Wednesday’s Wobegons

LOCAL AND REGIONAL

*  The big news in this article is way down at the bottom.  The Archgrounds are a National Park.  You might say that the Occutards won’t move there because Federal Park Rangers won’t allow it.  But who is the boss of the Federal Park Rangers?  One Barack H. Obama II, Occutard-in-Chief.

*  The history of one of my favorite places in the area, and a best kept secret that I hope stays secret, Lone Elk Park.

NATIONAL

*  Switzerland about to bust wide open.  Next stop, Cayman Islands.  And yes, I would be thinking of a certain poverty center.

*  Dead voters help choose the Mayor of Chicago from time to time.  So why can’t dead mayors be part of a favorite hobby horse of big city mayors?  Fair is fair.

*  “But she was scared.”  I wonder why.  She’s more scarer than scaree.

*  The student supposedly said the N-word several weeks earlier, so that was this bus driver’s excuse for whacking him several weeks after the “fact.”  Notice I used “fact” in quotes, because saying “s/he used the N-word” is a common tactic/excuse of black thugs who get popped for a violent crime against a white victim.

If the student did use the N-word, as the article implies, he probably did it because he’s sort of a wigger.

* Eldrick:  My ex-caddy isn’t a racist.  As if “racism” is something akin to murder or child molestation (oh yeah, I’ll get to that later on today).

INTERNATIONAL

*  Mexican jails are pretty nice places, as long as you’re plugged in to the right drug gangs.

*  WSJ nails it with this paragraph:

The response in France to last week’s attacks has been powerful and all-but unanimous: Six months before presidential elections, politicos from every quarter of the French establishment are rushing to defend Charlie, including some who, at one time or another, have threatened the magazine with defamation suits. “All the world, all Frenchmen, must feel solidarity with this newspaper that, with its very existence and way of being, expresses the liberty of the press,” said Interior Minister Claude Guéant. On Sunday hundreds of pro-Charlie demonstrators gathered outside Paris City Hall to declare their “right to blaspheme.”

The obvious solution?  Vote Marine Le Pen, who defends Charlie both now and when election time is far away.

*  Valid causation.  Norway is a great place to live precisely because of its trade policies, among other things.

*  The answer is yes, because we’re so PC and on edge about race that it won’t be long until Japan is the only place left on Earth where you can find “Sambos.”

HISTORY

*  At least for awhile, the fall of Gadhafi has re-opened archeological exploration of an ancient, lost but relatively advanced (for its time) civilization that existed in the Saharan Desert in the first half of the first millennium, the Garamantes.

Catch while catch can, science, because this all gets cuts off when the Muslim Brotherhood slash Al Qaeda takes control of Libya.

*  Ice Age humanity’s cave paintings were reflective of the reality of the animal kingdom around them, not a result of fantasy.

TECH

*  Adobe conceding.  HTML5 is going to win.

And the tech media are spinning this as a win for AAPL.  Anything but — HTML5 is a product of open source and open specifications.

Adobe is spinning this by noting that it will still continue to develop the Flash platform for desktop/laptop OSes.  Problem is, their ceding the mobile OS space to HTML5 will give it enough momentum to win in the desktop/laptop OS space.  On top of that, the paradigm is gradually shifting away from desktop toward mobile anyway.

*  The major OEMs of Android smartphones have interpreted GOOG’s purchase of Motorola’s cell phone business the wrong way.  They’re worried that GOOG will go into the hardware business themselevs, undercutting the Samsungs and LGs and HTCs of the world.  The reality is that the purchase was meant to get Motorola’s hardware patents under GOOG’s roof so that it can defend Android, and the Android-friendly OEMs, against the iCabal’s patent troll lawsuits.