinkers. They’re children to whom the press must explain things like they really are, not how they are portrayed on Fox News.
Some ranchers? Some cattle diseases? No, wait, the “some” does refer to ranchers. Some ranchers say the other ranchers do illegal things. Why would businessmen say ill things about their competitors? Who cares, it’s news!
Of course, the Post-Dispatch wants you to know that what follows is only the police story; actually, it’s entirely possible that the police shot him dead with his own gun or that a Republican strangled the man and staged the whole crime to cover it up and used illegal capitalist profit to buy off the police. So of course the police would say it was attempted murder-successful suicide.
Of course, that’s Saeed Hajjarian, a top adviser to outgoing President Mohammad Khatami, so we have an Iranian ex-secret agent defending the newly-minted (and not elected) Iranian president. But the Post-Dispatch has conveyed as much gravitas as it can on the report by noting that
it’s a secret agent and someone who would know. Theirs, ours, it’s all the same to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Of course not, as a Democrat was elected. However, the story only seems to quote one official, and he says “I think it would be really difficult for a losing candidate to get a judge to overrule the election code,” which is a far sight from won’t. Perhaps the other officials said won’t. Perhaps it was just the headline writer.
So does the St. Louis Post-Dispatch include or alter the “x says” portion of its headlines to flavor the following story? Eh, who knows. All I know is that they waste an awful lot of words on he-said, she-said, they-said.
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Deep Impact Spacecraft Ready for Mission:
A NASA spacecraft was speedily closing in on its target Friday, a comet scientists hope to smash open this weekend, producing celestial fireworks for the Independence Day weekend.
Finally, we’re an interplanetary hegemon! Woo!
Perhaps I’ll have to retool the t-shirt:
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City forces out 2 downtown businesses: Action follows high court ruling on eminent domain:
Last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling approving a Connecticut city’s plan to take private land by eminent domain may seem far away.
But to John Revelli, whose family has operated a tire shop near downtown Oakland for decades, the implications hit home on Friday.
A team of contractors hired by the city of Oakland packed the contents of his small auto shop in a moving van and evicted Revelli from the property his family has owned since 1949.
“I have the perfect location; my customers who work downtown can drop off their cars and walk back here,” said Revelli, 65, pointing at the nearby high- rises. “The city is taking it all away from me to give someone else. It’s not fair.”
The city of Oakland, using eminent domain, seized Revelli Tire and the adjacent property, owner-operated Autohouse, on 20th Street between Telegraph and San Pablo avenues on Friday and evicted the longtime property owners, who have refused to sell to clear the way for a large housing development.
It’s not fair, but late trends in our governance indicate that it’s more fair for some than others.
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Pit Bulls: 19
Sharks: 6.
The Sharks are really pouring it on and could mount a comeback!
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Who better to replace Sandra Day O’Connor than Daniel Day-Lewis?
It keeps the Day parity on the court, which is vitally important, since the judiciousness and meaningful career are less important to opposition forces than trivia.
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Minn. Government Shuts Down; 9,000 Jobless.
Jobless? Hardly. It’s not as though the Minnesota government will not come back. It should be Minn. Government Shuts Down; 9,000 On Unscheduled Paid Vacation.
But how would that play out the evolving epic of governments tearing dollars from the hands of the little guy?
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The Canadians can no longer adequately defend it:
The navy is back down to one working submarine.
Of the four used subs Canada acquired from Britain for $891 million, Halifax’s HMCS Windsor is the only one that can go to sea. HMCS Victoria has stopped sailing from its British Columbia base and will go into an extended docking work period next month that will last almost two years.
“We have no choice,” said Lieut. Diane Grover of navy public affairs.
We had better strike now. The Canadians will enter the 20th century in a matter of months. Well, 30 or 40:
The navy expects to see its first sub fully operational and able to fire torpedoes by 2009.
BTW, Happy Canada Day to all of my Canadian readers. Enjoy your first of July celebration while you can, before we subjugate you and force you to celebrate the fourth of July with us.
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Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times, supports government reduction of property rights:
I’m generally a personal liberty, Milton Friedman, let-’em-buy-heroin-if-it-makes-’em-happy kind of guy. Yet I’m also always glad to see cigarette smoking restricted, basically, because it kills some people and annoys the rest (so would legal heroin, but heck, why be consistent? It’s summertime).
We seem to be doing it the right way, too, slowly whittling away the social space allowed to smokers. Smoking has gone from being cool to being an embarrassing personal lapse, somewhere between picking your nose and bedwetting. Soon the guy standing on the corner smoking a cigarette will carry the same cachet as someone standing on the corner sucking wine out of a bottle in a bag.
I’m not gloating. I’m sad for cigarettes — a lovely habit, a nice vice. Except for the kill-you part. But it’s in society’s interest to shuck them as soon as possible. Women used to paint their faces with white lead, but it had bad side effects, like death, so they got out of the practice. Habits change, if we’re lucky.
Sorry to join the cacaphony of people who only comment when they disagree with you, Mr. Steinberg, but the slow whittling is not of smokers’ rights, but property owners’ rights in many cases. Would you applaud it were the governments to start banning pasta in restaurants because of the obesity academic?
They wouldn’t do that? Why not? It’s a public health issue, and property rights mean nothing any more.
Perhaps we could just think of it as though the local governments were condemning the airspace within private property and offered just compensation in the form of their continued indulgence in the “owner’s” “right” to own/operate the property/business.
Update: Apparently, this set off William Squire: Neil Steinberg is a Bigot.
(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)
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It’s the only thing I can get from this piece entitled "Little room for real news" by Rob Borsellino of the Des Moines Register. He intersperses the trivia covered by new media with things the media doesn’t cover, like the badness of the current administration:
I knew the exact time Terri Schiavo collapsed 15 years ago, and I could tell you that the runaway bride got a half-million-dollar advance to tell her story.
But I had lost track of how many U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq.
And:
I listen to the president making a speech about how much better the world is without Saddam Hussein in power and how much progress we’re making in Iraq. That’s followed by news stories about a car bomb killing dozens in Baghdad, U.S. recruitment going into the tank, Iran and North Korea getting nuke savvy.
So I’ve got to wonder if the commander in chief is dealing with reality.
I listen to the vice president calling Guantanamo Bay critics a bunch of anti-American crybabies with nothing better to do with their time, and then I hear those left-wing radicals from the Red Cross talking how the U.S. is using tactics “tantamount to torture.”
So how much attention should I pay when the V.P. speaks?
Finally:
The Bolton nomination and "the deadlock that has centered on Democratic demands to see draft testimony that Bolton's office prepared on Syria for a House committee hearing two years ago and insistence on seeing 36 names Bolton requested and was allowed to see from blacked-out National Security Agency reports." Or news that “Jennifer Wilbanks, the runaway bride, was found to have prior records for shoplifting in two separate cases.”
Given the choice between innocuous fluff and the common funeral drumbeating of “serious” journalists, I choose….
Not to watch the news or read the newspaper. Duh.
(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)
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Dear world, now that Kelo is settled “law,” I move we change the naming from eminent domain to:
Because now it’s just a matter of time.
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Radley Balko rounds up even more private-to-private transfers after the Kelo decision.
To quote Don Henley, "Gimme What You Got":
Now it’s take and take and takeover, takeover
It’s all take and never give
All these trumped up towers
They’re just golden showers
Where are people supposed to live?
Municipalities answer: who cares, as long as they shop here?
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