To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Francis Slay repeats call to join St. Louis County.
It’s 3am, and he’s promising to take the county back and forgive the county for letting the city dump it in the 1870s.
Keep calling, Slay. The Post-Dispatch will continue its breathless encouragement even as the two million plus county residents ignore your pleas to spend our tax money on your city residents.
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Class lectures? There’s an app for that: Journalism school to require iPod use:
Kayla Miller isn’t sure why she would need an iPhone or an iPod Touch in her courses at the University of Missouri, but she likes the idea of the school requiring students to have them.
“I don’t really see a need for them, but I think it’s cool,” she said.
After all, Miller, 19, said, if the devices are required — as they will be for all incoming journalism majors starting in the fall — many parents will feel like they have to buy them for their teens. Even though she’ll be a sophomore next year and won’t be required to have one, Miller said she might urge her parents to buy her one for her journalism courses, anyway.
The MU School of Journalism is requiring that all incoming freshmen have iPhones or iPod Touch devices to “help students adjust to freshmen year,” Associate Dean Brian Brooks said. “It also would allow them to record lectures and review it. Many schools are doing it now, and it seemed like a great idea to us.”
See, while you’re looking at Halliburton and Blackwater, the corporations favored by the cool and the hep are becoming mandatory.
And the worst part is the well-conditioned student who is in favor of compulsory iPods even though she doesn’t see the need for it. She just accepts that the authorities are compelling students for the better.
I’m not saying I fear for the future of this country, because that might imply I think this country has a future. Instead, here are real estate listings for Sandpoint, Idaho. Good luck.
(Hat tip to gimlet.)
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This is the Virgil Flowers book, although the difference between Flowers and Lucas Davenport is in their dress, their vehicles, their off-duty neat things, and that Flowers hasn’t married the love of his life and can pursue women. Like Davenport, Flowers is an ass man and spends a lot of the book commenting on women’s asses. Of course, I guess when you’re dealing with genre material, you really don’t get a broad variety of protagonists. And the book really doesn’t suffer from the similarities in the characters, unlike in, say, Robert B. Parker’s works.
The book takes place outside the twin cities, in small town Minnesota where a series of murders erupts with, dare I say it, ritualistic deaths? In a Sandford novel? Get out! No, really. Flowers works over the town, discovers many motives to kill a rich man who lived a lavish and swinging lifestyle in the early 1970s and earned the hatred of the townspeople in a business scam, and finally discovers the killer with a crack in the case that left me unsatisfied.
An average book, I suppose. At least Sandford didn’t feel the need to trash Bush here.
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This is a later volume from Nash, and it shows. His preoccupation with his children has passed onto his preoccupation with his grandchildren. His poetry is more gloomy amid the humor as he recognizes he’s aging and won’t be the young man again. Hence, it really doesn’t exhibit the playful nature of his earlier works which really is the strength of his poetry. As a Nash aficionado, I’m glad I read it, but it’s not a good starting point in his work.
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Obama to crack down on business taxes:
President Barack Obama plans changes to tax policy certain to be unpopular with corporations with international divisions and individuals who use tax havens.
Obama’s two-part plan, which he is slated to unveil at the White House on Monday, also calls for 800 new federal tax agents to enforce the system.
The president’s proposal would eliminate some tax deductions for companies that earn profits in countries with low tax rates, as well as consider U.S. citizens who use tax havens in the Bahamas or Cayman Islands guilty of violating U.S. tax laws.
It’s going to raise $21 billion a year in revenue, minus unintended consequences.
Or, to put it in perspective, 1/100th of the new deficit spending the President and the Democrat-controlled Congress has incurred. Not counting forthcoming cap-and-trade plans and national health care bills. And all unintended consequences forthcoming.
Full disclosure: This change will affect me because I am a capitalist Fat Cat who bought a couple hundred bucks’ worth of stock in a Taiwanese chipmaker, and I get to knock off the taxes I pay to the government of Taiwan. You know who else is a corporate Fat Cat in this scenario? Anyone with an International Fund selection in a mutual fund, 401(k), or retirement plan. You know, you.
Candidate Obama promised not to raise taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year or whatever. President Obama, though, has a different scale for determining feline weight.
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Man charged with illegal dumping of debis
Who knew that the government now actually has laws about ending romances? On the other hand, what’s there to stop it now that “rule of law”, “contracts”, and “The Constitution” are void at the whim of the Elect(ed)?
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The story is misheadlined: Missouri House votes to send $12 million in stimulus money to Metro because let’s just see what it is. Is it:
The House voted Wednesday to use $12 million in federal stimulus funds to soften dramatic service cuts at Metro.
The sponsor of the Metro funding amendment, Rep. Rachel Storch, D-St. Louis, said thousands of people can’t get to work since bus routes at the St. Louis-area transit agency were slashed. She also decried cuts in transportation services for the disabled.
I thought stimulus money couldn’t go to mass transit, but either I was misinformed or rules and promises out of the government are subject to change at the next member of government’s whim (logically, this is a false dilemma, as it could be both).
At least Representative Storch is clear about how unwise it is to use “one-time” stimulus payments to bridge budget deficits:
Storch portrayed it as stopgap funding until Metro can persuade area voters to raise taxes for the system.
Ah, yes. Because the voters have spoken, but they spoke wrongly and must receive chance after chance to do what the leaders want.
So what the state legislature has approved is a $12 million marketing and lobbying budget. It won’t get old bus routes running again, but it will bridge a gap in the efforts to convince people to raise their taxes.
Kind of like those nice vinyl signs on the bus stops that are out of service. Metro did not remove the bus stop signs. No, they converted them all into free billboards to tell the electorate how it done Metro wrong.
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The New York Post compiled an article enumerating Obama’s mistakes in office: 100 DAYS, 100 MISTAKES.
Maybe they were premature:
After all, who knows what might be done today or tomorrow? I’d save a spot on the list to see how the president handles the 100 days of disaster protesters in Arnold, Missouri, tomorrow.
The president claimed ignorance of the Tea Parties, but these guys will be right there. Unless their freedom-to-protest zone is in Hillsboro.
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Sarah Steelman forming exploratory committee for Senate run
Link seen on, believe it or not, Prime Buzz, the Kansas City Star‘s political blog that frequently links to me and sometimes mischaracterizes me as a left-wing crank.
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Missouri Legislature tackles eating disorders.
It would be entirely consistent behavior for the legislature to merely make eating disorders against the law. That would curb the problem, much like it does with drugs, prostitution, and so on.
Maybe they’ll take the tack of smoking and merely ban purging in public places.
Instead, they’ll just compel insurance companies to cover them in a fashion the government dictates, which will cause higher insurance rates, which will then require more government intervention at the Federal level.
Note that there are Republicans co-sponsoring the bill. Funny how small government principles fail in lots of small ways. Like encouraging government intervention for just this one little problem.
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Kiel Opera House might be redeveloped sometime soon:
A downtown landmark took one step closer to new life Tuesday, though it still has a long way to go.
A city board declared the Kiel Opera House blighted, a key in making it eligible for redevelopment incentives that could eventually bring shows and concerts back to the grand but long-empty hall on Market Street.
Remember, citizens, the Blues organization was supposed to rehab this venue as part of the agreement when the city built them a new arena in 1995.
You think the local government will learn a lesson about public/private partnerships and how they are the “mark” in these deals? Who cares, so long as the elected officials and unelected commission or committee members get to sit in the boxes.
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Wisconsin’s Attorney General has said open carry is legal in Wisconsin.
Milwaukee’s Police Chief says he will not abide by people doing this legal thing:
“If my officers see someone walking around the City of Milwaukee with a firearm openly displayed, it borders on irresponsible if I were to communicate to members of my community that they can carry that firearm with impunity,” Flynn said.
Embrace the arbitrariness of law enforcement. If we don’t like what’s legal, we enforce our own standards.
Good for paperback fiction, bad for a civilized society.
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Stimulus money paying Illinois bills:
More than $1 billion in federal stimulus money is winding its way toward Illinois school districts. But don’t expect any major changes in local education efforts.
Rather, the cash — approved by the U.S. Department of Education on Monday — will largely go toward paying bills the state already owes to school districts for items like transportation and special education services.
Isn’t that what taxpayers did with their stimulus checks? Instead of running out and buying consumer goods, they paid bills?
Unfortunately, at the state level, this is a real problem if states spend that one-time (hah!) windfall to pay ongoing expenses because those expenses will still be there when the funds are gone.
But it keeps state officials from having to make difficult decisions, hopefully until such time as the state officials become Federal officials, leaving a new crop of leaders to deal with the mess.
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So this afternoon, I went into my workroom, the utility room in the finished basement, to get some supplies for an outdoor project. And I heard this strange rattling coming from the water heater or the furnace.
So I got closer, and I isolated the rattle to the water heater. Crap, I thought, I don’t know who to call when I have problems with a water heater. It’s true, I have a furnace guy, an electrical guy, and a drain guy, and I know who to look for in the white pages if I need concrete work or plumbing. But water heaters? Crikey, I don’t know who to call.
The rattling was accompanied, sometimes, by a weird trill. Almost bird like. I assumed I was hearing something else.
So I grabbed my supplies and did my outdoor chore. While outside, I heard the bird trilling that I’d heard in the basement. I didn’t hear the rattling.
When I got downstairs, I put away my gear and heard the rattling again. I moved close to the water heater to listen closely. Then, I heard the rattling and the trilling with the same locus. Essentially, the duct leading to the chimney.
Why….
I went outside and moved until I was in front of the neighbor’s house. There, upon my roof, upon my chimney, sat the neighborhood woodpecker, a recent immigrant whose better-thought-out knocking I’d heard upon trees in mornings and early afternoons for recent days. He trilled, and then he drummed upon the metal cover on my chimney, as though to challenge the other birds in the area.
Or perhaps just to make me wonder and to fret just a bit.
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This book collects the first two books in the trilogy, natch. A featured selection in the Science Fiction Book Club, too, I learned from the ephemera that came with the book–namely, the flyer for the month where the book was featured.
I like Harry Harrison. I read his Planet of No Return in middle school, and I’ve dabbled with the Stainless Steel Rat series (see also The Stainless Steel Rat for President). I’ve even discovered that I read another alt history book of his recentlyish (Stars and Stripes Triumphant, July 2006). I characterized this as an alt history book as well when I bought it, but it’s more fantasy than straight ahead alt history.
The books center on Shef, a thrall raised by the local karl (minor royalty figure) who kept Shef’s mother. As a bastard, he’s mistreated of course, but he learns some smithing. When a band of Vikings invade to avenge their father, Shef becomes part of their army to rescue his captured stepsister. Then he rises in the ranks and becomes a lord in his own right, guided by a mysterious god-figure who thwarts even Othin.
It’s a fantasy book because it does feature Norse gods as real people, includes a lot of visions and stuff. The two books clock in at 800 pages, so I felt my bottom in the chair, so to speak, although the books were good enough reading as I went along. Although the battle scenes are more Patick O’Brian than Bernard Cornwell in that they’re rather anti-climactic and a bit of an afterthought, with much of the book coming in the in-between things going on. A bit of a knock, but I guess I did end the reading experience with the end of the middle part of the trilogy. If I stopped watching the first Star Wars trilogy after A Empire Strikes Back, I’d been left a little hanging.
Of course, if that’s the metaphor that holds, I’d better not read the third in this series, or I’ll find that the Ewoks keep the Norse gods from winning at Ragnarok.
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Forget the tea parties: if there’s one thing that will galvanize the drive for tax reform in Wisconsin, it will be complaining Packers:
The states without income tax, I felt, always had an advantage in recruiting free agent players. Teams in Florida, Tennessee and Texas used the fact that their states had no income tax to show players how much more they would take home than teams in high income tax states (like Wisconsin). In some cases, agents actually showed me data from other teams showing how much more the player would make over the life of the same contract in one of those states. In recruiting players for Green Bay, I would always hear from agents how much more a player would make from, say, the Buccaneers or Texans compared to the 6.6-percent state income tax that Wisconsin would take from Packer players.
If taxes are keeping the Packers from the Super Bowl, the people will rise against Jim Doyle and the Wisconsin Legislature faster than you can say “Rick Santelli.”
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You know, the media tends to really get down on surveillance in pursuit of terrorism. However, have you noticed how any intrusive police actions that infringe upon private citizens are okay if it falls under behavior that the media dislikes, such as driving after a couple beers?
Here’s the story:
Police in St. Charles County are drawing a new weapon in their fight to stop drunk drivers — blood testing.
On Thursday night, about two dozen officers from several area police departments are holding what they’re calling a “no refusal” checkpoint to catch impaired drivers.
From 11 p.m. to 3 a.m., police will stop all drivers at a busy intersection near Interstate 70, the city’s Main Street corridor and the Ameristar Casino. If those arrested on suspicion of driving drunk refuse an officer’s request for a breath test, police plan to get on-the-spot court orders for blood tests from a nearby on-call prosecutor and circuit judge.
Though the approach has already been tested in at least three other states, police say this style of checkpoint combining the “no refusal” element may be the first of its kind in Missouri. Police and advocates for tougher enforcement hope the effort adds muscle to a criminal justice system that often fails to keep drunk drivers off the roads.
Checkpoints, prosecutors and judges waiting on speed dial to issue warrants based only on refusal to submit to search, what isn’t to like if you’re pro-statist in pursuit of trivial goals or a pro-statist eager to just erode civil liberties because you can?
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If you take the classic British totalitarian works like 1984 and A Brave New World with the Existentialist preoccupation with unsavory protagonists, you have A Clockwork Orange. In a future England whose government and language appear heavily influenced by the Soviets, a young malcreant and his mates (droogs in the cant) spend their evenings committing crimes and ultra-violence for fun and for money. When Alex, the self-styled leader and your humble narrator is caught, he serves time in an overcrowded prison until he is offered an opportunity for early release through a program that brainwashes criminals into avoiding violent acts. When he’s returned to the street, he is at the mercy of those he victimized and his former droogs until some of the opposition party want to use him for their purposes of bringing down the totalitarian government.
One would hope that not too many readers identify closely with the narrator, a thief, thug, rapist, and murderer; however, Burgess uses the language of the narrator to lure the reader in. When you first start, the nadsat lingo one out of the book, but after a while, the reader understands the argot and this understanding has to act as the only bridge, one hopes, between the reader and the sociopathic I speaking.
It’s a short book–180 pages, like they used to write paperback fiction–and a decent enough read that really does carry the flavor of 1960s science fiction, perhaps even British science fiction. Its intersection of Orwell and Sartre, though, have given it its classic status.
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