Berner’s Street Hoax was one of the greatest practical jokes of the 19th Century
The year was 1809. Famed English author, Theodore Hook, made a bet with one of his close friends that within a week he could make any house in London the most talked about place in the city!
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Mike Keefe / Denver Post, Politicalcartoons.com
“Our society doesn't think much of the average consumer.
To wit: Only a moron would try to wash her daughter in a washing machine; or shake hands with the business end of a chainsaw; or light a match to check the contents of a gas tank.
And yet manufacturers still go to laughable lengths to protect their customers from harm, bombarding them with ridiculous warning labels or stunningly obvious explanations of how their products work. Why else would a carton of eggs actually say that the product may contain eggs?”
PHOTO: The label on the inside of reflective car sun shades advises that you shouldn't drive with them in place. How could you?
Today is Banana Cream Pie Day so go to the nearest bakery or supermarket and buy one in order to properly celebrate.
I know…it’s kinda late to be posting this but I just couldn’t let such a noteworthy day pass by without commenting.
Good night…
Excerpt:
“Certain members of the GOP — and, from the looks of it, the entire "tea party" — have decided that the first lady's Let's Move campaign, which seeks to fight obesity by improving school lunch programs, increasing focus on physical education and giving poor people better access to healthful foods, is an example of government intrusion and even a socialist plot.
Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann accused
What's going on here (besides the last gasps of an increasingly irrelevant radio blowhard) obviously has nothing to do with keeping kids from being obese. Surely even the most obtuse tea partyers know deep down that Michelle Obama is not planning to force-feed you vegetables and hijack your desserts any more than Laura Bush, who advocated for reading, was interested in foisting books on people and carting away their televisions. Instead, Republicans are turning a patently apolitical issue into an opportunity to bash the president, suggesting that the first lady has wasted tax dollars with her campaign and that the president's budget proposal, which includes adding $1 billion a year for the next 10 years to fund children's nutrition programs, will ruin the nation because it caters to her elitist whims. (Does anyone remember that Nancy Reagan's anti-drug campaign "Just Say No" coincided with $1.7 billion in funding to fight the growing drug problem?)” – Meghan Daum Read the Whole Column
All I can say is GOOD. I’ve heard a number of lame arguments why he shouldn’t be tried and NOT ONE makes sense. This clown stole military information and should pay the price!
As for him directly giving it to WikiLeaks, that’s neither here nor there. The fact is those military secrets wouldn’t have become public if he wouldn’t have stole them and gave them to whomever.
I don’t think the death penalty is the answer however. Just lock the sorry bastard up for life. He’ll probably pen a best seller for anarchists, but that money will be needed to keep his fellow prisoners from putting him in the “barrel” every day!
Excerpt:
“Following an intensive seven-month investigation, the Army on Wednesday filed 22 additional charges against Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of illegally downloading tens of thousands of classified U.S. military and State Department documents that were then publicly released by WikiLeaks, military officials tell NBC News.
The most serious of the new charges is "aiding the enemy," a capital offense which carries a potential death sentence. Pentagon and military officials say some of the classified information released by WikiLeaks contained the names of informants and others who had cooperated with U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, endangering their lives.
According to the officials, the U.S. military rounded up many of those named and brought them into their bases for protection. But, according to one military official, "We didn't get them all." Military officials tell NBC News a small number of them still have not been found.” FULL STORY
Right now, thanks to the NRA, a person can walk into a gun shop and buy two semi-automatic rifles a month, until the cows (lobbyists) come home!
What kind of person needs to purchase 24 semi-automatic rifles every year? I’ll tell you; someone who is selling those rifles to the first bidder (and they don’t care who the bidder is). Until weapons become really difficult for the cartels to get, they will continue to come across the border and buy weapons wherever they feel like it. For those of you who have never heard of “straw dogs” they are people who are legitimate buying weapons for people who aren’t. Simple. happens every damn day thanks to the NRA!
Pallbearers carry the casket of ICE agent Jaime Jorge Zapata, who was shot and killed in Mexico on Feb. 15. (Delcia Lopez / Associated Press / February 22, 2011
What would happen if American al Qaeda followers were demonstrating against the Pentagon’s tactics against them worldwide?
Would that be okay? I’m thoroughly disgusted with our Supreme Court. I thought it hit an all-time low when the justices declared corporations had the same rights as individual citizens.
But, Hell No! Where has common sense gone? When is enough…enough? This decision allows a hate group to threaten gay and lesbian’s very existence in this country… while they advocate DEATH for them!
I know many journalists in America were concerned about First Amendment Rights being watered down if the judges ruled against Phelps and his crazed family and followers. However, these great legal minds that are supposed to be interrupting cases that challenge the Constitution don’t seem to have a lick of sense. There could have been a better outcome than this. Forget about trying to get money from the Phelps psychos and look at the real-world effect they are having on innocent Americans who can’t bury their war dead in peace.
Yes, I’m a veteran, and that makes me somewhat bias. That’s why I’m blowing off steam here. That doesn’t mean that the Supreme Court did the right thing. I honestly feel they dropped the ball again. The Phelps Hate Club isn’t demonstrating for the right to vote, or over some human rights violations committed against them. They are taking advantage of a system that can be exploited by legal minds who have no idea what it’s like living in the real world – instead of their Ivory Towers.
What a sad day this is.
“The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the First Amendment protects fundamentalist church members who mount attention-getting, anti-gay protests outside military funerals.”
“No one has directly observed either electrons or fairies. Both of them are theoretical constructs, useful to explain observations that might be difficult to explain otherwise. The "theory of fairies" can actually explain more things than the "theory of electrons". So why do we believe in electrons, but not in fairies?
Is the issue a political one, where the "electron" fans got the upper hand in the nineteenth century, so by the twentieth century the "fairy" fans were a scorned and persecuted minority? Or, have we proved for sure that fairies don't exist?
No, to both. The real difference is that for electrons, we have accumulated a set of quite narrow and specific rules about how electrons will behave under various circumstances. Those rules let us make very specific predictions about electron behavior, and about the observations that will result. If those predictions don't come true, we know that either we didn't set up the circumstances correctly, or there is something wrong with the rules. But over many decades, we have repeatedly fixed problems with the rules, so we can now make really good predictions about electrons, especially in certain highly contrived circumstances (i.e., circuits).
Fairies are much more free. A fairy does what it decides to do. We haven't been able to find any useful rules for predicting how a fairy will behave under particular circumstances, or even for telling when a fairy has been involved in a particular observation. (At least I don't know of any such rules. I stand ready for correction on this.) Over many, many decades, it has not been possible for people to try out pretty-good sets of fairy-prediction rules, find out where they make mistakes, and replace them with better sets of rules.”
This is one of those things that I almost wish I didn’t know about; shopping carts carrying infectious bacteria. Yuck! The researchers said that the carts were worst than the bathrooms in the supermarkets! Now, that’s bad.
Apparently no one routinely cleans and disinfects shopping carts. Now I have to worry about salmonella and campylobacter bacteria attacking my grandchildren when I take them to the market or other type of store with shopping carts.
Excerpt:
“Every day, parents blithely drop their toddlers into the baskets of shopping carts, never giving a moment’s thought to who might have had their hands on the handle last. Preliminary results from a new study show that may be a mistake.
Researchers from the University of Arizona swabbed shopping cart handles in four states looking for bacterial contamination. Of the 85 carts examined, 72 percent turned out to have a marker for fecal bacteria.” Full Story
I finally hit the wall today. I can't think of what to say about all of the madness going on in this country right now. I'm a writer...
