Archive for June 2008
There are some interesting results in the Pew Religion report. Hey, let’s play Jeopardy.
Ready? Here we go.
Of this group, 21% believed in God (6% believed in a personal God, 12% in God as an impersonal force, and 3% don’t know).
What are Presbyterians?
No.
What are Methodists?
No. And you?
I give up, Alex.
What are atheists. Atheists.
I don’t think that word means what these 21% of atheists think it means. Or something. Anyway, thought I’d share.
Day 2 of no TV.
Dealt with the cords (note: cord tangle is a breeze to deal with if the cords aren’t attached to anything). Swept up all the dust bunnies, now on the back porch where they can naturally recycle. Best Buy called. They’re bringing the stand and TV (we have everything else here) between 10 and 11 today. So I get to look at a TV with no picture until Saturday.
not to elect or appoint liberals to any position in the judiciary system:
If you are caught leaving a public gun range in Massachusetts with a spent .22 casing stuck in the sole of your shoe, and you do not have a $100 gun license, under current state law, you can be found guilty of unlawful possession of ammunition and sentenced to two years in prison.
It’s a “common sense” public safety measure, you understand. Gotta keep the streets safe FOR THE CHILDRENTM.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts State Rep. James Fagan believes that sentencing someone to 20 years in prison for raping an 11-year-old is “draconian”.
Day 2 of no TV.
Everything is unplugged and removed, in two piles: Things to keep, and things for Best Buy delivery to cart away (TV and DirecTiVO). The cabinet has been moved to a temporary location.
It’s a mess, but not quite so much as this. We have a big pile of serious cord tangle on the floor where the cabinet used to hold everything, and big wads of electrostatically-bound dust. Right behind the TV picture tube was a big black spot, but it came right off with a little windex.
So I still have to untangle all the cords, then sweep (thank God the floor is laminate, and not carpet, and I can just sweep the dust bunnies out the french door onto the porch).
Delivery is today, so I’ll get to look at the pretty boxes until Saturday, when they come to set it up.
The first is an accurate description of how I feel. The second is because I just realized that we’re going to have to tear down the TV and equipment, and move the cabinet someplace else, because Best Buy won’t.
I don’t really like the idea of watching movies on the computer, but I may end up breaking down tomorrow and sticking one in my drive.
and I’m not making this up, from the BBC: Prison had ‘criminal subculture’ Hat tip to Squander Two.
I need a haircut. Bad. And this quiet house is driving me nuts, so I’m off to Wally World to get a haircut, and maybe some of those apple turnovers.
Very quiet here on Day One of No TV.
We went mid-rage, and got a 40″ 1920×1080 resolution Sony. We also got a 1080p upconverter DVD burner (and player too, obviously), and a new DirecTV receiver and DVR (they only had one, so that was easy). The Sony we bought was displayed with a whole lot of other TVs, and the picture quality contrast was stunning. Clean crisp resolution, brilliant color, with burn-your-retinas reds, and it was on sale (the color saturation is really remarkable, the best of any TV of any size in the store). We had to get a TV stand and we got a power conditioner strip so we won’t have the same problem again with the brownout.
The bad news is that they can’t install it until Saturday. That’s no TV. At all. Until Saturday. Aieeeeee!
Because we now have HD, or will have, we have to have the current dishes replaced with an HD dish. The soonest they can do that (it doesn’t cost anything) is Saturday, July 5, and when he said that, I thought I was going to have to dial 911 until he said we could get DirecTV, just not the HD channels, until then, so on Saturday, we will again have TV.
Remember that pure, unsullied by the outside world tribe they supposedly found in the Amazon last month? And what did I say?
Guess what? I was right.
‘Lost’ Amazon tribe a publicity stunt
By staff writers
June 23, 2008 08:26pmTHE man behind photos of warriors from an “undiscovered” Amazon tribe that were beamed around the world has admitted it was a publicity stunt aimed at raising awareness of logging.
Indigenous tribes expert, José Carlos Meirelles, said the tribe had been known of since 1910, and had been photographed to prove that they still existed in an area endangered by logging, The Guardian reported.
Mr Meirelles, who was working for Funai, the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency dedicated to finding remote tribes and protecting them, said he spent three years gatheiring “evidence” about the tribe, and then planned the publicity to protect them from losing their habitat.
One more time, folks, with feeling.
as we’re dragged into the 21st century.
I’m geeky, but I’m not a first adopter, and one of my colleagues back in Indiana used to tease me because I wasn’t. A first adopter is a geekiness for its own sake geek, somebody who has to have the very newest technology the minute it comes out. Call me conservative (no!) or a tightwad or both, but I figure if I’m going to spend a lot of money (and the latest greatest tech toy is usuallly fairly expensive), I first want to know if it works, and second, why I should buy it.
My first computer was a Commodore 64, and I didn’t buy it until my brother showed me his, and what he’d done with it. My second computer was a TRS-80, and I bought it because it had a disk drive (on my Commodore, you could only store data on a cassette tape), and only (again) after my brother had one — although it didn’t take much to convince me of the advantages of disk drives over a cassette tape recorder.
I only bought new technology right out of the gate once: The Laserdisc player (and discs). And look where we are with that. Dead technology, and we have 70-some 12-inch, very heavy, laserdiscs that can only be played on the $750 Pioneer player, which we’ve had to have fixed twice. And those players have not come down in price.
Having said that, let’s jump to 1986. I was a grad student, and my crappy little TV died. Just a block from where we lived there was an electronics sales/repair shop (it’s still there). Being nearly destitute, we went there first, because they rebuilt TVs and sold them at good prices.
On their shelf was a rebuilt GE with a 26-inch screen. It was a top of the line TV for the era, and the price was extraordinarily cheap, so we bought it.
You’re thinking, “Rebuilt TV, it probably crapped out on you,” and you couldn’t be more wrong. That GE worked flawlessly. It had a couple of quirks (it couldn’t remember channels, so every time you turned it off then on, you had to run it through the cycle so it could find them), but the picture was great, and it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It was one of the first line of cable-ready TVs, but as time went on and we went from cable to LR audio, we had to buy an RF modulator for it, but they’re only about twenty bucks, and the TV worked great, so who cared?
Yesterday evening, as I briefly stated at the time, we had another brownout (they’re almost daily here), and the system didn’t come back on, or it did, but there was no picture on the TV, and it couldn’t find a channel. I looked at the modulator and saw that no signal was going through it, so I thought it had died, and got another.
I hooked up the new modulator, and still, the TV could not find the channel. The TV was stuck in a potentially endless loop, running through the cycle over and over and over. So I cold booted the whole system.
When I turned the power back on, I heard the familiar hum of the TV, so it was getting power, but there was no picture at all, and there should have been snow (until it found a channel). Pressing the auto-find button (to start the cycle) did nothing. In fact, everything did nothing.
As if that weren’t enough, the DirecTiVO receiver was getting power, but the power light didn’t come on, and just like the TV, nothing did anything. And the RF modulator was receiving no signal.
I rebooted both numerous times, and the same thing: Power but nothing.
The brownout blew out both the TV and the DirecTiVO.
But it gets worse.
When we moved into a large house out in the country and bought furniture, we bought a mission book cabinet, and with a jigsaw, I turned it into an entertainment center. We did a lot of entertaining, and it was nice to be able to put the system on one of the DirecTV music channels and close the cabinet during parties. The GE just barely fit inside, which at the time was fine. But because of the wider aspect ratio, the only HD sets that would fit in the cabinet have pictures that are too small given what we’re used to, and the amount of money a new TV is going to cost.
So today, we’re buying a new TV, a DirecTV receiver/DVR, a backup power supply, and maybe, furniture to put it on (I have never seen an entertainment center that wasn’t an ugly, godawful thing I’d never let anywhere near my house, so I’m not sure what we’re going to do about that. We have to do something, though, because we have a TV, a receiver, a satellite receiver/DVR, a VHS/DVD player and recorder so I can put in an old VHS tape and a DVD-R and press a button and burn the tape to DVD, and that old Laserdisc player, and we can’t just put them all on the floor.) I suppose I should be excited (new toys and all that), but I’m not. I’m annoyed. So sue me for it.
We had a brownout, and it blew out the RF modulator. So no video on the TV. Getting another from Best Buy.
Yes, it’s an old, pre-cable-ready-era TV. Bought it in 86, rebuilt, from a TV repair place. GE with a 26″ screen (that was a big TV then). It still works fine, so there’s no need to replace it until next year.
There’s been a great deal of talk lately about universities’ making SAT scores optional for admission or dropping them entirely; today, Kimberly Swygert pointed to this article in the WSJ. Many of the articles about this topic have been of the moaning variety, largely because the authors are making unwarranted assumptions.
Let’s get a couple of things out of the way first, points I will expand in a moment. Dropping SAT scores as an admission requirement is distinctly different from lowering standards. Dropping the SAT is not in any way comparable to “education gaps” in the public schools. Finally, it makes no difference how well the SAT predicts student performance at the university.
The dirty little not-so-secret secret on campus is this: Underprepared students drop out, and do not complete degrees. I call it a not-so-secret secret because you almost never see reference to this anywhere but on campus. Whenever you see an article about “diversity among the student body,” it is always about admissions.
This is because, unlike the public schools, universities are not responsible for failed students: Going to college is your chance, and if you blow it, you blow it. I dare say that on every university campus every year, there are a couple of moaning, liberal, hand-wringing articles or editorials in the campus paper about retaining minority students. Administrations set up task forces, schools and colleges and departments create committees, all to study retention, but these task forces and committees don’t accomplish any policy and affects retention, for the one, painfully obvious reason: Students drop out because they are overwhelmed, and they are overwhelmed because they are not prepared for university work.
But in “The College Paradox: Not Everyone Gains By Higher Education,” an article about egalitarian v. tracking in education and not SAT scores, Steve Sailer puts his finger on the dirty little secret secret:
The prestige of Harvard and the other apex predators at the lofty pinnacle of the American educational pyramid means that the vast K-12 bottom has been infected with Harvard’s values (such as abstraction and abstruseness) and rhetoric (equality uber alles)…but not, alas, Harvard’s brains. Most of the K-12 educators, much less their students, aren’t smart enough to get the joke. They don’t understand that the IQ elitists of America are pulling the wool over their eyes when they rattle on about their purported liberal beliefs about how everybody should go to college.
They don’t understand it’s all a big pyramid scheme. The Harvard professors’ graduate students become the UCLA professors whose graduate students become the Cal State LA professors whose students become the schoolteachers who browbeat their more gullible pupils into believing that everybody should go to college, no matter how obvious a waste of money and time it will turn out to be.
Students with below average IQs [or underprepared students, regardless of IQ] are just the cannon fodder that keeps the system churning along for the professors.
Exactly. Dropping the SAT as an admission requirement is a win-win situation for the university. It’s a win-win because the university wins on two fronts: PR (and latte liberal feel-good-ism), and financial.
On the PR front, spewing nonsense about “diversity” accomplishes two things. First, it gives everybody something to feel guilty about, and as we all know, guilt is the primary motivator for upper middle class over-educated latte liberal academics, and as with any other source of guilt, it gives them something to “study” in those pointless task forces and committees. Everybody can pat himself on the back for “making a difference.” Second, it brings in lots of contributions from external sources, one of them guilty, wealthy latte liberal alumni, who give their alma mater more money because they are “making a difference,” and of course, because the contribution itself is “making a difference.” An extremely liberal alumnus of one Ivy League university who started a software company and did very well for himself donated several million dollars to his alma mater for setting up a program to study how the university could increase “diversity” in the student body (no names, of donors or universities).
The university also wins financially. Students are revenue. The more students a university enrolls, the more revenue the university rakes in — and the university always gets their revenue. Yes, most of the underprepared students will drop out, but the university has a freshman class every year. As Sailer points out, although talking about a completely different topic, it’s a pyramid scheme. It doesn’t matter that most of the underprepared freshmen won’t make it through the year (they will pay for the year, or somebody will), because there will be more the next year.
Sailer again:
Rather than follow CCNY’s disastrous route [open admissions], they made the cheaper choice of paying off minorities with affirmative action. Simultaneously, and paradoxically, they became even more IQ elitist in choosing mainstream applicants.
And it is exactly the same with dropping SATs from admissions, or almost the same. SATs required or not, the students who have the knowledge and are prepared will still apply. It doesn’t matter that a handful of qualified students will not be accepted in order to make room for “more diverse” students, because elite universities, with few exceptions, don’t make their reputations or most of their income from undergraduate education, but from graduate education and research.
And universities can always expand the number of undergraduate students they accept.
I’m not saying that universities don’t care about the quality of their undergraduate programs, and I’m certainly not saying that undergraduate education isn’t a big cash cow. But the undergraduate program takes a back seat to graduate programs, and here’s why.
Why do people desperately want to get into Harvard, say, or MIT? Because they’re top universities. And why are they top universities?
Not because of the quality of their undergraduate programs, but because of their reputations. And they have those reputations precisely because of their faculty who are big names in their fields and win things like Nobel Prizes and the PhD students they turn out who go on to become big names in their fields and win things like Nobel Prizes (as as anyone who has ever been in a PhD program knows, much of the time, the research that got Professor Smith that Nobel Prize is done at least in part by his PhD students).
“Diversity” is an investment. So are tools to achieve it (which never do), like affirmative action and dropping the SAT as an admissions requirement.
I call this a dirty little secret secret because from the talk about universities in the edusphere, you would think that all universities do is educate undergraduates. No doubt this is because most of the edusphere is made up of public school teachers and parents. But universities aren’t primarily in the business of educating undergraduates. I wouldn’t call it a sideline, but it does fall beneath research and graduate education, for good reason.
Universities don’t have to downgrade their education standards for these students, because they drop out, and there will be a whole new crop next year. Universities throw them bones, like African-American Studies Programs, Women’s Studies Programs, etc., but at many universities, these programs don’t offer bachelors’ degrees, and even if they do, there’s very little that student can do with that degree if he graduates. Standards are being downgraded in some fields, certainly, but that has absolutely nothing to do with “a more diverse campus,” and is unrelated to this discussion.
Sailer is correct. The underprepared students are cannon fodder for the pyramid scheme. They drop out, and the university gets more money.
As a final note, I suppose this sounds cynical, but it’s not meant to be cynical. It’s realistic. Universities, unlike the public schools, are businesses. Dropping the SAT is good business. Dropping the GRE (or GMAT, etc.) certainly is not, and that’s why you see very few universities lowering admission standards for graduate school (Ann Althouse last month referred to a university law school that’s dropping the LSAT, but I gathered from the discussion that it is not in any way prestigious, and seems to be trying to make a name for itself solely by scoring political points).
A&E is on right now, and they just ran an ad for Dog the Bounty Hunter. I checked the schedule, thinking they may have accidentally run an old ad. He’s back, Wednesday nights at 9 pm.
First, I reported on June 2 that our HOA had actually voted for liberty. Let me explain. Apparently, the HOA covenant was written up by the contractor who built the homes here. Okay, now I find this odd. Why would a contractor write a covenant, and was it with the input of at least some of the people who originally bought homes here? From conversations with an ex-board member and other communication, people have apparently challenged the covenant repeatedly because there are conflicting terms and it can be read either way.
Anyway, the questions were basically this: With regard to fences, sheds, pools, satellite dishes, and landscaping, should HOA members be required to get the okay of the HOA board, or should they be able to build without getting permission (provided construction is within township guidelines)? (And why would a covenant restrict fencing, when fencing adds to the property value?) Here were the results:
The results were consistent across all issues, with a clear relative majority voting to allow individual property owners to have the power to make their own decisions regarding fences, sheds, pools, and landscaping, providing their plans fall within X Township guidelines. No approval will be required by the HOA or its members.
Great, huh? Well, about a week later, we got this rather odd message (GHA refers to the HOA board):
We have received many nice comments and compliments about the recent neighborhood vote, but also a few concerns regarding the ballot and outcome. While we knew not everyone would be happy no matter what the outcome, we tried very hard to have the X HOA feel that the voting process was equitable. Based on some feedback we have received, it does not appear that we met that goal.
On the issues of landscaping and satellite dishes, the ballot results were clear, so a re-vote will not be needed. But the items concerning sheds, fencing, and pools raised questions. While there was a clear relative majority (i.e., one response that got significantly more votes than the others), the fact that the response options were not binary (like a clear yes/no vote) and two of the options were similar in nature (e.g., that some body should have approval power) made some members question the results.
So… let’s do this again! While it will be improbable that we’ll make everyone 100% happy, we’d like to re-vote, with newly worded questions, in an attempt to make the outcome more clear. Please note that whatever the outcome, the results will only affect future sheds, fencing, and pool installations.
Below is DRAFT wording for a new ballot. If you have any feedback pertaining to the wording of the questions or response options, please let us know. We may not be able to take all feedback into account (especially if it conflicts with someone else’s feedback!), but we will do our best to massage the wording so that it is as effective and clear as possible.
*Please provide any feedback you may have by Monday, June 16, 2008. *You may send your feedback to me or any of the other GHA Board members . . .
QUESTION 1: In regards to future fences in the X neighborhood, I vote that:
A. A governing body, such as the GHA Board of Directors or a committee of GHA members, should have the power to approve or deny fencing requests, based on a set of official guidelines. NOTE: If this response option prevails, then the GHA Board of Directors will follow-up with the GHA membership to establish a set of official guidelines regarding acceptable fencing that will be written into the X HOA By-laws and Covenants.
B. The individual property owners having the power to make their own decision regarding fencing on their property, providing it falls within X Township guidelines. No approval would be required by the GHA Board of Directors or the HOA members.
QUESTION 2: In regards to future pools in the X neighborhood, I vote that:
A. A governing body, such as the GHA Board of Directors or a committee of GHA members, should have the power to approve or deny pool requests, based on a set of official guidelines. NOTE: If this response option prevails, then the GHA Board of Directors will follow-up with the GHA membership to establish a set of official guidelines regarding acceptable pools that will be written into the X HOA By-laws and Covenants.
B. The individual property owners having the power to make their own decision regarding pools on their property, providing it falls within Patton Township guidelines. No approval would be required by the GHA Board of Directors or the HOA members.
QUESTION 3: Should X homeowners be allowed to erect sheds, whether temporary or permanent, on their property?
A. Yes, future sheds should be permitted in our development - NOTE: If a “Yes” vote prevails, then the GHA Board of Directors will follow-up with the GHA membership to establish a set of official guidelines regarding acceptable sheds that will be written into the X HOA By-laws and Covenants.
B. No, future sheds should not be permitted in our development.
We got a follow-up that stated that the pool question wasn’t going to appear, because they were accepting the results of the first vote (?) although I don’t understand why it’s even in the damned covenant, since the lots here aren’t big enough to build both a house and a pool, unless it’s a very, very small pool. And since we live right on the ridge, just six inches above solid limestone, I suspect that putting in a pool would be massively expensive. But back to the voting issue.
I agree that the original questions were bizarre. They were basically like this (working from memory, so it’s not an exact quotation):
The ambiguity was in the second option. Depending on how you read it, it could mean one of three things: More or less the same as the first, more or less the same as the third (since the property owners are the members of the HOA), or building requests must be submitted to a vote by the whole damned neighborhood. Puzzling or not, however, it was the third option that won (in what our secretary calls a “relative majority,” and if anyone knows what a “relative majority” is supposed to be, please enlighten me. The secretary’s definition, “one response that got significantly more votes than the others,” doesn’t sound relative. What would be a majority majority, then? Or a plurality? Or did the secretary not take civics in high school?)
Now, call me cynical, but I think this reeks of GHA board members (or a group of HOA members) who want to retain control over other peoples’ private property, and want us to re-vote because they didn’t like the outcome. I wonder if at the end of this vote if it comes out the same way, they’ll demand recounts, counting differently each time (oh, we only want these votes recounted, and those votes over there should be discarded) until they get the result they want — just like Al Gore and Florida in 2000.
Anyway, we’ll know in two weeks. Voting just opened, and I cast mine.
Class this morning. Blogging this afternoon.
I’ve only used the grill once this year, and while we were at Sam’s, I saw a package of two two-pound chuck roasts, and was suddenly inspired, so I tossed it in the cart ($2.88/lb, pretty damned cheap for beef around here). I got cheese — Land o’Lakes Co-Jack, to be precise, then we went next door to Wal-Mart for a supermarket tomato (not for me — I don’t eat filth on my burgers) and buns (they only have huge packs at Sam’s).
I lit the coals, then ground one of the roasts. I don’t buy ground meat. When I first used my grinder, I had an Aha! experience when I saw that everything came out looking the same. I (generously) added kosher salt and coarsely ground black pepper, mixed it up, and made it into four half-pound burgers.
Mmmmmm, meat! Animal flesh! Dead cow! Mmmmmmm! And after trying nearly everything, I have settled on Co-Jack as the best cheeseburger cheese. I’ve done the cheddar thing, and it’s good, but it’s too designer. It’s no longer a cheeseburger.
If I’d thought about it, I would have picked up cole slaw fixins, but I didn’t.
Coals are almost ready . . .
Mmmmm, dead cow! Mooooooo!
As someone I used to know once said, “If it doesn’t shriek in terror when it’s harvested, it doesn’t belong on a plate.”
From today’s local rag:
Motorists traveling Interstate 80 would likely be stunned if they knew how much criminal activity was riding along the highway with them.
Illegal immigrants and drug runners with fistfuls of cash and packages of narcotics travel the highway, police say.
And state police troopers based at Rockview are doing something about it.
Armed with training through a fairly new patrol initiative, Safe Highway Initiative Through Effective Law Enforcement Detection, or SHIELD, state police at Rockview already have set a number of records for arrests and the number of illegal immigrants taken into custody on I-80.
In 2007, Rockview state police arrested 109 illegal immigrants on I-80 in Centre County, according to state police Trooper David McGarvey, public information officer for Troop G based in Hollidaysburg.
Already this year, state police at Rockview have nabbed 157 illegal immigrants on the highway, he said.
Stunned? Kinda. The crime isn’t spilling over into the county, thank God. And illegals? The Hispanic population here is so low that it’s noticeable, fewer, certainly, than Monroe County. You’d think there would be more than there are. There isn’t a Hispanic grocery (Wal-Mart caters to what few we have), or as far as I know, a Hispanic-owned business. Even Bedford (Indiana, not Pennsylvania) has a Hispanic-owned restaurant. If there’s a Hispanic church, I don’t know about it. Most are Catholics, of course, but there are very few Hispanics at our parish.
I-80 is a major interstate that goes from Newark, NJ (maybe NYC) across (and up) to Akron and Toledo, South Bend, Gary, etc.
Check this out: WP-SpamFree has blocked 25,320 spam comments.
And I installed it less than a month ago.
I use Akismet too, but it doesn’t catch nearly as many, and I have to scroll through the Akismet queue. So even though it doesn’t get posted, I have to deal with it. WP-SpamFree just gets rid of it.
Die Hard, the king of all action movies is on. Priorities!
but I think this is funny: The UK refuses to let Martha Stewart in because she’s a criminal. I know, I know, given how the UK aggressively shelters actual criminals makes this kind of ludicrous, but I really despise Martha.
Charles, referring to a Kos Kid who published an angry diatribe about Obama’s flip on FISA entitled, “Apparently, Even Barack Obama Thinks You’re Stupid,” says:
When even Barack Obama thinks it, there just might be something to it.
Snark!
Uncommon, that is, given the source. Common sense from The Atlantic:
Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis’s hometown turned into America’s new South Bronx? Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city’s chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it’s a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don’t want to hear. It’s an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades.
Read the whole thing.
I just saw this really stupid TV ad for Garlic Pro. It’s a little chopper — you put your garlic in it and push the handle up and down, just like that chopper Ron Popeil offered years ago, but smaller. But wait! You have to peel it first, so you also get a cheap little rubber tube. See, you roll it in the rubber tube and the peel comes off! And you get both for only $14.95 (offer doubled if you order on the phone)!
For the kitchen technique impaired who are thinking, “Wow, that’s not much, and it’s really cool!” let me save you that $14.95, because you have one implement in your kitchen that peels and chops garlic.
Really?
Yes, really. It’s called a knife. Follow the instructions:
To peel garlic
To chop garlic (I could say just chop the garlic, but that wouldn’t be helpful, and I am always helpful)
You just saved $14.95 (plus shipping and handling, of course), and the embarrassment of having spent that money on a cheap piece of plastic and a cheap rubber tube.
You’re welcome, I’m sure.
This is the stupidest thing I’ve seen in print for a while, and that’s saying a great deal:
Not only was the driver of a Ford Bronco that fatally struck a 12-year-old girl unlicensed, but San Jose police say she is also an illegal immigrant, renewing the debate over whether undocumented people should be allowed to apply for driver’s licenses.
So what does killing a child with a vehicle have to do with giving illegal immigrants drivers licenses? To any rational human being, not a damn thing. And indeed, read through the whole thing, and nowhere is offered any connection between the two. So the implication must be that if she’d had a license, she wouldn’t have killed the child. Nonsense, yes, but no more nonsensical than the idea that gun control would prevent gun crime (hint: criminals, by definition, don’t obey the law, and that includes gun control laws).
But these aren’t rational human beings: They’re California liberals. And just as they’ll happily dance in the blood of the latest shooting spree to scream for gun control, they dance in this child’s blood to give illegals licenses. How sensitive of them! They’re so much more civilized than we rubes in flyover country! They’re ahead of the curve!
Journalism School is apparently the new Education School, to judge by the idiot who wrote this story. That paragraph would be marked up in red with question marks in the margin by any writing instructor — except in California. Only there would it represent a coherent flow from one idea to another.
Idiots.
Thanks to Hube, who heaps plenty of well-deserved scorn on those oh so sensitive California liberals, for the link.
I really have to start reading about pages on blogs. I just discovered Brutally Honest, and Rick says this in his about page:
My current confused spiritual state was probably affected (if not birthed) in some way by my stint as a potential ordinand of the Episcopal Church in 1998. During that two year Ordination Exploration Program, I learned quite a bit about myself, but even more about organized religion. Needless to say, I was, to my chagrin at the time, found not worthy to continue toward ordination in the Episcopal Church. Seems I was a bit ” too rigid theologically” as some were quick to point out.
As I’ve said, I realized back in the 80s that with very few exceptions, Episcopalians range somewhere on the “theologically squishy” to “newage-y bozo-the-clown-liturgy nuts” spectrum. Theology is something most would just rather not contemplate — well, Christian theology, anyway. But this did surprise me:
I think however that my downfall began when I inadequately expressed how I felt about my penis. Yes, my penis. It seemed that the ECUSA was very concerned as to whether I could talk freely about my member during the psyschological phase of the program. I was literally speechless about it at the time, given that I had never really considered giving much thought to the notion before.
And, well, what can be said about that? I can honestly say, however, that the idea of a priest discussing his naughty bits — and the idea has never occurred to me until now, thank God — makes me squirm in my chair.
Billionaire and presidential race spoiler Ross Perot is back.
Oh, for f*cks sake. He’s right. And what’s ol’ Idiot Perot’s site called? Perot Charts. Poor Ross never figured out how to do anything but charts, with meaningless, distilled, numbers.
Go away, Ross. Nobody cares.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . uh, sorry.
In a comment, Darren sez:
You’ve been in on conference calls and such, all leading up to this. How did it start? Did you contact the campaign or the party, did they follow your support of McCain on your blog–How?
I dealt with the conference call part in the comment thread (by the way, you can join the mailing list here — it’s a Yahoo group, so to join, you need to create a Yahoo ID if you don’t have one). The convention. Well, that’s a whole differnt critter that started months ago. Like January. Or maybe earlier. last October.
I’m on all the GOP mailing lists (surprise, surprise), and I got put on the GOP Convention mailing list. Anyway, a message went out about blogging the convention, with the instructions for how to apply. I applied.
Skip ahead a month or so. It probably wouldn’t surprise you to know that I read several gunblogs daily, and one of those daily reads is The Bitch Girls. Bitter Bitch (one of the bloggers I have actually met in meat life) announced that she was organizing a blogger bash at the NRA convention in Louisville.
Like the bumper sticker says, I luv Lou-a-vull. I was born there. Used to live there. People to see, places to re-visit, restaurants to re-visit, etc. Louisville is a doable drive from here, about 10-11 hours, plus I know my way around the city, so there would be no need to stay in one of the hotels the NRA had booked up. IOW, I was extremely interested.
I couldn’t afford to do both conventions, though, so I didn’t commit. I told Bitter and Sebastian (another blogger I’ve met, with Bitter — they’re a couple) I might, depending on whether I was going to get credentialed to blog the GOP convention or not. The NRA convention was in May, and it was now November. I assumed I’d find out one way or another before the convention in Louisville, and since I didn’t need to stay in one of the booked hotels, I could pretty much just drive to Louisville, if it turned out I wasn’t going to get to blog the GOP convention.
Uh, well, I didn’t find out. Months passed. May arrived. Then I realized that the NRA convention was during finals week. Oops. Bad, bad, bad timing. Anyway, I didn’t go to Louisville.
I only got a message from the convention people last week. I mean, come on. Get it together, folks.
So that’s when I did a little research, and found that (of course) all of the hotels within a ten mile radius of the Twin Cities were booked. I still do not know if the GOP has booked rooms for independent bloggers, as they have delegates and the press. I also found out that flying there would cost at least 3,000 bucks.
If we go, we’ll most likely drive. Chicago is a hundred miles over halfway, and about the same distance as Bloomington, so we could stop in Chicago for the night (and hit the Frontera Grill), then drive the rest of the way the next day.
That’s if. I’m not real keen on the idea of staying in a hotel 15 miles away from the city, driving in, and finding a place to park every day. So I’m waiting for the convention people to answer the question I asked, oh, five days ago.
Went to the doctor, and we agreed to just stop the muscle relaxers. So far, I haven’t had good luck with them.
Because I responded so quickly to the prednisone, and because the pain did not go down my leg, the doctor doesn’t think it’s sciatica, but (ahem) arthritis in the sacroiliatic joint. It’s a lot better — what’s been knocking me (and the blogging) out has been the medication.
The ilium is the wing-shaped bone that forms the seat of the pelvis. The sacrum is the “tailbone,” which lies between the two ilia. The sacroiliatic joint is between them. Here:
We all get arthritis as the body rebuilds bone in joints. I have a number of joints that cause discomfort from time to time, but this is the first time arthritis has caused serious pain. It’s also the first time that I have had bad reactions to not one, but two medications.
Life goes on.
Yesterday was rough. Fell asleep somewhere around 7:30 and slept till 4:45. No nausea today, but I have an appt with my doctor this afternoon to change the meds.
More importantly, Obama now says all that loose (but electorally useful!) talk about quitting NAFTA was just some “overheated rhetoric” of the sort that politicians sometimes use when they want to, well, lie to voters.
It’s so refreshing we finally have a “new kind of politician” willing to lie to the public to dishonestly get their votes.
Early yesterday morning, I got sick, but as soon as I barfed, it was over, so I figured I’d drunk too much coffee too fast and forgot about it.
This morning, I suddenly got sick, and didn’t make it. It went all over the bathroom, the walls, the floor, the back of the toilet, everywhere but in the toilet (it took about a quarter roll of paper towels to clean it all up). About an hour later, I got sick again, really sick, and continued with dry heaves after all the coffee was barfed up. I’m queasy now. So I’m starting to wonder if it’s the meds.
I almost never get sick enough to barf, by the way. Maybe twice a year, at most.
Anyway, I’m not feeling well, and may not post much.
Whatever you think of Mitch McConnell, thank him for stopping a 54 billion dollar tax increase.
From the AP: “Democrats in both the House and Senate are proposing to raise some $54 billion by preventing hedge fund managers and others from deferring certain overseas profits and by delaying a tax break that multinationals are slated to receive in the coming years.â€
Here’s an idea: Reduce capital gains taxes and personal income taxes so that it is not worth the bother for people like Bill Clinton and his wife, Al Gore and his wife, and John Edwards and his wife to move their money overseas.
Of course, that would cost Chelsea Clinton her job as a hedge-fund flunky.
But this is where he nails it to the wall:
Reported AP: “The legislation contains some $17 billion in tax credits to help industries develop renewable energy sources including wind, solar, biomass, geothermal and plug-in electric vehicles, as well as to promote energy conservation in commercial buildings.â€
If this stuff were viable, businesses would be doing it without welfare from the government.
Hey Don, is the AP going to try to sue you?
One of Hollywood’s last greats, the beautiful Cyd Charisse has passed away. Fred Astaire called her “beautiful dynamite,” and while there were other great dancers, such as Ann Miller, none had the fluid grace — or the legs — of Cyd Charisse. Here is Joubert’s tribute.
With Ricardo Montalban dancing the Tango:
With Fred Astaire, whom she said, “moved like glass,” from Dancing in the Dark:
And of course, with Gene Kelley from Singin in the Rain, the Broadway Melody Ballet:
And this number, also from Singin in the Rain:
Good for Kos. If you didn’t catch this, AP has decided that copyright law doesn’t apply to them, and have threatened to sue several bloggers (see Memeorandum for a big roundup of commentary from all across the political blogosphere).Note that the AP had demanded $2.50 per word, then turned right around and quoted one of Patterico’s entire articles without either asking permission or paying Patterico said $2.50 per word. And let’s not forget that AP is a network of plagiarists, consisting solely of news articles lifted without attribution.
AP can suck rotten eggs.
Does anybody here remember Amanda “Godbags” Marcotte? Like Franken, when word of her vile “contributions” to the nation’s political conversation gained widespread attention, she too played the “satire” card. Because, being morons, after all, we conservalibertaricans are obviously not nuanced enough to understand the subtleties of bashing the Virgin birth any more than we can understand the layers of complex thinking that led to Franken’s production of the “Porn-O-Rama” article.
discussing this, where the liberal Washington Post effectively demonstrates that Al Franken is the David Caruso of satire.
“What Should I Do? I Am A Grown Man With Red Hair.” Better yet, the article trashes David Caruso.
He can’t walk and talk at the same time (you should see him on stairs), requires dozens of takes for simplest line-readings (which as we all know, he can only do one way), and can’t even put his CSI gloves on on-camera (always a time cut, just watch). He will cuss uncontrollably (often in front of a child actor) and blame everyone but himself for his inability to act. He used to hack up big loogies on the floor of the set, too, until a producer gently reminded him of sanitation and courtesy. Oh, and he re-writes every scene he is in, so he is totally to blame for the hackneyed one-liners. He will take anything the writers give him, and destroy it. And the sunglass bit is all his, a truly innovative contribution to his character. But as he said to us many times, “What should I do? I am a grown man with red hair.”
We used to call the diet coke his “acting juice.”