Sunday Wrap-Up

And I thought college coaches giving scholarship to middle school students was bad.

*  We have photographic proof of a young person reading a printed newspaper.  You’ll more often see ivory-billed woodpeckers.

*  Several dispatches from the Smartphone Wars (borrowing ESR’s phrase) — The first is that Android becoming the majority smartphone OS in the United States has happened at about the same time that it has also become a more desirable commodity than the iOS.  Demand for traditional computers and therefore sales of Microsoft Windows are down because iMaxiPads are disrupting that market, and this has led to the first MSFT quarterly profit to be less than AAPL’s in twenty years.  All I can say is when Android tablets/pads finally hit their stride, MSFT is really going to be sweating bullets, because the Android tablet OS will be able to do Flash, unlike the iPad.  And in today’s “water is wet” moment, we find out that Foxconn’s Chinese factory workers are abused, treated inhumanely, are worked like dogs and are way underpaid.  Well, Duh — Why else put a factory in China?

*  Toldyaso.

“It would be conjecture.”  Well, not if a certain Circuit Attorney does some investigating.  If they do, we might find out that this guard and at least one of the two inmates have some sort of link.

*  Steve Tilley found out the same thing I did — There is evidently a cabal of vicious drones out there that defend the town of Cairo, Ill. to the hilt.  I still get a complaint about once every three months about this post in this space.  While I’m not a Steve Tilley fan, I will say that I do trust him, because I have been to Cairo, and I do know what he’s talking about.  I thought the black-on-white ethnic cleansing of the 1970s drove all the whites out, but there are apparently a few left, and those few seem to have nothing better to do than to troll the internet and send death threats and vitriolic e-mails to anyone who seems to bash their shitty little town.  What I think is behind that is that any white people who had any sort of “get up and go” got up and went long ago, so most of the whites left (not all of them) are as bad as Cairo’s shiftless black population.  You’ll find those in St. Louis as well — A substratum of the white “hoosier” population that lives close to blacks, and whose behavior is very stereotypically ghetto or very close to it.  To make the circle complete, daughters of such households wind up going with a lot of black men and having their children.

*  Since the Federal judge that lifted the NFL lockout last week was based in Minneapolis, and since Minneapolis is in the St. Louis-based 8th Appellate Circuit, the appeal hearing the NFL owners wanted was heard on the top floor at Eagleton.  And the ruling came down on Friday, right in the middle of the NFL Draft.  Which was kind of ironic — How’d you like to get hired for a job and right at that moment some judges say you can’t do your job?  Only in America, huh?

When I first heard that the appeal hearing would be at Eagleton, I was so hoping that a Limbaugh would be on the panel.  Wouldn’t that have been ironic — Rush Limbaugh wanted to be a minority share NFL owner a few years ago, some of the NFL owners bitched a fit, and now these same owners would have been asking for his cousin or uncle to re-instate their precious lockout.  Unfortunately, there is no Limbaugh on the 8th Appellate Circuit — I think all the Limbaughs that are Federal judges are on the trial level circuit at either Eagleton or the Limbaugh Federal Court House in Cape Girardeau.  If there here, he would have to recuse himself anyway, because of the obvious conflict of interest.

*  Tacos from Taco Bell — They’ll do it to you every time.

It says here that he could have faced child molestation if there were students present.  Huh?  I thought you actually had to have “contact” in order to be molesting a child.

And we wonder why elementary schools are loath to have men as teachers.  This nut just sent that cause back a hundred years.

*  Economically, stores like Save-a-Lot and Aldi, and the merchandise they sell, are considered “inferior goods.”  Not “inferior” in terms of a value judgment, but because their business goes up when various measures of economic well-being of individuals and whole societies decline.

*  This app is tasteless.  But I don’t want GOOG to pull a Steve Jobs and become the same kind of censorship politburo over the Android Market that AAPL is with the iPhone App Store.

Too, the Humane Society is being hypocritical here.  I’m still trying to find corroboration of this, but the Philadelphia Eagles bought off the Humane Society in order to drop their opposition to the team signing Michael Vick.  In other words, the HSUS is strictly pay-for-play.

*  They forgot to add that a year after the attempt to bomb Times Square, Michael Bloomberg still hasn’t been held to account for trying to blame the Tea Party Movement, before the member of the Religion of Peace was actually found to be the perpetrator.

*  Mumia-lovers in London are planning a vigil for their favorite cop murderer, using the anniversary of the MOVE incident (which happened long after Mumia Abu-Jamal aka John Wesley Cook allegedly murdered Philadelphia PD Officer Daniel Faulkner) as an opportunity.  From things I have read, there was really no strong or even weak association between the artist formerly known as Mr. Cook and MOVE — I just happen to think that Mumia and his mouthpieces drastically overstated the links between the two after the MOVE tragedy in 1985 in order to play up the “Mumia as victim” angle.  The reason is that the MOVE bombing, sometimes called the “Black Waco,” was a tragedy where law enforcement beared a lot of the culpability.  However, Mumia was totally irrelevant in that case.

The organizer of this protest in London states that “The [Mumia trials] were marked by racism, inept legal representation, and a bigoted and prejudicial judge.”  Except they happened in Philadelphia, not rural Mississippi.  Philly has been a town whose civic elite and civic culture has been egalitarian and anti-racist, animated by Quaker “sensibilities,” ever since the days of Ben Franklin.

*  Yeah, I bet the boy thought it was a toy.  What I do know for sure is that he needs to brush up on economics — He sold the gun, the clip and three rounds inside the clip for $3 — Hell, he could have gotten the three bucks just for the bullets around a year and a half ago, during the height of the run on ammo.

Right In My Own Back Yard

This happened right in my own city of Ballwin.  And this is the first I’m finding out about it.

You know, I used to have a modicum of respect for Richard Callahan.  But when a President with three Arabic names made him the U.S. Attorney for this part of the state, you knew his needle would eventually get stuck on stupid.

Remember, terrorism is not the be all and end all for radical extremist Muslims.  The implementation of Sha’ria Law is.  Terrorism is a means to that end, but not the end itself.  Why should they have to blow people and buildings up to scare people into acceptiong Sha’ria Law when dumbass dhimmi U.S. Attorneys will do it for them?

The reason I think most Federal courts will uphold these state level restrictions on Sha’ria is because the Federal Constitution gives Congress the power to guarantee each state a republican form of government, and prohibits Congress (and through the incorporation doctrine, state governments) from establishing religion.  Sha’ria would contradict a republican form of government and establish religion at the same time.

I’ll Be Damned

Nixon vetoes The Map.

I fully expect an override from the House and Senate before the end of the legislative session in a few weeks, because they’re not going to pass up such a good chance to gerrymander the state’s Congressional map — If some map doesn’t wind up going into law, then the Federal courts will decide the matter, and they’ll probably not create such a favorable map for Republicans.

The override will easily happen in the Senate.  As far as the House, they need to peel back a few more Democrats — Several of the big-name St. Louis black Democrat House members have already voted for this map, so you know they’ll be there for the override.  I think the horse trading behind that is that Tilley promises to let Nixon’s veto of other Republican-coveted legislation stand without any attempt at an override (e.g. SB 188) in exchange for those few Dems being there to override Nixon’s veto of The Map.

All along, I thought Nixon wouldn’t veto The Map because he knew that an override would happen.  Unfortunately for him, black Democrats from St. Louis City, still fuming at him over deseg, would be the ones who would have to sustain his veto.