Rumble Strips|You have been warned!

About a month ago I wrote a post about Francisco Linares, a Los Angeles man who was sentenced to jail for making property improvements to his home. I was looking around the net for a followup to see if anything else developed in the case but didn’t really find anything and the original article was gone as well but I did find a LA Times link to the story. What I really wanted was to see the extent of the property improvements that were worth sending an insurance manager to jail for six months.

Ain’t GoogleMaps cool? I see a dirt road running into someone’s back yard. I wonder how that fits into such tight homeowner’s code.?

In the comments of the LA Times blog post discussing the issue some guy said:

So, had they let Linares off the hook, here’s the message it would have sent to the law-abiding who spent the time and money to comply: SUCKERS — You got run through the wringer for obeying the rules, and you should have ignored them like Linares did. You may not like the rules, but isn’t it up to the citizens of RHE to decide what kind of community they have?

Hillary could not have said it better. Getting run through the wringer for obeying the rules you’re saying: I’m a sucker too.

It doesn’t say who wrote the post but he or she says, “I agree with the judge. What’s your opinion?”

Figures.

When good people ask for help we should send whatever help we can.

“Tell them to send foreign troops, UN troops,” said a young monk at the Mwe Kya Kan pagoda. “Please, fly them to our country to save our lives.”

An American in Rangoon told me yesterday about an opinion poll carried out on Burmese attitudes to US foreign policy.

“Like most people, they thought that it sucks,” he told me. “But not for the usual reason. Burmese wanted to know why George Bush hasn’t invaded their country yet.”

Not only is it the right thing to do, but it would sure take the news off of Iraq, if you need another reason to do it. People who beat and murder and rob monks sure sound like the same guys we hate in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria and such.

This is from a news article dated April 29, 2004:

That suggests that the junta understands its problem with world opinion. But token steps do nothing to solve the larger problems of repression, civil strife and epidemic poverty. [Only international pressure is likely to break through Burma's wall of repression.]

I guess the people in Burma know best what they need and it sounds like they don’t believe “international pressure” is doing the trick. Sounds like they think they need some boots on the ground.

I got a dollar that says there are mass graves in Burma full of men women and children. Even babies.

Speaking of Al Gore inventing the information age with his clever little Internet gadget, I was just bitching about AlGore in a recent follow up effort to the pithy “Creatures from outer space” post that never was finished.

I was getting short on time to get out the door so I kinda left the post short but I think my point was kinda obvious. These damn eco-freaks can’t get it through their thick skulls that humans are in fact a natural phenomenon that evolves, exists and survives on this planet just like every other thing, living or dead, organic or inorganic.

Global warming is a big scam that is run by a lot of wealthy people from around the world who are trying to marshal all the available resources they can swindle in a futile effort to protect their real property holdings in the event adverse conditions should, say, submerge New York City, or something. More likely is that New York City will still just be a sewer but a significantly warmer climate will render now fertile crop land into a more arid, less hospitable clime, resulting in a poor long-term business outlook for existing, bountiful agribusinesses.

Ordinary people like me don’t give a damn if other people besides the people now are making gobs and gobs of money. And I certainly don’t care that Al Gore will own a big dirt farm. If it were just a bunch of small farmers losing their ass global warming wouldn’t even be a blip on the radar.

Big corporations in the farming and real estate business don’t like the thought of their landholdings suddenly becoming worthless.

I’ve seen the data on this, so I know I’m right. I managed to get a copy of one of the key bits of intel:

Current climate conditions:

Any day now the world will look like this:

At least the Arabs have a bunch of oil to fall back on. In Tennessee dirty burning coal will suddenly become en vogue once again and Al Gore will be leading the charge.

UPDATE: “Rice vows USA committed to tackling global warming” …Whoa there, Nellie. Are we? I’m not. I reject the theory that we can “fix” “global warming”. I’m not even convinced that humans are, by simply existing and surviving, causing any significant amount of warming. Besides, I want the biggest fattest carbon footprint I can possibly achieve. “Hey, Buddy, my carbon footprint is bigger than yours, ha!”

UPDATE II: “DEM Plan Uses Taxes to Fight Climate Change”… Come on, everyone pitch in to save my jet.

UPDATE III: Gore calls for global Marshall Plan…

“This is an emergency,” Mr Gore told the opening session of the Clinton Global Initiative. “I think that the key to fighting global poverty is to have the wealthy nations and the developing nations join together to reduce global warming … I think what we need is a global Marshall plan to make the creation of jobs around the reduction of carbon the central principle for how we develop this.”

Does anyone else find this “global Marshall Plan”Ironic considering my turn of phrase above? But, hey, what about letting the free will of free people who decide what they want to be when they grow up form the basis of job creation? I know it’s a crazy idea.

Cory Doctorow in the Guardian on free data sharing:

Since the 1970s, pundits have predicted a transition to an “information economy”. The vision of an economy based on information seized the imaginations of the world’s governments. For decades now, they have been creating policies to “protect” information — stronger copyright laws, international treaties on patents and trademarks, treaties to protect anti-copying technology.

The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying and selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder to get access to information unless you’ve paid for it.

…

The world’s governments might have bought into the old myth of the information economy, but not so much that they’re willing to ban the PC and the internet.

Cory Doctorow is an activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing.

It’s a good article explaining why the Internet was no bubble for a lot of people but I think his premise is off. It’s not so much that the government bought into the “old myth” of how information needs to be secured instead of shared, it’s that they need it to be that way.

The old myth is not a myth. In a spice economy, he who controls the spice controls the universe. In an information economy, he who controls the information controls the universe.

Alien creatures may cause shifts in polar ice caps:

Scientists acknowledged that both poles were extraordinarily complicated systems of ice, water and land, and that the mix of human and natural influences was not easy to clarify.

There is a special place in Hell for people who pick on seventy year old great grand mothers:

In July, Perry was cited by Officer James Flygare of the police’s Neighborhood Preservation Unit for failing to water her lawn. Perry refused to give her name to the officer and, when Flygare tried to stop her from going back inside her house, she reportedly tripped and injured her nose.

She was arrested and taken to police station but released shortly afterwards.

There is also another special place in Hell for people who kill old retarded ladies confined to wheelchairs:

Within an hour of her call to 911, Delafield, a wheelchair-bound woman documented to have mental illness, was dead.

Family attorney Rick Alexander said Delafield’s death could have been prevented and that there are four things that jump out at him about the case.

“One, she’s in a wheelchair. Two, she’s schizophrenic. Three, they’re using a Taser on a person that’s in a wheelchair, and then four is that they tasered her 10 times for a period of like two minutes,” Alexander said.

If you tasered a cat to death your ass would be hanged within a fortnight. What kind of idiot does one have to be to become a police officer anyway? Is there a special test? Are people with common sense or who is not an egomaniac with a huge inferiority complex automatically rejected?

My advice: never, ever call the police. The police are not your friends. They act like they are your friends, but they are not. The police are more destructive to our society than they are beneficial.

Wake me up when the revolution starts.

What is Hillary’s favorite kind of nut?

CasHsu’s

OJ got arrested. Who cares?

Who’s Mukasey. I am sure he is well qualified. Who cares?

Surprise! $110 Billion Universal Hillary-care. It doomed her before, it’ll doom her again. Who cares? The presidency is a leadership position and Hillary is no leader–she just wants to be in charge of everything.

Gore won an Emmy so he must be right about global warming. Right?

If Greenspan claims much of Fed policy was politically driven, then maybe he is not as smart as everyone thinks he is. I bet he’s a big dunderhead and because he is a Clinton stooge the media has always played him up like a genius. Another fabrication of the left.

SO Miami is giving it’s officers assault weapons. At what point do you start giving law-abiding citizens weapons? If you take any city in America–or the world for that matter–that is ravaged with violent crime up to and including insurgency from homicidal mercenaries, and offer an “assault” weapon to everyone over 16 who qualifies to own one and conduct voluntary organized neighborhood training on the use of weapons and tactics, the crime problem would be over within six months, tops. There would be bodies stacking up at first up but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: some people need killin’.

Like Josey Wales said, “Dying ain’t much of a living.”

A frog goes into a bank and approaches the teller.
He can see from her nameplate that her name is Patricia Whack.

“Miss Whack, I’d like to get a $30,000 loan to take a holiday.”

Patty looks at the frog in disbelief and asks his name.
The frog says his name is Kermit Jagger, his dad is Mick Jagger, and that it’s okay, he knows the bank manager.

Patty explains that he will need to secure the loan with some collateral.

The frog says, “Sure. I have this,” and produces a tiny porcelain elephant, about an inch tall, bright pink and perfectly formed.

Very confused, Patty explains that she’ll have to consult with the bank manager and disappears into a back office.

She finds the manager and says, “There’s a frog called Kermit Jagger out there who claims to know you and wants to borrow $30,000, and he wants to use this as collateral.”

She holds up the tiny pink elephant.
“I mean, what in the world is this?”

(you’re gonna love this)

The bank manager looks back at her and says…

“It’s a knickknack, Patty Whack.
Give the frog a loan, His old man’s a Rolling Stone.”