Saturday, August 29, 2009

Stimulus checks lure Floridians to their arrest

The “man” got sneaky this time. There’s more than one way to serve a warrant I suppose…

“Police in a Florida City used the promise of economic stimulus checks to lure 76 people to their arrest on a variety of outstanding warrants.

The Fort Lauderdale Police Department set up "Operation Show Me the Money" to round up people wanted on charges ranging from second-degree murder to guns and drug charges to failure to pay child support.

Using the name of the fictitious "South Florida Stimulus Coalition," police mailed letters asking the suspects to call an undercover phone line and make appointments to claim their money. When they showed up at an auditorium and presented their identification, they were led to an area where uniformed police were waiting to arrest them.”

Click here to read the rest at Reuters.

Photo via Google Images

Friday, August 28, 2009

Nitrous oxide is no longer just a laughing matter!

It’s no laughing matter, but scientists are saying that nitrous oxide (N20), commonly called laughing gas, is adding to global warming.

The idea of global warming is a highly controversial theory, and scientists worldwide seem divided over what to call the earth’s warming trend. Now we have something else that is reputed to attack the ozone layer.

Here’s an exerpt from a recent Time magazine:

“But even with that battle all but won, scientists are finding a new man-made threat to the ozone layer: nitrous oxide (N2O), otherwise known as laughing gas. A study published in the Aug. 28 Science found that N2O — a by-product of agricultural fertilizer and a number of other industrial processes — is now the biggest ozone-depleting gas in the air, and could present a real threat to the ozone layer in coming decades. And worse, unlike CFCs, N2O — which also adds to global warming — is not regulated by the Montreal Protocol, meaning there is no global effort to try to reduce emissions.”(Read "Can Steven Chu Win the Fight Over Global Warming?")

Click here to read the whole story at Time.

Photo via Time.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Meet Roger Christie: a man with a ministry that promotes THC

This is the first time I’ve run across someone building a legitimate ministry on Marijuana. There’s probably more out there. I just don’t know where.

I found this site when someone told me my recent column “The government has a monopoly on growing and researching marijuana,” was featured.

Interested in becoming a THC Ministry? Here you go:

“The Minster’s Sanctuary Kit includes powerful legal precedents, successful cases, a history of Roger’s religious credentials and successful court actions and positive critiques from all the major cannabis magazines: High Times,Cannabis Culture, Heads, and Skunk.

  • You will receive the Minister membership I.D. cards with self-laminators for your wallet
  • 2 Sanctuary signs to secure your home and garden
  • THC Ministry affidavit
  • Sacrament/Plant tags for your stash bag and plants, and
  • All the documentation necessary to build the foundation for your own religious freedom.

The kit has approximately 130 pages of well-researched materials with research done on the state, national and international level. Included in the kit are real Motions to Dismiss marijuana charges written by lawyers and used successfully by members of our Ministry.”

Still want to know more? Click here to visit this unique ministry.

Even higher taxes coming for Californians

Things aren’t bad enough for the state bean-counters, so they raise our taxes again!

This just makes the case that California is becoming too expensive to live in. I wonder how many people, and businesses have escaped this cash-strapped state since last year? Maybe, in some ways that’s good. It cuts down on the population!

Here’s the latest news about the public screwing in the works…

While Californians are still feeling the sting of income and sales tax hikes signed into law earlier this year, now comes news that state tax authorities plan to take a little more from their pockets.
For only the second time in 30 years, the tax board is lowering the point where each tax bracket begins, bumping many people into a higher category. At the same time, officials are cutting back some deductions. Everyone will pay more, even people whose bracket or income doesn't change.
The extra sums will total as much as $140 per family, on top of the increases previously enacted.”

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Click here to read the rest of this article from the LA Times

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Help: can you tell me why we pay such outrageous prices for gasoline in Humboldt County?

Cartoon by Bob Conroy via EGPNews

If there’s one drawback to living in Humboldt County it’s the price we pay for gasoline!

Our little county continues to lead the nation in paying the highest prices for fuel. I’ve heard a lot of theories about why this is, and thus far none seem to be on the mark.

Does anyone have the answer out there in blog land? Please…enlighten me. Meanwhile, here’s the latest news on oil prices…

Oil prices fell again Wednesday as traders awaited a government report that could show if Americans are using more gasoline and crude.

Benchmark crude for October delivery slipped $1.05 to $71 a barrel. In London, Brent crude fell 99 cents to $70.83.

Crude prices soared last week after the government reported that U.S. crude stockpiles fell by the largest amount in nearly a year. Even though the report could be explained by a sharp drop U.S. petroleum imports, the benchmark contract surged, touching new highs for three straight days until it hit $75 a barrel on Tuesday.” Click here to read the rest at MSNBC.

Nothing from the article above explains why we get the dubious honor of leading the nation in fuel prices.

It’s not like Humboldt County is the most remote county in the nation. Surely there others more remote than ours that still pay less than we do?

Perhaps it’s just the price of living in paradise.

Sen. Ted Kennedy Dies of Brain Cancer at 77

 

By Tim Molloy

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal icon who carried on his family name and fight for the poor and working class after his brothers' assassinations, has died at 77.

Watch breaking news of Sen. Kennedy's death

The Massachusetts Democrat died Tuesday at his home in Hyannis Port after battling a brain tumor with which he was first diagnosed in May 2008, his family said in a statement. He had served in the Senate since 1962, two years after his brother, John F. Kennedy, was elected president, and was the third longest-serving senator in history. In a statement Wednesday, President Barack Obama called him "the greatest United States senator of our time."

Aftter the deaths of President Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, he became the patriarch of a famous family that included John F. Kennedy Jr.., Caroline Kennedy, Maria Shriver, and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the founder of the Special Olympics who died earlier this month.

Click here to read the rest at TV Guide via ABC News

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Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Nadya Suleman, the queen of bad-parent porn

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This is an excellent Op-Ed piece by a very talented writer…

By Meghan Daum

By the time you read this, the world will have peered inside the undoubtedly depressing and quite possibly child-endangering world of the nation's reigning social pariah. I'm referring to Wednesday night's two-hour special on Fox, "Octomom: The Incredible Unseen Footage." At press time, I'd only seen clips, but I think I can guarantee that we're in for another wave of Octo-villification, not to mention some major sanctimony.
Nadya Suleman, in case anyone's lucky enough to need a briefing, is the woman who gave birth to eight premature babies in January, the result of the implantation of six embryos, two of which split. She was later revealed to be not only single and unemployed but also mother to an additional six children, all of whom were also conceived through in vitro fertilization. The TV special, made up of footage collected by the online magazine Radar-Online.com, included scenes of Suleman attempting to soothe several crying babies and, in a moment of self-reflection, saying, "I screwed up my life. I screwed up my kids' lives. ... What was I thinking?"

Click here to read the rest at The LA Times

Beware of the ‘Snitches’

I found this link on Redheaded Blackbelt and was impressed by the way these bloggers go after people in West Virginia. Check it out…

The SNITCH LIST is a collection of info about persons known to supply information to law enforcement for their own personal gain, or to avoid their own consequences.

We realize that… …sometimes people may not have said what police claim, or are threatened or tricked into giving up that information-it can happen to almost anyone. But there are others who snitch for revenge, just to make a few bucks, or perhaps avoid going to jail or prison…These are the people we wish to showcase. Our goal is not a punitive one, our goal is to take a bite out of one of West Virginia’s  most abused weapons—The “Confidential Reliable” or Paid Informant.

Click here

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to read more about snitchs and prison correction guards gone bad!

Cheney takes swipe at Obama over prosecutor

It looks like “Darth” Cheney is pulling out all the stops to get Obama to not name a special prosecutor. Despite his “factless” story that torture saved the US from terrorists, it looks like it’s time for some people to pay the price for breaking American laws on torture. I would love to see Cheney do some time for his part!

From CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney

(CNN) — Former Vice President Dick Cheney is again taking aim at President Obama, issuing a statement Monday suggesting the administration's decision to name a prosecutor to investigate CIA interrogations under President Bush fuels "doubts about this administration's ability to be responsible for our nation's security."

"The people involved deserve our gratitude," Cheney said in the statement. "They do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions."

The former vice president also said documents released Monday prove enhanced interrogation techniques yieled valuable information that "provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda"

Click here to read the rest.

Photo via Getty Images

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to read the rest.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Man's love runs deep in search for ring

  • Talk about determined. This guy takes the prize…

WELLINGTON (Reuters) – A New Zealand man has been dubbed the Lord of the Ring after he searched and found his wedding ring more than a year after it slipped off his finger and sank to the sea floor.

The ring was lost for 16 months in the harbor of the country's capital city, Wellington, before Aleki Taumoepeau found it shining on the sea floor, the DominionPost newspaper reported Thursday.

"The whole top surface of the ring was glowing," Taumoepeau, an ecologist, said.

Taumoepeau had been married for just three months when he lost the wedding ring while conducting an environmental sweep of the harbor.

He roughly marked the spot where the ring had flown from his finger, but was unable to find it despite returning to the area many times.

Taumoepeau's wife offered to buy another ring, but he refused, pledging to find the ring.

But, equipped with new global satellite based coordinates and offering up a quick prayer, he found the ring after an hour's search.

"I couldn't believe that I could see the ring so perfectly," Taumoepeau said.

He said those with him on the boat at the time the ring flew off his finger had likened it to a similar, slow motion shot from The Lord of the Rings, much of which was filmed in Wellington by local director Peter Jackson.

(Reporting by Michael Dickison; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

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Odd friends in animal land

These guys are just chillin’…to see more odd parings click here to visit “Let’s Be Friends.”

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Sunday, August 23, 2009

Have you ever made money by selling a beat-up old vehicle?

Dave Stancliff/For the Times-Standard

Posted: 08/23/2009 01:30:12 AM PDT

I'd like to tell you about my 1989 Ford Aerostar cargo van.

It's the only vehicle, new or old, that ever made me money. I never in my wildest dreams thought the $800 I paid for it three years ago would turn a tidy profit of $3,700!

That old Aerostar was reliable, handy, had back doors and a sliding door on the side. It was white, but if you looked real hard at the sides you saw a discoloration that read Corona Beer. A decal was there until the company peeled it off when I bought the van. I used white spray paint to complete the disguise.

The farthest I ever drove it was in the week I bought it. My wife and I went to Napa Valley for a winery tour. Our friends there got a good laugh at my “Krispy Kreme” van, but I was pleased by the way it ran.

Click here to read the rest of this column at The Times-Standard

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Rat-eating plant discovered in Philippines

A carnivorous pitcher plant that eats rats and insects has been discovered in the Philippines and named after Sir David Attenborough.

Click here to read the whole story via The Telegraph

Don’t like reading? Read on…


Just because you don’t enjoy reading a good book, doesn’t mean there aren’t many other uses for all of those books piled up in the attic.
Click here to see more ideas.

Friday, August 21, 2009

William Calley apologizes for My Lai massacre




By Dick McMichael - Special to the Ledger-Enquirer
William Calley, the former Army lieutenant convicted on 22 counts of murder in the infamous My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, publicly apologized for the first time this week while speaking in Columbus.

“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” Calley told members of the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus on Wednesday. His voice started to break when he added, “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.”

In March 1968, U.S. soldiers gunned down hundreds of civilians in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai. The Army at first denied, then downplayed the event, saying most of the dead were Vietcong. But in November 1969, journalist Seymour Hersh revealed what really happened and Calley was court martialed and convicted of murder.
Calley had long refused to grant interviews about what happened, but on Wednesday he spoke at a Columbus Kiwanis meeting. He made only a brief statement, but agreed to take questions from the audience.

He did not deny what had happened that day, but did repeatedly make the point — which he has made before — that he was following orders.

Make a shirt from a dollar bill


Start with a relatively clean, crisp bill. It will make it much easier. All folds should be sharply creased. It helps to go over the fold with a fingernail on a flat, hard surface.
This is the finished product. You can do it with the following steps from Stumble

As vets await checks, VA workers get $24M bonuses

Outside the Veterans Affairs Department, severely wounded veterans have faced financial hardship waiting for their first disability payment. Inside, money has been flowing in the form of $24 million in bonuses.

By KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press Writer
In scathing reports this week, the VA's inspector general said thousands of technology office employees at the VA received the bonuses over a two-year period, some under questionable circumstances.
It also detailed abuses ranging from nepotism to an inappropriate relationship between two VA employees.
The inspector general accused one recently retired VA official of acting "as if she was given a blank checkbook" as awards and bonuses were distributed to employees of the Office of Information and Technology in 2007 and 2008. In some cases the justification for the bonuses was inadequate or questionable, the IG said.

Click here to read the rest
Reuters Photo above – A veteran walks through the lobby at the last reunion for World War II Veterans of the 10th Mountain Division.

Smokers decide to Grow Own Tobacco


By JIM CARNEY, The Akron Beacon Journal

AKRON, Ohio (AP) -- Standing on brown earth on a flat field hundreds of yards from the nearest road, Don Carey is surrounded by tiny plants.


He walks along a three-quarter-acre plot in a desolate spot in this rural township in northeastern Portage County and looks at the thousands of tobacco plants he is growing.Carey, 49, decided in April, when federal taxes on tobacco skyrocketed, to grow his own."I thought it was an April Fools' joke," he said of the tax increase that sent taxes on roll-your-own tobacco up 2,153 percent.


There is something "fundamentally wrong about picking on the smokers all the time," said Carey, whose experiment with growing tobacco comes as President Barack Obama last week signed the strongest anti-smoking bill in history.


The measure gives the Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate tobacco for the first time.A general contractor who lives in Peninsula, Carey has been a cigarette and cigar smoker most of his adult life.But when April 1 came and he read that taxes on tobacco products increased, he took action.Carey went on the Internet and found places where he could purchase tobacco seeds.


Within about a week, he had received 40 types of seeds and his life as a tobacco farmer was planted."This project is something of an experiment to identify varieties of tobacco suitable for growing in our climate," Carey said.


Note: Photo is not of Don Carey referred to in this article.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Like at the snout on this guy! And those ears! He's so odd that he's cute...kinda of.
The long eared jerboa is a nocturnal mouse-like rodent found in the deserts of China and Mongolia. It has a long tail, long legs and extremely large ears. Being such a rare creature, it is in danger of extinction

Re-enacting the Vietnam War...the stupidist thing I ever heard of!


By Dave Stancliff
It’s never
made any sense to me why someone would want to re-enact a battle, or a war.
War is not something to be proud of. It means that all chances of reasoning have failed. It means that innocent civilians have been killed. It means that soldiers on both sides are killed, or maimed for life physically or mentally.
War is chaos. Normal ways of thinking have to be modified so that a person can survive. Killing others before they kill you helps justify your actions. The instinct to survive is strong, and people will often do things that they would never have considered before. Like kill women and children.
When I read an article about military enthusiasts re-enacting the Vietnam War I was stunned. I’ve known for a long time that re-enactors having been doing the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and even the Spanish-American War. But Vietnam?
I suppose I can see the public’s interest in watching battles that happened over 100 years ago. What people wore, ate, and types of weaponry, is somewhat of a history lesson. But when the guns and cannons blaze and the re-enactors start falling in mock death, the whole thing becomes strange to me.
Is this a celebration of death? Is this really a history lesson, or just a chance for a bunch of guys and gals to dress up in period costumes and pretend to kill each other? There’s a general blood lust that lurks in crowds when scenes of violence are glorified. Secret desires to see what it would be like to kill another person stalks many viewers.
The ancient Romans were known for their bloodlust. Emperor’s had to satisfy the public by giving them gore masquerading as entertainment. There were no re-enactors in those days. Slaughter and mayhem were part of their normal lives.
America today reflects those bloody values in our sports and love for war. With the addition of mixed-martial-arts for both sexes, we see people "nearly" killed everyday. Little or no rules apply. Like the gladiators of old, we hold up our violent sport stars like idols, and worship them slavishly.
There’s no winners in war. In the end it’s just a feast for the grim reaper. We live with wars raging around the world in this new millennium, very much like the ancient Romans. Imperialism is alive and well in the USA.
I can’t imagine people watching a representation of a war that only ended 30 years ago. There’s thousands of survivors from both sides still dealing with the physical and emotional damage from that nasty little undeclared war. It’s not like seeing crude weapons from another era. Their still with us today.
The clothing that the Vietnamese survivors wear today is the same they’ve worn for centuries. The American veterans clothes from that era is also practically the same. There’s not much to be learned from that, is there?
So why the hell do people want to re-enact a shameful period of our history when we bullied another country for no good reason? We all know that for sure now. There’s no excuses to say what we did was righteous. It was wrong. All the more reason not to glorify it with some outdoor theater of the absurd.
The re-enactors will tell you it’s history and that they are honoring those that fought and died there. As far as I’m, concerned that’s bullshit! You don’t honor anyone by playing war games. What’s really happening is just another excuse to glorify war. And there’s always those folks who wished they had been in the military and now they have a chance to pretend they are.
Some of them might have been in the military but never saw action, and the opportunity to realize their dreams of killing becomes closer to reality. What’s next? Are re-enactors going to be doing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars before they even end?
Or, will they wait for a couple of decades and then re-enact our shameful grab for oil from those two nations?
As It Stands, war will always be wrong, regardless of how it’s portrayed.

America is Better Than This

A heartfelt message to the citizens of the world: I know that the United States has become unrecognizable in a relatively short period of ti...