I had to let a lot of stuff accumulate over the week, because my focus has been on election news.
* Modest proposal: Even though today is “officially” Halloween, I saw a lot of trick-or-treating last night and Friday night.
Several years ago, Congress expanded daylight savings time because the price of gas was so high. (What one had to do with the other, I don’t know. How turning your clocks ahead in early March instead of early April, and in early November instead of late October, would reduce the price of gas at the pump, is a mystery I have yet to solve.) One of the reasons why they added an extra week of daylight time on the autumn end is that it would guarantee that October 31 would be on Daylight Time, so all those brats collecting candy would be a little safer because of the later sunset. However, as this year showed, if October 31 is on an evening before a school day, then the parents will take the kids out begging in funny costumes on the Friday or Saturday evening before.
Therefore, we should start observing Halloween colloquially on the last Friday in October. Then turn the clocks back 2 AM the following Sunday. This means that “falling back” would happen every year no sooner than October 27 but no later than November 2. Reasonable, IMHO. Now, it’s no earlier than November 1 and no later than November 7, and this year is the latest possible. Before 2007, the range was October 25 and October 31. My proposal guarantees DST on “Halloween” AND reasonable clock fallback dates.
If you’re wondering why I’m locking ass about turning back the clocks, the way it is this year, we won’t fall back until November 7. That means “hour later” sunrises of around 7:30 in St. Louis (later the further west you get in this or any time zone) this coming week. (Example: Terre Haute, Indiana, far west in the Eastern Time Zone, will have sunrises around 8:20 this workweek. Then again, Terre Haute is in the wrong time zone, but that’s another discussion for another day.) If you want to worry about kids and darkness and safety, late sunrises are just as bad, because kids have to walk to school and to bus stops in the morning.
* Good, we’re making progress.
But what if the SLPD wanted to make these places “safe zones,” not just one night a year, and not just for brats collecting their future reason for daily insulin shots?
Guess who would be first in line bitching about racial profiling. I’ll give you a hint — He is black, even though his name sounds like a white ethnicity.
* Just what of yesterday’s Restoring Insanity rally were Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert trying to cover up?
I have three theories:
(1) Pot smoking, (2) Group orgies, and (3) People smoking pot while engaged in group orgies.
* Look familiar? If I didn’t know better, I would swear some of these pictures were taken in North or East St. Louis.
* The State of Arizona sent one Jeffrey Landrigan to his Eternal Justice this past week. They had to import the lethal injection drug from Britain, as domestic supplies are very limited. It is expected that anti-death penalty lawyers will use foreign importation as grounds in their attempts to stay executions and/or commute them to life sentences, supposedly because imported drugs aren’t properly inspected. (I didn’t know the United Kingdom was a backwater third-world country.) In reality, since Landrigan was being executed for a murder he committed in AZ after having broken out of a prison in his native Oklahoma 21 years ago, this is precisely the argument for importing the jolly juice from wherever you can get it. He can’t break out of prison to commit another murder now!
* Bush confirms: He sent the Air Force shoot-down orders against any hijacked airliners after it became obvious on 9/11 that it was terrorism. Bush thought that the AF did take care of the flight that went down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. I tend to think that both the Air Force and the “Let’s Roll” passengers are jointly responsible for bringing it down — I happen to think that the passengers got control of the flight from the hijackers, wanted to ground the flight somewhere where some of them would have a chance to survive, but the AF hit the airliner (unbeknown to the airliner’s new “pilots”), and the AF hit is what is reponsible for it coming down in Shanksville.
Nevertheless, Bush and the AF did the right thing. They had no way of knowing that the good guys un-hijacked the plane.
* I didn’t know the Illinois state judiciary had any jurisdiction over high school football.
This is relating to the genius who knew he was living and playing out of district, (his attraction to ESL was that a lot of his relatives are on the ESL coaching staff), yet genius goes and jacks someone up, leading a law enforcement agency on the East Side to get his home address on the public record.
And no, I don’t feel sorry for “all the other innocent guys” on the ESL team. (“Innocence” isn’t a word that much comes to mind thinking about East St. Louis.) Football is a team sport, and you either win or lose collectively based on the rules.
* Her real baby wanted to be fed real world food, but she was too busy being a pretend farmer on Facebook to care. On the one hand, she won’t have to worry about taking care of her baby anymore. On the other hand, she’ll never be able to use Facebook anymore.
“Pretend farmer.” I wonder if you can be a pretend cattle rancher on Facebook, too. As I stated in my voting reform proposal a few years ago, there were (at the time) figured to be some 10,000 people doubly registered to vote in CA and CO, most of those being Beverly Hills yuppie libs who escaped the consequences of their own liberalism by chopping up old cattle ranches on the Front Range of Colorado ten acres at a time (“rancheros”), so they can pretend to be cattle ranchers on weekends, and fuck up the Colorado body politic in the process.
* CPD wants to raise the minimum age for recruits from 21 to 25. From what I’ve seen, they should actually lower it to 14 if they want anyone to be a cop in that city, probably the most thankless job on Earth.
Actually, I think this move and the Vincent Richardson case are related. The only reason he was able to pull off the stunt for as long as he did is because he easily passed for a young-ish looking 21.
As the case may be, it turns out the move might make the CPD Cadet Program (i.e. $9 a hour pre-police work for those ages 17-21) moot. Believe me, being paid only $9 an hour in an expensive city like Chicago to work a job is so little that you might as well be paying them. And now, they’ll have to wait four years between being a cadet and being an actual cop? The CPD has pretty much told a lot of potential new recruits to fuck off.
* Lost in the obits is that Earl Wilson was a first cousin to Bill Clay Sr. Do you think that helped his life’s ambitions a bit?
* I would have left the dumbass stuck in that window. Instead, he’s got a four-year prison bid, which in England, means he’ll do about two months. In contrast, it would have taken him more than four years to get himself un-stuck.
* Fareed Zakaria, former editor of the Int’l edition of Newsweak (sic), and incoming Editor-in-Chief at Time, whines that:
We have no national sales tax in this country! We’re the only country in the advanced world that doesn’t have one!
I call that a feature, not a bug.
Zakaria thinks we need one in order to fund:
…the things that will make American competitive, and that involves many things. It means educating people to the level that- we can educate and put people through universities in science and technology and engineering and math.
Funny, because the Silicon Valley is full of white men in their 40s and 50s with advanced degrees in engineering and math. Yet, they can’t find work, at least work commensurate with their education. And the reason for that? I won’t say, but the reason is apropos, considering that Fareed Zakaria is a native of India.
* The last time this kind of thing happened in Northern Virginia, they were SO sure that the doer was white. And then the cops caught up with John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo.
* As Gwen Stefani might say, they don’t want to be no hollaback girls.
We don’t get any indication about any commonality of the men who are victimizing such women, so that’s our dog-not-barking clue that they’re probably black or Hispanic.
V-Dare thinks it’s mainly Hispanic men. Though in NYC, “Hispanic” tends to mean black Caribbean or mulatto-Caribbean Spanish speakers, e.g. PR, DR, etc.
And a few headlines.
NYT: 4-Year-Old Can Be Sued, Judge Rules in Bike Case
The plaintiffs are indeed going to go for the jugular — A lien on her allowance.
AP: Chicago Jewish groups on alert for odd packages
It would behoove Jewish groups everywhere not to accept UPS packages from Yemen any time in the next month, or any time ever.
Except if they’re running for the U.S. Senate from Delaware, then you’ve gotta make it almost criminal.
