2011 archive
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Recreation, the courteous way:
(snip)
Police were checking firing ranges along Route 9 as a possible source of the gunshot.
The state of Delaware has a public firing range in that area; my younger son and I have used it. (I believe that everyone should know how to handle a gun, just as strongly as I believe that persons who worship their guns are creepy and dangerous.)
None of the individual ranges face the river except for the shotgun range, and it’s too far from the river for shot to carry.
Classy 0
No doubt this was the reasoned action of a thoughtful person.
Also, pigs, wings.
Wonder how large the settlement will be?
Movable Feast 0
Lilacs come earlier (emphasis added):
To answer the question in bold, in the immortal words of a character (who can remind me who it was? I forget–a gremlin maybe?) from a Warner Brothers cartoon, “It ain’t Wendell Wilkie!”
Parking Wars 0
They should have been banksters. They have the right instincts:
The cars, police spokesman Lt. Ray Evers said, were taken by eight crooked tow-truck drivers who sold the vehicles to a Hunting Park scrap yard for a small sum, usually between $300 and $500.
On the Other Hand, Sometimes There Is No Other Hand 0
On of the dumber aspects of our current jounanimalism is the belief that for every “yes,” there is a “but”–that for every truth there is an equal and opposite truth.
I saw a particularly egregious example of this earlier this week in a column that otherwise appeared to be a quite sane; it discussed President Obama’s release of his birth certificate (which of course followed the release of his birth certificate in 2008). You can read the whole thing at the link; here’s the bit that set me thinking:
Of course, before you go off and believe in some conspiracy theory that nearly half of all Republicans are nuts, it’s important to note that more than half of all Democrats might be nuts, too.
About a third of Americans, again, suspect that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or failed to stop them so the U.S. could go to war in the Middle East.
And a majority of Democrats think President Bush may have known about the attacks in advance: 35 percent said he did know and another 26 percent weren’t sure but were, you know, keeping an open mind to the idea the president willingly let Americans die to benefit his Halliburton buddies.
He is unable to address the loonies on the right without positing equal and opposite loonies on the left.
But, despite his attempt to find a “but” for his “yes,” those loonies aren’t there, not as he has characterized them.
And here’s The Rest of The Story:
Dustbiters 0
And the FDIC starts its weekly trip to the West Coast, smiting banksters along the way:
Aside: Cocoa Beach always makes me think of I Dream of Jeanie. Guess the magic’s gone out . . . .
Torturous Reasoning 0
The recent attempts on the part of the wingnut right to claim that torture had a role in tracking Osama bin Laden, fraudulent though they are, leads me to wonder this:
It’s skeevy.
(Update: Typo corrected.)
Twits on Twitter 0
. . . except in Kent County, Delaware:
New provisions would bar workers from posting materials on or off the job that disparage co-workers, disclose confidential information or “reflect unfavorably” on county government, unless rated as a “legitimate matter of public concern.” The same proposals also would create a “duty to report inappropriate use of social media by co-workers or supervisors.”
Delaware’s other county and state governments already aggressively use social media as communications tools and tolerate limited worker use of public systems for private postings. From the moment he took office, Gov. Jack Markell has made heavy use of everything from blogging, to flickr, to YouTube.
Two thoughts:
- This sounds like overreach as regards personal behavior at home.
- What are the county fathers and mothers afraid of?
Early Polling 0
Andy Borowitz reports:
Full poll results at the link.
De-Pulped 0
How long has it been since you’ve looked something up in a phone book? I think I’ve done it twice in the past three years, and both times it was Yellow Pages. Think of the landfill space this will save:
Verizon will notify customers about how to request printed versions of the phone book through press releases and inserts in their bills, company spokesman Harry Mitchell told the Citizen.
Print directories containing business and government white pages, customer information pages and the yellow pages will continue to be delivered to all customers.
I can’t find a link, but my reading indicates that most of the opposition to this has come from companies that print phone books. They even tried claiming that it abridged their freedom of speech (apparently, speech is now spelled i-n-v-o-i-c-e).
Springtime in Paris . . . 0
. . . Paris, Texas, that is, is apparently not so great, especially if you are not-white.
Whether or not the story is true is yet to be determined, but I have been reading Field long enough to know that he does his homework and does not speak lightly.
If you find the story appalling, it is because it is.
If you find the story unbelievable, it is because you don’t know your history.
Down the Tubes 0
Er, yeah.
Disappointingly, the story does not explain the nature of the defect.
Ha-Ha-Ha-HA-Ha 2
This is to be the best lead (yes, it’s “lead,” not “lede,” for Pete’s sake–it “leads” you to read the rest) I have seen in a long time: