WORD AROUND THE NET

"Laws provide against injury from others, but not from ourselves."
-Thomas Jefferson

As you're probably aware, Santa Clara county commissioner Ken Yeager wants to ban toys in kid's meals at fast food restaurants. The resolution passed, 3-2, due to concerns about kids being overweight. Not long ago, another county commissioner tried to ban fast food restaurants period from the inner city, because it was unhealthy and thus racist to the locals. That one didn't go anywhere. This new ordinance now must face approval at the Board of Supervisors meeting in May, which probably won't happen. Anyone who opposes this, according to LA Times blogger Karen Kaplan, has sinister motives:

Not surprisingly, the toy ban has angered folks who resent government efforts to help Americans eat healthier.

Yeah, couldn't be they think that its unethical for government to get involved here or simply idiotic, they must be opposed to making Americans healthier. This is called "calumny" and it is simply presuming the worst of one's opponent. Calumny is easy to engage in, makes you feel better about yourself, and saves you the trouble of actually finding out why they disagree, but its almost always wrong and is always malicious and unethical.

Unlike Ms Kaplan's insulting presumption I share concerns about the health of young people, but I have a different approach. Maybe, now just work with me here, maybe if we stopped drugging all kids because they have more energy than a sloth, maybe if we stopped banning games because people might get hurt, stopped removing playground equipment because they might be dangerous, and stopped suspending and punishing children for showing energy and creativity, maybe they might not be so overweight? Anyone ever see Wall-E?

Having changed its name from Sci Fi channel to the absurd SYFY, the cable network is now going to ditch science fiction as much as possible. Already home to one or two decent shows and a festival of awful made for TV crap like Mega Piranha, SYFY has long ago lost contact with its original programming and intent which ran shows such as Star Trek, Babylon 5, and other big science fiction hits and movies of the past. Now they want to focus on cooking, sports, and wrasslin' according to Ree Hines at MSNBC Today:

If the recent announcement that “Top Chef” alum Marcel Vigneron would be joining the network for a cooking show called “Marcel’s Quantum Kitchen” wasn’t proof enough, Syfy’s acquisition of “Friday Night SmackDown” should be.

Not that Syfy really wants anyone catching on to that fact. Much like shoehorning the word “quantum” into the title of Vigneron’s upcoming gastronomic offering acts as a symbolic nod to traditional viewers, Syfy’s president, David Howe, hopes he can even convince fans that wrestling somehow fits the old and largely abandoned genre, too.

After all, World Wrestling Entertainment’s “SmackDown” marks “the ultimate in imagination-based sports entertainment,” according to Howe.

Yeah, that ought to be a big winner.

Really I can't add much to this headline from the Associated Press:

Illegal immigrants plan to leave over Ariz. law

Maybe just add what my brother said upon reading it: great, that sounds like its working!

Another idiotic Arizona immigration headline? This one from CBS:

The Law makes it a crime to be an illegal immigrant

How you can be so incredibly vapid to even consider typing that out in any manner but sarcastic or mocking is beyond my capacity to understand. Arizona's governor, far from being reviled and hated by the largely Hispanic population is now supposedly more popular, and other states such as Texas, Utah, Georgia and Maryland are working on similar bills. Look, whatever flaws might be in this legislation, what do you expect states to do, if the federal government will not do its job?

Also at Ace of Spades HQ where I saw the above immigration stories is this amusing comparison of hysteria with reality by DrewM:

Eugene Robinson has a fairly typical column on the supposed horrors of Arizona's new law.

(Arizona Governor Jan) Brewer, who caved to xenophobic pressures that previous governors had the backbone to resist, should be ashamed of herself. The law requires police to question anyone they "reasonably suspect" of being an undocumented immigrant -- a mandate for racial profiling on a massive scale. Legal immigrants will be required to carry papers proving that they have a right to be in the United States. Those without documentation can be charged with the crime of trespassing and jailed for up to six months.

Oh the horror! "Legal immigrants will be required to carry papers proving that they have a right to be in the United States" Why it's Nazi Germany all over again.

Wait, hold on a second. This just in...that provision has been part of the US Code for quite sometime.

Every alien, eighteen years of age and over, shall at all times carry with him and have in his personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card issued to him pursuant to subsection (d) of this section. Any alien who fails to comply with the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall upon conviction for each offense be fined not to exceed $100 or be imprisoned not more than thirty days, or both.

My God! We've been living in a xenophobic, racist, Nazi police state all this time. Why didn't someone tell me?

All it really takes is a few minutes to stop and think about this before blowing a gasket. Then again, if states start taking real action to stop illegal immigration, then the left loses a lot of potential voters and stats on the welfare rolls. After all, the more people on food stamps, the bigger the budget (and thus power for those in charge of it) has to be, right?

Burglars in Holland broke into a jail. Why? Because they wanted some of the stuff prisoners have, such as the televisions. I think its safe to say that not only is this not a secure enough facility, but that the prisoners there are enjoying perhaps a few too many amenities. Knowing Dutch leftist politicians, they will consider this a clear call for better TVs for everyone else at the expense of taxpayers.

Overreaction is probably the most charitable term to use for a recent event. Tea Partiers over the age of 60 gathered near where President Obama was to protest taxation, spending, and unconstitutional overreach by the federal government, and Obama sent... A SWAT team out to keep things under control. This was the same speech where Obama said that some people earn too much, and outside grannies were holding signs and knitting. Dangerous grannies, singing "God Bless America." I cannot help but see parallels between how the Nixon administration reacted to hippies and how President Obama reacts to ordinary Americans. I understand that decades of following Alinskyite tactics has reduced the left to believing their hysterical lies about the left, but this was just astonishingly heavy handed. Oh, and conspicuously missing from the legacy media.

Swedish climate expert Dr Goldberg looked at the data on CO2 without presuming any conclusions and discovered something that every climate scientist should have noticed a long time ago (scroll down to April 27th, they haven't worked out permalinks apparently):

Goldberg said there is a nearly 1000 year cycle in climate change but there is a downward trend indicating that we are going towards a new ice age within 4000 years. During the Viking era or the medieval Warm Period it was warm enough to grow grapes and cereal in England, he said. “We had a new peak in high temperature in 2002 after a solar activity maximum, now the temperature is going down again. So we are heading into a cooling period.”

“If you look at the last 150 years, we had a warming period from 1910 to 1940 and then a cooling period from 1941 to 1977. Then it was a warming period from 1977 to 2002,” Goldberg said. This shows a 60 year cycle correlating to the ocean current PDO in the Pacific Ocean.

During the depression period 1929-1933, the production of CO2 went down by 30 percent. But due to the increase of the global temperature, the CO2 increased in the atmosphere because of the heating of the oceans thereby emitting CO2. In 1991, there was an eruption of the Pinatubo volcano, one saw the reduction of CO2 because the volcano ash blocked the sun causing a cooling of the oceans. Goldberg said this is an indication that it was the solar activity that decides the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Got that? Warming causes greater CO2 saturation, as the ocean releases it. Like I've said here several times now in the past. He also pointed out that the pools of heat and CO2 around large urban areas seriously distorts climate studies and makes their conclusions basically useless.

The Guardian is an old UK newspaper, and in it they have a section called "comment is free" which is home to some of the most idiotic, vapid, and ignorant leftist tripe imaginable. However, a recent article in the paper was not in this section. It only should have been.

Wildlife documentary makers are infringing animals' rights to privacy by filming their most private and intimate moments, according to a new study.

Footage of animals giving birth in their burrows or mating crosses an ethical line that film-makers should respect, according to Brett Mills, a lecturer in film studies at the University of East Anglia.

Now, I've long wondered why these shows always seem to desperately need to show animals humping, like some demented fixation on zoophilia. Its inevitable, they show the life of the Warbling Bee Rat, and at some point, rats having sex show up on the screen. I don't really want to see this, I doubt many people do, but those documentarians just love this stuff. Sometimes I wonder if they don't have a big film loop of all the sex scenes for private time. "He crash-lands on top of a likely looking lady. There's a bit of luck! One thing's for sure: this boy is horny!" goes one such documentary. Really? Are you sure its not you that is horny film boy?

But to take the position that this violates some mythical right of animals to have privacy is simply insane. Not only do animals have no rights but they simply show zero interest in privacy to begin with. Who here hasn't had wailing cats wake them up, going at it on the back porch? Its not like they go find a nice quiet place and build a bower to keep things to themselves, they're animals. Simply absurd. And, of course, funded by taxpayers.

The guy who came up with this theory? East Anglia University. Home of Hadley CRU and the Piltdown Man hoax.

Johnny Whiteside over at Big Hollywood has an article up which I found interesting and highly plausible. His thesis? The same one as Joni Mitchell when she recently said:

Bob [Dylan] is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.

Mitchell sounds a bit bitter here, but Whiteside goes through and itemizes an amazing amount of plagiarism and at best "borrowing" from other musicians and poets throughout Dylan's unbelievably overhyped, over-rated career. I like some of Dylan's stuff, but most of the time I just cannot get the worship this man gets from hippies and hipsters alike.

Economists at the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) are the ones most trusted for and relied upon for determining when recessions end and begin. They also are considered experts on jobs, employment and unemployment. They made a pretty clear statement recently by more than a 2/3rds majority of the members: the "stimulus" package did no good for the economy. Hibah Yousef at CNN reports:

NABE conducted the study by polling 68 of its members who work in economic roles at private-sector firms. About 73% of those surveyed said employment at their company is neither higher nor lower as a result of the $787 billion Recovery Act, which the White House's Council of Economic Advisers says is on track to create or save 3.5 million jobs by the end of the year.

That sentiment is shared for the recently passed $17.7 billion jobs bill that calls for tax breaks for businesses that hire and additional infrastructure spending. More than two-thirds of those polled believe the measure won't affect payrolls, while 30% expect it to boost hiring "moderately."

But the president says he saved a gajillion trillion mabillion jobs!

President Obama recently made a speech appealing to voters to vote Democrat so they can continue their hard left agenda of change. His appeal seemed to make a lot of people think he was being racist, or at least hardly the post-racial president he campaigned to be, but Bruce McQain at Q and O points out that this was really a cry for help. See, these specific groups that President Obama indicated are moving away from supporting Democrats, which means electoral death for the party. Why? Over at US News and World Report, Ron Bonjean lists the reasons:

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that African-American unemployment jumped to 16.5 percent in March, up from 15.8 percent in February. Hispanic unemployment rose to 12.6 percent. These numbers are much higher than the nation’s unemployment rate, which still hovers at 9.7 percent.
• America’s young workers haven’t seen positive change. According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, one of these groups is workers age 16-24, whose unemployment rate peaked at 19.2 percent. And African-American 16-24 year-old workers had the highest rate, starting 2010 at 32.5 percent, followed by Hispanics at 24.2 percent.
• The percentage of investments made by the Small Business Administration supporting Small Business Investment Companies in minority-owned firms has dropped from 26 percent in 1998 to about 7 percent today.
• Some 80 percent of Hispanic seniors making less than $20,000 per year were enrolled in a Medicare Advantage program, according to 2007 data--and yet the Obama healthcare law cuts $132 billion from this program. A Medicare analysis released last week shows at least half of all Medicare Advantage enrollees will lose their plan, while others will see higher premiums and lower benefits.

These points do not include the many bad policy proposals that have yet to become law, such as President Obama’s 2010 budget, which cuts $85 billion in education funding to Historically Black Colleges and Universities at a time when they are underfunded during a recession.

Basically, the present economy and many decisions by the Obama administration are frustrating and upsetting these specific groups, and the president is trying to appeal to them to vote Democrat anyway, based on his campaign rhetoric. The problem is, while that might have worked, once, to elect him, its not going to help people vote for congressmen they are enraged at, nor will it likely work again even for President Obama.

Finally, the blogger controversy. Some Apple employee left a new-model IPod in a diner by accident recently, and a blogger picked it up. She commented on it and was arrested for theft. Apple went berserk over having one of its products previewed without their iron clad, absolute control. This became interesting when it was revealed that there is a New Jersey state shield law to protect journalists when they do this kind of thing: do something possibly questionable legally to report a story. So the question that arose was "are bloggers journalists" and the New Jersey judge Anthony Parillo ruled:

There is, of necessity, a distinction between, on the one hand, personal diaries, opinions, impressions and expressive writing and, on the other hand, news reporting.

There's some debate about how accurate that is, and I hope soon to write about just that topic (showing activities of reporters in the past and how much they are like bloggers now), but Scott Hogenson has a different reaction to the story. He doesn't think she was acting as a journalist, either:

Based on the available information, Hale found herself in hot water with a New Jersey software company for an entry she wrote in the comment section of a blog regarding the company, which subsequently sued her for defamation.

She wasn't blogging at the time. She was commenting on a blog, and not reporting anything. Even if reporters are protected by law, they aren't protected when not engaging in their job as a journalist. If some reporter finds out that the governor of New Mexico is actually an alien by breaking into his house, if they twitter that or write it on a bathroom wall, that's not being a journalist and I can't see how the law would protect them. Commenting is not blogging.

I think the question should be stated more like this: "should journalists be protected any more than any other citizen?" And I find it very difficult to say yes to that, even though I consider myself to be journalism on occasion here. And I think Apple is an overbearing company that puts out overrated gadgets for exorbitant prices which gullible hipsters are compelled to own. They should have gone out of business long ago based on their insane need to control everything, but they got clever by giving their products to Hollywood and education types, making them as idiot proof as possible so that even people like Julia Roberts can figure out how to use one. Its not that their products are awful, its that they are grossly overpriced and the business is almost fascist in its need to control every single aspect of their products and prevent anyone anywhere from benefiting from it without them being in charge.

And that's the Word Around the Net for March 30, 2010