Musings from Brian J. Noggle

From a story on Yahoo! news:

A judge gave a Tennessee zoo six months to convince him that an African elephant named Ruby is adapting well to her new home after being separated from a pachyderm friend in Los Angeles last year.

Judge George Wu ordered the report from the Knoxville Zoo on Thursday during a hearing in a lawsuit that seeks to return Ruby to the Los Angeles Zoo.

I think the judicial system’s rapidly becoming a joke, and this story is but one punchline among many.

According to Yahoo! news:

He is one of Hollywood’s best-compensated actors, but matinee idol Ben Affleck (news) came to the US Congress Thursday to lobby for higher pay for some of America’s lowest-paid workers.

Affleck, who earns millions per screen appearance, appeared alongside Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy to urge lawmakers to increase the federal minimum wage from its current five dollars and 15 cents per hour to seven dollars per hour.

Apparently, the pressure was getting to be too much, and Affleck had to open his mouth to let a little pressure out.

Instead of just talking the talk, Affleck could choose to spend his own damn money, of which there is no shortage from my vantage point but about which his fleet of accountants are undoubtedly concerned, to open a series of fast food restaurants and discount groceries wherein he could somehow pay workers $7.00 an hour and still keep in business. That would probably put some of his accountants in the morgue with heart failure, because they know (even if they don’t communicate this with their client) that higher labor costs and higher employment tend to work against each other, much like higher labor costs and affordable prices.

Instead of risking his own “earned” capital, Affleck wants to sacrifice that of real entrepreneurs. He chooses to “give at the office” by making other people and corporations pick up the tab for his community ideals, much like people who want to take care of the poor but don’t volunteer or donate because they already paid taxes but think the government could do more.

If the country were filled with people like you, Mr. Affleck and like-minded, we’d have a world….. well, much like the screwed-up one we have now.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch shows the voters the error of our ways:

Looking to go swimming at a St. Louis County park pool on Memorial Day or Labor Day?

Forget about it.

After voters this month narrowly turned down a sales tax increase to support county parks, the parks department is trimming five weeks off the swimming season.

Obviously, not forking over an extra sixteen and a half million dollars of our money every year has forced the county to prioritize its budget and trim some non-essential services. Unfortunately, this will infringe upon the pencilled-in right to swim found in the elaborately customized constitutions owned by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Undoubtedly, this will impact the children, the seniors, and the poor disproportionately, as they don’t have swimming pools in their backyards. I guess we’ll read that in tomorrow’s Post-Dispatch.

Friends, were I in college today, odds are that I would not graduate.

Instead, I’d probably be in jail for assaulting one or more dishonorable cretins, or be killed by a rabid mob of the same.

As a columnist in the paper in my college days, I mocked many ideals, but never a death.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The debate over Missouri’s growing methamphetamine problem took a major turn Wednesday, as police from around the state demanded that some common cold pills used to make the drug be classified as regulated narcotics available only at pharmacies.

At issue is a chemical called pseudoephedrine. It’s an active ingredient in more than 80 over-the-counter remedies that are sold everywhere from gas stations to grocery stores. But pseudoephedrine also is a key ingredient in most recipes for meth, a powerful stimulant often called ice, crystal or crank.

Missouri last year toughened existing regulations on how much pseudoephedrine a store could sell to an individual customer, and added new restrictions on where those cold pills could be displayed. As a result, meth cooks and their helpers now must shop at dozens of stores to get the thousands of pills needed to make even a few ounces of meth.

Police at the summit said that without tougher regulations, the explosive increase in small meth labs will continue in Missouri and throughout the Midwest. Although most of the nation’s meth is made at a small number of large drug labs in Mexico and California, Missouri and the states it borders accounted for more than half of the meth-lab raids and related seizures last year.

In other news, fire marshals demanded that lighters, matches, and magnifying glasses be sold only over the counter as they can be combined with an accellerant to intentionally start a fire, MADD is protesting against the availabilty of fruits and dandelions to young people, who can then ferment them and drink the contents, and the anti-gun lobby to restrict the sales of steel, lead, and wood.

Legitimate purposes and rights are a threat to security. Just stand in your stall and bleat a little until its your turn, veal.

The City of San Francisco is running into budget problems because drivers just aren’t racking up the fines anticipated, reports the San Francisco Chronicle:

The Bay Area’s sputtering economy has meant good news for San Francisco drivers, who have seen a drop in competition for the city’s notoriously scarce on-street parking spaces, but bad news for City Hall’s finance wizards who count on fines for illegal parking to help balance the budget.

Unfortunately, building fines and excise taxes into the budget lead to this sort of problem. The government needs people to do proscribed things, or it needs to proscribe more things to keep spooning citizens’ money down its sucking maw. People might shriek over a property tax increase, or might vote down a sales tax hike, but who’s going to oppose raising a parking ticket fine?

Until your dentist appointment runs over fifteen minutes, or you don’t know the lottery-style system of proper side-of-street parking (stay overnight in Milwaukee, eh?) and suddenly you’re paying $250.

The silver lining, if you’re looking for something positive to say about profligate spending outpacing revenue: The anticipated shortfall is only $4 million dollars in the $352 million dollar deficit San Francisco’s running this year.