Category: News

Over at Q and O, McQ invokes Orwell describing Zimbabwe’s plan to slaughter animals in national parks to feed the peasants. McQ says:

Rather Orwellian wouldn’t you say? Killing animals in “conservation areas?”

He overlooks the direct Orwellianism in this quote from a Zimbabwe official included in the post:

“Killing of animals for any reasons other than conservation can be very disastrous,” said one National Parks official.

You can kill some animals to save others because All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Teachers’ Union Suit Sparks ‘No Bureaucrat Left Behind’:

Dubbed ‘No Bureaucrat Left Behind’ the new plan would address teachers’ union complaints about unfunded federal mandates by removing the mandates, the funding and the federal role in public education.

“When I read the NEA lawsuit,” said Mr. Bush, “I realized that as long as we funnel education money through Washington D.C., we provide teachers’ unions with an excuse for their poor performance. Blame Bush. Blame Congress. Blame the Department of Education. But if all the money is raised and spent at the local level, then taxpayers can hold the unions accountable.”

If only. I suspect Bush would only offer to spend the same money on public or private schools, which wouldn’t be the same thing.

At least California’s Attorney General is not hiding his totalitarian instincts:

“The weighing of public benefits versus private rights tilts heavily in favor of the public benefits,” he said.

He’s speaking about a bill to force ammunition makers to put unique identifiers or serial numbers on each and every bullet sold in the state of California. Let me just bullet point (hem) the problems:

• He likens it to bills that established DNA laboratories:
  

  Lockyer likened the proposal to previous legislation that advanced law enforcement investigation efforts, such as funding for DNA labs.

  Except that funding DNA laboratories probably didn’t issue unfunded mandates to private companies and, ultimately, consumers. But don’t worry, there’s government pork, too, since the state would need a new technological money pit into which it can throw good money after bad.

• The bill will help solve crimes, but will not prevent crimes:
  

  “We’re going to solve (more) crimes if this bill becomes law,” Attorney General Bill Lockyer testified.

  You see, citizen, this will not prevent crime, but it will increase the case clearance rate after crimes are committed. If someone wants to shoot you dead and doesn’t care or doesn’t reason it out, those bullets with little numbers on them will kill you just as dead.

• Limited practical benefit:
  

  The proposal would provide investigators with a huge leap forward in their efforts to trace ammunition at a crime scene to the person who fired it. Though ballistics testing enables police to connect a bullet to the gun that fired it, its use in investigations is limited because investigators need to recover both the gun and the bullet to confirm a match.

  While bullets used in a crime may have been lost or stolen from their original purchaser, knowing who that person is will provide a starting point for investigators that they previously have not had, supporters say. Randy Rossi, the director of the firearms division at the state Department of Justice, likened it to “a license plate falling off a car when driven from a crime scene.”

  So it’s a starting off point for homicide investigations and nothing more, since the bullets might have been lost, stolen, or altered to remove identifiers. How many investigations are we talking about?

  Noting that California homicides increased to 2,400 last year from 2,000 the year before — with 45 percent unsolved — law enforcement officials urged senators on the committee to vote for the bill. Nearly three-quarters of the state’s homicides in 2003 were committed with a firearm.

  In 2003, Californians committed 2000 homicides, of which 1500 were purportedly with firearms, of which 45% are unsolved, which would make one believe that this new imposition might offer leads in 675 cases a year or fewer.

  Once the kinks are worked, at taxpayer’s expense, out of the system.

  I suspect the eventual success would match that of Maryland’s ballistic fingerprinting program.

Never mind, though; ultimately, the goal is to drive all bullets and guns out of the hands of non-professionals and to ensure that those guns in the hands of professional law enforcement are safely in a security camera viewing room while the guns in the hands of the professional lawbreakers are pointed at the law-abiding.

California lawmakers are doing something!!!1!, which should get them in the paper and, occasionally, on the blogs.

Laws of economics are more malleable than those of physics as far as Waukesha County, Wisconsin, are concerned, and municipal government bodies can repeal them at will:

Hoping to control health care costs by slowing industry expansion, the Waukesha County Board today rejected a hard-fought plan for a new hospital in the county’s fast-growing western region.

That’s right; to keep prices down, Waukesha County wants to keep supply down.

Too bad it wasn’t a sports facility of some sort instead of a health care provider, undoubtedly the government of Waukesha County would not only have approved the building, but would have made the citizens pay for it.

Concern over rise of ‘happy slapping’ craze:

In one video clip, labelled Bitch Slap, a youth approaches a woman at a bus stop and punches her in the face. In another, Knockout Punch, a group of boys wearing uniforms are shown leading another boy across an unidentified school playground before flooring him with a single blow to the head.

In a third, Bank Job, a teenager is seen assaulting a hole-in-the-wall customer while another youth grabs the money he has just withdrawn from the cash machine.

Welcome to the disturbing world of the “happy slappers” – a youth craze in which groups of teenagers armed with camera phones slap or mug unsuspecting children or passersby while capturing the attacks on 3g technology.

According to police and anti-bullying organisations, the fad, which began as a craze on the UK garage music scene before catching on in school playgrounds across the capital last autumn, is now a nationwide phenomenon.

Oddly enough, this fad probably won’t catch on here in America. Particularly the right to carry states.

Roeper on tattoos:

You can’t call the tattoo craze a craze anymore, as it’s been going on for more than a decade and it crosses all demographics.

Still, one day it will ebb. Today’s 10-year-old will become tomorrow’s 20-year-old, who doesn’t want to have anything to do with what mom and dad think is cool. I can see a college kid in 2015 saying, “My mother has my name tattooed on her neck. I mean, is she old-fashioned or what?”

I have no tattoos and never got a piercing. I saw Larger than Life which features a retired circus painted lady. Elderly, and covered with tattoos. That was the future tattooed people have embraced, and they don’t know it.

Sink or swim: Neighborhood pools struggle to compete with public facilities:

Chesterfield, Manchester, Ballwin, Des Peres and other West County communities have built elaborate aquatic centers in recent years.

Those facilities are among the factors swamping some neighborhood and subdivision swimming pools, once the staple of the suburbs but now finding it tough to compete with the publicly funded pools.

You know, certain people condemn Wal-Mart for this sort of behavior. Local governments want to prove that their micromunicipality is as good as the next, so they waste tax money on these wet amusement parks and “invest” in a future of rising costs of maintenance for these facilities. Meanwhile, they raise our taxes to fund pension plans for police and government employees and to take care of other ongoing expenses for which the local government is short of funds.

All this to duplicate services offered by these private groups, local gyms, and the YMCAs.

When did the equation building waterparks = governance enter our civics textbooks? Probably when the governments found that they could just write it in.

Nugget from this story: Skydiver Dies After Striking Plane in Fla.:

Skydive DeLand, which organized the jump, said Saturday’s accident was not common. The death was the second involving the company this year.

Two deaths this year by April, and the accident wasn’t common? Brother, that’s too common to us consumers.

Ladies and gentlemen, watch what the authorities do to child molestors, because they will eventually take those same measures with other offenders.

• Registries and posting their names on the Internet? Already crept to prostitution and arsonists.
• Permanent institutionalization beyond the sentence imposed by the court.
• GPS tracking of previous offenders.

Because the crimes are so repellent, citizens will accept these measures and parents will clamor for them. But as the first item shows, once these rights are abrogated to protect the children, law makers and law enforcement officials will use those mechanisms to persecute other criminals who might commit the same crime in the future.

Sure, Westchester County only wants sex offenders to wear a bracelet; but sex offenders can take those off. Countdown to mandatory microchipping has begun.

O’Connor Dismisses Ado Over Int’l Law:

O’Connor, a Reagan appointee, participated in a lively one-hour discussion at the National Archives with Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen G. Breyer. She said if there is no controlling U.S. precedent or the viewpoint of states is unsettled, “of course we look at foreign law.”

“This is much ado about nothing,” she said in response to a question by moderator Tim Russert of NBC. “Our Constitution is one that evolves. What’s the best way to know? State legislatures — but it doesn’t hurt to know what other countries are doing.”

Our constitution has a mechanism in it for evolution. It’s the amendment process.

Any other evolution, a la reading the penumbras, emanations, and secret codes inherent in interpreting the rights derived from reading the third letter after every punctuation mark isn’t constitutional evolution. It’s judicial creationism.

(Link seen on Althouse.)

More women’s bodies protected by security cameras:

A San Francisco police officer is facing possible disciplinary action for allegedly using surveillance cameras at San Francisco International Airport to ogle women as they walked through the terminal, according to San Francisco Police Commission documents.

Oddly enough, he’s in the most trouble because apparently it wasn’t his turn at the cameras:

Police share the surveillance system with several agencies. When the Police Department traffic substation is controlling a camera, none of the other agencies is able to use that camera, the charging documents note.

Rossi allegedly spent a total of three hours manipulating six of the cameras.

He ignored coworkers’ warnings that he should not be using the cameras, saying “he did not care since he was not assigned to the substation he would not get in trouble,” according to the charging documents.

Here’s a feel-good story with a happy ending:

At first, Charles Kulage suspected a buddy was playing a joke by calling to verify his address and then saying his $4,296 federal tax refund check had been found at St. Peters’ recycling center.

But it wasn’t a joke. While sorting paper, a worker at the recycling center spotted the check Monday and saved it from destruction.

A happy ending until you consider how much attention workers pay to papers in the recycling bin.

This message brought to you by someone too paranoid for a shredder.

Ladies and gentlemen, I want a new organization. I want People for Ethical Treatment By Animals. Because I don’t think it’s right that people are treated this way by animals:

74-year-old animal lover was found dead in her home after what police believe was a brutal attack by the woman’s two mixed-breed dogs.

Animals shouldn’t treat people this way. Join us next week when we splash some red paint on a chow to protest that breed’s tendency to bite off the hand that feeds it.

US sent banned corn to Europe for four years:

All imports of United States corn have been stopped at British ports following the discovery that the US has been illegally exporting a banned GM maize to Europe for the past four years.

It’s all part of the long-term Bush plan to alter the genetics of Europeans using genetically-modified corn to make Europeans lazy and unself-determined and to suppress their sex drives, yielding a lower birth rate so that Europe has to rely on radical, non-integrating Islamic immigrants for population stability. Ultimately, the Bush administration wants to generate a rationale for the Second Crusades which will begin in twenty years when Empress Barbara I invades Europe to liberate the Cradle of the Enlightenment from the Heathen.

That’s why the United States, as a nation and a single entity, shipped genetically modified corn to Europe. Those who think it might have been a single company’s error swallowed in the bureacracy are simplistic and lack the imagination for proper conspiracy-mongering.

Spokesperson spokes:

The TSA won’t comment on the specifics of the reports until they are released, spokesman Mark Hatfield Jr. said.

But, he said: “When the political posturing is over, rational people will see that American screeners today are the best we have ever had and that they are limited only by current technology and security procedures that are significantly influenced by privacy demands.”

Handy thumbnail translation for those of you outside of the government:

“We need more money and less oversight to increase our productivity.”

Three quick hitz from the last week’s Shepherd Express, which we picked up in Milwaukee but didn’t actually use to find activities downtown:

• Something Doesn’t Add Up: Did John Kerry Win?
  

  Five months after the election of George W. Bush on Nov. 2, 2004, something still doesn’t add up.

  Although the election results have been accepted by the majority of the country, a nonpartisan group of university-affiliated statisticians and other experts found that something may have gone very, very wrong—so wrong that the wrong man may be sitting in the White House.

  This group, USCountVotes, looked at the exit poll results taken throughout Election Day by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International. The exit polls indicated that Democratic nominee John Kerry would win by 3% of the popular vote. Nevertheless, George W. Bush officially won the national popular vote by 2.5%. This type of discrepancy is the largest to ever occur in a presidential election. Exit polls are conducted with those who have just voted—they are not a sampling of “probable” or “eligible” voters before the election.

  Five months after the election and a non-partisan but named group has analyzed the exit polls and determined John Kerry won the presidency. If only we could get the damn constitution and its means for determining the presidency out of the way. What’s next for these people? In 2000, they wanted to selectively recount ballots from only certain areas; in 2004, they want to use exit polls instead of ballot counts. What’s next for 2008? I’m less than eager to find out.

• In a piece entitled "Destroying Dorothy: How a media tycoon got even with a Hollywood actress", the author poses this question:
  

  How much, if at all, was newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst to blame for the shocking fate that overtook the brilliant young Hollywood actress Dorothy Comingore?

  The author then spends two pages recounting what happened to Comingore, but the only evidence presented against Hearst is that she starred in Citizen Kane and that Hearst was rich and powerful. Ergo, or Ogre as the case may be, Hearst was behind it all. Because that’s the only reason it could have happened.

• But, on the other hand, I am what Media Musings columnist Dave Berkmann calls a blogosphere enforcer:
  

  You have to wonder—five years out, will any expression that a right-wing administration and its blogosphere enforcers object to be considered acceptable?

  I would bust Berkmann’s kneecaps, digitally and metaphorically of course, were he worthy of the attention. Because columnists among real papers know they’re inconsequential in 2005 unless the blogosphere either loves them or hates them. But Mr. Berkmann, I don’t think of you.

Since 2000, a large number of publications have become largely unreadable, with every article and column somehow bemoaning the controlling force of the Administration in Washington. Harper’s, Time, The Shepherd Express….

Funny how these sorts of publication laud more intrusion helpful participation from the Federal government in daily lives, whether through free health care that will determine who gets what care, to regulation that makes it harder for new pharmaceutical products that will help many come to market because it will harm a few, to what words the FCC will ban from television (whether it’s racial epithets that are banned or swear words). Unfortunately, its the growth of this encroachment benevolent despotism that makes the occupant of the White House too damn important for daily life and for overemotionalism in daily, weekly, and monthly publications.

Here in Missouri, we’re not blessed with sharks, so the media needs to latch onto slightly more, um, mundane trends to carry it through the summer.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has seized upon just such a pattern of natural disaster with its second story in two days about marauding birds. Today’s entry: Boy feels the effect of goose nesting season:

Five-year-old Chase Standefer wanted to get a fishing lesson but instead got schooled about another type of wildlife.

As he set foot on tiny Jolie Isle in Lake Saint Louis on Sunday afternoon with his stepfather, Robert Price, a nesting goose attacked the boy, causing a small but deep gash on his scalp.

I cannot wait for the in-depth local television news investigating if the birds around your house will attack you.

(First story about bird attacks here.)