America
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Virginia Tech shootings
This is horrible. I just checked the news for the first time all day. 31 people dead?
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Your tax dollars at work
In Lilburn in this case:
Shut up and drink, Lilburn bar patrons told
…
Earlier, the city outlawed pool — the game that spelled trouble in the musical “The Music Man” — in its watering holes. Now it’s also barring karaoke and just about any other party game from places that serve alcohol.America is getting ridiculous at an increasing rate. However, my zoning for no-children idea is gaining good feedback in my informal polls.
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An interesting movie
I finally finished watching the documentary Bastards of the Party, an interesting history of gang activity in Los Angeles from the 40s to the present day. It’s not a balanced take and doesn’t pretend to be, which is quite refreshing.
One quibble – the historian explaining the rise of crack traced it back to Iran-Contra and the CIA-crack folklore. I’ve always found this ridiculous. It assumes that the government was that clever (doubtful) and also that no one else would have thought of taking a commodity that sells for five cents in South America and selling it for fifty dollars in the US.
Beyond that though, well worth watching.
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MLK day thoughts
Since it’s his birthday, I guess I’ll post my impression of MLK. I find it surprising that everyone misses his most singular accomplishment, namely that he he was able to manage a coalition of highly and disparately motivated parties and have them all (more or less) follow a strategy of nonviolence, which is the only strategy that would have worked. As a management endeavor that is staggering.
For more on that, see The Gandhi Game, which explains it all in a game theory sort of way. Put simply, it allows the opposing party to do what you want them to do (usually defined as “doing the right thing”, though it doesn’t have to be that way) and not suffer any violent consequences. If the Palestinians did that, they would be in a much better position than they are now.
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Very sad
Tech journalist James Kim and his family are missing. He was one of the main reviewers from the old TechTV days, lately he’s been at CNet.
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Thoughts
As it seems Allen is going to concede (in an unexpectedly classy move for him) it would seem that I was wrong on both counts in my predictions.
Quote of the moment, via Instapundit:
The Republicans lost and the Democrats won for the same reason — they distanced themselves from their base.
I think we’ll like divided government. And the anti-Kelo measure passed, which is an unalloyed boon to America.
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Two things
Whilst listening to left wing radio today I heard two notable things, which struck me as totally wrong.
- The claim that over 50% of all discretionary government spending is spent on the military. While true, the weaselly use of the “discretionary” modifier makes it meaningless. To declare that some percent of the budget “must” be spent on programs, when they have the full power to change any law making them spend it on said programs is downright silly.
- The left wing (usually uttered by baby boomer types) screed that it is wrong not to show caskets of dead soldiers and marines as they arrive back in the states. This is usually followed by something like “if we could only see the human pain of this war, we wouldn’t be there at all.” Then it occurred to me that we all watched 9-11 happen and then three weeks later we were bombing Afghanistan, and 18 months later we invaded Iraq. The sight of dead Americans seems to make us more aggressive, not less.
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The three funniest things I’ve read today
Both arise from this post by Althouse, entitled Wisconsin, the necrophiliac’s playground.
Surprisingly necrophilia is not illegal in Wisconsin. One of the comments is
You’re just jealous because you’re not dead.
I read the two articles linked, the first of which yielded this gem
Authorities said the three were not acquainted with the woman but had seen an obituary with her photo.
which makes me think they were holding out for a hot corpse.
Radke said Grunke asked him to help because he wanted to dig up Tennessen’s body for sex, the court documents said, and the three had stopped at a store on the way to the cemetery to buy condoms.
Condoms? One would think the necrophiliac crowd would be a bit more devil may care about such matters.
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Wow
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The funniest thing I read today
Cook County prosecutors say a 29-year-old man traveling with his mother desperately didn’t want her to know he’d packed a sexual aid for their trip to Turkey.
So he told security it was a bomb, officials said.