Musings from Brian J. Noggle

So Suffolk County, New York, finally got their woman. According to this New York Post story, the alleged madam ran a chain of massage parlors, and now they’re throwing the encyclepedias at her. In addition to two counts of promoting prostitution, she got:

Clifford said Kim, who had herself been busted twice for prostitution, was charged with money laundering because she would invest her ill-gotten gains back into her massage parlors.

What, nothing else? Didn’t she stub out a cigarette on the sidewalk and get some hazardous waste or attempted arson charge?

Quick, someone call a legislator who needs to get tough on crime! We need someone brave enough to realize that if spending illicit proceeds on illegal activity is good to tack onto other charges, our prosecutors need more pancakes to stack on top, such as the following”

• Getting money through illegal activity.
• Spending money made through illegal activity.
• Laying waste your powers with illegal activity.
• Having stuff bought with money made illegally.
• Using stuff bought with money made illegally.
• Eating food bought with money made illegally.
• Having money that was once earned illegally.

Because remember, the prosecution engineers DAs will only use these creative railroading charging techniques to hound the bad people.

If this story was true about the United States putting its troops under international command in Iraq (which I really want to doubt entirely), I hope it became untrue when the EU apparatchiks started flapping their gums:

The United States accepts that to avoid humiliating failure in Iraq it needs to bring its forces quickly under international control and speed the handover of power, Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, has said.

Class, compare and contrast the following essays/columns:

• Kim du Toit’s The Pussification Of The Western Male, which details how the modern American male is shackled and coddled by the State and society into a “civilized” passive consumer.
• Val MacQueen’s Tech Central Station column A New Stockholm Syndrome, which explores how Swedish society has become so passive that citizens stand idly by while a leading political figure is stabbed to death in a mall.

As long as the number of points of contrast outnumber the comparisons, we’re okay. But I suspect the gap is shrinking.

Andrew Sullivan links to a gushing review of a John Kerry ad that attempts to turn George W. Bush’s carrier landing into a slam against the president. Here’s how the blank Slaters describe the ad and infer its meaning:

The second shot is Bush, in the infamous shot after he landed on the deck of the carrier, dressed in an olive-drab flight suit (military garb and straps were in last season) with a helmet tucked under his arm. The ad suggests that this was a phony costume to go with the false label on the big ship. Bush had no right to wear military garb, because he never served in the real military, only in the Texas Air National Guard, which kept him far from Vietnam. This juxtaposition is a page out of the Bush family’s own political playbook: It’s Michael Dukakis playing soldier in a tank.

The National Guard is not the real military?

A damn fine sentiment to express when National Guardsmen are dying the same as “real” military men in Iraq.

I blame the yahoos at Slate (Jacob Weisberg wrote the particular assertion) first, but damn Senator Kerry, too, and anyone, active military or not, for casting aspertions on anyone who served.

Ravenwood has a post which features an incredulous exchange between Paula “Zipppppppp” Zahn and Tucker Carlson wherein they discuss why people under thirty don’t think the Iraq invasion and occupation are a bad thing. Carlson zooms in with this insight:

It does surprise me. I mean, I think the theme throughout all of these numbers is hopefulness. People under 30 just are much more optimistic about America’s future. They feel more secure in the job market with the economy. They think things are getting better. They think Iraq is going better than people over 30 do.

How can that be? Don’t they realize it’s Vietnam!

Pardon me while I shake the doughnuts off of my cluebat.

Note to big thoughtless media players out there: Vietnam is not an apt or immediate metaphor for anyone under forty. I was born in 1972, and I was 3 when Saigon fell. I don’t remember any of it. Someone who’s forty today will have some preteen memories of it, but thirty year olds were born in 1973 and don’t remember the Miracle on Ice, either.

You might as well compare the Iraq invasion to the Crimean War. Your average thirty year old has the same immediate access to each. In a book. So just hitch your trousers a little higher, show us some more of those sexxxy black socks under your sandals, and go back to your regular poor Boomer behavior of worrying that you’ll have a single, non-Federally funded financial responsibility between the end of your career and the end of your retirement.

Thank you. That is all.

Headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Criticism of Inner Belt project angers Olivette! Anything but that!

What’s the beef?

Les Sterman, the executive director of the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council and professional funding teat-sucker, said that the federal government really doesn’t need to spend $24 million dollars on an interchange where I-170 meets Olive because it doesn’t have as much traffic as previously predicted. This, of course, upset the professional funding teat-suckers in Olivette, where the $24 million dollar interchange would have been added.

“Show me a community that doesn’t want $24 million in federal funding and I will show you Olivette, because that is the only one,” said [Larry] Gerstein [director of the Olivette Community Connection].

While Gerstein acknowledges Sterman has no financial stake in whether the interchange is built, he insists Sterman should not be using his position to evaluate the merits of the interchange, which is a topic of local debate.

Because, obviously, the taxpayers in Mississippi and Wyoming should alleviate non-existent (sorry, light) traffic congestion in a relatively affluent suburb of St. Louis.

Show me a community that would let the pork return to its source and I’ll show you Olivette, who is not one.