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Archive for 2011
October 29, 2011
IS AL GORE IN TOWN? New Jersey Declares Snow Emergency.
UPDATE: A reader emails:
This was the view of my back patio at 8PM Saturday night in Northwest Morris County NJ, also known locally in the tri-state area as “north and west of the city”. :-)
Lots of branches and trees down all around, and well over a foot of snow here.
Good call by the Gov!
Good grief. And before Halloween!
Meanwhile, we learn that Al Gore is rumored to be in Massachusetts. I guess he’s drawing the storm up to him. . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: Earliest New York City one-inch snowfall since records began.
MORE: Reader Stephen Berg writes: “Believe the rumors. Some parts of Mass. already have 2 feet of snow, some have 30 inches (and it still hasn’t stopped snowing).” It must be Al. I can’t imagine anything else that could account for this.
OCCUPY JUNK MAIL?
UPDATE: Not hilarious, but a dumb idea.
NOW ONLINE: Video of my Harvard Law School constitutional-convention conference keynote is now online. You can see all the videos here.
SOME MOOD MUSIC FOR THE #OCCUPY MOVEMENT, courtesy of Jackie Lomax.
SENSE OF HUMOR as a job qualification?
OFFICERS PROTEST ARREST OF LAWBREAKING OFFICERS: Officers Jeer at Arraignment of 16 Colleagues in Ticket-Fixing Investigation. “A three-year investigation into the police’s habit of fixing traffic and parking tickets in the Bronx ended in the unsealing of indictments on Friday and a stunning display of vitriol by hundreds of off-duty officers, who converged on the courthouse to applaud their accused colleagues and denounce their prosecution. . . . The assembled police officers blocked cameras from filming their colleagues, in one instance grabbing lenses and shoving television camera operators backward.”
Their signs read Just Following Orders. You guys better not pull any attitude on anyone you pull over for speeding now. In fact, both the scandal and the reaction seem like good arguments for privatization. Why should taxpayers subsidize an entitled class that thinks it’s above the law?
More here. “This is felony conduct. It is criminal conduct.”
UPDATE: Reader John Simons writes:
Just wanted to highlight one thing in that article you linked by the NY Times. The last sentence “Once they had gone and the tide of officers had dispersed, the street was littered with refuse.”
I found it interesting that the NY Times would note that.
Who do these guys think they are, #Occupy protesters? Once again, the Tea Party shines by comparison. . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: The New York Post editorializes: “Fact is, the best way to cultivate contempt for the law is to create the impression that the rules apply only to some.”
I’D SAY NOT YET, but maybe some of this stuff helps. Maybe not. Has The Fountain Of Youth Been Found?
FRANK J. FLEMING HAS A NEW BOOK COMING OUT: Obama: The Greatest President in the History of Everything. I’m pretty sure it’s fiction.
TIM CAVANAUGH: Print Media Still An Excellent Source of Yesterday’s News. Gotten wrong, in this case.
POPULATION BOMB Epic Fail. “Which is quite a contrast from the old days when Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, was a worldwide best-seller, national and international population control organizations and lobbies were set up, and so forth. In the meantime, global fertility rates have fallen so fast that we can now foresee the peak of global population a few decades out, after which we will likely start to see the world’s population start to shrink fairly dramatically. A few people in the media have started to notice: Reuters notes that falling population may present more serious social problems than rising population. (How will we pay for our welfare states, to example?)” How, indeed?
SO IS THE “ARAB SPRING” SOMETHING THE #OWS PEOPLE WANT TO EMULATE? For Young Women, a Horrifying Consequence of Mubarak’s Overthrow.
ASTRONOMY CROWD SPOTS PLANET KILLER! Well, not quite. But: “Unravelling DNA, identifying exoplanets, and now, spotting near-Earth asteroids: is there anything that science can’t outsource to an Internet crowd? The European Space Agency has announced that its Space Situational Awareness program, in which amateur astronomers pitch into to help analyze sky survey photographs, has turned up its first near-Earth object.”
Somebody should write a book on this phenomenon.
DARTMOUTH’S DIVERSITY PROBLEM: “If Dean Johnson is going to play that game, perhaps she could note that 50% of Dartmouth undergraduates are men, and yet over two thirds of the employees in her area are women. . . . We could take Dean Johnson’s logic even further: 71% of Dartmouth alums are men; yet I wonder if anyone is worried that all but one of the 24 members of the Office of Alumni Relations are women.”
Related item here.
UPDATE: Kim du Toit writes: “Scratch Dartmouth from the list of places I’ll send my two college-age kids…”
DOING THE REPORTING THAT REPORTERS DON’T SEEM INTERESTED IN DOING: Howard Stern on what the #Occupy protesters believe.
MICHAEL TOTTEN: Did We Lose in Iraq? No, and Here’s Why. “Al Qaeda in Iraq scarcely even exists anymore. No militia, either Sunni or Shia, controls territory or has its own ‘capital’ anywhere. Baghdad’s government is not going to fall, no matter how much Tehran tries to undermine it. No one will be able to claim even implausibly that Americans were driven out of Iraq under fire. Nor can anyone plausibly say the United States lost. The enemies of the United States and Iraq’s elected government have either been vanquished, forced to give up the gun, or driven into the shadows.”
It remains to be seen, of course, whether that victory will survive the latest “smart diplomacy.”
BARACK OBAMA: Campaigning Like It’s 1936.
IN THE MAIL: Atlas Shrugged Part 1.
Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Big Ed’s Pizza.
GLAD TO HELP: Reader Matt Blackie writes: “I’d like to thank you for your recommendation of the Livestrong app for weight management–based on your recommendation, I decided to give it a try about three months ago, and in the time since, I’ve lost 23 pounds with very little effort. I visited family recently and several people were interested in how I’d done so well, so I passed the info along. This has been a huge boon to my health and confidence. Thanks again!”
Yeah, as I noted a while back, the Livestrong app is handy. As long as you’ve got your smartphone, you can get calories on just about everything, and figure out what you can eat while staying within the calorie range it sets based on your weightloss goals. I lost about 10 pounds with it effortlessly last year, and I’ve kept them off, also painlessly. I was inspired by a colleague’s wife who lost a lot more weight, and looks terrific, using Livestrong.
If you don’t have a smartphone, you can get a free Web account, too, but that’s not quite as handy when you go out to eat. It also lets you keep track of protein, carbs, etc. I more-or-less follow the Gary Taubes approach, which seems to help.